What is it like to live a life in fear of a despot god?
I don't know.
But you still see the problem, though. What claim can you make for special creation of anything that doesn't carry the danger of being explained as an outcome of natural processes, which in turn are then explained in terms of other natural processes? The logical conclusion is the god gets shrunk back to nothing and you become the vaguest of deists on the question of creation.
That's just not possible with Easter though. I mean, is it? Dead from Friday night to Sunday morning, and then not dead anymore?
I don't know Stuart. Maybe believing Easter is believing God of the gaps, but if Easter is possible at all without a miracle, maybe I need to rethink what a miracle is. Good question.
So what is your attitude to those who can give evidence-based answers that don't involve any god hypothesis?
That's not what people say about Easter. They say Easter didn't happen, they don't offer any alternative that would explain Him dying on Friday and then rising from the dead on Easter Sunday.
Well, I do admire your forthright declaration of that. You make christianity falsifiable, which is in its favour, but against that is the scientifically induced fact that humans don't walk again after execution, which is a scientific disproof of the easter myth. So you come down to the probability that one man in all history has survived a successful execution, and place that in the context of a belief system that denies all other claims by other religious groups that all their man-gods uniquely arose from death. How is the christian claim for their man-god any better than any other 'easter' story?
Numbers. There's no other major religion with such an important and crucial and vital and integral and essential resurrection claim. And then there are two-to-three billion Christians who all believe it. And then there's how Easter ripped right through the ancient world, growing the Church by leaps and bounds, and while it's not proof, it is in the realm of what I would expect if Easter is nonfiction. And the fact is, that's a lot of what I base my reasoning on, is, What if it's nonfiction? What would I expect? I would expect what has happened, in large part.
Another slight problem is that you still need quite a lot of mythology to link 'man rises from dead' to 'we are all saved from the anger of an invisible friend by that invisible friend'. Or do you think all of that is contained within the word easter?
Yes I do. I know you don't believe Easter, so you'll just have to imagine it being nonfiction. Once you've done that, perhaps you can see that of course all the rest of the Christian faith must also be nonfiction, and only trivially so, because if Easter is nonfiction, then the whole Christian faith is too, because the whole Christian faith stands upon Easter. That's paraphrasing what's in the Christian Bible. 1Co15:14KJV
I don't think the story itself is that interesting. It's more like the plot of a badly-written historical fiction.
I meant that, if Easter were fictional, how the Easter story would have come about is interesting. Who made it up? How did they convince so many people to endure torture and the death penalty, without ever recanting? How did they fool so many people so powerfully?
But the question of how people could behave like sheep on such a grand scale, I agree that's interesting. Do you think we would be having this discussion now if Constantine had not made christianity the religion of the Roman Empire?
I do. I get your point, but I do. Because, the reason he did that, was all part of the history of the Church that is in the realm of what I would expect if Easter is nonfiction. I would expect that the Church would grow and grow, in numbers and in power, and so she has.