“History vs. Faith: Dr. Richard Carrier on the Origins of Christianity”

Christmas is around the corner… and today we’re diving into a question most people wouldn’t dare ask out loud: Did Jesus really exist?

In this explosive episode of Truth Be Told, Tony sits down with historian and author Dr. Richard Carrier — one of the world’s leading experts on the origins of Christianity — to explore the evidence, the myths, and the centuries-old assumptions that shaped Western belief.

From Paul’s mysterious letters, to the surprising celestial worldview of the ancient world, to how Christianity may have evolved without a historical Jesus at all… nothing is off-limits.
Dr. Carrier breaks down the scholarship, the controversies, the misconceptions, and what modern people should take away from the earliest Christian writings.

We also dig into:
✨ Why so many cultures invent gods
✨ How ancient people imagined the “heavens”
✨ Why Christianity today looks nothing like the teachings of Jesus
✨ What evidence would convince him a historical Jesus existed
✨ And how secular humanism reframes morality and meaning

Whether you’re a believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, this episode will challenge your assumptions and push you to rethink what you thought you knew about history, faith, and truth. 📌

Watch, comment, debate, and keep it respectful.
Truth isn’t always comfortable — but it’s always worth exploring.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/truth-be-told-paranormal--3589860/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, welcome back to Truth Be Told.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Before we get started, I want to give everyone a
little trigger alert. Today's episode dives into some controversial ideas
that challenge long held beliefs, and I know that it
can stir up some strong reactions. But remember, this show
is about exploring truth from every angle. So I'm asking
you to come into this conversation with an open mind.

(00:23):
You don't have to agree with everything you hear, but
I invite you to listen, sit with it, and see
what sparks your curiosity. Today we're talking with historian doctor
Richard Carrier about some big issues. Did historical Jesus actually exist?
How did Christianity really begin? What did ancient people believe
about Heaven's gods and the cosmos? Why do so many

(00:46):
cultures event divine figures? And how do we make sense
of faith, morality and meaning in the modern world. And
it's deep, it's challenging, and yes, it's going to get
people talking. Well, I'm tony sweet the Truth Be Told.
Please welcome to The Truth Be Told Studios for the
first time historian and author doctor Richard Carrier. There is

(01:11):
doctor Richard Carrier. How you doing great? I am so
excited to have you here. You know, Christmas is coming
up and and I know this could is probably going
to be a little controversial, which, hey, you know, truth
be told After this many years, I like a little controversy,
so I appreciate you being.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Well, I just want to dive right in because I
want to talk about your your background and also all
your books that you've written. But today, with Christmas coming
up in just a few weeks, and you know, Jesus
is the VIP, and so I want to just dive
in and say why why should people consider that the

(01:55):
possibility of Jesus may not existed? Which everybody's gonna go
like the home alone, Like what what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Can we can we start there? Can we just start there?

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah? So this this all started. I mean obviously there
have been people for a long time, over one hundred
years who've been arguing this, often badly. So there's a
lot of internet you know, let's call them conspiracy theories
about the non existence of Jesus, right, that don't hold up, right,
they don't, they don't, they don't survive review really, and

(02:29):
I was when I was an editor for the Secular Web.
This is long ago, when the Internet just began. I
was an avid historicist and I would really lay it
in on the mythicist right and and just completely debunk
what they were saying because it was easy to do.
And then someone told me, you know, you, you know

(02:50):
you're right about all those other people that you've been
interacting with. But there's this guy who has a completely
different theory than they do. And he actually looks like
he knows how to what he's doing. Right. He's got
like sound argumentation and he's got facts backing his case.
And I had multiple people tell me this whose judgment
I trusted or respected, And I go, okay, that's interesting.
All right, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll read

(03:11):
his book. And this is Earl door D and the
Jesus Puzzle. And this was way back, We're talking about
two thousand ish a little after. And I looked at
that and I read I was like, wow, this is
actually pretty good. And he actually does make a goo.
He doesn't fall into any of the mistakes and the
obvious blunders that everybody else was, and he was making

(03:33):
a sound argument. And I realized that no one had
responded to this. So like all the mainstream scholars in
the field had no response to this because no one's
paying attention to it, right, no one's reading this book
or whatever. And so after that I wrote a review
on the Secular Web, and I took the position like,
if this was a dissertation, if I had a student
coming to me, and you know, I got my PhD

(03:54):
in at Columbia University in ancient history, so that that's
why I know what I've done out in this subject.
But what I would treat it like if I was
if he was a graduate student that came to me
and I was his dissertation advisor and he says, here's
my first draft of my dissertation. I'd say like, well, okay,
so here's what I would tell you that you need
to do for this to pass, right, And then the
impressive thing already is like it it was fixable, like

(04:16):
there are errors, there are things, and it needed to
be fixed and things like that, but it's like this
is doable, Like you could make all these corrections and
it would pass as of dissertation. You would be able
to defend it at any university that wasn't completely biased
against you, right, And and so at that point I
was kind of agnostic about this. I was like, well,
I don't know, Like I'm not completely convinced, but I
am also not completely convinced anymore about the historicity side.

(04:39):
So it's I don't know. So then in two thousand
and eight, when I got my PhD finally you know,
passed and got my PhD in the field, and that's
everybody you might remember two thousand and eight, the economy
collapsed here. Yeah, that resulted in a freeze on hires
for humanity as majors, Like there was no market, there
were no jobs for history PhDs, and so I was like, wow, okay.

(05:04):
And also by that time it kind of soured on
the job. I'd now, I've seen how the sausage is
made on the inside, the politics and the amount of
labor you have to put in for the pay doesn't
really work out hourly, like it's bad pay. Actually it's
not great. And so it's like I wasn't really hot
on the job either. And so what I did is
I went to all my readers at the time, because

(05:25):
I had a fan base already, and I said, look,
I'll apply my PhD and do essentially a postdoc research
project on any subject you want if you can clear
my student loans, which by then was like twenty grand,
which is fairly low for most folks. And they raised
the money and cleared my student loans and said, okay, yeah,
so this is the deal. So I'm going to produce

(05:45):
a study of this. And they all wanted historicity of Jesus.
That was the thing, like unanimous. It's like, okay, I
guess I'm doing that then, And so I spent six
years as a PhD would do if you're doing a
postdoc research program, you do the full deep dive. You
check all the sources, you do all the research, read
all of the arguments on both sides that have ever
been published. It was a six year project, right, And

(06:08):
they didn't clear my loans, and so I did this.
So it's basically six years of work for twenty grand
is not a great payout, but nonetheless, and I didn't
have I told her body, look, I'm not guaranteeing your result.
Like if I come out on the other end and
I see, I'm convinced you existed, that's the argument I'm
going to make, right, But the thing is it went
the other way. Surprisingly that every time I picked it
a thread of this. It fell apart, like everything fell apart,

(06:31):
and I was like, okay, this is like this needs
to be published, like people need to know about that.
This stuff doesn't really hold up these sort of assumptions
that people are making, and so that led to multiple
peer reviewed journal articles. My monographs, so both proving History
and on the Historicity of Jesus are both peer reviewed monographs.

(06:52):
And on the Historicity of Jesus, which is the actual thesis,
which I'll talk about in a moment, that's the one
that was published by Sheffield Phoenix, which is like a
significant like respected biblical studies press, and then after that,
in twenty nineteen Raphael Attached are published with Brill, which
is an even more prestigious peer reviewed academic press corroborating.

(07:12):
So we have now two complete peer reviewed studies of
the soul just the question of the historicity of Jesus,
both finding in the negative, both finding that we should
doubt it, we shouldn't be confident in the historicity of Jesus.
And there's been no countermanding study. So no one has
published a peer reviewed study arguing the reverse case against us.
It's not happened. There have been some like you know,

(07:33):
snarky polemical academic reviews, but no one's done a study
that actually interacts with what our arguments and evidence are
r And so that's the state of things now. People
might be wondering, like what the hell am I talking about? Like,
if Jesus didn't exist, how do you explain the origins
of Christianity? Right? And this is one of the failures
of amateur Internet mythicists, at least up till then, was

(07:56):
that they had bad ideas about what the alternative explanation is.
And there are usually weird conspiracy theories and stuff that
there was no evidence for. And it is true, like
if you're gonna if there's no Jesus, you really do
need to be advancing a positive theory like and defending
that theory a model for the origins and development of Christianity.
You got to do that. That's the only proper way
to do this. And so what I did is I
built one of those based on Doherty's thesis. So I

(08:18):
just stripped it down to the most defensible stuff and
compared it to what I call minimal mythists or minimal historicity,
which is not assuming any of the grandiose supernatural stuff,
just just going to like what the mainstream consensus is,
which is which is what I believed before all this,
Which is it? You know, he was just sort of
a you know, a rabbel rousing, sort of charismatic preacher.

(08:39):
Maybe he was, you know, an apocalyptic prophet and thought
God was talking to him. Maybe he thought he was
bringing in the end of the world like whatever, and
then and then legends grew up around him, right, and
maybe he taught some cool shit and you know that
kind of stuff, right, And that's what I thought, And
that's what most I would say most historians now think
is the case that he wasn't a supernatural, miracle working
son of God, that he was just you know, a

(09:00):
Jewish preacher who had an impact and led to all
led to a Christianity. And so I compared that, which
is a much more defensible thesis, with the denial version,
the alternative model, and come out pretty much like I
come out. Basically, the upper margin of error is one
in three chants that there was a historical Jesus, which

(09:22):
is a respectable chance, right, So that means one in
three chances, you know, So it could be like that model,
that standard mainstream historical model of Jesus is plausible and
totally could be true. But I found on balance or probability,
it's this other model. And so question is what is
this other model? And this is the Doherty thesis, right.
What Doherty proposed was that if you read the letters

(09:42):
of Paul and pretend the Gospels don't exist, right, and
they didn't, then right, they come out decades after Paul.
So if you assume those haven't been invented yet, it's
just we're just listening to what Paul has to say.
There's a conspicuous absence of a historical Jesus there in
our sense. He certainly believes there was a Jesus like historically,
and he believes that he was crucified recently in time

(10:04):
like so he believes these things that there's the but
he but the question of where these things happened is
really missing, right, Like so when you get to give
you an example, so like in one Corinthians fifteen, he
gives the creed that you know, this is what we
believe or else our faith is folly right, and he says,
but it starts with the death, and then he appears
to people, So there's no mention of ministry, there's no

(10:26):
mention of a miraculous birth, there's no mention of his genealogy,
which would be important, like if he's a dividic messiah,
you would want to like defend that or be part
of your creed. So it just it looks like and
it also says like the death is in scripture according
to scripture. Right is the source he sites is scripture.
And then the first time he mentions witnesses, it's after
his death that people who saw the vision of Jesus

(10:48):
after and and Paul makes very clear that he thinks
that people saw them internally and visions inside them, like
either back then, like dreams and hallucinations were not distinguished
with any particular vocabulary, so we can't tell if he
means dreams or waking visions. They're the same vocabulary, so
we don't know. But either way, that's how they were
seeing this vision of this angelic figure came to them

(11:09):
and said, hey, I just died recently. Hear the scripture
is proving that it's happening this and proving what it
means and how the world is going to end any
minute now, because this is proof that the world is
not the end is nigh, and that's how the religion began.
It was a belief that this occurred somewhere else outside
of human view. The death and resurrection and burial or
the death, burial and resurrection, right, And the words for

(11:31):
crucifixion are also very vague in terms of what the
method of execution is. So there's the assumption that the
gospels are describing it, but of course, again decades later,
we don't know when that got mapped onto this story.
So the Dougherty thesis is that this all happened in
the lower heavens, that there was there's a lot of
background evidence we have that the people generally believed that

(11:51):
Satan and his demons occupied the atmosphere between the Earth
and the moon, and they had castles and gardens, and
they had their own little territory up there that they
used the sort of law over us down here. And
the big plan was for God to defeat them so
that he could bring us back out of this hell
hole that the devil has made and you know, let
us escape back to heaven or to some better world

(12:12):
that he would make in return. Right, And so in
Doherty's view that this all happened in space, and there's
a lot of precedent for this kind of thing, so
it's not out of the blue, and that people just
learned of it through two ways. One is the visions
or the Jesus would just tell them, like appear to
them and their dreams or whatever and say this is
what happened. And the other is hidden messages that they
were finding in scripture. And this is a message of

(12:35):
interpreting scripture that predates Christianity. You find it all over
the Dead Sea scrolls, the Camaron sect where people believe
that God hid secret messages in scripture. And so you
could build what's called a pessure where you look at
verses in like ten different books and you can pull
those verses together into a singular story that creates the
missing book, right, Like that's the secret storyline that there

(12:57):
was all predicting what would happen in the end times.
And so the Christian you were doing the same thing.
So they're learning about the crucifixion of Jesus and the
role of Satan and how this is important and what
it means and all this stuff. They're pulling it out
of scripture using this sort of creative, imaginary presture method
of interpreting scripture. So those two things combined, and you
see this in Romans sixteen twenty five to twenty six,

(13:17):
where Paul explicitly says this that the teaching of Jesus
and the Gospel we get entirely out of scripture and revelation. Right,
there's no ministry of Jesus, there's no mention of him
to teaching it. And there's a verse also in Romans
ten that in the Greek is more telling that it
shows up in the English. If you know the Greek.
It's basically saying that Jesus never preached to the Jews.

(13:40):
He only ever preached to the apostles. So the Apostles
are the only people who ever heard Jesus teach, and
therefore the Apostles were necessary to preach to the Jews,
so they had to go out and preach to the
Jews and Gentiles and everybody else. But that's the revelatory model,
so that's eliminating the Galilean ministry, where he's preaching to
thousands of Jewish people and so on. There's a variety

(14:00):
of things like that in the text that suggests that
that's how it really began. And then the tendency there
was a common fadback then to take these celestial deities
and put them in history and write a little biography
about them interacting with people in history. So all the
other gods this happened to, you know, Hercules, Romulus, Osiris,
and so on. So what Dougherty's thesis was that the

(14:22):
Christians just did the same thing that they in order
to preach the gospel, they wrote this myth about Jesus
and Galilee to sort of symbolize and communicate the meaning
of the Gospel. And it's very much like in Mark
four where Jesus says, look, you're not supposed to he
says privately to his disciples. He says, you're not supposed
to take what I'm saying literally. You're supposed to understand
the deeper meaning of what I'm saying. And the outsiders,

(14:44):
the people who are listening, are not going to be
saved because we don't want them to turn and be forgiven.
We want them to like join, become members, and then
we can teach them the secret meaning of the stories.
And this matches up with something we find in Plutarch
about how Pagans did the same thing. There was like
an earthly mission for Osiris and earthly history of him,
but that was all myth and really it was just

(15:04):
all symbolic for the cosmic story of Osiris never was
on earth. He goes through his death and resurrection in
the cosmos, you know, in the lower heavens.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Just like all this.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
So it's like a model. It fits in context, right,
there's a lot of context with this makes sense. Dougherty's
thesis makes sense in context, and it does fit the
evidence pretty well right, in fact better this is at
least a little better than the standard model. And you know,
there's a lot of nuances to this, Like there's a
lot of obvious counter arguments that people bring up, and
those are the things that I checked in my six

(15:34):
year postdoc, things like do these counter arguments work, do
they hold up?

