Lunar Eclipse

Hubby announced that we are having a lunar eclipse tomorrow morning.  Rather than fall down to venerate him for having divine knowledge, I asked how he knew that.  It was published in the newspaper.

Being able to predict an event such as a lunar or solar eclipse used to put you into the Priest category in many cultures.  Of course, there are a few cultures where you would have been said to be consorting with the Dark Forces like Satan so there would be some potential for a bad outcome for the Prophet involved in the prediction.

Being an exChristian, I cannot help but think about how the stories in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke stated that the skies grew dark as Jesus was dying on the cross.

Wiki says:  Jesus' crucifixion took place around Passover, the middle of the lunar month and the time of a full moon. Solar eclipses naturally take place only at the time of the new moon. For this reason, medieval commentators viewed the darkness as a miraculous event rather than a natural one. Humphreys' and Waddington's reconstruction of the Jewish calendar, associating the crucifixion with a lunar eclipse rather than a solar eclipse, has been used to infer the date of the crucifixion.^[45]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_darkness_and_eclipse

Well, throw in the walking dead and the curtain being torn in the Jewish temple along with earthquakes, well, I think someone would have written something about this at the time that these events allegedly occurred.  Although there were many writers of that area and time frame, not one of them mentions these events.  As is common with the Gospels, Mark had a fairly simple account and Matthew and Luke have additional fluffery to make the Jesus story even bigger and better.

Although there may have been a Jewish man that was killed, we have no evidence for the protagonist Jesus nor do we have any words written about Jesus during his lifetime or immediately afterwards.  Was there a man named Jesus.  I honestly don't think so but even if there was there is no evidence what-so-ever that there was the Son of God living on earth.

No Christ, No Christianity

I still remember the moment that I became an exChristian.  I read this article onInfidels.org

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/marshall_gauvin/did_jesus_really_live.html

As far as I am aware the information is still pretty accurate.  There is some talk of Nazareth existing in Jesus time but.... I am not convinced.

Anyway, I read this article after a lot of research on hell, universalism, Jesus/Yeshua/Joshua, Calvanism/Armenianism, various denominations, characteristics of cults, how even many Christians don't believe that Jesus said most of what is alleged to have said in the New Testament, etc., etc..  All of that time going on the premise that Christianity must be real on some level.

I finished that article and I sat there stunned.  The Jesus of the Bible never existed.  That guy that did miracles and was the son of god never existed.  No Christ, no fulfillment of the Old Testament, no actual proof from history even thought there were 42 writers of the era and area of Jesus, no writings by Jesus, nothing.  There is no evidence for the Jesus of the Bible.  That guy never existed.

It kind of washed over me.  All this effort to figure out what to believe, all this time spent, all the studying and researching, trying to figure out what god wanted.  And there never was a Christ who was god who was crucified.  At that moment, I was an exChristian.  No Christ, no Christianity.

Was there some idiot running around saying he would return in a cloud.  I don't care.  There never was a Jesus Christ.

It took me awhile longer to decide that I am an atheist.

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Notable Quotable

This tidbit really struck me today.  I have read this essay before and this is the essay that was the final nail in the coffin of my disbelief but today, I was amazed by this.

Did Jesus Christ Really Live? (ca. 1922)  by Marshall J. Gauvin
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/marshall_gauvin/did_jesus_really_live.html
The full article can be found at the link above.


On the theory that Christ was crucified, how shall we explain the fact that during the first eight centuries of the evolution of Christianity, Christian art represented a lamb, and not a man, as suffering on the cross for the salvation of the world? Neither the paintings in the Catacombs nor the sculptures on Christian tombs pictured a human figure on the cross. Everywhere a lamb was shown as the Christian symbol--a lamb carrying a cross, a lamb at the foot of a cross, a lamb on a cross. Some figures showed the lamb with a human head, shoulders and arms, holding a cross in his hands--the lamb of God in process of assuming the human form--the crucifixion myth becoming realistic. At the close of the eighth century, Pope Hadrian I, confirming the decree of the sixth Synod of Constantinople, commanded that thereafter the figure of a man should take the place of a lamb on the cross. It took Christianity eight hundred years to develop the symbol of its suffering Savior. For eight hundred years, the Christ on the cross was a lamb. But if Christ was actually crucified, why was his place on the cross so long usurped by a lamb? In the light of history and reason, and in view of a lamb on the cross, why should we believe in the Crucifixion?


We once again see the evolution of the Christ story.  For the first 800 years of Christianity, Christ was not depicted on the cross.  A lamb was depicted.  A very human decree by a Pope changed history and the views on Christ.  With the stroke of a pen the Christ story took on whole dimensions of new meaning.  


Now we could talk of the torture of Jesus before he died.  His fully human, fully God status.  His vile treatment at the hands of the Jews.  [As if God wasn't fully responsible.  How Christians have loved to hate the Jews for killing Jesus, who was also a Jew, in these tales from the pages of the Bible.]  No longer was a lamb sacrificed to the Heavenly Father.  Now it was His own Son, His own flesh and blood, reviled, tortured, whipped and brutally hung on a cross.  The drama of the story is complete. An amazing tale of a demi-god. 


Think about how crazy this story is.  That God sacrificed Himself to save all of us from Himself, when He could have just issued a decree saying:  There, there my children, if you see what you have done wrong and truly repent and try very hard to do better in the future, then I forgive you." The whole story of Jesus is cobbled together by one power monger after another that want very much to have a say in what each of us believes about God.  For his own benefit.

Notable Quotable

Hector Avalos in The End of Biblical Studies writes of Hermann Samuel Reimarus [1694-1768] who is often credited with producing the first modern critical enquiry into the “historical Jesus.”  Avalos quotes Reimarus on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection:

    Now, if all the apostles who, of course, had seen and heard Jesus’ earlier miracles…were still skeptical and doubtful about such an important event, how much less should we be reproached today for being doubtful and skeptical since we cannot experience all the things with our own senses but must accept it seventeen hundred years later from the reports of a few witnesses?

Albert Schweitzer is quoted:

    There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus…”

Avalos summarizes thus:

The quest for the historical Jesus is an abject failure.  After hundreds of years and probably millions of person-hours, reconstructions of Jesus are no better than the one of Reimarus in the eighteenth century.  Reimarus had nearly exhausted the critical search for any historicity, and he found mostly a myth.  … Further progress is futile because we simply don’t have any preserved accounts of Jesus from his time or from any proven eyewitnesses.”

Can God blame us if we search for any historical evidence of Jesus and come up empty handed?  Is there any fairness to state that we will all be tortured in a burning hell forever and ever and ever when God has not even given the proper tools for belief?  There is no eyewitness account to be found of Jesus. The gospels are in not eyewitness accounts.

 Even Christian Biblical scholars admit that the vast majority of what Jesus is alleged to have said in the New Testament, those letters in red that you see in your Bible, could not, or would not, have been spoken by their Jesus.  The vast number of additions and omissions in the New Testament are astounding.  It all strikes me as so not inspired by all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful God