Of two equally convenient gas stations near my house, one is run by an evangelical Christian who sells Christian-Right books at the counter, including one bout how terrible we atheists supposedly are. He once told me that Seattle is a “very dark” place, probably because there are so many people like me here. One day, I thought about skipping his place for the neutral gas station across the street from it. The proprietor and I are cultural enemies, and shunning his place would be my own little boycott. But instead I went to his place, and after the transaction at the book-laden counter I had a word with him.
“You know, you and I probably disagree on just about everything when it comes to religion,” I said, “but I'm glad you're selling these books. I'm glad you live in a free country where you can do whatever the hell you want.” He laughed, warmed up, and genuinely thanked me. Like Jesus said*, “Don't beat ’em with brutality. Baffle ’em with beneficence!”
Last Sunday, my girlfriend and I attended a virtual church service and coffee hour. Churches across the nation are going virtual. They’re streaming sermons and music, and they’re hosting virtual meet ups. If you’re quarantined and looking for company, now would be a good time to check out local churches. Lots of people derive value and encouragement from the connection, and you might be one of them.
It surprises lots of people that an atheist like me would recommend that people try out a church, but churches in the US are unusually practical as houses of worship go. Here, they serve as intergenerational community centers. In most other places in the world, places of worship occur in communities, ethnic groups, or nations that are predominantly one religion. As a result, the people who worship there don’t necessarily have a special relationship to each other. In the States, there are countless competing traditions, and one’s congregation represents a shared identity, turning it into a social hub of like-hearted individuals. Among liberal religious traditions, these social centers serve especially for Sunday school and political organizing. My childhood congregation was constantly working on issues like clean water, immigrant rights, and the Nestle boycott.
Predictably, I might suggest that you consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation. An ex-girlfriend used to say that the UU tradition is “like religion, but only the good parts”. The UU congregation that I’ve attended for 20 years is a lot like the Lutheran congregation I was raised in, except that no supernatural beliefs are expected or taught.
Every congregation is different, but in general there’s a real inclination toward science and away from physics-defying miracles. In last Sunday’s virtual service, the ministers addressed the topic of COVID-19 in a naturalistic way, with a bonus etymological reference to why the pandemic of 1918 was called “influenza”. Some UU congregations will doubtless feature relatively vague prayers for people to be safe, but none of our ministers are going to heal the disease over the Internet. We’re also not going to rely on supernatural protection to justify meeting in person. We like science, and we treat pandemics the way scientists tell us to treat them. Speakers in some congregations are bound to talk in more-or-less New-Agey terms about God, meaning, challenges, visualizations, mysterious workings, or everything happening for a reason. We don’t have a pope to tell everyone to think or say the same things, so each congregation is its own thing.
And of course if you find value in a community where you share supernatural beliefs that I don’t share, more power to you.
If the idea of connecting to a “church” makes you choke the way it used to make me choke, you can find UU “fellowships”. These are often congregations whose founders didn’t want to call their communities “churches”. Alternatively, you can think of the church as an “assembly”, which is the word used by ancient Jews, including early Christians.
Churches also do online activities for kids. I’ve taught church school on and off for years, and there’s good stuff there, so I would bet that UU churches will have worthwhile stuff for kids to do. When I teach church school, I don’t usually know which of the kids believe in the supernatural and which don’t. A lot of them don’t really know themselves.
You can find my church’s online programs on their web site, and you can readily find others by searching online.
In the book Sharing Reality, Jeff T. Haley and Dale McGowan promote the idea that we science-oriented secularists should promote not particular philosophical conclusions but instead a disciplined respect for evidence. They point out that religions have been becoming more evidence-oriented, and they would like to hasten the trend. The two suggest a neologism—evidism—as the term for this approach to personal belief and public policy. In the tribal conflicts between atheists and believers, it’s easy for atheists to focus on hot-button issues, such as nativity scenes or the Ten Commandments on public land. Haley and McGowan propose that we should instead focus on respect for evidence and on spreading the norm that policy-makers use evidence to guide them. They have a point. “Evidence” is a winning touchstone to help people agree and collaborate.
At Seattle’s March for Science in 2017, I said that evidence can bring people together. Sharing Reality makes a similar point. An advantage of pointing people toward evidence is that almost everyone says that they value evidence and thinks that they value it. Atheist PZ Myers makes the point that creationists try to bolster their position by portraying it in scientific terms. For example, they love to talk about the laws of thermodynamics, as if natural selection contradicts those laws. Even the people who disagree with scientists still affirm the authority of science. Likewise, almost everyone affirms the importance of evidence. Will evidence really convince anyone that they’re wrong? But without evidence the odds are zero. The authors expand on the topic at length, discussing the value of evidence and the best ways to communicate the importance of evidence. They show how a respect for evidence leads naturally to agnostic and secular behavior, even for people who believe in God and scripture.
In my personal experience, I can confirm that people usually can’t ignore the importance of evidence even when they wish they could. People arguing on the Internet often rely on abstract arguments, but they recognize the value of evidence when you ask them for it. Focusing on the evidence might not change the mind of one’s opponent in a debate, but it impresses the audience.
The term “evidism”, however, doesn’t grab me. If lots of people start using the term, I won’t be the last, but I’m not going to be the first, either. I’d rather call it empiricism. For some people, empiricism has negative connotations suggesting soullessness or faithlessness. That’s fine by me. I’d rather use a word that people care about than one that they don’t.
Haley and McGowan say that believing in God demonstrates that the believer isn’t following the evidence, but I would not make the same judgment. While the authors reluctantly agree that it would be worth working with science-oriented believers, I would be enthusiastic about it, not reluctant. I don’t care if someone believes in God, but I do care if they respect science. I have more in common with an evidence-oriented believer than with an atheist who thinks that reality is constructed by language, by power hierarchies, or by the power of positive thinking.
Sharing Reality makes an important point, that focusing on evidence is a promising way to improve dialogs about policies, injustices, and other issues of general concern—especially with religious people.
Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World.
By Jeff Haley and Dale McGowan. Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA), 2017
Atheists love to talk about religion, usually to criticize it. Here are two atheists, Valerie Tarico and me, debating whether religion is mostly good or mostly bad. The debate is the fifth in our series, using a format that prevents the debaters from talking past each other. The debaters also field a question from Daniel Dennett.
After the debate, an atheist from the audience asked me if I really believed the positive things I was saying about religion. He also told me that I had made him think. He told me that twice. The debate format is designed to circumvent the human predisposition to block out what “the enemy” is saying. Most debates make people feel more sure of their own position, and we’re trying to do better than that.
The moderator and I also run moderated one-on-one dialogs between people who disagree on political issues. The dialog uses the same “summarize in a sentence” structure that you see in this debate.
I’d love to get feedback on the debate, especially the format, but also the content.
Valerie’s blog post
Valerie talks about how she “played the gender card” in our debate, as part of her blog post about #MeToo. Link to her post, January 15, 2018.
Aron Ra was kind enough to have me on his podcast to talk at some length about historical Jesus. We met last year in Seattle when he came through on a book tour, and he took an interest in my debate last summer with Dr Carrier. Aron is a mythicist, although he doesn’t follow Carrier’s hypothesis. The conversation meanders a bit, but there’s a lot of good material in here. We talk about the composition of the early Christian church, Paul’s crucifixion theology, the temperament of atheists, and more.
Here’s the video, Episode 77 of the Ra-Men Podcast.
Aron was surprised to learn that sometimes atheists call me a fake atheist for promoting the historical Jesus hypothesis. He actually laughed at the idea. Should I have been surprised to see that people who watched the video left comments about me being a Christian? I was surprised, but only because I’m a fool. Of course that’s what some atheists are going to say, even after watching Aron laugh at such irrational behavior. Aron agrees with me that atheists shouldn’t use the historical Jesus as a point of orthodoxy, and that’s my overriding message, so it’s nice to have him on my side on that point.
We also talked a little bit about the divisiveness that seems to be too common among atheists. Aron talked about the people who will shun and slander you for disagreeing with them on one issue, even if you agree on many others. Sam Harris also talks about this phenomenon, the hyper-critical stance that is common among atheists. In the US, atheists are more analytical and more disagreeable than average, and it shows.
As for historical Jesus, we half agree. About half the stuff he had to say about the New Testament and early Christianity is the same sort of thing I would say. Jesus clearly wasn’t God. The gospels are not eyewitness accounts. The New Testament books contradict each other, and they include a bunch of legendary material adapted from pagan sources. On the other hand, Aron and I disagree on a lot, such as what century the Christian cult started; what the cult that Paul joined was like; whether the first reference to Jesus being placed in history implies that he was born on Earth hundreds of years BC; and why the historical consensus for the last hundred years has been that Jesus was a historical figure. I’ve gotten a lot of practice summarizing others’ points, and I think that habit helped ground the conversation. Most of the conversation was about the historical Jesus.
I did a little homework after the discussion, and after the end of this post are some notes that I think provide a useful context for understanding the discussion. If you haven’t watched the video yet, you probably want to watch it before reading my notes.
The big idea: accepting bias as natural
Everybody’s biased, and that’s natural. We atheists know that our beliefs bubble up from our meat brains. They’re not divine inspiration from above. Our beliefs are fallible and often self-serving. Even mythicists like Aron Ra can agree that when atheists accuse me of being a Christian, that’s tribal bias at work. Maybe we atheists can use the topic of historical Jesus as a way to recognize bias in our own community. Recognizing bias is the first step toward mitigating it.
I got this wrong. A papal encyclical of 1907 prohibited Roman Catholic scholars from evaluating the Bible from an historical-critical perspective, but that restriction was rescinded in 1943. In fact Catholic scholars, such as John Meier, have helped spur today’s renaissance in historical Jesus research.
Timeline
Aron and I had trouble agreeing on the timeline of when various works and ideas entered the historical record. Here is an approximate timeline according to mainstream scholars.
30, Jesus’ ministry and execution 50s–60s, Paul’s writing and ministry, introducing the crucifixion to Christian theology 70, Gospel of Mark, first record of Jesus’ biography 90?, Epistle to Titus, describing elders/overseers, roles that later developed into priests and bishops 90, Josephus, who refers to John the Baptist and Jesus 150, Justin Martyr’s First Apology
Docetics, “phantomists”, early Christian faction
They believed that Jesus had “walked among us”, although he only appeared to be physical. This belief shows how implausible Carrier’s celestial-only Christ would be. Even the early Christians who hated the physical world still taught that their divine-only Christ appeared to people here on Earth. The Gospel of Thomas represents a similar view, in which the celestial Jesus came to Earth temporarily. Docetist beliefs are first documented in 1 John, written about a generation or two after Paul.
Ebionites, “the poor ones”, Jewish Christians
Basically, these were original Christians, before Paul came in and established Christianity 2.0. They were Jewish ascetics who hung out around Jerusalem, fawned on Jesus’ brother James, and waited for Jesus to return and usher in the End Times. There was no faction of Ebionites when Paul joined Christianity. The zealots hanging out around Jerusalem were just regular old fanatics. They became a “heresy” only after Paul’s Christianity 2.0 took off and the hard-core fanatics didn’t go along.
Jesus ben Ananias
Around AD 70, this madman reportedly prophesied against Jerusalem and was killed during its siege. “Jesus” was the sixth most common male name at the time.
Justin Martyr, Christianity’s firs apologist
He wrote the First Apology around AD 150. He argued that pagans should accept Christians because their account of Christ was like stories about their own gods. And why were the stories about Jesus like those of the pagan gods? According to Justin, the gods and heroes were similar to Christ because demons had studied the prophecies concerning the future Christ and had imitated them. Here’s what he says:
When the demons heard through the prophets preaching about the coming of Christ, … they proposed many so-called sons of Zeus, supposing that they could cause people to think the things about Christ were a catalogue of marvels similar to those uttered by the poets… But even though demons heard what was said by the prophets, they did not accurately understand them, but they imitated in error the predictions about our Christ.
Justin expands on the point, showing how various “son of Jupiter” were failed attempts to create fake “Christs” based on Jewish prophecy.
And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-born of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Chris, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and descended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. Be well assured . . . that I am established in the knowledge of and faith in the Scriptures by those counterfeits which he who is called the devil is said to have performed among the Greeks; just as some were wrought by the Magi in Egypt, and others by the false prophets in Elijah’s days. For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by [Jupiter’s] intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses? And when they tell that Hercules was strong, and travelled over all the world, and was begotten by Jove of Alcmene, and ascended to heaven when he died, do I not perceive that the Scripture which speaks of Christ, “strong as a giant to run his race,” has been in like manner imitated? And when he [the devil] brings forward Aesculapius as the raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases, may I not say that in this matter likewise he has imitated the prophecies about Christ? . . . And when I hear . . . that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this.
Historians’ presuppositions
Mythicists commonly say that historians are biased or that they have a blind spot about Jesus. Carrier says they wear “Christian goggles” even if they’re not Christian themselves. Are historians really unwilling to question Jesus’ existence? History says otherwise. From the early 1800s to the early 1900s, it was respectable for a historian to promote one mythicist theory or another. Influential scholars, such as Bruno Bauer from Tübingen, argued that Jesus was a fiction. Mythicism waned over time, and early in the 20th century it collapsed when historians reached a consensus that the gospels were written in the 1st century, not in the 2nd. Historians have all sorts of things to say about how the gospels were written and how that history reflects on historical Jesus. Mythicists, on the other hand, tend to deal lightly with the topic of how and why the gospels were composed. An historical Jesus became the consensus not because historians always assumed Jesus existed but because decades of research along mythicist lines didn’t lead anywhere.
Multiple angels and different Jesuses
Aron was referring to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which Paul writes, “But even if we, or an angel from the sky, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let them be accursed” (Gal 1:4). Later in Galatians (4:14), Paul equates Jesus with an angel. Paul thought that Jesus was an angel who had taken on human form to live and die among humans, as part of God’s plan.
Context questions for mythicists
In the future, I’ll try to remember to to ask questions like these. Mythicists like to focus on specific arguments, and questions like these help put the conversation in a broader context.
What scholar do you follow most closely?
What’s the least plausible part of your hypothesis? (Carrier names the cosmic sperm bank and the undocumented switch from celestial to earthly Jesus.)
What’s the best evidence for Jesus’ historical existence?
What cult in history is most similar to the Jesus cult that Paul joined? (Carrier says the Osiris cult.)
What book is most similar to the Gospel of Mark? (Carrier says the account of Elijah and Elisha in the Books of Kings.)
Where did the crucifixion story come from? (Carrier says a vision by Peter.)
About how sure are you that you’re right?
When someone tells you that the scholarly consensus is wrong, how skeptical should you be?
What would happen to a historian who could demonstrate that Christianity started without a historical Jesus?
