Because 9/11 Actually Happened!

In the above image, taken from another thread on Reddit’s Atheism board, we’re supposed to laugh at the Christian that compares 9/11 to Jesus and Christianity, because “9/11 Actually Happened.”  What’s amusing to me is that this breaks one of the fundamental arguments that Atheists use to defend their case that there is no God.

How does the majority of the world know that 9/11 happened?

While there were thousands there at New York City, millions of people did not see the events of 9/11.  If we broaden the number of people to those that saw the towers fall on live television, the number grows, and yet still pales in comparison to the entire population.  Broaden it out to those that saw it on tape delay, and maybe we get close to twenty five percent of the world may have seen it (figuring 20% of the world has televisions).

So, the world must trust less than a quarter of the population to accurately depict what happened in New York City on the morning of September 11th.  As time passes, some will hear of it, and given a generation or so, 9/11 will be just like Pearl Harbor—we believe it happened, we have documentation that it happened, but no one is around that saw it happen.

Jesus and Christianity

Compare this to Jesus and Christianity.  Some were witnesses to his actual ministry.  Many more saw His miracles.  At least 500 saw his risen body.

In a day without television, He got around, writing about Him got around, and by the time of the fall of Rome, the entire European Continent, Russia, and the far east had heard of Jesus of Nazareth.

By that time, no original disciple would have been around, but the majority of the people not only believed that the person existed, but what He claimed that He did—regardless of whether they accepted it or not.

The Clincher

When I was at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. in May I couldn’t help but marvel at the old copies of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Here were old papers, barely legible, that we kept all locked up and on display, and I had to wonder why!

Then it hit me, these documents are kept because they represent the truth from the people that were there.  If someone brought forth a forgery, it could be compared to the originals, and then we would know that he had the truth or not.

In a couple of generations, people may wonder if the 9/11 attacks were faked.  No one alive will remember them, and seeing a lot of what Hollywood can do today, some may doubt that it ever happened.  (I mean, how many people are there now that doubt we landed on the moon?)

There will be no scientific test we can perform on the site to discover if it happened, it will be historical records that prove it.

And that’s what the Bible claims to be—a historical account of things that happened around 33 AD in a far of place that most of us have never visited, and yet we’re told that something major happened there.

To claim that 9/11 and Jesus Resurrection are not the same type of thing (a historical event) simply because we’re in the generation that witnessed the event is preposterous.

I’d love to see an atheist travel to the South American jungle to a tribe of natives and try to explain not only what a skyscraper was, but what a Muslim is, an airplane, and then to get them to believe that Fundamentalist Muslim Radicals crashed our own airplanes into two of our towers.  To watch the natives reaction would definitely be amusing.