The belief that Jesus of Nazareth physically rose from the dead is one of the most significant claims in history for those who hold it. Paul understood its importance when he wrote to the church in Corinth around 53–54 CE. He told them that the entire foundation of Christian belief would crumble if Jesus was not resurrected, as some were beginning to doubt. In essence, Paul argued that if Christ was not raised, then Christian preaching and faith are meaningless, and believers are "still in your sins." This isn't a minor theological detail; Paul made it clear that Christianity, in his view, is not simply an ethical philosophy that includes a resurrection story. If you take away the resurrection, according to his logic, nothing else in the religion remains.

This is precisely why the question of its historical reality deserves the same thorough, balanced examination that historians apply to any other significant historical claim, rather than being considered settled by the strength of belief on either side. Before diving into the disagreements, it’s helpful to identify common ground. Across the spectrum of scholarly views, from those who affirm to those who question, there's a general agreement on a few basic facts: Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate; not long after, some of his followers reported experiences they interpreted as encounters with a resurrected Jesus; and this belief spread quickly enough to launch a movement willing to endure persecution. This consensus forms the basis of what Habermas and Licona call the "minimal facts" approach. They use only historical data that most scholars, regardless of their personal beliefs, accept as solid evidence, and then debate which explanation best accounts for this data. The main disagreement isn't about whether something happened after the crucifixion, but rather about what the best explanation for the available evidence is. The core question is whether the conclusion "God raised him from the dead" is a historical finding or a theological interpretation added on top of historical events.

This distinction is crucial because it's at the heart of most of these debates. There's virtually no serious scholarly disagreement that the earliest Christians genuinely believed Jesus had risen. Ehrman states this clearly, arguing that Jesus' followers came to believe he had been raised because some of them had experiences they interpreted that way. He emphasizes that this explanation works for everyone, whether they are Christian or not. This means a historian doesn't need to decide if those experiences were objectively real to explain why the belief emerged. The sincerity and life-changing nature of this conviction are not in doubt; what is being questioned is whether the conviction accurately reflected reality. People can sincerely believe many things that later turn out to be false. The intensity or the personal cost of a belief doesn't prove its truth. History shows many examples of followers of failed messianic movements, some of whom died still believing their leader would return. Their willingness to suffer for a belief demonstrates the strength of their conviction, not the accuracy of the belief itself. The relevant historical question is not "Did the disciples believe this?" (which is widely accepted), but "What caused that belief?" Naturalistic explanations, such as grief, visions, cognitive dissonance reduction, or cultural expectations, are available and don't require the underlying event to have actually happened.

One initial point of doubt is about getting confirmation. All the stories we have about the resurrection come from people who were already part of the early Christian group. There are no records from Roman officials, no accounts from Jewish sources like Josephus (in the parts most historians agree are his), and no other outside writers who mention an empty tomb, a guard posted there, or a teacher appearing alive around Judea. This silence is striking, especially since Matthew describes an earthquake and dead saints walking into Jerusalem. Historians usually see testimony from a single source, especially from within the group, as less reliable because there's no neutral party to check it against. Founding documents of a movement will naturally support that movement.

Supporters like Wright argue that most historical events we accept as true are only supported by people who had an interest in them. Ancient historians didn't often produce neutral news reports. Wright believes the key question isn't whether there's outside confirmation, but whether the testimony from this specific group is unusually trustworthy. He points to Paul's early statement in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, suggesting the main claims were established and circulating within a few years of the event, which is too soon for myths to completely replace memories.

A second issue is the age and perspective of the sources. Paul's letters, which are the oldest documents we have, were written about twenty years after the crucifixion and mention appearances of Jesus but not a story about the tomb. The Gospels were written forty to seventy years after the events. The authors' names were likely added later, not at the time of writing. John explicitly states his purpose was to create belief, not to provide a neutral record. This time gap is long enough for oral stories to grow, change, and become more consistent, especially within a community strongly motivated to do so.

However, Habermas and Licona respond that forty to seventy years is still within the range of living memory in a culture that relied heavily on oral tradition and strong community sharing. They also note that this gap is shorter than the one for many ancient biographies we accept as history. They further argue that if a group were inventing a story, they probably wouldn't have made women, whose testimony had little legal standing at the time, the first witnesses to the empty tomb. Such a detail would be a disadvantage, not an advantage, if it were made up. Allison, in particular, finds this argument quite convincing and suggests in his book Resurrecting Jesus that a reasonable case can be made for the empty tomb being a historical event, even if he remains uncertain about what caused it.

A third problem involves internal inconsistencies. To make the resurrection accounts fit together, one needs to do considerable interpretive work because the Gospels differ on details that eyewitnesses to the same event typically wouldn't confuse. These differences include who went to the tomb, how many angels were present and what they said, whether the women told anyone right away, and whether Jesus appeared in Jerusalem (as suggested by Luke and Acts) or Galilee (as suggested by Matthew and the earliest ending of Mark). In a legal setting, these kinds of variations would suggest separate, later traditions from the community rather than a single, factual account.

Christian apologists, on the other hand, argue that minor differences in secondary details are actually a sign of genuine, independent testimony rather than fabrication. They explain that witnesses to a truly shocking event often disagree on minor points while agreeing on the main story. Those who try to harmonize the accounts argue that the different Gospel stories can be seen as complementary, not contradictory. Critics, however, point out that the effort required to make these accounts agree demonstrates how much work is needed to reconcile them.

One argument suggests natural explanations are still possible. Visions related to grief are a known phenomenon after a death. Allison's book "Resurrecting Jesus" details many cross-cultural examples of people seeing apparitions of the recently deceased, sometimes with multiple witnesses. This suggests the disciples' experience, while having massive consequences, wasn't fundamentally different in kind from other such visions. Ehrman, in "How Jesus Became God," makes a similar point by referencing modern accounts of group visions of the Virgin Mary. These visions, sometimes photographed and reported by professionals, show that collective visionary experiences are real and recurring human events, not something that can be dismissed outright. Research on cognitive dissonance, starting with Leon Festinger's 1956 study of a failed apocalyptic group, shows that when a group's core beliefs are severely challenged, some members actually strengthen their belief and proselytize more. This happens as a way to cope with psychological stress. The empty tomb itself could also have simple explanations, like grave robbers, the body being moved in poor visibility, or authorities wanting to prevent a pilgrimage site from forming. Critics like Michael Licona have countered Ehrman by noting that the specific type of group hallucinations described – multiple people, over different times and places, all reporting the same details – aren't as well-documented in clinical psychology as individual grief-related hallucinations. They also argue that the conversion of skeptics like Paul and Jesus's brother James is harder to explain through dissonance reduction, as these individuals didn't have a strong pre-existing belief to defend.

A fifth point to consider is the cultural backdrop. The ancient Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern worlds had stories about deified emperors, ascending heroes, and figures who died and came back, like Osiris or Romulus. This doesn't necessarily mean the Gospel writers copied these myths directly. Modern historians, including Ehrman, are cautious about drawing direct parallels, avoiding the outdated approach of the "Christ myth" literature. However, it does mean that a resurrection story would have been a culturally understandable way to express the idea that a righteous man, wrongly executed, had been vindicated by God. In response, scholars like Wright argue that Jewish resurrection beliefs, unlike most pagan myths of dying and rising gods, anticipated a general bodily resurrection at the end of time, not an individual rising in the middle of history. Therefore, the "copied pagan myth" explanation doesn't fit well with the Jewish context of Jesus's earliest followers. Something unusual in their experience seems necessary to explain why they broke from this expectation to claim one person had already been resurrected.

Finally, there's a more fundamental philosophical challenge: history might not be equipped to definitively prove a miracle. Even scholars who, based on historical probability, accept that the tomb was likely empty and that early followers genuinely believed they saw Jesus alive, often hesitate to conclude that a resurrection actually occurred. This is because "resurrection" is a supernatural interpretation added to those historical findings. Ehrman has argued this point, stating that historians can document the disciples having visions without needing to decide if those visions were real experiences of the divine. Making that judgment would require a prior decision on whether miracles are possible at all – a question that historical methods, which rely on comparing probabilities based on normal human experience, aren't designed to answer. Historians influenced by David Hume argue that accounts of events violating natural law are more plausibly explained by mistakes, exaggeration, or misunderstanding rather than an actual suspension of natural law. This is because our consistent experience supports the reliability of natural laws more strongly than any single witness's account. However, philosophers like Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig counter that Hume's argument has been shown to be logically flawed by later probability theorists, such as John Earman. They contend that Hume's argument implicitly assumes its conclusion – that miracles are highly improbable – rather than weighing the specific evidence objectively. They believe historical methods should follow the evidence to the best explanation, even if that explanation is unusual.

The historical evidence doesn't definitively prove or disprove the resurrection. Instead, what the presented arguments show is that the resurrection doesn't pass several standard historical checks for extraordinary claims. These include being attested only by a community with a vested interest, being recorded decades after the event in documents with conflicting core details, and being explainable through psychological and social factors that scholars have studied independently of Christianity. The resurrection also occurred in a cultural context already familiar with vindication stories, and its central tenet relies on an inferential leap that historical methods alone might not fully support.

The sincerity of the first believers isn't the issue; the skeptical viewpoint aligns with the idea that they genuinely believed their message. The real debate is whether that sincere belief corresponded to an actual event or to strong, well-documented human reactions to grief, disappointment, and cultural norms. As Paul recognized, the significance of this question for Christianity is immense, which is precisely why it requires thorough, balanced examination rather than being settled by faith alone.

I’m not saying it didn’t happen but I really doubt it.

Think about it,

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

5. The Moral Argument

Revolutionized by Immanuel Kant, the powerhouse philosopher who believed that pure reason could not prove God. But he did believe that practical reason required God’s existence. This was further popularized by C.S Lewis in his work Mere Christianity, believing that all humans seem to bound by laws that they did not create but feel the need to follow. William Lane Craig later formalized it.

The premises and deductions go as follows:

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.

Deduction: Therefore, God exists.

(Objective as in independent of subjective human thought; values concern worth while duty concerns obligation/actiob)

Rebuttal:

The main objections unsurprisingly contend the first premise and the assumed concept of Objective Morality. The main argument remains the famous Euthyphro Dilemma originated by Plato.

The Dilemma claims; If an action or concept is good simply because God commands it, morality becomes arbitrary as if God commanded torture or murder it would become good. If God commands it because it is inherently good, then goodness exists independently of God, making God unnecessary for grounding morality, simply serving as the messenger.

Many Thomists and other theists claim that God is the good nature itself. However the same question can be flipped again asking if God’s nature is good because of the way God happens to be, or is it good because it matches an external discussion or establishment of goodness?

RATING: 6/10 (double edged sword)

4. The Argument from Consciousness

Initially sparked by Descartes in the 17th century with his famous statement "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). Descartes argued that the mind is completely distinct from the body. Although used to argue for dualism, it was later developed by David Chalmers in “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” talking about what and why feels exist. In modern day legendary figures like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantiga argued that the sudden appearance of conscious minds in a historically mindless universe is highly improbable under atheistic materialism, but highly probable if the universe began with a Conscious Mind.

Premise 1: In a purely materialistic universe, all things are ultimately composed of mindless, non-conscious physical matter and energy.

Premise 2: Subjective, qualitative mental states exist and cannot be fully explained by, or reduced to, physical matter.

Premise 3: The existence of consciousness is highly probable if a fundamental, supreme Conscious Mind (God) exists, but highly improbable if reality is purely physical.

Deduction: Therefore, the existence of a supreme Conscious Mind is the best explanation for human consciousness.

Rebuttal:

1. Many argue through the lens of Panpsychism that although consciousness is fundamental it makes up the universe rather than being inserted by a conscious God

2. Science argues that properties can emerge from systems that do not possess those properties individually. A single H₂O molecule is not "wet," but billions of them combined create the emergent property of wetness. Similarly, a single neuron is not conscious, but multiple create the feeling of consciousness.

RATING: 7/10 (grounded in undeniable reality but ignores some potential views)

3. The Contingency Argument

Famously created by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, this argument ignores the question of a temporal beginning entirely. Rather, it focuses on the metaphysical side of things, focusing on the question “why?”. We must something exist if it otherwise could have not.

It goes as follows:

Premise 1: Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause (The Principle of Sufficient Reason, or PSR).

Premise 2: If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

Premise 3: The universe exists.

Deduction 1: Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence.

Deduction 2: Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God.

REBUTTAL:

1. Many famous philosophers such as the legendary Bertrand Russel argued that there is no need for more reasoning. The universe exists and could just be a brute fact.

2. Many argue that just become parts within need a cause everything doesn’t. Take for example a human versus the entire human race.

RATING: 8.2/10 (functions using PSR a foundation of logic and the question is very hard to attack)

2. The Kalām Cosmological Argument

Originally made by Islamic theologians, it was popularized by William Lane Craig, making it an established argument for the existence of God. The premises and deductions go as followed:

Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Deduction: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Rebuttals:

The most famous and elegant argument simply uses real life examples, analyzes the world of quantum physics. Critics argue that at the quantum scale, subatomic particles regularly pop into existence out of a vacuum without an cause . If tiny things can begin without a cause, the initial singularity of the universe might have as well.

RATING: 8.3/10

We’re finally at the last one! If you have been following along I really appreciate it and make sure to subscribe!

Honorable mention: First Cause argument. Consistently used by Thomists, it also relies on the PSR and Aristotelian Metaphysics, describing God as the actualizer of actuality.

1. The Fine-Tuning Argument

Based in probabilistic proof and modern day physics, it does not focus on how or when the universe began, but rather on the precision of the laws and governing current reality. Also known as Teleological argument, derived from the Greek word telos which means a natural purpose. After Darwin’s counterarguments to initial argument it was weaponized by philosophers such as Robin Collins.

Premises and Deductions

Premise 1: The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.

Premise 2: It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

Deduction: Therefore, it is due to design.

REBUTTALS:

1. The potential for a multiverse. Many argue that multiple universes exist which each their own laws of physics. Completely probabilistic, our universe ended up perfect constants and are just lucky.

2. Many bring in a new dilemma stating if If complexity and fine-tuning require an external explanation, then God's complex mind requires an explanation. If the theist claims God is just a fact who doesn't need an explanation, why not accept the universe's constants as a fact?

RATING: 8.8/10 🥳🎉🥳🎉

It forces atheists into a tough positions while being backed by modern day science. It’s only weak point is derived from the fact that even if the argument is correct, it does not prove the God of Abraham, Christianity, or Islam. Also if physicists find a "Theory of Everything" (a single equation that proves all physics constants must be exactly what they are by necessity , the argument loses meaning.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate the support we’re so close to 150 subs and I couldn’t be more grateful, enjoy!

Think About It,

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

(Honorable Mention)

Pascals Wager:

While this isn’t known as a strong argument for the existence of God, it most certainly is one of the most well known arguments so I think it deserves a shoutout.

As the name states, the argument was developed by philosopher Blaise Pascal. He famously argues in his Pensee that belief in God is an essential bet. As a Christian, he viewed this as an easy choice. If God exists and you believe in him you receive heaven eternally, if you believe he does exist and he doesn’t you lose only some earthly pleasure. However if you believe he doesn’t exist and he does you receive eternal hell. He used these premises and deductions (indirectly)

Premise 1 - God is beyond human comprehension and cannot be proven with reason.

Premise 2 - Neutrality is Impossible

Premise 3 - Reward for belief is salvation and punishment for disbelief is damnation.

Deduction 1 - The Risk is worth it (to put it simply)

Deduction 2 - The value is infinite despite the small chance.

Deduction 3- Value of disbelief is infinitely bad

Rebuttal:

1. Belief requires actual conviction if an omniscient God actually existed he would be capable of differentiating between authentic and inauthentic belief. If this choice was a logical choice prayer would be through fear not love.

2. If 2 religions offer infinite rewards they cannot coexist so you cannot objectively prefer one. Also, escaping the fear of the Christian God forgets about the thousands of other possible God. Since multiple wagers co-exist, one wager cannot be valued more.

RATING : 2/10

10. The Argument from Design

This one specifically focuses on the introduced idea of William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology.

He introduces a thought experiment:

If you come by a stone on the floor, you wouldn’t think too much of it, believing that it has been there for a long time with no curiosity due to the lack of intricate details the suggest otherwise. However, if you come across a watch, you realize that it complex has intricate parts and is perfectly designed the way to is to ensure proper functioning. It all has a purpose and one wrong detail would ruin its purpose.

Paley argued that if a watch that appears to be intricate and complex then the universe which is infinitely more complex requires a grand complex Universe Maker. To put it in a syllogism it can be put like this:

Premise 1: Man-made objects (like watches) are complex, ordered, and designed for a specific purpose.

Premise 2: These man-made objects are the product of intelligent design.

Premise 3: The natural world (like an eye or an ecosystem) is also complex, ordered, and operates for a specific purpose.

Deduction- Therefore, the natural world must also be the product of an intelligent designer

Rebuttals:

Although highly intuitive to the mind, it has been constantly disproven by modern day philosophy and science.

1. Most notably, it was disproven with Darwin’s discovery of natural selection. As commonly known nowadays, the function for a complex human part such as the eye does not need a complex creator but can rather be explained through natural selection. A conscious creator is not necessary as over time only the advantageous traits succeed.

2. If the watch were to often jam or not work for short periods of time, it would be sensible to deduct that the watchmaker wasn’t as talented. If the real world faces so many troubles and constant suffering, how flawed would a creator be according to this argument. The analogy in itself also makes large logical jumps and therefore commits a huge fallacy.

RATING: 3/10

9. The Classical Ontological Argument

The Ontological argument was developed in the 11th century by the Anselm of Canterbury, a theologian in his work Proslogion. Unlike many other arguments, this one serves as a priori argument relying on deductions claiming that the definition of God serves as proof.

