What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (22 page)

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. [Hebrews 11:1]

 

I like the sentiment of this verse. Faith in the future, or in yourself, or in your friends, or in your country, are all fine because it’s an attitude you have based on experience. It’s a sense of trust and hope, and a source of strength and optimism. But it’s not proof of anything, and certainly not verification of a higher power that runs the universe. Gravity is an invisible force that governs the cosmos, too, but it took an apple clunking Newton’s head and some thoughtful number-crunching before it made sense to build a space program dependent upon it.

Waxing poetic about faith has its benefits. But it’s no substitute for sensory evidence or rational analysis when it comes to authenticating facts, which is what Paul is asking us to do. Faith is belief in the
absence
of evidence. When you fall back on faith, you give up the ability to distinguish fantasy from fact because you’re no longer looking for proof. Faith is not a higher standard than reason; it’s a lower one. It’s based on feelings, and even animals have those. Your cat
believes
she can catch that fish on the TV screen. Your dog has
faith
that, when you take him to the vet, he’ll come back with his balls. It ain’t always the case.

Paul would have us accept faith itself as a form of evidence. Belief in the absence of evidence now becomes evidence. This is how conspiracy theorists think. If there’s no evidence of an evil plot, that’s proof of the plot because the conspirators are
that
diabolically good. You can never disprove the conspiracy, which is what keeps it alive whether it’s true or not.

Some insist that Paul’s own conversion from persecutor to evangelist is proof of his claims, as if it confirmed anything beyond his susceptibility to mood swings. They’ll argue that knowledge also comes through revelation, or intuition, or authority. Empirical evidence alone won’t do.

Well, wisdom or creativity clearly involve more than scientific proofs. But if you’re establishing something as a
fact
, like a miracle or a god, you need more than faith. Facts require evidence gained through the eyes and ears. So does knowledge of the Bible for that matter; it’s not inborn. You can’t act as if sensory evidence is an excessive demand made by stubborn skeptics. That’s a classic dodge: If you can’t prove your point, insist that you don’t need to. Your
belief
is enough. Move the epistemological goalposts and equate your convictions with fact. Sorry, but this doesn’t lead to truth. It just leads to Fox News.

To rely on faith means to abandon your senses, literally, and lose the ability to distinguish reality from bullshit. If faith itself is proof, then all religions would be true because they’re all based on faith. If you think most of them aren’t true, then you’re forced to concede that faith is not reliable; it usually steers people wrong.

The Pagan Perspective

So where did the rest of the ancient world stand on all this Jesus stuff? Pagans have always gotten a bum rap from Judeo-Christian culture primarily because the word “pagan” refers to worshippers who weren’t Jewish or Christian. There was never a specific religion called paganism. It is a sweeping term that refers to anyone with spiritual beliefs not found in the Bible. It originally referred to rural folks who worshipped nature gods—trees and meadows, or even houses and doors. Some use the term more loosely to refer to any non-believing Greeks and Romans—which was about 90% of them.

Today’s popular image of their civilization is pretty unfair. We imagine the Greeks split their time between carving statues, gay orgies, and standing around asking, “Why is there air?” The Romans just conquered, crucified, bet on gladiators, and lounged around marble fountains being fed grapes. If the movies are right, they all spoke with British accents and had the moral sensibilities of Jabba the Hut.

In reality, what they did was invent western civilization. From roughly 600 B.C. to A.D. 450 the Greeks, and then the Romans, dominated the scene and reinvented the way people lived and thought. It was hardly a bed of roses; life could be harsh and unfair by our standards. But the world they created would be more familiar to you and me than anything going on in ancient Judea, and their cultural innovations would eventually liberate us from the baggage of theocracy and superstition.

Greco-Roman civilization was largely secular, but there was no shortage of cults and religions scattered across the Empire, ranging from Isis worship to Mithraism to belief in the Olympian deities. Like Jews and Christians, pagans worried that misfortune would strike if their gods were not honored.

The Romans may have been liberal about religious choice but they were sticklers for ceremony, especially those that reinforced the authority of the state. Much like the United States, with its Pledge of Allegiance and National Anthem, Rome had rituals to ensure that its vast and diverse population remained loyal to the unifying symbol of the emperor.

It was here that many Jews and Christians got themselves in trouble. They wouldn’t play ball, and snubbed even token recognitions of any authority but their own god. It was the equivalent of refusing to salute the flag or not standing for
The Star Spangled Banner
. They had every right to their opinion. But it made them unpopular and suspect. So, when hard times hit, they were easy to blame.

This didn’t make the Romans any worse about religious persecution than anyone else, however. In the Old Testament, any disaster that befell the Israelites was routinely blamed on their tolerance of other religions. In the Middle Ages, a lack of godliness was the default explanation for every malady from the bubonic plague to impotence. Even today, many evangelical pastors keep us entertained when they characterize a hurricane or a terrorist attack as the Lord’s vengeance against
Roe vs. Wade
or same-sex marriages. Interesting that they know the specific offenses that get God to blow his stack. And it’s always
those
offenses. It’s never war, torture, greed, or ads for Christmas gifts in October.

