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People throughout history have had personal relationships with their own gods inside their heads. Do not for one moment imagine that the priests of Baal, Jupiter, Odin, Zeus, Kali or Thoth were any more deliberate knowing liars than Christian priests and pastors. Sincerity is no guarantee of verity. If you really have Jesus' voice living in your head you can prove it to me conclusively by asking him to teach you Aramaic, real Aramaic, the language he must have spoken when he was alive. Join me on a live webcam event in which you can demonstrate to the world the accuracy of your claims to be in direct contact with Jesus. I will telephone you and ask you some questions to which Jesus will be able to answer easily based on his experiences of life as a carpenter and wandering preacher. Are you up for it? If you really are sincere in your beliefs, in your claims of contact with Jesus and in your desire to show the world the reality of Jesus you should leap at this opportunity. I will do what I can to ensure there are plenty of atheists watching and listening. My own experience of being an atheist is that atheists do not believe in gods and therefore do not pray to Jesus or any other deity or spirit. The act of asking Jesus into your heart is simply a form of self-hypnosis. Everybody knows what is supposed to happen when Jesus comes into your life and this is what happens. Nobody becomes capable of speaking Aramaic, or any other language they do not know. If you really are in contact with a man who lived two thousand years ago, who spoke Aramaic and made his living by carpentry and begging you will be able to demonstrate this to us clearly. If you are making it all up you will wriggle out of the challenge and call me a fool or impious or make some other meaningless taunt for making such a suggestion. I have absolutely no intention of trying to hypnotize myself into becoming a Christian because I appreciate the freedom to think for myself and make up my own mind. I do not want to have my decisions made for me by my own subconscious prejudices telling me how to play the part of a Christian. Why would I want to become a Christian? I know plenty of them. They don't impress me very much. Evidence first then belief. That is the scientific way. If it was good enough for the disciples why is it not appropriate for me? If Jesus doesn't go in for proof and values unquestioning gullible faith why did he offer so much proof to his disciples? They didn't have to take anything on faith, the power of Jesus was demonstrated to them directly, they didn't have to take anybody's word for it, they saw miracles performed in front of them. Of course a cynic would say that miracles are much easier to arrange thirty years or more later when the time comes to have something in writing. The Christian approach of denying doubt first is anathema to Enlightenment thinking. Faith is not a virtue, it is a weakness of mind, a crippling of the intellect. Nothing that is worth believing in requires that people rule out the possibility of questioning. Science and liberalism are not afraid to not only allow but positively welcome doubt, checking, verification and most importantly of all falsification. Have you tried asking other gods into your heart (kidney, spleen, brain, soul, mind or whatever)? Why not? Why should you assume the god of the people who last beat up your ancestors has to be the only legitimate god? If there is only one true god how can Muslims who are smarter than you pray five times per day and be prepared to kill and die for the wrong one true god? By that I mean the ones that simply are smarter than you, there's more than a billion of them, not that all of them are smarter than you! Why don't Buddhists and Hindus sat meditating about the truth of the universe suddenly start hearing the voice of Jesus? What else have they got to listen out for? Why don't Baptists see visions of the Virgin Mary? Why don't Catholic priests or New Age goddess worshipers start speaking in tongues? When you are hypnotizing yourself to believe in Jesus why don't you regress to a past life, recall being anally probed in a flying saucer or remember that your father sexually abused you for ten years? The answer is simple, people behave under any form of hypnosis the way they are expected to behave. If you ask a Muslim goat herder from Burkina Faso to let Jesus into his life he wouldn't be able to do a very good job of it because he has no idea how to play the role. Somebody from Alabama would have a much better chance of doing it convincingly. Children have a natural affinity for learning languages, but nobody encourages children to speak in tongues because they won't have picked up enough clues how to do it right. Of course nobody spoke in tongues for eighteen centuries then the craze spread in much the same way as crazes for kite flying or stilt walking. How do you explain the fact (I presume you do regard it as a fact) that Jesus preached only to Jews, only had Jews as disciples (and only men too come to that) and made no efforts at all to preach to any gentiles? Why only care about gentiles when he's dead? If your answers to any of these questions involve Jesus being a slippery character or smarter than any human being could ever hope to understand how can you know that this spirit is Jesus and not, say, Satan? Would Satan be incapable of making you feel good inside? Why? And how do you know? Once somebody has postulated a slippery liar lording it up over the Earth trying to deceive people for his own murky not-to-be-probed reasons how can anybody ever feel confident of anything, internal or external? No doubt when you think about Jesus you get a feeling inside that tells you that you are right. How does this feeling compare to that which gamblers have before they lay a large bet they know will win and doesn't? What evidence have you got that human beings are capable of directly feeling the truth of ideas through concentrating on sensations within their internal organs? Doesn't the existence of a profitable gambling industry give the lie to the idea that the human body is equipped with a functioning direct truth evaluator? Can you explain why God and Jesus value credulity so highly? Why is believing in a god who seems almost perversely shy so important? Why is belief more important than good behaviour? What is eternal life for? Isn't it meaningless without an after-eternal life to aim for? But that would be silly, wouldn't it? Who is God jealous of? And why? Did Jesus die for your sins or so that you would believe in him? What does he get out of being believed in? Go on, ask him. This is the biggie: what do you give the being who made everything and why would he want it? Why has the creator of the universe got a character that resembles that of an evolved ape? OK, it seems he's unknowable only when the impious ask to know him but fully knowable when the faithful ask things of him. Why? If Jesus is God and his "death" was a sacrifice to atone for sin who was he sacrificed to? How can going through the motions of "killing" an immortal achieve anything? It's ridiculous mythological nonsense. Immortals can't die, it's in the job description. If Jesus died for the sins of humanity committed and yet to be committed, paying off our debts, what happens if we stop sinning? Do we then go into credit? Has he ever told you something you didn't already know? Has he ever told you why Christians are a minority? Why not ask him for directions for how to demonstrate or disprove the existence of the Higgs Boson? What has God got against homosexuality? Why is he now OK about eating shrimp? Do sabbath breakers still deserve to be put to death? What was the big thing about foreskins about? Why does an unchanging Alpha and Omega yet somehow still manage to change? Why not ask him for an explanation for why he let so many good Christians die in the fruitless search for the North West Passage? How hard would it have been to tell them that it was a waste of time looking? If Jesus can appear as a vision so artists can paint him why couldn't he send a vision of the Earth seen from space, or of the dark side of the Moon, to an artist with the skill to paint it? Wouldn't a Leonardo da Vinci of the dark side of the Moon that subsequently matches up almost precisely (allowing for more recent cratering) be the sort of evidence that would turn the whole world into believers? Far better than some lame effort at nude photography. Why does the explanation you have been forming have the ring of the explanations offered for why glove puppets don't tap dance or speak when their masters are asleep? |
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