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People have no idea how real world change is actually effected. Freemasonry sprung out of a LARP novel about a fictitious Rosicrucian Brotherhood; freemasonry rituals involved LARPing; this organization had a huge effect on the modern West. If you are an atheist, it’s impossible to see Christianity as anything other than a Hellenic / Hellenized-Jewish LARP over the Old Testament — yet it’s the most important movement of religious history. The entirety of the Roman elite were engaged in various “mystery cult” LARP rituals, like the Mithraists who were LARPing their own version of a Persian cult. Hitler, of course, was motivated by Wagner’s Live Opera Role Playing work Rienzi, a LORP, and then joined a LARPing movement filled with LARPing occultists who inflated their numbers, and before all his speeches he neurotically LARPed the gestures to seem organic and impassioned. It was LARPing all the way down, and the last thing you can say about Hitler is that his influence on reality was small.
The thing about the LARP is that the more you do it, the more it becomes true. If I were to throw you into the Chinese military, to do their ritual allegiances, you would be faking it 100%. But when you fake it, there’s invisible peer pressure and then music and ambience which changes your memory of the event… The second time you do it, it’s only 95% fake. After enough times, you wouldn’t be LARPing anymore. Provided that the ritual is actually reinforcing the right things. Not too dissimilar to the techniques used by the Chinese in the Korean War to gradually change a person’s identity. Of course, it’s far easier when you yourself are interested in modifying your own identity.
It’s like if I just repeat an affirmation, that’s not going to do much. But if I repeat it while elaborating upon all the connections in my life, and all the benefits, and I imagine various rewards of the affirming identity, over time I will believe it. Our own identity is constructed by memories, and we can modify our memories and make new ones — ergo, we can construct our own identity. This is akin to sports hypnotism. It works.
LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality. What’s fake is people pretending that they are in reality, when they are doing nothing. This comprises a lot of posting online. Posting online does little; LARPing identity rituals can change the entire history of the world. I imagine that this is part of the reason why IRL organizations are routinely slandered as LARPs — it is a useful tool to prevent anything that has actual potency from disrupting current structures.
Also, “authentic belief” itself is kind of mysterious as a concept. If I’m some guy online, and I write all these logical reasons for why Jesus is definitely God, but my behavior in the world does not evidence this belief, then do I really believe it? I mean, Jesus says right there that giving away my wealth gives me 100fold in this life and the next. So, why am I not doing it? There would be no better investment or use of my time. The reason no one does it is because they don’t actually believe. Whatever they say they believe, it doesn’t matter, because their revealed
preferencebelief is that they don’t believe. So their criticism of others’ lack of belief is Pharaiscal. They would be more faithful to a Mr Beast challenge prize. And well, of course, Jesus also assumes this, hence why he spends so much time talking about how we need just the faith/trust the size of a mustard seed. I think that, we don’t really believe as we think we believe; we believe we believe, because this feels good; in actual fact, in our soul, we do not believe. And we don’t believe because there is insufficient social reinforcement / identity-rituals regarding the belief. The “faith statements” are something of a stretch or exercise: you practice believing that this bread is real flesh, and that the man was born a virgin and revived from death, in a socially-reinforcing way; and though you will never fully believe, you will at least be convinced part of the way, that it’s a good idea to be kind and a little giving. The faith statement is not a belief statement (we don’t accurately know what we believe) it’s instead an exercise with a mechanical consequence in our behavior.Hardly. I am perfectly willing to believe that a lot of Christians - and certainly a majority of early Christians - sincerely believe in the objective reality of their messiah and his miracles.
But it’s at least the case that Jesus larped, and then the Disciples larped when writing about specific miracles.
Not necessarily.
Jesus may have been earnestly delusional. We certainly get a lot of schizophrenic self-proclaimed messiahs nowadays; why would the original article need to be anything more or less than the most successful one in history? C.S. Lewis used to say the "Jesus was insane" hypothesis could be dismissed by looking at the overall coherence and sensibleness of his teachings whenever he wasn't declaring himself the Son of Man. But that doesn't track with my, or many others' experiences talking to the mentally-will but well-educated. (See Scott's "Professor T" story for anecdata that's at least adjacent.) Grant that crazy attracts crazy, and whoever originated the more fantastical miracle stories may have likewise just been psychotic at the time, or something.
