An awful lot of books and movies went into last week's shenanigans. Thought I'd plug my favorites.
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Christopher Hitchens) - Hitchens can be a tough pill to swallow sometimes--he is ruthlessly unapologetic, but there are lots of great nuggets in here. This is where I learned about lanugo, the hair that infants grow and then shed in utero.
Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (David Mills) - I love this book. I picked it up and could not put it down. Mills writes elegantly and intelligently, and has structured the book in such a way that every chapter represents a complete, independent argument. He encourages readers to pick a chapter that looks interesting and start there. The most fabulous-est tidbit here is one I've quoted before: he posits that without the Catholic church's war on science, there's no reason we wouldn't have had a man on the moon by 650 AD.
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faiths We Never Knew (Bart D. Ehram) - gives a very compelling argument for the origins of Christianity and cites (and reproduces) many of the existing and referenced "lost" gospels. He also has a peculiar sense of humor that bobs its head above the surface every now and then.
Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally (Marcus Borg) - I've read many, many Borg titles, and this was the first. It goes into depth about the historical context of the Bible.
Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (Marcus Borg) - more Borg, and while I don't agree with Borg's conclusions, this is an excellent resource for if you'd like a better understanding of the sociopolitical and religious climates of 1st century Jewish Palistine. Borg describes a historical Jesus whose teachings developed as a Jewish revitalization movement in response to two other similar movements: the Pharisees and Saducees. There is also invaluble discussion of the Synoptic problem and the Q document.
The Dark Side of Christian History (Helen Ellerbe) - If nothing else, this book is an excellent primer on solid, academic argumentation. I shouldn't say "if nothing else", because the book if filled with wonderful information. It particularly captures the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition.
The God Who Wasn't There - a DVD that digresses often, but gives a nice treatment to the argument that Jesus never existed. It is heavily tied to the work of Earl Doherty, whom I've not read, but his The Jesus Puzzle (and website) supposedly lay the foundation for this documentary.
Keep the faith... erm,
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4 comments:
Ah, David Mills. That guy could make Mother Theresa sound like a money-grubbing whore. I had a hard time with his writing because it struck me as overly arrogant, so I didn't get past the first chapter.
I do enjoy Ehrman, I have several of his books.
I'm curious as to what Earl Doherty asserts as being Paul's motivation for inventing a religion around a contemporary, yet fictional, character - I mean, it's not like he got a book deal. ...Or are you going to make me read Doherty's book?
Having not read the Doherty book, I'm not 100% familiar with his argument for Paul's motivations (I'm seen derivative works, as for Doherty's book, it's been ordered, so I'll get to it presently), but an off-the-cuff answer would be this: early Christianity was very similar to a number of other mystery cults going on at that time. If you assume that at least some of them are fabrications (as they can not surely all be true) then why were any of them started?
Mills didn't strike me as particularly arrogant, but I admit bias in that I agree with him. I don't think of myself as particularly arrogant either. To my knowledge, he never accused Mother Teresa of money-grubbing, but Penn and Teller did. I don't think they accused her of whoredom, though.
Perhaps, but the other religions revolved around mythical characters from the ancient past. Inventing Jesus so close to Paul's time and place would have added a pretty significant complication, since people could easily check on the facts of his writings. As you've mentioned, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I assume Doherty will address this concern in his book (as it seems pretty neccessary to me), and am interested to hear what he says. I'd put it on my reading list, but at the rate I'm going, I wouldn't get to it until sometime after the rapture ;)
Not all of them did. There were a number of contemporary equivalents to Christianity that involved some sort of intercessor between man and god, and that intercessor took a number of forms from cult to cult to cult. Abby knows substantially more about this than I do (her undergrad is in archaeology), but I'm brushing up, so I should be able to elucidate at more length in the near future.
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