The Arrogance of a Theist

I've always loved the video about factors of 10, where they show how you are simultaneously enormous at an atomic scale and minuscule at a galactic scale. When I think about how small I am relative to the Earth, and how small the Earth is relative to the Sun, and how the Sun isn't even a speck on the windshield of the galaxy, that is sort of how I have imagined humans must look at a godly scale. Humans knowledge would be insignificant next to godly knowledge. God would know every thought ever thunk by a human; humans cannot even figure out why the stock price of Accenture dropped to a penny on May 6.

It is in this context that I read a letter to Andrew Sullivan from one of his readers:

If Jesus was little more than a uniquely-adept Jewish mystic with a profound experience of the Divine (God-as-"Daddy," a pretty great idea), then while that is profound, it's no reason for me to follow him uniquely as opposed to the path of the Buddha, the Hindu mystics, or the Kabbalah.

So what is Christianity's trump card against these other faiths?

[The Resurrection] was the thing that separated Jesus from all the other miracle-working Torah commentators of his day (as stated previously, if one just takes Jesus at face value, he's pretty unremarkable). The Resurrection divinizes Jesus and humanizes God (the most amazing part, I think), and as such, makes Christianity unique.

Firstly, the "Resurrection humanizes God"? How? The Resurrection was when Jesus rose from the dead. This is not human. I have never heard of a human doing this. The Resurrection clearly establishes an enormous distance between humans and God. No human has ever risen from the dead; God has.

Secondly, it's interesting that the reader thinks that "if one just takes Jesus at face value, he's pretty unremarkable". Unremarkable? He walks on water! He turns water into wine! He feeds enormous crowds with paltry amounts of food! I have never seen anyone do any of those things. And yet, compared with "all the other miracle-working Torah commentators of his day", Jesus was "unremarkable". What sets Jesus apart is that he rises from the dead.

Therein lies Christianity's real trump card.

It's not that we have a unique experience of God, it's not that we have a monopoly on God, it's not that our ceremonies and rituals are better (they're pretty terrible sometimes). It's that God knows what it's like to be a human being. God eats, drinks, sleeps, cries, gets angry, bleeds, dies, and then shows us that death is not the end.

How desperate is this reader to be on par with God? An all-knowing god such as the Christian God does not need to be born as a human to know what it is to be human. An all-knowing god will already know what it is like to eat, drink, sleep, cry, get angry, bleed, and die. But an all-knowing knows so much more than any human ever will about any of those things. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a woman with no teeth to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a man whose tongue has been cut out to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a master chef to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a smoker to eat. In short, an all-knowing god knows so much more than any human ever will about the human condition. And yet this reader believes that God needed to be born as a human, die, and rise from the dead, all that "He" may be humanized.