"It’s time to face this fact. And stop denying it. It’s time to get over it already. Resurrected savior gods were a pagan idea. All Christianity did, was invent a Jewish one."
-- Richard Carrier
Source: richardcarrier.info
“The New Testament is recognized by biblical scholars the world over as an arbitrary hodgepodge of dubious literature of uncertain origins and reliability.
We have no reason to believe the authors of the New Testament documents were any more honest or critical or infallible than any other men of their time, and there's plenty of evidence to suspect they were less so.”
-- Richard Carrier
“If I had to sit in heaven forever, knowing that there are these people, millions and millions-probably billions of people, suffering these eternal horrible torments and there was nothing I could ever do for them, that, to me, would be hell.”
-- Richard Carrier
“No, the character of Jesus in the Gospels was not the wisest and kindest of beings - he is actually quite loathsome and rarely gives anything but really bad advice.”
-- Richard Carrier
“Christians always write to me threatening me with Hell. Strange how they think this vindicates them and their religion.
Threats are the hallmark of a wicked creed.”
-- Richard Carrier
How else will people know that Xianity is a religion of love? /s
“You must test your own religious claims and texts by the same standards you apply to other religions.
If your religion's claims and texts fair no better, then your religion is just as false as theirs is.”
-- Richard Carrier
Intellectual integrity is the downfall of religious belief.
“That someone would want another human being to suffer, or would even tolerate the idea, for committing *no crime* at all but being reasonable, is truly frightening.
A religion that breeds such people is a genuine plague upon the Earth.”
-- Richard Carrier
Worship is a fear response. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn. If your response to threats of hell is to fawn over the one who threatened you in the first place, rather than band together with humanity to hunt it down and kill it, then you’re a coward who has chosen sycophancy to evil over your own humanity.
“Almost the entire universe is lethal to life-in fact if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the submicroscopic speck of area that sustains life. It would be smaller than a single proton.
Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly.
Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this. But atheism predicts exactly this.”
-- Richard Carrier
“Witness what many Christian scholars come up with just to reject evolution, or to defend the literal miraculous resurrection of Jesus (which they do even with the terrible and paltry evidence we have).
Consequently, I don't care anymore what Christian apologists think. They are not rational people.
I only want to know what rational scholars think.”
-- Richard Carrier
“Outside of fundamentalism, few scholars believe the resurrection account in John 20 has any basis in fact; to the contrary, its every detail was obviously invented 'so that you would believe Jesus is the Christ' (John 20:31).
If that could be done to create belief in the EVENT it describes, it could be done to create belief in the MAN. The purpose is the same.
And anyone willing to tell the one lie will be just as willing to tell the other. The more so if the liar himself has already been fooled into believing these things.”
-- Richard Carrier
It’s amazing how little believers know about what how fictitious scholars know the bible to be.
“Each Gospel author just makes Jesus say or do whatever they want.
They change the story as suits them and neglect to mention they did so. They craft literary artifices and symbolic narratives routinely. They frequently rewrite classical and biblical stories and just insert Jesus into them... the authors of the Gospels clearly had no interest in any actual historical data... these are thus not historians. They are mythographers; novelists; propagandists...
We have to stop thinking we can use them as historical sources.”
-- Richard Carrier
The authors of the bible openly state that the objective of their writing is to convince you to believe, not to accurately record real things that actually happened.
“That Matthew is essentially a redaction of Mark is almost universally agreed. He borrows extensively from Mark (nearly the whole narrative), and frequently duplicates his material verbatim. Matthew then added a ridiculous Nativity Narrative (which no reasonable historian should regard as anything but fiction) and a brief but vague resurrection-appearance narrative (to fix what he may have regarded as the unsatisfying ending of Mark), which most historians also doubt is historical, and then revised the material in between, often altering or expanding on the stories Mark invented, occasionally inventing new ones and adding large sections attributing new teachings to Jesus.”
-- Richard Carrier, “On the Historicity of Jesus”
"On the Cleansing of the Temple: Of course, that scene is hardly believable: the temple grounds were enormous, occupying many acres (the temple as a whole occupied nearly forty acres, and a large portion of that, at least ten acres, was devoted to public space), extensively populated (there would have been _hundreds_ of merchants and moneychangers there), and heavily guarded by an armed force deployed to prevent just this sort of thing. They would have *killed Jesus on the spot*. So the story is obviously fiction even on that point alone.”
-- Richard Carrier, “On the Historicity of Jesus”
Even the mundane, non-magical claims in the bible are wrong. To get even the basics wrong but still insist that the extraordinary, supernatural claims are true is delusional.
“The New Testament underwent a considerable amount of editing, interpolation and revising over the course of its first two centuries...
This is not something to sweep under the rug. It makes a real difference in how we estimate probabilities.
Unlike most other questions in history, the evidence for Jesus is among the most compromised bodies of evidence in the whole of ancient history.”
-- Richard Carrier
“When we look closely, we discover that all the actual evidence that Jesus rose from the dead consisted of unconfirmable hearsay, just like every other incredible claim made by the ancient religions of the day.
Christian apologists make six-figure careers out of denying this, but their elaborate attempts always collapse on inspection.”
-- Richard Carrier
Xians often say things like “if the resurrection wasn’t true, why would the apostles go through persecution/torture/death?”
And they have a point. Likewise, if Islam isn’t true, why would people hijack planes and blow themselves up? And if faith healing isn’t true, why would people subject their sick kids to it, rather than take them to a doctor?
Because faith.
“If Jesus was a god and really wanted to save the world, he would have appeared and delivered his Gospel personally to the whole world.
He would not appear only to one small group of believers and one lone outsider, in one tiny place, just one time, two thousand years ago, and then give up.”
-- Richard Carrier
“There were, in fact, numerous pre-Christian savior gods who became incarnate and underwent sufferings or trials, even deaths and resurrections.
None of them actually existed.
Yet all were placed in history, and often given detailed biographies.”
-- Richard Carrier
We don’t need to prove, nor even claim, that Jesus was a plagiarized character. We can simply observe that the authors of the bible just did exactly what every deity-author did before them.