I just saw a movie on U-tube that proves Jesus never existed and that religion is just a myth that some people invented just to control other people. So what are you planning on doing for a living now?

Yours Truly,

Dee Pazapuddle 

I too have seen the movie to which you refer and it isn’t anything new. It is about the myth of the dying god. It seems that in many cultures and traditions there is a myth about a dying, and usually, rising god. Fertility religions are particularly big on the myth. It has to do with the return of life in the spring. 

The story of the Egyptian god Horus is particularly similar to the story of Jesus. C.S. Lewis talks about the myth of the dying god in his spiritual autobiography, “Surprised by Joy.” 

Most people don’t know that C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist of the 20th century started out his adult life as an atheist. You may be familiar with him as the author of the Narnia Chronicles. He didn’t become a Christian until he was 33 years old. He was an Oxford scholar who specialized in mythology.

When he was still a convinced atheist he was jolted by a conversation with a much respected atheist friend. His friend confided to him that he was afraid there really were reasons to believe that the Gospels are history, not just myth. “Rum thing! It seems like this myth of the dying god really may have happened once.” This jarred Lewis to his disbelieving roots. 

If you want to know more about Lewis and the proof of the Christian religion read Mere Christianity.

There is great deal of difference between the beautiful myths of ancient religions and the story of Jesus of Nazareth, but before I prove to you that Jesus really existed, lets talk for a bit about the not-so-beautiful myth of science. 

The myth is simply this: “Science has proven that we evolved from apes and that there is no god. Science is making life better and better and now there is no need for religion.” 

An old family friend, Henry Ford, lived down the road from my great grandpa’s farm. He was great believer in science. He used to play cards with my great grandpa every Friday night, and one such evening, he came to great grandpa with an interesting proposition. Henry never did a lick of farm work if he could help it. Henry’s father would come into great grandpa’s store and complain that Henry just spent his time playing with motors in the barn. 

Well, Henry told my great grandpa that he thought he could make the horseless carriage, the automobile as we now call it, available to the common man. He wondered if great grandpa, who was prosperous, might like to invest in the project. Great grandpa already had a car, an electric that went at the breakneck speed of fifteen miles and hour. He thought about it for a while. A stinking, smoking gas engine, lots of fools speeding down the road at, who knows, twenty, maybe twenty-five miles an hour . The noise, the dirt, the smell, the chaos. Great grandpa said he didn’t think it was such a good idea. Henry found other backers, bought out all the farms in the neighborhood, built the Dearborn Plant and started to hang around with a more scientific crowd, like that Edison fellow. 

Great grandpa never told us if Henry was any good at poker. (I am not making any of this up.)

Well, I have always thought that great grandpa was right. The world would have been a better place if Henry had done his farm work and forgotten about all that scientific progress nonsense. Soon, Detroit and the whole world were full of smoking, belching Tin Lizzies and now the Greenland ice sheet and the south pole are melting, the deserts of the world are growing the world climate is heating up at a geometric rate and we are embroiled in the madness of and unending war for oil. We import the goo at a frightening rate and America has imported more than she’s exported since 1975. In other words, we’ve been living on credit for the last 33 years all because of that idiot, Henry. 

Oh, one more thing. Henry’s progressive and scientific world view was shared by another fellow, Adolf Hitler. The New York times reported on Dec. 20, 1922, that behind Herr Hitler’s desk was a portrait of Henry Ford and the table in the outer office was covered with German translations of book published by Henry. It seems that Henry was Adolf’s first foreign financial backer. Henry thought that Hitler’s devotion to the science of eugenics and his desire to exterminate the Jews were swell ideas so, Henry paid for the Nazi party’s headquarters and helped them get a start. Hitler and his friends were very scientific. The gas chambers were wonderfully efficient and Jews he didn’t kill, he used for scientific experiments. 

Yes, science unhindered by the chains of superstitious religion has made the world so much better. We never knew that Austrian fellow, Einstein, who accidentally laid the ground work for the nuclear bomb, and thus gave the world the capacity to blow itself up. I suspect that, because of oil, we will melt all the glaciers before we set off the bomb. If you live in a low lying place like Florida or New York or Bangladesh, I suggest that you learn to do the backstroke. 

Thank you Henry Ford!  You may think that science has made belief in God unnecessary, but I rather think that if there is no god to save us from our own inventions, we are most certainly in big trouble. 

So much for the myth of science.

Rev. Know-It-All 

(To be continued next week - - -> Click Here To Go To - Part 2)