The BBC’s Radio 4 is doing* a five part series of short programmes entitled “Who Killed Christianity?”:
Dr David Starkey argues that 5 major Christian figures distorted – even betrayed – the Christian faith as envisaged by Jesus.
He has interesting guests on to help mount the defense.
The suspects? St. Paul, Emperor Constantine, Martin Luther, Sir Isaac Newton, Pope John Paul II… quite an assassin’s guild, I must say.
You can find the website here and the archived audio for the Newton one (at least for a few more days) here. They are still doing that annoying thing where the new programme erases the older episode, so after next Tuesday, Newton will be gone.
Cheers,
-cvj
(*Thanks Ed Copeland!)
February 3rd, 2006 at 5:54 pm
If Sir Isaac Newton had any impact at all upon Christianity, it was Christianity that seized and squeezed a cholla in its own boney fist. It serves the silk-clad poofters right for adopting a god who does not know Aristotle from empirical observation.
http://www.allmyeye.com/images/pcd/pcd0786/cholla-branches.3.jpg
cholla
Is there any cult of Yahweh that didn’t adopt a god-given calendar that was purely embarrassing? (13 months)(28 days/month) gives you these same day for moldulo-7 dates. Add a day off/year, off the day count. (Two days off every fourth year except for centuries evenly divisible by 400.) A decent calendar does not seem like too big a stretch for the omnipotent, omnsicent, omibenevolent Creator of the entire universe (and presumably the stuff outside our lightcone, too). Is applying integer arithmetic a test of faith?
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
I would have said Paul, but it’s cliche.
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:35 pm
But Newton and JPII? I’ll really have to hear this.
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Sorry Clifford (I am constantly saying “I’m sorry,” day after day.) But I can’t talk publicly about religion, though I really want to. There are so many things wrong with asking the question “Who Killed Christianity,” the first question being, “Is it dead?” But I must say no more. You might as well ask, “Who killed string theory.” Or, “Who killed Jazz.”
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Hi Pyracantha…. Please take it up with the BBC. I had nothing to do with the making or titling of the programme. By reporting that the programme exists I am not claiming that it is my view that Christianity is dead. (I’ll remind you again -we’ve talked about this before- that I am not one for anti-religious rants for the sake of it.)
It certainly is a provocative title (also when applied to Jazz and String Theory…interesting choices)…and it generated some interesting and informative discussion on the programme. Perhaps Dr. Starkey, the host, can offer more insight into why he made that choice. I’ve nothing to offer. Sorry.
-cvj
February 4th, 2006 at 12:41 am
I agree with Amos that Paul is cliche, but I’d say he did more damage than the other four combined. And I wonder why Martin Luther won out over Calvin.
As for JP II, my guess is that he’s a stand-in for the office of the pope in general, which could arguably be a Major Christian Figure — if it’s the position and the power that’s dangerous, not the person. I’m looking forward to these programs.
February 4th, 2006 at 2:29 am
I agree that JPII certainly doesn’t fit. In a century or two, he won’t even be remembered as an especially important pope.
Newton is an interesting case, since he and Galileo did great violence to theologyg by undermining the Aristotelian underpinnings of Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God. But they certainly weren’t intending to do so. You could make an equally good argument for Hume or Darwin.
St. Paul is the obvious choice. But what about any of the Gospel writers? None of them knew Jesus, and there’s no way of knowing how accurately they were reflecting his views. They had a lot of their own local politics to worry about.
February 4th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Well I certainly am one for anti-religious rants. In my opinion the words of the New Testament speak for themselves and from there one can infer the moral quality of (biblical) Jesus and the ideas he was advocating. The idea that Christianity has been distorted by latter day figures is, IMO, largely a smokescreen designed to evade the problems with Christianity itself.
I’m sorry that this is slightly off-topic (please feel free to delete this), but I’m a bit surprised that no-one on Cosmic Variance has commented about the row over the cartoons of Muhammad that have been printed in Denmark and now France etc. See for example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4675462.stm or the piece on Lubos’ blog. This is really big news over here.
February 4th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
michaeld, I do hope to comment about the cartoons. Just not enough minutes in the day sometimes.
February 4th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Since Paul’s letters are the oldest notice of Christ around, it’s a bit hard to claim that he used ‘em to distort the message of Jesus. The Gospels supply the homey biographical information about Christ lacking in the Epistles, thus converting the gnostic Christ of Paul into a much more human figure. Now one could certainly argue that the innovations of the Evangelists, what I think of as the novelization of the myth, were an improvement; but they only became the Source after the fact. More or less plausible reconstructions of oral traditions aside, Paul invented Christianty.
February 4th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
“Is it dead?”
I agree with Sean, no one person contributed to the demise of Christianity, or religion as a whole for that matter, but that’s not to say that it’s made obsolete, one would have to be totally moronic to say Christianity doesn’t exist anymore, instead the principles of Christianity and religions in generals have been undermined, be it consciously or indirectly. I thought the programme of Newton made that pretty clear.
February 5th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
I couldn’t agree more with what Jim Harrison said in the previous to the last comment. `Paul invented Christianity’. It is not even certain that any Jesus remotely similar to what most people have in mind ever existed. If he did he made virtually no impact – there is *no* contemporary reference to the guy in any historical, philosophical or Jewish religion text whatsoever, till the epistles of Paul appear! See the, highly disputed, wikipedia article on the `historicity of Jesus’ for more (disputed) details.
February 6th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
[Coming from the viewpoint of a Catholic astronomer (yes, those exist). ]
Actually, I’d say that there was more done to change the meaning of Christianity from its early origins by Roman influence and some of the early popes. One of my friends is studying early Christianity (as a hobby) and has figured it out that the problem is the change of the meaning of “faith” and “belief”. It was a change from the meaning behind statements like “I believe in universal health care” or “I believe in the Civil Rights Movement” to “I believe in fairies”. From my friend’s work, he’s found that the Greek word for “faith” (pistis) does not mean ‘blind faith’ or ‘blind trust’ (as opposed to reason) “…but rather trust arrived at by proof or persuasion. We are not to believe in the existence of God without knowledge, but to trust God and his will because he has won us over to his cause. …In no case does the idea of trust without reason exist. There is no blind faith, and no faith opposed to evidence, but rather, trust based on deeds.”