He famously defines God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” In simpler terms, God is the absolute ultimate reality and the highest, greatest, most perfect entity imaginable.

Premise 1: God is defined as the greatest conceivable being.

Premise 2: Even the atheist can understand this definition. Therefore, God exists as a concept inside the atheist's understanding. If you can’t conceive it you’re not doing what I asked since it’s the greatest conceivable being.

Premise 3: It is greater to exist in reality than to exist merely in the mind.

Deduction 1: Suppose God exists only in the mind and not in reality.

Deduction 2: If that were true, we could immediately conceive of a greater being that has all of God's qualities but also exists in reality.

Deduction 3: You would be saying that a being greater than the greatest conceivable being can be conceived.

Conclusion: Therefore, to avoid this contradiction, the greatest conceivable being also known as God must exist in reality

Rebuttals:

The most noticeable argument is the absolutely devastating one from powerhouse philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Kant realized that “existence” was not a term that assigned any characteristics.

For example, the word for this is a predicate. A predicate can for example be applied to a horse. I could say the horse is brown or the horse is fast. However if I say it exists it does not make it more perfect or add any meaningful descriptions.

As a result he deducted that you cannot list "existence" as a perfection that makes a concept "greater" than another concept. Defining a God with the property of existence does not mean a real God exists.

Rating: 3.5/10

8. The Modal Ontological Argument

Developed by modern day Christian theologian Alvin Plantinga, it argues using Modal Logic with possibility and necessity. It goes as follows:

Before moving he first requires understanding of 2 ideas.

1. This is a thought experiment so a “possible world” means an existence or playing out of worldly events to at could have happened. For example, dinosaurs could have never gone extinct. The “actual world” is how things actually turned out.

2. It uses S5 Modal Logic. If something is defined as a necessary truth and it exists in even one possible world, it must exist in all possible worlds as it is necessary.

Before working on the actual premises and deductions, two terms are defined. Maximal excellence is moral perfection in 1 possible world and maximal greatness is maximal excellence in every single world.

Premise 1: It is possible that a Maximally Great Being exists in atleast one possible world.

Premise 2: If it is possible that a Maximally Great Being exists, then it exists in some possible world.

Premise 3: Maximally Great Being must possess maximal excellence in all possible worlds according to its definition.

Deduction 1: Therefore, because this being exists in one world it also exists in every world.

Deduction 2: One of those possible worlds is the actual world itself.

Conclusion: Therefore, God exists in the real world that we live in.

Rebuttal:

Although it is a mathematically perfect argument, it lacks conviction within non believers.

But the most fatal counterargument is that the exact opposite could be argued.

It is possible that a Maximally Great Being doesn’t exist.

If there is a world where God does not exist, then God cannot be "Maximally Great"

Therefore, a Maximally Great Being is impossible, and God does not exist in the real world that we currently live in.

RATING: 4.5/10

(Strong for believers but doesn’t do anything for non believers)

7. The Argument from Reason

In simple words, it challenges materialism and naturalism.

It attempts to explain that since the universe is physical, humans become untrustworthy so we must believe that our minds are rooted in a rational being, God,

Premise 1: Under a naturalistic worldview, human thoughts and beliefs are entirely caused by physical and scientific explanations or existences.

Premise 2: Physical and chemical laws are non-rational.

Premise 3: Natural selection drives the evolution of the brain and only cares about survival and reproduction.

Deduction 1: If your beliefs are entirely the product of non-rational physical events aimed at survival, then the probability that your thoughts accurately reflect abstract truth is very low.

Deduction 2: Therefore, if naturalism is true, you can no longer trust your own thoughts, including your belief in naturalism.

Conclusion: To escape this self-defeating trap and confidently trust human logic, we must reject naturalism and conclude that human reason is grounded in an objective, transcendent Rational Source which is viewed as God.

Rebuttal:

Many argue that this case presents a false dichotomy fallacy and that survival is only pursuit of natural selection.

For example, if a mind is based in true facts and faced with a pool of spikes, they will leave. But if it’s based in false reality that the spikes are actually chocolate cake, then they might jump in.

Natural selection heavily penalizes inaccurate thinking. Over millions of years, evolutionary pressures naturally align human sensory perception and basic causal reasoning with objective reality. Truth-seeking is an essential tool for survival

RATING : 5.5/10 (raises serious philosophical questions but relies on a false-dichotomy that weakens it)

6. The Argument from Desires

As popularized by C.S Lewis, it argues (in layman terms) that a natural human desire does not exist in the real world without some object or experience to fulfill it.

For example, the desire for hunger has food, the desire of lust has sex and masturbation etc. It simply asks why a desire for ultimate truth is present?

Therefore it operates under simple premises and deductions.

Premise 1 - Desires only exist if they have something to fulfill them.

Premise 2 - Humans contain a desire for finding the ultimate truth and transcendental meaning.

Deduction 1- There is something to fulfill this desire for ultimate truth.

Conclusion- Some necessary being is designed to fulfill this meaning which can be perceived as God.

Rebuttal:

Many thinkers like Kant have argued the existence of “desire without an object” , where the feelings are there without the want for an apparent solution.

Some believe that the desire is targeted at the process and that it is inherently infinite so nothing can ever fulfill it.

RATING: 6.5/10 (very strong on many levels but lacks a clear proof structure)

Part 2 comes out tomorrow 7:30 PM EST stay tuned!

Think About It,

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

There is an old heresy, muttering at the roots of many faiths, that the universe is not sacred but hilarious. At the heart of things, not a syllogism but a punchline. The best way to comprehend the unknowable is through a joke. This heresy takes various shapes: the holy fools who wander winter streets in Russia, naked as winter itself, declaiming cryptic sermon-poems; the Sufi madmen, the Zen masters, who answer grave questions with slapstick or nonsense syllables. This heresy has a right to exist, because it represents the limit of human thought touching on the divine and recoiling. It is not merely that these holy jesters perform antics to illustrate some other meaning; their very existence is the only possible response to that which cannot be responded to otherwise. It is not that they are merely mad; it is that they are too sane, too comprehending, for the sanity and comprehension of their contemporaries.

Their particular branch of theology begins with a simple observation: any attempt to describe the Absolute involves a comic act. Any assertion about God is a performance of some kind. To say “God is good” is first to construct a binary between good and bad, to make room in the mind for the idea of something as good. But to make room for the idea of something as good is to make room for the possibility of something as bad, and to construct an economy of value that would have no buyer or seller in the presence of the perfectly unvaluable God. The most rigorous theologians have long since understood this danger, hence the practice of apophaticism in ascetic traditions – the art of speaking of God not as this or that, but as not this, not that. Negation itself becomes a form of speech; the performance becomes the content, the means the end. And now we have reached a point where not saying something becomes a kind of holy saying; but is it not time to recognize that even this kind of speech is an idol, this kind of sincerity a form of vanity?

The holy fool takes the next step; negation becomes his method, but not his goal. He negates in order to unmake, to undo the whole linguistic enterprise, not just its false premises but its very possibility. When asked “What is Buddha,” the Zen master does not say “He is not this, he is not that.” He says “Three pounds of flax,” which is a response appropriate not to the question but to the questioner. In the same spirit, holy fools perform their farce, their particular brand of anti-sermon. The very fact of their antics exposes the emptiness of any alternative proposition, the false seriousness of any other engagement with the divine. Humor, likewise, operates not through assertion but through exposure: its fundamental formal device is incongruity – the collision of two logically incompatible conceptual frames. A pun works by making a word bear two meanings at once. In the same way, the holy fool embodies the collision of two conceptual frames: that of the abject fool and the wise man, juxtaposing the two so that it becomes impossible to accept either without recognizing the falsity of both. It is this very mechanism that grounds humor’s sacred potential; no other tool exposes the human condition as thoroughly. When we hear a pun, we recognize simultaneously and indivisibly both meanings conveyed by the word, but we feel that neither of them is fully correct. Similarly, the holy fool’s antics are designed to expose the emptiness of human discourse on religion, politics, and anything else that can be spoken of only in clichés. The very act of attempting to extract a pithy statement about God from the fool is like explaining a joke after you’ve heard it – a profoundly inappropriate follow-up, since no one can truly grasp why a joke is funny once they understand it. When the joke is finished, the laughter fades, because it was always the joke itself, with its fragile, ephemeral structure, that was funny.

This is probably the reason why the Divine chooses to reveal itself in jokes: not because it is capricious, but rather because it recognizes that to be properly comprehended, it must elude comprehension. A simple statement about God, a pious utterance that would summarize the ineffable in a phrase, would itself become an idol. A joke, on the other hand, can never serve as an idol precisely because it always is one. A joke is the assertion of the comedian that vanishes the moment it is grasped by the listener, replaced by the gasp of recognition. If God has some essential quality that needs to be known and articulated, then He is no different from anything else that can be known and articulated – and thus not God. The comedian understands this; that is why he turns to jokes as a means of expressing his own sacred insights. He recognizes his own limitations, which is why he cannot say what he knows, only act it out. The joke is always about something bigger than itself, about cosmic forces beyond human control, but it is also about the comedian’s own insignificance, his fundamental inability to communicate that bigger truth directly. This recognition, this self-knowledge, is what elevates the joke and the comedian who utters it to the level of sacred objects. If anything is holy, it is this ability to elude capture, to vanish, to deny itself.

