freeinfidel

I’ve been busy with the day job lately, hence the lack of posts, but I just had to share this post over at Pharyngula. Check it out - and see if you can come up with an appropriate caption (I imagine there will be quite a few takes on ’second coming’ and ’suffer the children’). This has to be about the most inappropriate representation of Jesus I’ve ever seen - and presumably it was designed to sell to the faithful. Ah well, plenty of people get excited about Jesus, it’s nice to see him getting excited too.

The resurrected controversy about the alleged Lost Tomb of Jesus raises an interesting paradox: are Christians better served by a mythological Jesus? Might discoveries about the real existence of Jesus undermine their faith?

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In first-century Judea, apocalyptic prophets with serious messiah complexes were thick on the ground. When Saul/Paul set about creating a church, did he pick the wrong one?

After the death of the Jewish despot Herod (several years before the alleged birth of Jesus, by the way), the Jewish world was in a chaotic state. Herod, in spite of his savagery, was still something of a Hellenised Jew. By and large, however, the Jewish civil war - or Maccabean revolt, if you will - that had occurred decades before had sent Judaism lurching back into a more fundamentalist form. This savage period, dishonestly sanitised and decorated with the fabricated miracle of the eight-day oil lamp, is now celebrated as Hannukah. In first-century Judea, however, the result of this reversion to a more totalitarian church was not light but darkness - a deep brooding and foreboding.

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I remember clearly the moment I became an atheist. I was 10 years old when I suddenly realised that there was no good reason to believe in god or Jesus. That realisation has been a strength to me ever since.

It was all because of an argument. One sunny day, a friend and I were walking home from primary school. For some reason, now lost in time, we were arguing about whether Jesus was ‘real’. I was stoutly defending the historical truth of the Christ story while he was saying that it was all ‘made up’.

Not that I was what you would call ‘religious’. My family were not believers. My mother survived the allied bombing of Hamburg, and you don’t come out of that both sane and religious. I had, though, absorbed the unconscious, unthinking social conventions of believing that god was up there somewhere, that Jesus was real and that Christmas was great.

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