Justin Welby’s Easter, Dishonest or Dumb?

Justin Welby, Dishonest or Dumb? At least the latter has no moral implication for him – he can’t help it.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter 2017 Sermon – Sunday 16th April 2017

Christian faith starts with One who literally (that misused word) rose from the dead.

So much for the hard work of all those sophisticated theologians (h/t Jerry Coyne) that have been trying to dissuade people from reading books like The God Delusion by Dawkins, “because nobody believes it that literally”.

Literal belief is literally real.

And the depths of irony in Welby’s ‘that misused word’ has my head spinning. Here’s a summary of Christian theology

Jesus literally rose from the dead … allegorically … such that there’s no actual evidence that he did … and no real requirement to provide evidence … except that if you have faith, and believe it, it will be literally true …

And so the nonsense goes on like the endless Easter parades I used to watch as countless churches gathered and marched to bands.

Laid stone cold dead in Joseph’s tomb on Friday, on Sunday morning the tomb is empty, he is physically, bodily, tangibly alive. Why would we presume to know better than these first witnesses what took place?

Let me see …. because there were no witnesses? Because there is no evidence of witness to the death let alone any resurrection? Because a fourth century Emperor got tired of all the conflicting stories and with a bit of arguing and a game of eenie-meanie-miny-mo (there’s as much evidence of that as there is of the resurrection) chose which fairy tales would make the least implausible gospels?

Welby knows damned well how flaky Christian history is. He knows damned well that none of the gospels represent a true interpretation of what little biblical ‘original sources’ exist.

It happened: the witnesses are those who met him. Today the calling of every Christian is to be a witness to the Resurrection.

Let that sink in. “Today the calling of every Christian is to be a witness to the Resurrection” As much a ‘literally happened’ witness as any original person that happened to live around the time Jesus is supposed to have died and been resurrected … by himself.

How do you do that, resurrect yourself, when you’re dead without not really being dead, as in dead dead, not an undeadable deity pretending to be dead? God did it? But Jesus IS God? Miracle! Maybe Harry Potter is literally true by the same sort of miracle.

The idiocy of Christian belief is palpable – and a damned sight more literal than the theological nonsense.

In our reading from Acts, Peter speaks of events that are only a couple of years in the past … It was a testimony easily checked, easily dismissed.

No it is not easily checked. This is an utter lie. There is no way to check that. Even if there were multiple records that were used as evidence that Peter actually said what he is supposed to have said, that would be no verification whatsoever that what he said was true – it would be hearsay, nothing more. Likewise Josephus, that supposed ‘witness’ to Christian truths that merely told us what Christians were telling someone else. Hearsay!

We are used to facts being contested. We are even used to facts being reduced to the level of opinion. So individualised are our news cycles that our opinions are in themselves the only facts that seem to count. However, what brings the faithful out to worship in Tanta and Alexandria is truth. It happened. The resurrection is an event which – although never experienced before or since – changes everything because it happened.

This is an unbelievably stupid thing to say. It happened because Welby and a bunch of other gullible or dishonest people proclaim that it did. He has nothing else.

Events claimed to be fact are reduced to opinion when there is no evidence to support the claim that the events took place. Just as in the case of the resurrection, or the cruciFICTION, or most other stories about Jesus. So many are so obviously trumped up they out-trump Trump.

You know what this bit is …?

However, what brings the faithful out to worship in Tanta and Alexandria is truth. It happened.

That’s an infant mind throwing it’s toys and stamping its feet because it can’t have its own way. That’s all that is. It really is that childish a statement, especially in the context of the paragraph as a whole.

We atheists often point out how Islamism, the politicised Islam, is actually plain old Islam, because Islam is a political religion. But next we have Welby making the political claim for Christianity:

Yet it was not on the lists of important dates for me to learn at school. It is not in the politics text books, although it defines the aims and ends of politics. It is not in the economics lessons, although economics is transformed by it. It is not in the geography courses, although human geography was changed more by this than any event that has ever happened. It is not on courses at military academies, although war and peace are judged by it.

He’ll be asking to ‘teach the controversy’ of of Design over Evolution next, the dimwit.

Bear that in mind when political leaders that are religious tell you they are ‘informed’ by their religion but don’t let it interfere with their politics. Looking at you, Tim Farron, my dear leader of the Liberal Democrats. [I may be a bit harsh on poor old Tim, but I’d rather keep imaginary friends right out of politics.]

And talking of political Islam, here’s Welby’s back stabbing ode to it … inter-faith respect, my arse.

The greatest mystery is that the greatest event went almost unnoticed and spread to conquer the known world without drawing a sword, without taking a life, winning an election or starting a campaign.

Welby headed his sermon with references to St George’s church Tanta and St Mark’s church Alexandria, sites of Islamist killing of Christians. No such barbarity from Christianity! … except …

Actually, it’s no mystery that the ‘greatest event’ went almost unnoticed. It didn’t happen. And neither is it a mystery that it ‘spread to conquer the known world without drawing a sword’, because of course swords were well and truly drawn in its spread, from the early Roman emperors converted to Christianity, through warring popes and kings and queens, and on through the western empires that that forced Christianity on the wider world. A bit like Islam really, just better at it … so far. Heads up!

At the resurrection the world did not merely shift, a new world emerged in embryo …

Funny that nobody noticed until many years later, with many twists to the tales. Just like a myth, really.

Consider the women; they thought death ruled, that despair had conquered, that stones could not be moved. They were wrong on everything. Death was conquered, despair fled, the stone was rolled away.

This is what the religious do. They feign doubt, talk about opinions, present objections as if unimportant, … and then go right on an act as if it’s all totally documented, triple signed and on record, with photographic evidence that has passed umpteen tests for photoshop trickery true.

Because God acted and raised Jesus everything is different: we know the truth about God, through the resurrection.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Did I say stupid? This little circle is tighter than Jesus’s sphincter when the nails went in.

Look, you cannot have a supposed revelation (in a book, the word of a person, or the content of a myth) that claims to be the source of its own truth.

If liar came up to you and said, “Hi, I tell the truth. I never lie.” And then a truthful person came up to you and said, “Hi, I tell the truth. I never lie.” How would you know which was telling the truth? How would you even know they were not actually both liars, if all you had to go on was that I told you one of them was telling the truth … you’d then be relying on me telling the truth too … and so it goes. This rhetoricaly BS from Welby is stupid … did I say that?

“This is the holy book. Revealed by God. To the man. The man that is handing it to you now. A book in which it tells you that God is real, and that did the revealing, … a book that totally wasn’t made up by the man. … honest!”

Stupid!

More on that topic … The Liar’s Holy Book – Your book, your god’s revelation, cannot contain the proof of the truth of its own claims. You have to presuppose a god that does the revealing; and a presupposition isn’t proof of anything, it’s you making shit up.

After a couple of paragraphs of more mumbo jumbo meaningless Alice in Wonderland prose, Welby comes up with this:

But be under no illusion, this is utterly counter to how the world runs itself, and so we live in the now of a world in which the resurrection has happened, and the not yet of a world where there is still evil.

Illusion? It’s not an illusion. It’s a fully fledged and taken flight of fantasy delusion.

But, the words Jesus says on that first Easter day he says to you and me now; ‘Do not be afraid’….

But of course there is no known record of Jesus having said anything.

There is only one finality: Jesus the crucified one is alive. … blah-dy-blah-dy-blah … joy and light in the face of suffering bullshit … blah-dy blah … it happened, Jesus is alive.

“It’s True!”

Here’s Justin welby as a little girl explaining his theology: