Raphael Lataster, “There was no Jesus, There is no God” (Amazon Digital Services, 2013)

In the preface of There was no Jesus, There is no God (Amazon Digital Services, 2013),Raphael Lataster states that “it is not my job to disprove Christianity or any other religion. It is not my intention to destroy the fait of the faithful; nor do I desire to offend or upset believers in any way.” His new book is, in fact, meant to be an objective analysis of the evidence available for the existence of Jesus and of God. He details, for example, the evidence present for the two different “Jesuses” people believe in, categorized as the “Biblical Jesus” (the son of God who performed miracles and died for our sins) and the “Historical Jesus” (a non-divine but cool guy who preached and helped others). He relates how many people who fail to find evidence for a divine Jesus tend to fall back on the position that at least a historical Jesus existed, but Lataster thoroughly examines the evidence and finds it lacking for either version. By using Bayesian methodology and the mindset that history is a study of probabilities, Lataster points out the problems in the arguments of apologists and Biblical scholars. In the second portion of this book, the author focuses on God and monotheism, sorting through the arguments used to support God’s existence. He concludes that even if one gives each argument considerable leeway, they all still ultimately fail to providence evidence for any god – least of all the monotheistic Christian god. Though Lataster is a skeptic, his book is one focused on evidence, not on the pros or cons of religious faith. As he states in his preface, “the truth is not a democracy, and certainly does not care about our feelings.”

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