Tag Archives: Hebrews

Where’s Jesus?

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Not a rhetorical question. Christians keep telling us that he’s alive, so where is he exactly? If he’s alive he has to be some place. The old hymn, ‘I Serve A Risen Saviour’, which I sang many times in my younger days, thinks it knows:

He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way.
He lives, He lives, salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.

This isn’t much use though, is it. All it’s saying is ‘I’ve convinced myself Jesus is alive because I feel him inside me.’ That’s the extent of it, and this being so, it’s really no evidence at all that Jesus is alive in any sense the word is usually understood, let alone that he has an independent on-going existence.

Perhaps the bible will be of more use. Acts 7.55-56 has Stephen see Jesus alive in heaven, standing at the right hand of God. Well, that’s great. Now we’ve got two problems. Not only do we still not know where Jesus abides, we don’t know where God lives either. They’re both together somewhere, ‘heaven’ according to Acts says, but we’re no closer to knowing where this is either.

According to the preceding verse, Acts 7.54, Stephen is ‘looking up’ when he has his vision of heaven. This is significant because for early Christians, God’s abode – heaven – was in the sky. The New Testament speaks of different levels or realms of heaven, all of them up in the sky.

In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul claims to have visited the third (and highest?) level, while the Paul-imposter who wrote Ephesians helpfully explains that the lower level, the one nearest the earth, is occupied by demons and Satan’s minions whom he refers to as ‘the powers of the air’, ‘cosmic powers’ and ‘powers and principalities’. These are the very beings whom Paul claims in 1 Corinthians 2:8 killed Jesus (betcha thought it was the Romans) and 1 Peter 5:8 says seek to devour men’s souls.

Next is the heavenly realm inhabited by angels and the original perfect copies of everything here on Earth (Hebrews 9:22-24).

Then, finally, there’s the highest heaven (alluded to in Luke 2:14)) where dwells the CEO, God himself. If Jesus stands or sits at his right hand, then presumably that’s where he is too. But where is this highest heaven, or indeed any of the levels the early cultists believed existed? There’s no evidence for any of them.

In fact, the Bible’s heavenly hierarchy (which you can read about in detail here) is absolute drivel. Above us, as John Lennon was known to say, is mere sky – the stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and the like – followed by the endless vastness of largely empty space. If Jesus is alive in an imaginary highest heaven somewhere out there, then he, like it, is similarly non-existent.

But let’s not write a living Jesus off just yet. It’s possible that he, his Father and all those lesser supernatural beings – the demons and devils, powers and principalities as well as the angels and snoozing saints – are hidden away in some other invisible and undetectable alternate dimension.

Other dimensions are, according to some scientists, theoretically possible. There may, they say, be as many as 11, but unfortunately for Jesus, none of the Bible authors knew of them. Those who wrote about heaven in the early days of the Jesus cult, were convinced it was overhead and, as ‘intellectual’ Christians are fond of pointing out, we need to read and interpret scripture as the ancients themselves did, not with a modern sensibility. Certainly not with an understanding of ‘dimensions’ derived from Star Trek.

Despite this, theologians have to work mighty hard to transplant such theoretical dimensions into the Bible in order to claim that heaven, and therefore Jesus, exists in one of them. And work hard they do, at what is little more than a god-of-the-gaps argument: ‘we know Jesus is not a few (or even many) miles up above us, therefore we must find a location for him somewhere that science appears to allow.’

(Interestingly, when it comes to the fine-tuning argument, apologists are quick to dismiss the idea of other dimensions, multiverses and parallel worlds; these make the earth less special, less ‘just right’ for life, less designed by God specially for us.)

Locating the living Jesus is like finding Wally/Waldo in one of those cluttered pictures, except this time he hasn’t been included. So tell us, Christians, where is Jesus? And where is the evidence he’s where you say he is?

God’s Megaphone?

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from his book, The Problem Of Pain

Does the Christian God use pain to draw people to himself? Assuming for a moment that such a God exists, does he use human suffering to make followers for himself?

There is no evidence in the Bible to suggest he does. To be sure, the Bible has a fair amount to say about pain. It claims that suffering is a means by which God either chastens Christians (Hebrews 12.7) or strengthens them (Romans 5.3-5), but this is exclusively for people who already believe. The Bible does not say non-believers are afflicted as a means of drawing them closer to God; the idea is unbiblical.

Let’s assume then that while this notion finds no support in the bible, Christians have learnt over the centuries, perhaps though extra-biblical revelation, that God does use pain in this way. What does this tell us about God? That he’s a being whose principal way of making human beings pay attention to him is by causing (or allowing) them to suffer frequently unbearable pain and anguish.

What sort of God is this? Not one who loves the world and cares for humans far more than he does mere sparrows (Matthew 6.26). He’s more an unpleasant, sadistic bully: the jock who backs you up against the wall, grips your balls and squeezes hard.

