What resources are there for helping teens develop a broad, secular, fully integrated understanding of life?
People raised in a religious environment may discover atheism in their teens, but it can be very hard for them to sort through everything they have been told and retain the factual while discarding the baseless.
Religion, for example Christianity, is based on some historical reality with admixtures of magical thinking and power politics and philosophical mind-games. It takes work to tease out the fact that Jesus was real, but he was a Jew, not a Christian - and then to deal with all the implications.
I first became an atheist at 17 - but it took me a couple of decades to rid myself of all magical thinking and to integrate history, science and the development of religion as a coherent world view. It is this ability to "see life steadily, and see it whole" which I feel is essential for a stable and comfortable transition from a religious to a secular life.
I am interested in connecting with all resources for helping teens (and adults) be comfortable in developing their own world view. My own contribution is a novel, The Gospel According to the Romans, that contextualizes Jesus as a fundamentalist rabbi within the ongoing resistance to the Roman occupation of Palestine. It is designed to allow those brought up in the Christian belief to see how the religion developed from its historical (non-Christian) origins - but presented as a spy story, not as a university text.
If you know of other resources out there - for dealing any religion - please let me know.
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Yup. There are many Roman documents that Christians hold up as extra-Biblical evidence of Jesus, but almost every single one of them refers to things that Christians did, not Jesus himself.
The one by Flavius Josephus is the only one that directly mentions Jesus, in a historical context, but it has issues.
To me, regardless of the reliability of the Roman and Jewish non-NT references to Jesus, the big question is this: By what process, and for what reason, could this new religion come about?
It was already spreading around the Mediterranean before Paul's journeys, carried by word-of-mouth rumors of miracles, healing, preaching, crucifixion and resurrection. Something Jewish appears to have occurred in Galilee and Jerusalem, and that was the necessary foundation for Paul to build his bizarre edifice on. Yes, he used religious practices and beliefs from Mithraic and Egyptian religions and anything else that crossed his mind, but he built it *on* something - something that Jews and non-Jews had already heard about.
If you don't think so, give me a credible narrative for how it was done, and by whom, and why, and how it was so successful so rapidly.
Agreed there were lots of Messiahs in that period.
http://robinhl.com/2011/10/18/jewish-uprisings-against-the-romans-b...
http://robinhl.com/2011/10/19/jewish-uprisings-against-the-romans-a...
So why disbelieve that there was yet another failed wannabe King and Messiah called Jesus?
Some of the best evidence for the existence of Jesus does indeed come from the NT: that some of the stories in it are contradictory (different genealogies instead of one clear and believable one), or mean-spirited (Jesus cursing the fig tree), or of Jesus' failures (inability to heal in Nazareth, being chased away from Gadara).
In other words, the NT reads more like an apologist explanation for a crucified failure (the Gospels), followed by a mumbo-jumbo preacher's spiritual rants and political manipulations (Paul's letters and wresting of the movement away from the Jews).
It does NOT read like a coherent invention by a Joseph Smith or an L. Ron Hubbard.
Bart Ehrman explores the believability of stories that are self-defeating or counter-productive in his books, such as 'Misquoting Jesus' (HarperCollins, 2005).
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