Richard Carrier - The Hero Savior Analogy

[Minimalist]

This is a bit long but the point is compelling.... to all but theists I imagine.

Hero Savior of Vietnam
 
Suppose I told you there was a soldier in the Vietnam War named “Hero Savior” who miraculously calmed storms, healed wounds, conjured food and water out of thin air, and then was blown up by artillery, but appeared again whole and alive three days later, giving instructions to his buddies before flying up into outer space right before their very eyes. Would you believe me? Certainly not. You would ask me to prove it. 
 
So I would give you all the evidence I have. But all I have are some vague war letters by a guy who never really met Hero Savior in person, and a handful of stories written over thirty years later by some guys named Bill, Bob, Carl, and Joe. I don’t know for sure who these guys are. I don’t even know their last names. There are only unconfirmed rumors that they were or knew some of the war buddies of Hero Savior. They might have written earlier than we think, or later, but no one really knows. No one can find any earlier documentation to confirm their stories, either, or their service during the war, or even find these guys to interview them. So we don’t know if they really are who others claim, and we’re not even sure these are the guys who actually wrote the stories. You see, the undated pamphlets circulating under their names don’t say “by Bill” or “by Bob,” but “as told by Bill” and “as told by Bob.” Besides all that, we also can’t find any record of a Hero Savior serving in the war. He might have been a native guide whose name never made it into official records, but still, none of the historians of the war ever mention him, or his amazing deeds, or even the reports of them that surely would have spread far and wide.
 
Besides the dubious evidence of these late, uncorroborated, unsourced, and suspicious stories, the best thing I can give you is that war correspondence I mentioned, some letters by an army sergeant actually from the war, who claims he was a skeptic who changed his mind. But he never met or saw Hero in life, and never mentions any of the miracles that Bob, Bill, Carl, and Joe talk about. In fact, the only thing this sergeant ever mentions is “seeing” Hero after his death, though not “in flesh and blood,” but in a “revelation.” That’s it.
 
This sergeant also claims the spirit of Hero Savior now enables him and some others to “speak in tongues” and “prophecy” and heal some illnesses, but none of this has been confirmed or observed by anyone else on record, and none of it sounds any different than what thousands of other cults and gurus have claimed. So, too, for some unconfirmed reports that some of these believers, even this army sergeant, endured persecution or even died for believing they “saw Hero in a revelation”—a fact no more incredible than the Buddhists who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War, certain they would be reincarnated, or the hundreds of people who voluntarily killed themselves at Jonestown, certain their leader (Jim Jones) was an agent of God.

Okay. I’ve given you all that evidence. Would you believe me then? Certainly not. No one trusts documents that come decades after the fact by unknown authors, and hardly anyone believes the hundreds of gurus today who claim to see and speak to the spirits of the dead, heal illnesses, and predict the future. Every reasonable person expects and requires extensive corroboration by contemporary documents and confirmed eyewitness accounts. Everyone would expect here at least as much evidence as I’d need to prove I owned a nuclear missile, yet the standard required is actually that of proving I own an interstellar spacecraft—for these are clearly very extraordinary claims, and as we saw above, such claims require extraordinary evidence, as much as would be needed, for example, to convince the United Nations that I had an interstellar spacecraft on my lawn. Yet what we have for this Hero Savior doesn’t even count as ordinary evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence we really need.
 
To complete the analogy, many other things would rightly bother us. Little is remarkable about the stories told of Hero Savior, for similar stories apparently have been told of numerous Vietnamese sorcerers and heroes throughout history—and no one believes them, so why should we make an exception for Hero? The documents we have from Bob, Bill, Carl, and Joe have also been tampered with—we’ve found some cases of forgery and editing in each of their stories by parties unknown, and we aren’t sure we’ve caught it all. Apparently, their stories were used by several different cults to support their causes, and these cults all squabble over the exact details of the right cause, and so tell different stories or interpret the stories differently to serve their own particular agenda. And the earliest version, the one told by Bob, which both Bill and Joe clearly copied, and just added to and edited (and even Carl seems to have done the same, just far more loosely), appears to have been almost entirely constructed out of passages from ancient Vietnamese poems, arranged and altered to tell a story full of symbolic and moral meaning. These and many other problems plague the evidence, leaving it even more suspect than normal.
 
This Hero Savior analogy entirely parallels the situation for Jesus. Jesus even has the same name: “Christ Jesus” in Hebrew literally means “the messiah and savior.” In other words, “Hero Savior.” The shady state of the evidence is likewise the same, as documented by Bart Ehrmann in Jesus Interrupted (2009) a book I strongly recommend.† And the way the Gospels just emulate and adapt prior stories is discussed by many scholars, including myself in Not the Impossible Faith (2009), and I will soon publish a book more directly On the Historicity of Jesus Christ.†
 
Every reason we would have not to believe these Hero Savior stories applies to the stories of Jesus, with all the same force. All we have attesting his miracles are letters by a guy (Paul) who never saw Jesus except in private “revelations,” and Gospels by unknown authors of unknown date using unknown sources and methods to document wildly unbelievable claims we wouldn’t trust from any other religion. So if you agree there would be no good reason to believe these Hero Savior stories, you must also agree there is insufficient reason to believe the Jesus Christ stories. Hence I am not a Christian because the evidence is not good enough. For it is no better than the evidence proposed for Hero Savior, and that falls far short of the burden that would have to be met to confirm the very extraordinary claims surrounding him.

