Sunday, February 11, 2018

Heaven's Gate and where religions come from

I just finished listening to 10 episodes of Glynn Washington's podcast about the history of the cult known as Heaven's Gate. Two people--a man who called himself Do and a woman who called herself Ti--became convinced that they were God's messengers, or maybe God incarnate, or messiahs or prophets of some sort, and they gathered believers around them and worked for 20 years at purifying themselves, and then they all committed suicide.

There are many ways to think about this whole thing, but to me, what this shows is that people can be completely sincere and convinced of things that are manifestly not part of actual reality, and they can give their very life for it--and still be wrong.

And that makes me think about the apologetics around Christianity, which I was taught and which I believed for a long time: namely, that we can be sure that the resurrection of Jesus really happened because the apostles all died as martyrs, convinced of this fact, and there's no way they could have believed it unless it had really happened. Therefore, since they believed it enough to die for it, it must have actually happened. And therefore, we can know that Christianity is true.

I have stopped believing that Christianity is true for some time now. And I am sure, now, that the fact that the apostles believed that Christ had risen is no proof that he actually did.

The gospels report that as he died, Jesus cried, My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?

When I taught a Bible study to a group of Japanese women, they were pretty stunned when we got to this verse. And I think every believer, if they experience this for the first time, will agree, this is pretty shocking.

But Christians have salve for this wound; they explain that it's from a psalm, that it doesn't mean that Jesus lost hope during his suffering, or that God had actually forsaken him.

It seems likely to me that Jesus really thought he was God's messenger, and that as he died, he really thought that he was badly mistaken, that he was abandoned by God..

The disciples are depicted as being shattered by his death, filled with despair, ready to qabandon the whole thing as a bad dream.

But then, somehow, many, most of them, became convinced that he wasn't really dead, that his body was gone, and that he was among them in some semi-physical/semi-spiritual form.

Given everything we know about death, and everything we know about belief, and everything we know about human psychology and the ability to believe what is literally unbelievable, it seems to me that the likeliest thing as that they were deluded. A person who has been dead for 3 days does not come back to life--but even if they did, even if Lazarus somehow walked out of that tomb, they would come back to life as physical beings. Not as beings that can walk through walls, appear and disappear, not as beings that float up to heaven, never to be seen again.

The story of the resurrection is all mixed up. Was it his body that was raised back to human life? or was it his ghost or spirit that somehow dwelt among the disciples? The four gospel accounts, plus Paul's, say yes to both. The details are inconsistent, the story is not coherent, the tomb is empty, the stone has been rolled away by angels, there are angels (maybe one, maybe two) in the tomb, they tell the disciples different things.

It's just what you would expect from people who are believing something that they really don't know, really haven't seen.

It's just what you would expect of a delusion.

They weren't lying. They weren't trying to deceive anybody.

But they were mistaken, they were wrong. Jesus was dead, and like all dead people, he stayed dead.

Just like the woman known as Ti in Heaven's Gate died, and remained dead. And her followers, desperate to believe that she was an incarnation of God, waited for her to return and finally decided to commit suicide in order to meet her in the air. The disciples of Jesus told themselves the same kind of story--he's coming back! We'll meet him in the air! We'll live with him forever in some other realm.

Glynn Washington points out to us that the Heaven's Gate cult is no more foolish or unbelievable than any other religion, than Christianity and the belief in the resurrection.

My take-away is sort of the flip of that--belief in Christianity and the resurrection is not a bit more reasonable or rational or likely or true than the belief of Heaven's Gate that space aliens were going to take them to heaven in a UFO.

People, humans, have an amazing ability to reason, but we also have an amazing ability to be deluded, to believe unbelievable, irrational, impossible things.

Jesus preached to his followers for 3 years, and his teachings are in some ways definitely admirable and noble. And then he died, and people have built an amazing edifice upon what he said and taught for 2000 years. Some people, many in fact, still think he's coming back.

It's about as likely as Ti and Do coming in a space ship with a bunch of aliens to bring us all to a superhuman level.