Recently, the ten most memorable moments of British TV were voted on, and Colin Firth coming out of the lake in Pride and Prejudice won most memorable. To commemorate, a huge statue of Colin Firth has been sculpted and has apparently been making the rounds to various lakes in Britain.
But what’s really interesting about the scene this statue depicts is that it never actually happened. Check out the following clip to see Firth talking about it:
http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/colin-firth-never-came-out-of-the-water/2771254
And here’s a clip from the film to prove it:
This mini-series ran in 1995, and now 20 years later, people have mis-remembered a scene from it to such a degree that they’ve voted it the most memorable scene in British television history. Aside from it being an interesting anecdote, why do I bother to bring it up here? Because apologists often tell us that the period of time between Jesus’ death and the first Christian writings (at least 20 years) is not long enough for legends to develop; therefore, Paul’s epistles and the gospels must be recording actual events. Yet in this day of photographic evidence, we have an example of how easily the actual facts can be embellished.
This scene was created simply through the evolution of human memory. No one stood to gain anything by making this up. By the same token, apologists are wrong when they claim that if the gospel accounts aren’t accurate, then they must have been developed by a conspiracy. There’s no reason to believe that at all. Stories change as they pass from one person to another, and 20+ years is an awful lot of time for the telephone game to take its toll.
Finding Truth 
I may barf.
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Yeah, but unlike most theists, your baying approaches honesty.
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I can see where he’s going with this, guys – he has some cherry-picked historians in his hip pocket, and he keeps dangling the word out there before you as bait, hoping you’ll bite – literally a fisher of men.
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Howie, I’d have to say the Captain is playing with at least a 51-card deck, and that’s not bad, it could be SO much worse!
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Thanks, Arch. Your insight that my deck has but 51 cards finally explains why it’s so hard for me to win at Solitaire!
I address this to all of you when I say that I ‘get it’. It makes sense that you’re understandably wary of “wily Christians” who are bent on hoodwinking you into believing in God — or in some sort of god. That really isn’t my intent. My intent is to make clear what I mean when I say that I believe in God and give you the opportunity to challenge my beliefs. The “challenges” that you’ve applied so far haven’t been challenges to what I believe. The arguments you guys make only cause me to shrug my shoulders and say, “whatever.”
From that I conclude that I haven’t done an adequate job in conveying what I mean when I say that I believe in God.
Let me offer this — it might not get me any closer to success than my other attempts have gotten me, but I’ll give it a try anyway…
Take a peek at Matthew 5, 45. Let me begin by stating clearly that I’m not asserting that the verse has authority simply because it appears in the Bible, nor am I assuming that the manuscripts we possess are accurate renderings of what the gospel writer actually wrote. I’m not saying that our translations from the Greek are reliable. I’m not insisting that Jesus actually said those things, or denying that someone might have said the very same thing before Jesus said it. I’m perfectly fine with the idea that people have said it better than the way Jesus is depicted as saying it. None of those things matter to me, so if you try to engage me on any of those points I won’t have a whole lot of interest in promoting one side of the argument or the other.
All that matters to me is that we have the IDEA of a god who loves Indiscriminately available to us here and now and that we can have a conversation about it.
I’m interested in having that particular discussion about that particular verse because it is bluntly dichotomous to what most ‘believers’ believe. It’s even dichotomous to what ‘non-believers’ believe.
If you want to understand what I believe, understand that particular passage. Look over the entire section (Matt 5, 43-48) and think about it. I’m not asking you to believe it, I simply want to get us thinking about what the ramifications of that idea would be. In what ways would people behave differently if they put that teaching into practice?
If I understand the idea correctly — and I most certainly believe that I DO understand the idea correctly — the whole idea of rewarding ‘good’ behavior and punishing ‘bad’ behavior is antithetical to the God Jesus preached about and the God I believe in.
I point this out because most people who describe themselves as ‘Christian’ believe that good behavior IS rewarded and bad behavior IS punished. In fact, that’s pretty much the core of what they believe and I’m here to insist that the idea itself is a defiant attack on the truth.
I recently read a blog post written by an atheist who differentiated her beliefs from “Christian beliefs” by stating that she doesn’t believe that there’s someone ‘watching over us’ nor does she believe in the afterlife.
I have nothing to offer to any debate about either of those two points. I don’t even know where I STAND on those issues. Is there a conscious mind observing our behavior? You got me beat! I will say, however, that I don’t believe that there’s a conscious mind JUDGING our behavior. As far an an afterlife goes, all I have to say is that I’m convinced that any time I spend speculating about the hereafter is time better spent on attending to the life I’m actually living now.
