Christopher Hitchens on Whether God is Loving

This is an excerpt from a panel discussion hosted by The Christian Book Expo of 2009. This is a brief exchange between Hitchens and Pastor Denison on free will and the problem of evil. 

 

You can't prove God doesn't exist

From Iron Chariots Wiki

It is not uncommon to hear statements like, "You can't prove God doesn't exist," from apologists when they are challenged to support the claim that God exists. Such statements are an attempt to shift the burden of proof, a kind of logical fallacy.

Statements like this — which is a special case of the more general claim, "You can't prove a negative" — are based on the premise that belief in God is justified until sufficient evidence is presented to refute such existence. While this response may be considered sound under a world view which accepts the premise, this is simply a form of compartmentalization. If we were to apply that premise to all claims, we'd be unable to develop any useful picture of reality, since every claim would then have to be accepted as true (until it is disproved — a burden which is especially difficult when dealing with supernatural claims).

To put it more bluntly, no sane human being would seriously claim that because we have not disproved the existence of leprechauns or unicorns, they must therefore exist (or must be assumed to exist).

More tellingly, though, apologists typically only apply this premise to questions that address their particular religion — and nothing else. The same Christian, for example, who argues, "You can't prove God doesn't exist," would almost certainly reject such an attempt to shift the burden of proof if it was attempted by, say, a Hindu: "You can't prove Vishnu doesn't exist!" This compartmentalization is a form of special pleading.

A somewhat famous counter-argument was posed by Bertrand Russell when he said the following:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

Christian Caller: Evidence For Biblical Miracles - The Atheist Experience #609

Evidence For Biblical Miracles (Christian Caller, Part 1). 

This is a clip from The Atheist Experience #609, "Guerilla TV (from the couch): Our first live TV show without a TV studio", with Matt Dillahunty and Martin Wagner: http://blip.tv/file/2249090

The Resurrection Hoax

The Resurrection Hoax:

By Abdullah Kareem

 

 

The resurrection of Jesus is a hoax because Mark, the earliest gospel, never contained the story. The “resurrection” passages were later added to Mark, and his gospel was changed by Matthew and Luke, the Gospel writers are anonymous. It was necessary for Matthew and Luke to change Mark according to their own understanding, they also relied upon the Q source. Regarding the Gospel of John, it’s completely different and draws upon ambiguous sources. The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament are Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both of these Greek manuscripts have no ending for Mark!

Mark is the first gospel to be written:



A central working hypothesis of this book and one of the most widely held findings in modem New Testament study is that Mark was the first canonical Gospel to be composed and that the authors of Matthew and Luke (and possibly John) used Mark's Gospel as a written source. (Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions, p. 23)



Mark was the first writer to record the crucifixion, yet he was NOT an eye-witness!


“The author of Mark, the earliest of the narrative gospels, was not an eyewitness: he is reporting information conveyed to him by a third person or persons, who themselves were quite possible not eye-witnesses” (Robert Walter Funk, The Jesus Seminar: The Acts of Jesus, p. 4)


Here is what Christian scholar Mack Burton says:


“There is no reference to Jesus’ death as a crucifixion in the pre-Markan Jesus material” (Who Wrote the New Testament? p. 87)


This means the Gospel writers fabricated the resurrection story. The legend of Jesus’ “resurrection” developed over a period of time. This explains why Paul, the earliest Christian writer, never records the Gospel version. Paul only says Jesus was “crucified for the sins of mankind” and he “rose from the dead”, which does not explain anything.


Paul asserts that Jesus was crucified, yet he fails to mention any details which would later be recorded in the gospels.


We must keep in mind that Paul knew nothing of an event called the ascension that was separate or different from Jesus' resurrection. Paul's writings contain no hint of the two-stage process that would develop later, where resurrection brought Jesus from the grave back to life and ascension then took Jesus from earth to heaven. Paul's proclamation was that God had raised Jesus into God's very life. That was Easter for Paul. For Paul there were no empty tombs, no disappearance from the grave of the physical body, no physical resurrection, no physical appearances of a Christ who would eat fish, offer his wounds for inspection, or rise physically into the sky after an appropriate length of time. None of these ideas can be found in reading Paul. For Paul the body of Jesus who died was perishable, weak, physical. The Jesus who was raised was clothed by the raising God with a body fit for God's kingdom. It was imperishable, glorified, and spiritual. (John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality, p. 241)


The most striking feature of the early documents is that they do not set Jesus’ life in a specific historical situation. There is no Galilean ministry, and there are no parables, no miracles, no Passion in Jerusalem, no indication of time, place of attendant circumstances at all. The words Calvary, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Galilee never appear in the early epistles, and the word Jerusalem is never used there in connection with Jesus (Doherty, pp. 68, 73). Instead, Jesus figures as a basically supernatural personage who took the “likeness” of man, “emptied” then of his supernatural powers Phil 2:7. (G.A. Wells, Can We Trust the New Testament? p. 3)


Paul’s account of Jesus’ resurrection contradicts the Gospels:


The first thing we need to force into our minds is that when Paul wrote these words, there were no such things as written Gospels. This means that the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection so familiar to us, as told by these Gospel writers, were by and large unknown to Paul and to Paul’s readers (Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, p. 48)


For Paul there were no empty tombs, no disappearance from the grave of the physical body, no physical resurrection, no physical appearances of a Christ who would eat fish, offer his wounds for inspection, or rise physically into the sky after an appropriate length of time. None of these ideas can be found in reading Paul. For Paul the body of Jesus who died was perishable, weak, physical. The Jesus who was raised was clothed by the raising God with a body fit for God's kingdom. It was imperishable, glorified, and spiritual. (ibid, p. 241)


What does this mean? The resurrection accounts in the four Gospels contradict the testimony of Paul. Hence, Paul contradicts the Gospels on a simple event which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian religion.


