Tomorrow is December 25th, and I would like to wish a very happy birthday to Krishna, Mithra, Attis of Phrygia, Herakles, Horus, Sakyamuni Buddha, Quetzalcoatl, Tammuz, Adonis, Bacchus, Prometheus, Dinonysus and Hermes.

I feel like I’ve forgotten someone. Maybe there was someone who came later…

RIGHT! Happy Birthday, Jimmy Buffett!

~I AM~

P.S. Yes, I’m still alive.

The 2008 election is pretty dismal if you’re a libertarian atheist, as I am. As it stands right now, I’m not planning to vote for president, because I don’t see any good choices. However, the thought of not voting really bothers me, so I’m throwing my blog open for people to make suggestions and arguments. I’ve always tried to keep my political views off this site, but now I need help. I’m pretty sure I’m going to regret this, but we’ll see how it goes.

Except for Bush in 2004 (I’m so sorry), I’ve never voted major party before, but I’m willing to consider it if I can be convinced that it’s a good decision. Here’s a little of where my thought process has gone so far…

Obama is a non-starter for me. For a libertarian, his fiscal positions are an absolute nightmare, and I tend to consider fiscal issues more important than social issues. His gun control policies are also a big problem for me.

During the primaries, I was supporting Giuliani, because I think he’s the only guy who really understands the war we’re fighting. When McCain clinched, I was going to just bite the bullet and vote for him, even though I’m by no means a fan of his. Once he picked Sarah Palin, I could no longer support him in good conscience. Her religious views scare the hell out of me, and McCain’s age makes his VP choice way more important than it would usually be. No one seems sure exactly what kind of Pentecostal she is, but I’d like to keep snake dancing off the White House lawn. The potential for a Pentecostal President almost makes me miss Mitt Romney and his magic underwear.

So, I started to look at the third party candidates, as I have typically done in the past. Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate, seemed like a good fit. I saw him on Glenn Beck, and I liked most of what he was saying. However, when I did some research on his past, my support for him faded away. He has been EVERYWHERE on the political spectrum at some point in his life, and he seems to be a total political opportunist. I can’t vote for a guy who has no convictions. Look him up on Wikipedia if you’re thinking about voting for him.

That led me to consider writing in Ron Paul. However, after a few Google searches, I found his position on the separation of church and state. For a guy who claims to champion the Constitution, he really misses the boat on that issue. He claims that the Constitution is “replete” with references to god (there are NONE), and that the founding fathers never expressed a desire for a separation of church and state (“Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall.” – Christopher Hitchens). If you’re going to base all of your positions on the Constitution (and I think you should), you should probably read it first.

So, that’s where I am. I’m a libertarian atheist without a candidate. Convince me.

~I AM~

P.S. If Aaron still visits here, I’d particularly like his take on this.

In the last few days, I’ve been hearing this seemingly innocuous phrase bandied about quite a bit, and it’s pissed me off enough to get me to come out of hiding and blog after over six months. It’s not the thanking of god itself that irritates me. If you believe in a god, you should probably thank him, her or it frequently. First of all, this is a being to which you owe your very existence. Second of all, whether the prescribed method of expression is saying grace, dancing in a circle, sacrificing a chicken or mutilating your child’s genitals, most gods seem to really, really like being thanked. A lot. In fact, it seems that once the act of creation has been achieved, most gods take up getting humans to express gratitude as their primary occupation. This raises questions about any given god’s need for validation or level of emotional maturity, but who am I to doubt the divine will?

For the purpose of this post only, let’s stipulate that a god or gods exist and that they are either omnipotent or at least unimaginably powerful. Frankly, any being that doesn’t fit this criterion probably shouldn’t be called a god, so I think that’s safe. When might be an appropriate time to thank this god? Well, for example, when one is viewing the wonders of nature seems like a good time. In practice, though, when was the last time you heard someone say “Thank god, it’s a rainbow?” Contemplating the simple fact of or aspects of one’s own life or existence seems like it should stir this sort of emotion, but one doesn’t often hear “Thank god, my kidneys work beautifully.” In fact, at least nine times out of ten, these two words only issue forth from the lips of someone who has recently experienced tragedy or near tragedy. Tune into any of the cable news networks the day after a natural disaster (so just about any day), and you’ll hear a whole lot of people thanking god. For example, you might hear something like “The wildfire destroyed my house, and my car exploded, but thank god I’m alive.” Hospitals are also a popular place for this kind of thing, such as “My baby died of Ebola this morning, but thank god I have another child.”

So, my question is why do these people choose to sing the praises of the lord right after they’ve been crapped on by life? “Thank god most of my goats survived.” Thank which god? Is it the same one that just sent an F4 tornado through your living room? “Thank god I’m in remission.” Did you thank him when he gave you cancer? People seem very willing to forgive the bad thing that’s happened when they are graciously allowed to live or keep some of their possessions. Would they be so generous if the offender turned savior was a human being? Wouldn’t it sound strange to you if you overheard a conversation between strangers, and one person said to the other “Thank you for taking me to the emergency room after you beat me half to death in that alley, stabbed me in the eye and stole my wallet.”?

Human beings attribute blame for the infractions of other people just as quickly as they thank those who have been kind or helpful. Why doesn’t god receive the same treatment? Why is it that when a surfer is attacked by a shark and loses his leg, he’s quick to thank god for letting him live, but he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge about the fact that this same god created sharks and/or created that particular shark and/or didn’t stop that shark from trying to eat him and/or didn’t make sure a better surgeon was on call and/or didn’t at least allow his very expensive surfboard to come through unscathed? None of that is ever god’s fault. I find it curious that a person won’t attribute the same level of complexity to the motives and actions of a magical, invisible being who pervades the entire universe as they will to the anonymous strangers who stole his hubcaps. Is an omnipotent being not (by definition) capable of good and evil? I suppose it’s uncomfortable to worship such a being and to know you have no choice in the matter. I suppose it’s what led early Christian theologians to torture a few snippets of scripture until they yielded the modern concept of the devil.

