Is religion just another myth, fairytale, or legend? (@imbeggar response)

a lot of people will have these blocks they'll say I don't believe in God or Jesus or Christianity ah so your video title asks is religion just another myth fairy tal or Legend when you really mean Christianity that's okay we also focus on Christianity around here because I think it was all made up well that depends on what you mean by made up I think most Christians including the early ones were putting forth thoughts and ideas they genuinely believed in an accumulation of well-meaning leaps and exaggerations is sufficient to explain Christianity as we have it today if when you say made up you mean doesn't correspond to reality then yeah it's mostly made [Music] up welcome apologia where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians today we're looking at a short video from a channel called I am beggar they describe themselves as stuff about God for those who believe those who don't and those who just aren't sure sounds like everyone the Creator wanted to marry his love of apologetics and animation which I can totally get behind so you're attempting to explain a non-believers take on Christianity it's a myth or a fairy tale or a legend I'm glad you're splitting up these categories depending on how you define them they'll say that Jesus is just another mythical god pieced together from other mythical gods that already existed such as mithis Horus d and others I see that you're conflating the concept of God and the concept of Jesus of the New Testament it's the dying Rising Miracle Worker where some claim parallels not the Creator God like the one in the Old Testament those parallels would be Creator Gods from other cultures like Marduk or Brahma or atam or that there's really no evidence in the first couple hundred years that proves he even existed no matter the topic it's not helpful to boast that there's no evidence for almost any theory on any anything you can find some evidence there's some evidence that the Earth is flat there's some evidence that reptile people run the government someone can probably bring forth some evidence that the video you're watching now was created by a team of dolphins this no evidence claim is generally inaccurate and always needlessly dismissive better to say that the evidence for a proposition is insufficient or unconvincing or overcome by evidence to the contrary don't have to conclude that there was a historical figure of Jesus to admit that there is some evidence that he did however weak being overly hyperbolic is a barrier to being taken seriously or that some guy named Jesus not the Son of God probably did exist but everything else about him was made up and added on later bing bing bing that's the one that's what I think basically I'm not going to say a lot about these but I will say this for the first this idea that Jesus was was just an amalgamation of other ancient mythical Gods one doesn't have to posit that Jesus was just an amalgamation of the other ancient mythological Gods to notice and acknowledge that elements of the Jesus story are not wholly unique and his stories arose in a time and context where such stories were commonplace and could easily have been direct or indirect influences the original Star Wars isn't just an amalgamation of Buck Rogers Flash Gordon and Akira kurasawa Samurai films but those were all direct or indirect influences when Stan Lee was creating Heroes like Spider-Man Iron Man and the X-Men he wasn't directly copying from Superman and Batman but he was working in a culture where stories of costume characters with extraordinary powers were circulating and popular the overlap doesn't need to be one to one to recognize that the stories of Jesus contain tropes who according to this had virgin births were baptized had 12 disciples performed the same Miracles and were crucified died and resurrected as Savior of the world well none of this is true yeah this phrasing is the most bombastic and hyperbolic and requires creative interpretation and probably be Beyond how the text can charitably be stretched and that's too bad because by exaggerating how similar they are it diminishes the impact of conversation about the actual similarities healing raising the dead providing miraculous wine Supernatural births sacred meals death and rebirth symbolism just to name a few those were tropes familiar story elements in the era of Jesus that undermined the notion that he was a particularly revolutionary or unexpected figure these claims can all be traced back to a couple guys in the 18 and 1900s who had no evidence now Mr beggar is making the same mistake he chastised his opponents for hand waving away a hypothesis as having no evidence clearly there is some evidence you may be unconvinced that the author of The Gospel of John specifically had dionis in mind when he wrote about Jesus turning water into wine but you can't deny that stories of dionis supernaturally providing wine exist it's some evidence actually all the evidence we do have shows these ancient mythical gods are really nothing like Jesus at all that depends entirely on your definition of Nothing Like Jesus at all some exaggerate the extent of the similarities sure but it's also all in the genre of gods interacting with men so it's not entirely unalike my assessment is somewhere in the middle but I leave your determination as homework for the viewer which is why every scholar archaeologist and egyptologist dismiss these claims a long time ago so we can throw this one out and this is the one that's all over the internet