Discussing High Conflict

In my congregation’s 4th Principle Dialogue Group, we discussed the book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, by Amanda Ripley. We found it to be a good source for understanding community conflicts when they turn polarizing, and here are some resources if you want to run your own book discussion or just learn about the book on your own.

Concepts & Terms

The book High Conflict has several concepts and practices that seem like pure gold. In particular, I have seen looping lead to productive dialogues on hot topics that are otherwise impossible to discuss.

Fourth way. A way to go through conflict that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent, the three usual paths. Leaning into the conflict.

Illusion of communication. The extremely common and mistaken belief that we have communicated something, when we have not.

Looping for understanding. An iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said—and checks to see if the summary was right. Developed by Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein and detailed in their book Challenging Conflict. 

“Tell me more.” Simon Greer’s ground rules were: “We’re going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear”, “We’re not going to try to convince each other we’re wrong”, and, “We’re going to be curious”. The phrase “tell me more” embodies these rules, and it’s a handy response whenever someone says something that you don’t know how to respond to. 

Magic ratio. When the number of everyday positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, creating a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy. (In marriage, for example, the magic ratio is 5 to 1, according to research by psychologists Julie and John Gottman.) 

Crock pot. A shorthand term for the issue that a conflict appears to be about, on the surface, when it is really about something else (see Understory). 

Understory. The thing the conflict is really about, underneath the usual talking points (see Crock pot).

Online Resources

Here is a link to Amanda Ripley’s list of discussion questions. Some of them you can answer from your personal experience with conflict even if you haven’t read the book. 

https://www.amandaripley.com/blog/discussion-questions-for-high-conflict

Here’s a solid review from the NYTimes (no paywall).

https://nyti.ms/3OsHdLl

Session Schedule

Our format ensures that everyone gets to speak. Our goal in the Dialogue Group is not just to discuss valuable topics but also to develop the skills and habits of good dialogue. 

7:00 welcome, settling in

7:05 introductory words, intentions, ground rules, do-not-disturb, chalice lighting

7:10 opening comments. 2 minutes each: introduce yourself, questions or comments about the chapters we’re discussing, or for that matter what you’d like to say about any part of the topic

7:30 suggestions for topics and questions to discuss (might be obvious)

7:35 forty minutes of open conversation (alternatively, 50 minutes with a 10-minute break in the middle)

8:15 last words, 1 minute each for closing comments or thoughts about future sessions

8:25 closing words

8:29 optional group photo

8:30 done

“High Conflict” in Unitarian-Universalist Communities

Ever since 2017, the UU community has been in “high conflict” over the national leaders’ political agenda, so for us this book is timely. The section on gang violence is interesting but doesn’t much apply to our experience. The section on conflicts within a liberal Jewish community, on the other hand, parallels our own experience in a lot of ways.

More Resources for Better Dialogues

See also this post: https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2022/03/resources-for-better-dialogues.html

Samson the Old-School Terrorist

Philistines are going to starve

When my daughter was little, I wanted to tell the story of Samson to my daughter orally, as it was originally told, instead of reading it out of a “Bible story” book. To get the story right, I opened the Bible and read about Samson. Turns out that his big claim to fame is massacring Philistines, most of them civilians. 

To the Hebrews, Samson was a folk hero, someone who killed their enemies by the thousands. He killed a lot of people, most of them civilians, whose crime was that they were Philistines. Today we expect more than that from a hero. 

Here’s how Samson’s first heroic act goes. He marries a Philistine, and then he challenges thirty Philistines with a riddle, betting them “thirty sheets and thirty change of garments” that they can't solve it. When they solve his unsolvable riddle, Samson knows that his wife has given them the answer. To settle the score, he collects the sheets and garments by killing 30 Philistines...

“And the Spirit of YHWH came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave change of garments to those who had solved the riddle.”

Later, he torches fields, slaughters Philistines, and kills a thousand with the jawbone of an ass. He dallies with a harlot in Gaza, and then falls in love with Delilah, who betrays him. He’s captured and blinded, but eventually he pulls the Philistines’ temple down around him, killing three thousand more people on his way out.

“So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.”

I never told the Samson story to my little daughter. By modern standards, this guy isn’t a hero. He’s a terrorist.

