CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

 
In the light of the fact that one religion contradicts the other and that the Bible calls for violence in the name of God, should say the Catholic Church lose academic accreditation for its catechesis, philosophy and theology programmed and banned from teaching them in public institutions?  When a religion claims to be educational, should it be legally penalised for saying that condoms do not help a person reduce their risk of HIV and that man and woman ultimately came from two parents, Adam and Eve against the DNA evidence?  If the Church discriminates against LGBT people in marriage and in teaching positions and undermines science, should it lose its tax exempt status and its right to claim gift aid?

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Religions are based around allegedly supernatural events.  A sceptic is not a scoffer but a checker.  It just happens that the checking out shows nothing really supernatural happened.

Christianity claims that it can show that it has a reasonable, that is a non-contradictory - faith. A faith that is unreasonable is simply a faith that is not inspired by God assuming God is reasonable. If he is not reasonable then he is pure evil and believing in him is dangerous. For example, if it makes no sense to say that Jesus is two separate natures, God and man united in one person, then this doctrine isn’t true. Christians feel that God gave us the power to think to help us work out the truth. They say that silly religions insult God who gave us the gift of reason and degrade our nature for we have the power to think for ourselves and it is given to be used and not as an ornament.
 
We will look at how useless and superficially convincing Christian defences of the faith are.
 
Christianity claims that the faith comes before the state or anything else. If it's correct, then the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus in the four gospels must fit legal requirements. They must satisfy a court of law that the resurrection happened. The resurrection accounts can’t do this for none of them claim to be other than hearsay. For example, there is no mention of signed statements or affidavits from the witnesses. As for St Paul’s apparitions of the risen Jesus he is so vague about what he saw. Accordingly, what he says is not a testimony that Jesus rose at all. Is a testimony about white shapes at a marsh a testimony about a ghost appearing? No – we know it could be marsh gas. In a court something so vague as gospel testimony would be dismissed.
 
The Christian apologist distorts the facts to give his religion plausibility. The apologists are bigots. They ignore the rule that hearsay is no good in court to verify the resurrection accounts and then they laugh at accounts of miracles from other religions such as Islam and Mormonism. They dismiss those as hearsay!
 
For example, the apologists say the gospellers must have been cross-examined for a cross-examination is necessary to discern if they are telling the truth. This is pure hypothesis and even the Bible doesn’t support the hypothesis that there was a cross-examination either. It's pure speculation.
 
We know from law that:

"A failure to assert a fact, when it would have been natural to assert it, amounts in effect to an assertion of the non-existence of the fact. This is conceded as a general principle of evidence...[it is] 'prima facie' an inconsistency."
 
Wigmore on Evidence – this is an encyclopedia and a legal text book.
 
The Bible God agrees for he said that when a public charge is made, the whole truth must be told and to keep any of it back is to be held responsible for subverting justice (Leviticus 5:1). Public charges were made against Jesus for crimes against the Roman Empire and against Judaism. Public charges were made against his disciples for stealing the body of Jesus from the tomb and against Jesus for faking miracles. The gospels tell us all this. None of that was addressed by the New Testament writers.
 
The Christian apologists lie that the gospels are true. They say that despite one gospel saying there was one man in white at the tomb – conveniently supposed by Christians to have been an angel - and others saying there was more. Believers say the evangelists just left things out with one gospel mentioning only one man but not meaning to infer that there was only one. But legally speaking this is the same as saying there was only one man. The gospels were written for ordinary people and for lawyers as well. They were meant to satisfy lawyers too! Their failure to be proper testimonies shows they are not to be taken seriously. The worst problem is how only Matthew mentions the tomb being guarded against body snatching and the others don’t.
 
Matthew and Mark state that the women saw Jesus risen from the dead first. But Paul writes that the first appearance was to Peter. The Christians, knowing there can’t be another excuse, say that Paul doesn’t give the complete list. They contend that since men were thought to be the only legal witnesses and women were not, he simply does not bother to mention the women. They lie that he is not denying that women seen Jesus first. But in that case he had no reason to say Jesus appeared first to Peter. Why say the word first at all? Paul wasn’t treating his list as a legal list or a list to satisfy people legally. No New Testament testimony claimed any legal authority. Therefore there was no reason for saying nothing about the women - unless the story of the women is lies.
 
Paul gave a list of risen Jesus witnesses, starting off with Peter, and mentions 500 seeing Jesus. The 500 are no good as evidence to us for Paul did and not say where or who they were and when. It is legally useless. It is no good as evidence. Christians might say that Paul's account was addressed to ordinary people and they might ask why would you get legal with people who don’t think legal? They want to deny it would be any good in the sight of a court. Why? Because to say that Paul was legally saying Peter saw the Lord first negates the gospels which could equally be said to be legally saying it was the women. We have no reason to think Paul is being legal so nobody has the right to use the legal escape route to gloss over this contradiction between a resurrection witness and the gospels which are not testimonies written by eyewitnesses. Paul is more believable than the gospels for he wrote nearer the alleged apparition events. And at least we know he wrote his letters while the gospels are anonymous. The gospels lie that Peter did not see the Lord first.
 
Christian defences of the faith offend against the rule of plausibility. Using their standards, any contradiction at all can be fixed up and we will never be able to learn anything if we start doing that!
 
Christianity is notorious for ignoring the refutation of its arguments. Ideas that have been refuted centuries ago are still used today. Apologetics does little to make converts. It is just a trick to reassure believers that their absurd faith makes sense. It leads to believers becoming so cocksure that they set out to take away the civil rights of those who disagree with them. Remember how the Catholics of Ireland fought to stop the right to divorce and contraception and persecuted those who complained against clerical sex abuse?
 
Christianity argues that Jesus rose from the dead for many of his friends believed he did. That does not follow. Also, it is really putting faith in the testimony of people rather than in God. It would in fact be evidence then that God was not behind whatever happened. God wants to be honoured for being God. There is something sectarian about taking a group's interpretation of God and what he has done in preference to that of other groups.
 
Christian apologetics is based on manipulation. Why be surprised? If there is one true religion, it follows that the defenders of false religion are indeed lying and twisting things and doing all they can to have their religion look reasonable and sensible. There is a lot of that about. Apologetics should not be treated as a science or as factual. It's speculative rubbish and there should be no academic accreditation for it.
 
Apologia, Catholic Answers to Today’s Questions, Fr Marcus Holden and Fr Andrew Pinsent, CTS, London, 2010