The humorist’s performance also serves another function: it punctures the bubble of piety, exposes the sanctimony of those who believe themselves to be chosen to speak for the Divine. For most people, the experience of engaging in religious practices is intensely narcissistic – it is the affirmation of one’s own sacred nature, and the consecration of one’s life and deeds as holy. The holy fool punctures this bubble with merciless exactness, exposing the self-importance of every pious individual. His very existence demonstrates that there is no preferred way to speak for God – he speaks for Him just as well, albeit foolishly. The fool’s antics may seem absurd, but the absurdity is not in his actions but rather in the fact that the world permits such people to exist. The fool, in his way, is also a comedian, and he punctures bubbles not because he is mean-spirited but because he recognizes the sheer ridiculousness of the social order in which he lives. It is this realization that often comes across in the holy fool’s laughter, which is perhaps the purest form of human joy achievable by a human being. The fool’s laughter is a laugh of relief, at having grasped something terribly simple that everybody else has failed to realize.

Let the reader, having considered these words, pause briefly in contemplation of what he has heard. Perhaps there is something in these ideas that resonates too closely with the familiar Advaita Vedanta philosophy to be mere coincidence. At the heart of Advaita, too, is a cosmic joke – the assertion that an appearance of reality, of duality, is taking place within Brahman, with none of it being any more real than the stage show it’s played on. It is similar in this regard to the idea of the holy fool, who laughs at the idea that anything apart from Brahman or God could be real – it is all, in the end, a joke, because reality has no fundamental basis in anything solid. The very fact of creation, of existence, is this joke; it is not the joke of Brahman, of the Divine, but rather an act committed jointly by it and the realm of appearances. Creation is a joke because, in this philosophical view, both sides involved in it are unreal. Creation is a play, lila – and that word, play, is very close to the root of the English word ‘joke.’ Just as the joke is a literary device that uses the violation of logical expectations to elicit a laugh, the lila is a divine act performed in order to satisfy the curiosity of the conditioned soul. Advaita Vedanta and the Christian holy fool have a lot in common: both understand reality to be a joke played by God. It is fitting that the holy fool should laugh and enjoy the joke, since it is the only possible response to God’s play.

Perhaps it is not necessary to descend to the level of mysticism in order to recognize the value of this line of thinking. Let us return from the holy fool’s laughter to God’s, the one who created him. When he created the world, he created it with certain structures of value in place – not objective value, mind you, only a specific set of subjective evaluations. The value of humor is to make room for these structures to appear; it is not inherent to either religion or the world created by God, but rather something that exists solely between them. Humor, in this interpretation, is indeed God’s own tool, but it is one he employs to observe his own creation more keenly. A joke can serve as a reminder that the value placed on various acts is subjective, that it is appropriate to laugh at ourselves when we take ourselves too seriously. The joke reminds us that the world is not objective; it is not solid, that it is a game we play. It is this ability to recognize objectivity as subjective that makes jokes holy – and the ability to make others laugh is the mark of the holy fool, who always knows when to laugh at himself. Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to say that the joke reminds us of the presence of God: it is an intervening force that reminds us all, in the most pleasant way imaginable, of the sacred potential in our everyday lives. It is a tool that enables the realization of that potential, since it can only be understood within the context of the encounter with the divine. The reader is left with a feeling of reverence not because the joke explained God, but because it reminded him of the presence of the Divine in his daily life. The fool does not explain this to him; he simply laughs and asks the joke to do the same, and dares the reader to notice the sanctity of the joke, the way it somehow touches on our deepest longings to be free from the tyranny of subjective values.

Think About it,

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

START:

I have spent a lot of time thinking about religion, not out of a desire to find the “best” one, but because I really want to understand how we make sense of existing and just the age old question of why. Why does this framework, this temporary existence and just these components that we take to be normal really exist. Some often ask me why, despite my pursuit of many spiritual traditions, I probably will never be a Christian.Christianity is, after all, the dominant cultural narrative of the Western world. It has inspired breathtaking architecture, immortal music, and deep philosophical rigor. Yet, every time I pull up a chair, open the text, and try to settle into the Christian worldview, I hit a wall. It isn't just a matter of disbelief in the supernatural or a knee-jerk reaction against organized religion. It comes down to structural, mechanical, and conceptual flaws that I simply cannot reconcile with how I observe the universe to work.

When you talk to committed Christians, the conversation usually pivots to love, grace, and personal transformation. Those are beautiful ideas, but when you take some things into account that I will dive into, it doesn’t feel cohesive in a way.

Take, for instance, the main narrative of redemption. The entire Christian framework hinges on a very specific series of cosmic events. God creates humanity, humanity disobeys by eating a forbidden fruit in a garden, and this single act introduces "sin" into the human DNA and world like a hereditary thing . Because God is infinitely holy, He cannot abide sin, which creates a debt that demands punishment. But because God is also merciful, He sends His Son—who is also Himself—to earth to live a blameless life and be executed on a cross. This sacrifice satisfies God’s own justice, paying the cosmic fine so that anyone who believes in this event can be saved from eternal torment in Hell.

If you step back and just take a look at it for a second it seems kind of odd. Why is the cosmic mechanism for reconciliation always tied to some sort of punishment? The idea that a loving Father requires the execution of his innocent Son to forgive me for being born with a human nature He designed feels less like divine justice and more like something you would see in a court.

What makes this God-Human dynamic even more odd is the drastic shift in divine personality between the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, God presents primarily as a regional storm and war god—a fierce tribal deity protecting His chosen people by destroying their neighbors. In Exodus and Leviticus, this deity dictates rules how things like slavery should go, instructing His people on precisely how hard they can beat their slaves (Exodus 21:20-21 notes that if a slave survives a beating for a day or two, the master isn't punished, "for the slave is his property").

Then you arrive at 1 Samuel 15:3, where God explicitly commands King Saul: "Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

A lot of the time we think that these are just something like spiritual metaphors, but take a step back and apply that to our own world and how we know it . I like to put it this way. Imagine if you discovered that a modern world leader was secretly issuing commands behind the scenes to completely wipe out an entire population—down to the infants and livestock. Let’s be real, it sounds kind of crazy. Yet, because it is written in a sacred text, believers are expected to nod along and call it divine righteousness. William Lane Craig claims that the children should be happy to die as they were immediately sent to heaven. We have to understand how that sounds. Even if apologists argue this was ancient hyperbole, it’s kinda staggering to realize that this is what believers are asked to worship as the ultimate source of moral goodness.

Then, suddenly, in the New Testament, the narrative flips. The war god who commanded infant slaughter and governed slave-beating regulations is rebranded as an all-loving, gentle Father whose core essence is love and forgiveness. The divine personality shift is so abrupt it creates a massive conceptual rift. This part is especially hard for me to comprehend that God could just completely alter when he is beyond time. To bridge this gap, Christians argue that God’s justice was fully satisfied on the cross, allowing His love to take center stage. But changing the tone doesn't erase the underlying mechanics; it just raises the question of why an unchanging, perfect God acted like an iron-age warlord for thousands of years before deciding to preach “pacifism”.

If a religion is going to speak to the vastness of existence, it feels like it should be fundamentally open—an invitation to explore reality directly rather than an insistence on subscribing to a strict, ancient court contract. When you look at a philosophy like Advaita Vedanta (not preaching just comparing), the non-dual tradition, you see a completely different way of framing spiritual life. It doesn't ask you to join a club to avoid divine wrath. Instead, it frames the primary human struggle not as sin, but as ignorance—a simple failure to recognize our underlying connection to the cosmos.

Bringing up Advaita Vedanta isn't about trading one rigid dogma for another; it’s useful simply as a point of contrast to show that spirituality doesn't have to be legalistic. In Christianity, salvation is an external transaction: a cosmic judge, a guilty defendant, and an innocent substitute taking the hit. In a non-dual framework, liberation is an internal realization: waking up to the nature of your own awareness. One system builds a rigid binary between the clean and the dirty, the saved and the damned. The other suggests that reality is far more fluid, open, and interconnected than our conceptual boxes allow.

This contrast highlights what I find to be one of the most glaring conceptual flaws in Christianity: the problem of Hell and eternal damnation. In traditional Christian theology, your brief, finite lifespan on this tiny planet determines your infinite state of existence. If you get it right—if you accept the right theological proposition before your heart stops beating—you enjoy eternal bliss. If you get it wrong, either through disbelief, being born in the wrong geographical location, or simply being unable to force your brain to believe something that doesn't make sense to you, you face infinite punishment.

