Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 13 Jul 2014 3:27:28am
Nothing stated by Dr Dickson points to the existence of an individual child of a person called Mary and a universal supreme being, nor a person that could raise the dead, heal the sick or cause water to become wine, nor does it indicate a person that was crucified and ressurected 3 days later. All that we are being shown is that some people, after the fact, believed in the existence of a person with those qualities.

You have not proven to even a secondary level the existence of jesus, merely that people of a similar time in history believed that such a person existed.

Is that unfair scepticism? I do not think so. The people we are concerned with here were in desperate need of a messiah after (a) it was foretold and (b) they were under th heel of Roman occupation (that would destroy their holy city and sites in the course of that occupation). There was also a significant angst towards their orthodox religious orders that were complicit in that Roman occupation and Jesus clearly showed us a certain opinion of them.

There is simply insufficient contemporary evidence of Jesus for us to cross from the mere notion of him to state that he is an actual person. There is also far too little evidence for us to make the leap (of faith) to him being endowed with those characteristics that his believers ascribe to him.

Where does this take us? Well, nowhere. The only scholars that are seriously interested in Jesus' existence are christians. Atheists do not find any purpose in considering the fairy tales that christians bring forth. There are far better grounds for an argument about religion than musing on the possibilities of a being that we cannot examine in full.