I'm so glad others can come along and articulate arguments I "feel" but cannot adequately put into words. Scott Clifton does a wonderful job.
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...and why they are now fading out.
I watched a BBC documentary called Inside the Medieval Mind the other day and it all clicked for me. Atheists wonder how it's possible that so many people accept Christianity as true, and now I have an answer. Let me explain.
What the presenter, Robert Bartlett, FRHistS, FBA, FRSE, FSA, English historian and medievalist, pointed out is that people used to believe any damn thing they were told. He didn't put it so crassly, of course, but there you have the essence of his point.
Take as an example the belief in whole societies of dog heads. People were told of sightings of human men with the heads of dogs that lived in a distant land, and they believed these accounts with no evidence and no skepticism. This belief was so entrenched that the phenomenon was given a name (Cynocephaly), and the church leaders actually debated whether or not these creatures possessed human souls.
It's not that people in ancient times were stupid. It's that they were understandably credulous. After all, the natural world was largely unknown; the scientific method and the idea of skeptical inquiry were nonexistent. So one deranged or mischievous person starts with a tale of dog heads, and the rumor spreads until it's something everyone knows.
This phenomenon occurs today, but it tends to get started and then sputter, remaining among the kook fringe (take alien abduction, Bigfoot, etc. as examples).
So my theory is that stories about Yahweh and then Jesus circulated and were believed, then written down, with no evidence and little skepticism until the belief systems came to be accepted by so many people that they came to possess credibility by sheer force of numbers in our modern day, supposedly rational culture.
Your thoughts?
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I received this in the mail yesterday from some people concerned about my spiritual wellbeing...
One of Christian apologists' more common themes is the statement that without God there is no basis for morality. With no "absolute authority," morality can change relative to the norms of the current culture, situation, circumstance, etc. But try confronting them with the morally repugnant commands of their god in the Old Testament and see how they use the relativism explanation without batting an eye.
For example: Why God allowed polygamy:
Why did God allow polygamy in the Old Testament? The Bible does not specifically say why God allowed polygamy. As we speculate about God’s silence, there are a few key factors to consider. First, there have always been more women in the world than men. Current statistics show that approximately 50.5 percent of the world population are women, with men being 49.5 percent. Assuming the same percentages in ancient times, and multiplied by millions of people, there would be tens of thousands more women than men. Second, warfare in ancient times was especially brutal, with an incredibly high rate of fatality. This would have resulted in an even greater percentage of women to men. Third, due to patriarchal societies, it was nearly impossible for an unmarried woman to provide for herself. Women were often uneducated and untrained. Women relied on their fathers, brothers, and husbands for provision and protection. Unmarried women were often subjected to prostitution and slavery. The significant difference between the number of women and men would have left many, many women in an undesirable situation.
So, it seems that God may have allowed polygamy to protect and provide for the women who could not find a husband otherwise. A man would take multiple wives and serve as the provider and protector of all of them. While definitely not ideal, living in a polygamist household was far better than the alternatives: prostitution, slavery, or starvation. In addition to the protection/provision factor, polygamy enabled a much faster expansion of humanity, fulfilling God’s command to “be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth” (Genesis 9:7). Men are capable of impregnating multiple women in the same time period, causing humanity to grow much faster than if each man was only producing one child each year.
