Man the ramparts, the attack is nigh

One of the foundational disputes in life is meaning. Why are we here? On whose authority? And who continues to have authority? Some versions of authority are meaningless...nobody defends or attacks them.

For example, I cannot remember the last tooth and nail battle over the existence of Santa Clause. Nobody has embarked on an expedition to the North Pole to find his home, nobody has dug up graves in Austria or Germany or wherever it was the "Nicklaus" the whole Santa paradigm is based on was buried...frankly, it isn't important and nobody cares. Nobody truly believes there is an eternally vigilant fat guy in a red suit spending his relaxation time grooming raindeer and spying on people to determine if they are "good" or "bad"...alongside the realization that "good" and "bad" are completely subjective. Who determines good and bad? If a child steals a horse from an older person, that is bad, right? Well, no...not if the child is a Native American practicing the skills they will need in life. Fighting was also part of their training...so saying "children who fight are bad" is therefore inaccurate for these individuals, albeit perhaps quite accurate for a Canadian.

But the point is...nobody bothers to investigate because it doesn't matter. Whether he exists or not has no impact on our lives...we do not suddenly have a responsibility to Santa if he indeed DOES exist, our behavior is not modified, nor is the rationale for it.

Not so with Jesus. The Bible itself mentions that if He did not resurrect then His followers are to be pitied most of all men. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate that pity is because the very foundation of those lives is shattered...they have denied themselves temporal pleasures in view of A) their proscription and B) in hope of future reward (and, to be fair, in some cases for fear of future punishment). Following Christ fundamentally forms a life. It informs every action...what job a person will work...and when...who s/he associates with, what they vote for and why, the language they use, the substances they consume, and more.

And because there is a book that purports to express the will of God it is more feared and hated than any and all other literature. The concepts expressed therein...love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control....these are hardly the things to inspire revulsion, spite, hatred...yet they do.

Because if there is indeed a God and if this is indeed His Word then many activities in the lives of most people are in direct contradiction to the precepts laid out therein.

Therefore the Bible comes under constant attack. People are constantly attacking the "contradictions" found within...although when you research these alleged contradictions they are nowhere to be found..., the bad archaeology...although time and again it has proven to be archaelogically accurate...they attack the "bad science" of the Bible...though there is yet to be so much as one assertion made by the Bible proven wrong...quite the contrary, while the leading "men of science" were leeching away lives the Bible declared "The life is in the blood", while sailors had no awareness of entire continents the Bible discussed "the paths of the sea" and so forth.

Yet people attack it because it inspires fear. And even more they attack the Messiah, Jesus Christ. How often have you heard "He was a good man" or "a good teacher, but not God"? If that is true then He was perhaps the worst person to ever live for He would then be a blatant liar when He claimed to be God. The very foundation of His teaching, the very foundation of the morality He taught came from that concept, that He was indeed God.

Can the teachings of a liar have value? That is an excellent question. What is not questionable is the authority that follows. If the instructor is a liar then the authority of His teaching is non-existent. Hence anyone who can prove He was not who He said He was has destroyed the moral authority of all of Scripture and released us to the anarchy and chaos that is public opinion.

Public opinion morality has brought us such wonderful things as Eugenics...the idea that led to Hitler's Final Solution, to institutionalized belief that non-Europeans are inherently inferior, to World War I, to World War II, to racism, sexism, and many other -isms. It led to involuntary euthanization (read "murder") of invalids and "less desirable" peoples.

Another fine example of public opinion morality would be the excesses of the industrial age as "Economic Darwinism" adapted the principles of "Natural Selection" and "Survival of the Fittest" to the economic world and justified the abuses that led to the "robber barons" age of unlimited expansionism, repression, oppression, and so forth.

And this is not meant to be a condemnation for those things in that setting...because a morality based on what "public opinion" declares or what "the majority thinks is right" or on "progressive" or "enlightened" thinking is malleable, open to review, changable...it is not certain nor is it authoritative.

What brings all this up? Noted "thinker" James Cameron...you know the one, the guy that brought us such wonders as Titanic and the Terminator...now if that is not a way to gain moral authority I don't know what is...he brought entertainment across the board, to gun-happy action heads to tragic romanticists...well, he is nor making a "documentary" in which he purports to have found the remains of Jesus Christ.

Not only that, he continues the nonsense Dan Brown repopularized in his fictional...let me emphasize that in his admittedly fictional book The DaVinci Code that Jesus fathered a child.

A quick and dirty (and effective) deconstruction of the arguments set forth by Cameron and his band of conspirators is not hard to find.

But how many people are going to buy into this yet again and declare once more the end of all Christianity, both the few who actually follow the Word as written and the many who nominally follow it but actually follow perversions of it guided by public pressure, private interpretations, political considerations, and other reasons that sap the authority and integrity from it?

Those who lose their faith over this had a very questionable faith anyway. If your faith does not go deep enough to actually investigate outlandish claims...whether that claim is a "virgin birth, crucifixion and resurrection" (because, to be fair, those are pretty outrageous claims if unsubstantiated) or finding a body that cannot be on earth if the resurrection occurred then you really don't have a meaningful faith...you have a membership in a social club.

No, I don't no why this set me off. Yes, I realize this is a long and probably unentertaining read. But I think it is an important bit of writing because at some point I might need a refresher on what was going on when the latest attack on the Word of God started.