Thinking Christian

If I thought this was an isolated sentiment I wouldn’t pay it much attention. Unfortunately it’s not.

“We can sympathize with gay people because they are a minority and we are a minority,” said anti-Prop. 8 rally organizer Doug Kalagian, 17, a senior who founded the school’s Freethinking Atheist and Agnostic Kinship student club.

“Prop. 8 is not only a religious issue. It’s an issue of discrimination and prejudice. Who’s to say atheists and agnostics won’t be next?”

This is appallingly upside-down. What Kalagian is saying is this: the religious people have mounted an attack on gay marriage, and “who’s to say atheists and agnostics won’t be next?”

The real sequence of history is that gay-rights activists mounted an attack on marriage. And who’s to say Christianity won’t be next? Is that an overstatement? Not necessarily. Look at Canada. Look at San Francisco.

I could be wrong on that, time will tell. But the verdict is already in on Kalagian’s version: it’s already wrong.

Daniel Dennett, one of the four most prominent “New Atheists,” is no proponent of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The hallucination theory to explain Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances is no longer held by many scholars. Nevertheless there are exceptions to this, including Gerd Lüdemann (detailed further here). In Consciousness Explained, however, Dennett says on page 7,

Another conclusion it seems we can draw from this is that strong hallucinations are simply impossible! By a strong hallucination I mean a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional object in the real world—as contrasted to flashes, geometric distortions, auras, afterimages, fleeting phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous sensations. A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looked like.

(See the full argument here; go to page one if it doesn’t open directly there) Based on Dennett’s analysis, then, hallucinations cannot explain the events in Matthew 28:9-10, Luke 24:13-48, John 20:24-28, or John 21:4-19.

See Gary Habermas for more on hallucination theories.