If you’re like me, you’ve spent many sleepless nights wondering whether Jesus’ last name was really Christ. I also like to ponder whether the Easter bunny is real or if Santa Claus really does live in the North Pole. Luckily for us, one man has done his homework.
Most of you probably haven’t heard of Eric Metaxas. Before last Thursday, I hadn’t heard of him either. Formerly a writer for the children’s show “VeggieTales,” Metaxas now gets his kicks by writing religious books purporting to answer the questions you “were afraid to ask.”
Questions like “Did Jesus live at all?” or “Was his last name really Christ?”and other ludicrous fare are covered in his book, “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About God: The Jesus Edition.”
How is Metaxas an expert on this subject? Simple: Like any religious person, he makes up the answers.
Sometimes for light entertainment I will turn on religious-themed programming, such as “The 700 Club,” just to see what nonsense these people are selling. But last Thursday, while watching the Metaxas interview, I realized just how desperate some people are to hear answers to questions about things that never really happened.
It is curious to me that in the 21st century, with advancing technology and a strong understanding of the world around us, people still put their faith into antiquated and disproven religious myths in order to acquire “guidance.” The fact that people still think that a guy named Jesus turned water into wine is preposterous.
Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen; wine is made from fermented grape juice. Simply put, Jesus never turned water into wine — just as no one in the history of the world has ever turned water into wine. And that’s because it cannot be done!
But I’m sure there are people reading this who would believe otherwise simply because a book says so. And that’s the problem. A book with unknown origins written around AD 45 is believed to contain the answers to everything, as well as the history of the world.
Let me put this into perspective. While rummaging through your refrigerator one day, you come across a box of strawberries buried in the back that had expired six months prior. Would you eat them or throw them away?
Most people would do the latter, because the contents of the box were expired and rotten. The same could be said of the words in the Bible. They are over a thousand years past their expiration date, and were written when people had no concept of electricity, the world being round or the fact that subatomic particles exist.
Still, people continue to believe that a man actually rose from the dead. So was he a zombie? Maybe he wasn’t the kind that tried to eat brains like in “Night Of The Living Dead” but he was a zombie nonetheless.
Why don’t things like this happen now? It’s because these things never happened in the first place. The Bible is humanity’s greatest example of a coping mechanism. People need help in coping with the fact that they are going to die and there is nothing they can do about it.
Furthermore, the fact that people like Metaxas claim to have answers that nobody else has should be offensive to the believers among us. Here is a man who wrote for “VeggieTales” claiming that he knows what happened 2,000 years ago.
I use reason and science as basis for my beliefs, not religious conjecture and myth — and you should too.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.