EASTER, ALWAYS A MYTH AND STILL A MYTH SINCE CHRIST

No miracle claim is worth looking at unless there are first-hand critical sources as well as sources that say a real miracle took place. There is nothing critical at all in the reports concerning the resurrection of Jesus.
 
Christianity and Islam believe that the body will rise again. Christians hold that Jesus rose from the dead and left an empty tomb and subsequently appeared to his disciples.
 
The earliest Christian writer, Paul the apostle, spoke for the Church when he said that if Jesus has not risen then our faith is in vain and useless and our dead will not rise and believers are to be pitied above all people. "But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But if he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men" (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). This argues that just because the resurrection is preached it should be believed. That is unfair. The apostles were manipulating and subtly bullying their believers. Paul then later says that it should be believed because it is testified to. That is only slightly better and slightly more charitable than what he said before. But still testimony is only human and so we can reject it if we don't see why we should accept it. Paul certainly was not very confident about the testimony. If your testimony is questioned you repeat it and answer problems people have with it. You don't say, "Accept my testimony because you are calling me a liar or wrong if you don't." To do that would set alarm bells ringing. All the religious frauds in the world try that tactic. Paul states that the faith even if it makes people happy is useless and futile if it is not true. He seems to mean here that God will damn believers if their faith is wrong. Happiness would only be useless if it was the means of landing you in Hell forever after death. Paul's argument shows that he is only concerned about being called a fraud like the other apostles. He was not as saintly as he pretended to be.
 
If you want to refute Christianity, all you need to do is focus on the resurrection of Jesus and see whether it is credible and possible or not. Every other miracle reported by Christianity is not as important. Paul set the standard and as an apostle we are meant to take his word as the word of Jesus himself. To repudiate the standard is to become your own religion and cease to be Christian. People think a huge miracle happened at Fatima in 1917 when people had visions of the sun spinning and changing colour in the sky. The Christian teaching on the resurrection of Jesus implies that this miracle was not necessary. It implies that it could not be as convincing as the resurrection. It implies that it is dishonourable to spend time examining that miracle instead of the resurrection. In reality, the Fatima miracle would be one of those miracles that refute the resurrection for it is better attested. Thus it purports to be the miracle that deserves the most faith.
 
The gospel writers offer not evidence for the resurrection of Christ but an interpretation they put on what they think happened. Why should we accept theirs for millions of interpretations are possible? They are the ones that say there is only one explanation so it is up to them to refute all the alternatives even if it takes to the end of the millennium so they have no right to our faith. Worse, there is no proof that the accounts are eyewitness accounts. Christians say they are. They seem to think that eyewitness accounts that have been worked over will do. They will not. We don't want something that was edited. We want the original unaltered written accounts and we want assurance that the witnesses checked over them before they were made public. They can't give us any of that.
 
Faith in somebody's interpretation of a revelation or miracle from God is not the same as faith in the revelation or God. It is not faith in them at all but in the person doing the interpreting.
 
Nobody claims the body was seen coming out of the tomb. The tomb somehow was open but not a single line of the New Testament eliminates the possibility that somebody sneaked in and took the body. The tomb had been unattended while open. And Matthew does not say the tomb was checked when the guards took their post. It was alone until then.
 
Bodies have vanished inexplicably from their tombs. Even if nobody knows how or why they were taken, nobody reasons that this indicates resurrection. Christians agree and they say the empty tomb on its own is not enough and that is where the apparitions of Jesus come in. Apparitions alone would not be enough either - consider the visions that Mormons and Catholics see all contradicting one another. So Christians say that the empty tomb alone proves nothing and the apparitions alone prove nothing but the two together indicate that Jesus rose. But nothing can prove a connection between the two. Jesus could have been stolen from the tomb perhaps by people who thought he had enough healing ability to recover. And he could have risen in their care and vanished. But that is no use to those who seek evidence. We have no record of Jesus's body being observed as it vanished from the tomb or as it rose. And we need that.
 
A ghost could have masqueraded as Jesus to create the resurrection appearances. It’s easier to believe that than that a man came back bodily from the dead so it is more reasonable. Ghost stories are the most common miracle accounts. That counts for a lot. The Church admits that if it was just a ghost story that started the whole thing off there is no point in believing in Jesus any more for his resurrection was meant to be a miracle that could not be duplicated by Satan or anybody else. Jesus being a ghost would mean the resurrection was a hoax.
 
Jesus being among the apostles for a few short appearances and being touched once by Thomas is not great evidence of a bodily resurrection. A person would need to live an ordinary life for a while. Jesus during the appearances kept them very brief as if he had something to hide. The shorter a vision is the bigger the chance that the person is imagining things. He was also very curt and complaining - it was not like a man who really rose and was happy to meet his friends.
 