if you want opposit Jesus as solely a literary composition the burden of proof is pretty high and academics tend to shy away from Notions of absolute certainty so this is true but unsurprising such a claim is also unlikely to resonate with a devout believer so does little to encourage introspection or dialogue unfortunately the more modest and defendable claim that Jesus is partially a literary composition influenced by Divine genre copes of the day is getting tossed out at the same time for the second this idea that there's no evidence within the first few centuries that proves Jesus even existed well there's plenty of evidence I agree that Jesus probably existed but plenty is a subjective judgment call just a statement that Mr beggar is convinced rather than labeling the positions how about we just present the positions just open a Bible New Testament those are all first century counts written by a bunch of very different guys who are all alive when Jesus was alive Scholars are not in total agreement that all 27 books of the New Testament were written in the first century though I think it's plausible that they were alive when Jesus was alive doesn't mean much when the later authors would have been small children at best when Jesus was alive the authors of Mark and Luke didn't meet Jesus nor does Paul associated with 13 of the books ever claimed to have met Jesus before he died also there is clear literary dependence in these books so it's not really the kind of multiple attestation that one would be looking for or is currently being represented on screen there's also non-Christian evidence from Jewish and Roman historians from those who are opposed to Jesus and from those who didn't even like him but those who hold this view argue that all the evidence was either forged altered or made up one of the more popular videos on my channel is this one called are there authentic secular writings of Jesus some elements of these were definitely altered that's not really in dis dispute that said I do think a few of these are reasonably solid though not a slam dunk when it comes to a historical figure not so much on these Supernatural claims I think proponents of Jesus mythicism would say that these references are being misinterpreted and or are just telling us what Christians believe rather than what history tells us but I will point you to another video on my channel the case for Jesus mythicism if you'd like to see a mythicist make their own best case there's really no evidence of Alexander the Great until 400 years after he died but he existed right there's no extent literary evidence for Alexander the Great until 400 years later but there is a plethora of archaeological evidence like coins and scriptions and artifacts honoring Alexander dating all the way back to his lifetime you're not comparing Apples to Apples here even if you don't believe in Jesus Christ Son of God you can't just throw away all the evidence that's too easy which is why today nearly all historians whether Christians or not accept that Jesus existed what does that have to do with being too easy are you saying historians act out of laziness which brings us to the last one that some radical preacher named Jesus probably did exist but everything else about him was religious embellishment at best or completely and totally made up at worst there's also another category of sincerely mistaken Christians May well have been passing along some believed detail tals without exaggeration beyond their current understanding but not actually rooted in fact some say it was made up by his disciples the Romans by Constantine by a bunch of rich white guys in Rome who wanted a lot of power or just by sitting around the campfire telling stories over and over and over again it's likely that some of his disciples were involved there seems to be some reasonable evidence that Peter and John met Paul at some point but they needn't have made anything up in any kind of dishonest or malicious sense they could just as easily have been sincerely mistaken about aspects of the story Constantine came on the scene too late to have forged the core historical claims of Christianity Jesus's death and Resurrection I do think his misguided efforts contributed to some of the later ancillary traditions still held today but those are out of scope for this analysis and yeah the campfire telling stories over and over definitely happened most early Christians converted because of friends and Neighbors not because they encountered one of the original 12 disciples and the first 40 years were without a written gospel so word of mouth is how it spread and during this time a form of Evangelical Evolution must have taken place if you tell the story once and your listener has objections the next time you tell it you incorporate your pmics against those objections if that works you repeat it again and the adaptation now becomes part of all future tellings well the earliest evidence of Christianity that's pretty solid shows it was already fairly well established by around 64 ad I'm not sure what you mean by well established estimates of these numbers vary wildly but are most realistically in the ballpark of tens of thousands of adherence in terms of Doctrine there was still significant variations and debate over core Orthodoxy still going on that said Peter and Paul died around that time so their contributions were set I'm not sure are you going with this one and most of the New Testament is thought to have been written between the 50s and the 70s that's not true at all really only the seven Undisputed