Nativity and Thanksgiving

I found a little booklet of Christian Christmas gift idea laying on a table. I think it’s kind of funny, that people make so much money off of religious paraphernalia. If I recall, Jesus had something of a problem with that.

But what I found absolutely hysterical is a book called Why a Manger? It’s description reads, “Drawing from their meticulous research, authors Bodie and Brock Thoene tell the story of the nativity using historical truth to help readers see Christmas in a whole new light.”

Their research must not have been too meticulous, since the contradictions in the Gospels themselves are pretty damning evidence against the story, the total lack of historical corroboration for any of the claims of Matthew’s narrative is just icing on the cake (Matthew’s is the one traditionally told, Luke’s is almost entirely different).

If you’re curious, the good folks over at Debunking Christianity have a good write-up of the evidence against the traditional narrative.

The ridiculous things that people can convince themselves of will never cease to amaze me.

Speaking of traditional narratives, I went to my six-year-old sister’s Thanksgiving “play” today, and part of it was a telling of the Thanksgiving story. What surprised me was how accurate the thing actually is (at least based on my understanding of it, which is from mostly-reliable sources). It really does make a good story.

It’s just too bad that the first relationship between natives and colonists didn’t set the tone for the next three hundred years.

Faith Does Need Proof

I'm currently reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith. He has a lot of good points, but one I'd like to discuss here is that all beliefs require some form of proof, or at least people desire proof for their beliefs. Most people seem to think that, in the words of Douglas Adams, “Proof denies faith.” But I think it’s fairly obvious that “faith demands proof.”

Don’t believe me? Take apologetics. If faith doesn’t need proof, then why have thousands of people throughout history felt the need to defend their faith with evidence? Why is it that when you ask the faithful for proof, they give you an answer? If faith didn’t need proof, then the answer would be “our faith is proof enough”, but that’s very rarely heard.

Then there’s the science-deniers. If faith needs no evidence, and evidence is irrelevant to faith, why spend so much energy attempting to refute scientific claims? Why spend so much time insisting that science and archaeology “prove” the Bible? They shouldn’t need to, because their faith is worth more than all the evidence in the world.

But it isn’t, and people know it. The human mind craves rationality. When we believe something, it has to have some rational basis. And when we get information that goes against our beliefs, we have to rationalize it somehow, whether we utterly dismissing it, or change our beliefs (see this article).

Which means, of course, that beliefs don’t survive unless we ground them in reality, even if that reality is distorted. Which is why we have apologetics, and why Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” is totally wrong; science and religion cannot survive together as long as they both make claims about how the world is.

The simple fact is that a belief, any belief, needs some kind of rational basis; that faith needs proof. Which is why the religious fear science so much. Science is capable of finding the real truths in the universe, religion is a muddle of ignorance, fear, and bigotry that we’d be better off without. It’s only a matter of time before religion is relegated to the history books, and I hope I’ll live to see it.