Let's Talk About Christian Apologetics

Okay, let's start out with a quick explanation of just what Christian Apologetics is.  In a nutshell, Christian Apologetics is when someone defends the Christian religion by coming up with explanations for problems with Christian belief and Christian doctrine that rational thought and skeptical analysis bring up when such thought and analysis are leveled at Christianity.  The word "apologetics" has its roots in the Greek word apologia, meaning "a speech made in defense."  In Ancient Greece, it referred to a defense made during a trial.  After the accusation, the defendant was allowed to refute the charges against him with a reply to the accusation.  Up until the 1700s, the word "apologetics" was used to indicate any sort of intellectual defense made against accusations.  Right around the middle of the 18th Century, however, the word started to be applied only to the defense of religious doctrine and belief, and it is that narrower definition that continues to be used to this day.  Christian Apologetics is specifically the defense of Christianity.

So in a nutshell, that's Christian Apologetics.

The one thing to always keep in mind when discussing Christian Apologetics is that its basically made up nonsense.  The apologist relies on logical fallacy and semantic games to make his point, and counts on the general ignorance of science and the need of most unthinking Christians to have an easy answer to the "blasphemous" accusations made by the skeptical about their religion.  Supposedly, Christian Apologetics is based on "evidence," but the truth is that most of the so-called evidence is nothing more than personal opinion on the part of whatever "scholar" produced it in the first place.  (And producing this supposed "evidence" is a multi-billion dollar a year industry).

Two favorites of the apologist are Lee Strobel and his book The Case For Christ, and Josh McDowell and his book Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  It should be noted that both of these men are ministers.  Neither pretends to any scientific impartiality, objectivism, or unbiased opinions.  Oh sure, both make claims to objectivity, and claim to be looking at Christianity from the viewpoint of scholarly truth, but in practice they are as biased in favor of their own religion as any other believer, and are willing to make the most befuddling leaps of faith (pun intended) to support that religion as they find necessary.  The truth is, both men are snake oil salesmen selling a con game to the gullible.

But then, conning the gullible is the basic essence of religion.

Christian Apologists have nothing to support their personal opinions other than more personal opinion.  They have no access to documents written by Jesus (because no such documents exist), no museums full of Jesus artifacts (because no such artifacts exist), no supporting documents by other writers (because none such documents exist).  In short, they have nothing to support their words but logical fallacy, supposition, guesswork, and -- to put it bluntly -- their own ability to convince people that what they are saying isn't just a big pile of bullshit.  What they do have, though, is faith.  And its faith that not only keeps the pile of bullshit from falling over on itself, its what convinces the gullible to actually buy into it.

The primary source of the so-called "proof" that Apologists use to convince the general public that their arguments are sound that their storybook hero is real is the storybook itself.  The Bible is given the special privilege by these people of being able to confirm the truth of itself.  Unique among all other historical documents, Christians hold that the Bible is "historically reliable" simply because the Bible itself says that it is true.  Yes, that's right.  The Bible is true because the Bible says that it is true.  That's a handy little concession, isn't it?  Now, is there any sort of actual justification for this belief?  Does the Bible give accurate chronologies and verifiable facts about people, places, and things contained within it?  Are there avenues of research that clearly show that the Bible is accurate when it comes to the things it says?

Not at all.  Like any fictional story, the Bible describes a series of unlikely events using a plethora of characters and a mass of completely unverifiable fictional details to tell its story.  Oh sure, the setting for the story, Roman-ruled Judaea, was a real-enough place.  First Century Palestine certainly existed (you can, after all, hop a plane to Israel and visit the ruins).  But that said, fictional stories set in real-world locations do not cease to be fictional.

The central question is this:  Did a Jewish Carpenter walk on water, raise the dead, piss off the authorities, get crucified, and somehow get resurrected and taken up to heaven, just like the Bible describes?  Unfortunately for Christians, the only evidence -- the Biblical "facts", legends, history, and the vast number of "witnesses" -- we have saying that such a person really lived and did all those things are other characters in the same story giving testimony that the Jewish Carpenter in question actually existed.

As Dr. Kenneth Humphreys once put it, "This is rather like proving the existence of Batman by quoting the words of Robin the Boy Wonder."

Think about it.  As evidence of the "divine birth" of Jesus, we have the Book of Luke's testimony of the shepherds and the angels (Luke 2).  Never mind that Luke was written between 90 and 105 years after the supposed birth of Jesus.  The writer of Luke steps forward as a witness to dialogue quoted verbatim.  Jesus turning water into wine?  Well, we've got the writer of the Book of John as our key (and in fact, only) witness, writing his story nearly 140 years after the fact.  And who do we have to vouch for the resurrection?  Evidence for the "risen Christ" actually comes from Paul's testimony of "500 witnesses", none of whom are actually identified, the sightings of 12 apostles, and himself (1 Corinthians 15).  Of course, Paul's testimony contradicts the Book of Matthew, which only has two unidentified women and eleven of the twelve apostles.  The Book of Mark raises Matthews tally to three women and names them (Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome), two random passers-by, and the eleven apostles.  The stories don't even match up, but we are expected to take them as if they were unshakable truths, written in stone.  Sure.  Pull the other one.  The entire core belief of Christianity -- the resurrected savior -- rests on just under five hundred self-contradictory words written over a period of 180 years in an ancient and thoroughly discredited book.  Perhaps the writers of the Bible simply expected people to believe as they were told and never question anything.