Comment on Twitter.

Atheist Judo

Tim LaHaye on humanism

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!”

*I’m paraphrasing. 

Kendi Says Change Policies

a daring work

In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi offers a number of critiques of social justice activism. Activists, he says, should fix their failing messaging, stop saying that African Americans can’t be racist, and change their focus. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of changing policy over changing hearts. As he explains, an emphasis on policy change is hardly new, even if it runs counter to today’s mainstream antiracist activism. Kendi says you’re not an activist unless you have a track record of changing policy. This bold framing comes as an indictment of a broad range of social justice action that seems to be aimed more at winning converts rather than at changing laws and regulations. As a liberal who has been surprised and disappointed by impractical rhetoric on the left, I heartily welcome Kendi’s perspective.

For years it has puzzled me why so many social justice messages fail to include a call to action. The documentary 13th has no call to action. The book Caste is the same way. Signs at the MLK march tend to express feelings but not plans or next steps. Activists have told me that it would be “white privilege” if they made practical plans to fight racism. Thomas Sowell suggests that movement leaders focus on feelings rather than on plans because that’s the less risky approach. If you don’t attempt anything, you can’t fail.

A good deal of demonstrations seem meant to declare or promote general support for a movement. Some activists explicitly describe their job as building participation in “Movement” until the population reaches a tipping point. Sometimes this tipping point is pegged at 3.5%, a figure derived from a study that confirmed the value of mass movements of nonviolent protest. For these activists, there’s little point to pursuing electoral victories? Until the population reaches its tipping point (the story goes), electoral efforts are going to be ineffective, and after the tipping point they’ll be a breeze. In Kendi’s formulation, the people marching on MLK Day are merely demonstrating, not really protesting. Until they have changed policy, they don’t even deserve the term “activist”, at least not in Kendi’s perspective. 

Some of the feelings-first rhetoric on the radical left appeals to the New Age imagination. We are enjoined to wake up, heed a new vision of humanity, embrace the spirit of abundance, dismantle civilization, and create a new society founded on equity. It’s sometimes called the Great Turning. Here the focus is on confession, repentance, and zeal rather than policy change. New-Age “visualization” makes an appearance here as “re-imagining” society.

Feelings-oriented antiracist rhetoric also appeals to some people because it tells them what they want to hear. The implicit message is, “Your personal feelings are super important.” Plenty of would-be activists respond warmly to the idea that the work they’re called to do amounts to reading, self-help, introspection, and being emotionally moved.

Kendi, however, calls all this feelings-oriented work into question. To back up his challenge, he cites Martin Luther King, Jr. Activists these days have a love-hate relationship with King. They love to quote him when he agrees with them, such as when he said that riots are the language of the unheard, but they hate it when he gets quoted against them, such as when he condemns riots as self-defeating. In Kendi’s case, he criticizes activists for failing to heed King’s message that it is wise to focus on changing policy rather than on changing hearts. Changes in heart, King said, will follow changes in policy. With 50 years of hindsight, Kendi backs up King’s claim with historical evidence. For example, the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriages are legal in 1967, which was followed by a steady rise in support for such marriages. If King and Kendi both agree that policy change should come first, who will say otherwise?

If we accept Kendi’s message, what sort of policy change would be considered antiracist? Kendi defines antiracism as anything that improves racial equality, regardless of intent. In that view, any policy that helps Americans who are less well off is, by default, antiracist because it disproportionately helps African Americans. Fixing health insurance, Kendi says, would be antiracist. A do-nothing climate policy, on the other hand, is a racist climate policy. Kendi’s reference to policies that help the poor reminds me of King’s Poor People’s Campaign, now given new life by Rev William Barber II.

How much influence will Kendi’s dissenting take on activism have on social justice movements in the US? To date, I haven’t heard much discussion in social justice circles about Kendi’s challenge to feelings-first rhetoric, but maybe there’s dialog taking place behind the scenes. I’d love to see more focus on policy change because I agree with King and Kendi that it’s more effective. Is it wishful thinking to expect that Kendi’s book will really make a difference?

Group Instincts and Modern Politics

Identity without biology

tl:dr Some aspects of our identities activate in-group social instincts, and it’s easy for people to organize politically along those lines. Other aspects of our identities relate more to distinctions within the in-group or within a family structure, and it’s difficult to organize politically along such lines. 