Think about the math of that for a second. A finite human life consists of, say, eighty years. Even if a person lived a life of uninterrupted, unspeakable wickedness for all eighty of those years, an infinite punishment in a lake of fire is a penalty that mathematically scales to infinity percent over punishment. It completely destroys any coherent notion of justice, which requires the punishment to fit the crime. How can an all-loving, all-powerful God create a universe where the baseline destination for most of His creations is eternal misery, avoidable only by accepting a specific historical event that happened in a small pocket of the Middle East two thousand years ago?

I just want to make a quick stop here as this may sound like an endless rant. I truly respect people who believe in Christianity and this paper operates to just show my thoughts. I’m always open to learning. When you read the Bible with an open, critical mind, these points appear everywhere. In Exodus, God repeatedly "hardens Pharaoh's heart" so that Pharaoh will refuse to let the Israelites go, explicitly so that God can show off His power by inflicting horrific plagues on the Egyptian population—including the slaughter of every firstborn child in the land. Think about the mechanical logic there. God overrides a human being's free will to ensure disobedience, then punishes an entire nation of innocent civilians for that exact disobedience.

Or consider the Book of Job. God makes a bet with Satan—literally treating a righteous man's life like a poker game—and allows Satan to murder Job’s children, wipe out his wealth, and cover him in painful sores, all to prove a point about Job’s loyalty. At the end of the story, when Job finally asks God why all this terrible suffering happened to him, God doesn't apologize or offer a moral explanation. He essentially pulls rank, shouting out of a whirlwind, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" In other words: I am big, you are small, shut up and take it. When Job is eventually rewarded with new children and new livestock, the text treats it as a happy ending, as if children are interchangeable farm animals that can just be replaced after being collateral damage in a divine wager.

These aren't just minor textual quirks; they reveal the foundational character of the deity being described. The God of the Bible often acts like an insecure, quick-tempered ancient king who demands absolute fealty, burns with jealousy when His subjects look elsewhere, and operates on an ethics of arbitrary power rather than intrinsic moral logic.

Compare this to traditions that view action and consequence through natural law—like Karma in Eastern thought—where cause and effect operate mechanically without a divine figure throwing lightning bolts or holding ancient grudges. In those models, if you act with malice, you naturally distort your own mind and create suffering, but there is no infinite punishment for finite mistakes. The universe is treated as a self-correcting, open process rather than a closed courtroom governed by an unpredictable monarch.

Another major stumbling block for me is Christianity’s exclusive claim to truth, coupled with its reliance on historical contingency. Christianity asks you to place your eternal destiny on the accuracy of ancient manuscripts, written decades after the events they describe by anonymous authors, translated across multiple dead languages, and selected by fourth-century political councils deciding which books were canonical and which were heresy.

To expect a modern human, equipped with a critical brain, to look at that complex, historically messy, and often contradictory paper trail and say, "Yes, I am certain this exact set of documents contains the sole, literal truth of the cosmos, and everyone who disagrees is spiritually lost," feels intellectually irresponsible. It turns faith into a virtue, defining "faith" not as trust in the goodness of life, but as the willingness to believe claims without sufficient evidence, or even in spite of contrary evidence.

A healthy spiritual outlook should be an open inquiry, not a loyalty oath. Instead of demanding that we accept an ancient historical narrative under threat of punishment, true spiritual exploration should point to things we can test in our own living experience—how we pay attention, how we relate to suffering, and how we cultivate compassion. If a system insists that it holds the exclusive key to the universe and that everyone else is living in condemnation, it immediately closes the door to genuine curiosity.

There is also the concept of original sin, which strikes me as psychologically damaging at its core. Christianity starts from the premise that you are fundamentally broken, born in a state of spiritual bankruptcy, and incapable of saving yourself. You are a dirty rag, as the Book of Isaiah puts it, needing divine intervention just to be tolerable to your creator. This creates a profound emotional dependency. First, the theology infects you with the idea that you are inherently diseased, and then it offers you the only available cure—which just happens to be allegiance to its own system.

If you look at human nature without that theological lens, you see something much more nuanced. Humans aren't inherently "fallen"; we are evolved biological creatures carrying a complex mix of evolutionary drives some selfish for survival, some altruistic for community. We don't need to be redeemed by an ancient martyr to be worthy of love, dignity, or peace. Realizing our potential shouldn't require carrying a lifelong debt of guilt; it should be about growing into deeper awareness and connection with the world around us and the depth of existence itself.

None of this means that Christians are bad people or that Christianity hasn't produced immense good in the world. I have friends whose faith makes them kinder, softer, and more generous. I respect the comfort it brings to people facing grief, and the sense of community it builds. But a system's ability to comfort someone doesn't make its core mechanics true.

To accept Christianity, I would have to turn off the very faculties of logic, moral intuition, and critical inquiry that I use to navigate every other part of reality. I would have to pretend that a divine sacrifice makes sense, that eternal punishment for finite disbelief is loving, and that an ancient text is immune to the human flaws of the people who wrote and compiled it.

I want a perspective on existence that feels spacious, open, and capable of holding the messy, beautiful complexity of life without forcing it into a ancient legal framework. I want to explore consciousness and ethics with curiosity rather than fear. And that is why, barring some fundamental restructuring of how I understand logic, morality, and the cosmos, I probably will never be a Christian.

Here me out, I truly believe that true faith can be found through any religion and I say that openly I don’t think any religion is inherently better than another one. I just think many religions don’t go the full way. If you can truly grow and see yourself as a better person through what you believe, maybe that’s the path for you, but there has to be multiple paths to the truth. Just because you climb a mountain from a different side, it doesn’t make the mountain different but it does make the path to get there look different.

If you disagree, I would love to discuss and talk about the perspectives you may have! 

Think About It? 

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

Prior to engaging with the dispute in terms of non-dual metaphysics, it is essential to describe the conceptual framework within which the free will-determinism tension traditionally exists. The tension between free will and determinism arises from the observation of the prevalence of both phenomena in relation to the same actor. On the one hand, nature is a deterministic system in which all events, including human actions and decisions, have their causes preceding them. The actor as a part of nature is subject to the same deterministic forces as all matter in the universe. Consequently, the actor’s body and mind are the products of deterministic interactions with the environment at the neuronal, synaptic, and molecular levels. This is the position of Determinism that states that every intentional act of the actor is conditioned by preceding events, rendering the actor’s will not truly free but incorrect in its belief in freedom, while his responsibility for the actions is socially constructed.

On the other hand, the actor’s self-awareness and ability to act intentionally allow for observing that some of his actions are not conditioned by preceding events. Such a position is known as Libertarian Free Will, and it claims that the actor is genuinely able to make decisions independent of any prior events, thereby rendering him truly free. From the libertarian perspective, the ability to make free decisions is what grants the actor his responsibility in relation to his actions. The actor’s freedom, however, is denied by Determinism, because his free decisions, if existed, would be unconditioned, while the deterministic nature of reality does not permit the existence of unconditioned events. The third position in the free will-determinism controversy is Compatibilism, which postulates that the actor’s freedom exists independently of any conditioning that might affect his decisions. According to Compatibilism, an actor is free when his actions are motivated from within rather than being determined by external conditions.

The compatibilist position is arguably the most reasonable in terms of practical implications associated with the freedom of the actor. According to this position, the actor’s freedom exists independently of conditioning, which allows an actor to decide his actions based on his internal motivations without being dependent on external factors. However, Compatibilism fails to account for the possibility that the actor’s internal motivations might be conditioned by external factors, rendering his decisions, while seemingly self-motivated, still dependent on the environment. As a matter of fact, Compatibilism, as well as other traditional perspectives on the free will-determinism tension, fails to account for the actor’s freedom in general due to the inability of these perspectives to consider the actor’s freedom in the context of broader ontological and phenomenological foundations of reality.

The philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta provides the conceptual basis for considering the free will-determinism tension from the holistic perspective that takes into account the actor’s freedom in relation to both conditioned and unconditioned events. Advaita Vedanta is able to account for the actor’s freedom due to its two-fold structure of reality and the actor’s consciousness as a whole.

The two-fold structure of Advaita Vedanta rests on the fundamental distinction between two levels of reality, namely the empirical and absolute realities. The basic tenet of Advaita Vedanta is that objects and events exist at two levels corresponding to these two types of reality. The events occurring at the level of empirical reality are subject to specific laws of nature, while the events at the level of absolute reality are subject to deterministic laws of nature.

The free will-determinism tension is resolved by Advaita Vedanta at the level of empirical reality through distinguishing between conditioned and unconditioned events. Conditioned events are the events occurring as a result of other events. When applied to the actor, conditioned events include responses and decisions made by the actor as a result of other decisions and events. These responses and decisions are subject to deterministic laws of nature, accounting for the existence of determinism on the actor’s part. Within the framework of Advaita Vedanta, unconditioned events occur independently of other events at the level of empirical reality. When applied to the actor, unconditioned events are free responses and decisions that exist independently of other events. While conditioned responses and decisions are responsible for the presence of determinism on the actor’s part, the existence of unconditioned responses and decisions accounts for the actor’s free will, thereby resolving the tension between free will and determinism.