The risen Jesus said that his crucifixion and resurrection were foretold in the Jewish scriptures. That was a lie and the apostles knew it because there are literally thousands of different interpretations for the passages he was on about that Christians say predict the crucifixion and nothing at all predicts the resurrection. Psalm 16 allegedly does (Acts 2) but all it mentions is the recovery of King David from serious illness.  It doesn't even mention dying.
 
The Christians all say that it is easier to believe that Jesus rose than the natural explanations. Hello! So a miracle then is a viable alternative to an outlandish natural explanation? A bizarre but possible natural explanation is always to be chosen over a miracle one. We know weird outlandish natural things can happen for heaven’s sake and what is natural comes first. Also, you can only assume that a miracle has happened and you cannot know exactly what the miracle was. For example, if somebody seems to have risen from the dead bodily, could it be that the miracle is how people thought he did though he did not? You do not assume bodily resurrection when a lesser miracle would suffice.
 
Faith in the resurrection depends on denying that a far-fetched natural explanation is better than a miracle one. Faith in the resurrection depends on assuming a bigger miracle than you need to. Once you do that you show you care not about the truth but about what you want to believe. Any witness you give is destroyed.
 
Faith in the resurrection of Jesus is a denial of the principle that we do not say something is a miracle unless we have to. We need to keep true to this principle for our own protection. We cannot live if we give people free rein to claim that say the missing money from the piggy bank could not have been taken by saintly Alex or sickly Paul and since there was nobody else in the house a demon must have taken it. Jesus wants us to be irrational if he wants us to believe in this resurrection. Irrational is the same as evil for evil is irrational. The irrational thought is what starts evil off. To condone the irrational is to repudiate the right to try and invite people to live better lives.
 
The Christians won’t admit that there could be mistakes in the gospels that makes the resurrection tale more credible than it looks. Yet they use the gospels to prove the resurrection. So what they are really saying is that no other explanation works for the gospels are right. Evidently they are begging the question or arguing in circles: “The gospels are all true therefore there is no other explanation but resurrection and the resurrection proves the gospels are true.”
 
The Torah emphasised that nobody should be punished by death under God's law unless there were two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6). Then later it said that nobody must be accused of a crime unless there are two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19.15). God gave this law. Jesus said two witnesses were needed that he was the Son of God and quoted this law in the Gospel of John (John 8:17-18). . He said God was one witness and he was the other. Any madman or religious fraud could say the same. Jesus was not genuine when he said this. But that aside, he was implying that witnesses to the resurrection were not needed. Indeed looking for them or depending on them would be sidestepping his testimony and that of his Father God.
 
So the law is reaffirmed by Jesus and the apostles taught it as God's will ( 2 Corinthians 13:1 and 1 Timothy 5:19). This means that if three people tell you they had a revelation from Heaven that Jesus was a fake or did not rise from the dead then you must believe them. After all it makes sense to believe people you know than people who lived thousands of years ago like the gospel writers. This proves that those who focus so much on the resurrection of Jesus are being arrogant and arbitrary bigots. They centre on this and ignore better miracle claims just because those claims do not fit what they want to believe. There is no such thing as believing what you want to believe. If you think you have done this then you merely feel that it is true. That is not belief. Roman Catholicism then thanks to Jesus' low standard, has been refuted by the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon, a volume that denies that the Catholic Church is guided by God and is his true Church.
 
The major lie about the resurrection is that it is the miracle that proves to us that Jesus saved us from sin and death – a doctrine that was put into Jesus’ mouth by the gospellers and the other creators of the New Testament. For it to do that, you would have to prove that aliens or demons didn’t do some kind of trick like making everybody go to the wrong tomb and have hallucinations of Jesus induced and controlled by their super-science. In other words, nothing ever can prove that the resurrection was supernatural or the work of God. The resurrection of Jesus and the outlandish emphasis put on it destroys the credibility of Christianity.
 
The next big lie is that Jesus was not merely brought back to life but made immortal and has a glorified spiritual body. Not a single alleged witness supports that. Paul speaks of this totally radical body but never says there was evidence. It cannot be stressed how much the Christians need him to be right for the religion says that merely returning from the dead is not enough and does not in itself help or represent the doctrine that the dead rise to enjoy eternal life and perfect. There are other returns from the dead and Jesus' loses importance unless it is all about what eternal salvation is all about.
 
The resurrection of Jesus is a cruel lie and people waste their lives and prayers over it. Sincerity is no excuse for following Jesus unless you have no way of checking it all out objectively.