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”. 

2017

Kate Willich’s Dance Church

Dance Church, Seattle

Secular communities are a pet interest of mine, and my latest discovery is Dance Church, which operates here in Seattle and now in Portland, too. In Seattle, the talented Kate Willich leads people of all ability levels through synchronized dance in a large group, as she has been doing for seven years. The group started as a movement class, but her students soon enough told her that the community she was leading is a church, and she embraced that terminology. The way the “church” concept bubbled up from a secular dance class reminds me of the way that a spiritual “Temple” bubbled up out of the profane Burning Man festival. Dancing together makes you feel connected to other people the way that talking just can’t match. If my Unitarian church featured more dancing, that would be fine by me.

Before we humans could talk about world politics over coffee and share gossip over the fence, we danced together. Walking is something that we humans have to learn, but we are programmed to learn it. It’s the same with dancing. Toddlers are desperate to learn to walk, and adults love to dance. To be fair, not every last person on the face of the planet over the last hundred thousand years has loved to dance, and not every toddler has learned to walk. It’s just the norm, the behavior that the human genome is adapted to. Today, not loving to dance seems common. I know people who basically never dance. But I’m not sure we love dancing any less. What’s different is maybe not so much that we love dancing less but that we fear it more. One reason it scares us is that we don’t know how to do it, and that’s generally because we dance like no one else ever has. In primeval terms, dancing is about making music and moving rhythmically together. In most languages, there’s one word for singing and dancing. In many languages, that same word means ceremony or ritual. For our ancestors, being able to sing and dance was assumed, just like being able to walk is assumed. Dancing together is how our ancestors reminded each other that they were all equal and were all one. But today the culture has taught us that we are all individuals and that it’s shameful to do what other people are doing because that’s bowing to peer pressure. “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off?” The obvious answer is that it depends entirely on what happened to your friends. If twelve of them are down there in the water under the bridge yelling up at you that it’s OK, then yes, jump off! Today, people are expected to dance as individuals. But not too much as individuals, because if you dance funny, people will laugh. Singers, even professionals, are not expected to write their own songs, but amateur dancers are expected to invent their own choreography, ad lib. The unmet need for dancing in synch creates dance crazes, such as the Macarena or line dancing. Dancers are so grateful to have the choreography provided for them that they flock to these popular dance styles. Predictably, the elites mock the “simple” people who like dancing and don’t like choreographing their own steps. Meanwhile, the people who dance most frequently are often those who are part of a choreographed program. They do square dancing, contra dancing, exercise dancing, or otherwise follow a caller. You don’t see those dancers at the clubs, but you see them week after week at community centers and ballrooms.

Seattle has a chapter of Jerk Church, for eating and singing together; the Seattle Atheist Church, for intellectual discussion; and Dance Church, for dancing. The big thing that any regular church has that these secular communities lack is a multigenerational community. That’s a big ask.

Find out more about Kate Willich, her Dance Church, and more at her website: http://katewallich.com/#/dance_church

For more about how deep dance and music go in the human psyche, read This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. 

Sunday School for Geeky Kids

UU youth at the General Assembly

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. 

All my Unitarian posts: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Unitarian

To find a congregation near you, visit this page: http://www.uua.org/find

2017

Rob Heinsoo (right) and me, with 13th Age rulebooks

Gen Con 50 and my Projects

Here are all the things I’m plugging at Gen Con 50. 

Grandmother Fish

The first book to teach evolution to preschoolers, back in print, this time from Macmillan. Available in bookstores. I have copies to show. www.grandmotherfish.com

Over the Edge, Atlas Games, booth 1401

All new. What have I learned about roleplaying game design in the last 25 years? Find out! I’m posting about it on Google+. Earlier edition and supplements still available at the Atlas booth. Sign up here to get on the mailing list to hear about the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. http://atlas-games.com/in/ote_kickstart/

Clades and Clades Prehistoric, Atlas Games, booth 1401

How do you make a kids’ game about evolution that gets the science right? These two animal-matching games feature living animals (Clades) and extinct animals (Clades Prehistoric). Information here: http://www.grandmotherfish.com/clades Preorder here: http://bit.ly/CladesPreorder

13th Age fantasy RPG, Pelgrane Press, 1317

Character-oriented roleplaying meets fast d20 action. Bestiary 2 is here, including my personal recommendations for twisting monsters to your better use. Core rulebook is here, plus years of supplements. http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/category/products/13th-age/

Follow me on 

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tweet

Twitter https://twitter.com/JonathanMTweet

G+ https://plus.google.com/+JonathanTweet

And here’s my schedule if you want to find me

Wednesday evening, Diana Jones Award Party

Thursday

     11 am, 13th Age Adventure Design Workshop

     5 pm, Over the Edge panel (all new version coming to Kickstarter) video recording here

     6 pm, Ars Magica panel

Friday, 11 am, 13th Age Monster Workshop

Saturday, 2 pm, Wizards Resurrects D&D, with the entire 3e design team, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Rich Baker, and Peter Adkison.

