The Great Zombie Uprising Of 33 A.D.: Jesus Wasn't The Only One Who Rose From The Dead

I stopped being a Christian not because I stopped believing in empathy, compassion, and kindness, but because I couldn't accept the main tenets of Christianity -- mostly the supernatural stuff.

Christian theology states that Jesus suffered, died, was entombed, and then was resurrected from the dead. He not only came back to life (which might be half-way believable to a skeptic, given the fact that in biblical times, it might have been easy to declare someone dead prematurely), but he ascended bodily into heaven. This means that Jesus' body floated (of flied) up into the air and into Heaven.

If we're honest with ourselves, this is very far out stuff. There is no reason to believe, given what we now know about life, death, consciousness, and the self, that the body of a human being could come back to life and then float up into space. There is also no science to explain how, without a functioning brain, a person could retain any sense of their former living self in any type of afterlife. (Of course, the claim is that Jesus wasn't just a normal human being, but more on that later.)

I do realize that most Christians actually do believe that the resurrection actually occurred:

In the 2008-2009 wave of the U.S. Congregational Life Survey, 94 percent of evangelicals, 91 percent of Catholics and 78 percent of mainline Protestants said Jesus was raised bodily from the dead after his crucifixion.

Jesus' resurrection from the dead was an actual event, said three-quarters of the more than 25,000 respondents to congregational surveys offered by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research from 2004 to 2010. Most of the participants were mainline Protestants.

More than two-thirds of Christian respondents, including 84 percent of black and evangelical respondents, strongly agreed with the statement, "Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead," according to the Portraits of American Life Study.

I also believe that many of these respondents haven't really sat down and thought about what is required to actually believe the resurrection to be true.

I also believe that many people don't like the implications of the resurrection as myth. If the resurrection is a myth, what else is not literally true? If the resurrection is mere symbolism, doesn't that kind of throw a wrench the whole Christian doctrine?

Resurrection aside, there are some pretty amazing claims made in The Gospel of Matthew that are sorely overlooked by the average Christian. In fact, having been a Christian myself for a good part of my life, I was kind of amazed to have been made aware of this particular passage.

After Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, Matthew 27 describes, quite simply, a major zombie uprising:

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

This is fairly clear in the text. Zombies actually rose out of the ground and walked into the city and certainly scared the bejesus out of people. What in the world are we to make of this?

I don't know. I'm no theologian, and I'm sure apologetics have found a way to explain it. But I believe one of the big takeaways from this passage is this: The Bible should not be taken literally. If you do take it literally, it is rife with claims that, quite honestly, are no less fantastical than the claims made in Greek or Roman mythology, or Scientology, for that matter. The only difference is that you likely have heard them since birth, and hence, they seem as true as the crossing of the Delaware.

The Bible is a book written by superstitious Bronze Age men with a very limited understanding of the laws of nature and the capacity to spin a good yarn. This doesn't mean that there was no Jesus. All signs point to the fact that he indeed existed. This doesn't mean that the Bible doesn't offer us great passages of wisdom, beauty, horror, and heartbreak. It does. It doesn't mean that everything in the Bible is bogus.

As comedian David Cross said, "The Bible is the world's longest game of telephone." There is probably a great deal of truth to that. It doesn't make the Bible sinister, or counterfeit. It makes it exactly what it is: a long oral history put to paper in a great undertaking that took hundreds of years, with many different authors writing to many different audiences for many different reasons, in different languages. Throw in some major squabbles over content and purpose, the expulsion of several books, significant editing, and pseudonymous writing, and you have a complex, if not flawed, collection of writing. We also have to take into consideration the fact that the Gospels, which many believe to be eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus, were written many years after Jesus' death. The first Gospel accounts (Mark) did not appear until 40 years after Jesus died. If we take into consideration the life expectancy at time of the writing, that is quite a bit more than a lifetime.

C.S Lewis posed to us his 'trilemma': Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.

Lewis is forgetting a fourth option: Perhaps Jesus never made the claims to begin with. This is not a radical suggestion.

Regardless, there is much to gain from the observance of Easter. It is, after all, a celebration of rebirth that echoes other springtime rituals predating Christianity. Its symbols and traditions reverberate all throughout human history.

There's certainly no reason to let a couple of zombies get in the way.