Why is it so much easier to organize African Americans around fighting racism than it is to organize poor people around fighting poverty? Why is it easier to convince poor, white Americans that Muslims are a threat than to convince them that the rich are taking more than their share? Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King tried to unite poor whites and Blacks, but that dream died with him. Why the big difference? Maybe the difference derives from humans’ in-group and out-group instincts.  

Our tribal instincts organize our brains to respond to tribe-versus-tribe conflicts with much stronger emotions than when they respond to conflicts within the tribe. As a result, Christians and Muslims are primed for conflict, while poor people don’t find it natural to organize as a class or group. Below I’ll offer a basic take on nine aspects of identity, pointing out how some of them activate the brain’s tribal programming pretty well while others fail to do so. 

Nine Aspects of Identity

This list comes from the “ADRESSING” model of identity and oppression (see end of post).

Age

All human societies recognize age categories within the group, and these are grounded in biology. Nobody identifies as, say, a “teenager” the way people identify as “Germans” or “Catholics”. 

Tribal Politics: It’s an in-group distinction, and it has low political salience. 

Disability

Disability is a biological reality with broad social implications. Disabled people organize politically, but disability is not a source of identity the way language or religion can be. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

Religion

Religion uses symbolism and ritual to unite people, and before modern times it was the only way to unite different tribes or nations. It’s a breeze to re-orient religious enthusiasm and convert it into hostility toward outsiders. Today, we see hostility across religions lines all over the globe. 

Tribal Politics: Religion distinguishes between “us” and “them”, and it has high political salience.

Ethnicity

Ethnic identity traditionally determined one’s nation, language, religion, and homeland. Armenians, for example, belonged to Armenian culture, and a Navajos belonged to Navajo culture. Today, of course, everything is more complicated, as it was, for instance, in the Roman Empire. Still, even today it’s easy to get most people to identify emotionally with their ethnic groups, especially when there are conflicts with other groups. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics.

Social Class/Culture

People commonly admire the successful people in their own “tribes.” My daughter loves Beyoncé because Beyoncé is a boss. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans defer to high-status individuals within the group. How easy is it for the rich to keep the poor divided by race and nationality? Way too easy. In some societies, class and ethnicity align more or less well, especially when class definitions are explicit and legally enforced. When not linked to ethnicity, class still comes with some of ethnicity’s trappings, such as distinctive dress or accents. 

Tribal Politics: In-group or between-group, middling political salience.

Sexual Orientation

Sexual desire operates on its own agenda, cutting across lines of social identity, and often at odds with a conservative religious identity. Oppression and hostility give the LGBTQ+ crowd good reason to organize politically, but “tribe-style” identities seem powerful compared to sexual orientation. 

Tribal Politics: In-group, middling politics.

Indigenous Background

This category is a special case of the more general tendency to form exclusive groups based on ethnicity and nationality (especially in the broad sense). 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

National Origin

Humans are unusual among social animals in that we can tell which strangers are in our society and which are not. A nation is a level of social organization above the tribe, historically allowing tribes to work together and allowing strangers to trust each other. Traditionally, nations have been defined by shared language, religion, lifestyle, and ethnicity. Consider Armenians, Navajos, Danes, etc. Largely, the point of a nation is to get people within it to treat each other better than they treat outsiders. Nearly all Americans, for example, would say that our federal government should concern itself more with our well-being than with the well-being of Argentinians. Politically, it’s easy to get people riled up about their nation, and something like a massive terrorist attack can get even liberal intellectuals to put flag stickers in their car windows. 

Tribal Politics: Between-group, high politics. 

Gender

Traditionally, men and woman have often had single-sex social groups, but our tribal instincts are organized to unite men and women in the tribe with each other and against the enemy rather than to unite women against men or vice versa. Gender may be an important part of one’s personal identity, but it’s not typically a political identity. In fact, filling a man’s role often means competing with other men for status, and the same goes for women.  

Tribal Politics: In-group, low politics. 