In addition to the argument that the Bible is true because it says it is true, Apologetics also cite early Christian scholars as evidence.  No, I don't mean they cite the works of these early Christian fathers, they cite the existence of such people.  The supposed lives of these men are used as evidence supporting Christianity, not just what they put down on paper.  For example, Ignatius of Antioch, who lived some time between 50 AD and 115 AD (we're not sure, precisely) has become the lynchpin of the Roman Catholic claim to world mastery.  According to the story, Ignatius was martyred when Emperor Trajan (a man for whom an astonishingly large amount of historical records exist, and who was, in truth, a relatively benign and harmless man as far as Roman Emperors go) took offense to the man for some unexplained reason, and rather than having him tried and executed in Antioch sentenced him to be killed by wild beasts in the Colliseum of Rome.  (This is doubly odd, given that, if that's what Trajan wanted to happen, Antioch had a Colliseum of its own that they could have used.)

We are asked to believe that the Emperor, who was at the time assembling his armies for the coming war with Parthia, took time out of his war preparations to assign an entire battalion of soldiers to bring bring Ignatius to Rome by way of a long and circuitous land-route that gave Ignatius the opportunity to meet and greet notable Christians nearly every step of his way.  Supposedly along this four month long journey, Ignatius wrote fifteen letters to various individuals, including the Virgin Mary and a Christian bishop who wasn't even born by the time Ignatius supposedly died.  Miraculous!

Of course, the importance of these supposed letters is not to supply historical accuracy to the story, but to bolster Catholic doctrine.  Ignatius's letters are filled to the brim with Fourth Century orthodoxy, telling the faithful how they are supposed to live their lives under the benign rule of the Church, how they are supposed to follow the doctrine supplied by the church, and how they are supposed to live their lives as good Christians.  Note I saidFourth Century orthodoxy.  Coming from the supposed pen of a Second Century martyr.  Amazing how that happens.  In addition, Ignatius is used as the "connecting authority" between the early so-called "Christian Jews" and the first true Christians.  (The first Roman bishop to identify himself as "Pope", Anicetus (who reigned over the church between 156 and 166 CE) -- did so supposedly after being named as such by Ignatius.  Similarly, Clements, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus are all used in a similar manner to Ignatius, as if the fact that they existed at all validates Christian doctrine, as if, somehow, the fact that a person living in the Second or Third Century somehow proves that a person in the First Century actually existed.

The problem with this being that evidence of belief is not evidence of fact.  If the fact that lots of people believe something means that the belief is automatically true, then that would validate the Hindu gods a lot better than the Christian one, given that Hinduism pre-dates Christianity by three thousand years.

Then there's the "sheer quantity of documentation" argument.  It goes something like "There is only one manuscript copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars and that dates to the Tenth Century.  In contrast there are twenty thousand manuscripts of the gospels in various languages, dating from the Sixth through Twelfth Centuries.  Doesn't that PROVE the correctness of the New Testament?"  Uh, no, it doesn't.  A lie repeated a hundred times does not stop being a lie, and a truth told only once does not stop being a truth.  But what this does show is how few Christian manuscripts -- or even scraps of Christian manuscripts -- managed to survive from before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Whole libraries full of ancient wisdom and learning -- Pagan wisdom and learning -- were burned to the ground by Christians.  For centuries, by order of the Christian church, the only approved literature was the Bible.  Everything else was forbidden and destroyed.

And modern Christian Apologists have the brass balls to claim that this self-generated lack of documentation for anything other than Christianity is proof of their own religion.  That's sort of like a Nazi saying that the lack of Jewish art is proof of the supremacy of the Nazi cause.

The Apologetics argument that really gets my goat is the one where the Christian asks, "Why would the apostles of Christ have suffered and died for a fake religion?"  Are you kidding me with this nonsense?  Seriously?  People "suffer and die" because they are told lies every single day.  Tell me, Mr. Christian, if suffering and dying for your faith is evidence of the truth of that faith, does that mean the terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 go immediately to heaven, as the Koran said they would?  Even better, one early Christian king in what would become Germany is known to have tortured and murdered nearly ten thousand pagan Germans in an effort to force them to convert to Christianity.  Does the fact that they suffered and died prove the existence of Wotan and Thunor?

And that's ignoring the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that the "apostles of Christ" actually even existed, much less were tortured and murdered by the Romans.  At least not until the Christians started turning its attention to burning heretics at the stake.  Paul, for example, never refers to the execution of a single apostle.  Not once.  Though of course that does nothing to diminish the often repeated story of how the Emperor Nero "put Christians to the torch" in a pogram for which no historical evidence exists at all.  Religious-inspired murder proves nothing.

Now, normally, we could all just sit back and laugh at the gullible rubes who get conned into believing this nonsense.  Problem is, this is as rational as some Christians ever get.  And these people vote.

The thought of a truly Christian government in the United States scares me like no other nightmare scares me.

Christianity is Killing America

I figure if I haven't driven you away already, you're likely going to start burning me in effigy for this commentary.  No one wants to acknowledge the absolute damaging effect that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has on the founding principles of the United States, not to mention the society that has grown up around us that's supposed to be based on those principles.