Sunday, 2 pm, Contemporary Designs in Roleplaying Games, with Luke Crane, Vincent Baker, James Wallis, Ron Edwards, and Jared Sorensen

2017

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. 

Link to Event — August 11

Debate Format

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.

Honest Debate: Christianity Good and Bad: Good example of the format working right, with me as Moderator. Link to video. 2016. 

Agreeing How to Disagree: Theory behind the practice, with reading list. 2014.



Evidence Can Bring Us Together

At Seattle's March for Science, I said that evidence can bring us together, and I think that's true with history as well. Here are some great resources, assembled by a Daniel N. Gullotta, a Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies (Christianity) at Stanford.

Dale Martin at Yale Universityhttp://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

Philip Harland of the University of Toronto's podcast on ancient religion in the Mediterranean world:
http://www.philipharland.com/Blog/religions-of-the-ancient-mediterannean-podcast-collection-page-series-1-6/

Stanford's Continuing Studies podcast has a good one with Thomas Sheehan:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/historical-jesus/id384233911?mt=10

Mark Goodacre of Duke University's the NT Pod:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/nt-pod/id420553592?mt=10

Bart D. Ehrman of UNC Chapel Hill has his great course on the Historical Jesus:
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-historical-jesus

HDX's "The Letters of Paul" taught by Laura Nasrallah, who is based at Harvard University:
https://www.edx.org/course/early-christianity-letters-paul-harvardx-hds1544-1x

And finally, if you want to watch a documentary on the historical Jesus with the world's best scholars, the best one, with no pandering and no sensationalism is From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians from PBS. 
Part 1: https://youtu.be/kZPKCDOeyMg
Part 2: https://youtu.be/NB1WXhoEA0o
Part 3: https://youtu.be/S0pfQ2ZBe2Q
Part 4: https://youtu.be/-_jY2E8I_mA

Speech at March for Science Seattle

Here’s the 4-minute speech I gave at the March for Science in Seattle, Earth Day 2017, April 22. That’s Karen up on stage with me, wearing a coral reef on her head. It was an honor to speak and a joy to march.

My topic is how evidence can unite us all. My book, Grandmother Fish, gives children evidence for evolution when they wiggle like a fish and hoot like an ape. Kids love learning that humans are part of the great family of animals. Evidence also says that humans are all one family, as Charles Darwin concluded. Evidence can unite the human family because it allows people to share ideas across cultural boundaries.

“Can you wiggle?”

Karen and I are available for artist and author visits, either together or independently. Contact us here: http://www.grandmotherfish.com/contact/

For what it’s worth, here are the notes I used when giving the speech.

evidence together
grandmother fish
earliest fish with jaws
over 400 Mya
200 million greats
3 years
evidence
Grandmother Fish
evidence for little kids
wiggle like a fish—earliest fish
crawl & breathe early reptiles
squeak & cuddle early mammals
grab & hoot early apes
walk & talk early humans
kids love: animals, family, animal family
“I am a HUUMAN”
family of life
humanity one big family
Charles Darwin knew—evidence
evidence says: all related
evidence bring us together
Chinese translation of Grandmother Fish—language, culture, political system, economic system
Not like me: English, Seattle, Mary Oliver, Unitarian
everyone’s story
we are all related
a vision of who were are that we can all share

2017

Male robins fighting over territory

Robins and Evolution for Kids

[This post was posted in March of 2017, before John & Colleen Marzluff and I created Crow Scientist, the free app that teaches kids how to observe real-life crow behavior.]

Now that spring has come to the northern latitudes, here in Seattle the robins are back in the parks. Robins are easy to observe so they provide a good opportunity to talk to kids about how behavior and natural selection play out. Here are science notes for kids, worded simply and arranged roughly from the most basic for the younger kids to the more advanced for older kids. These notes teach a core evolutionary concept, that individuals within a species compete with each other to have healthier and more numerous offspring.

Brighter Robins Are Male, Plainer Robins Are Female

The robins you see easily are males. They have bright red feathers on their chests, and they spend a lot of time out in the wide open. You can sometimes spot females, too, but they have duller breast feathers, and they don’t put themselves on display the way males do. Males also tend to be somewhat larger than females. Male robins are like roosters, and female robins are like hens. 

Male Robins Fight for Land

Robins need to gather food for their children, so each male fights to have a bigger plot of land. You often see two male robins out on a field or big yard, each keeping his distance from the other. When two robins face off and neither one backs down, they fly at each other and turn around each other in a sort of whirlwind. It’s easy to spot male robins facing off against each other because they stand out in the open. If they notice that you’re watching them, however, they might stop fighting, so be sneaky.  

