If I had had doubts about the zombie Jesus sightings reported in the Bible when I was a teen, I don't remember. The question of whether he rose from the dead didn't really figure into my doubts about the validity of Christianity. If there was a God, Christianity might be valid. If there were no god, then it didn't matter what the Bible said, even if some supernatural-seeming resurrection did indeed happen.
But then Elvis died. Or maybe he didn't. I was a fan but not a rabid fan. I had other things on my mind, like boys I knew in person. But some fans just couldn't accept his ignoble death. How prosaic of a "king" to die from something as ordinary as a drug overdose.
It didn't take long for him to appear to people, or near people, or near people who knew people, who would then report that he was in fact alive. I don't recall if the media reported on the similarity between Elvis sightings and Zombie Jebus sightings, but I certainly noticed it. And I've never forgotten it. It completely threw the Easter story into doubt for me. If people could imagine they see Elvis in our modern, rational times (heh, my thinking at the time), then certainly superstitious ancient peoples could have made the same mistake.So now, every Easter, I think of Elvis. A hunka hunka bloated drug-addicted zombie gobbling up the brains of the gullible. I wish he hadn't died, but he did.
And then Jesus, like David Koresh, did indeed die from the inevitable backlash against possibly psychotic hubris. Very sad in both cases.
So, for your Easter reading, I offer an article from one of my favorite organizations, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: 
3 comments:
If (and since) there is a God, it's important to know what the Bible says. http://atheistlegitimacy.blogspot.com/
PZ Myers was right. Religion has two major weaknesses -- one is that it's wrong, but the other is that it's hilarious. Now all we need is a decent zombie Jesus movie, hopefully a horror-comedy along the lines of Shaun of the Dead.
certainly superstitious ancient peoples could have made the same mistake.
In fact, we don't even know that that much happened. There's no reference to the zombie Jesus appearance in any contemporary account, nor even to popular reports of such a thing, even though such tales would certainly have attracted a lot of attention had they actually been in circulation. The only references to it are in the Gospels -- crude propaganda written decades after the fact by committed agents intent on spreading the Jesus myth.
William Craig (Christian apologist/philosopher)loves to argue that the "fact" of the resurrection of Jesus proves the existence of God. Where does he get this so called factual tidbit from? Of course, the bible accounts. He takes all the tales related to Jesus resurrection as factual. Yet there is no evidence that 1. Jesus ever existed outside the scriptures 2. And that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate or 3. That he rose from the dead. Just another apologist making assumptions out of myths.
Post a Comment