03.23.08
Eastern musings
Since it’s easter it is worth reiterating what I posted last easter (or the year before), noting that Anthony Flew is under severe slippage on this: Flew Impressed by Evidence for Resurrection: Resurrection: Fact or Fantasy.
Scienceblogs speaks:
Something to think about on Easter Sunday…, and
This day in history
This is Easter, the day Christians everywhere set aside to celebrate the day they were hoaxed by a gang of Middle Eastern charlatans into believing a local mystic rose from the dead.
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Here’s an earlier post on a critical analysis: The Empty Tomb.
It is a sad question: neither Christians nor secularists can arrive at any answers. I can understand Myers’ impatience and anger.
The nature of the historical evidence, and the subsequent mythologization, has so confused the issue that it is impossible to quite sort out what happened on any level.
But, at least in principle, it is not hard to see what’s going on. Secularists are right to baulk at the myths of physical resurrection. But, Christians to the contrary, is that the point?
Read the following article at the link, here’s a snippet: Note how the idea of an afterlife, the myths of such, and the idea of resurrection are not always conceptually distinguished.. There’s probably part of the answer right there.
Despite ‘New Atheists,’ 82% in U.S. Think There’s An AfterlifeBy Cary McMullen
LEDGER RELIGION EDITOR
Life after death is a comforting belief for many people. Ken Schmidt found comfort in giving it up. “It was enlightenment. I was relieved,” said Schmidt, 69, of Lakeland, who was raised in the Catholic Church. “I knew for the first time I was not going to hell. Catholics live in fear of hell.
Pam Mutz in the studio of The Leger in Lakeland, Fl. March 19, 2008. Easyet match by Cary. David Mills/The Ledger
I’m not going to rise from the dead, I’m going to cease to exist. It will be like before I was born.”Schmidt’s is a minority point of view. According to recent polls, about 82 percent of Americans believe in some kind of afterlife, and today, Easter Day, Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which they say is the guarantee of their own resurrection and life after death.
It is a belief that is both crucial and vulnerable.The Apostle Paul, responding to skepticism among early Christians, wrote, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”
Over the centuries, Christians have fended off repeated challenges to their beliefs. In the 19th century, philosopher Karl Marx famously called religion “the opium of the people,” and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, saw religion as “infantile” and a projection of human wishes.
In recent years, an outspoken cadre of atheist writers and scholars have aggressively challenged religious faith of all kinds, and resurrection is among the beliefs they have discounted and even ridiculed. They have been dubbed “the new atheists,” and they include SamHarris (”The End of Faith”), biologist Richard Dawkins (”The God Delusion”) and journalist Christopher Hitchens (”God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”).
And skepticism may be growing. A recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that about 16 percent of American adults have no particular religious belief, including about 4 percent who identify themselves as atheists or agnostics. A 2007 Pew survey showed20 percent of adults ages 18 to 25 have no religious affiliation, almost double the percentage in 1986.
The new atheism has prompted Christian scholars, pastors and lay persons to mount new and vigorous defenses of their doctrines, including belief in the resurrection, leading to a lively public debate about the nature of God, humanity and the world. etc, etc….
Now read this bit about Schopenhauer:
Schopenhauer on death
The last clue is to realize what is a frequent occurrence in certain ashrams and the environment of certain gurus, spiritual teachers, or others. A sudden sense of contact across space happens over and over again, whatever the merits of the case.
We can see what happened (and especially so if we consider the account of St. Paul): a sense of shock and terror, the sudden sense of something coming across space, amplified by the powerful emotions of the moment, first the horror of losing a beloved figure, then a sudden sense of contact, this told and retold by very simple people who had no prior experience of such things, or the concepts to understand them. The reality and the developing myth rapidly diverge.
Consider the perspective of Schopenhauer. You can figure the whole thing out from that, as long as you respect the limits of metaphysics, and never take intuitions here as knowledge. On that basis the question clarifies, not to a certainty, but a rough perspective of what was possibly the case, one that explains the facts of the case as does no other account.