The Myth of Jesus

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

We should think of it as a mythical truth or religious truth. That's a different kind of claim than a scientific truth. People don't rise from the dead and he didn't, I think so. It's a hundred billion to one that he did. And if you're not going by numbers, which would be absurd, there are too many other good stories out there for that to be a reasonable story. To believe that death is not death is to fiddle with one of the real major facts on our plate.

We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, oﬃcial archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live ― in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show.

So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still oﬀer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can’t be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht in her new book, The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives, is in poetry.

Shermer and Hecht discuss: awe and wonder • science and religion • the new atheists • humanism and atheism • secular Judaism • replacing religion, with what? • the original meaning of liturgy and why it’s still important • rituals for atheists • how to cope with loss, death, and grief • what to say at weddings and funerals • Alvy’s Error (the universe is expanding but Brooklyn is not) • what we do in the hear-and-now matters, whether or not there is a hereafter (which there probably isn’t) • love.

Jennifer Michael Hecht, a historian and poet, is the award-winning and bestselling author of the histories Doubt, Stay, The Happiness Myth, and The End of the Soul. Her poetry books include Who Said, The Next Ancient World, and Funny. She earned her PhD in history from Columbia University and teaches in New York City. Her new book is The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives.