Ground Floor:

"Skepticism is the beginning of faith"

-Oscar Wilde

Holy week is upon us again.  As year go by I find myself more and more vulnerable to "cringe moments," when it comes to our celebration of the Resurrection.  At first it was the same kind of problem as I have at Christmas: commercialism... and creepy Easter Bunnies, and the weird conflation of pagan spring fertility rites with Jesus' Passion.  But year after year I am struck by the genuinely bad theology that rears it's head during this week.  I suspect that more dedicated observance of the Lenten discipline would help us out of some of these, which largely involve the more monstrous ideas about the atonement, and most of which bulldoze the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth in favor of a rather disturbingly Gnostic divine being.

Therefore, I would like to start from the ground up on this Monday morning.  I am going to explain why I would wish to call myself a Christian, even if I was an Atheist.  A lot of the objections to Christian faith are rooted in all the things that the church insists are true about Jesus, most of these involve our statements about his divinity.  This is because objective history (meaning history other than what we find in the Gospels, and other writings of Jesus' followers) has very little to say about Jesus of Nazareth.  He was a Jewish itinerant preacher/teacher who was crucified by the Romans for treason.  There were lots of people like him, and there is almost nothing historically peculiar about him.

Thomas Jefferson notoriously created a book he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or also called The Jefferson Bible, by literally cutting and pasting pieces of the Scripture together.  He excised all supernatural elements like miracles and resurrection, and left only the parables and teachings of Jesus.  Jefferson is often criticized for this behavior, but I would maintain that his approach is pretty much on par with what most of us do with Scripture: we take the parts we like and we tend to ignore things that bother us.

What I would like to do right now is engage in a little Jeffersonian exercise and strip away all the hocus pocus and simply focus (hey that rhymes!) on the teachings of Jesus.  On my good days, Jefferson's Jesus is all I really need.  I can find everything I really need to know in order to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in his ethical teachings, distilled down to one commandment: "Love your neighbor."  Remember, I can't include: "Love God," because we're working from an Atheist platform here.

Within many of the parables and "historical" events of Jesus' life there are examples of people who are attempting to get him to define, narrow down or otherwise qualify the command to love your neighbor, so that it won't be impossible, but he never will and he never does, and he bears the consequences of following that creed without flinching.

Even if there is no God, that is still pretty amazing, and he's still someone I would want to emulate and follow, in other words, I would still want to be his disciple.

The ground of Christian faith does not actually require faith at all, it simple requires looking at what we know about Jesus of Nazareth and agreeing that his way is better than our way, any of our ways.

You don't have to believe in miracles, or resurrection, or bloody theories of atonement, you don't technically have to even believe in God, to think that Jesus was "the way, and the truth and the life."  You can define those things is purely humanistic terms and they are still him.

The most basic faith is often the most unshakable.  The bedrock reality of a purely human Jesus is enough for me to want to call him teacher.  If there is no God then there is no sin, and I don't really need atonement.  If there is no resurrection then I don't really have to worry about what happens after I die, because I'm just going to disappear back into the chaos from which I emerged mostly by chance.  But learning from Jesus still makes my world a better place, it teaches me how to love others and be the best ephemeral creature that I can possibly be.

Even if there is no mystery to the universe, Jesus is still my Lord.