It is noteworthy, however, that the events at the level of empirical reality, including conditioned and unconditioned events, are only apparent from the perspective of absolute reality. Unconditioned events are responsible for the apparent existence of the actor’s free will within the framework of empirical reality. At the level of empirical reality, the actor experiences unconditioned events as his free responses and decisions, whereas conditioned events are the results of these responses and decisions, rendering the actor’s actions deterministic. Nevertheless, the apparent existence of free will and determinism at the level of empirical reality does not override the nature of reality at the absolute level.

Within the framework of Advaita Vedanta, the apparent existence of determinism and free will within the limits of empirical reality can be explained by distinguishing between two aspects of an actor’s consciousness, namely mind as the instrumental reason and the witnessing Self. The structure of mind, in its turn, can be divided into four fundamental components known as Antaḥkaraṇa that perform the functions of memory, intelligence, judgment, and sensations. The events occurring within the mind can be classified as conditioned events, since they originate from within the actor but are subject to individual conditioning. This conditioning manifests itself in the actor’s ability to respond to external and internal stimuli in a predictable manner, accounting for the presence of determinism on the actor’s part.

Conditioned responses, however, are not absolute within the structure of consciousness. An actor can exercise his free will within the limits of empirical reality by engaging his higher intelligence, or Buddhi, that allows him to choose between conditioned responses available to him at the moment of decision-making. As soon as the actor engages Buddhi, his responses and actions cease to be conditioned due to the actor’s ability to choose between available conditioned responses on purpose. In this sense, conditioned events account for the presence of determinism within the framework of an actor’s actions, whereas unconditioned events allow an actor to decide his responses and actions, thereby exercising his free will. The unique perspective on the nature of consciousness allows Advaita Vedanta to account for the presence of both determinism and free will on the actor’s part.

According to Advaita Vedanta’s perspective on the actor’s ability to choose between conditioned responses, the events experienced by an actor can be regarded as conditioned or unconditioned much in the same way as the actor himself can experience both conditioned and unconditioned events. In this sense, the free will possessed by the actor within the framework of empirical reality is merely apparent, because the presence of conditionality is inherent to all events experienced by the actor. The deterministic nature of the actor’s actions is accounted for by the conditioned responses available to him, whereas his free will is exercised as soon as he decides to use his unconditioned responses to engage these conditioned responses.

Ultimately, the tension between free will and determinism is resolved by Advaita Vedanta within the framework of the third option, namely the reality at the absolute level. At the absolute level, reality is perceived as pure consciousness that is omnipresent and omniscient. From this perspective, consciousness at the absolute level transcends and encompasses reality at the empirical level, thereby possessing all of the traits inherent to it. In terms of consciousness, the absolute reality is identical to the actor’s Self at the level of empirical reality. In terms of the universe, the absolute reality is identical to God or the universal consciousness. In terms of the events occurring at the level of empirical reality, these are the projections of consciousness onto the actors, thereby endowing the actors with the ability to perceive conditioned and unconditioned events. As a consequence, the distinctions between conditioned and unconditioned events, as well as conditioned and unconditioned responses, are inherent to the actors’ perceptions of reality at the level of empirical reality. From the perspective of the absolute reality, however, these distinctions are illusory due to the unity of consciousness transcending these conceptual oppositions.

Ultimately, from the perspective of the absolute reality, an actor’s responses and actions are neither conditioned nor unconditioned, predetermined nor free, because those who claim to have free will or determinism confuse conditions with events. At the level of absolute reality, the conditioned responses experienced by actors at the level of empirical reality are the projections of consciousness onto the actors, thereby creating the illusion of limitation and determinism. In truth, however, the actors are identical to the absolute reality, omnipresent and omniscient consciousness perceiving conditioned events that occur at the level of empirical reality. In actuality, Advaita Vedanta reveals the existence of genuine freedom of the actor, but it is not the freedom of the actor as an independent ego to choose between conditioned responses. Instead, Advaita Vedanta shows that true freedom is the ability of the actor to become aware of conditioning as a mechanism trapping him within the confines of the ego, thus creating the false sense of determinism. According to Advaita Vedanta’s metaphysics of consciousness, the actor has the ability to become aware of unconditioned events and use them as a tool to transcend his ego and conditioning.

Think About It,

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

Specifically, while the Church did not believe that the sun was at the center of the universe, it did believe that God was at the center of the universe, and thus it acted out of a desire to protect the latter belief. Although today the superstitions attributed to the Middle Ages have been relegated to the trashcan of history, the dark forces fueling the Inquisition’s hunt for heresy continue to live on in society today, often inspiring humanity to engage in acts of ideological carnage. The same desperation to purge society of people with “wrong” belief, ideas, and ideology, has manifested itself in the clashes between progressives and traditionalists, nationalists and multiculturalists, and other ideologically opposed groups and individuals. People of various ideologies may argue with each other about the superiority of one’s beliefs over the other, but rarely do they argue rationally. Why is it that so few individuals are willing to defend their deeply held core beliefs with rationality and objective reasoning?

Why Do People Defend Their World Views?

One reason why people tend to defend their core beliefs with such vehemence stems from the fact that these deeply held beliefs provide them with a sense of order and security. As sociologist Peter Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy (1967), people need a “nomos,” i.e. a system of order, to avoid “anomy,” the state of chaos and lawlessness. According to Berger’s nomos theory, religion provides people with a “religious nomos,” enabling individuals to achieve order in their lives. Religion, Berger argues, is “the most comprehensive human enterprise in the direction of order,” and thus, when Galileo’s heliocentrism threatened to dismantle the Church’s worldview, the Inquisition reacted so furiously in its attempt to put Galileo on trial and bring him to repentance.

A similar explanation for the vehicence with which people defend their core beliefs comes from philosopher Alvin Plantinga. In Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga speaks of “properly basic beliefs,” which are self-evident truths requiring no evidence or justification, such as belief in God’s existence. People who hold certain religious beliefs consider them to be properly basic, and thus any attempt to challenge these beliefs is perceived as an assault on one’s very being, prompting a fierce reaction. The reason why belief in God is often considered to be properly basic is because, for many people, it is axiomatic – it defines their worldview, serving as the foundation upon which their entire reality is built. Thus, questioning one’s core beliefs often leads to existential angst and can cause a person to experience a crisis of faith or even a nervous breakdown.

Sacred Canopies as Mortality Buffers

The most convincing explanation for people’s desperate attempts to defend their core beliefs, however, comes from terror management theory. This theory, which has gained much empirical support in recent years, posits that people’s core beliefs act as “mortality buffers.” Specifically, terror management theory (TMT) suggests that the awareness of death drives people to develop cultural worldviews and pursue symbolic immortality through various means, such as having children, achieving fame and fortune, and engaging in religion.

According to TMT, worldviews act as mortality buffers allowing people to alleviate the existential anxiety caused by the awareness of mortality. Scholars of terror management theory argue that without cultural worldviews, people would not be able to deal with the sheer horror of knowing that they are going to die one day. It is therefore not surprising that people often base their beliefs on religious doctrines, engage in extremism, or resort to terrorism. The reason why people choose to follow a particular religion or adhere to a certain set of values is because these beliefs constitute their mortality buffer allowing them to overcome the existential dread fueled by their awareness of mortality.

There is a substantial body of empirical research supporting the idea that core beliefs act as mortality buffers for individuals and entire societies. Specifically, multiple studies conducted in laboratories demonstrate that the threat of mortality (“mortality salience”) causes people to become more committed to their own worldviews and more derogatory toward other groups. In other words, when people are made to think about their impending death, they often become more extreme in their beliefs and more willing to engage in violence against members of other groups. The fact that people are often willing to kill and die for their core beliefs demonstrates that these beliefs often act as their mortality buffers, allowing them to deny the reality of their impending death.

Worldviews as Identity Buffers

The fact that core beliefs often act as mortality buffers helps explain why people are so invested in them that they feel they cannot exist without them. The main reason for this is that the human psyche often treats core beliefs, especially one’s core worldview, as an extension of one’s self-conception. In other words, when people believe in a certain set of ideas, they think that these ideas define who they are. In contemporary philosophy of mind, there is an emerging school of thought which suggests that people are not unitary consciousnesses, but rather different “narratives” inhabiting one body. Some philosophers argue that people construct “narrative selves,” which are nothing but a set of beliefs held by an individual. From this perspective, it is therefore not surprising that people often become deeply committed to the ideas they believe to be true. One’s self-conception is therefore often inextricably linked to one’s core beliefs. People, especially today, think of their beliefs as a reflection of their mind, and the idea that they are wrong about their core beliefs is repulsive to them.