Narrative of Christian origins
A telltale difference between the mainstream account and mythicist accounts is that mainstream historians can provide a plausible story of Christian origins that fits the evidence we have. Mythicists like to pick at the evidence for Jesus, but they don’t like to explain in any detail how early Christianity developed and how it left the historical traces we have. I would love to see a mythicist narrative that covers these points, all of which are explained by the historical Jesus hypothesis. I am not even asking for proof, just a believable narrative.
How and when did the cult start? Who founded it?
Where did the crucifixion story come from and why do the pre-Pauline creeds and the Didache omit it?
Who were Peter, John, and James (the brother of the Lord)?
When Paul joined, what did the cult structure look like, why did it look like that, who was in charge, and why?
What did Paul contribute to the sect?
How did Mark get written? Why does it include embarrassing details that later gospels had to walk back? Why is Jesus’ messianic identity a secret? On what authority was the gospel accepted by Christians?
How did Matthew get written and where did the strikingly original material in the Sermon on the Mount come from? How did two Beatitudes end up separately in Thomas?
How did Luke get written and why are its phrases harder-edged than parallel phrases in Matthew? Where did the additional parables come from?
How did John get written, how is the story different from the earlier gospels, and why?
How does John the Baptist change from Mark to John and why?
How did the structure of the early church develop from Paul’s time to the end of the first century?
Dr Richard Carrier and I disagree on a lot of points regarding Jesus, but in our debate last summer there was one important point on which we agreed. Most of the Jesus-mythicism scholarship out there is bad scholarship. He called out in particular the parallels between Jesus Christ and Horus as an example. Carrier and I did not delve into why so many atheists are willing to accept bad scholarship about Jesus not existing. To me, the answer is simple: tribalism. Humans have instinctive tribal feelings that lead us to see our own “tribes” in a positive light and to see “enemy tribes” in a negative light. See, for example, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene. For lots of atheists, Jesus Christ is the “sacred totem” of the “enemy tribe”. They are willing to accept bad scholarship provided it tells them what they want to hear, which is that Jesus never existed.
The phenomenon that energizes me about this topic is the emotional commitment that many atheists have to mythicism, all while portraying themselves as more objective than mainstream historians. I know an atheist who says that hearing the phrase “historical Jesus” makes him want to retch. That reaction is visceral, not rational. In the local atheist book club, the topic of whether Jesus was historical is prohibited in side conversations. In the past, too many discussion were derailed by emotional arguments over this issue. Christians, for their part, also disagree with mainstream historians about who Jesus was. For example, they consider the gospel of John to be historically valuable. Christians have perfectly understandable reasons for preferring a nonstandard view of early Christian origins. Muslims also have their pet ideas about who Jesus was. So do a lot of New Age promoters, such as Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. And along come atheist mythicists proving that atheists are human, too. Atheists sometimes let their tribal affiliations channel their thinking, and lots of atheists promote their pet ideas about Jesus over the longstanding consensus of mainstream scholars.
In my dream world, atheists would use the Jesus-mythicism controversy as a reality check. The well-documented willingness of atheists to accept bad Jesus-myth scholarship would wake us atheists up to our own biases and tribal instincts. Even atheists who think that Carrier is right would acknowledge that the track record for atheists evaluating Jesus-myth scholarship is dodgy. Atheists commonly criticize religious people for letting their feelings cloud their judgment, and the Jesus-myth phenomenon could be eye-opening for us atheists. We could acknowledge that being led astray by tribal feelings is part of the human experience. Tribal thinking is not a unique sin committed only by people who believe in the supernatural. Am I dreaming? Can atheists really be the first “tribe” to acknowledge our own tribalism and rise above it? Probably not, but hope springs eternal.
As I mentioned in my debate with Carrier, I once got a little carried away with some bad scholarship about Muhammad not existing. Like any human, I’m vulnerable to having my intellect be swayed by feelings. I also had some unrealistically positive feelings about the historical Jesus before I did the research and accepted the evidence. Contradicting what I’d been taught, I learned that Jesus’ message was to his fellow Jews, not to the whole world. I like Jesus, so I don’t like the idea of him being so “ethnic”, but that’s where the evidence points. My message to my fellow atheists is not, “Be without bias”. That’s unrealistic because we’re all human. If you think you’re without bias, you’re probably more biased than average. Without bias, I couldn’t get up in the morning. Every hour I care more about some things than other things. That’s bias. Instead of “Don’t be biased”, my message to my fellow atheists is, “Acknowledge your own bias and humbly follow the evidence”.
For his part, Carrier sets himself above other mythicists because he takes on a greater challenge than they do. He not only tells people that they “might have reason for doubt” about historical Jesus, he also offers an explanation for how 1st-century Christianity originated. Who started it? How did it develop? How did it leave behind the historical traces that we have today? If there was no historical Jesus, how did everyone—believers, heretics, and skeptics alike—come to think that he had existed on this Earth? Carrier offers an explanation. In brief, someone had a vision (or claimed to have a vision) of an angel being crucified in outer space to free Jews from the Temple, and soon enough the allegorical stories about this celestial angel were misunderstood as historical stories about an actual historical figure. Carrier does a favor to everyone interested in Jesus mythicism by providing an alternative account of Christian origins. We can look at his account and judge how plausible it is compared to the mainstream account. If Carrier is wrong, then most likely Christianity is based on the life and teachings of a Jewish, hillbilly faith healer and preacher. Carrier says that this mainstream account is plausible. In our debate, Carrier did not summarize his own account of 1st-century Christianity, and his 3-page summary in On the Historicity of Jesus is light on details but heavy on argumentation. Here he describes one part of his account as ”not so implausible as it may seem”. He’s written about his history on his blog and Facebook, but it looks like he’s not going to spell out his account in a clear, chronological outline. My guess is that he knows that his account would sound implausible if it were laid out end-to-end with no embellishment.