So, let's start with some background information.


Christianity, as a religion, did not start with Jesus.  Nor did it start with Paul or any of the other apostles.  Christianity actually started with Constantine I , who ruled the Roman Empire from 306 to 337 CE.  The Empire, which once upon a time had been a democratic republic but had long since become an autocratic, war-mongering military-dominated conquering state, was having a problem.  Namely, the Roman army, made up of men from all corners of the Empire -- men who rarely shared a language, certainly didn't share a background culture, and absolutely did not share much in common when it came to religion -- was having a problem fighting together.  The army brought together Germanic pagans, Mediterranean Jews, old-blooded Romans who followed the Imperial cult -- dozens of religions and dozens of cultures, all supposedly working together under the banner of the Empire, but in actually all rivals and hating each other.

So what was a war-mongering dictator like Constantine to do?  He knew he had to unify his armies somehow, and he knew that religion was the problem, all the while keeping his temporal authority as Emperor.  The old style Green paganism might work, but it lacked a central authority.  Judaism featured a central authority, but the Jews were never one to grant a human being that central power.

And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, a new group arose.  The people who made up this new group weren't particularly rebellious, like the Jews were, and they preferred a central figure ruling over them.  They seemed to willingly go to their death because they were promised salvation after death and not any sort of reward in this life.  They didn't fight and fret over the beliefs of other people, either, it seemed.  They were an offshoot of the Jews, who believed that a Jewish man named Jesus had been the son of God, and followed the supposed teachings of this man.

So, with all this in mind, Constantine made a choice that would best unify the various cultures and people under his rule -- especially those in his armies.  He chose to make Christianity the official state religion.  It was a brilliant and masterful piece of brinksmanship.  Not only would the people in his Empire all share a religion, it was a religion that taught the peasants to accept a life of misery -- because they were sinners by nature -- and only hope for something better in the afterlife.  And even then, they'd only get the afterlife if they behaved and followed the rules in this life!

Now, since they knew that his people would have a hard time simply dropping the pagan life they'd lived up until then, the leaders of the new official Empire-wide church worked traditional pagan chocolate -- the rituals and holidays enjoyed by the pagan people -- into their brand new Christian peanut butter.  The best example would be the story of the death and rebirth of the Greek god Dionysos.  It was was adapted by Christianity, with Jesus in the starring role.

And so the government of Rome created a brand new religion, which would serve for years to convince the people of the Empire -- of whom three-quarters lived in abject misery, oppression, and slavery -- that all the misery and servitude and death was not only acceptable, but to be expected, because they were inescapably sinners and thus suffering was their lot in life.

And as time passed, Rome moved further and further from being the democracy it was founded as and more and more toward an autocratic theocracy, until finally Christianity landed Europe in the depths of the Dark Ages, where religious dogma ruled and independent thought was forbidden.

Rome wasn't the only country to follow this program, by the way.  If you look at every single civilization on earth that turned from intellect and reason toward religion, you find the civilization in question diminishes and becomes more and more oppressive until finally it collapses in on itself.  Take ancient Greece, for example.  The government of Athens executed the great philosopher Socrates for teaching young people how to think critically, intelligently, and independently.  The formal charges made against him was heresy; that is, for having different thoughts, beliefs, and religious views than those approved of by the government.  He taught his students that they, too, could think as they wanted, and thus he was put to death.

Anyone who has read the works of Socrates today knows that there is nothing unholy about them.  Nothing evil or corrupting.  He simply taught logic and independent thought.  And the rulers of Athens -- a group of wealthy, war-mongering politicians known as "The Thirty" -- didn't like that at all.  But notice:  they didn't charge and convict him of sedition, or treason, or inciting rebellion against their rule.  They charged him with heresy.

Its a basic fact.  Religion has always stood against critical thought.  Independent thought.  Rational thought.

Always.

Consider the following.

In order to finally become a true democracy, England had to actively reject the influence of the Church of England on politics.  France today has strictly secular laws that enforce a separation of Church and State that even the United States could learn from -- but they had to go through the Terror -- a very religious, very conservative time when Maximillian Robspierre and his Jesuit cronies sent every person who dissented with them or disagreed with them to the guillotine -- before they embraced rationality again.  Italy, a nation that is perhaps the most stereotypically religious country in all of Europe, exiled the Pope to to an independent "nation" smaller than the city of Rome itself, and thus is a secular democracy.  Even Israel keeps its religion separate from its state as much as possible just to encourage democratic thought.

On the other hand, you have those countries where religion and government are irrevocably intertwined.  Iraq.  Iran.  Saudi Arabia.  Oppressive dictatorships, every one.  Because in reality, religion and freedom are directly opposed to one another.

Which bring me to the United States of America.

Right now, as I write this, the popularity and influence of Christianity has been ascending for about the past 30 years.  Since the Reagan administration, religion has replaced secularism as the American norm.  Americans have handed over their previously remarkable talents for critical thinking, rationalism, and independent thought in exchange for faith-based acceptance of ideas that are not grounded in fact and absolutely are not in their best interest.

