Village atheism

This advertisement has been running on blog ads for as long as I can remember there being blog ads. I haven't seen the whole film and probably won't, because the advertising and the trailers make it sound like a complilation of typical "village atheist" kinds of arguments. Those are the kind that take an adolescent delight poking fun at the beliefs of the devout without bothering to much know what they are talking about themselves.

Secular historians don't generally question the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a human being. And Christians who don't maintain some kind of "literalist" view of the Christian Scriptures also don't try to argue that there is secular historical proof of supernatural actions on his part, nor of the Resurrection. But the preservation of sayings and stories about Jesus, wrtitten down in the form that we have them within decades of his life and based on what for oral traditions were very recent events, are themselves persuasive secular historical evidence that the man Jesus existed and was a religious teacher with a strong core following.

For most Christians, understanding the "signs and wonders" of Jesus as reported in the Gospels and the Resurrection itself, the core event for the Christian religion, as spiritual events that neither require nor are subject to historical proof in the sense of battles or dynasties in the ancient world is not a problem. Biblical literalists find it problematic. And "village atheists" seem to think the lack of historical evidence should be as much of a problem as fundamentalists see it to be. But they are not dealing with Christianity as most of the religion's practitioners experience it.

Tags: atheism, jesus christ, jesus of nazareth