letters of Paul are consistently dated before 70 AD the gospels and the other 16 books are most commonly dated after 70 AD with only the most conservative evangelicals even making Arguments for earlier again since Mr Beggar's point would work equally well by making the more modest claim of during the first century he could have had the same evidence with less dispute or hyperbole so we know it couldn't have been made up after this I bristle at the characterization of made up but agree that some of the core Christian ideas existed well before Constantine in the 4th century and it's unlikely that his disciples made it up because well they all died very brutal vient deaths for it citation needed even accepting the most outlandish Church tradition at face value John and Judas weren't murdered the most comprehensive study of this that I'm aware of the fate of the Apostles by Shawn McDow concludes that of the original 12 only Peter and James son of Zebedee are strongly evidenced as being murdered and Shawn has recently downgraded his confidence in James we're kind of down to just Peter in this murder claim and if we're talking about one guy it's pretty easy for one guy to be sincerely m mistaken sincerely mistaken people will die just as readily as someone's sincerely correct in any case this is just factually inaccurate and Sean would tell you to stop saying this I think there's also been a hyperrust by many Christians who read and says hey they all died as Martyrs and they Proclaim it well I've met that claim in the past so I Repent on this show from making that before I did my research that should be corrected as well so that leaves about 20 years of embellishing stories around the campfire to turn just some preacher named Jesus into the Son of God who healed thousands fed thousands changed the weather Rose the dead walked on water died and came back to life and more or less changed the world as we know it until this very day why 20 years that's when Paul started writing but Paul has almost no details at all about Jesus's life there's really 40 years between Jesus's death and the writing of the First Gospel in which the stories could be embellished and the non-canonical gospels show us that the stories of Jesus kept growing and growing even after Mark was put to parchment now I can embellish with the best of them but that would have to be the most Mega mother of all embellishment in the history of the entire universe not to mention that all the people you're embellishing it for were alive when Jesus was alive we live in an era where each of us have History's Greatest factchecking machine in our pocket and embellishments and false claims still circulate and are readily accepted during the lifetime of the people involved it's probably happened to you that some false or exaggerated story was circulating about you and you were actively trying to correct the record and yet the story spread anyhow despite your best efforts the fictional George Washington cherry tree anecdote likely originated with his biographer and persists to this day Napoleon bonapart was of average height but the tales of his minuscule stature and Napoleon complex spread and endured during his lifetime detractors of Russian Mystic Gregory Rasputin made widely believed claims that he had a cult based superpowers to heal himself and others John Henry Johnny apple seed Paul bunan all likely based on actual humble men Cleopatra gas Khan Christopher Columbus while Bill Hickok Annie Oakley PT baram and on and on all had widely accepted and rarely fact checked near Supernatural embellishments that took hold about them during their lifetimes there probably were Close Associates and Witnesses out there correcting the facts at every social Gathering and every Tavern they entered but that's not going to stop the tithe of a good story this claim by Mr beggar is absurd he must live in a very different fact caring Society than I do to even say this with a straight face so you can't get away with too much without somebody saying uh yeah that didn't happen I was there okay so the Fireside Storyteller talks about the time Jesus healed a man with Leprosy The Listener can't pipe in and say that didn't happen I was there because this guy obviously wasn't with Jesus 24/7 the Storyteller would rightfully say no it was another time you weren't there you can't disprove a murder charge bring up a long list of people who insist that they've never seen the suspect murder anyone that's not how any of this works it's even Siler for the big claims like virgin birth or Resurrection those were private moments myth and Legend would have created a more predictable figure and the experience of Jesus is so unusual that something much more substantial than the imagination is needed to explain in predictable in what way as we talked about upfront the claims about Jesus largely fall into the C category of tropes at the time entirely predictable apocalyptic preachers were common at the time with similar messages to Jesus's the dead SE scroll community's teacher of righteousness was a product of similar old testament's interpretations tell me what exactly is unusual about Jesus and by what measure can we judge which claims fall within the confines of expected mythology this whole argument is an invitation to shallow thinking what story is beyond human imagin Nation but I'm sure you could argue any one of these points very well why thank you I do my best and we could go back and forth and not really get anywhere except on each other's nerves and we got to stop doing that seriously what do