Whatever the thought process behind it, conscious or otherwise, it irritates me to no end. First of all, how dare you impose such limitations on a being who is capable of absolute evil right alongside absolute good? More importantly, how can you bring yourself to worship such a beast? How can you toss a fiver in the plate after your hamster has been killed in a motorcycle accident (must be a great story)? To do so is intellectually dishonest. It is to surrender oneself to celestial blackmail. Face the facts, people. God is a dick. (I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere.) For my part, if you could show me absolute proof of the existence of god this very minute, I would still choose damnation over worshiping that kind of monster.

~I AM~

Psst… Hey kids… College is a waste of time. Back in the day it was the only way to get a higher education, but now all you need is iTunes and/or a web browser. Well, unless you need one of those fancy diplomas that get you jobs that allow you to feed yourself with things that you can’t order by number, but really, don’t be so shallow. It’s all about the learning.

In the last year or so, many major universities (like Stanford, Harvard, Yale and MIT) have started offering their class materials online for free, and I’ve recently started to take advantage of this incredible opportunity for continuing education. I just finished listening to a Stanford course (downloaded from Stanford on iTunes U) called Historical Jesus given by first century Biblical scholar Thomas Sheehan. If the idea of spending about 15 hours listening to lectures on this topic appeals to you, I highly recommend this course.

Anyway, I came to this class with the reasonably firm belief that Yeshua of Nazareth had never existed. If we look for extrabiblical accounts of Jesus the pickings are slim. Chronologically, the closest such account to the supposed life of Jesus is the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, which is a reference to Jesus by Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, written around 93AD (about 6 decades after the supposed death of Jesus). It’s certainly more than a little sketchy that a man who had such tremendous impact wasn’t considered a worthy subject to write about for generations after he was dead, and that the first non-Christian to do so was a guy who wasn’t born until several years after the date given for the crucifixion. So if you’re looking for contemporary accounts, you come up totally empty. And, even if the Testimonium is good enough for you, its authenticity is hotly debated. Most scholars consider it to be at best an exaggeration of the original reference by later Christian scribes and at worst a completely fraudulent interpolation. If you’re interested in details of those arguments, they can be found in the Wikipedia articles to which I have linked above. Beyond that, there are no other extrabiblical references until well into the second century, by which time the authors are almost certainly influenced by early Christian accounts, and not by history.

As for the Biblical accounts, the earliest of which (the first Pauline Epistles) come more than 20 years after the crucifixion, I had always dismissed them out of hand as being biased, and therefore unreliable. However, this course opened my eyes to several techniques which can be used to sift potentially real information out of the largely (if not completely) mythological gospels. The most compelling of these (as far as I can concerned) are the criteria of multiple attestation and embarrassment.

The criterion of multiple attestation (or “the cross section”) focuses on those sayings or deeds of Jesus that are attested in more than one independent literary source (e.g., Mark, Q, Paul, John) and/or in more than one literary form or genre (e.g., parable, dispute story, miracle story, prophecy, aphorism).[source]

To really begin to understand the implications of this criterion, you first need some understanding of the relationships amongst the gospels. Since the gospel of John is so late in comparison to the three synoptic gospels (usually dated around the last decade of the first century) and so different from them, let’s ignore it for now. The two-source hypothesis is widely accepted, and seems the most sensible to me. This is the theory that Mark was the first of the canonical gospels to be written and that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark extensively. However, there is also a good deal of other material that is identical in Matthew and Luke, but not present in Mark. In this theory, this material is attributed to a theoretical and undiscovered gospel (called Q by scholars) which was read and copied by both. So, in Mark and Q, we have two independent and relatively early accounts of Jesus. If you accept the earlier dates given for the writing of the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas (discovered in Nag Hammadi), there are three such independent sources. The criterion of multiple attestation says that anything which appears in two or all three of these sources is probably historically accurate. I won’t go into what overlaps, but for this discussion, it is sufficient that overlap exists.

Now let’s have a look at the criterion of embarrassment.

The point of the criterion [of embarrassment] is that the early church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position in arguments with opponents. Rather, embarrassing material coming from Jesus would naturally be either suppressed or softened in later stages of the Gospel tradition, and often such progressive suppression or softening can be traced through the Four Gospels. [source]

In short, this criterion states that anything appearing in the gospels which seems to undermine the message of early Christianity or embarrass the founders is probably either true (and well-known enough that it couldn’t have been left out completely) or a modification of an even more embarrassing account. A good example of this is the story of Jesus submitting himself to baptism by John. If Jesus is actually the son of god, it doesn’t make sense in the Christian worldview for him to take this subservient position to a mere prophet. When this story first appears in Mark, it is softened by a reference to a passage in Isaiah in which the talks of (supposedly) John as “preparing the way” for the messiah. Matthew and Luke soften the story even further, including Luke’s account of a fetal John the Baptist leaping for joy in the presence of a fetal Jesus. By the time John’s gospel rolls around, the baptism has been completely eliminated. The crucifixion (a shameful way to die) and Peter’s denial of Jesus in the passion story are further examples of this criterion.

This article doesn’t do justice to any of these arguments, but there is plenty of material available online for you to research on your own if you’re interested in greater detail. The point I was trying to make is simply that using these methods of viewing New Testament books, there may actually be useful historical information which can be gleaned. So am I now a believer in the historicity of Jesus? Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I am far less certain about his nonexistence. I think the worst you can say about the existence of Jesus is that it’s an open question.

~I AM~