Thoughts on Atheism and Apologetics

[The Inquisition]

Not only would it be embarrassing to spend three years with god and lack faith, it's almost inexplicable.  It's more of the pattern that I see in the Bible, where ordinary people experience transcendent things, and a surprising number of them seem utterly unimpressed.  Three years of watching Jesus do and say so many things that John ends his gospel by claiming that he 'didn't think there were enough books in the world to write them all down.'  Jesus explains to them several times that he will die and return shortly after, and this concept is so foreign to them that when it happens they're dumbstruck?  These were men who, in some cases, immediately dropped what they were doing when Jesus first called on them to become his followers.  But after three years of having that intuition reinforced, they become bumbling and confused dimwits?  It doesn't make sense.

It's the pattern during the OT too.   God gives the Jews rules and performs great things for them (like parting the red sea) and yet in no time at all they're doubting and going after other gods.  Once god gives them the promised land the same thing happens over and over.

It reads like a literary device, like the endless pattern in the Harry Potter books where Harry saves the school once a year and once a year is suspected of being the heir of Slytheryn or some such.  And it has a lesson aspect.  The OT was largely edited and compiled and in some cases written during the Babylonian captivity, and the question that had to be answered was why would god allow this to happen?  The whole narrative is god covenants with man, man breaks covenant, god punishes, man repents, god restores good life.  Rinse, repeat.  You would think that is these things were real, man would get the message.  But if it's only man explaining the ups and downs of Isreal, it makes perfect sense.

They were practicing post-hoc apologism from the very start in the OT.