What Carrier and I agree on is that atheists are too willing to accept bad scholarship that says Jesus didn’t exist. If you hate that statement, and if you can feel that hate in your gut, that’s probably a tribal instinct at work.
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4 minutes of Christian origins: My summary of Christian origins, from Jesus’ career to the composition of Mark (video from the debate).
Am I a fake atheist?: How my fellow atheists treat me when I betray “the tribe”.
Dr Richard Carrier, me, Brandon Hendrickson (moderator)
Below is a link to the video of my debate with Dr Richard Carrier over the historicity of Jesus, which I lost decisively. While I lost the debate, I also feel as though there’s real value here, and it was a useful start at addressing the serious problems with Dr Carrier’s hypothesis of Christian origins. It’s definitely worth a look. Here is some context to help you see what is going on in the video.
First of all, through a miscommunication, Dr Carrier didn’t understand what was being asked of him in the middle section of the first part of the debate. I was asked to give a historical summary of Christian origins, which I did. He was asked to give a historical summary of Christian origins, which he did not. Instead, he focused on the writings of Paul and his evidence that Paul thought Jesus was a celestial angel but not a man. He has debated the historicity of Jesus plenty of times, and he approached the topic the way he is used to doing it rather than in line with our format. The fault lies with us organizers, as we did not explain clearly enough what we meant when we asked him to give a 4-minute spiel on the history of early Christianity, from AD 20 to AD 100, followed by 6 minutes of my critiques and his defense. His account of Christian origins sounds, in his own terms, “incredible”, and the meat of my argument was going to be showing people how implausible it is. Since Dr Carrier didn’t outline his account of Christian origins, I could hardly critique it. For me, that’s where the debate fell apart, and I never really recovered. My central point is that the historical account of Christian origins is plausible while Dr Carrier’s is not. In personal email after the debate, I asked Dr Carrier to provide a spoken or written outline of Christian origins to parallel the one I provided in the debate, and he said he might write up such an account for his blog. To my mind, the more details people know about Dr Carrier’s account, the better.
Second, I apologize for losing my cool during the debate. While preparing for the debate, I was shocked to find out how insulting Dr Carrier is to other scholars. His negative words about Bart Ehrman were particularly galling since I have read a lot of Ehrman’s work and value his contributions to my understanding of early Christian history. Ehrman has taken it on himself to popularize Jesus research so that regular folks like you and me can get a look at what the scholars are saying, and that’s wonderful. In my own humble way, I’m a popularizer myself, having written a children’s book to teach kids that we evolved from fish. Dr Carrier’s comments about other scholars disturbed me so much that I felt quite ambivalent about giving him a platform and helping him sell books, but the debate was already scheduled, and I went on with it. Dr Carrier and I shared our notes with each other ahead of the debate, and he took issue with the way I was going to bring up his treatment of Ehrman and other scholars. I dropped that material from my notes, but it was still on my mind. In the debate when Dr Carrier said that other scholars are 100 years behind if they haven’t read his book, that might seem like innocent hyperbole, but it set me off. The moderator received a question from the audience asking me to explain why that claim set me off like it did, but he declined to ask that question in the Q&A, so I didn’t have the chance to explain myself. Here’s what I was getting at. If Dr Carrier says that other historians are 100 years behind, he’s implying through simple algebra that he is 100 years ahead of other historians. That’s a striking claim, and I don’t want people to miss it. Since no other historians have adopting Dr Carrier’s view, he is, by his own estimation, the world’s leading expert on Christian origins. If his hypothesis is right, he is the only historian who understands how Christianity really started and how the gospels were really written. In fact, he’s not just 100 years ahead of other scholars, if he’s right then he is 2000 years ahead. Dr Carrier doesn’t press this point himself, and in fact he backed off of it when I questioned him about his “100 years” comment, so it falls to people like me to point it out. He also claims to be ahead of other historians in his use of Bayes’ Theorem. Perhaps in the future, Dr Carrier will be recognized as history’s most important Jesus scholar, as well as the founder of truly modern historical research. Perhaps.
Third, the moderator confessed to us at the break that he had inadvertently given Dr Carrier more air time than he had given me. There are plenty of points I never had time to bring up. In addition, the questions after the break were not as useful as we had envisioned. While there was good material in the debate, it did not live up to our expectations.
Despite my loss, I think that the debate demonstrates some points on my side. We get to hear from Dr Carrier himself the negative way in which he talks about other historians. He acknowledges that the mainstream historical account is plausible. He agrees with me that whoever is responsible for the Sermon on the Mount was a counterculture genius. He names the cult of Osiris as the cult most similar to the early Christian cult, which is strange. Perhaps he was answering the question, “Which cult had a savior figure most like celestial Jesus?” because the Osiris cult as a religious organization is hardly like the early Christian sect. Since he didn’t bring up the “cosmic sperm bank” from which he says the celestial Jesus was created, I did. On these and other points, the debate shows the beginning of what could be useful inquiries into Dr Carrier’s account of Christian origins and its many problems.
As I said in the debate, I am not trying to prove to anyone that Jesus existed. My point is that the mainstream historical account is the most plausible account of Christian origins available to us. It might be wrong, but there is no other account that is equally plausible. The small number of historians who agree with Dr Carrier about the historical Jesus being dubious also agree with me that his account is not plausible. When debates about Jesus are filled with competing proof texts, they can make the eyes glaze over, and it’s hard for non-experts to evaluate the evidence. Lay people are better suited to evaluating a debate that evaluates the relative plausibility of two hypothetical accounts of Christian origins. I learned a lot from this debate, and I hope I get a chance to do better in a similar debate some other time.
Honest Debate Format—The format for this debate, plus links to more data on historical Jesus.
Honest Debate: Christianity Good and Bad—Here’s my post on the previous debate. It is a better example of the “Honest Debate” format than my debate with Carrier is.
New Testament Plot Fixes—The New Testament is full of erroneous details invented to paper over the inconvenient facts of Jesus’ life. These inventions point back to the historical Jesus, whose life and ministry they amend and “improve”.
When I was a kid, Sunday school at my family’s Lutheran church was no place for me. The teachers taught material that didn’t make sense, and my hard questions weren't welcome. My geeky interests had no place, and the system was designed to get all us different kids with all our different personalities and experiences to conform to the same credo. Then, after Sunday school ended I had to attend the church service with my family, which was even worse. For instance, you weren’t allowed to kick the back of the pew in front of you, not even if you were bored as hell. Take a guess as to whether I hated and resented the whole ordeal. So you can imagine my surprise when I ended up, 30 years later, teaching Sunday school myself. What I found out is that a Unitarian church can be a pretty great place for geeky kids. My 10-year-old self would have gotten something out of it. In September, Unitarian churches all across the States are starting their Sunday school programs. Here, the kids are not subjected to the church service, hard questions are welcome in class, and each student’s own beliefs are valued. The programs help kids understand the “big ideas” rather than laying out a creed for them to sign onto. Maybe one of these programs would be a good fit for a geeky kid in your life.
Geeky Kids. Unitarians are the only denomination in the US to edge out Jews when it comes to high SAT scores. We’re a highly educated bunch, and you can see it in the kids. They are into Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Cosmos. Here you might find kids with names like Mithril. These kids are curious, with good questions that deserve good answers. “What is a Jew?” “Why do different religions fight all the time?”
Geeky Topics. The official curriculum includes holidays around the world, contemporary world religions, the scientific story of our world’s origins, and justice in today’s society. Questions are welcome, and conformity is not expected. One 8th-grader got us into a discussion of whether the universe is a computer program. A 4th-grader was interested in Greek myths, so she ran a class session where she presented information to the class, followed by an improvised skit where the kids acted out the story of Artemis and Actaeon. Kids like acting things out, and one 6th & 7th-grade class improvised a skit about the Six-Day War. My daughter’s class, when studying religious history, watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I never got to watch as part of my Sunday school training.
Modern Values. The kids start the class year by crafting a “covenant” covering the behavior that they expect of each other and of themselves. This exercise enforces the idea that social rules are up to us. The curriculum embraces pluralism and freedom of conscience. My own training in Sunday school was mostly about teaching me how to be a Lutheran, while Unitarian Sunday school is mostly about what it means to be a human in these modern days. Our 6th & 7th grade class visits houses of worship around the area: Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, etc. Eighth graders take a yearlong class in sex ed called Our Whole Lives (OWL). It’s a world-class program with no-nonsense information in the context of personal choices, confidential conversations, and intention. It’s the class where my daughter learned something that Dan Savage didn’t know, that you can’t use male and female latex condoms together. Our ninth graders finish off the whole shebang with a year-long coming-of-age program, where each adolescent is paired with an adult from the congregation who participates with them over the year’s conversations and activities. And if you want your kids to be aware of climate change, racism, gay rights, poverty, immigration, and other important issues, a UU church is a great place for them to see liberals engaged in these topics.
Atheist UUs. Here in Seattle, there are plenty of atheists in our congregation and teaching Sunday school. The believers believe in a non-anthropomorphic God that might be identified with nature or described as ineffable. For the most part, I couldn’t tell you which of my students were atheists and which weren’t. They’re kids, so they probably don’t know exactly what they believe anyway, and we don’t force them to pick a side. For that matter, I also can’t tell which adults are atheists. Word on the street is that our head minister believes in God, but not so’s you’d notice. Some congregations, especially on the East Coast, lean more toward Deism. We don’t have a pope or creed to enforce conformity from one congregation to another.
Multigenerational Community. When my late wife made us all start attending church almost 20 years ago, I was not into it. After a couple years, my daughter talked me into teaching Sunday school, and that’s when I connected to the community. For me it’s been rewarding to see kids grow over the years, from Sunday school, to OWL, to coming-of-age. For the last three years, I’ve been involved in the local atheist community, but none of the promising new groups are intergenerational. Now my late wife’s ashes are interred in the memorial garden, which is a service that atheist groups have a hard time matching.
Dr Richard Carrier is the world’s
leading doubter of the historical Jesus.
Honest Debate Format
Update: Last Friday I debated Dr Carrier and lost decisively. Several things went wrong. Then again, several things went right. Other than that, I’m saving my commentary until the video of the debate goes up. Friday, August 11th, I'll be debating Dr Richard Carrier, the world's leading doubter of historical Jesus. This debate is the fourth in our series, and it uses the “honest debate” format inspired by Daniel Dennett and Jonathan Haidt. Classic debates are polemical, and they date from an era when “men” thought that Reason was a divine faculty. Now we know that cognition is messy, and we understand that a productive dialog requires a better format than dueling proofs. Verbal disagreements tend to trigger tribal instincts of us-versus-them, and our debate format is designed to avoid that reaction. Here's a rundown of our event outline, with commentary. Richard and I are termed "advocates" because we each advocate a position. We're not opponents because we have a shared goal of presenting both sides clearly to the audience. A moderator runs the dialog. We are recording the event for publication online.
We want to start by defining the positions Richard & Jonathan represent, so we start by polling the audience, and giving each advocate a 2-minute opening statement.
We want to show our audience where both sides agree, so we’re doing a quick Agreement Round. We quickly cover points that establish a common ground, making it easier to understand the context of each position. On an emotional level, this exchange sends a signal to everyone that this dialog is not a fight.
We want to show our audience where both sides disagree, so we’re doing a quick Disagreement Round. Again we cover points quickly, framing the scope of the debate and hitting some high points.
We then want to dig into why each advocate believes what he believes, so we’re doing a Straight Debate Round.
The Straight Debate Round will consist of 3 major topics.
The Moderator asks each advocate to summarize the other advocate’s views. (This is to help our debate stay focused; it’s even more helpful, though, to allow the audience to focus on the big points.)
Our three topics are the mainstream narrative of Christian origins, Richard's narrative of Christian origins*, and the state of Jesus scholarship.
We want to see how the audience is responding, so we take a halftime poll.
We want to collect audience questions, so we take an intermission and hand out index cards.
At the beginning of the intermission, both advocates privately ask each other if they’re succeeding at keeping the tone polite and respectful.
We want to address audience questions, so we do a Q&A Round.
Questions are submitted on cards to prevent verbally aggressive audience members from dominating air time.
During the Q&A Round, we’ll go extreme in re-stating the other advocate’s opinion.
Again, the purpose of this is to help keep the debate on track — but even more it’s to model “first understand, then discuss” for people in our community. Part of why we do these debates is to improve people’s understanding of what good debate looks like.
Specifically, here’s how it will go:
The Moderator reads an audience question.
Richard will have 1 (uninterrupted) minute to answer the question.
Jonathan will get 1 sentence to restate the gist of Richard’s answer.
The Moderator asks Richard if Jonathan got it at least 80% right. If so, then we switch.
Jonathan will have 1 (uninterrupted) minute to answer the question.
Richard will get 1 sentence to restate the gist of Jonathan’s answer.
The Moderator asks Jonathan if Richard got it at least 80% right. If so…
Both panelists have a 5-minute free debate — which might look more like a two-way conversation, or like more a moderated dialog, depending on how it shapes up.
We want to bring all the information together, so we conclude by giving each advocate a 2-minute closing statement.
We want to see how views have changed (if at all), so we take a final poll. *This section, Richard’s account of early Christian origins, is the part that got dropped, due to miscommunication.
Moderating and Humanizing
Two features of the debate are not apparent from the outline.
The moderator sometimes takes an active role in getting the advocates to come to terms with each others’ questions or arguments.
We put some work into humanizing everyone involved, for example with personal details in bios. The human touch helps set a tone of collaboration. Other “Jesus” Pages Several posts on this blog flesh out my take on Jesus as a historical figure. See my blog posts on Jesus.
Other “Honest Debate” Pages
These are the other posts I've made about this debate format.
Tuesday I’ll be presenting about the historical Jesus and Jesus mythicism at the Seattle Skeptics meeting here in Seattle. Here is the outline of my presentation, plus links to resources.
Your Humble Presenter
Lifelong atheist. Raised liberal Christian.
Atheist community organizer: “honest debates”, Darwin Day, Winter Solstice Potluck.
Author of Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution.
Mainstream views on Jesus. The experts’ evidence convinces me.
Talk Format
There’s too much material to cover in one night, so I’ll review the whole thing briefly and then I can answer questions or expand on topics that folks find interesting.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt
says humans are “groupish”.
Human Cognitive Shortcuts
These biases make it difficult to hold a productive debate over the question of Jesus.