The modern Republican party has, in fact, been transformed into a group of preachers, teaching dogma and catechism to their followers instead of political thought.  Republican "policy" is based on a fundamentalist understanding of Christian teachings.  This dogma is spouted from countless sources of propaganda, and rather than discussing it, criticizing it, and molding it using reason and rationalism, the rank and file simple accepts it without question.  They simply swallow what their political leaders -- who are becoming more and more similar to their religious leaders -- tell them, no matter how non-factual, how untrue, and how unbelievable, based on nothing more than faith.

And before you think I'm being one-sided, let me tell you -- the phenomenon is happening with liberals too.  Just more slowly.

The source of nearly every single problem facing American today is the fact that the American people have abandoned critical thinking en masse.  The idea of questioning the popular wisdom and analyzing it based on facts instead of dogma is frowned upon.  Normal people just accept.  They take things on faith.  They don't analyze, they don't examine, and they certainly don't raise doubts or contradict "what everyone knows".  Every single problem faced by the people of the United States right now was easily foreseeable, but only by people who think independently.

Christianity tends to punish and excommunicate independent thinkers.  Christianity tends to shame those who express doubt, or who question the "Word" as given by those in authority.  Christianity tends to discourage education and seeking knowledge for its own sake.  Christianity tends to encourage ignorance and the acceptance of whatever nonsense is handed down from on high.

At least, a certain segment of Christianity does.  Unfortunately, that segment is dominant in the United States right now.

And so, the United States has been slowly, gently been turned into a nation of unthinking peasants.  When their bosses tell them that from now on, they'll be doing the work of two people but won't be getting paid any more than they already are.  When they are given the smallest amount of vacation time of any country in the First World.  When they work more hours but are less and less able to make ends meet.  When all of this happens, the American people accept it, because the Christian dogma they are addicted to has taught them that the problem is them.  The problem is each person, as an individual.  They are sinners, and deserve to be mistreated.  To be enslaved.  If they speak out or stand up they'd simply be whining about things mandated by God.

Talk to your average working-class Christian American.  Ask him why American workers shouldn't be paid more, or be given more vacation time, or why Americans shouldn't complain about how many hours they have to work just to get from week to week and you'll hear rote responses about how Americans are better than those "socialists" in Europe who are treated like human beings by their government and their employers.  Why only losers seek to take better care of themselves and educate themselves.  Why only dorks and weirdos care about things like fairness and quality of life.

To these people, the purpose of the American worker is to slog on without complaint, even as they accrue more and more debt, as they become less and less healthy, as they die younger and younger for easily preventable reasons.

We seriously need to get out from under religion if we are going to survive as a culture.  We need to get back to the days where we embraced intelligent, independent thought.  Where we celebrated intelligence instead of ridiculed it.  Where "great men and women" weren't overpaid athletes or celebrities who were famous merely for being famous, but were men and women who achieved greatness through intellectual prowess:  inventors, scientists, philosophers, explorers, and leaders who were not afraid to question the common wisdom.

America has a Christianity problem.  As a nation, we'd better start doing something about it, or we'll be just another Third World theocracy before anyone here notices.

It's Simple: Intelligent Design Is Not A Scientific Idea. Period.

Intelligent Design (ID) is not a scientific idea.  Its just not.  And if you think otherwise, then you need to actually learn what "science" is, because right now you're demonstrating that you know less than nothing about it.


Part of the problem is that the terminology used in "design theory" aren't actually defined.  The way that the ID movement uses the word "design", for example, has nothing to do with the definition of "design" as it is normally understood.  "Design" is defined in terms of some intelligent agent actively and purposefully arranging something.  The IDers, on the other hand, define "design" by pointing out what "design" isn't (known regularity and chance), therefore making their definition of "intelligent design" the product of an argument from incredulity.


In engineering, a solution to a problem must address the parameters of the problem, or else the "solution" is no solution at all.  Any theory about design must, therefore, address the agent and the purpose, or else its not really about design.  No proponent of Intelligent Design has ever included the agent or the purpose in any attempt at a "scientific" theory of design, and some absolutely come right out and say that these two factors cannot and  should not be included.  Thus, even if the ID crowd were to somehow prove that the universe was purposefully put together, this proof would be practically meaningless.  And it would certainly say nothing about the design in the usual sense of the word.


The idea of "irreducible complexity" also isn't scientific because it, too, is an example of an Argument from Incredulity fallacy.  "I think this is too complex to come about naturally, therefore it must have been created."  Anyone paying attention should recognize how utterly subjective this is.  Whenever one person can think something "too complex to be natural", but another person can say, "No, its still not complex enough... its still natural", the idea behind it isn't science.  Science is either true, or its not.  There's no "might be true" in science.


Lastly, at its core, intelligent design just makes no damned sense at all.  Take spider webs, for example.  Intelligent design says that, because spider webs are complex acts of engineering, the spiders that make them must be intelligent.


And by "intelligent", they mean the spiders must be as smart as people.


Or, it might be that the spiders aren't the intelligent ones, but rather its the spider's designer who instilled into the spider the ability to create heavily complex webs.  The problem being that it could just as easily be argued that the spider's designer isn't intelligent... its just that the spider designer was himself instilled with the ability to create complexity, and was designed that way.


So the question would then become "who designed the designer?"  Or was the designer's designer merely designed?


Such infinitely regressive nonsense gets us nowhere.


But anyway, last and certainly not least, its been admitted by several of its proponents that the entire "Intelligent Design" thing has nothing to do with science and everything to do with sneaking religion into our science classrooms in a way intended to avoid the First Amendment non-establishment clause.

No Evidence For Jesus. No Evidence At All.

I keep having to post this.


On Facebook, I'm active in several different groups dealing with atheism and Christianity. And being so active, I have found I have to repeatedly refute certain claims regarding extra-Biblical proof of the existence of Jesus.

At one point, I had to post this three times, to three different people, over the space of three days. I am disgusted that Creationists just do not seem to learn, and I'm tired of it. So if there are any creationists out there, I'm about to give you an ass-whipping you deserve.


Kevin Jones said, “There is more solid evidence for Jesus Christ than there is for any other historical figure.

If you really believe this, let me just get this out of the way: you're an idiot, and you're wrong.

And here is why.

First, we have no contemporary sources that mention Jesus Christ. None. Absolutely none. And no, none of the sources Christiants usually name were contemporary. "Contemporary", since you apparently cannot understand the concept, means "occurring at the same time."

Second, quite often, when they make claims about “historical evidence”, what they are actually trying to do is use the Bible as evidence for the Bible. Even if this weren't easily dismissed as a logical fallacy (go look up “circular reasoning”, folks), it still wouldn't work. Let me tell you about the Bible, folks. The Bible has been demonstratably proven beyond any possible doubt to have been changed, edited, and rewritten to suit the religious and political dogma of men who lived *centuries* after the supposed lifetime of Christ.

And when I say "changed, edited, and rewritten copies", I would like to point out that sometimes those changes, edits, and rewrites are substantial.

In addition, careful study of the Pauline epistles in the New Testament have shown that while all of the Epistles are supposedly written by Paul, at least fifteen of them (1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Hebrews, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philipians, Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians) were absolutely not written by Paul at all. Most of these were, in fact, written between 150 and 250 years after Paul supposedly was martyred in Rome.

The remaining Epistles (Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, and Romans) have been thrown into doubt as to their authenticity to the point that its entirely possible that Paul didn't write any of them.

At the very least, later parties took Paul's original words and heavily edited and rewrote them. We know this through careful examination of the vocabulary and the grammar used, and their relationship to the known timeline of the life of Paul (to put it bluntly, at least two of the epistles turn out to be happening at the same time, meaning that Paul was in two places at once -- and these places are hundreds of miles from each other).

Despite the fact that Biblical literalists like to claim otherwise, we know that the Gospels were not written by the men whose names are on them (indeed, outside of the Bible, there's not a lot of evidence that these four men even existed). Mark did not write Mark, John did not write John, and so on. So who did write the Bible? We don't have the first damned clue.

We don't even have original copies. What we have are copies of copies of copies. So we really have no idea what the sources for these documents, which remember the literalists thing are historically authoritative, really are.

And this goes for the apocryphal gospels and epistles also. We don't have the originals, we don't know when they were written, and most of them aren't old enough to be contemporary.

The New Testament canon wasn't assembled until three hundred years after the alleged death of Jesus. The Bible as we know it right now didn't exist until the Fourth Century CE. The reason why the New Testament looks the way it looks is because a man named Athanasius pretty much unilaterally declared it would look like it does.

But for the sake of argument, let's look at some of the usual suspects, the people Christians often claim can be counted as “extra-Biblical evidence” for the existence of Jesus.

Publius Cornelius Tacitus: Tacitus was a Roman senator and historian. He was born in 64 CE, and he didn't write "Annals" (the history that Christians like to cite as if it proves something) until 109 CE. That's a century after the fact, young man. A century. Trying to claim that Tacitus is contemporary with the supposed life of Christ is like me claiming to be contemporary of Ulysses S. Grant. After all, I was alive in the 1960s and he was alive in the 1860s, right?

In any case, Tacitus doesn't mention Jesus, he mentions "the followers of a certain man named Christus" and gives no source for his information. What he's writing about in Annals is information that he heard from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy, a hundred years after the fact. That's hearsay, and absolutely has no value.

Thallus. The problem with Thallus is that we don't actually have anything from anyone named Thallus that makes any mention of anything that could be considered close to Jesus. What we have is a 9th Century Byzantine priest named George Syncellus writing that a 3rd Century priest named Sextus Julius Africanus wrote about some unknown writer named Thallus who supposedly wrote a contemporary description of a solar eclipse at Jesus's crucifixion.

Even worse, we don't even have the document from Africanus that talks about Thallus. All we have is Syncellus claiming that Africanus says something about Thallus saying something. More hearsay. No evidence.

Now, there is note from that notorious liar, con-man, and forger Eusebius of Caesaria who claims that Josephus also wrote about this Thallus account, but that's still one guy talking about what a second guy who got it from a third guy. Even worse, at this point no historian worth his PhD would accept the word of Eusebius of Caesaria if he said the sky was blue because he's been shown to be, as I mentioned, a fraud.

Clement of Rome: Born sometime between 90 and 100 CE. Not contemporary.

Ignatius: Born sometime between 55 and 65 CE. Not contemporary.

Polycarp: Born in 69 CE. Not contemporary.