The Nonbiological ADRESSING Model

Leticia Nieto’s model of identity and oppression treats these nine aspects of identity as if they are all analogous to each other, with no real sense that humans are flesh-and-blood animals. Being Black, in this model, is essentially like being disabled. My late wife was both Black and disabled, and I can tell you that these two aspects of one’s identity are not essentially the same. In college I studied 20th century social sciences, and half of what I learned was well-meaning bogus stuff that I later had to unlearn. Nieto’s ADRESSING model fits the pattern of 20th century social science because it’s formulaic and nonbiological.

Missing Aspects of Identity

Three biologically potent aspects of identity are missing from the ADRESSING model. 

Language is a primal indicator of who is “us” and who is “them”, as people with thick accents can tell you. Little children seem to intuit identities based on language at an earlier age than identities based on race. The high political salience of language aligns with that of ethnicity, nation, and religion. Say yes to the Oxford comma, or else let’s fight!

Family is a primal source of personal identity, especially perhaps the mother-child connection. It has low political salience in general. The conflict of “young versus old” gets some traction, but that isn’t exactly a conflict between offspring and parents. 

Individual flesh-and-blood reality—the “crazy diamond” of one’s own unique phenotype—can be a major aspect of one’s personal identity, especially for those of us who diverge from the average in mental or physical terms. Political salience is low.

See Also

My review of The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett, which explains the unusual human penchant for identifying not just with clans of people we know but also with larger societies of people who are “us” even though they’re strangers.

What Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind means to me and resources for learning about it. 

Gospel Anti-Semitism in Jesus Christ Superstar

My friend James blogged about
this live performance of JCS

The 1973 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar has an amazing soundtrack, and you can use the story to learn about anti-Semitism in the Christian gospels. First-century Christians wrote the gospels after a war between Jerusalem and Rome. The first Christians had all been Jews, but at the end of the first century there were plenty of gentile Christians as well as Jewish Christians who denounced mainstream Judaism. These early Christians compiled and promulgated the gospels in part to show everyone that it was the wicked Jews who were the enemies of Rome and not the good Christians.  

Jesus was a hillbilly exorcist and apocalyptic prophet. The Jewish leaders had him killed as a threat to public order, which he was. His story has gotten embellished and retold several times. Jesus Christ Superstar delivers a great story, mostly by playing up the conflict between Jesus and Jews: Jewish leaders, the Jewish mob, even his Jewish disciples. Each song contributes a little bit to our understanding of anti-Semitism in the gospels. 

No Talk of God then We Called You a Man. As a Jew in good standing, Jesus never claimed to be God. The fourth gospel portrays Jesus as divine, as misunderstood by the Jews, and as something of a Jew-hater.

What’s the Buzz. The song shows Jesus’ Jewish disciples to be fools. 

Strange Thing Mystifying. Christian churchmen started talking down Mary of Magdala pretty early, and her she is a woman of ill repute. It makes for good drama but, this tradition is not in the gospels. In this song, Jesus rebukes the disciples. You know, the Jewish disciples.

We Are Decided. The leaders of Jerusalem had little choice but to take out trouble-makers to prevent insurrection. They kept the peace through Jesus’ life and for decades after, until AD 66. Historians are divided over whether Jesus styled himself as the king of the Jews.

Everything’s Alright. Here’s another opportunity for Jesus to rebuke his Jewish disciples. After Jesus’ execution, Mary of Magdala might have been the first follower to have a vision of Jesus after his death, but the gospels limit her role. Did Jesus have sex with followers? Maybe, maybe not. There’s not a trace of churchmen denying the charge, so I figure it probably didn’t happen.

This Jesus Must Die. If this rock opera makes High Priest Caiaphas and the other leaders of the Temple seem wicked and creepy, that’s pretty much what the gospel authors would have wanted. 

Hosanna. Historians are split on whether Jesus really did ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. The gospels have the Jews hail Jesus as their king (“messiah”) so that when they turn on him later it comes across as particularly wicked.

Simon Zealotes. Here, Simon refers to Jesus as “Christ” (“messiah”, “anointed [king]”). Historically, Jesus didn’t claim to be the awaited king, but the story is better if it’s their own king that the Jewish leaders execute.

Poor Jerusalem. The Jewish leaders and people don’t understand at all. Jerusalem closes her eyes to the truth.

Pilate’s Dream. Historically, Pilate was a brutal ruler, assigned to rule Judea by decree because no client king could keep these locals in hand. The gospels make this villain into a complex and sympathetic figure, tormented because the Jews force him to crucify their own king, an innocent man.

The Temple. The more of a cesspit this place is, the worse the Jewish leaders look. Historians figure Jesus got crucified for causing a disturbance in the Temple, but the details are not reliable. For sure, the Temple was a source of huge wealth for the Temple leaders, and it probably featured a graven Roman eagle over the main entrance, so there are reasons that Jesus, a penniless exorcist from the sticks, might pitch a fit here. 

I Don’t Know How to Love Him. Even Mary of Magdala, the Jew who knows Jesus the best, doesn’t understand who Jesus is. 

Damned for All Time. Historians are split on whether there was a Judas, and I don’t think so. His name sounds a lot like “Jew”. Who could be so terrible as to betray Jesus? Mr Jew, that’s who! Great song, though. [EDIT: James McGrath helpfully pointed out that the name Judas doesn’t just sound like “Jew”, it was actually the common Jewish name, Judah, the biblical figure that Jews are basically named after. The Jews represent the tribe of Judah, that is, the tribe of Judas. His blog post.]

Last Supper. Boy, those Jewish disciples really are losers, aren’t they? Especially that traitor, Mr Jew.

Gethsemane. Jesus knew that he was about to pay the ultimate price, but those faithless Jews can’t even stay awake with him. 

The Arrest. Mr Jew betrays Jesus, and the disciples are obsessed with fighting. The Jewish people turn on him. 

Peter’s Denial. Historically, Peter was the most prominent Christian leader outside of Jerusalem, at least until Paul came along 20 years later. The gospel writers spent extra time cutting Peter down, such as in this scene where he denies Jesus. 

Pilate and Christ. The gospel writers wanted the Romans and everyone else to know that it was the Jews that were the problem, and Christians aren’t Jews any more. It’s the Jews that lost a war against Rome, just as God planned, and now the Christians are God’s chosen people. 

King Herod’s Song. This scene is not historical, and it’s one more example of the Jews failing to recognize their king. 

Could We Start Again Please. Mary still doesn’t understand. Historically, Jesus’ crucifixion seems to have caught his followers by surprise, and they fled back to the hinterlands of Galilee. His followers were surprised because crucifixion wasn’t part of the plan, but in the gospels they don’t understand even though it is part of the plan, and that’s worse. 

Judas’ Death. Mr Jew’s sin is unconscionable, and the Temple leaders are creepy. Great combo. 

Trial Before Pilate. Historically, it’s hard to understand why the Roman prefect would care or even notice if the local leaders wanted someone crucified as a trouble-maker. In this song, Pilate judges him innocent and tells the traitorous Jews that he’s their king. The Jews demand that he be not just flogged but crucified. 

Superstar. Historically, the disciples did not know how Jesus’ crucifixion fit into God’s plan, but Paul came along 20 years later and came up with an explanation. Is this the least anti-Semitic song in the soundtrack?

The Crucifixion. The Roman’s were expert at inflicting punishment, and crucifixion was a horrific way to go. In this song, you hear Jesus forgive the Roman soldiers that nail him in, reinforcing the theme that Christians are good Roman subjects, not like those traitorous Jews. One anti-Semitic detail that they left out was the Roman soldier recognizing the crucified Jesus as the Son of God. That gospel scene was meant to show that gentiles recognized Jesus while his own people betrayed him.

John 19:41. This verse refers to Jesus’ empty grave, a story designed to reinforce the idea that Jesus really did rise bodily from the dead. John’s gospel downgrades Peter, acknowledging him as the lead apostle only in a bonus resurrection appearance tacked on as an epilog.

Humans love stories, and stories need conflict. The gospel writers set up a conflict between Jesus and “the Jews”, and Jesus Christ Superstar takes this theme and runs with it. Great story, bad history, baked-in anti-Semitism, great vocals—quite the combo. 

[EDIT: Fixed the bit about the church tradition and Mary of Magdala, which I had gotten wrong.]

‘Bible and Music Update’: Religion professor James McGrath commented on this post.