Female Robins Choose Males with Good Land, Good Feathers, and Good Songs

When a female chooses a male with brighter feathers and a stronger song, that male is probably healthier than average. When she picks a male with a larger area of land, she probably gets more food for her chicks. If her mate is healthier and her chicks have more food, then her chicks are more likely to be strong and to survive. 

Most Chicks Die

A robin mother might hatch a dozen hatchlings in one summer, and most of them die before winter.   

Robins Fight Because They Can’t Cooperate

Robins don’t have language, laws, money, or other tools that humans use to divide up resources. That’s why robins are stuck fighting. Fighting takes lots of time and energy, and it’s dangerous, but it’s the only way a male robin can claim enough land to get a mate. Male robins don’t help each other, work together, or make friends with each other. 

Robins Don’t Know What They’re Doing

Male robins don’t know why they’re fighting. When they see another male’s red chest, they just feel like fighting. Female robins don’t know why they choose males with lots of land, bright feathers, or strong voices. They just feel like making that choice. Humans are driven by feelings, too, but we can reflect on our own behavior and even make explicit agreements with others about what we will do or won’t.  

This lesson is a big one because it’s easy for humans to project human-like thinking onto animals, or even machines.  

Testosterone Drives Male Competition

Hormones are chemicals that animals’ bodies make that affect how they grow, feel, or act. Testosterone is a hormone that affects how robin chicks develop in the egg. One effect of testosterone is to organize the male chick’s brain for fighting. When the chick grows into an adult and the breeding season starts, the male chick’s body creates more testosterone, driving it to fight the other males. Testosterone is a type of hormone called a steroid.

“Testosterone for Amateurs”, the basics about this much-talked-about hormone.

Cock robins at peace, a 10-second video of newly returned male robins hanging out peacefully. 

Bonus Science Humor

Robins are a type of thrush, and the genus name for thrushes is Turdus (Latin for thrush).

Crows in the Park
Once you learn the call of a hungry juvenile crow, it’s easy to spot crows families. With any luck, you'll see the the juvenile beating its wings and the parents feeding it.

Games for Humanist Families

Clades, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, 
Cheeky Monkey, King of New York, Dixit

The games pictured here are the ones I took to the first meeting of the “humanist family game club” at my Unitarian church. The idea behind the game club is to give humanist families a fun way to hang out together. As a game designer and a father, I have spent years thinking about games that are great to play with kids and grownups together. Here are my descriptions of these games, which I recommend for humanist families.

Dixit by Jean-Louis Roubira

This charming game involves looking carefully at the detailed, dreamlike, full-color images on the game cards, so it has plenty of appeal from the start. One player gives a clue about a card they secretly chose from their hand. Then each other player secretly chooses a card from their own hands that more or less matches the clue. These cards get turned up, and only the clue-giver knows which one is the “real” card. Everyone tries to guess which card is the clue-giver’s, and players all score points based on how the guesses turned out. The real trick is that the clue-giver gets points only if at least one player successfully guesses the card and at least one player fails to guess their card. If the clue is too clear or too vague, the clue-giver loses the round. Kids have a hard time hitting the right balance between clarity and opacity, so they can struggle as the clue-giver. Little kids do well on a “team” with a grownup. Most of the game, however, is guessing others’ cards, and little kids can have fun doing that. Playing Dixit, whether giving a clue or trying to follow one, is a sophisticated use of our ability to communicate. For kids, it’s an enjoyable way to practice thinking “what did they mean by what they said that?” As for its humanist qualities, Dixit is all about understanding other people’s stories—and often misunderstanding them.

King of New York by Richard Garfield

This action-oriented game is the only violent game on this list, and it’s the most rules heavy. I recommend it because it handles battles in a way that is smart for play balance and good for avoiding hurt feelings. It’s true that the players control monsters that fight over who is the “king of New York”, but the system works such that you never choose which player you attack. Everyone attacks the monster that’s in Manhattan, except for the monster in Manhattan, who attacks everyone else. Play is straightforward: you roll a bunch of special dice, and reroll any dice whose results you don’t like. After up to two rerolls, you use the final results to determine how your monster fights other monsters, heals its wounds, smashes buildings, fights the military, gains energy for special powers, or gains fame. Kids who don’t really know the game can play by feel, and even if they don’t win their monsters will smash buildings, fight other monsters, and step on tanks like the big kids’ monsters do. Educational bit: The map shows the five boroughs of New York so you can show them to kids. One downside: A monster can sometimes get knocked out of the fight and the player out of the game. Usually, however, a player wins by amassing 20 fame points, not by defeating all the other monsters. 

