Awesomelyglorious wrote:
ChrisVulcan wrote:
In my experience, people who are drawn to modern-day faith healers or televangelists tend to be have fragile personalities. For instance, my aunt, who was bipolar and emotionally delicate, was a big fan of Benny Hinn. People doing hard physical labor in Roman Judea were generally not your fragile type.
And you say this with all of the background of a historian, yes? The people in Judea were of course going to have some degree of fragility, they were divided, they were occupied by a foreign power who disagreed with them, and frankly, it is hard that there was no "fragility" given that Jesus wasn't the only Messiah of the day. This isn't to say "there were multiple messiahs conglomerated into one", but rather this is to say "look, these non-fragile people are already engaging in the 'fragile' cultic behavior". So... y'know, I just don't find this credible.
Even further, let's even do comparison:
Which seems more likely, the extremely absurd case where a perfect God creates a world that evolved, rather than one that actually was intelligently designed. That He creates a world FILLED with all sorts of evils. And that he then incarnated himself and died on a cross, which by many Christian theologies, is to save us from his judgement....
OR
That these Judean fisherman were more emotionally fragile than you guessed? After all, they also were more superstitious than us moderns, as people who are not that fragile still end up thinking all sorts of miracles occur in those less educated parts of the world.
I am going to have to side with option 2. It preserves a LOT more of our intuitions. Even further, there are better attested claims of "spiritual forces" than the Christian text ANYWAY, so if I reject most of those, including modern miracle claims coming from various religions, why should I accept Christianity? Why should YOU accept Christianity given that you can't accept many of the miracle claims floating about from so many different groups?
Quote:
Another thing, people like Benny Hinn will almpost only "heal" people who are not obviously disabled (people with diabetes, for example). Jesus, on the other hand, healed people with obvious and grotesque diseases, like leprosy.
We don't have original records, so we don't know what Jesus really did or really didn't do. A few embellishments and we end up having grotesque and obvious diseases healed.
You know what, okay. I'm about to do something that I almost never do: I'm admitting that I've set up a weak argument. Forget fragility. Here's a better argument.
I'll concede: if Benny Hinn hopped in a time machine and traveled back to ancient Judea and tried to gain a following, he could do so. So could any faith healer. The question is: why has Jesus' following lasted so long. Most Messiah-type figures will be popular while they are living, then they will die, and gradually the following that they gained while they were alive will dissipate.
What made Jesus unique was this. Firstly, his followers saw him crucified. All four gospels record that people were there while Jesus was crucified (three or four women). Do you know how crucifixion actually kills someone? It's disgusting. I had to sit through a documentary on crucifixion for Easter once when I was in middle school and I blocked out most of it. It isn't blood loss or thirst or anything that you might expect. The person would die of suffocation. Because of the way the victim is positioned on a cross, they have to work to lift themselves up high enough to take each breath. Eventually they get so tired that they can't breath any longer. If someone was taking a particularly long time to die, a Roman guard would break one of their legs so they would die faster.
Bottom line, he was bloody deceased. When he died, the disciples were reduced to a huddle of scared kids. They were afraid that the Romans would come after them. All eleven remaining apostles (plus the women who visited the tomb afterwards) saw Jesus alive and well after he was buried.
There are two psychiatric explanations for what could have happened. One is Shared Psychotic Disorder, (Folie a deux) which is where one person, during a psychotic episode, imposes a delusional belief on the other. For instance, a 34-year-old couple named Margaret and Michael both had similar persecutory delusions, which involved people getting into their home, spreading fluff and dust and wearing out their shoes. I can't find a case of Shared Psychotic Disorder that involved more than a handful of people.
The other possible condition would be mass hysteria, where more than one person shares the same hysterical symptoms. The most extreme case I can find occurred in 2009 in Fort Worth, Texas. 34 people were sent to the hospital after they complained of symptoms when they mistakenly believed that they had been victims of carbon monoxide poinsoning. Mass hysteria often occurs with numerous people reporting the same of similar physical symptoms, or with people reporting similar events (as was the case with the Salem witch trials, for instance). However, mass hysteria can't produce something as vivid and complex as seeing someone
you know to be dead, standing there in front of you.
So either you're dealing with mass hallucination on a scale never seen before in history, or you're dealing with the real thing.
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Well, I was on my way to this gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled when I suddenly thought, "Gosh, the Third Reich's a bit rubbish. I think I'll kill the Fuhrer." Who's with me?
Watch Doctor Who!
11 Nov 2010, 11:44 am
