They could learn a lesson from that old time religion, Christianity, where instead of just shouting at people, like John the Baptist did (and look what happened to him), St Paul professed to become all things to all men in order to win souls to his cause. Eventually, that strategy made Christianity the majority faith of the Roman empire.

I’ve run across these ideas about Paul before, and I thought I’d use this as an excuse to complicate them a bit.

John, Jesus and Paul

Let’s get the first part out of the way. According to tradition, John the Baptist and Paul both met the same fate: beheading as a punishment for troubling the authorities. And according to most historical Jesus scholars, John the Baptist played mentor to Jesus, so you can’t say he never accomplished anything. Any comparison has to accept that John started the movement that Paul found so inspiring.

Hoffman alludes to 1 Corinthians and Paul’s claim to be “all things to all men.” But accepting that at face value causes a problem when you run into one of Paul’s testy moments. For example, in Galatians we get to see Paul when his authority has been questioned.

Paul insisted that he derived his authority solely from God – no scholar’s modesty here. He prayed that “If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received [from me], let him be accursed.” And cursed “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!” Since his opponents were arguing for circumcision, this is sometimes translated as a wish that they’d ‘finish the job’ and castrate themselves. Fun guy.

Rather than being a flexible teacher, Paul had a very touchy pride that appears to have led to rifts between himself and the rest of the movement. His preaching led to a near riot in Ephesus (Acts 19:21-41), which the author of Acts attempts to explain away as caused by the base motives of the pagans, but which was more likely caused by the perception that Paul was dishonoring the patron Goddess Artemis.

Constantine

Then there’s the question of how much Paul accomplished. This question is hard to answer, because we have no reliable numbers from the period. Most of the traditional estimates come from Christian sources that were written very late. Some estimate that 10% of the Roman population was Christian by the time of Constantine.

There are problems with that number. 10% is also an estimate as to the number of Jews in the Empire. We have a great deal of archaeological evidence for the presence of Jews, including artwork and synagogues. In comparison, we have scant archaeological evidence for the presence of Christians.

This has led some historians, notably Peter Brown and Kenneth Harl(*), to suggest that Christians never spread as widely or as deeply as once thought. Whatever Paul’s successes as a missionary, his converts mainly stayed within the Jewish communities. The Neronian persecution put the brakes on future missionary work, and Christianity remained a minority of the Jewish minority until Constantine

If Brown and his colleagues are right then Constantine’s role is absolutely vital. There are many people who shaped early Christianity, like Paul, Ignatius and Origen. Without their influence Christianity may have survived, but it seems unlikely that it would become a world religion. However, without Constantine and the powers of the emperor, there is no real question: Christianity would have remained an afterthought.

So what can we atheists learn from “old time religion”? I suppose the lesson is that it doesn’t matter how cranky and controversial you are. If one of your converts holds absolute power, then your success is assured. I’m not sure how this lesson is useful, but there it is.

(*) Arguments here drawn for Kenneth W. Harl’s Teaching Company lectures, “Fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity.”

Theists: If you had to pick just one, what part or action of the human body would you say is the best example of something that had to have been designed by a perfect intelligence, for which evolution does not provide a satisfactory explanation?

Atheists: If you had to pick just one, what part or action of the human body would you say is the best example of something that a perfect intelligence wouldn’t have designed, but which evolution explains well?

One thing: it’s a truism that funerals are for the living. From my perspective, funerals exist to help the survivors come to grips with the gap that has opened up in their lives.

Different people will need different things as they learn to cope with the death of a loved one. But I have a hard time understanding the role of the southern baptist ceremony I just saw. All the talk about heaven and the repeated bouts of evangelism seem to me to miss the point. None of it helps close the hole that now exists.

(As an aside, I think that if Rabbi Hillel had been a Baptist, he would have stood on one leg are recited John 3:16 and the Great Commission, then proclaimed that all the rest of the Bible was commentary. I’m an atheist, but sometimes I think I get more from the Bible than they do.)

Madalyn Murray O’Hair got in trouble once when one of her supporters suggested that an atheist funeral was a contradiction. Chuck the body in a hole and go on. This strikes me a foolish and blind. The psychological issues that exist are very real and have to be dealt with, and where better to start than a funeral?

And honestly, I don’t think that religion helps deal with the problems nearly as well as many believers insist. More often than not it simply changes the subject. Perhaps the deceased is in heaven, but I’m still alive and I have to keep on living. How do I cope?

Which raises the question: what would a truly atheist funeral look like?

But that cutting joke gets turned around and slices the wrong way when the word “biblical” is substituted for the word “creationist.” It thus winds up reaffirming Ham’s assertion that his “scientific creationism” is the best and the only way to read the Bible. It suggests, as Ham does, that “biblical = creationist.” It suggests that Hamsterian “scientific creationism” provides a valid interpretation of the story of Noah rather than being a weirdly illiterate exercise in missing the point.

Whenever we atheists talk about the bible, I’m reminded of the great Ingersoll quote:

“Too great praise challenges attention, and often brings to light a thousand faults that otherwise the general eye would never see.

Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature’s night.

These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt.”

Ingersoll was writing this before the Liberal/Fundamentalist split, before the waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants really began to arrive on American shores, before Tri-Fath America and so on. As one historian put it, America was as Reformed Protestant a nation as it was possible to be. Ingersoll could speak to an audience who overwhelmingly believed that the Bible should only be approached in a literal, “face value” fashion.

But that’s not the case today. While still a third of American Christians are biblical literalists, two thirds are not. Catholics are now the largest single denomination, making up almost a quarter of the Christian population. The numbers of liberal Christians are growing. The largest growing religious group are the unaffiliated, many of whom are seekers with broad religious ideas.

Should we still be approaching the public as if we’re talking to protestant biblical literalists? Granted, the literalists are still a large and vocal faction who need to be countered, but maybe it’s time to start aiming at biblicism rather than the bible itself. Maybe we should be trying to marginalize the biblicists, rather than treating them like the standard.

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I’m wondering if this struggle will be easier for the people who come into atheism after us. Or even if it will be a struggle at all. I’m wondering if they’ll look at atheism the way my friend Tim and I look at existentialism. “Sure, there’s no God, and my consciousness is a biological product of my brain, and my sense of a cohesive identity and selfhood is a somewhat illusory mental construction, and when I die I’ll just be gone forever. So what? That’s fine with me. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

Read the whole thing, because I think she spells it out very well. It’s also a good follow-up to the flap that she sparked over at Slacktiverse.

It’s interesting to look back at the history of Western atheism. For centuries, atheism was an accusation that you threw at other people. There is little evidence that anyone was actually an atheist from the collapse of Rome until maybe the 17th century. Then, slowly, people began to express doubts in private correspondence and journals. Then people started embracing streamlined religions like deism and pantheism. Then you started to see people call themselves agnostics. Then, finally, atheists.

It’s as if atheism was something we had to tip-toe up to. But now we’re here. So what’s next?

I’d like to think that Greta is right. Now that we’ve elbowed some cultural space for atheism, and shored it up with arguments and counter-apologetics, maybe atheism will soon become unremarkable.