Cheeky Monkey by Reiner Knizia

In this simple but engaging game, players pull animal tokens out of a bag. You can stop after taking a few tokens, or you can take more, but if you pull an animal that duplicates one you’ve already pulled this turn, all the animals you pulled this turn go back in the bag. A press-your-luck mechanic like this is great for kids because they can make real tactical decisions by feel, deciding whether to play it safe or to take risks and living with the consequences. If you have to put all those tokens back in the bag, it’s because you pulled one too many tokens, not because another player messed with you. A few additional rules involve stealing tokens, allowing for player interaction. In addition to being a fun game, Cheeky Monkey features hyenas, walruses, and other distinctive animals from around the world, with science notes about their habits and habitats. 

Chicken Cha Cha Cha by Klaus Zoch

In this German game, you move your chicken around a track, using concentration-style memory play to control movement. Kids are famously good at memory tasks, so it’s a great multigenerational game. The pictures are fun and colorful, mostly animals and eggs. The game includes an aggressive element in that you are trying to steal the tail feathers of all the other chickens, but the circular track prevents players from simply picking on whichever other player they like. Most of the action is memory play and moving around the track. 

Clades and Clades: Prehistoric by Yours Truly

In addition to teaching kids about evolution, Clades has a lot going for it as a game for kids and grownups. Physically, the game involves looking at lots of cute pictures of animals, something that even little kids enjoy. Everyone plays all the time, so kids never have to wait their turn. It’s easy to make the game simpler for beginners, and it’s easy to handicap. Plus, of course, it’s about evolution and science. A middle school science teacher I know says that the game elicits deep questions from students. Clades: Prehistoric is the same game, but with dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other extinct animals. Order here from Atlas Games or ask for it from you friendly local game store.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

Why Games for Humanist Families?

Games are great ways to let kids see humanism in action. For one thing, we humanists turn to other humans for our meaning in life, not to a spirit or an afterlife. Your experience playing a game results from a live interaction shared with other people and with no fore-ordained conclusion. That’s a genuine interaction in a way that seeing a movie together is not. Engaging with other humans for an evening also sends the implicit message that human relationships are worth investing in, a message that adults pick up as well as children. Second, playing games is good for social development. On one level, it teaches basics such as fairness and being a good sport. On a more fundamental level, games teach children to see human interaction as a social construct. Society is like a game, with rules, penalties, winners, and losers. We agree to interact with each other by the rules, but ultimately the rules are up to us, and we can change them to make things better. For example, if we play a game “fairly” and by the rules, some people have built-in advantages that give them an outsize chance of winning. Older kids, for example, do better at Dixit than younger ones. Is that fair? If not, can we change the rules to make the game more even? Whatever the answer, that’s good humanist thinking. 

Kids’ Games and Clades: earlier post on noncommercial games for kids 

2017

the presenter as a grade-school atheist

Outline of Jesus Presentation

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.

Us versus them, emotionally motivated reasoning.
E.g., Am I a fake atheist? 

Binary thinking, all-or-nothing intuition, pattern matching.
E.g., “Are the gospels fact or fiction?” 

Confirmation bias, difficulty in recognizing one’s own error.
E.g., forgetting inconvenient facts. 

“May I?” thinking versus “Must I?” thinking, grasping at straws.
E.g., “There are no contemporary accounts.”

David Strauss said the gospels were
history plus mythology (1846)

Topic One: Historical Jesus

Who he was and how we know.

History of historical Jesus scholarship.

Who was Jesus, according to secular historians: The Jewish hillbilly exorcist.

The best evidence for Jesus: his disorganized cult. Lots of strong evidence about this leaderless cult. 

My favorite evidence for Jesus: his remarkable way with words.

Other evidence.

Jesus’ crazy life story.

How beliefs about Jesus changed from AD 30 to 100.

State of scholarship.

Occam’s razor.

If Richard Carrier can make his case, he will
revolutionize the scholarly study of Jesus

Topic Two: Jesus Mythicism

Historical evidence aside, skeptics can tell the mythicism is bogus by looking at it skeptically.

What is Jesus mythicism? Radical denial of evidence.

Mythicist arguments. They criticize historical evidence but offer little their own evidence.

Who are the mythicists? Atheist writers you’ve heard of only because they’re mythicists.

Is mythicism a conspiracy theory? Is “historical Jesus” the biggest con game in the history of secular scholarship?

Who’s right, the experts or you? What are the odds?

Conclusion

Links

Here are links for folks who want to see more.

History for atheists: examines evidence for and against Jesus, by and for atheists. http://bit.ly/atheistJesusTO

Christopher Hitchens lays out “impressive evidence” for a historical Jesus. http://bit.ly/hitchjesus

State of scholarship, this blog post addresses that issue: http://bit.ly/tweetjesus

Changes in belief about Jesus from AD 30 to 70, this blog post addresses that issue: http://bit.ly/TweetNTplotFixes

Other blog posts on Jesus: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Jesus

Encyclopedia Britannica, an article written by the world’s top historical Jesus expert: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus

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.