Speaker 1 (15:38):
What?

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Like? Is there any way to refute this thesis and
basically and analyze all the possible arguments you could throw
at it, and they're all either weak or bad. And
I was surprised by that.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Actually, what was that moment though, with the background before
you really started researching this period, What was the moment
where you personally was like, yeah, wait a minute, I
might have been taught wrong or learned wrong.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know I have that moment over
and over again. I'm sure you do, because it's always
something right. It is there a cue document that is
the source for Luke and Matthew. I just was told
that and I just believed it, and then I like
research it now the arguments for this are terrible, and
that you know, I have that same reaction. And then
there's other things like there's a thing called doctism, which

(16:28):
there's a whole story behind that, but there's this item
after item after item. The things that I thought were
true turned out to be false when I checked into them,
and so there's a lot of false information that's writing
on sort of dogma and institutional inertia that people aren't checking.
But for the for the whole big picture, the moment
occurred when I read Doherty, and it was because it's
very gradual, so like Doherty didn't convince me, like I

(16:50):
wasn't walking out of there like well there was no
Jesus right, I was like right, But what he did
that the sort of flipping of the paradigm for me
was this, Well, he actually how he's made it at
least plausible, and I didn't think that was possible. I
didn't think it could make a plausible case for the
non existence of Jesus. So at that point I was
kind of on the fence. I didn't really know. And
it took, you know, over the gradual six years, it

(17:12):
took a while for me to get more and more
confident that actually he was right, and it did take
tons of research and all these moments where these arguments
would fall apart, and so i'd have the you know,
revelation after revelation as well, Wow, that argument is way
weaker than I thought, Like I was using that argument
ten years ago, and I shouldn't have been. So that's
that's kind of like the answer to your question. It's

(17:32):
not like there was one Eureka moment, but it did
start with reading Doherty's book, and I wouldn't have done
that had people not recommended it to me. Who was
judgment I trusted because normally I'm just not interested in
the most mythesist literature, certainly back then. So yeah, that's
kind of where it began.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
I would have to say, I remember, I can't remember
his name.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
He's he's passed away. He was a scholar in religion,
but he was I remember seeing an old interview of
his talking about Jesus and as a myth, because he
said there were like six or seven figures before Jesus

(18:16):
that were very similar to Jesus about.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
Everything that he taught.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
So he feels that, I would interpreted that he felt
that those old stories kind of became Jesus. What is
your thought, in your expertise on past religions that actually
could have created who Jesus was.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, so that's kind of onto something. It's a little
like the story is a little more complex, right, So
the reality is there were a bunch of these figures,
and of course it depends on what you mean by
these figures, because Jesus is kind of like five different
figures folded into one.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Yes, yes, I think that's what he meant.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Performing multiple different functions, and for each one there's precedence
and also like not precedents, but other figures after him. So,
like the religion we were pretty sure began in the
thirties AD, whether he existed or not, it launched with
these visions like whether it existed or not, the religion
begins with the post mortem visions that's in the Creed

(19:21):
that Paul cites when they decide that this is in scripture,
and then they have the visions of Jesus telling him
it all happened, or it's all real, or it's all
God's plan or whatever. That starts the religion, and that
probably dates to the thirties AD. Now we have these
other sort of messianic figures after thirty between thirty and
sixty six when the Jewish War started, right, and the

(19:42):
Gospels get written after the Jewish War, because that was
a huge existential change in the whole world at that time,
especially for Judaism and Christianity. Is it was really lynchpin moment,
and that sort of spawned the decision to sort of
create the Gospels to start marketing Christianity as a kind
of replacement for the now destroyed Temple Cult because the
Temple cult was gone. So even even all of Judaism

(20:04):
had to rethink their entire religion right at that point
because it was all based on the sacrifices and the
calendar at the Temple, right, and so the Temple's gone,
they were not allowed to go back, so they had
to reinvent their religion essentially, and so that created a
market vacuum for Christians to move into. And there's also
like the emperor started taxing Jews, so there was the

(20:24):
jew the Jewish tax that was going to the Jewish
temple he redirected to the Pagan temple in Rome. That
was kind of a punishment. So this this created an
incentive to just not want to be Jewish anymore, right,
Like you don't want to pay this tax. Right, So
so Christian saw on market to hit right, like say, look,
you can get all the good stuff about Judaism, but

(20:44):
you don't need the dietary laws, you don't need to
cut off the peace of your genitalia, and you can
get all of this and you don't have to pay
the tax. Right. The only downside is that we're not
licensed to practice. And under the Roman Empire, you needed
a license to assemble for any purpose, even like to
be a firefighter, to have a firefighters and a fire

(21:05):
fighting house, you had to have a license from the government.
And and this is out of fear of political activity, right,
So like the emperor was at the time, like in
the in the early second century, wasn't even allowing firefighting
houses to be assembled because they were worried that they
would become political clubs and start a rebellion or something
like that. So so that the fear was politics, not religion.

(21:27):
When the when the Romans came after the Christians, which
was actually much rarer than the Christians, make out that
the Romans really didn't care that much about the Christians,
and when they did it was only because of this
illegal assembly thing that like, technically you're breaking the law.
What we investigate you guys, and we find out you're
kind of not doing any of the things that we're
really worried about, but it is the law. So you know,

(21:48):
if if you get calm, we're going to have to
kill you. But really we're not going to hunt you down.
And that's literally from the Emperor Trajan. We have a
letter that he wrote. It says, don't even hunt them
down like this. They're they're harmless. It's not a big deal, right,
But the worry was this as a thing, so that
was the only thing going against Christians. But they kind
of sort of established themselves to the point where no
one was really harassing them anymore and they could be

(22:09):
public about it and all of this stuff. It all
the real harassments started way later, so in the late
third century when at the end of a massive civil
war and a massive depression, so they they had a
fiduciary collapse of their fiduciary economy, and then there were
witch hunts and then they picked someone to blame, and
they picked the Christians, and then you get the massive
pogroms against Christians start way back then. But by then

(22:30):
Christianity had already grown. It had open churches in all
the cities and like it was, it was a major
religion by then. But anyway, so that's the sort of
story of that. But otherwise they had all the advantages
over the Jews, who everybody hated because of all the
wars they were fighting against Rome and then for all
the other usual Antisemitic reasons, right like all this everything
that anty Semites like go on about, they were going

(22:52):
on about it back then too, and so so like
it was unpopular to be Jewish, and so the Christians
seized on that market. So that's kind of the story
of how this happened. And that's when the historical version
of this became more popular. They had to defend that
to secure themselves right, so that the original version of
of a revelatory Jesus just wasn't as marketable, and therefore

(23:15):
it became the hostile like it became a heresy. They
declared this a heresy. You can't claim this anymore. And
one of the things they do in my new book
on the obsolete paradigm of a historical Jesus is I
have a whole chapter showing that we actually have a
lot of evidence that there were these Christians teaching this,
that there was a celestial execution. Jesus was never on earth,
yet he only comes to earth in the end times.
I don't know what you guys are thinking, et cetera.

(23:37):
And they were condemned, they were morally vilified, they were told,
they were shunned, they were you know, the Christians on
the Orthodox Sydbe were told not to talk to these people,
don't read their books, et cetera. And so all that
stuff was destroyed. And what we have is the surviving
politically successful church, which is the historicist Church. And that's
how we ended up where we are today and why
people are like mystified how there could be a non

(23:58):
historical back stories because the non historical backstory was all
wiped out. It was it was declared heretical and gotten
rid of and their text not preserved and so on,
and and that's actually a mainstream story. We know the heresies,
all their texts were destroyed or not preserved and so on.
We know we're missing a ton of information. We know
the historicists will love to make stuff up, and we're

(24:19):
wild polemicists and all of this. So that all fits right.
It actually like it connects with Doherty's thesis and makes
sense of it.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
I wish we could go down into the vaults of
the Catholic Church. I'm sure there's some of the historical
records down there that we could probably find some information.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
You know, what, do you know what? People always say
that to me, It's like, what do you think is
in there? And I think, you know, if there's anything
really damning, they would have destroyed it by now.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
I'm sure they would.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, If anything, there's probably a lot of
really horrible stuff about their like more recent crimes than
ancient stuff.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
But yeah, you've brought up celestial.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
I'm celestial. I know what it is.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
But for the for some of the people that are
listening today, especially when it's when we're talking about Christianity.
What does that mean when it comes to say that
celestial You know, Jesus was not necessarily human, but what
is celestial?

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Right? Right? That's a really great question. I'm glad you asked,
because this is another one. This is and I talk
about this a little in Obsolete Paradigm, the new book
that just came out, Which is it? I think people
I took it for granted because I was trained up
in ancient history and I knew ancient stuff. But then
I realized, like there's a disconnect between the ancient world

(25:46):
and the modern world about this, which is today, when
you talk about heaven, people think, well, that's another dimension.
It's not in this universe. You can't fly a rocket
to it. It's somewhere else, right, It's another plane of existence,
and God is there, and all the stuff that happens
in the heaven happens there, and it's not in the
universe per se. That view of the world did not

(26:09):
exist in antiquity. It gets invented somewhere towards the in
the late Middle Ages, actually really even later than that,
but the nascent ideas start in the late Middle Ages,
you know, an antiquity. No one had any concept of
other planes of existence. God God lived literally just shortly
above Saturn like everything they every there with all these

(26:30):
the spheres. So Earth is in the middle, right, and
everything orbits around the Earth and these spheres, and that
the furthest sphere, and that they believe that the further
you get away from Earth, the more perfect the world is.
So like each sphere has more perfect copies of everything
on Earth. So if you have gardens and castles and
halls and vaults and things at each level, they get
more and more perfect, and the angels get more and

(26:52):
more perfect as you go up. And then the most
perfect was the starfield, which is the final orbit, and
that's where God lived. God lived where the stars were,
which is you know that, So you could literally like
measure it in miles. You could fly a rocket there
in theory, if you had a good enough telescope, you
could go see God sitting on his throne like. That's
how they understood the world back then, and they divided

(27:12):
it between the Moon and the Earth. They knew the
moon was one hundred two hundred thousand miles away, so
they knew that it was a vast, really huge territory.
They thought the atmosphere, most of them thought the atmosphere
went all the way up, so it was all air
with clouds and stuff going all the way up to
the moon. Some of the more informed scientists knew it
was more like forty thousand mile Yeah, forty thousand miles,

(27:35):
not all the way there. And then were they were
arguing over what the remaining you know, one hundred and
sixty mile thousand miles was made of. But the typical person,
the average person, and certainly the average rabbi or Christian theologian,
thought it was all atmosphere, right and so like, and
that's where Satan and everybody lived. That the idea of
Satan and everybody living underground that didn't exist for the Christians. Yet,

(27:58):
there was no underground hell coexistent with them. They imagined
in the future God would make one and it would
then would throw the devil there and when it was
all over, But the idea that there was a hell
that people went to now that's below the earth, that
didn't exist then either. The dead sort of just floated
off into space and hovered around the moon, right like
we have this Plutarch talks about like the idea that

(28:19):
the the dead hover around the moon, and the lucky
ones find their way through and can get up to
the higher, more perfect heavens. And this is what the
mystery religions were supposed to help you with. It's like,
how do you find the door, what's the secret code?
How do you get up into the other upper levels,
and so on, and so they really thought of this
in a very physical, cosmic sense. And so when in
the Doherty thesis, which is entirely plausible, his idea is

(28:41):
that Jesus gets executed by Satan and his demons somewhere
on some cloud city or garden, somewhere in the atmosphere,
way way up like one hundred thousand miles up, halfway
to the moon, right somewhere somewhere below the moon, but
way beyond human vision and so on. But then it
really happened. This is a thing like Paul and the
first Christians thought that this really happened, that there really

(29:02):
was some sort of like crucifixion on a cloud somewhere,
you know, way up there in the sky. But the
only way to learn about it is to be told
about it, you know, divinely or through scripture and so on,
and so that's yeah, it's important to note that what
they're talking celestially, they're thinking actual outer space. They're thinking,
like what we understand is outer space. They thought it

(29:22):
was full of all kinds of cities and angels and
stuff like that. All the planets were inhabited, like angels
lived on them and did weird things for God on
them that were somehow important to things going on Earth.
Snow would be stored up there in giant vaults, so
when the snow came, they would open the vaults and
snow would fall down through outer space on the Earth.
Like this is the kind of stuff that they thought,
like took seriously back then. And so you have to

(29:45):
understand the origins of Christianity in that context that that's
the mindset, and that's how people understood the world to
be then. It's very different from what Christians understand to
the world to be today, and so that can sometimes
become a block to understanding this ancient theory.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
I mean, truth be told.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
You know, we're all about paranormal and the Ananaki and
where humanity came from.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
I mean it kind of in.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
Some ways ties into that so that that could spark
even more interesting Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Well, you know, all the paranormal traditions today, you know,
they do stem from Some of them are actually lifting
ideas that had their start in the ancient world. And
there's a lot of like the someday I'd like to
do a book on the paranormal and the ancient world.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
I would love that.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
There's so much stuff. Yeah, there's so many interesting things.
There are goods, some good books about magic, like how
they thought magic worked, because I don't know if you
know much about magical traditions, Like you have natural magic,
you have demonic magic. There's different kinds, and ancient magic
was all demonic magic. So it was all based on
the idea that you were controlling invisible demons fatting around
the air, you compel them to do your bidding, and

(30:49):
that's like all even white magic was demonic because back
then demons were not morally classified, like the Christians classified
them as evil, right, because the Jews did, but the
Pagans that there's uh, you know, demon comes from dimonis,
which just means divinity, So just all the lower gods
were dimona is. They were all like so you know,
all the gods are demons in some sense, and some

(31:09):
are good and some are bad, and some are mixed
and right, so like you can persuade or bribe them
or compel them or whatever, depending on how powerful they
were and so on. So that's how it worked back then.
But you see like how that evolved into modern concepts
of magic today. And the only thing that's like new
in paranormalism today is the other plane of existence, thinking

(31:29):
that there's some other planes of existence which people can
transfer to the ethereal plane. And all of these ideas
those are not ancient, those are very modern actually. But
then if you import all these ideas from the ancient world,
you kind of get the mixture of ideas that we
see today. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
No, I mean it keeps us busy.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
I want to I want to jump back to the
Gospels a little bit, because I think anything from that era,
I mean, it's ancient history.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
It's ancient for us.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
And do you consider the Gospels useful as a historic
a historical source at all or.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
So here's the thing. So, and I talk about this
in Absollete Paradigm. I have a really good example that
I go through in detail in chapter six of that
book where I talk about there's this weird story in Luke,
the Gospel of Luke, and it's right before Jesus gets arrested,
and he he has this thing where he says, well,

(32:33):
like I've told you like to go around without a
purse or a bag or whatever, but now I say,
go around with a purse or a bag, and do
you have swords? You're going to carry swords or whatever.
And they say, well, we have two swords, and he says, okay,
that's enough, and then he's and then they say why
and he says, well, because I have to be numbered
with transgressors. He has a scripture. Right, it's a very

(32:54):
strange story. It doesn't make sense historically, like this isn't
a conversation that would happen in real life, Like two
swords isn't enough to do anything. But also there's some
cleverness in the Greek. When you look at the Greek
the structure of it, it's actually a very good trickster
god narrative. And if you know, like like trickster gods,
they always it's very much like the Devil's contract where

(33:14):
they say one thing, but if you take it literally,
it actually means something you didn't expect, right, And the
Gospels are full of these stories where Jesus says one
thing but he really means another. And he talks about
the least shall be first, and everything's going to be
upside down. You don't understand how it's gonna work. And
he'll say all these paradoxical things that people misunderstand, right,
And there's a lot of this misunderstanding. He'll say a thing,

(33:35):
they don't understand it because they're taking it too literally,
But he talks to his disciples secretly. If you understand
it figuratively, then you'll get it right, you'll understand. And
there's a lot of stories in the Gospels that are
like that that when you understand what the meaning is
that the author's trying to convey, it becomes much more enlightening.
Like it's actually much more powerful as literature when you

(33:55):
get what they're doing, because it's so brilliant. The Gospels
aren't really brilliantly constructed literature. Sure, And this is one
where you look at the Greek and it's actually Jesus
was not advocating swords. He was actually comparing two different
ideas of the Messiah. The slaughter Messiah, the militant Messiah
who would kill everybody with two swords. There happens to

(34:16):
be at the time there was popular fan fiction going around.
When Luke wrote, it was spinning one of the Old
Testament stories where the Seshamites were killed with two swords.
Right there was over the rape of Dinah, and you
had Simon and his buddy. They go, just the two
of them and they wipe out the Sheeshamites, and the
Old Testament this is not reflected on as a good thing.

(34:38):
In fact, they're cursed for the rest of their life.
Their lines are obliterated by God, specifically because they broke
a covenant and so this is actually a treaty violation.
It was murder, et cetera. And they were saying it
was righteously, but we had to avenge Dinah, like they're
all self righteous. But what was happening by the time
that Luke was writing is that this was getting spun
into a positive story that these guys were heroes, and

(35:01):
there's a say that this is how the Messiah will win.
He'll just defeat everybody with two swords, just like the Scheschemites.
And you see this in the novel. There's this this
fictional novel called Joseph and Asenath that was probably a
hot novel on the market. When Luke is writing, and
in Joseph and Aseneth, this is the same thing. Look
this two sword story. These guys are heroes. This is

(35:22):
what God can do. Do you see? You know that
kind of thing. So in fact, Luke is actually saying,
don't adopt that this is a bad model. What you
should do is you need to adopt the pacifist model,
which is the mission where you go collect money for
the mission peacefully and not so the real message was
not collect swords, right, but you'll miss that. And there's

(35:44):
a lot of like historians who take this as a
historical scene are trying to argue over, well, what swords
were they these? How big were they? Why was it too?
Why do they need to like what is physically happening
in this scene, And they're missing the whole literary message
of the story. And so I tell that long story
here to sort of illustrate that. That's what I think
the Gospels are is they are myths deliberately constructed to

(36:05):
convey ideas and teachings, and they're not meant to be historical.
They have historical color in them like any historical fiction would.
And it'd be similar to if we were to take
the Harry Potter novels or Star Wars and we admit
those did not happen. Nevertheless, we can use them to
teach moral lessons from We can say like, oh, this happens,
This teaches us this thing, and we do that all

(36:27):
the time, right, And that's kind of how the Gospels
are being written. They're written that way, and there's more
nuanced to this and how it was being sold in
different ways and so on. But that's how I take
the Gospel. So I take the Gospels as fiction. But
as a historian, you can learn things about history by
studying it's fiction, right Like if you read Dashiel Hammett novels,

(36:48):
you're learning things about, you know, the America in the
early twentieth century. Right Like, even though there is no
you know, the stories aren't true, that people in them
aren't real, they import a lot of facts that are
going on and assumptions about how cities work, how crime works,
how police work, and all that stuff. It is true,
you know, true in the sense that that's how it worked.

(37:08):
Then so as a historian, you can use those novels
to reconstruct things. Same with Jane Austen, like you can
go reconstruct the early eighteen hundreds by looking at her
novels in terms of how society worked and stuff, even
though they're fiction. And so I think that's how historians
can use the Gospels, plus the idea of getting at
the teachings, like what is a literary purpose of this?
Tells us what the author wanted us wanted us to understand, right, so,

(37:31):
like they did this on purpose, And so if you're
not looking for this messaging, you're missing the entire point
that the author wrote these gospels for. And so I
think that's one of the biggest messages that we can
get out of this is if we stop trying to
reconstruct the historical backstory to the Gospels, then we can
start paying attention to what the gospels are actually saying,
which is a completely different thing. And so I think

(37:53):
that if you want to really understand what the authors
were on about, you've got to approach them as literature
that's deliberately doing this kind of thing, and not the
historical reporting kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
What what would be your interpretation of like extra extra
if I can say extra biblical references to Jesus, such
as like Josephus and and I'm going to see if
I say it correct tech tech taxeitus.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
It's tacitus. You're closer to the original. It would be
Takitus would be the Latin, but today we're calling it tacitus.
That's just the English confuse, the English spin on it. Yeah,
but Taktos is actually the Latin. So yeah. So I
mean the short answer to that is that those are

(38:41):
both post Gospel and they don't say anything that's not
in the Gospels, so we can't prove that they're independent
of the Gospels. So they might just be reading the
Gospels and taking them at the face value and saying,
oh well, or they're talking to Christians who are repeating
these things to them that the Christians took from face
value the Gospels. Right, It's just like Mark four where

(39:03):
Jesus says, like, you will tell the outsider these sort
of literal stories and they won't understand them, but don't
explain it to them, like let them believe the literal thing,
we'll understand the true meaning. So even the Christians could
have been telling them all of these things and you know,
kind of snickering saying like, yeah, they don't know the
real truth. But you know, this is the this is
the surface level that outsiders deserve, Right, that's the story
you get to hear. And so that would explain those

(39:25):
those texts, and so we can't use them as evidence
for historicity. We would need earlier texts to have done that,
or we would need texts that have more information in
them that's not in the Gospel, so like to show
that they were using sources other than the Gospels, and
we don't have that. So so that's an example of
the kind of thing that it's not terribly useful because
it's too late and it's too derivative to be meaningful.

(39:49):
And so there's more to that story, Like there's the
possibility that those guys never even wrote those things and
so on, but that doesn't matter even if they did.
The point I just made still holds.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
What do you what do you?

Speaker 2 (40:06):
What do you What evidence would change your mind? What
to say, you know, Jesus did exist or possibly Jesus
did exist? What now you know in twenty twenty five,
what evidence would actually convince you?

Speaker 3 (40:21):
Yeah, I so I explore this a lot. I talk
about in chapter I think chapter five. I can't remember
chapter five or chapter six. I think it's chapter six
of Obsolete Paradigm. I could do this for historical people.
This is why I'm convinced these historical people existed. And
it's a variety of different reasons for different people. Right,
So it's not like one particular thing that'll do it,

(40:42):
as a variety of any one of those things could
do it. And so if you want to get a
sense of the answer to my complex long answer to
that question, that's where it to go, right to go
check that thing. And I just added to it recently
on my blog. I did Aristotle. I did why are
we sure Aristotle existed? And I go through and explain
in detail, and that kind of reflects that sort of
a short version of what shows up in my book

(41:05):
and for a bunch of other people. And one of
the people comes close is Apollonius of Tayana, who's a
sort of like a pagan messianic figure, is very similar
to Jesus in a lot of ways. And the thing
is that the historians aren't sure he existed either, right, So, like,
but what I do is I show like, well, on
balance of probability, he probably did, but we can't be sure.

(41:25):
And then I show why, Like what kind of evidence
do we have for him that we don't have for Jesus?
And really it's it's stuff that we already have already had, right, So,
Like if you're talking about, like what would convince me
now in a world where that evidence doesn't exist, it
would we would have to be talking about some new find, right,
We've found something new but broader, like there there could

(41:48):
have always been this evidence, right Like so like we
could always have had a full dossier of Paul's letters
that were authenticated to Paul's time that talk about the
ministry of Jesus. Like that would be a slam job,
right that would be I think this very strong evidence
for the historicity of Jesus. But another one that could
be I'll tell you, like an interesting story about what
could have happened is that there were a lot of

(42:12):
historians of Nero alive at the time, so like they
were they witnessed the fire of Rome, the burning of Rome,
and what Nero did after and Tascitus the text of
Tasitas now claims that he killed a bunch of Christians
blamed them for the fire and mentions like what they believe.
So there's a brief line about what they believed. Now,

(42:36):
if that's authentic, his most likely source would have been
Plenty the Elder who was one of these historians who
wrote about Nero, and for various reasons, that probably does
not survive in what we call the Herculaneum library, but
his sources might, So there might be other eyewitness sources.
Almost certainly, it's got to be someone who was there
at the time wrote about it, and their book will

(42:57):
be under the ashes of Herculaneum in Italy right now.
So there's a whole library sitting under the ash and
we're not digging it up because of monetary and political reasons.
This is basically this. No one can basically everybody's loggerheads.
No one can agree on what to do to go
in to get these books. But there's a bunch of
books there, and this was they were buried in seventy

(43:18):
a d. So if we were to if we finally
go in there and finally excavate all those books, and
some of them were like these people who saw the
aftermath of Rome, they would have probably personally talked to
Christians in the sixties and or they would have heard
the propaganda against them. They could there could be data
and their descriptions that just make it very clear that

(43:40):
Jesus actually was a rebel executed by Pontius Pilot and
that all of this other stuff was just legends grown
up around him, which is the standard model, that's the
mainstream version of a historical Jesus. So if we got
documents like that out of Herculaneum and it could be there,
like there could be this stuff there already. If that, yeah,
that could do it, right, It's a really good one

(44:00):
came out of there, like oh wow, yeah, that's that
pretty much nails. It definitely was a historical Jesus, but
it would have to be something like that, right, So
lost a recovered letter of Paul or something.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Why do you feel I mean, every as a human
as we both are, at least I think you are.
You're not Ai or anything, but yeah, yeah, it's hard
for me to believe there's not something. But why do

(44:32):
you believe humans? You know, Hindu, Buddha, Jewish, every religion
or every culture ancient history has a god or something
bigger than us. Why do you feel humans need that?

(44:55):
And and do you believe there's something bigger out there?
Because it it is kind of to me. I always think, well,
it's hard for me to believe the earth not necessarily
was created by in you know, seven days or whatever
it was.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
That is difficult for me to believe.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
But yeah, everything has to be so specific on how
to breathe and how to the heart pumps and the
mind thinks, and there has to be something that created something.
So why do you think humans need this? And do
you believe there's something bigger out there?

Speaker 3 (45:32):
Yeah? Of course, I mean I'm an infamous atheist, of course,
so for me, I want to know why that is
the case. My blog has a lot of stuff. I
have a book sense in Goodness without God that goes
into all of this. I mean, there is obviously something bigger,
like the cosmos is like, yeah, unimaginably huge, right, and
you know there's more things in heaven than we can contemplate, really,

(45:56):
but that means physical heaven, right, So the question is
is there something greater that's an intelligence? Right? That is
there something supernatural working at And of course people on
the secular side that you've got the simulationists who think
maybe we're a simulation in some alien's bedroom or something. No,
I don't think any of those things are true. And
the reason is because I think the evidence there's two

(46:18):
ways that these what we observed can come about, and
one is like intelligent design or guidance, and the other
is through a series of accidents interacting with physical laws.
And so, like you can, the evidence stacks up for
the physical law accident storyline in a lot of ways,
Like there's a lot of weird things that don't make
sense except as what we would expect on that case.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
So, I mean, we could do a whole show just
on that.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Be happy to so the so, but I got distracted there.
So you were asking like what was what? Why do
humans go to this? And you and you're right, they
all do that. Atheism is rare. I would say naturalism.
Let's let's do it more like worldview, because we're not
just talking about the belief in one thing. We're talking

(47:04):
about a worldview, like how do you explain all of
the existence? And we know naturalism can be arrived at
independently because we have ancient Chinese naturalists. So Wang Chung
is a famous example is a Confucian philosopher who went
around debunking supernatural versions of things, and he didn't. He
thought gods were more like just concepts, and religions were
about social organization and so on. So like, he was

(47:27):
very much not a supernaturalist and organized his explanation of
everything in terms of natural laws and so on. And
then of course we have Aristotle, and then eventually straight O,
which is a third head of Aristotle school strata is
full on getting rid of the gods and doing the
whole naturalism things. So it can be done. But culturally,
every ethnographic as far as I know, every every culture,

(47:48):
whole culture in the ethnographic record that we have, which
is hundreds and hundreds of cultures past and present, all
have supernaturalism in them somehow. And you know, summer to
you can say, like Sweden and so on, even America
is becoming more and more naturalists, et cetera. That's kind
of a new development. So the question is why did

(48:09):
all these independent human groups come up with gods? And
one thing to point out is that that they didn't
come up with God singular. That's actually a late development.
It's not even really a thing in Judaism when Christianity began,
because they have angels and demons and they have Satan,
and so these are really godlike beings. So it's really
a pantheon, right, they're not even really but the at
least they're talking about one supreme God, and Aristotle did too.

(48:33):
His is more of a god of the philosophers, but
it's still but this idea of a singular God seems
to come out of Persia, kind of uniquely out of Persia.
So the Zoroastrian religion predates all this other stuff and
it diffuses out and it affects Judaism, so we have
a lot of imports the Jewish idea and the resurrection
of the dead, Messianism, a apocalypticism, Satan is an enemy

(48:55):
of God like all this comes from Persia, the Persian religion,
and then we see it seep into Greek as well,
as we see in Stoic theology. We see an Aristotelian
theology and so on. So it seems to be just
one idea that one culture came up with and it
just got popular in various places. But if you go
look at all the pockets that didn't get the memo
as it were, or predate that or codate it or whatever.

(49:17):
They're all polytheists rights and even like more correctly animists,
so they see, like every tree is a god right.
But it comes out of just that we have some
sort of built in psychological mechanisms that make us think
that because it's easier for us to organize nature as
a society, because we've grown up, we've evolved to be

(49:40):
social animals. We need to be able to build social
networks in our head and navigate social networks, and so
we just start mapping that onto nature. And there's a
variety of like there's agency over detection and these other
things that we found where it's it's to your advantage
to over detect agency than to underdetect it, because underdetecting
it gets you killed. Over detecting it the worst thing

(50:01):
it does. It wastes a little bit of your time.
So wasting a little bit of time is like better
than being dead. So like so it's worth the cost
essentially to over detect agency. And so we have this
tendency to like assign mental action behind the things that
we see, and this is it's built in, so like
we the moment we're born we already have this hardware

(50:21):
in us, this design to make us think that way,
and that's why kids have like are very much into
like imaginary friends, and they're much more prone to seeing
spirits everywhere. Animals are intelligent, you know, like like there's
they answer promorphize everything. You kind of have to train
them out of that to get them to believe in
just one God, right, Like that has to be a
cultural thing that you instill in them. So yeah, the answer,

(50:44):
my answer to your question is it's just we've evolved,
and it would be expected that we would evolve in
a way that we would be have this tendency to
answer promorphize everything. It's just easier for us to organize
the world that way. In our head. It just happens
to be erroneous. And that's not the only thing that
we do wrong in our brain. Religion isn't the only

(51:05):
straight thing. There's a lot of like built in bad
reasoning in our heads that make us come to incorrect
conclusions about politics and daily life and love and romance
and all of these other things. There's a lot of
built in evolutionary stuff in our head. This cluese of
our sort of randomly assembled brain that isn't the smartest,

(51:26):
it doesn't get things right. And we have to train
out of ourselves right, so that we have to learn math,
we have to learn science, like we have to teach
ourselves that critical thinking. We have to teach ourselves that
it's not born in We're not inborn with that kind
of that level of like smart analytical reasoning that can
kind of get behind the faulty intuitions that we sometimes have.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Yeah, and I know we got to get out of here,
but I heard you talk about this on another show,
and I've been, you know, at fifty six years old
to grew up in the Bible bell Christians. My biggest
issue I have with Christianity now is the the teachings

(52:09):
of it, but not living by it, of you know,
the teachings of Jesus of being loving, caring, you know,
giving to the poor, you know, staying away from the rich.
But yet they're completely opposite of what Jesus was.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
And that that's my biggest my biggest I guess fritique
of it.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
Yeah, yeah, Like what Christianity has become as an institution
and as a sort of elite captured cultural mechanism is
very different from what it was supposed to be. And
you get this already. Yeah right, well you get this
in the letters of Paul already, where like there's some
bad ideas in Paul, but he's still thinking in terms

(52:59):
of like communal, legalitarian, pacifist thinking. He's not thinking in
terms of, well, you should keep a baseball bat by
your bed in case someone steals your watch or something. Right,
that's not the thinking. And then when you see get
to Matthew, get to Matthew, and you get all of
these sort of like total pacifist and forgiving and loving

(53:20):
ideas that these were radical in terms of like how
you should live and are not what's being practiced today.
I have a blog article called I can't remember the
exact title. It's like open letter to the Christian. I
think you're worshiping the Antichrist. And the reason is is
that Antichrist means the opposite of Christ, right, and so

(53:42):
you can embody the spirit of Christ even if he
didn't exist. So it's like the spirit of Christ is
an idea, it's a concept, it's like an ideal way
of being. Just that you can embody the spirit of
Darth Vader or the spirit of obi wan Kenobi. They
don't have to exist for you to like model yourself
after this character. The model sort of embody the spirit
of Christ. It would be to embody what Christ actually

(54:04):
is depicted as a character doing and teaching. But Antichrist
means the opposite of that. So if you embody the opposite,
you are literally embodying the spirit of the Antichrist. And
that's true whether spirits exist or not, because this is
totally a conceptual idea. And what I do is I
go through the teachings of Jesus and show what like
the lead teachings of the evangelical church today, it's the opposite, right, So,

(54:27):
like Jesus said, prayer in private, because people who pray
in public are hypocrites. But what do the evangelicals want public?
Not only public prayer, but forced public prayer? Right Like
it's the exact opposite. And so like that's the Antichrist.
Like the evangelical Christianity is worshiping the Antichrist. And if
you think you think I got them on just the
one thing, No, there's item after item you mentioned, like
being loving, and there's like this Jesus is not vague

(54:50):
about that, like he gets more specific about what do
I mean, Oh, here, here's some things that you should do,
and evangelicals teach the opposite of that and do the
opposite of that. So yeah, I think that's corrupted the
original idea of what the first Christians and earliest Christians wanted,
Like they would not have wanted at all what Christianity

(55:10):
has become. Yeah, and that's certainly not what's showing up
in the Gospels. And that's another example. If you just
read the Gospels as literature trying to teach you an idea,
like they have this idea. They think it's a good
idea about how to be and how to make the
world a better place, And if you actually pay attention
to it, it's not what's being sold as Christianity most

(55:30):
of the time today. And so I think that makes
sense to be like, yeah, actually I like that program,
or at least most of it. I can push off
the parts that are bad and keep the parts that
are good. But that's just not the program that Christianity
as an institution is selling today. And so like, yeah,
you can be completely against the sort of organized institutional
Christianity cultural Christianity, but be all about the best messaging

(55:54):
that you can pull out of the earliest Christian literature.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
No, I The good example is when there was a
when I lived in Kansas City years ago, there was
a guy. He was a millionaire and he would give
away tens of thousands of dollars. It was always on
the news, but he was he would never want to

(56:18):
be seen, He never wanted his name to be known.
He just wanted to give. And he wasn't trying to
be in the on television. He just wanted to give
back to people. Where I feel that's what Christianity should
be about. It's like giving without wanting, and where yeah,

(56:39):
many Christian Christians I feel it's like, oh, I give
way ten thousand dollars today, and it was like call
the news, I give way ten I mean.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Or kick off the box.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
I'm done, yes, yes, so yeah, and uh.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
Well it even extends more broadly than that, right, you know,
christ Jesus says give all your wealth away, which is
like that's a little that's pretty rare, but still like
so I'll give you an example. I long ago, I
did an article before even what's happening now, which what's
happening now is on next level stuff. But I'm talking
about immigration sort of attitude towards immigrants among the Christian community.