Barnabas: There's no actual evidence this person was real. Traditionally, this is the Barnabas mentioned in the Bible, and several works have been ascribed to him, but most of these works actually date to long after the man's supposed martyrdom (for which he don't have any evidence, either) some time around 80 CE. The best account we have of Barnabas is the journal of Anthemios, Archbishop of Constantia, who claimed to have been visited by Barnabas in a dream.

So yeah, the evidence we have for Barnabas even existing is a dream.

Papias: He wrote his "fragments" between 95 and 120 CE. Not contemporary.

Justin Martyr: He was born until 100 CE. A century after the supposed life of Christ. Not contemporary.

Aristides the Athenian: He suffers the same problem as Thallus. All we have of his work is Eusebius the Liar describing how Aristides said thus and so. We don't actually have copies of his work, so its all hearsay, and thus no evidence at all.

Athenagoras the Athenian: He wasn't born until 133 CE. Not contemporary.

Theophilus: Wasn't born until 165 CE. Not contemporary.

Quadratus of Athens: Also known as Quadratus the Martyr: Yet another religious figure we have no evidence actually existed other than the well-known lying word of Eusebius of Caesaria. Again, we have no copies of his works, just Eusebius telling us what the man supposedly said.

Aristo of Pella: We can put Eristo in the "Eusebius probably made him up" club, as the only mention we have of him or his work is Mr. "Lying for the Holy Mother Church is a Virtue" himself.

Melito of Sardis: We don't actually know when Melito of Sardis was born. But we do know when he died: 195 CE. Now, seeing as its highly doubtful that the man was over 200 years old when he died, its entirely reasonable to say that he, too, was not a contemporary of Jesus.

The Didache: The Didache was first mentioned by our favorite Christian con-man, Eusebius. There is absolutely no evidence for it being older than the 2nd Century, and all the evidence we do have for its origins show that it was actually written by Eusebius himself. Like most of his writings, the Didache claims to be a contemporary account (specifically, of the actions and teachings of the twelve apostles), but no credible scholar actually believes this.

The Epistle of Dignetus: This document was written by an unknown someone sometime between 130 CE and 200 CE, based on the language and other textual evidence. Thus, it is not a contemporary document.

Josephus Flavius: Josephus, the Jewish historian, was born in 37 CE. His "Antiquities" wasn't even written until 93 CE, after the first gospels got written. Therefore, even if his accounts about Jesus came from his hand, his information could only serve as hearsay. In addition, despite the best wishes of believers and the lies of Christian apologists, the account found in "Antiquities" has been definitively proven to be a forgery written by, you guessed it, Eusebius of Caesaria. So thoroughly has this passage been debunked that no credible Biblical scholar ever mentions Josephus except to use it as an example of a Christian forgery and hoax.

Pliny the Younger: Pliny was born in 62 C.E. Not contemporary. Also, his letter about the Christians only shows that he got his information from Christian believers themselves.  Lastly, the earliest versions of the manuscript do not have that account. That likely means that the account in Pliny the Younger's work was added later by Christians.

Phlegon of Tralles: Wrote his histories in 137 CE. Not contemporary.

Lucian: Born in 125 CE. Not contemporary.

Celsus: According to Origen, Celsus wrote "The True Word", his attack on Christianity, in 177 CE. We don't have any surviving copies, but the fact that Origin places it nearly 200 years after the supposed life of Christ means he's not contemporary either.

Mara bar Serapion: Dates to 73 CE. Not contemporary.

Suetonius: Seutonius has two problems. First, he was born in 69 CE and thus isn't contemporary. Second, he doesn't mention Jesus at all. He mentions a criminal named "Chrestus," which was a common name at the time ("Christ" is a title, not a name). His account is only about Jesus if you squint, tilt your head, and pretend.


So to say there is no authentic historical evidence that Jesus Christ walked the earth is simply to be utterly factual and in accordance with modern Biblical scholarship.

Thus endeth the lesson.

What If the United States Really Was a Christian Nation?

Let's pretend the United States really was the Christian nation that the fundamentalist social conservatives and religious rightists claim it is for just a moment.

Seriously, let's just take them at their word and assume that they're right:  the United States actually is a Christian nation.

So, does America the Christian Nation live up to its lofty religious beliefs?

America, as a sovereign nation, has never once in its history actually acted according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, as depicted in the Bible.  Not once.  Oh, sure, America as a nation sends a miniscule percentage of its vast and awesome wealth in aid to assist this or that third world country currently suffering from poverty, rampant disease, and natural disasters, but the very same fundamentalist conservatives who insist that this is a Christian nation want to put an end to that practice, and want to end it yesterday!

The truth is that the primary impulse from most funamentalist Christians in this country has been explotative selfishness, and this has been true since before we actually existed as the United States.

The first colonists from England had barely just arrived to the shores of the New World when they started stealing and murdering the indigenous inhabitants.  You know, that's pretty much the way the Hebrews acted when they entered the land of Canaan now that I think about it.  So perhaps we can call this behavior "biblical", but not "Christian."  Anyway, these English so-called Christian pilgrims quickly expanded their program of exploiting and subjugating the natives, promoting superstition and fear, murdering "witches" (a fad that they shared with a lot of fundamentalist Christians of their day) and establishing, via the Dutch, a lively trade with certain African warlords for that all-important commodity for their burgeoning empire:  cheap labor in the form of slaves.