Granted, it's likely that someone deliberately made something up at some point, but even then I'm not sure I'd call it LARPing if they were attempting to perpetrate actual fraud against would-be followers. A hoax isn't the same thing as LARPing.
Or you ignore the traditional narrative that the Disciples wrote the Gospels in which case you don't need a hoax, or delusion. It's just later believers believing what they're told or extrapolating from what the Hebrew Bible says the Messiah will do, an old tactic and not a sign of being insane or mendacious.
Except for the original resurrection claim of course. Strangely, the Disciples may be better candidates for delusion than Jesus. It's possible that Jesus really did think he'd bring about the end of Roman rule in some political sense with God's help like many other unfortunate Jews of the time. But at least some of the Disciples clearly believed that he was resurrected , which is noted by Paul to be very odd by the beliefs of the time, and were willing to be martyred despite having a front-row seat to the mother of all disconfirming events.
I've actually seen this used as a modern version of the Lewis argument by secular Christians who can't appeal to miracle claims: the Disciples had first-hand knowledge and were devout Jews. It's insane for them to go with the divinity of a crucified criminal. Unless...
Oh, I wasn't assuming the Gospels were the direct writings of the Disciples, but someone at some point needs to have originated the miracle claims; either they were later liars, or they were contemporary crazies.
Re: the Resurrection, I'm not convinced it was such a radical notion at the time, since the Gospels themselves allude to contemporary speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John the Baptist - and/or that John himself may have been a resurrected Isaiah.
And then there's the thing where Mark's account ends at the mourning-women finding his tomb empty and having a brief, ambiguous encounter with a man clad in white (who is, TMU, generally interpreted by believers as an angel, not even the actual risen Christ himself). There are many plausible non-supernatural reasons for Jesus's body to have been removed from Joseph of Arimathea's crypt a few days after he was placed there; it being found empty would have been plenty good enough to start hopeful speculation that he had returned, especially if Jesus himself had in fact alluded to a future resurrection prior to his death. From there, scattered eyewitness reports of risen-Jesus-sightings are no different from people claiming to have run into a middle-aged Elvis Presley.
Paul says the crucified Messiah is the stumbling block and folly, because that bit requires a Messiah claimant to die without fulfilling the prophecies and be raised. If you're reading from a secular POV, you have strong reason to be skeptical of Jesus' prophecies of his own death and resurrection (just as everyone is skeptical of his prophecies about Jerusalem) so you have a yet another Messiah claimant being brutally disproved by being hung on a tree and then followed and seemingly deified by Jews (while every other such movement died out)
The problem is that Paul says that Jesus directly appeared to people like Peter who, unlike the Gospel writer, we believe are probably his contemporaries.
Between that and the reference to the appearance to the 500, it seems like someone had to have had some delusional/bereavement episode that then spread.
But the Christians who make the case - e.g. Habermas - often skip the tomb since it first appears in the Gospels (I think Crossan denies Jesus got a grave at all since criminals weren't supposed to, despite the story having a plausible explanation). They focus on a few "minimal facts" which even critical scholars allegedly agree on.
With those few facts, it is weird. How weird depends on how strong you think the borders between paganism and Christianity were. But it seems like at least someone, maybe Peter, had a delusion (or lied)
Fact 6 is slightly confusing here. The apostles claimed to have seen a physical Jesus in his actual, resurrected body. Paul's vision of Jesus happened long after Ascension Day and was understood as a vision of someone was not currently living in a physical body - I don't see why it is evidence for a resurrection at all.
Habermas' criteria for his minimal facts is that "vast majority of even critical scholars must recognize the occurrence’s historical nature"
I can see how later Gospel material doesn't meet that standard while Paul's vaguer mentions of appearances right alongside his talk of persecuting the Church would. There's the naturalist assumption. And critical scholars accept at least seven undisputed Pauline epistles and no Gospel's attribution to an Apostle or follower of one has the same level of consensus AFAIK. So someone would likely have quibbled about the "apostle's claims" while Paul's own claims of a vision combined with vague claims about appearances to Peter, James and the 500...maybe not.
He's just being conservative I think.
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