Sent
to The Star, Johannesburg, Sun 05/04/2015 22:08 in response to the
Editorial below.
Sir
I refer to your
Editorial “Let’s honour the Miracle of Easter” on Thursday, April 7.
In fairness, it
looks as if the Editor went on holiday and delegated the Editorial to the
Sub-Editor who, needing some time off, delegated it to the Sub-Sub-Editor, and
so on down the line until it ended up in the lap of a junior staffer.
This could explain why it is thought through so poorly.
The word “miracle”
has two main meanings:
(a) An
extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by scientific laws and
is thus attributed to a divine agency.
(b) A remarkable
event or development that brings welcome consequences, or an exceptional
product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something.
The Editorial makes
the elementary fallacy of confusing the two.
The “South African
Miracle” you cite is an example of the second one. It was welcome,
perhaps unlikely, but entirely governed by physical laws.
The alleged
resurrection of Christ (if it occurred at all) would be an example of the
former type of “miracle”, something inexplicable by science.
The fact that we
had a “miracle” of the second kind is no reason to believe that miracles of the
first kind take place.
Indeed, the
evidence for the alleged resurrection of Christ (if he ever existed), is not
convincing. No eye-witness accounts exist. The earliest of the
gospels was written at least 40 years after Easter. The gospels differ
significantly on major points, therefore some, perhaps all, of them are
wrong. The earliest existing copies of the same gospels differ in
thousands of ways, many of them materially so.
Contemporary
historical records outside of Christianity do not corroborate any of these
major events claimed in some of the gospels:
- Darkness over all the land from noon until three in the afternoon (Matthew 27:45, Mark 15:33, Luke 23:44) (but not John)
- An earthquake at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:52) and another on Easter morning (Matthew 28:2)(but not Mark, Luke or John)
- Dead arising from their graves and walking the streets (Matthew 27:53) (but not Mark, Luke or John)
How is it possible
that such (literally) earth-shaking events were not recorded by anybody
else? Or even in all the gospels?
The unbiased observer
has to conclude that the resurrection of Christ is not, in fact, a miracle, but
a myth.
The Star is –or was
until the takeover by Iqbal Surve– a newspaper concerned with facts, unlike
some others.
It behoves the
Editor, even in the Editorial, to stick to real-world facts and not to indulge
his readers in their superstitious fantasies, no matter how comforting or
well-entrenched they may be. By all means, wish the Christians well with
their holy day (which not all your readers share) but please do not treat these
myths as reality.