The Only Conversation Worth Having: A Tribute To Hitchens

The below video tribute offers a wonderful example of Hitchens's ferocity, passion, and conviction. Hitchens, in his own words, speaking of knowledge, wisdom, belief, and death, against a backdrop of majestic natural beauty.

The tribute was created in January of 2011 while Hitchens was undergoing treatment, but it couldn't be any more poignant than it is now.

The audio is taken from Hitchens's closing remarks in a debate with William Dembski at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Dallas, Texas in November of 2010.

...When Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city, and he accepted his death he did say, “Well, if we are lucky perhaps I will be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters, too.” In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But, I do know that it is the conversation I want to have while I am still alive. Which means that to me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet… that I haven’t understood enough… that I can’t know enough… that I am always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Spirits and Souls

The latest Calamities of Nature comic dovetails nicely with Sean M. Carroll's recent comments on the soul and the afterlife.

What Does Science Have To Say About Life After Death?

Physicist and cosmologist Sean M. Carroll sure did step in it. Hot on the heels of Stephen Hawking's assertion that heaven (or any afterlife, for that matter) was "a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," Carroll has published a Scientific American piece entitled Physics and the Immortality of the Soul, that is quite clear on what physics has to say on the topic. And for such a nice guy, he certainly doesn't sugar-coat it.

Now there are many who, like Stephen Jay Gould, assert that there are things on which science and religion do not overlap. Many cite this non-overlapping magisteria when arguing the existence of God, the afterlife, or souls. However, we can't discount the degree of improbability of life after death given the laws of physics.

Carroll explains:

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren't any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

Further on:

Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can't be a new collection of "spirit particles" and "spirit forces" that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham's razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.

Carroll then goes into The Dirac Equation and demonstrates, as simply as a particle physicist can, that it requires an amazing amount of metaphysical shoehorning and the chucking out of everything we know to put any credence in the afterlife concept.

There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.

I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's feelings on the afterlife:

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

If we think about where the concept of the afterlife originated, we must look to our ancestors -- ancestors who, if they were lucky, lived only a fraction of the time we will live.   These ancestors had only a fraction of the knowledge we now have at our fingertips -- knowledge of the interconnectedness of all living things, knowledge of the world, and of the cosmos.  Perhaps, as our knowledge and our lifespans continue to increase, we will find (as we are beginning to see in modern European secular societies), that we do not need the promise of an afterlife.  Isn't this life more than enough?

Study: Increased Life Expectancy = Postponement of Religious Participation

A new study, by Dr Elissaios Papyrakis at the University of East Anglia and Dr Geethanjali Selvaretnam from the University of St Andrews in the UK, seems to state the obvious: Because of longer life expectancy, more people are postponing active religious participation.

It is undeniable that death plays a major role in religious belief.  Our earliest evidence of religious belief is based on the ritual treatment of the dead.  Evidence from burial sites and associated artifacts supports early belief in the afterlife.  

Belief in the afterlife is common in all human cultures, and is somewhat of a cornerstone of religious belief.  And although religion has provided many benefits to humans throughout history, perhaps the most potent selling point of many religions has been the promises of an afterlife.  And certainly the threat of an eternity of hell has been one of religion's greatest motivators. 

If the afterlife serves as one of religion's major attractions, it seems logical to expect that, with an ever-increasing life expectancy in developed societies, making peace with one's god would lose some of its urgency.

"The findings have important policy implications for what churches want to do and how they attract members," explained Dr Papyrakis, of the School of International Development at UEA. "Many religions and societies link to some degree the cumulative amount of religious effort to benefits in the afterlife. We show that higher life expectancy discounts expected benefits in the afterlife and is therefore likely to lead to postponement of religiosity, without necessarily jeopardising benefits in the afterlife."

From the article:

Religions that largely delink salvation/damnation to the timing and amount of religious effort will particularly need to resort to such means to boost membership numbers. In most religions, the perceived probability of entering heaven or hell depends to a certain degree on the individual's lifetime behaviour. The degree of this varies across religions, being relatively high in Buddhism and Catholicism, but lower in Protestantism. In Calvinism, in particular, salvation/damnation is largely seen as predestined.

In poorer countries where life expectancy remains low, a larger share of the population, both young and old, is concerned about what happens after death, which naturally encourages religious participation.