For most pagans, the new Jesus religion was just another among the many that people fell for. Sheep herders and village dwellers were easy marks for a magic act. In
Acts 14:8
, after Paul witnessed to the Greek city of Lystra, a crippled man got up and walked, and the locals shouted out, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!” Later, in
Acts 28
, on the island of Malta, Paul was bitten by a snake and, when he didn’t die, the crowds figured him for a god. It must have been a lot easier to launch a messianic following in those days.

Josephus wrote of “tricksters” who convinced crowds of their divine authority. People reported weeping statues and wise men performing miracle cures. During the Olympics of A.D. 165, a pious nitwit named Proteus set himself aflame to prove his belief in reincarnation. Lucian, a skeptic who knew him personally, decided to test popular gullibility by spreading the story that Proteus rose up to heaven as a vulture after his death. That rumor later came back to Lucian as a “fact.” In another instance, he wrote that someone stuck a puppet’s head onto a snake and promoted it as the god of healing. A petition even went out to rename the town where this happened in the god’s honor.

There’s one born every minute, and sometimes two or three.

Values Scorecard

So, how did the values of Hellenism actually stack up against the ideas enshrined by the Jews and Christians of the time? To hear the believers tell it, Western history is one long glorious conquest of biblical values over the godless debauchery of paganism. Without the one true God of the Bible, we’d all be groveling before chunks of marble, or fornicating in the streets, or tossing children into fireplaces like Yule logs. No Family Values, no democracy, no personal responsibility, and no god-fearing Republicans. Nothing but false deities, temple prostitutes having ritual sex, and man-boy love. (Okay, so maybe there’d be
some
Republicans.)

Fortunately, we escaped the soulless idolatry of paganism. We got a deity that established a patriarchal theocracy which kept slaves, practiced polygamy, sacrificed animals, and extinguished anyone who complained too much. Boy, did we luck out.

This was then followed by a new Gospel centered on a messiah who asked us to give up everything and follow him because he was going to change the world. But then he died, and now we have to wait for him to get back to us. That was two millennia ago and, in the centuries since, his followers have provided hope for the destitute and a nice code of conduct. Of course, they’ve also provided persecutions, inquisitions, crusades, book burnings, witch burnings, press censorship, religious intolerance, and no talk of democracy for a thousand years. But, hey, at least they didn’t have sex in church.

Morality without God

News flash: You don’t need religion to have morals or values. You certainly didn’t need Yahweh or Jesus. Hammurabi didn’t. Confucius didn’t. The Buddha didn’t. Babylon, Egypt, and Canaan all had codes of morality, justice, and personal behavior a thousand years before the Ten Commandments were committed to granite, and they weren’t all based on a belief in the supernatural.

Nor did the ancient Greeks have an all-powerful god to lean on. Instead, around 600 B.C., they started to produce generations of thinkers who established moral standards completely independent of religion—values most of us cherish today. Some of them were so appealing that Jews, Christians, and Muslims would later borrow them and then act as if they invented them. They didn’t.

The foundation stones of the modern West were not set down in the deserts of the Sinai or in the hills of Galilee. They were established around the blue Aegean, and half of everything we are today comes from a world of people who didn’t know Yahweh from a potato knish.

What’s more, biblical religion has never provided the changeless values it claims. Five centuries ago, slavery and religious intolerance were acceptable. Women’s equality and free speech were not. Monarchy was preferred to democracy. Where were all our Christian values then? And as for the theory that, without a belief in the biblical god there is nothing to restrain our darkest ambitions, the record shows that many of history’s darkest deeds were done on orders from that same biblical god. Belief in him didn’t stop these deeds. It some cases, it inspired them.

Of course, this is a hard notion to sell. One of the slickest tricks successful religions get away with is to take credit for every idea or event they consider to be good, and to blame everything bad on someone else. Churches are masters at this. If an earthquake hits South America and ten thousand die in the ruins, nobody blames God for the disaster—even if managing seismic events would seem to fit his job description. Yet, if an infant is found in the rubble without a scratch, everybody praises the Lord for “the miracle.” We do this same sort of thing with our values—we attribute them to our faith whether or not it was actually responsible for them.

Well, why don’t we look at the record and see where our most important cultural ideals originate? Let’s sum up the key values of Hellenism and place them side-by-side with those found in the Bible—which are supposedly the only thing that distinguishes you from somebody raised by wolves.

It’s clear that Christianity did popularize some good ideas. But it’s also clear that most of the values we’re willing to fight for today can be had without any reference to Scripture—democracy, free expression, religious tolerance, scientific inquiry, ethics, trial by jury, privacy rights, marriage, the rule of law, the rights of man. Sorry to burst the balloon but none of these “Judeo-Christian values” originated with the Bible. They all have independent roots in Greece, Rome, and earlier cultures.