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
—Programmer Alberto Brandolini.
Thinking Fast and Slow, emotions first and reason as your press agent.
I.e., You think you’re right when you feel you’re right.
A coherent mythicist account of Christian origins: No link. So far no one has been able to show me one of these, so if you find one, let me know. Update (August ’17): Dr Carrier gives a brief account of how Christianity originated in On the Historicity of Jesus. I’m happy to critically compare the mainstream account to Carrier’s account any time.
Here’s a video of a recent debate about Christianity, good and bad. I was the moderator, and I think it turned out well. Both debaters are non-believers because this debate is not about atheism versus Christianity. These debates are by and for atheists, created for the atheist community here in Seattle. Each debater represents a different viewpoint, but both viewpoints fit within the atheist worldview. The debate was what we call an “honest” debate. We have specific ground rules, roles, and expectations that prevent problems you see in typical debates: the unfair arguments, evasive answers, and rhetorical tricks. This format is inspired primarily by Rapoport’s rules for criticism, as popularized by Daniel Dennett. With that sort of approach in mind, I’ve been working with the Seattle Atheists to develop dialogs and debates that would facilitate a significantly more meaningful dialog than many of us have come to expect. This “honest” debate on Christianity is the third, and it’s the best.
Sometimes people think that the point of Rapoport’s rules is to be nice. It’s true that the rules have the beneficial effect of taking some of the heat out of a disagreement, but niceness is only half of it. The other half is intellectual honesty. One rule is that you state your opponent’s viewpoint in terms so reasonable that the opponent accepts your paraphrase. Once you’ve done that, you can’t resort to caricature or exaggeration. When you state the opponent’s viewpoint, you demonstrate that you know exactly what you’re disagreeing with. Most people don’t. Over the years, I have seen people have a surprisingly hard time articulating their opponent’s point of view. You see some of this paraphrasing in the Christianity debate, and both debaters are pretty good at it. Before the debate, we had some preliminary discussions, so the debaters were already familiar with each others’ general positions.
Another of Rapoport’s rules is to find places of agreement. I’ve come to appreciate the power of that technique more and more. This technique also appears in the book Crucial Conversations, about how to de-escalate conflicts and facilitate cooperation among people who are at odds with each other. In this Christianity debate, you see some times when the two debaters find things to agree on.
The video ends before the results of the polls are announced. By the end of the debate, the pro-Christian side had picked up more undecideds than the anti-Christian side, but the anti-Christian side still had more sympathizers overall.
The anti-Christian debater is Bob Seidensticker. He’s the author of Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey, and he critiques Christianity on his Patheos blog, also called Cross Examined. Bob had heard of Rapoport’s rules and was eager to participate.
Christianity was our third topic. Our first dialog was on Islam and Islamophobia, and it was not recorded because the topic is too touchy. The second was on Jesus, and you can see it here. We plan to do more.
Daniel Dennett has long promoted rules for criticizing honestly instead of insultingly. For example, you should start by stating your opponent’s position clearly, in terms that your opponent would use. This exercise demonstrates that you understand the position you’re about to criticize, not attacking a straw man*. It also sets a tone of exceptional reasonableness. Recently, the idea of “steel manning" seems to be gaining attention, and that’s in the same ballpark as the rules Dennett popularizes. Steel manning means addressing the opponent’s position in its strongest terms. Usually we caricature an opponent’s view without ever realizing we’re doing it. We honestly state our judgments, and we don’t try to caricature anyone else’s view, but the caricature starts in our own heads, so it’s almost impossible to avoid. On the other hand, if you intentionally make a “steel man” argument and address the opponent’s strongest points honestly, you overcome the reflexive tendency to caricature the opponent’s view. Sam Harris has made arduous efforts to communicate across lines of disagreement, and he has suffered some dramatic failures. He’s still trying, and sometimes it works. Two years ago, Dennett’s proposals got me experimenting with formats for disagreeing. Two years ago, I talked two other atheists into joining me online for a video conference where I would debate one of them and the other would moderate. The topic was “how useful is it for us atheists to challenge the religious beliefs of others?” I just reviewed the video, and it holds up surprisingly well. Take a listen if you like. There’s video, but it hardly matters. The action is all in the audio.
It’s an amateur performance and recording, for sure. At one point there’s a technical glitch, but soon enough everyone is back in the conversation. None of us are familiar with the format we’re trying, not the Google Hangout nor the moderated discussion. No one’s timing anything, so sometimes our answers go on too long. The performance is uneven. But given all that, it’s an interesting record of our experiment because the conversation is different from a regular debate. We…
figure out what we agree on, which is as important as what we disagree on.
take absolute either/or questions and turn them into questions of proportion.
state each others’ views fairly.
clarify where our differences of opinion really lie.
address each other’s points directly.
This video is not ready for prime time, but as food for thought it seem worth sharing.
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* “straw man” and “steel man”: These terms are needlessly gendered. Any chance that introducing “steel manning” is also a chance to change both terms at once? How about “straw dog” and “steel dog”? This switch works for me because men are dogs, but dogs are not men.