(57:15):
And I wrote a blog kind of like criticizing the
Christian position on this, but then I realized, like I've
found some counter examples, like liberal Christians with actually explaining
how Jesus would be on the other side of this,
Like Jesus would say accept, like accept the refugee. That's yeah,
you should bring them in and help them. Like that's
that's the Samaritan, right, the good Submaritan story. Beyond that,

(57:37):
like he's talking about literally this, yeah, yeah, bring in,
Like every one of these people is me, right, So
how you treat these people is how you're treating me.
Like that's literally what he says, right, And so there
were Christians who are saying, like, yeah, no, we should
we should accommodate these people, we should find help, we
should help them, we should not be treating them like this,
and so that happens, right. So it's just that's not

(57:58):
the mainstream doctrine of Christianity. Most Christians aren't on that page.
And so that's why Christianity can be a turnoff for
people because it's lost its way, really, and I think
that there's a lot more to this messaging than just
the things that'll be brought up. I think people check
out my Antichrist page where I go through item after item,
there's a bunch of stuff in there. So yeah, I think,

(58:21):
like the best the Christianity had is good, but it's
just being drowned out by Antichrist thinking really.

Speaker 1 (58:29):
Yeah, no, I agree.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
I think there's going to have to be a part two,
but I think we'll have you back. Like you said,
we can talk about that other subject for hours for
the people that are I know this is going to
be controversial, but sometimes controversial things can help people really
think about what their belief is, what they want to
do better, what things that they can change. So what

(58:54):
do you hope people take away from your books? And
I'm going to show it's not a book. You have books, books.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
More to come, more to come, But yeah, that's what's
that's what's out now.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
But what do you hope people take away from your books?
And what our topic is today?

Speaker 3 (59:10):
Yeah? So you know our topic today is, in my opinion,
just sort of like a side story in history, right,
Like I really that's I think what I would want
people to take away is to not like sort of
dispel the false messaging you've received about the ancient world
and the origins and development of Christianity, like you've ben
sold a bunch of myths. And I, as a historian,
like my role in society is to like fix your memory, right,

(59:33):
Like we're the memory cells of society. So if you
want to have dementia and misremember how how reality went,
that's bad. I don't want to do that. I want
to like align your beliefs with with what the best
evidence shows really happened in history. And I do think
this is a I don't write this particular subject to
be anti Christian. I don't, in fact, I don't even

(59:55):
think like And then I think it's a conversation Christians
can have because you have kind of have to leave
the face before you can even entertain the possibility that
Christianity began without a historical Jesus. So for me, it's
more just an academic study of what really happened. I
just want to know what really happened, right. But I
do have a side of my life that is counter Christian,
right is that I do because I think there's a

(01:00:17):
lot of bad things being done in the name of Christianity,
and we need to fix that. And I think the
solution is secular humanism, or I do think there is
an objective morality we can get at without trying to
rely on people claiming to speak for God about what
is moral or the scriptures or whatever like that, with
which are just the same thing. And scriptures are just
some human wrote things down their ideas. You can't treat

(01:00:38):
them like the ideas of God because they could be
just as bad as any other humans ideas. We need
to defend them with evidence and reason, and then they
should stand on their own. They You don't need the
scriptures if you can defend them. And so that's what
my book Sense and Goodness Without God does is it's
actually there's a rare example of a book that's by
an atheist that is about what atheists should believe. So

(01:01:00):
like there's a little section about what we don't believe,
but most of it is what do we believe? Right?
What are the positive beliefs that we replace religion with? Like,
if we're going to get rid of religion, we got
to replace it with something. We've got to have a
worldview that teaches us and makes understanding about aesthetics like
beauty and things like we've got to understand what that
is and why it matters and so on. If there's
no God, then what right, So there's got to be

(01:01:22):
a what that's an alternative, same with morality politics, but
also epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, like there's a lot of things
that we can do to understand the world and how
we should be that come out of like the evidence
and reason and so on. So there are things that
atheists ought to believe. We should have a lot of
positive beliefs, not just disbeliefs. And so that's the other

(01:01:45):
takeaway in my life is I would like to steer
people towards that secular humanist view. And I think even
if you're a liberal Christian, if you're a Christian who
agrees with that Antichrist article and says no, we should
be on the other side of most Christianity, we should
be like doing things. And those are Christians I think
are very basically my my colleagues in that sense, right,
They're they're Christians who are doing the same thing that

(01:02:07):
I'm doing. They're just doing it in a different system. Uh,
And that's good too. So you know, I'm okay with
with that. If we can get them that far, that's
still progress. But that I've had that happen like I've
been I've done lectures to Christian audiences and particularly Christian youth,
and I've had Christians come up to me after, like
when their pastors weren't watching and and telling me like like, yeah,

(01:02:29):
we're really not like we don't not really, we don't.
We we want to, we want to, we want to
stay in the church, but we don't want to stay
in the church because the church keeps telling us to
care about abortion and gay people, and we just want
to do Jesus ethings. And this is like a direct quote.
We want to do Jesus ethings. So we want to
feed the poor, we wanna we want to help help
women who may be in the position of meeting an

(01:02:51):
abortion right. We want to do things that Jesus would do.
We don't want to focus on these sort of like
hotbed cultural issues that don't really seem to be caring
about the people that they're talking about. So so there
are people who are moving in that direction, and I
do I'm there to help them too, because they can
use my arguments without even buying all the rest of it.
They can still use my arguments to push their own

(01:03:13):
perspective on things. So I can be useful even to
liberal Christians in that regard, and I'm happy to be.
But also, you know, if you could get all the
way over to secular humanism, I think there's a lot
a lot to learn and do there as well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
So yeah, I always say, because I actually stopped going
to church because it got so political when I hear
when I hear other churches saying the church down the
streets not as good as ours, or you know, this
music is bad, you know, or don't listen to Oprah.
I remember walking out of a church when they said
when Oprah was still on. I was like, what does

(01:03:46):
this have to do with Oprah?

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
But yeah, but I love the concept of Christianity. I
always into show and I'll end it again today is
like take care of yourself and each other because I think,
you know, this is our one once in a lifetime
time on this earth. We should treat each other great.
We should treat each other well, and you know, take

(01:04:09):
care of each other. And and I and one thing
I do appreciate is doctor Richard Carrier to be here today.
Where do people find you? Follow you and all that
good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
Yeah, and I agree with everything you just said there.
I think that's true no matter what the case is,
we're the only ones who can make the world better.
So and enjoy our lives while we're here, like you know,
why why waste it? The best you can? Right, and
help each other because that's we're the only ones around
a meaner that they So the where you can find

(01:04:43):
me Richard Carrier dot info. So that's just my name,
Richard Carrier dot I NFO. And you can find all
things me there. So I have online courses I teach,
I have books, I have a blog you can subscribe to.
I've got social media you can get at my bio.
Like you know, everything you want to know about me
is available there. And so that's the place to go,

(01:05:03):
Richard Carrier Info.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
And what's the new book again.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus?

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
Love it? Love it well?

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
Thank you so much for taking the time out of
your busy schedule to be here today. And I know
this is gonna it's gonna ruffle some feathers, but I
hope in a good way. I hope it's gonna really
make people think and maybe change their their ways they
treat other people. So thank you and thank you everybody

(01:05:33):
for tuning in. Please subscribe, leave a comment, and share
this show.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Listen.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
I can take criticis I have been doing this long
enough to her. I want to hear your thoughts. I
want to hear what you think about today's topic. And
either way, have a great holiday and until next time,
I'm Tony Sweet with truth be told on the Clump
Paranormal Network, and take care of yourself in each other.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Bye.