The Jesus myther nonsense

[piscator]

Your reply has the feel of a giant nonsequitur about it.

Let's try and reset this back to first principles. You started the thread asserting that people who didn't accept the historical existence of Jesus Christ were abusing history. When XC asked you why it mattered if Jesus was a rea guy or not you brought that brief history of social reform to imply that Jesus was a social reformer and as important to our contemporary understanding of human rights as people like Ghandi or Mandela et al.

OK?

The question has been, what does any of that have to do with whether Jesus was a real guy or not, and does it real matter one way or the other if he actually existed or not? Are you saying that our understanding of human rights is fundamentally tied to the existence of a actual individual of Middle-Eastern extraction born c.2000 years ago, and in such a way and to such an extent that if Jesus were only a myth or a token then we simply would not have human rights, or at least not as we currently know them?

I note that you stake a claim to Jesus being among the blessed who 'strengthen the moral claim that is on society to assuage unnecessary and gratuitous suffering' but, firstly Jesus would not need actual existence to do that, he would only need symbolic or conceptual existence in the mind of his followers,

Quite right. But then again this reasoning does nothing to advance the debate about the existence or non-existence of Jesus as an actual human person who did exist.

and secondly, your 'enlightened' recasting of the nazarene narative put aside all the actual unnecessary and gratuitous suffering carried out in his name which was predominant in the history of the West until about c.250 years.

And so it should, because neither the man (if he existed) nor the narrative has anything to do with the perversion or distortion of either or both by those who came after. This is one of the prime conceits of religious Atheism: to condemn Jesus and his message ex post facto because of the actions of others. Anybody can do anything to anyone "in the name of" someone or something else, but this does not necessarily impeach the individual whose name is invoked nor does it necessarily diminish other acts done in that same name that are beneficial rather than noxious.

It's a standard Atheist attempt at reverse guilt by association that condemns the author for the acts of the reader, as in blaming the author of "Catcher in the Rye" for John Hinckley's murder of John Lennon.

That's not how reason and logic actually work, Brian.

It seems to me that only after the literal existence of Jesus was cast into legitimate doubt, rather than just being taken for granted, that Western society finally managed to progress towards its more enlightened outlook.

Assumes facts not in evidence. Many people argue that Western society has not progressed towards enlightenment but has actually regressed into hedonistic ignorance by denying the commandments of God. Who is to say who is right?

God, I suppose, if he/she/it exists.

Actually, one especially striking recasting of the Jesus model does coincide with the greatest leaps in enlightenment and human rights during the late 18th/early 19th centuries. That recasting most directly involves models like those adopted at the time by writers like Jefferson (in his rigorously non-miracles Jefferson Gospel collation) and others of his generation. The Jefferson model was broadly reflected in a whopping majority of the most educated readers and writers of the Jefferson generation: That model was a strictly human rabbi who was historic and had nothing magic about him.

By contrast, the concurrent Jesus myther model barely made a blip at that time at all. Sure, a tiny few advanced such notions, but if we're going to determine just which Jesus model most directly impacts and reflects, at the same time, the peculiar zeitgeist of the West's 18th/19th-century progress towards its more enlightened outlook, it's the secular historic model of the Founders generation that most directly reflects and has an impact on that zeitgeist, by a mile, not the Jesus myther woo at all.

Furthermore, since that time, intense philological analysis of the original Koine Greek texts has actually confirmed that some enlightened readers like Jefferson plainly stumbled on something quite real in their initial seat-of-the-pants discrimination of which passages more likely reflected early documentation and which ones deceptive embellishment. The use of the Greek language is apparently drastically different from stratum to stratum. The philologists are to be congratulated in determining that (much of) the choices that a Jefferson made in his early cut-and-paste job eventually matched very similar conclusions made by philological experts of many years later.

To ignore this rigorous analysis duly performed -- in the teeth of the church's hysterical opposition -- by brave secular scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries is no different from ignoring the specialists who further unwrapped the full implications in Darwin's work on evolution. No one here even bothers to address the work these philological specialists did in the teeth of the church's opposition. I can't help wondering just why all this work by two or three generations of gutsy secularists in defiance of the church is being strenuously ignored on a board like this one that purports to be composed of rationalists. Could it be that mythers are just as dyed-in-the-wool reality deniers as any Westboro fundies? They sure act that way.

Stein

You talk like "Philological analysis" is something objective, like Saussure formalized some aspect of number theory, or something. Such shit.

[Seth]

I fart in your general direction!

I wave my privates at your auntie! Pfffffft.