Maybe that’s how it is. The God who created the universe is just such a being; a moral monster, as commenter koseighty puts it. It’s easy to see how he might be: human beings suffer, yet there’s (supposedly) a God who loves them; therefore pain and suffering must at the very least be sanctioned by God, or, more likely, delivered by him. This, after all, is the story of the Old Testament. The God so arrived at though is a thoroughly human creation, a means of minimising cognitive dissonance by reconciling human suffering and a God who supposedly cares.

One more assumption is needed. Let’s assume this time that despite the odds, this character really exists. Does his strategy work? Does inflicting pain and anguish on people make them, as Lewis suggests, cry out to the One doing (or allowing) the inflicting and compel them to love him? It seems unlikely; I can’t find any evidence online of anyone claiming that pain or anguish brought them to God. From a personal perspective, I can honestly say that in times of distress or suffering I have never, post-deconversion, called out to God or any supernatural entity for help. I’ve never interpreted my suffering as his calling me closer and have never, since escaping Christianity, succumbed to his malicious charms. (What I did do occasionally, following my deconversion, was to convince myself that my suffering was a punishment from God – for leaving him behind, being gay or something I’d done. These feelings disappeared when I embraced fully the fact that the Christian God isn’t real.)

Where does this leave the Christian with, as Lewis puts it, ‘the problem of pain’? How do they reconcile a loving God who allows or even causes human beings to suffer? They can’t. Instead they spout empty platitudes that they think let their indifferent, imaginary God off the hook. Just look at the meaningless theo-babble religious leaders came up with in 2004 after a tsunami hit Indonesia, killing 227,898 people.

Leave God out of the equation, however, and there are far better explanations for why humans suffer. ‘Shit happens’ is far more convincing than anything the religious have to offer. Physical pain is the body’s reaction to damage. It is an imperfect system that frequently overreacts or fires up even after damage is repaired (I know this having fibromyalgia). That’s what it is to have, to be, a physical body. Anguish comes from random acts of nature, the violence and cruelty we inflict on each other and the death of loved ones, much of which is beyond human control. ‘Thoughts and prayers’ are useless in ameliorating this kind of suffering. Measures to restrict people’s access to weapons undoubtedly helps, as it has in countries with politicians with sufficient strength and intelligence to enact gun-control legislation. Without it, as in Ulvalde recently, more children will die, more parents will experience terrible anguish and another massacre is inevitable. God won’t stop it.

Suffering is not symbolic of something else; it is not ‘God’s megaphone’ or an opportunity for others to point those afflicted to Christ’s light (or any other bullshit that involves the supernatural.) Pain simply is. It is our lot as physical bodies to endure or alleviate it as best we can.

What Second Coming?

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Richard Carrier notes in On the Historicity of Jesus (p560) how Paul never speaks of a ‘second coming’, prompting me to look at all the predictions of Christ’s future arrival in the New Testament. Here’s a selection of verses, some of them supposedly the words of Jesus himself, where this coming is ‘prophesied’:

And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory (Mark 13.26).

You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven (Mark 14.62).

For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24.27).

For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man… they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24. 37, 39)

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all his angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of glory. (Matthew 25.31).

You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect (Luke 12.40).

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God (1 Thessalonians 4.16).

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5.23).

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11.26).

Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord… Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand (James 5.7-8).

Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Titus 2.13).

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him (Revelation 1.7).

Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done (Revelation 22.12).

Isn’t this strange? None of them refer to Christ’s arrival as a ‘return’ or ‘second coming’. You’d be hard pushed to find any such ‘prophecy’ in the New Testament*. His appearance here on Earth is described as the coming of a celestial being. Even Jesus is made to talk about the manifestation of such a figure, taken by Christians to mean his own future self, as if he’s talking about someone else: the Son of Man, who hasn’t yet appeared but will do so in the near future. It’s as if the gospels’ fictional Jesus is being made to predict the arrival of the ‘real’, celestial Jesus.

More importantly, the Son of Man and Paul’s version of the same figure, the Christ, are spoken of as ‘coming’ or ‘descending’, not ‘returning’ or coming again. It’s as if Paul, the writers of the synoptic gospels, John of Patmos and other first-century Christians* didn’t believe that the Christ had already visited the Earth. They talk instead as if he’s about to arrive for the very first time. When he does, they believed, he would be coming as an avenging angel, rescuing those who believe in him – as a celestial being who carried out his salvific work in the heavenly realms (1 Corinthians 15, Galatians 1.11-12 etc) – and slaughtering those who don’t. This is the apocalypse – the revealing or uncovering of the heavenly Christ for the very first time.

That Jesus will ‘return’ or make a second coming is an assumption made by later believers on the basis of verses like those above. In fact, they say no such thing. The earliest Christians wrote as if they didn’t believe their envisaged hero had ever been on Earth. For them, his one and only arrival was still to come.

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* An exception appears to be Hebrews 9.28 which says, ‘so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him’. Hebrews, however, regards the Christ only as a supernatural high priest, operating in the heavenly realms. This second appearance then can only refer to this character, who is not conceived as having had any existence here on Earth.

What are the Odds?

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To look at it another way…

The stories of the Old Testament are largely fictional. They’re myth, legend and otherwise fabricated. There was no Eden, no world-wide flood, no slavery in Egypt, no Exodus. There’s no evidence that the characters around which events supposedly took place actually existed: no Noah, Abraham, Moses, Job, Jonah or Daniel. Their stories were created long after the time they purportedly lived; centuries later. The stories written about kings – which, if they existed, were no more than half-remembered tribal chiefs – and the so-called great prophets are constructed from folktales. In short, nothing we read in the Old Testament actually happened.

When we get to the New Testament, we find convoluted exposition of Paul’s ‘revelations’ about Jesus; visions and imagined sightings of a celestial being he had in his own head. It’s the same for the fruitcake writer of Revelation who envisaged an unreal comic book Jesus; invention every bit of it. The Acts of the Apostles offers a fanciful and wholly inaccurate ‘history’ of the early church, including angels, teleportation and fatal miracles. Of the 21 letters in the New Testament, at least 11 are forgeries, known to have been written by anonymous authors who were not who they claimed to be. The other 10, including Paul’s genuine letters and the likes of Hebrews, make up all sorts of mystical stuff about an angelic Godman-cum-high priest.

 And yet, in the midst of these myths and legends, made-up characters and stories, forgeries and fantasies and mystical musings stands the indisputable truth of the gospels. Or so Christians and theologians would have us believe. These particular stories, surrounded as they are by fiction on all sides are historical, factual and true.

What are the odds?

God is revealed in Jesus… or not

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Blog335CompositeOn his blog-site, humbly named after himself, Roger E. Olson trots out the tired old cliche that there’s no such thing as atheism. Atheists, Rog tells us, know in their hearts that God exists, they just choose to ignore him. As a result, Rog has little time for atheism. (I discovered Roger’s wonderfully smug site through Bruce Gerenscer’s excellent one.)

Rog says that if we want to see what this heart-implanted God looks like, then we shouldn’t look to the Old Testament and the tribal warlord we find there – goodness me, no; we can safely discard him! That God just doesn’t match up to our twenty-first century sensibilities. No, if we want to see God then what we must do is look at Jesus, for in Jesus we see what God is really like.

Oops! We’re right back at the problem I’ve been discussing these last few posts: just which Jesus are we talking about? There are so many. There’s the Jesus of the synoptic gospels (though he’s neither consistent nor pleasant), who is nothing like the self-obsessed Jesus of John’s gospel. Paul’s Christ is different again; he’s a complete invention, much like the Jesus of Hebrews who has morphed into a Jewish High Priest. The Jesus of Revelation meanwhile is an Evil Mutant straight out of the Marvel Universe, what with swords coming out of his mouth and all. So which Jesus has Rog got in mind? I think we should be told.

There are so many discrepancies in the various interpretations of Jesus in the New Testament, that it’s hard to see a clear, consistent picture of anything, let alone God, in such a shifting kaleidoscope of images. I’ve recommend that Rog should take atheism a little more seriously; the often incompatible Jesuses of the bible don’t reveal ‘the true nature of God’ anywhere as clearly as he claims. I’d go further: none of them show – can possibly show – what the non-existent is ‘really’ like. What they reveal instead are ideas about a God and a saviour made entirely in the image of the men who tasked themselves with creating them.

God’s forgiveness doesn’t last forever

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JesusWelcome

Apologies that there hasn’t been a post for a little while. I’m compiling articles from the last three years into a new book – probably to be called Jesus Exposed – which is taking up a lot of my time. I realise that , in spite of my reading and re-reading these posts over and over again before I publish them, there are far too many typos. I apologise for those too!

Recently I came across a couple of verses in Hebrews (10.26-27) which I thought were interesting in terms of Christians who repeatedly ‘miss the mark’ and behave immorally (‘sin’ to use their esoteric terminology) and think that all they have to do is repeatedly ask God to forgive them. Well, the author of Hebrews seems to think differently:

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.

The writer of one of the weirdest books in the bible (there’s some stiff competition) says that those who go on deliberately sinning effectively negate the effect of Christ’s salvation (‘here no longer remains a sacrifice for sins’). Those who do are already up God’s shit creek without a paddle or prayer (or, if you prefer, with ‘fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume [them]’) – with no hope of forgiveness.

As I said a few posts back, repeat offenders – Christian child-abusers, fraudsters and bullies – who run to God every time they ‘sin’, aren’t going to get anywhere with him. They wouldn’t even if their chosen fantasy were true.

 

Edited for clarity 26th April