Deprogramming : I Might Be Wrong
Written by Anthony David Jacques in Opinion at November 6, 2011
One question most Christians aren’t prepared to answer is, “What would it take for you to change your mind?”
As a Christian, I was always ready to share my testimony, my favorite scriptures or worship songs, my reasons for following Jesus, but for many years I was simply closed to the possibility of being wrong. I had been coached, and had even coached others, to walk away whenever conversations took this turn.
That’s a mistake I don’t intend to repeat. If there’s one thing I learned a little late in my faith but now maintain as a free thinker, it’s that I could always be wrong. Now, it takes more than authority claims or veiled threats of eternal punishment to get my attention. I require sound reasoning and, when available, verifiable proof.
Just open to the book of Genesis and read through the genealogies. You’ve got generations marked by men living seven-hundred years or more. Methuselah, the oldest man in the Bible, is said to have lived a remarkable nine-hundred sixty-nine years. The typical apologetic response to problems in Genesis is to claim such a scripture is a metaphor.
So are these genealogies metaphors? I know of no Christian doctrine that holds such a view, and virtually every believer I have spoken with on the topic believes these to be factual accounts. Given the fact that these men allegedly lived within the last six or seven thousand years, a period of time for which we have no shortage of human remains, were an archaeologist to find a skeleton, a bone or a skull of a person who lived for even five-hundred years, that would certainly give me pause.
Why has not a single one these specimens been recovered? Were we to dig up skeletal remains for a creature fitting the description of a Minotaur or Cyclops, we’d certainly give Greek Mythology a second look, and rightly so. We don’t expect to see these in the fossil record because we accept their accounts as mythological. Are these centuries-old men in Genesis any different? Or the mention of sons of God mating with the daughters or men a few chapters over? What about the lack of any geological evidence for a catastrophic global flood and mass extinction within the last six-thousand years?
The stories in Genesis have no better claim to historicity than Aesop’s Fables or Homer’s Odyssey, and if I’m brutally honest, Genesis rates far below these and most other works of ancient mythology from a literary standpoint.
But this is not a hill on which I would stake my doubts. Most would say to properly deal with Christianity, one must confront the impeccable character of Jesus himself, so let’s turn our attention to the Gospels.
“He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”
Now for some basic facts: The mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds. It’s not even the smallest seed in the Middle Eastern region. Nor does it grow into the largest of all garden plants.
That’s three strikes.
Yet if you Google the phrase “Is the mustard seed the smallest seed” you’ll bring up dozens of mutually exclusive reasons why Jesus misspoke that run the gamut from highly nuanced to downright ridiculous. All of these explanations have one thing in common: They ignore the most simple explanation, which is that the mustard seed was the smallest seed Jesus knew about. This requires no verbal acrobatics or linguistic trickery and makes perfect sense, unless you have a preconceived notion about who Jesus is.
An illiterate first century carpenter turned religious leader wouldn’t be expected to have such expertise. The creator of the universe, however, doesn’t get off the hook so easily. The extent to which apologists attempt to massage the meaning of words here is reminiscent of a certain philandering President floundering over the definition of the word “is”.
A few pages before this horticultural snafu, Jesus makes one of his biggest mistakes: An explicit prediction which clearly fails to come to fruition.
“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
Now I don’t care if Jonah really survived three days and nights in a fish’s belly. Any God worth our attention could certainly handle that. But if we flip a few pages to the right, do we find that Matthew’s own account validates Jesus’ prophecy? The short answer is, No.
Jesus was crucified on Good Friday, and we can trust he was laid in the tomb before sundown as this was not only the Sabbath, it was the yearly Passover Celebration. That gives us Friday night. He then lies in the grave all day Saturday. But come Sunday morning (either while it was still dark or just after sunrise, depending on which Gospel you read) Jesus is gone.
That’s two nights, and only one full day, a mere thirty-six hours. Three days and three nights is seventy-two hours. Could a man raised as a carpenter be this bad at arithmetic? He’s wrong by half for crying out loud.
This is no slight error or a nuance of translation. There are no word games available to the apologist on this front. This is a plainly stated prophecy where either someone has put words into Jesus’ mouth, or Jesus was seriously bad at basic math. Can we trust a man with our eternal security if we can’t trust him to prophecy the timing of his own resurrection?
I have yet to encounter a cogent response to this problem that doesn’t call into question the veracity of the text. Would you trust me with your life, or even with your life’s savings, if I told you that three plus three is twelve? I should hope not. Yet this is the magnitude of the miscalculation.
According to the Bible, Jesus said X would happen.
According to the Bible, X did not happen.
End of story.
I could go on about other basic historical and factual problems in and between each of the gospels, and in a future post I will touch on another failed prophecy Jesus makes, but if you’re interested in this sort of reasoning I can think of no better place to turn than Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason in which he dismantles the entire Bible from beginning to end using nothing but scripture as evidence against itself. And since the book is available free on many apps for iPhone or iPad, as well as on Kindle or Nook, you have no excuse*. Anyone who still views the Bible as anything but a literary curiosity after reading that book falls outside the purview of Reason itself**.
As a last ditch effort, when I have this conversation with a believer I am often asked, “What if Jesus showed up in your living room? What would you say?”
“Jesus,” I’d say, “I might be wrong. I remain open to discovering errors in my information or thinking process so I can better understand the world around me. But if you want me to put my faith in you, if you claim to be the perfect son of God, you had better be able to add better than my three year old daughter. Sorry, I’m just not impressed.”
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* And for those of you without e-readers, here’s a link to a free, downloadable PDF of The Age of Reason. Like I said, no excuse.
** Don’t get me wrong. The Bible is still an important book. You’ll never understand Shakespeare or Dante or Blake without being familiar with the Bible. Everyone should read the Bible. There’d be a lot more atheists in the world were this the case.