Reddit reviews Not the Impossible Faith

I'm reading Not The Impossible Faith, where Richard Carrier explores reasons for Christianity's rise in the first century. It turns out that people flocked to Christianity because of the shitty socio-economic prospects faced by the majority. There are strong parallels to the US, I think.

EDIT: Flubbed up the title. Oops!

Random selection of some of my favorites to help you expand your horizons:

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a great introduction to scientific skepticism.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris is a succinct refutation of Christianity as it's generally practiced in the US employing crystal-clear logic.

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt is the best biography of one of the most interesting men in history, in my personal opinion.

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski is a jaw-dropping book on history, journalism, travel, contemporary events, philosophy.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a great tome about... everything. Physics, history, biology, art... Plus he's funny as hell. (Check out his In a Sunburned Country for a side-splitting account of his trip to Australia).

The Annotated Mona Lisa by Carol Strickland is a thorough primer on art history. Get it before going to any major museum (Met, Louvre, Tate Modern, Prado, etc).

Not the Impossible Faith by Richard Carrier is a detailed refutation of the whole 'Christianity could not have survived the early years if it weren't for god's providence' argument.

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman are six of the easier chapters from his '63 Lectures on Physics delivered at CalTech. If you like it and really want to be mind-fucked with science, his QED is a great book on quantum electrodynamics direct from the master.

Lucy's Legacy by Donald Johanson will give you a really great understanding of our family history (homo, australopithecus, ardipithecus, etc). Equally good are Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade and Mapping Human History by Steve Olson, though I personally enjoyed Before the Dawn slightly more.

Memory and the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel gives you context for all the Bible stories by detailing contemporaneous events from the Levant, Italy, Greece, Egypt, etc.

After the Prophet by Lesley Hazleton is an awesome read if you don't know much about Islam and its early history.

Happy reading!

edit: Also, check out the Reasonable Doubts podcast.

Read this if you actually serious about a quality answer to your question

How is atheism hypocritical? Do you have any examples? Why flawed.

Flawed like, "an eye for an eye" in one chapter of the bible, and "turn the other cheek in another?" How schizophrenic. One would think a god could figure that shit out on the first go round.

Perhaps based on the idea that this was just one of many very common classes of cult, and the fact that one happened to survive is not special, just a lottery?

Richard Carrier works this angle in Not The Impossible Faith, which might be interesting to OP?

http://astore.amazon.com/supportcarrier-20/detail/0557044642

L'idée que Jésus est une personne et non pas juste un esprit a été établie au Concile de Nicée en 325 par la politique et la violence. Donc même pour les premier Chrétiens, c'était controversé que Jésus ait vraiment existé sur terre.

Ton argument a un nom, il s’appelle "la foi impossible" : c'est impossible que la foi ait poussé de même si au départ c'était faux donc c'est vrai. Et plus génériquement, c'est le sophisme de l'incrédulité personnelle : "je ne peux pas croire que le christianisme serait apparu sans Jésus donc il a dû exister".

Si la question t'intéresse, il y a un historien spécialiste de cette période qui explique dans le détail comme une religion peut pousser même si complètement fausse. Si ça t'intéresse: Not the impossible faith, par Richard Carrier.

Here you go

>Why was a gruesome public execution necessary?

Possibly in fulfillment of Psalm 22:16 and Zechariah 12:10. As an aside, why did Osiris have to be dismembered? Why such a gruesome death? Was he real?

There are plenty of ways he could have not existed. This book really goes into detail using many cited mainstream sources:

http://astore.amazon.com/supportcarrier-20/detail/0557044642

Basically, Christianity offered many communist-like values in a time where Roman rule resulted in widening the gap between economic classes, and high control over their lives. They join a church, and people took care of each other. It made life better. That's all the reason anyone needed to believe.

And if you think that they would think the resurrection would be too incredible to follow, understand that this was a myth-ridden time. People believed crazy stuff ALL THE TIME. If you only look at Christianity, and ignore the rest of history, it seems they'd need evidence. But you'd be taking the Christian story out of context by doing that. Similar miraculous claims abounded at that time in countless pagan religions, and people did crazy stuff to join the groups that made those claims, including castrating themselves.

Imagine what you'd have to do to check into a claim. Put yourself into a world where it'd be very unlikely you could read, let alone write. It'd be unlikely that you'd even know anyone who could read outside of the church making the claim. Cities had to employ a literate person to handle this kind of thing. Imagine all that entails from that. Now consider that there's no telephone, no cars/planes, no internet. You are basically stuck where you are. The books of the Bible were written in Greek. Jesus supposedly spoke Aramaic. Now, you have a language barrier, a geographical barrier, and an educational barrier.

Now let's say you are a skeptic for some reason, and decide this is important enough (despite the social benefits it already offers) to make the trek. You are poor (as were the vast majority of converts at the time). This means you're not likely to start walking out toward a city you've never been to, risking your life to check out a story. Even if you did, how would you even start investigating this one dude who died and supposedly wasn't in his tomb anymore? They speak another language, and lifespans were much shorter back then. By the time the gospels were written, most would be dead. And if it was a myth, people who heard it would speak of the myth as fact anyway (as they did about other Jesus-like figures at the time, and gods).

Ok, now realize how powerfully rare this situation of the determined poor skeptic would be. Even if it did happen, those people would just not be Christians, and obviously most people did NOT become Christians. Like I said, people believed all kinds of crazy claims back then. They lived in a world where you basically had to give up on the idea of evidence, if it even occurred to you at all. Christianity offered social benefits of being in a group that had a belief in taking care of others in the group. That was plenty of reason to join. It's not UNreasonable to think that people didn't check it out, and that it was just a myth.

Like I said, people did some crazy stuff for pagan religions, but it's not unreasonable for you to think that those gods were myths. In fact, I'd say it leans toward being unreasonable to think they weren't myths, given what we know today about how biology/physics/history works. Myths were crazy common, and thus extraordinary claims at the time were likely myths. Supernatural claims were almost definitely myths.

Take a look at the Mormons. Take a look at those who follow Scientology. It's SO obvious to us that it's all made up, yet look at how many Mormons there are out there. Imagine how much easier it would have been for them to flourish if you took away literacy and the ability to investigate. In fact, the Mormon religion was growing like mad for quite a long time, but there was a sharp decline in converts after the internet came into use. Their growth now pretty much only comes from birthing babies that they indoctrinate, and that's thanks to the VERY new investigatory/communication tools we have. I agree with you that it seems like it SHOULD be unreasonable to think that people would just believe insanity based on claims alone, but history shows it's not by FAR. Why do you think myths exist? We sometimes think they talked about myths like they were just stories like they are to us, but these are now considered myths only because they are ex-religions. Religions that held on for thousands of years as fact to the people following them. In another thousand years, I imagine people would be talking about Jesus in the same way they talk about Zeus.

I found Not the Impossible Faith a really interesting book on the social conditions during the beginning of Christianity. It was basically communist, which is highly ironic given the generally right wing politics of American Christianity, obsessed with principles of personal rights and self-reliance. Early Christianity was literally the exact opposite.

Look to a scholar for the answer to your question. Richard Carrier wrote a book you should read, if you are truly interested in good quality answers to your question.

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Impossible-Faith-Richard-Carrier/dp/0557044642