2020

medieval weekend

Ex-Nomads’ Weekend

In his book The Gifts of the Jews, historian Thomas Cahill mentions the day of rest only in passing. If this author thinks that a weekend for laborers deserves only passing mention, perhaps he’s a man more of words than of labor, and he doesn’t fully appreciate what a gift the weekend has been down through the ages. About three thousand years ago, Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization collapsed, and the Hebrews abruptly switched from nomadic herding to sedentary farming. They had no aristocracy to despise physical labor and write the rules accordingly, and these former nomads invented for themselves a day off from “civilization”. On the day of rest, even wives, slaves, and draft animals got the day off. The other nations had laws written by their ruling classes, and they preferred that laborers labor with no weekly break. Christianity and Islam both picked up the practice of the day of rest, and they spread it wide. Modern labor unions took up the cause, and now the weekend is an expected part of secular society. 

These days, ancient Hebrews catch a lot of grief for their genocidal fantasies and other indicators of unacceptable, Bronze Age bigotry. Still, it pays to also understand what they got right.

See also: Evolutionary psychology and the Fall of Genesis

2020

Unitarian University Church, Seattle

Virtual Church Gatherings

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.

click here

Being Wrong Sucks

What is it like to be wrong? 

Kathryn Schulz gave a famous TED Talk in which she points out that, for the most part, being wrong feels like being right. After all, people who are wrong feel like they are right. Even when our beliefs are false, they feel right to us. On the other hand, I was dead wrong about big things when I was a young man, and in retrospect I can see how being wrong shaped how I talked about the things that I was wrong about. Being wrong led me to approach my views narrowly and shallowly. 

Simple formulas

When I was a self-styled mystic, if someone questioned my spiritual beliefs, I could say that we were each on our own spiritual journey, so I wouldn’t expect them to agree with me. When I thought that no gender differences were inborn, if my brother reported that his infant son was notably more “boy-like” than his older sisters had been, I could explain any reported differences as caused by subconscious messaging and confirmation bias. When I thought nonhuman animals had no conscious inner experience, I could ascribe all the observed behavior in nonhuman animals to automatic reactions regulated by neural activity. These are all either-or propositions. “No spiritual journey is better than any other.” “No newborn is psychologically more boy-like or girl-like than any other.” “No nonhuman animal is more conscious or emotional than another.” Simple formulations like these defy investigation and are therefore good ways to prevent false ideas from being revealed as false.

Creationists love simple takes on science, such as the idea that evolution contradicts the law of entropy. Atheists who deny the historical Jesus like to say that Jesus is simply like Zeus or Spider-Man, when obviously he’s a lot more like John the Baptist. Critical theorists* say everything is about power. 

Incuriosity

Even though, as a young man, I understood evolution, I still accepting the teaching that boys and girls are born with essentially identical psychological and behavioral predispositions. I never showed any interest in speculating about how the sex-differentiated instincts of our ancestors might have “evolved away”. I never tried looking up scientists who would have contradicted what was in my fraudulent textbook, which featured the infamous case of David Reimer. As a spiritual seeker, I never worked too hard at figuring out the truth. Star Wars had taught me to just “trust”, with no training or discipline needed. I read spiritual books, but as a hobbyist, not as a devotee. If nonhuman animals were unconscious because language created inner experience, then why wasn’t I curious about what happened with Helen Keller? Did she suddenly becoming self-aware when she learned sign language? Why wasn’t I curious about how language and self-awareness develop in children?

Creationists are not curious about which animals group together to form “kinds”. They don’t pursue archeological investigations to figure out which ruins are from before the Flood and which after. Atheists who say Jesus never existed are not curious about how Christianity started. Critical theorists don’t try measuring the relative power of groups over time, or comparing relative levels from one place to another. You’ll never see a graph of how the white-black power gap has risen or declined over the 20th century. 

Rigidity

When I thought that the government should provide everyone with a guaranteed income of $30K a year, I dismissed skepticism as backward and had no way to question whether my dollar figure was right. It was based on intuition, so there was no way to consider whether $20K or $40K might make more sense. (That $30K from 1987 would be over $60K in today’s dollars.) When I heard a case study of workers appreciating an incentive system that paid them more to work faster, I compartmentalized it so that it would not alter my impression that the getting workers to work faster was exploitation. 