Curious to see if any of our resident believers jump in to try to prove that their boy is different.

[Aoi Magi]

Your hero savior is false as because my religious texts do not pprove of him. Nor do my beliefs perfectly match with my imagined version of his beliefs. /s

[Minimalist]

That will be about par for the course.  The biggest problem is that it is TLR for people who prefer to read one bible verse at a time and pretend it means something.

[Mudhammam]

Meh. Carrier's analogy is rather flimsy. It doesn't include the important consideration that there are in fact thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of "Hero Saviors," many who die in obscurity, a great number of whom are in a real sense, well, real, despite the ever-growing-and-fading legendary status and creepy, fan girl cult that with each passing generation proceeds some Great Leader one way or another. Like I said, many of these "Hero Saviors" tend to be authentic, physical human beings, despite the claims that surround their biography--Pythagoras, Jesus, Paul, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, even if in some cases the information for the first 100-150 years is pathetically devoted to some agenda or, as in the case of Muhammad but certainly not Jesus, almost nothing about your personal life has survived. And then there's the fact that this is all too common insofar as ancient biographies go, that 99% of individuals are no better known, not to mention throngs of contemporaries who were of much greater stature and significance as either politicians, generals, artists, authors, scientists, mathematicians, etc., unfortunately because human record keeping, until the past few hundred years, has been very unimpressive. Still, it's not as if we are talking about characters who lived 500 or 1000 years prior, as in the case of names like Abraham, Moses, David, and most of the names you find in a book like Genesis or The Iliad. Rather, until relatively recently, any "Hero Savior" or normal Joe would have unlikely been able to read or write, and when the materials were available, the means of distribution were slow, tedious, and even when successful, the duration of the final product was never outstanding, works of stone or metal aside. Aside from waning popularity, a book of the sort that "Hero Saviors" typically fill might get banned or altered, or a multitude of new frauds would inevitably try to profit off their own perpetuation of the original tale. So, the story that he is asking me to perceive as incredible is, of course, incredible, but what he suggests must follow from that is not at all established in this lengthy but ultimately pointless comparison.

[The Grand Nudger]

It doesn't -matter- whether or not "there was a real guy" if the book isn't talking about him, eh?  Inevitably, when this sort of position gets espoused...one has to ask which real guy we have in mind..if any of them are "the real guy" to begin with. I'm sure that carriers analogy could be improved...but I don't think that your notion of the many real hero saviors (or subsequent fraud, of all things) actually illustrates it.

[Arkilogue]

Archetypes gonna arch.

[Mudhammam]

It doesn't -matter- whether or not "there was a real guy" if the book isn't talking about him, eh?  Inevitably, when this sort of position gets espoused...one has to ask which real guy we have in mind..if any of them are "the real guy" to begin with.  I'm sure that carriers analogy could be improved...but I don't think that your notion of the many real hero saviors (or subsequent fraud, of all things) actually illustrates it.

A hundred different people could have inconsistent impressions of you. Some of their beliefs about you may not by any means resemble you as you actually are. That doesn't mean that there is absolutely nothing in their false impressions of you that contains some truth of you as you indeed are, or that the false impression is based on some other being who is not ultimately derived, however distorted the caricature may be, from the real you.

[Minimalist]

None of which makes him "god."

[The Grand Nudger]

A hundred different people could have inconsistent impressions of you.  

Absolutely.  I;d even go so far as to call that one a fact, not a possibility.

Some of their beliefs about you may not by any means resemble you as you actually are.

Well, given the sheer number of them and their varied opinions on me we'd have to say that few, if any, resemble me as I am.

That doesn't mean that there is absolutely nothing in their false impressions of you that contains some truth of you as you indeed are, or that the false impression is based on some other being who is not ultimately derived, however distorted the caricature may be, from the real you.

What truth might that be?  That's the problem, isn't it?  "Some" truth, "some" person.  Unless you care to hazard a guess as to which narratives provide us a glimpse of whichever of the jesus you think existed...this is all irrelevant. 

"If jesus was as real as you, then whats true of stories about you could/would be true of stories about him"  Well no shit...but -is- jesus as real as me?  Isn't that the question? If a book is full of caricatures (this, too, simply assumes that jesus is really real).....what sense does it make so say that it contains a historical jesus, particularly when you can't even tell me which caricature is more accurate than another? A book full of caricatures about me would be no more representative of "the historical rhythm". Regaradless of the fact that I exist in the here and now, that doesn't actually give anyone any good -reason- to think that I did..centuries (or even just decades) into the future. You'd ask for corroborating data, wouldn't you? You wouldn't be satisfied with a book of exaggerated descriptions of the archetypal redneck as "the historical rhythm", would you? When that corroborating data turns out to be simple misinterpretation all the way to fraud, and so does the book of caricatures...would you -still- feel confident that one of the caricatures is "the historical rhythm"?

[Minimalist]

Actually Carrier is talking about the quality of the evidence for the godboy.... which is virtually non-existent and would not be accepted as valid for any other character in any other novel.