Empirical Blindness
Earlier this week I watched a TV documentary called “Forbidden History” – the episode I saw was called “Uncovering the Historical Jesus”. The program posed many arguments, a central one being that the archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus is very weak and on that basis (the program strongly proposed) Jesus most likely did not exist and the person of Jesus was fabricated as part of the canonical Gospels in order to promote Christian dogma many years after the alleged existence of Jesus. If you ever wanted to see what weak pseudoscience looks like, this episode is a good example.
Several days later I find myself wondering why I feel so irritated by this program. After all, I have stated in my writings that God exists whether we accept it or not – it’s a fundamental truth which is unaffected by our personal beliefs. In our current times of declining belief in anything spiritual, many of us will never understand this fundamental truth.
If I have strength of conviction towards God, and the spiritual, why should I be bothered by weak pseudoscientific efforts to discredit and blatantly deny the existence of Jesus? In truth, I honestly don’t care about the doubt of others; it will not change my conviction. And let’s be clear, when I talk about conviction, I’m not talking about blind and faithful obedience to a religious dogma (I couldn’t give two farts for religious dogma); I’m talking about personal firm belief in spiritual reality, of which Jesus is an essential part.
Jesus, the human, did exist – there is ample historical evidence of this, including the testimony of Pontius Pilate to Emperor Tiberius concerning the crucifixion of Jesus; writings from the Roman historian and senator Tacitus; as well as the writings of Flavius Josephus. There are also the canonical Gospels, as well as the non-canonical Gospels, and other writings from the disciples of Jesus that refer to the life and teachings of Jesus.
I do not claim that Jesus was either “God made man”, or that he was the “son of God” – I do not believe these religious dogmatic arguments. Firstly, God is so beyond the human race and all its imperfection and rot, why would God want to degrade to be a human? Secondly, Jesus is no more a son of God than each and every one of us humans is a “child of God”; Jesus was a human who (through his own personal choices) allowed his soul to receive true and complete enlightenment from the spirit of God – that’s what set Jesus apart from every other unenlightened human.
I also do not believe in the “immaculate conception” – that Mary (mother of Jesus) was impregnated by God or an angel of God. Mary was impregnated by Joseph – a mere human male. The notions of an “immaculate conception” and of Jesus as “God made man” were constructed as 1) initially, a means to save Joseph’s reputation as a pious and holy man in the Jewish “church”, and 2) later, as religious dogma to deceive and control humans as subjects of a powerful political church. I believe Jesus was human conceived by humans.
Jesus lived a human life and suffered a human death so that 1) he could experience and understand the human condition and pass that wisdom onto God, and 2) so that he could be resurrected from death with his soul and body intact to show humans that physical bodily death is not the end.
The “miracle” that Jesus showed humanity is that if humans achieved true soul consciousness and allowed their souls (through their own conscious efforts and choices) to be imbued with the spirit of God, those humans could achieve eternal life. However, it’s a personal choice each of us humans has to actively make as we live our lives on this planet; Jesus is not going to make the choice for us, and certainly God is not going to automatically save us.
Of course there is no archaeological evidence of Jesus in the sense that someone has found the material bodily remains of Jesus. Are we not told that Jesus was resurrected after death and that he ascended to God? As that happened, why would there be material remains of Jesus’ body on earth? The reason people have issue with this is that they 1) do not believe in God, 2) they do not believe it possible to resurrect a dead body, 3) they do not believe that Jesus (or any other human) could ascend to God – i.e. transcend and leave this earth to go to another place / realm beyond this earth.
When archaeological evidence of sorts was presented to the world (through the shroud that covered the dead body of Jesus after he was crucified, and bears the imprint of Jesus’s entire body, including his face, which was irradiated into the fabric by energy fusion upon the soul’s re-entry into the body) humans rushed and still persist to declare it fake. Yet nobody can properly explain it (even with our so-called scientific understanding of nuclear fusion)!
Soul unconscious and spiritually barren humans will, no matter what evidence is presented, deny the existence of Jesus, anything spiritual, and especially God.
In Jesus’s own words (from John 3: 12, John 5: 37-38; John 5: 44, and John 20: 29 respectively):
“If you do not believe me when I speak about things in this world, how are you going to believe me when I speak to you about heavenly things?”
“You have never heard his voice; you have never seen his shape, and his words (teachings / wisdom / enlightenment) find no home in you because you do not believe…”
“How can you believe, since you look to one another for approval and are not concerned with the approval that comes from the one God?”
“You believe because you can see me; happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Image: Sunlight, Victoria, Australia. Copyright - Michael Beaton
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