Doubting Thomas | Does Jesus Reward Ignorance? - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Hi friends, welcome back to my channel.
If you don't already know, my name is Christi and this channel aims to deconstruct all of the things that we were taught to believe growing up in fundamentalist, conservative, and evangelical Christian churches.
Today, I want to talk about the story of doubting Thomas and the implications of how Jesus responded to Thomas when he wanted proof, he wanted evidence that what he was being told about the resurrection of Jesus was true.
I think a lot of times in churches, Christians are told this story as a way to encourage their faith and discourage their doubts.
They tell us don't be like doubting Thomas.
Just have faith.
Just believe.
Don't question it.
And they pose this doubting as a type of character flaw or a weakness in Thomas's faith.
But I'm here today to challenge this idea that Thomas's doubts were something to be discouraged.
That Thomas having doubts was a bad thing.
So we're gonna read through the story and at the end of this video you can decide for yourself what you think.
Before I jump into today's topic, I just quickly want to let you guys know that I'm really excited about my new partnership with biblical scholar Bart Ehrman to promote his courses and his upcoming virtual conference September 21st through the 22nd, New Insights into the New Testament.
I will be attending this two-day event for those who want to go beyond what they were taught in the church and dig into the real history behind the life and letters of Paul.
Ten world-renowned scholars will be sharing groundbreaking insights that could completely change the way you see early Christianity.
So if you're interested in joining, please use the special affiliate link in my description and use code 20OFF at checkout to get $20 off your tickets.
So let's jump into the book of John and let's talk about the story of Doubting Thomas.
We're gonna start in chapter 20 verse 19.
This is when Jesus appears to the disciples, but Thomas is not there.
It says when it was the evening on the day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were for the fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, peace be with you.
After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.
Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said that to them again, peace be with you as the Father has sent me, so I send you.
So Thomas is not here at this point.
The other disciples are.
Jesus shows up.
Surprise, surprise, I'm alive.
And the first thing on his agenda is to prove to the disciples that he is Jesus, that he died, he came back from the dead, and he is alive and well.
He's got the the holes in the hand, the wound in the side, and he shows them this so they know that what he's saying is true, that he's not some imposter or, you know, somebody's not playing tricks on them.
I have a lot of questions.
I'm a very curious person, so I can't just like stop at what the text says.
I'm trying to think, okay, if Jesus is back from the dead, does he look like a corpse?
He's got these flesh wounds.
Does that mean all of his wounds are still there?
Does he look like this beaten, bloody corpse of a man that is just kind of walking around like a zombie?
Has he fully healed in all other areas, but now he just has the holes and the wound in the side?
I'm not really sure, but this poses a lot of questions for me, but that's not what this is about today.
This is about Jesus showing up to the disciples.
He proves himself to them first thing on the agenda.
They don't even ask.
They don't ask to see any proof.
He just gives it to them.
But then the story continues.
It says in verse 24, So this is almost like a rebuke of Thomas, doesn't it feel like that, that Jesus is rebuking Thomas for having these doubts and not believing the disciples?
But Jesus knows that he had just showed up to the disciples.
He was right there in the flesh showing them his wounds and he had no problem doing that.
But for some reason, when he gets to Thomas and Thomas wants what the disciples got, he's rebuked by Jesus.
Jesus says, And isn't this exactly what they tell us in the churches?
That they have this truth, this ultimate truth.
They're giving it to us and we are not supposed to doubt it.
We are not supposed to question it.
We're not supposed to seek any alternative perspectives or answers.
This is the truth.
This is reality.
And you were to just put your faith in it, move forward and believe.
To me, this just raises a really important question about what Jesus values in his followers, because it seems to me that Jesus would value ignorance and blind obedience over reason and rationality.
That he doesn't want people to think critically about the information that they're being presented.
He just wants them to believe.
And he goes on to say that he will bless those who believe without seeing.
And so right here we have this admission of Jesus that.
It is better to believe in him without asking for evidence, without asking for proof, it is better to just put your trust and faith in him, which to me seems absolutely ridiculous that God would give you a brain.
He would give you the ability to think critically, to reason through the information you're being told.
But he would want you to ignore all of these methods that we use to come to conclusions about our reality, just so you can have faith in this one thing.
And this one thing is the most important thing.
The most important thing, according to Christians, is your faith in God.
And so you would think that with the most important thing in your life, that it would be very important that you sort through it, that you ask the hard questions, that you really scrutinize and analyze the information that's being given to you so that you can be certain that what you believe is true.
But that's not what we're seeing here.
We're not seeing Jesus say, hey, good job, Thomas, asking the hard questions.
Good job, not just believing whatever people tell you.
Good job wanting to see this for yourself before you believe it.
Jesus doesn't say that.
He says quite the opposite.
