I would like to get opinions on this: The only way Christianity will ever come to an end is if 2000 more years go by, no Jesus. 3000 years go by, no Jesus. 4000 years go by, no Jesus…and so on. I think only then will believers throw up their hands and say “well, maybe it all WAS a myth.” Until then, I think Christianity will still be with us. What do you think?
As I said to a similar question…if humanity lasts, the goal posts will simply move. Many people simply continue to believe in such unevidenced things because they prefer it.
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If they required no proof or physical presence to believe in the first place, I don’t hold much hope that his continued absence will wake any up…
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It’s worth noting that in the Gospel narrative, clear and unambiguous words were put in Jesus’ mouth in the form of a prophecy: “I tell you the truth, some of you here today will not die before you see me return in glory”. Couldn’t be arsed to look it up, but that’s pretty close.
So it wasn’t supposed to be but a relative handful of years, within the lifetime of at least the children present at that alleged gathering, so not more than let’s say 75 years. In fact according to Bart Ehrman, some of the early Christian sects fully expected this. One of them discouraged marriage as a distraction from the very urgent need to get the gospel out into the world. 100% of a family’s resources and time were to be directed to this end. Procreation was a waste of precious time before Jesus would return and end everything.
The hilarious unintended consequence of this was that it liberated women in the cult to have a status (more?) equal to men and freed them from the societal expectation to bear and raise children.
In fact one of the books that didn’t make it into the New Testament was titled “The Acts of Thecla”. Thecla was one of these women who supposedly did various heroic exploits and miracles all over Asia Minor. IIRC she was said to have started out as one of the Apostle Paul’s hangers-on. Most of the text survives to this day and in one scene she is told to forsake her beliefs or die. She refuses and is thrown into a vat full of seals, and miraculously she is not savagely mauled to death. Obviously the author wasn’t familiar with seals and figured they were sufficiently exotic / dangerous-sounding animals for his audience of rubes to be impressed by – and maybe he was right because most people were born, lived and died within a few miles of the same spot.
At any rate … the goalposts had to be moved just decades after the time of Jesus. I was taught that what Jesus said at that gathering meant something other than what he said, such as that some of the people present would have a vision of Jesus or be ushered directly into his presence like Elijah or something. This is obvious weaksauce reaching for straws, but like Trump spouting utter bullshit about the economy, it was enough for True Believers™.
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Jesus (if you believe he existed at all) supposedly believed that the end of the world and the establishment of God’s kingdom would happen in his own generation’s lifetime. Oops…all of his generation passed away and never saw any of it. So his prophecy failed.
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And you know what they’re supposed to do to false prophets … stone them!
I agree, I actually think the inevitable non-return of a fictional deity makes this an unfalsifiable idea, yeah he hasn’t returned, but that doesn’t mean he won’t. You can’t dent a rationale like that.
the closest thing we might have to a “return” of Jesus is if Christianity dies, becomes forgotten for a good long while, gets rediscovered, and becomes popular again but this time with some kind of variation.
The “Jesus” himself most people think didn’t come back but the myth, the name, and the perception did.
The Mormons think this already happened. The church went off the rails early on and lost the “true” faith. They see themselves as a reform movement to bring the church back to its true roots. The Jehovah’s Witnesses – pretty much the same idea. Both claim the mantle of Christianity despite being heretical in terms of the historic church creeds. Both worship Jesus. New variants of Christianity. No reincarnated Jesus though, just claims of new revelation.
Only because believers won’t let you dent it. But that doesn’t make it any more real. And besides Jesus (if you believe the myth) believed that the end times would take place during his generation, not for any future generations. He was not interested in founding a new religion either. Why don’t Christians see this?
My thoughts are this: I hope it ends much sooner. Religion should hold no place among mankind. It’s a childish belief that should have ended a long time ago. We as a species should have outgrown it by now. But no, there are many of us that persist in these Santa like beliefs.
I still maintain that all deities, devils, angels, demons and other “occult” stuff were created by ancient, primitive and superstitious people either before science or after the first scientists came along but were rejected and persecuted by the religions of the time…in other words, mythologies. In that, I consider myself not only an atheist but also a diehard antitheist.
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Well, the sad fact is that religions tend to have a longer lifespan since the advent of written languages. An ancient sacred scroll trumps some bastard standing on a soapbox proclaiming truth and wisdom it seems…
I always found it interesting how someone will fall for a lie written down, but doubt the same lie spoken to their face. It makes you contemplate the motives of the 3%-10% of literate humans wandering around Roman Palestine a couple of millennia ago…
I wonder if it isn’t true that there’s always a subset of people who either can’t, or can’t be arsed, to read, and so prefer someone else to just tell them what is written, what it means, and how to be faithful to it. Just because the percentage of the population that’s at least marginally / technically literate is much larger now doesn’t mean that literacy isn’t wasted on them. With knowledge comes responsibility, and that’s not a burden everyone wants. Religion absolves you of navigating difficult moral conundrums and tradeoffs. It simplifies life by outsourcing your thinking to others.
See Arthur Schopenhauer: Parerga and Paralipomena and The World as Will and Representation
I love the way he points out that within a given society, vice is openly punished, but stupidity is not…indicating stupidity as being innate.
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