And when they weren't murdering the natives, hanging and stoning people for being witches, or whipping their slaves into obedience, these enterprising "followers of Christ" were busily chopping down every tree they could find and shooting every animal they came across; both trees and animals were aspects of "nature" they believed they were given dominion over.  Again, we can see Old Testament style ruthlessness, but not a hint of the love promoted by Jesus Christ.

Adding to the problem is the fact that the rise of the corporations as a power bloc in America began almost as soon as the country was founded.  The very same folks that Jesus tossed out of the temple in Jerusalem, the people he warned had as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel had to passing through the eye of a needle, had already taken control of the government and were steering the brand new nation toward their own personal destination:  the Land of Eternal Greed.

This version of America is the same one that is still present today, what with its celebration of filthy rich celebrities who are famous for being filthy rich celebrities, its millionaire athletes, and its lineup of corporate titans who, despite having more money than they could ever hope to spend, drive themselves to acquire more and more and more.  Because enough is never really enough.  This nation is quite apart from any sort of Christian ideal.

The successful conquest of the United States by the corporations ended any concept of the American public concentrating en masse on thoughts of philosophy, art, science, love, or religious devotion.  These things would still be pursued by a few, but the overwhelming majority were lured into another way of living:  that of "consume consume consume."

Jesus said, "The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise." (That's Luke 3:10, just so you know.)  The corporations say, "If you've only got two tunics, you're worthless; what you need are a dozen of those things!  Get to a mall, now!"  Nothing is too childish, nothing is too silly, nothing is too meaningless to be obsessed over until you purchase it, at which point you'll be told that what you really need isn't what you just bought, but something you need to buy next.  And of course, while you're engaged in this endless cycle of purchase, purchase, purchase, your mind is far, far away from any sort of actual enlightening thought or activity.

Such is the real religion of the United States of America.

Currently, America is exporting some of the most dangerous products in the history of the world, including predatory business ideals, banking practices that highly resemble Mafia protection rackets, and industrial practices that are just short of criminal.  We send pesticides and herbicides oversees that are so toxic we've forbidden their use within the borders of the United States (apparently the rest of the world doesn't matter much).  This, too, is the product of the corporate domination of America.  And yet, we never hear a peep of protest from would-be Christians against this sort of "missionary work" as their so-called "Christian nation" deals evil to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the American military-industrial complex arose that has never seen a lethal weapon it didn't want to sell to the general public at wholesale prices.  This has had an interesting effect on how the timeline of history has been portrayed in American textbooks.  History actually comes across as a continual cycle of "prelude-to-war", "war,", and then "prelude to war" again.  In its entire 238 year history (as I write this), America the So-Called Christian Nation has only been "at peace" (by which I mean, not fighting anyone at all) for only about 10 years or so.

In only the last 75 years, the United States has carpet bombed Europe, dropped two nuclear weapons on inhabited cities, rained bombs and napalm and agent orange all over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, invaded tiny nations like Grenada and Panama that had no hope of standing up to us, and then proceeded to dump "shock and awe" all over Iraq and Afghanistan.  The level of justification used for these actions varied from definitely necessary to not necessary whatsoever, but regardless of justification, "peace through warmongering" is the precise opposite of what Jesus taught.

It is clear, based on America's culture of consumption and endless military adventurism that America is about as far from being a Christian nation as it can be.  The only time that America ever strayed into the actual ideological territory championed by Jesus in the Bible was when it tries to take care of, and expand the rights and dignity of the disenfranchised and abused:  the poor, women, children, people of color, Native Americans, immigrants, gay, lesbian, and transgender people, the sick, the elderly, the disabled, the oppressed, and the hungry.  In other words, those outsiders that Jesus Christ said would eventually "inherit the earth."

America has a special term for such people.  We call them We the People...

The United States: Not a Christian Nation

The United States is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a Christian nation.

Period.

Even if the Fundamentalists get their way and manage to not only take over but manage to install a theocratic Christian government, it wouldn't be the United States of America.   It would be a zombified imposter pretending at the name.

There is no Christian ideology (or even Biblical ideology) to be found in America's founding ideals.  None of it, not the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the subsequent Amendments to the Constitution, the laws that have been generated since then, and our system of government derived therefrom has anything to do with Christianity or the Bible.  If anything, the American system is a radical and emphatic rejection of Biblical ideas regarding laws and government.

The Bible, in case you missed it, promotes the so-called "Divine Right of Kings" and theocratic dictatorship.  These two ideals are at the core of the Abrahamic governmental tradition, and America just isn't about that sort of thing.

Diametrically opposed to the idea of a God-appointed King and a set of laws that commands you to revere one particular religion (thankfully), the legal system of the United States of America was instead based on English common law, as established primarily by the Magna Carta in 1215, the British Constitution of 1657, the Habeus Corpus Act of 1679, and the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

None of these drew from Biblical government philosophy, either.