If Paul is the first writer, then he must be relaying the earliest tradition, yet the Gospels, written many decades later, record an entirely different story. This certainly proves that the resurrection was fabricated in the oral tradition, because there’s not a single reference to the resurrection by historians like Philo Judaeus, and the testimony of Josephus is wholly agreed to be a forgery.


Paul contradicts the Gospels:


'For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.' 1 Corinthians 15:3-9


There are several problems with this passage.


(1). There was no “third day” prophecy in the Old Testament. [1]
(2). There is no evidence that five-hundred people saw Jesus. [2]

(3). Paul says Jesus first appeared to Peter, yet the Gospels say Jesus first appeared to women! (Matt 28:1)

(4). Peter disbelieved that Jesus was alive (resurrected).

(5). Paul implies that Judas did not hang himself, he was still alive (contradicts Matt. 27:5).

(6). Paul describes the body of Jesus to be spiritual (1Cor 15:42). Yet the Gospels say Jesus was physical.


Mark does not have the resurrection:


All things considered, then, Mark does not begin his story of Jesus very satisfactorily. Indeed, within two or three decades of Mark's completion, there were at least two, and perhaps three, different writers (or Christian groups) who felt the need to produce an expanded and corrected version. Viewed from their perspective, the Gospel of Mark has some major shortcomings: It contains no birth narrative; it implies that Jesus, a repentant sinner, became the Son of God only at his baptism; it recounts no resurrection appearances; and it ends with the very unsatisfactory notion that the women who found the Empty Tomb were too afraid to speak to anyone about it. (Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions, p. 34)


Almost all contemporary New Testament textual critics have concluded that neither the longer or shorter endings were originally part of Mark’s Gospel, though the evidence of the early church fathers above shows that the longer ending had become accepted tradition. The United Bible Societies' 4th edition of the Greek New Testament (1993) rates the omission of verses 9-20 from the original Markan manuscript as "certain." For this reason, many modern Bibles decline to print the longer ending of Mark together with the rest of the gospel, but, because of its historical importance and prominence, it is often included as a footnote or an appendix alongside the shorter ending. [1]


The Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus do not record the resurrection:


Matthew 16:2 f. is omitted, Mark ends at 16:8, Luke 22:43 f., John 5:4 and the Pericope de adultera are omitted. The doxology of Romans comes after 16:23. Hebrews follow immediately after II Thessalonians. [2]


The ‘Longer Ending’ of Mark is preserved in the Byzantine texts, which are interpolated. The Anglican scholars Westcott and Hort discredited the Byzantine (KJV) text. Yet, the oldest Greek manuscripts do not have the longer ending. The Alexandrian (NIV) omits the longer ending (Aleph and B). The Anglican scholars Westcott and Hort attest the Byzantine text was conflated in the 4th century.


There are no Byzantine manuscripts before the fourth century when Lucian of Syria conflated the various readings and produced what became the Byzantine or Traditional Text. We know this is true because we have no Byzantine readings before the middle of the fourth century, but we do have Alexandrian and Western readings. Therefore, any second century reading which supports the third or fourth century readings of the Alexandrian line are considered important and are offered as proof that these textual lines are more original than the Byzantine line. However, if a reading is found in these very same manuscripts which agrees with the fourth century Byzantine reading, it is considered unimportant and unconsequential. [1]


In Antioch the early form was polished stylistically, edited ecclesiastically, and expanded devotionally. This was the origin of what is called the Koine text, later to become the Byzantine Imperial text. Forth century tradition called it the text of Lucian. [2]


Hort characterized the Byzantine text as 'late, conflated, heavily edited and revised', whereas Hort extolled the Alexandrian text as 'pure, primitive, carefully corrected, and neutral’.


The Gospels are clear that no one witnessed Jesus’ resurrection. It was seen by NO ONE.


Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. (Mark 16:14)


It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not. (Luke 24:10-11)


The Greek and Roman historians


Very few Christians know that Gentile historians NEVER mentioned the resurrection of Jesus. The Jewish philosopher Philo (50 CE) absolutely makes no reference to Jesus’ crucifixion. The Christians are embarrassed that Philo lived during Jesus’ lifetime and never mentioned his resurrection.


After the departure of Jesus, his teachings spread to North Africa and Egypt, but he was not popular or widely known.


The following writers do not mention Jesus’ resurrection:

Philo-Judaeus
Arrian
Appian
Theon of Smyrna
Lucanus
Aulus Gellius
Seneca
Plutarch
Apollonius
Epictetus
Silius Italicus
Ptolemy

We challenge Christians to prove his resurrection. None of these writers mentioned Jesus’ resurrection.