When people feel that their deeply held core beliefs are being challenged, they can react as if these beliefs were an intrinsic part of their identity. This, in fact, is the central insight of TMT, which highlights the role of worldviews in helping people manage their existential dread. The reason why people are so willing to defend their core beliefs is because these beliefs constitute an important part of who they are. There is a concept in social psychology which is related to the idea of the self-serving bias and is often referred to as “identity fusion.” Identity fusion occurs when people’s self-conceptions become irreversibly intertwined with a certain ideology, worldview, or group. In such cases, people may experience criticism of their worldview or group as an attack on their self. In other words, people may feel as if they themselves are being criticized, which can make them respond far more harshly to criticism than they otherwise would. One prominent philosopher who acknowledged the importance of this psychological phenomenon was Charles Taylor. In Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor speaks of belief in God as constituting a “moral space,” without which an individual cannot exist. For Taylor, worldviews inform people’s moral beliefs, and therefore denying God’s existence can often feel like a tremendously immoral act to a believer. Similarly, criticizing a person’s core beliefs can often feel like an immoral act, which can provoke an equally immoral reaction from the individual.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Costs of Being Wrong

The final reason why people are often unwilling to abandon their core beliefs, even when confronted with facts that contradict these beliefs, is that doing so would cause them to experience severe cognitive dissonance. People tend to believe in what they believe in because believing in it feels right to them, and abandoning these core beliefs would make them feel as if they were wrong about something really important. In psychology, this phenomenon is referred to as the “confirmation bias,” and it suggests that people interpret information in a way that confirms their existing beliefs and assumptions. Related to it is the “disconfirmation bias,” which causes people to discount or ignore information that contradicts their existing beliefs. When it comes to core beliefs, however, these biases often fail people, prompting people to deny facts that contradict their core beliefs rather than adjusting their beliefs to accommodate new information.

Furthermore, people are often unwilling to accept that one was wrong about something because believing that one was wrong about something usually entails tremendous psychological costs; thus, the desire to avoid these costs can prevent people from adjusting their beliefs in light of new evidence. In many ways, the costs of being wrong are closely related to the concept of “investment.” Simply put, people are often unwilling to accept that one was wrong about something because one invested a lot of time and effort in believing in that thing. The more time and effort one has invested in believing in something, the more one is likely to continue believing in it despite evidence to the contrary. This is especially true for core beliefs that people hold on to with such conviction that they are willing to fight to the bitter end to defend them. People are also often wrong about their core beliefs because these beliefs often entail tremendous psychological and material costs for them. There is no doubt that believing in something really big often feels tremendously empowering, but there also are costs that people who hold these beliefs must bear. The most obvious example of such costs are the financial expenditures one must make in order to support one’s core beliefs. These expenditures can be prohibitively costly, which is why people often feel particularly offended when their dearly held beliefs are criticized, which makes them particularly willing to defend their core beliefs.

Conclusion

When people are asked why they believe what they believe, they often cite reasons for their beliefs. However, when it comes to core beliefs, which most people hold on to with such tenacity that it is difficult to convince them that they are wrong, the reasons for believing in them often turn out to be irrational. The reasons why people defend their core beliefs with such persistence rarely stem from reason; rather, they stem from the fact that these core beliefs provide people with a certain degree of comfort. Specifically, core beliefs act as “nomoses,” giving people an order of sorts, as well as mortality buffers, helping people deal with the existential dread that stems from their awareness of mortality. These core beliefs also act as identity buffers, as people often think of their core beliefs as an extension of their self-conception. Furthermore, people are often particularly invested in their core beliefs because they perceive the costs of being wrong about them to be prohibitively high.

Think about it.

From,

TheBelieveingAgnostic

Inside the digital space, billions of people today digitally transform their biomaterial presence every day, engaging their consciousness in the virtual domain as a means to gain liberation from bodily limitations.

This is how people practice modern Gnosticism, a heresy that considers material existence as something that should be put aside in favour of some higher power.

In essence, the entire point of the classical incarnationalist theology is that one’s physical presence is the means by which one can experience a valid and true encounter with reality. By contrast, Gnostic thought is fundamentally anti-somatic, holding that flesh and matter distract human beings from engaging with something greater than themselves. Digital technology enables and empowers exactly this kind of anti-somatic interaction with reality, one that puts one’s physical body aside in favour of something more convenient and less restrictive. Inside the digital domain, a person is not limited by the burdens of physical presence because, in the digital space, location does not equal presence. The physical body is inconvenient, unreliable, and unpredictable, subject to disease and decay, and requiring constant maintenance and care. All of these limitations are eliminated once one transforms one’s physical presence into a form of digital communication. Inside the digital domain, each person reorients their consciousness in such a way as to liberate themselves from the restrictions of their bodies.

In the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the human body is the center of the world, meaning that to perceive the world around us, we need to first perceive our own bodies. In short, the body is the prerequisite of all other physical perceptions. However, digital technology essentially lifts the person out of her body. The choice between text messaging and face-to-face contact, between the digital realm and the physical meeting is in many ways a choice between Gnosticism and incarnationalist faith. By engaging in the digital, I essentially accept that my physical presence is not necessary for me to experience truth. My body and my physical location are inconvenient, unreliable, and dispensable. They are a burden I must get rid of in my pursuit of truth, just as the early Gnostics tried to liberate themselves from their bodies in pursuit of gnosis.

In turn, the entire digital realm is constructed as a gigantic Gnostic trap with an entire array of demiurges ready to assist users in their delusions. In the early Gnosticism, the demiurge was a privileged agent who acted as a demiurge, creating traps for people to keep them inside the material realm. Today, the demiurgic function is performed by the digital space, which traps people inside its own limited and self-centred realm. Algorithms recommend content, decide what is newsworthy, and generally frame the way in which we experience the world around us. The demiurgic realm of algorithms and big data keeps us inside its realm, manipulating us in order to become more profitable.

Inside the realm of digital manipulators, users are confronted with the digital version of Gnostic gnosis. The early Gnostics reserved gnosis for the enlightened few, those willing to undertake the effort to liberate themselves from their bodies and material desires. The modern user of social media is in many ways similar to the early Gnostic believer. Heretical social media users spend hours of their precious time scrolling down their feeds looking for some secret knowledge to enlighten their mundane and everyday lives. The digital realm offers a chance to escape the banality of our everyday lives by transcending our bodies and minds.

Ultimately, the modern Gnostic is the transhumanist ideologue who promotes the development of artificial general intelligence and who believes that human existence should be upgraded to the next level. In the Gnostic thought of Hans Jonas, the feeling of being thrown into a hostile material universe is the root of all heresies against the Church. The transhumanist thinkers share this view of material existence as something inherently inferior, and therefore all transhumanist views on human enhancement are effectively Gnostic at their core. According to transhumanist beliefs, the purpose of human existence is to leave our physical bodies and minds behind and enter a realm of light and energy, transcending our current limitations as material beings.

Therefore, the goal of the transhumanist theology is to overcome mortality and achieve a kind of digital immortality. In this respect, its similarity with early Gnosticism is telling – once the Valentinian Gnostic managed to shed his body, he would achieve the goal similar to the one envisioned by the modern transhumanists. It could be stated that the obsession of many modern people with augmented reality, digital existence, and leaving their physical bodies behind in pursuit of some higher digital existence is ultimately the result of their inability to accept their physical existence as something holy and divine. It is similar to early Gnosticism in that many believers left their bodies in pursuit of gnosis. Thus, the only way to combat this latest manifestation of Gnosticism is to engage in a broader philosophical discussion about the role of the physical in our lives.

Think about it.

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

Before we fully unpack this topic, let’s analyze the teachers. We first have the preacher of Galilee. This depicted version of Jesus often spoke to the masses and crowds about a God in the distance separate from us who had an abode in the Kingdom of Heaven. He is the one who serves as a judge who although gives everyone a chance to reach heaven, condemns the sins that humans commit while praising the righteous and keeping them close. After death, he rewards the moral and punishes those who were stuck in sin, sending them to hell. Blatantly, these descriptions of God are dualistic in their nature. We are here and God is there, with a vast distance between us. If we do good we can achieve heaven.

Later on, we see a different rendition of God, especially in the mystic of The Gospel of John as well as The Gospel of Thomas. The version of Jesus here speaks in a paradoxical way compared to his previous remarks, making similar views to the Advaita Vedantan’s view of God. John 10:30, Jesus claims “I and the father are one.” In Luke 17:21 he claims “The kingdom of God is writhing you.” The previous separation between the abode of humans and god seems to vanish, where God is presented not as a being to be pleased but rather as the ground of being itself.

Christian Orthodox theology often clears this up, claiming that the divinity of Jesus is unique as he is God by nature, taking his form to connect with human beings. But if we step back and look at this through the lens of Indian philosophy in particular, the non-dualistic tradition of Advaita Vedanta, the puzzle pieces start to fit. It can be inferred that Jesus was not contradicting himself but rather following what is known as Adhikari-bheda—the deliverance of the ultimate truth depending on the spiritual readiness of the listener.

In the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate truth beyond all maya is known as Nirguna Brahman, non-dualistic consciousness in its most ultimate form, beyond all name, form and attributes. Although widely accepted in the circles of Advaita Vedanta, if we look in history, masters like Adi Shankaracharya recognize a problem with this immediate revelation. If such a large concept is immediately dropped to the human mind, filled with ego and attachment to the material world, it instills a sense of existential nihilism. The human ego simply uses the justification of “I am God” to justify their wrong doings and pleasures, losing the plot completely.

