Dan Barker’s Book Godless: my reaction

(see here)

In some sense, Dan Barker’s book Godless is a standard: “what I was like, what happened, and what I am like now” kind of story. He started out steeped in fundamentalist Christianity, developed doubts, became an atheist and then became involved in atheist/free thinker/freedom from religion causes.

What is different though is that he devotes the first part of his book to describing what he was like when he was a “believer”.
I could relate, in a sense, as I was a “cradle Catholic” who grew up following Notre Dame football, going to Sunday school and church, going to confession, etc. In fact, I seriously thought about becoming a priest (though my friends told me that I lacked the patience/people skills; they said that I ought to be a religion professor instead).

But this is where the commonality is: Mr. Barker and I were/are both seekers; it was important for us to keep seeking “the truth”. And yes, when we were in our religion, we both thought that we had found it.

But as we learned more (history, science, natural history, etc.) the inconsistencies began to gnaw at us. Doubts grew…”how could THAT be possible”; “if this miracle is false…well…why believe any miracle”, etc.

I am convinced that is why I ended up an atheist instead of ending up as a religious liberal; my mind simply wouldn’t permit some sort of “ration of miracles”. A belief in miracles is inconsistent with scientific principles and I am unwilling to live with cognitive dissonance.

As Barker said, our stop at our respective religions was due to the same journey that lead us to atheism; it isn’t as if we had changed personalities but rather it was a matter of learning more.

But back to the book: the book features a standard rebuttal on most religious claims (not much new here) but it also has an interesting chapter on Jesus and gives a wide variety of arguments, including those arguments which claim that Jesus was never a single historical figure!

Barker notes that there are no contemporary writings about Jesus; the first ones that appear are the writings of Paul, and Paul says nothing about the details of his life. There are other gospels but these were written around the same time (or later) than the canonical gospels, which were written about 70-90 C. E. Secular writings about Jesus were non-existent, save a very brief passage from the work of Josephus called Jewish Antiquities. There was a somewhat longer fraudulent addition to this work and many historians think that the brief mention wasn’t in the original.

Of course, that might mean that Jesus simply wasn’t popular and famous during his lifetime and therefore unworthy of being written about at that time.

Sure there are other mentions of Jesus oriented groups forming and mentions that they believed stuff about him, but there is no contemporary mention of him or his deeds.

Of course, the gospels do draw on the literature of the day to tell their story, (see: Gospel Fictions by Randal Helms ) but that in and of itself doesn’t infer that Jesus wasn’t historical. After all, fictional narratives are often used to describe current figures.

In short: I am glad that I bought the book. I learned some facts and I enjoyed the story. But mostly I came to understand why I ended up as an atheist (or at least, as someone who understood that he was an atheist) ; I wouldn’t have had I not had this “seeker” drive.

For many of my last years as a self proclaimed Christian, I said that I believed in a deity, but in reality I believed that the events of this universe were all completely naturalistic.

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