Adam Rutherford comments on some of Christianity’s more absurd (“tangible”) tenets:
“If faith concerns the spiritual, the eternal your soul and ill-defined things like that, why are churches so preoccupied with the physical?
Of course, the media love the tangible tenets of religion. The absurdity of the Turin Shroud, a sheet that is claimed to have covered the dead Jesus, was in the news last week as it's back on display after yet another round of pointless analysis. Next week, the pope is due to check it out, and do a bit of praying in front of it.
And yesterday, the Daily Mail felt it necessary to cover in depth a group of fundamentalist Christians who are convinced they have found bits of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. I say convinced, but I must give them credit for showing some doubt: Yeung Wing-cheung, from Hong Kong's Noah's Ark Ministries International, said "it's not 100% that it is Noah's Ark but we think it is 99.9% that this is it.'
This is the bit of religion that demands ridicule. Christian fundamentalists are of course silly people. This primarily 20th-century phenomenon uses James Ussher's silly biblical generation calculation to assert duff theology and literal truth to Genesis, which while quite elegant in its prose, is also quite silly. The story of Noah is not just silly but hateful, and impossible. Leave aside the story that a pair of lions would wage terror over all the other animals, or the hideous genetic bottleneck that would result from repopulating an ecosystem with such small samples. Ark proof comes around every few years. In the latest discovery these fanatics claim carbon dating on a bit of Turkish wood to determine that it was from the time of Noah's flood. It might be worth mentioning how creationists often assert flaws in carbon dating as a means to refute evolution. But nailing inconsistencies in fundamentalist arguments pointlessly uses up irretrievable time. I just don't understand why anyone would want to hunt for physical proof of a story that revealed your God to be a bit of a genocidal arsehole.
During the second millennium after Jesus' murder religious authorities became a tad fixated on demonstrating the physical aspects of their culture. Relics became big business in the middle ages, with every bit of nail or wood from the cross, or drops of blood from mediocre saints being targets for pilgrimage. That continues to this day, with millions of people expected to visit the Turin Shroud. The Holy See displays a noncommittal ambivalence towards relics that doesn't approve, but doesn't really condemn. I guess we're all rather used to that from the Vatican nowadays. And so again it demands ridicule.
So what is it about physical evidence that is so interesting to certain religious types? Relics are said to bring you closer to the original owner, and veneration is not idolatry. In Jesus, some of the other grisly bringers of proximity include the sponge he sucked vinegar from, the spear that he was finished off with, his umbilical cord and the best of all, the Holy Prepuce: Jesus' foreskin. I like to think that when Charlemagne felt jolly close to Christ when he handed over an 800-year-old foreskin to Pope Leo III, and then they all had a bit of snigger.
It seems to me that the physical aspects of Christianity are so much less interesting than the intellectual. Did Jesus exist? No one knows. And while I understand the import of his actual existence and more significantly his gory death, what's far more fascinating is that billions of people believe in him. Did Noah's ark exist? No. But there are diluvian myths in many cultures and religion, and that's interesting. The problem with relics is that they are fundamentally silly, and that limits discourse to the absurd.”
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