What interests me about the ‘mind watching over us’ or the ‘afterlife’ isn’t whether the ideas are true or not. The thing that interests me is why people would be so anxious to advance those particular ideas. My take is that these ideas are cherished by people who desperately need to believe that good behavior is rewarded (their good behavior in particular) and that bad behavior is punished. Obviously, even a cursory examination of ‘reality’ refutes that belief so you need to posit an omniscient judge and a final disposition of the soul in order to prop the notion up.
It’s not simply that I don’t BELIEVE that good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished, I go much further and say that the belief itself is destructive — fundamentally destructive, and in fundamental opposition to the passage I’m highlighting from the ‘Sermon on the Mount’.
The issue of WHETHER God exists is far less important to me than the issue of WHETHER the notion of rewards to the good and punishments to the bad is truthful or sound. Truly, I don’t have much to say about God’s existence — only about God’s nature.
Is any of this the least bit enlightening?
Paul
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Oh yes, no doubt Arch, and I’ve mentioned that to him elsewhere.
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And THAT is exactly why I classify you as being the most honest theist I’ve ever known. You’re just a tad short of agnostic, but I won’t hold that against you —
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Howie – see “ANaiveThinker” on Vi’s and Matt’s and Neuro’s blogs.
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Yeah I’ve read Brandon’s (ANaiveThinker’s) comments on Matt’s and Neuro’s blogs Arch and I understand what you are saying. Brandon’s had very kind convos with me so far and I’ve enjoyed them. Social dynamics are a complicated thing. Things go south in some cases but not in others depending on who’s involved and how much coffee, sleep or lack of food people have had.
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Cap’n,
I think I see what you’re saying.
I agree with this completely. I’ve mentioned several times before that I’m a huge fan of Marcus Aurelius’s quote:
I even like Bill and Ted’s simpler rendition: “Be excellent to each other.”
Is this similar to what you’re saying? If I understand correctly, you’re saying that the idea of a God that loves unconditionally opens us up to treating one another with real love and compassion. I tend to see it more like Aurelius laid it out, but regardless of the approach, your view and his view seem to land us in the same place. I can get behind that — the rest just seems to be semantics.
Am I understanding correctly? Thanks as always for your comments!
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Hey Paul – I’m very glad you made the extra effort for people like me who sometimes are too dense that they do need others to spell out their views more clearly. If we were in person I’d give you a tap on the shoulder and say “now that wasn’t so bad was it?”
I loved what you said in this last comment (at 11:22pm). I love so many parts of the sermon on the mount. I think our world would be a much more wonderful place to live in if all of us put these practical ideas you reference here into practice. Maybe the conversations you have here don’t get much further than you want them to because we don’t have much to really disagree about. I want to also hi-light something you said which I like quite a bit:
I’d like to also offer a few other thoughts I have:
– Part of why people like Nate and I run our blogs is because we know a lot of people who want to give us a hard time for not believing in supernatural things like minds watching over us or afterlife (and we get it from conservatives, moderates, and even liberals sometimes). We also know a lot of conservative Christians who give us an extra hard time with this stuff. So this causes us to feel that it is worth our while to express what we believe and don’t believe and try our best to make that clear. I myself blog for several reasons but one of them is to try and help others understand the mind of atheists like myself with the hope that it will bring some better understanding and better relations. So when you read Nate’s blog posts it may help to keep in mind that he is sometimes responding to conservative ideas and pressure that are shoved down his throat perhaps 24/7 (ok, exaggeration, I couldn’t resist).
– I’d like you to reply to my comment with what you think about what I’ve said here. You seem to like ignoring direct questions or inquiries for clarification sometimes. Please don’t get me wrong I’m totally cool with that – maybe you are busy or maybe you don’t think we are sincere, or maybe you don’t want to engage in useless talk, or maybe whatever – it’s cool. But I would like to gently suggest that if you do that you may be part of the cause for why you get so frustrated with being misunderstood.
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“How are you going to choose which is which – by some dodgy analogy or by checking what historians say?”
Sometimes unkleE, you have to set aside the scoreboard and use good old common sense. Do you base everything you believe in by the general concensus of other people ?
In this case, Nate’s story like so many I have read and heard of over the years makes sense to me . I , with my own eyes and intellect can see where this same thing could have happened with the story of Jesus. It’s not a far stretch, unkleE.
