Funny to apply evolutionary principles to a critique of religion ;) But I do think you're making the incorrect assumption that religion hasn't already undergone that sort of strenuous debate. Jesus is probably the most discussed/doubted/critiqued figure in history - certainly we've had more time to find out his flaws and the flaws of his followers than we have of science. And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
> Jesus is probably the most discussed/doubted/critiqued figure in history - certainly we've had more time to find out his flaws and the flaws of his followers than we have of science. And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society. Even today in the US politicians know they need to demonstrate their Christianity to become president -- I doubt we'll see an atheist, Jewish, Hindu or even Muslim president within my lifetime (I'm 31).
Also, religious dogma largely lives separate from science and philosophy. It is true that many aspects of what "Christianity" is have been defined by consensus in the Vatican Council (including what scripture -- and which specific version of that scripture -- is considered canonical) and some Christian churches have been adjusting their dogma since (e.g. the CoE has become more accepting of homosexuality, the Catholic church has accepted evolution as factual). But saying "religion has undergone strenuous debate" is a very romanticized view of history.
Not to mention that much of Christian theology/philosophy foregoes the possibility that any other religion might be true to the point where Pascal's Wager only works if you supply the premise "All other religions and sects are definitely wrong" (i.e. you can't accidentally insult the "True God" if you submit yourself to the Christian God and turn out to be wrong).
> Well, to be fair, Jesus was the central figure of the religion of the people you're talking about and for a long time outing yourself as a non-believer was "problematic" for your well-being and status in society.
Not before many, including the earliest Christian leaders, were killed for their belief in Jesus. Christianity has proven to be a determined startup.
Prove what point? Take off your retrospective determinism glasses for a second and note that for any alien species, there's probably going to be a few religions which have double-digits of the population. These religions started from nothing at some point, so of course they look extremely tenacious in retrospect, when in fact any other equally viral religion could have taken their place if history had played out slightly differently.
While what you say is true to some extent for Western Christianity, the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America. A huge diversity of cultures have had their own struggles with Christianity.
In most of these cases, Christianity did not organically spread. It was brought in and forced upon local populations by mostly western colonial powers. Colonial powers always export their cultural beliefs and identities in an effort to bring those subjugated in line with their own ideas and expectations. Where religion wasn't brought in by colonialism's force, it was exported and introduced by typically western missionaries, yet another example of using a different kind of force to help it take root and spread. After some time, it's true that Christianity began to evolve with its own localized flavor, but it's not like these non-western cultures discovered Christianity via their own Damascus Road experiences with local prophets.
While I can't speak about every culture, in W. Africa, Christianity took root because the colonial powers brought missionaries who established religious schools wherein the practice of traditional religion was impossible. For the longest time, these were the only schools available so the educated became Christian, and thus the powerful and well-connected were all Christian as a result.
An even more interesting comparison is the Eastern Christians of Greece, Russia, the Middle East, etc. Their theology and relationship with science has been fundamentally and increasingly different than the West since the Great Schism.
> While what you say is true to some extent for Western Christianity
Its just as true of Eastern Christianity.
> the fact remains that Christianity has taken deep root in a number of places in the world that were free of western biases, e.g., China, Korea, Africa, and South America.
All of those examples are largely a consequence of imperialism (largely, on the part of societies comprising Western Christendom.)
That's not to say that there aren't a few cases of durable Christian communities in regions (IIRC, particularly in the Middle East and East Africa, and some in South Asia) where they aren't a result of the heritage of ties between the common ancestor of modern Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christianity and the Roman empire, including those descendant churches ties to imperialist European states, these isolated communities are notable as exceptions within Christianity.
While religion in ancient Greece had great debate, anything that happened during and after the fall of the Roman empire had effectively zero critical thought to it for the next several hundred years. Christianity was ultimately thrust on western populations by force. It stayed there for generations until it became so engrained in European culture (and American culture, as a consequence) that nobody questioned it anymore until modern day.
It is a coincidence of history that Greece happened to have a a Christian faction that was good at converting people right around the same time that that Roman empire was collapsing.
Many other religions that tried to similarly gain traction were met with destruction before they hit critical mass, so you must be careful to acknowledge some survival bias here for your religion of choice. Christians, by pure chance, got the timing right.
I don't think you can include apologetics or even theology as part of having a fierce, honest, secular debate on Jesus or religions. Apologetics and theological discussion already implicitly involve the assumption of truth, which prevents a truly strenuous, secular debate. As soon as you bring the claims of religions, with all their impossible-to-prove truth assumptions, into the debate, you're no longer having a secular debate. You have to leave the assumptions of divinity, faith, gods, afterlives, etc. None of these things can be adequately defined outside their self-referential religious contexts, and thus the very concepts that ought to be discussed in secular debate can hardly be given adequate definition to inform and frame the debate.
Comparing the persistence of Christianity to Baal and Thor is, I think, just this side of intellectually dishonest. If you're going to discuss comparative religions and their place in the dustbin of history, then like with other such comparative discussions, you shouldn't be making comparisons to things long since dead, especially myths. Instead, you're up against other extant religions with their own rich and ancient histories—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.
More importantly, the persistence of any of these religions provides no informative or measurable proofs of their truth claims. At best, we'd be delineating the ways in which they provide subjective meaning—but that tells us nothing at all about their objective truths. We cannot really say we've identified any of Jesus' flaws, given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws. We can critique the flaws of his followers, but that still doesn't inform any objective and secular discussion of the truths and meanings of religion.
It's true that billions find meaning in their chosen religions. Millennia of effort has provided no conclusive evidence this is anything other than subjective, though.
> given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws
I'm not sure that all of those stories claim that; only four of these stories were accepted as canon by the later consensus of Christian churches, but others are known to exist, which have somewhat different contents.
Also, Christian churches reached some kinds of consensus about what they say the canonical gospels said about Jesus, but not everyone who has read those gospels agrees with those interpretations; there have continued to be some debates about what Jesus said about himself and what his early followers believed about him. Some of those interpretations have been considered heresies in mainstream Christianity for a long time, but there have been a lot of such views which people have held to quite strongly, and often claimed were supported by their readings of even the canonical gospels.
After all, one of the reasons that Christianity even had all of those ecumenical councils and promulgated those creeds was that there were lots of people who claimed to be followers of Jesus and didn't believe some or all of those things. (And maybe there would be more today if there had been a separation of church and state throughout the Middle Ages.)
I am exceedingly aware of the history of Christianity, its sects, its texts, and the many variations therein. I thought it was obvious the exchanges the parent was involved in were, from the parent's side, only referencing the canonical scriptures used by the church today. Thus far, the parent has given no indication that non-canonical texts or sects held authority. Moreover, non-canonical texts and discarded heresies hold little relevance to the primary matter being discussed. The multiple Christianities of history are a fascinating subject in their own right, but strike me as of little concern here.
Oh, no apology necessary. I find the points you brought up to be incredibly fascinating, and have spent quite a lot of time studying them myself. I probably erred in omitting mention of only referring to canonical scriptures. If this were a discussion on the subjective meanings found in various heresies—as deemed by the councils that won their debates—that'd be quite a fun conversation.
I don't think I would call someone well-critiqued when until roughly the 1700s to 1800s, critiquing him in the Western world, and also in parts of the East, would get you murdered.
>And yet he hasn't been relegated to the dust heap of history like Baal and Thor.
Neither has His Divine Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, from a pulp science-fiction franchise. The popularity of a character as a character does not indicate their historicity.