Christians are obliged to talk about the Trinity in certain ways and must not talk about it in certain other ways. The three Persons must be distinct but coequal, and the metaphor of one God with three “masks” is forbidden. That’s true even though “person” originally meant “mask”, prosōpon in Greek. Jesus-denialists will talk about whether there’s proof Jesus existed but but don’t like talking about the most likely account of how early Christianity could have developed the weird way that it did. 

Anger and contempt

The flip side of these defenses was contempt toward people who disagreed with me and anger toward them if they had actual evidence that I couldn’t dismiss. The contempt was for people who were unenlightened, and the anger was for people who threatened my ideas. 

Go online and watch people disagree over politics, culture, or religion, and you know what you’ll find: contempt and anger. 

“What if I’m wrong?”

Twenty or thirty years after the fact, it’s easy to see how wrong I was. Partly that’s because it’s not painful to admit that one was wrong decades ago the way it is painful to admit that one was wrong earlier today. How likely is it that people can self-reflect and see the signs of error in their own current behavior? In my personal experience, it takes a lot of work to get there.

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* “Critical theorists”: Critical theory is the ’30s–era political philosophy that describes oppression as power struggles between groups, driven by ideology. It is marked by the Marxist and Freudian theories of human nature that were popular at the time, and it’s become so common in social justice circles that most of the people who promote it just take it for granted. Most proponents seem not to know that their ideology has a name or even that it’s an ideology. If folks don’t like the term “critical theory” for this school of thought, I’m happy to call it whatever they like if that let’s us avoid debating semantics.

Resources for Studying The Righteous Mind

The book I recommend the most. 

Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is the book I recommend the most. It has changed the way I understand political conflict. Irrational behavior that used to baffle me, such as denying evolution or thinking Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, now makes perfect sense to me. Haidt shows how political and religious conflicts are grounded in evolved, moral feelings. These feelings provide us with moral judgments, for which we then invent justifications so plausible that we believe them ourselves. This analysis informs the moderated dialogs that a friend and I have been running in Seattle for years. Now at my Unitarian church, I’m running a book discussion group on The Righteous Mind, and I’ve collected links to a few good, online resources for anyone who wants to understand what Haidt is saying here. 

Bill Moyer and Jonathan Haidt

This is reportedly the best video to get an overview of the book and to see what Haidt looks and sounds like. 50 minutes, video. Link. 

Jonathan Haidt and the On Being Project

Good introduction, with extra emphasis on religion and Judaism. 50 minutes, audio. Link.

Figures and images
The figures and images from the book. You can pick up a lot just by reviewing them. Link.

YourMorals.Org research site

Learn about your moral feelings while helping researchers calibrate their tests. This site let me create a group just for people in my church, so we can each see how we compare to others in the church who took the same test. You can spend hours here. Link.

The OpenMind platform

This online program helps you coordinate productive conversations within your organization. The introductory tutorial and interactive quizzes are eye-opening even if you never use this platform with a group. The introductory exercises take less than 90 minutes. Link. 

Fan page

A fellow Unitarian-Universalist wrote up his notes on the book, with a fun chimp-bee graphic. Link.

Link to more resources

A whole page of links to talks or videos that cover the topics in The Righteous Mind. Link. 

Evidism and Respect for Evidence

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

Honest Debate: Religion, Good and Bad

Valerie Tarico tackles the intersection between
religious belief, psychology, and politics.

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.

Podcast (iTunes)

http://bit.ly/podcastReligionTaricoTweet

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.

Participants (besides me)

“Bad” Side: Valerie Tarico, a psychologist and writer.

Moderator: Brandon Hendrickson, an educator and school founder.

Guest Interrogator: Miles Greb, a comic publisher.

Guest Interrogator: Jeff Haley, co-author of Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World.

Guest Interrogator (via email): Daniel Dennett, who promotes the discussion techniques that these debates are based on. 

MC: George Juillerat

2017

Aron Ra, Historical Jesus, and Bias

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.

Earlier posts

Am I a Fake Atheist? 

Honest Debate: Historical Jesus with Ricard Carrier

Notes

Roman Catholic Jesus scholars

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? 

2017

Carrier on Jesus-myth scholarship

Bad Jesus Scholarship for Atheists

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”.

Honest Debate: Historical Jesus with Richard Carrier

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. 

Link to debate

Other Posts

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”.