Let's look at the pedigree of the modern atheists' claim that Christianity is a silly, evil myth.  First of all, the claim that Christianity is a myth is not new. The seeds were planted about a half-millennium ago in the Renaissance and burst into full flower in the Enlightenment. It began when pagan literature was read with a new spirit—a this-worldly spirit of secularism, a spirit that assumed that the spiritual was impossible.

Suddenly, the incredible myths of ancient Greece and Rome stood beside the incredible stories of the Bible as equals. Zeus and Jupiter stood on equal footing with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were all equally fanciful, foolish, and false. There is exactly as much truth in Homer’s Iliad as there is in the Holy Bible, which is to say, none at all.

Thus was born comparative religion, the notion behind it being that all stories of the dealings of the divine with the human must be fictional. Or, if we get at it from another angle, since some such stories are evidently mythological, then all must be mythological, especially those found in the Bible. The point was not to get at the truth, but to use pagan mythology as a way to deflate Christianity, so that Christianity would be merely mythical too.

What is the problem with this type of reasoning? It contains two erroneous assumptions, one open and obvious, and the other more subtle. The open and obvious error is that if most people get something wrong, then no one can get it right. The more subtle is that human reason defines what is reasonable.

To understand the foolishness of the first error, we need a bit more background. In the Renaissance, and even more fervently in the Enlightenment, there arose the belief that human reason was always and everywhere in wonderful, universal agreement, and that religion only brought confusion and chaos. The cure, for them, was to put forth a religion of reason; that is, to throw out revelation, and worship the human mind as the new divine and unifying god. Comparative religion was the way they sought to discredit Christianity, so that they could make way for the religion of reason.

The obvious problem was not obvious to them. We don't need religion in order to disagree and get mired in error and confusion. Human beings, using their merely human reason, disagree all the time. If mere human reason produced wonderful, universal agreement, then why is the history of philosophy punctuated by so many rival, irreconcilable schools of philosophy—Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Platonists, Aristotelians, neo-Platonists, Skeptics, and to continue from the Enlightenment, Lockeans, Humeans, Kantians, Hegelians, Marxists, Pragmatists, Nihilists, Existentialists, etc., etc. (not to mention the sub-school splinter groups at each other's throats)?

Can we then say that because there is so much disagreement, then no philosophy is better than any other? That they are all equally false? That we should give up the search for truth by human reason and study "comparative philosophy" instead? That because most people are illogical, then we should throw out logic, and confine ourselves to the study of "comparative arguments"? Ironically, that is about the state of current philosophy. So much for the religion of reason.

Secularists might be tempted to substitute "science" for "philosophy." But the problem is the same. We shouldn't be misled by histories of science that focus only on the very few paths that led to later successes, rather than the far more numerous dead ends and wild goose chases. The history of science is largely the history of confusion and disagreement among many, while only a few get it right and (not unlike Moses) lead others out of their confusion to a land of more solid conclusions. Do we want to say that because most get it wrong and disagree, that no one can get it right? That there can then be no science, but only "comparative science"?

One can already hear the objection: "But science is about reality!" That brings us to the above-mentioned second error, that human reason defines what is reasonable. The most important truth we learn about science from the history of science—the long, complex story of how it is that we came to know more and more about nature—is that reason does not define what is reasonable; reality defines what is reasonable. The one thing that we can demonstrate about the universe is that it is always proving itself to be stranger than we thought it would be, and that our cherished hypotheses are continually challenged and overturned by new discoveries.

But if we find that reality is continually more mysterious than we'd thought—more strange, intricate, and elegantly contrived—then reason must be open to the possibility that there is a mysterious contriver whose intelligence is far more intricate and elegant than our own. And since He is mysterious, what keeps Him from trying to reveal Himself to us? How can we cut off that possibility?

Zeitgeist-the movie - Conspiracy theorist Peter Joseph uses online medium to promote an ancient theme.

"Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems [...] empowers those who know the truth, but use the myth to manipulate and control societies. The religious myth is the most powerful device ever created, and serves as the psychological soil upon which other myths can flourish." - Peter Joseph

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeZB2EsPqGE

New Testament Scholar pulls back the curtain on Zeitgeist-the Movie

Ben Witherington is no stranger to the "Jesus Myth" industry. As the author of The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth, and serious New Testament scholar, he is uniquely equipped to see through the slick compilation of conspiracy based assertions that form the structure of the 2007 online documentary Zeitgeist-the movie that garnered a cult following and some film industry accolades.

Witherington's recent blogpost takes the movie and its maker seriously enough to take on both the message and the motives of the project.

"Of course Peter Joseph is that increasingly popular kind of writer and movie producer-- the conspiracy theory specialist (think Dan Brown on steroids). His essential argument is that the truth about the mythological origins of all religions has been suppressed for oh so long. His argument is that all savior figures are anthropological projections, creating a religious myth. He also wants to see them all whether Mithra or Jesus or someone else as all fictional creations. He is especially angry about elitism-- his view is that the myth of Judaism and Christianity was imposed on the world from the top down, and we are still suffering from this sort of elitist thinking. So, in his view Jesus did not exist and we have all been lied to about this matter.

So of course Peter Joseph is also regaling us with the theory that his theories have been suppressed, and his film black-listed. If you go on Youtube and look up comments on the Zeitgeist movie, including a radio interview with Joseph, and a brief comment by that true pundit, Keith Olbermann, you will see that not only is this movie about conspiracies, this movie is seen as the victim of a suppression 'conspiracy'.

Never mind it is a bad movie based on shabby 'research' ( I use the term loosely) and actually no historical understanding about Jesus and the origins of Christianity. Never mind that Mr. Joseph can't tell the difference between arguments about the myth of the Easter bunny and arguments about Jesus Christ. He's got his knickers all in a knot because his 'truth' is being suppressed. It has not occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, thoughtful people who know far more than he does about this subject are very kindly letting his bad movie die a slow death, as it did not deserve worldwide attention and fame and fortune. The problem with syncretistic thinking like Joseph's is that you put all sorts of disparate sources and information into your mental blender and blend them all together. Thus the Jesus myth and conspiracy is likened by him to the cover up of 911 conspiracy and so on. The sad part about this is that it is just emoting and anger masked as and pretending to be historical research and scientific evidence. The sad part he believes that he is the victim of the suppression of free speech."

Professor Ben Witherington
blogpost

Use this link to see Zeitgeist-the movie
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/main.htm

Use this link to read more of Ben Witherington's critique of Zeitgeist the Movie:
http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/12/zeitgeist-of-zeitgeist-movie.html

The idea that Christianity is mere mythology is not something new. It was an intellectual assumption used as a weapon in centuries of attacks on Christianity.

In the 1400s scholars began to discover ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts that gave them new insight and appreciation of the philosophy, history, literature, and religion of the pagan cultures that preceded Christianity—a little too much appreciation, for some. Soon, the appreciation of pagan wisdom began to eclipse the revealed wisdom found in Holy Scripture. For these neo-pagans, both the Old Testament and the New Testament came to be regarded as one more instance of ancient mythology, to be put beside such works as Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad, or Virgil’s Aeneid.

What makes the historical “mythologizing” of Christianity difficult to trace as a matter of intellectual history, is that at its origins and for quite some time, those who secretly believed the Old and New Testament to be mere mythology went about their intellectual deconstruction of Christianity in a rather roundabout way.

Thus, one of the leading figures of the early Enlightenment Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) led the attack on Christianity indirectly by ridiculing ancient pagan superstitions in a way that drew the reader to make connections to ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Bayle’s Dictionary was enormously popular throughout the entire 18th century, and helped to spread the skeptical approach to the study of ancient religion that, by the end of the 18th century, became the open, skeptical attack on the Old and New Testament.

Of course, Bayle was not original. His work was heavily indebted to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), both of whom defined religion as superstition caused by fear and ignorance. Even though both offered lukewarm endorsements of Christianity as an exception, most people of the time saw right through their subterfuge to the real message delivered underneath: all religion, especially Christianity, is mere mythology.

Dr. Benjamin Wiker

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