you mean not get anywhere wrestling with these questions and arguments are what made me eventually realize my faith in Jesus was unfounded I get messages every day about the similar experiences of others that's getting somewhere and are you admitting that these points have no Evangelical value that people don't come to Christianity based on the preponderance of the evidence I mean I happen to agree with you as do many apologists that it's the holy spirit that saves not the evidence so I understand your appeal to stop thinking and examining learn to circumnavigate or go around the person's intellect the place of argument and to speak directly to their conscience to to the to the place of the knowledge of right and wrong that's what Jesus did but we're missing the point here it really has nothing to do with any of this so forget about all this so you do agree Arguments for Christianity are ineffective what it all boils down to is this is this man-made or is it from God you don't specify what you're referring to by this so without clarification I'll point out that there is a potential for category error and false dichotomy here something is man-made or or God made only if you can first establish that it was made for example I see no reason to conclude that matter and energy are made things even then things can be made by entities other than man or God what about beavers what about demons or Angels or Nephilim what about other possible Gods from other pantheons of gods this is a poorly formed question now my question is don't you think you'd be able to tell the difference this appeals to intuition is a bit of conflation because when I start Conjuring images of the Rocky Mountains I obviously accept that humans didn't make them but that doesn't leave God as my only alternative natural processes that we understand relatively well are responsible for the Rockies that's not humans or God if you want to argue that God created the natural processes then we can have that discussion but it's begging the question to insert God here for anything humans are directly responsible for beware of this logically fallacious tactic I mean wouldn't the gap between what is man-made and what is divine be huge and immense I would think so which is why I find it so ridiculous that the arguments for the Bible being a book beyond a normal human book are so weak if a Divine being wrote a book wouldn't the gap between it and the manmade ones be huge and immense rather than nuanced subtle arguable and barely perceptible I mean if I put something in front of you and said this was either man-made or from God don't you think you'd be able to tell just by looking at it that's a car humans are capable of making cars I've never been in a car factory but I've seen a lot of video footage as well as read books and documentaries on how the process works Henry Ford's company produced documentaries about car manufacturing techniques so yeah well it's possible God made this car it's reasonable for me to assume that a human made it because I know that humans make cars what's your point exactly H wouldn't that be all the proof you would need are you talking about my own personal intuition upon first glance no personal intuition isn't a reliable way to know something that's the reason the scientific method had to be created in the first place to have a more reliable way of determining things than our own limited snap judgment and what would you do about competing intuitions it's my intuition that the concept is entirely Superfluous and unnecessary to explain anything I've seen or experienced is that intuition and all the proof I need I think you could tell I think we all could tell cuz we all have that built-in meter inside us that detects on one side and Truth on the other are you kidding me are humans never wrong has no human ever been fooled or misled my perceptions and best assessments turn out to be wrong all the time this all powerful God you're positing can be demonstrated only by the least reliable decision-making process that we know of Truth is what we're looking for here is it it sounds like you're looking for a good feeling maybe we don't agree on a definition of truth I Define truth as the extent to which a proposition conforms to reality as adjudicated by predictive power that takes my feelings and my intuitions out of the equation a proposition conforms to reality or it doesn't no matter how I feel about it if a proposition is true there's almost always some measure of prediction of future data to go alongside it if it's true that an object is red we can predict the range of the wavelength of light reflected by the object if no predictions can be made by a proposition it is an unfalsifiable claim and therefore not particularly useful so I challenge you a friendly challenge in peace Okay Google The Sermon on the Mount Sermon on the Mount and actually read the thing don't worry I'll only take you about 3 minutes I mean as a teenager I committed The Sermon on the Mount to memory the whole book of Matthew in fact but sure I can read it again a few minutes later and ask yourself well I'm not a fan of this question phrasing is he truth only propositions of Truth value not people is apia truth is a nonsense question so I'm going to be generous and rephrase is The Sermon on the Mount true I mean we start with Beatitudes I think it was blessed are the cheese makers well obviously it's not meant to be taken literally it refers to any manufacturers of Dair products blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted that's obviously not universally true many have mourned and not been comforted in this life since I have no reason to think that humans have experiences beyond our one and only life I'm not buying any counter that the Comfort comes in the next life and even so most interpret the Bible to mean that only those who accept salvation from Jesus will have a positive afterlife experience so many non-believers will mourn and not be comforted so not true we could do this verse by verse later on in the sermon Jesus says but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart if your right eye causes you to stumble gouge it out and throw it away it's better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell if this advice were literally true why are Christian churches not filled with people with gouged out eyes if it's only metaphorically true what's the metaphor exactly still the same sermon do not resist an evil person if anyone slaps you on the right cheek turn to them the other cheek also and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt hand over your coat as well and if anyone forces you to go one mile go with them two M give to the one who asks you and do not turn away from the the one who wants to borrow from you as a child of Western capitalism this doesn't ring true to me why do Christians have locks on their doors take self-defense classes own guns why has any Christian ever hired a defense lawyer in what sense is this passage true most of this is advice advice is not a proposition advice can be evaluated only in the extent to which it helps accomplish a goal what is the goal of The Sermon on the Mount so that I might evaluate it nobody can tell you what is truth or not you have to see it for yourself do you mean the concept of truth I can tell you what my concept of Truth is and you can tell me yours and where there is overlap in our definitions we can evaluate propositions based on the extent of that common understanding or do you mean that true propositions cannot be communicated if I say George Washington was the first president of the United States of America I have told you a true proposition regardless of whether you've seen it yourself or whether or not you even accept it as true in any case you've been told truth or do you mean that you cannot become convinced of truth without seeing it yourself I'm convinced that we are made up of Adams but I've never seen one I'm convinced that India is a country but I've never been there to see it on the flip side I've seen things that I don't believe optical illusions mirages hallucinations Mind Tricks and isn't that a theists traditional knock against the non-believer that they don't believe in a god because they haven't seen a God and that is somehow shortsighted of them the back half of this video has devolved into an unhelpful fortune cookie and if something sticks with you the rest of the day or the rest of the week that's God if something sticks with you that's God songs can stick with you are they God when we do something embarrassing that sticks with us is that God will process problems for extended periods of time sometimes eventually coming to the realization that we made a mistake or that something was out of place or that we've been duped or wronged none of that is God but it's something that sticks with us and what about my lingering doubts about Christianity I didn't give it up all at once the doubts kept coming back and back I started suffering cognitive dissonance those questions stuck with me was that God too because God is truth you can't make that up despite the title affirming religion in general Mr beggar point pointed out a number of gods in history that he doesn't accept and based on his catalog I can see that he rejects plenty of non-Christian gods in his view someone made those up so God can be made up I hear Christians claim this all the time but I think I've demonstrated here and in many other videos that Jesus is extremely inventable for example seei too good to be false analysis of Tom Gilson's book of the same premise could some Christian please articulate this alleged gap between the most imposing thing that a human can invent and where Jesus is aside from becoming popular a measure that also doesn't require the supernatural to explain any objective Observer will see that Jesus is entirely in line with wellestablished tropes in the God man genre it's too bad this historian from 19 30 never got to see Star Wars choose God sorry Mr beggar but we don't actually have the capacity to choose what convinces us to some extent we can control how much of the evidence we'll listen to and to what extent we'll seriously consider it but all the time and earnestness in the world doesn't allow us to Simply choose to believe something we're not convinced of can you simply choose not God no you'd have to be convinced and that's the end of that video and also the end of our year I'd like to take this chance to thank all of the amazing people who support the work of Pia through patreon and YouTube memberships if you find my work valuable and you're willing and able please consider becoming a financial backer for as little as a dollar a month Christians love to give to their so it means so much more when we counter in Christianity help check the description for links and thanks for watching for for more of this former Christian taking a look at the claims of chrs tap on the thumbnail on screen now and I'll see you over there until next time later

Channel: Paulogia

Views: 99,387

Keywords: paulogia

Id: wl26CyW13PY

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023