Jesus: Lord or Lunatic?

Critical thinking skills are a precious commodity - far too precious, in fact. They reason why they are precious is that they are in such short supply. People need them and need to use them, but so often we find people who appear to have never heard of basic logic and principles of reasoning. It is also unfortunate that such people's poor reasoning so often occurs in the context of religion.

A perfect — or maybe perfectly bad — example is set by David Reinhard who wrote the editorial "Jesus of Nazareth: lord or lunatic?" for The Oregonian. Reinhard is annoyed at what he calls “The Domesticated Jesus” - a conception of Jesus which simply treats him as a great moral teacher rather the Son of God.

He promised his own resurrection (“Hereafter shall the Son of Man sit on the right hand of the power of God”) and had the effrontery to forgive sins that people committed against God or others (“Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee”). Beyond all this, Jesus was very clear, judgmental even, about what he believed was necessary to upgrade a human being: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

Now, you don’t need to believe any of this. You’re free to conclude it’s all total rubbish. But it’s impossible to maintain Jesus is just “Mr. Nice Guy” and one of history’s great moral teachers. “The Domesticated Jesus” doesn’t hold up logically. He’s either lord or lunatic. He can’t be both.

I suppose you could say you believe certain things he’s said to have said and disbelieve others. But this seems arbitrary and makes about as much sense as saying you believe some wack job also happens to one of the world’s great moral teachers.

The above is what is known as a “False Dilemma” — it’s an attempt to frame a debate as being a choice between two options when, in fact, there are other options available (for example, Reinhard doesn’t consider the possibility that what we know of Jesus isn’t entirely accurate). This particular False Dilemma is derived from a False Trilemma et up by C.S. Lewis — that famous apologist added in the third option of “Liar.” Reinhard is familiar with C.S. Lewis and even quotes him, so why did he reduce a set of options that was already too small by yet one more?

Reinhard is an “associate editor” for The Oregonian. I suppose that there are standards for writing clarity at that paper, but I have my doubts about any standards for thinking clarity. The above argument is, quite simply, ridiculous — it has absolutely no redeeming qualities except as an example for students about how not to go about things. Unfortunately, some of Reinhard’s readers probably don’t realize that and will actually believe that he had something intelligent and useful to say in his editorial.

 

Philosophy:

• Logical Fallacies
• Critical Thinking