You can continue to believe that Jesus was divine, but if you want to be honest, you would have to admit the analogy Nate gave could have happened with the Jesus story. You don’t have to warp your thinking to believe this like Christians sometimes have to do with bible stories.
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Oh and Arch, I realize I didn’t directly respond to what you were getting at re ANaiveThinker. I try to make an effort to truly understand the perspectives of everyone I talk to while leaving the character judgments by the wayside. I realize this approach is idealistic and for sure doesn’t work for others, but it’s my way of keeping things positive. I think the only person online I have not been able to do this with so far is Silence of Mind.
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Ken, I like your question.
Does he tell that bread in his house is rotten based on consensus. I think sometimes this appeal to consensus is to refuse to think for oneself
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Unklee,
Nate’s analogies may not be precise and perfect, but they are meant to show that humans have a proclivity to remember things not quite so precisely and also have a proclivity to expand on stories as they are passed on. And you are right, ancient times were different from today, but not different in the sense that their histories were more trustworthy, rather the opposite. It was a time when practically everyone was superstitious, fact checking was nowhere near the standards of today, and people were less focused on accuracy of events and more focused on the ideals and values that were represented by the stories. Bart Ehrman in his resurrection debate with William Lane Craig even describes how he thought the stories progressed, and his description sounds awfully familiar to these examples (again there may be subtle differences). Ehrman may have been going off on a fringe expression of thought that goes against consensus in that debate, but my reading of Dale Allison’s “Resurrecting Jesus” gives me the same impression of that viewpoint. And Dale Allison was one of 2 people that Mike Licona (who is very conservative) mentioned as the most unbiased scholars in the field.
I’ve also read that the consensus of scholars in the field is that there is some legendary embellishment in the gospel stories especially surrounding the resurrection, but what there is no consensus about is how much embellishment occurred.
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As far as consensus goes, it’s my understanding that the general consensus says Jesus was likely a real person who was crucified by the Roman authorities. He was an itinerant preacher from Galilee who had some followers. The gospels were likely written by Greek Christians a couple of generations after Jesus died — not by the actual disciples whose names are attached.
Does anyone know of other points that the scholars are in general agreement over?
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Nate-
Thought I’d drop a line to let you know I’m still around (I knew you were wondering)!
I think it’s good for Christians, especially those who believe and push that our beliefs can be proved beyond doubt, to see things like this and think about what it really means. We worship a God who has chosen to reveal himself in the least, lost, broken, and outcast of the world. We should be careful to claim too much confidence in undeniable proof of anything if this is the God we truly believe exists, and this is how he reveals himself. For whatever reason, He has chosen not to make his existence undeniable. I wish that wasn’t the case, but even Scripture makes the case that this is how God has chosen to operate.
Thanks, as usual, for the post, Nate.
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And thank you for the comment, Josh. Always great to hear from you 🙂
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Naive may not even realize it, but despite his new-found relationship with Cheesus, he suffers from the biblical sin of Pride – but what do you expect, when his own god admits to being guilty of the biblical sin of Jealousy. A sincere worshiper would go off and quietly worship, but he chooses to come on these boards, not to convert anyone, he knows he can’t do that, but rather to show himself and possibly his Cheesus, how much more intelligent and clever he is, than we are. If he can manipulate one or more of us into moving from our position, he feels his day has been made.
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You always have a way with words Arch. 🙂
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Arch-
Not sure if that was meant for me, but I’m feeling that it was. Regardless, I freely admit that I do suffer from the sin of pride, as well as pretty much every other sin you or anyone could find in the Bible. I’m as guilty of them, if not moreso, than anyone I know. And, no, I’m not above manipulation, either :).
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Oh, Josh, they were talking about someone else! Don’t worry — I think everyone on here has a high opinion of you, whether we agree or not!
But kudos on taking the criticism so well, even though it wasn’t meant for you! 🙂
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Nice quote, Nan. I had a similar feeling after the tsunami that hit Myanmar in 2009 or 2010 — whenever it was… And also the big earthquake in Haiti. Considering these places were primarily populated by the “lost,” and how their lives were already living hells, in many respects, why would God allow so many to be wiped out in such ways? If anyone needed more time to find the “truth” surely it was them?
Just one of the many questions that plagued me at the time…
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I know the quote had little to nothing to do with the original topic of your posting, but from the comments of others throughout your blog, it just seemed appropriate.
The other thing I find interesting is that when things go the way a person wants or there’s a positive result, it’s all about thanking God. But there’s no mention of God when things turn out badly. Hmmmmm.
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