For once, I shall be posting in the religion/spirituality board…
but why this change? I have been thinking about why people hold to religions,
or I have called them superstitions, childhood indoctrinations, prejudice,
bigotry or bias…
I am not going to challenge the usual religious hypocrisy and cant,
I live in America the home of hypocrisy and cant… you know those who
pretend to be pro-life but they aren’t… you know that hypocrisy and cant…
no, I have been thinking about something free spirit wrote…about how
we should hold to the Christian religion because of the “evidence” that
shows us the existence of the god, Jesus…that we can believe the “evidence”
of the 500 people who saw Jesus after his death… his resurrection…
we can believe in that…Miracle…and that must compel us to believe…
now, the day to day stuff, of the parable of the good Samaritan for example,
that isn’t the stuff that drive people to hold belief in Christianity…
the hard moral questions, am I my brothers keeper? that type of stuff,
isn’t what bring in the crowd for Christianity… no, it is the miracles,
raising Jesus from the dead, feeding the multitude with a few loaves of
bread and turning water into wine…that is the crowd pleaser, the stuff
that raises money for the Christian churches…
what is Christianity without, without the miracles? Joshua stopping
the sun and the moon, so he can win his battle? The raising of Lazarus from
the dead… take away the flashy stuff out of Christianity and who would believe?
would you still believe if, if you weren’t given an eternal life and a place at
god’s side? would you still believe if all you had of Christianity was the moral lessons
and the cute homilies?
I think the answer is pretty clear…the Christian religion survives because of
a couple of reasons, first, the miracles and secondly, the promise of eternal life,
remove those from the Christian religion, and you have a dead religion…
and that is my point, believer’s believe because of the extraordinary
and quite implausible miracles…take away the miracles and Christianity
is no more…take away the implausible and no one holds to Christianity…
and why should I hold to a religion that only exists because of
ridiculous claims to being right because of miracles?
if we hold to Christianity only because of the miracles, then
why haven’t we seen any such miracles like those in the bible in
thousands of years? why should I hold to a miracle based religion
that hasn’t had a miracle in thousands of years?
Can defenders of the faith even defend Christianity without
any reference to miracles? Can we defend Christianity without
any reference to the two talking points… one, eternal life,
and two, the miracles of the bible?
defenders of the faith hold that they believe because
the miracles of the bible are miracles… that “proves” the
existence of god…the miracles are what drives belief in
Christianity, not the moral stories of the bible, but the
belief in the impossible… with the key word being “belief”…
the holding of Christianity requires belief… and that is what
is important, the belief, the facts, the evidence is unimportant…
what matters in Christianity is the holding of belief, the faith
is what matters in Christianity…in other words, the object of belief
is less important then the faith itself…Christianity survives because
of faith, not because of the object of faith, miracles, are implausible
and unrealistic… have you or anyone you know, witnessed a miracle?
in thousands of years, no one has seen a miracle…a miracle by
definition is something that cannot be explained rationally…
the work of divine agency…
(I point out that even in my lifetime, there have been events
that has, to this day, caused people to wonder… I point out, even with
cameras and film, we still can’t definitely show who shot JFK… we have
theories and other faith based materials, but we cannot say for sure who shot
JFK, but does that mean the assassination was a divine event because we cannot
say who did it? it cannot be explained rationally and thus is divine?)
so can you Christians say you believe in Christianity even without
the miracles? Is Christianity as a moral base religion, enough for
you to hold faith in it?
can you defend Christianity without any type of engagement with miracles?
no, quite simply no…
Kropotkin