Therefore Dualism (known as Dvaita) must first be taught to the devotee in order to develop habits such as prayer, peace and devotion. This is the concept of Saguna Brahman, which is not the ultimate consciousness but a manifestation of it with attributes that humans can understand. It functions as the first steps as it teaches the human ego to surrender itself to a force greater than itself.

So what does this have to do with Jesus? Well, this is exactly what he seems to do. When he spoke to the general public, full of fisherman and farmers and those who worked daily jobs, if he had suddenly mentioned the need for the collapse of the human ego and the lack of subject- object relation in ultimate reality, it would have been unfathomable and ultimately useless for them, as it would have only led to negative results. This is why a new technique was needed. By being taught of a Father, they know had something and someone to work towards and provide hope and guidance through their suffering allowing for a truth beyond this mortal fate to appear.

This double layered technique was noticed by Jesus himself who famously claimed.

"To you it has been given to know the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables, so that 'they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen but not understand.'" (Mark 4:11–12)

Dualism was not the final end goal but rather a stepping stone for even the general public to slowly understand the truth and the idea of the human ego that needed to be wiped.

In English editions the word “metanoia” is used. The Greek word which holds a translation of repentance carries a unique connotation. It often entails feeling guilt over actions and repenting and ultimately getting better and being forgiven.

However the origin of the word derived of the Greek word “meta nous” means something that is far more interesting. Meta refers to “going beyond” and the word nous means the intellect. Together is forms “going beyond the intellect”. Its eventual translation does not mean seeking forgiveness but rather entails a transcendence of the human ego and consciousness.

In Advaita Vedanta, this would be the dissolving of the (jiva) or the ego that constructs a false reality of a separate sense far away from the ultimate idealistic foundation of consciousness.

When Jesus talks about denying oneself, he doesnt mean inflicting torture but rather the letting go of the desires that is holding the human ego back. If you are so integrated in yourself, viewing the body and personality as fundamentally “you”, adopting the non-dualistic nature of the world becomes almost impossible.

When asked about the arrival of the Kingdom of God, Jesus states

The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There it is!' For in fact, the kingdom of God is entōs hymōn." (Luke 17:20)

The Greek phrase entōs hymōn is widely considered to have an internal reference. It is often claimed to mean “within you” or “in your midst.” Both versions of interpretation deviate away from a separation between humans and the Kingdom of God but rather point to an internal overlap between the two.

It is often believed that the language of Jesus was not made for such transcending vocabulary which is why Jesus portrays this reality through figures of speech and metaphors.

This concept is very similar to a Jivanmukti, a liberated soul who still has not reached the end of their human life. In mainstream religion, this enlightenment is often seen as an event that occurs after death. But in deep non-dualistic philosophy, “The Kingdom of God” is often not seen as a physical place but rather as a state of unconditional awareness of oneself true identity as one with consciousness. Reaching this state is often seen as a final goal, disssolving the human ego and becoming “enlightened”.

When Jesus later said that he and the father were one, his is almost completely stoned for blasphemy. This is because they are still witnessing life through the dualistic lens. Orthodox Christianity often interprets this as Jesus claiming to be God, an Advaitan would look at this differently.

Jesus was making a statement similar to Aham Brahmasmi or “I am Brahman”, believing that you are one with the ultimate consciousness. When a realized being like Jesus claims “I am the father are one”, the “I” does not refer to the physical body of Jesus the Nazareth but as one with the universal self and reality. The individual of “I” no longer existed. His desires and human ego was dissolved.

When approaching the Gospel through this sense, we see that he didn’t preach dualism since he was a dualist but rather because he knew that to understand the non-dualistic states of the world proper progression was needed.

God must first be seen as “The Father” to Christians but soon not as a physical being but rather the foundation of ultimate reality or the consciousness that is the make up of everything around us including ourselves.

Think about it.

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

From,

TheBelievingAgnostic

As with a majority of the population, I have embarked on multiple journeys of finding “God” and I’m sure I’m certainly not alone. Even for the believer, a crucial question arises. If different religions fundamentally have different and contradictory claims about the concept of God, the afterlife or salvation and even the purpose of life, what awaits man, who is in the pursuit of truth. Furthermore, how should one approach life without constant fear of choosing the wrong path?

II. Key Differences

Before moving on, the key difference between mainstream religions must be acknowledged. Even simple questions like who God is and what happens after death fundamentally differ. If you ask the Christian, they’ll answer that, believing in one god in the Trinity and claiming that either heaven or hell awaits you post-mortem. If you ask the Muslim, they believe in a Monotheist culture as well believing that Paradise or Hell follows human life. The Hindu claims that multiple manifestations exist but Brahman is the one ultimate reality and that the law of karma exists, with human taking multiple births until they achieve Moksha or eternal liberation. On the other hand, the Buddhist doesn’t even believe in a central creator God. It is abundantly clear that these distinctions cannot all be true since they attempt to answer the same questions in conflicting manners. This is crucial as if one religion is correct on a belief, then the others are mistaken. However if a multitude of religions are partially correct, then it leads us to the conclusion that the eternal truth is far more complex than anticipated. If none are true, it would reshape ethics and human meaning. While few may follow a nihilistic approach, some may still adopt a deterministic mindset, still motivated to do their due diligence. If an individual is faced with conflicting claims, what is expected of them, and what is the result of an “incorrect decision”.

III. The issue with Heaven and Hell

In the case that a Muslim is correct and Islam presents itself as the true religion. Then the Christian, despite their efforts of aligning with Christian morals and becoming the best person they can be, they still face a terrible fate. Vice versa if Christianity ends up becoming the true religion, then a Muslim or Hindu no matter how great of a person they are or their mortal contributions, they face eternal hell. Is this truly fair? While thinkers like Gautama Buddha and Stephen Law developed claims that God may not be all-good, this article works under the assumption that God seeks to do what is good for humanity. If an incorrect decision leads to hell, it inevitably instills existential fear in many, believing that nothing matter if their choice is wrong. But by that context there is so much that dictates what religion you follow. While someone born in Greece has an 80% chance of being saved, one born in the Czech Republic has an 80% chance of going to hell. This brings us to another major questions. Without a completely clear guide of which religion is so called “true”, then how can it be reasonable for eternal consequences to depend on arriving at the correct conclusion in the midst of contradictory religious claims? Hinduism, although criticized by many takes a different approach stating that the path to god has thousands of entries. Regardless of your religion, through devotion can lead to salvation. Although Hinduism is critiques in many aspects, this seems to be a more formidable claim of what a true god would expect.

III. Potential Solutions

One may argue that because certainty is impossible, thorough investigation is needed, avoiding the adoption of belief simply based on inheritance. One may also argue that due to the uncertainty, morality and honesty must be pursued. But that opens even more questions for relative vs intrinsic morality (future topic probably). Although these are potential approaches they are halted once again by another conclusion. What if you do your own thorough research and end at one religion that you believe to be true despite massive time spent on finding the truth, the pursuit can certainty be altered by preconceived notions and personal goals and views. Thus, one must realize that belief isn’t simply a quick fix. If someone can’t force themself to change their mind, is it their fault? Would God make someone an agnostic or atheist if not believing leads to hell? Then who’s fault would that be? This highlights a lay concept known as Doxastic Involuntarism, which is the idea that genuine beliefs is not a simple choice. Similar to how you can’t convince yourself that grass is purpose, an individual cannot force themselves to accept a theological or philosophy claim that they do not find convincing. If belief is involuntary and not a conscious decision that punishing someone with eternal hell for a honest lack of belief seems unjust. If God is all knowing and withholds the information the problem is no longer human error but rather Divine Hiddenness also known as Deus Absconditus.

IV. Conclusion and Being Ok With Not Knowing

To truly find a solution, one must accept that it’s ok being uncertain. Important decisions are constantly made with uncertainty being present along the way. Absolute certainty is very rare. Even in the theological and philosophical space, the majority of philosophical papers propose an idea instead of establishing it with absolute certainty. Alex O Connor further supports being uncertain and avoiding the fear of Hell as fear isn’t evidence. Just because you adopt an ideology out of fear, it doesn’t make it any more true. That would lead to picking a solution out of terror rather than person goals and pursuits. This is where propositions such as Pascal’s Wager fail in saying that you should believe since the positives outweigh the negatives. The decision to make logic based is therefore not a rejection of God but rather a requirement for authentic faith. A God truly worth pursuing would certainly value an honest atheist of believer over a hypocrite of a believer who genuinely does not believe what they “practice”. I sincerely believe that the best way to achieve fulfillment is switch the mindset from “How to not go to hell?” to “What is actually true?” . Every pursuit is different for everyone and along the journey think to yourself if you’re ok changing your mind, if you’re honestly seeking the truth and that the fear is acceptable. At the end of the day a decision out of fear will always fall short of a decision made through sincere inquiry.

Think about it,

TheBelievingAgnostic