Instead, they were based on a pair of pagan legal philosophies:  Greek  democracy (which promoted the idea that citizens got a say in how the government did things) and Roman civil law (that promoted the idea that the law treated everyone under it in the same non-prejudicial way).  Other important inspirations for the American system of government were obtained from philosophers of the Enlightenment Period, principle among them John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.  There is also some evidence that Benjamin Franklin brought ideas from the Iroquois Confederacy's form of democracy into the mix, particularly the idea that each state would be an autonomous unit bound to a larger federal whole.

If the founding fathers had intended the United States to be a Christian nation, you'd think they might have included the words "Jesus," "Christ," "Bible," or "Christian" somewhere in the Declaration or the Constitution.  But they didn't.  What, do you think they did that accidentally?  No, not at all.  On the contrary, they intentionally left religion out, and did so for some very, very, very good reasons.

The first reason was that a lot of the founding fathers simply were not Christian.  Along with other great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, people like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Monroe, and many others were rethinking long-held ideas regarding religious doctrine, religious dogma, and religious "tradition" and were finding much of it contrary to their sense of justice, morality, and spirituality.  They found that some of the most widely-held religious dogma stood in direct opposition to the ideals of freedom and equality for all.  The rise of modern scientific thought had begun to undermine the Bible's simplistic (and utterly incorrect) teachings regarding how the world worked, and as a result these learned men began questioning.  If the Bible was wrong about so many things, what else was it wrong about?  Thomas Jefferson went so far as to publish his own version of the Bible, one that left out everything he personally disagreed with.  It ended up being a comparatively short, rather compact volume.

Many of the founding fathers identified themselves as Deists.  Not Christians.  Not even theists.  But Deists.  They still believed in a god, but refused to believe that god would break his own laws of nature to interfere in human affairs.

The second reason was that the founding fathers were very aware of the disasters caused when religion and government mixed, as had occurred in England and throughout the rest of Europe, as well as in the early American colonies where, for example, being a Quaker in Massachusetts was to court being tried for "heresy" and put to death by hanging.  The founders had absolutely no intention of adhering to "traditional Christian values" of treating those who you disagreed with in a brutal, bloody, and barbaric manner.  They could look at the history of Christian vs. Christian violence that had ravaged Britain and Ireland and Europe during the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, and the continual "Troubles."  Now would they countenance anything like a government-sponsored religious crusade against "infidels" like the heathen Cherokee or the Catholic French.

As such, the founding fathers made the extremely wise choice to wholly and utterly exclude religion from the government.  Any religion could flourish freely, and hopefully peacefully, in co-existance with all other religions, but would lack any sort of public support or institution.  In the United States, you could be an Anglican or a Quaker or a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or even an Atheist and not be compelled into obedience of anyone else.  It was a brand new concept called "freedom of religion,", though it could easily enough also be called "freedom from religion."  Any way you want to look at it, this freedom is one of the central pillars of our society and is one of the most important building blocks in our collective awareness of what freedom means.

Not only is the idea that the United States is Christian a false one, the idea that we used to be more religious than we are now is also false.  At this time, about 60% of the population of the United States self-identifies as religious (and that's counting all religions).  Religious affiliation as a percentage of the population actually peaked in the 1980s.  In 1800, that figure was only 9%.  During the Civil War, the number of people who identified themselves as religious was only about 20%.  And today its nearly 60%.  So no, we weren't more religiuous in the past.  For the record, the percentage of people who identified as religious has been dropping steadily every year since 1983.  People who do not go to church and who identify with no religion at all are the fastest growing segment of the population.  The number of non-believers currently stands at 20% of the population.  Last year it was 14%.  If things keep going the way they're going, next year it might be 35%.  Pretty soon we'll be right back at the 9% religious population of the founding fathers.

Obviously, a "Christian America" never existed, nor was it ever intended to be created.

But for the sake of argument, let's play a game of "Let's Pretend."

Let's suspend all common sense and fantasize for a moment that America really was supposed to be a Christian nation.  Let's ask ourselves just what exactly that would mean?

What precisely is a "Christian nation?"

What other nations can we hold up as examples of such a government?  Byzanium under Constantine?  Italy during the Renaissance?  Jean d'Arc's France?  Henry VIII's England?  Martin Luther's Germany?  The Denmark portrayed in William Shakespeare's Hamlet?

Which version of Christianity are we going to base our "Christian nation" on?  There are hundreds of distinct variations of Christianity, and some of them hate each other with a rage that burns as hot and bright as a supernova.  Will our Christian nation be Catholic?  Orthodox?  Anglican?  Evangelical?  Episcopalian?  Mormon?  Pentecostal?  Quaker?  Or maybe something really obscure like Milleritism or Cooneyitism?

Would our Christian nation be based on the love, forgiveness, and pacifism of Jesus Christ?  Or on the bloody violent crusader mentality that came along later?

And who gets to choose all these things?  Would we vote on which kind of Christianity we followed every four years, in the same years we voted for a new president?  Might we swing from the "love thy neighbor as thyself, feed the poor, turn the other cheek" kindly Christianity to the "kill them all for God will know their own" bloody violent Christianity overnight when the Christian-Republicans win out over the Christian-Democrats?  Would we be open and accepting of other religions, or would be lynch the unbeliever and heretic from the nearest lamp-post as a warning to the devil-worshipping heathens that their ways will not be tolerated?

Its all very vague.  Just like the real meaning of the phrase "Traditional Christian Values."