The Blind Leading the Blind

I had discovered through a friend some years ago about an Atlanta exhibit that was trying to promote understanding between people with and without eyesight. They took small tour groups through a variety of environments in complete darkness, inviting them to rely on senses they were far less used to trusting.  I intended on taking the tour but found that they had closed in 2012 and had moved to New York.  I used my Yelp app when we were in New York this past December to find Dialog in the Dark, and called, only to find that they had just closed as well.

While sitting in my favorite wing dive the other day someone down the counter said, “Ya, it’s the blind leading the blind.” Immediately I thought of the scenario above. The turn of phrase “the blind leading the blind” was not fulfilling the negative connotations associated with it – as the person at the counter meant it to be.  The idiom is meant to depict a common impairment of insight, knowledge, and vision of reality.  Typically, the saying is applied in situations where the person (or people) in charge knows no more than those whom he is leading.  The phrase is biblical in origin, coming from Jesus in Matthew 15:14.  "Let them alone," Jesus said of the Pharisees; "they are blind guides of the blind.  And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit."

Like Jesus, the scribes and Pharisees of his day, the non-religious of 2015 sometime describe every religious person in such terms.  They reason that the anatomy of faith in general promotes a culture of the blind leading the blind.  Moreover, Christianity in particular, they argue, is founded on such a blindness.  The deluded disciples, blind by their love for Jesus or perhaps simply their need to be right, perpetuated a story that continues to delude the world.  In his published Letter to a Christian Nation in 2007, Sam Harris writes that nonbelievers like himself are thoroughly dumbstruck by the pervasiveness of Christian blindness, by the Christian "denial of tangible reality," by the suffering these Christians create "in service to religious myths," and their wholehearted "attachment to an imaginary God."

While blindness to reality is a common accusation among the nonreligious, their accusations typically extend well beyond the charge of blindness.  Charles Templeton, for instance, describes the resurrection story as a fable put forward by followers hoping to keep the dream alive.  He insists that resurrection is first of all, implausible, and that the story must be false because there are no secular histories which mention it.  What's more, he describes the discrepancies within the gospel accounts themselves as evidence of dishonesty or tampering of the storyline.  Like many, he ends with the sharp conclusion in his book Farewell to God: My Reason for Rejecting the Christian Faith, that though Christians embrace it with blind eyes: "The entire resurrection story is not credible."  In such a scenario, however, in my opinion, it would be more accurate to accuse Christians of being "the deluded following the liars" than "the blind following the blind."

In fact, as I read that I will vigorously agree that the resurrection is indeed unfathomable.  Unfathomable, in the same way that Mary and Joseph understood that pregnancy among the virginal does not make sense, the resurrection flies in the face of what I know to be true of dead bodies: they do not rise.  On this point, I am not blind.  If by some way a body did happen to rise, it would have been a miracle unparalleled in history.  On these details, I as a Christian and atheists can, in fact, agree.

On the other hand, the claim that resurrection is implausible cannot be accurately bolstered by the claim that secular histories make no mention of it.  Secular writers of the time, including Pliny, Josephus, and the Roman historian Tacitus, in fact affirm the biblical accounts in matters of historic detail.  Christ's life, his reported miracles, his sentence under the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion, and his reported resurrection are all well documented by the historians of the era.  Templeton's insistence that a miracle of resurrection proportions would have convinced the entire population in a matter of hours, in my opinion, is optimistic at best.

It's not my intent to get off into the weeds by saying; the oft-mentioned claim of discrepancies in the biblical accounts of the resurrection story cannot be used to logically discount the story itself. But, first, error must not be confused with imprecision.  It makes sense that Paul mentions men as the first witnesses of the risen Christ because in that historical context women (who are named as the first witnesses in other accounts) were not considered valid witnesses.  Second, falsity must not be confused with perspective.  The minimal differences between the gospel accounts actually assure there was legitimate conveying of perspective going on and not simply a memorized story they needed to keep straight. 

Then, finally, the theory that the story was conjured up by disciples who simply believed what they wanted to believe is not quite plausible.  If the disciples had agreed to propagate a story, it serves to follow that they would have known to conceive something far less remarkable, a story that would accommodate the arguments they would undoubtedly face.

I'm sorry, but with even the slightest bit of intelligence, one could see the claim that Jesus had only "spiritually" risen again could not be proven false by antagonists.  Furthermore, when standing up for these falsified claims was a matter of life or death, it seems more likely to me that at least one of them would have buckled; far more likely than an entire group—and many others—being willing to die for a known lie.  A far cry from "the blind leading the blind," such a scenario would call for "the liars following the liars."

On the contrary, the disciples took the dangerous road—the inconceivable road—and they went to great lengths to proclaim it. Unlike those who might call me blind for conceding to the unfathomable, I find it far more difficult to examine some of these evidences and yet refuse to see.