He says blessed are the ones that that are going to believe without having to actually touch my hands and touch my side.
And so if he's blessing these people that just believe without seeing what he's really doing is blessing people who just believe what other people tell them about Jesus.
Instead of Jesus actually showing up and showing them for himself, he just wants to send a messenger out and he wants you to trust that messenger.
Now, how are you supposed to know what messengers you do and don't trust?
This is the same Jesus that warned of false prophets.
Be careful.
There are false prophets and false teachers that are going to come and they're going to deceive you.
So how are you supposed to determine that what somebody is telling you about this Jesus is true?
To me, the most rational and reasonable thing you could do is to examine the claims and then do the research, figure out if it aligns with what you know about your reality, to use the brain that God gave you, if he exists, to come to reasonable and rational conclusions and to not just believe whatever somebody else tells you.
Because there are a lot of people out there that claim to be speaking for Jesus.
They're all over my comments.
OK, and they all disagree with one another, by the way.
But how am I supposed to know who to believe?
These people that come into my comments and they say, Jesus loves you.
He loves you so much.
And he just wanted me to tell you that.
OK, well, why can't Jesus come to me himself?
Why can't Jesus show me himself?
Why does he want me to just trust the words of a stranger, trust the words of someone I don't even know, or even just to trust my parents or to trust a pastor?
Because what if you're raised in the wrong type of Christianity?
What if you're raised in the wrong religion?
Does he want you to just trust what people are telling you about God?
No, because you're supposed to believe in Jesus and have faith in his father.
So you're lucky, I guess, if you're born into the right religion, born into the right Christianity, and you have the pastor and your parents telling you the right version of Jesus that you can have faith in.
You don't have to question it.
But what about those people that aren't raised in those environments?
If they were to take the advice of Jesus to just believe and not have doubts, well, people would be following all kinds of false religions and false beliefs, according to Jesus.
So we have to kind of figure out the most reasonable way to approach these claims.
When somebody is presenting you with information, the most important thing you can do is to scrutinize that information, to try to poke holes in it and to try to see if what you're being told actually aligns with the reality that you're living in.
There is this common theme throughout the Bible taught in Christian churches that you are to remain as ignorant as possible when it comes to these these spiritual claims about God, these biblical claims.
That all throughout the Bible, God rewards ignorance, rewards blind obedience, and he discourages people from asking questions, from pushing back, from stopping and going, wait a minute, is this right?
Is this what I should be believing?
Is this what I should be following?
God doesn't want you doing that.
He wants to tell you what to do and then you need to do it no matter what.
No matter how your brain might put up a fight and might say, hmm, that doesn't sound right.
Ignore that.
Ignore all of those roadblocks that get in the way.
The process of critical thinking, just disregard it and obey.
In Genesis two through three, we see Adam and Eve being told that there is this this tree that is a tree of knowledge and that they are to stay away from it.
He doesn't give them a reason why.
He doesn't tell them why he put the tree there in the first place and made it look so appealing and with delicious looking fruit that was good for gaining wisdom.
And Eve saw this tree and she saw that the fruit was delicious and she saw that the fruit was good for gaining wisdom.
She had some sort of knowing about what this fruit could do for her and that this fruit could give her wisdom.
And she decided to follow her intuition and to gain wisdom, to seek wisdom out.
And what does God do?
He punishes her for it and he banishes her from the garden and he condemns all of humanity because his creation sought wisdom from a tree that he created, a tree of knowledge.
God wants you to be ignorant.
He doesn't want you to be wise.
He doesn't want you to seek knowledge.
He doesn't want you to come to reasonable, rational conclusions within your mind.
He just wants you to obey whatever he says and to remain as ignorant as possible.
Genesis 22, he told Abraham to take his son up to a mountaintop and to sacrifice him, to put a knife over his head and to stab him.
And Abraham was not encouraged to stop and think about this and go, hmm, this God who is all loving and who loves me and loves my son.
He wouldn't ask me to do such a terrible thing to my kid.
No, he was not encouraged to push back or to ask questions or to reject this this command.
He is praised for having the faith and devotion to do whatever God said, even if it was the most terrible thing.
When 1 Peter 1, 8 through 9, it says, although you have not seen him, you love him.
And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
So this is just it's just encouraged over and over again.
Don't don't look for the reasons to believe.
Just believe.
And so we can see why when we start asking questions and we start pushing back on these things that are really kind of making us pause to think, we can see why so many people in the church get upset with us.
They think that we are we are trying to kind of dismantle their beliefs.
We are trying to interrupt their faith by asking questions, by not remaining blindly obedient and ignorant.
They don't like that because they're taught that the best thing they can do is to remain steadfast in their faith and to not have any doubts.
So the moment you start doubting and walking away, they see that as an attack on the faith, which is so interesting because all you're really doing is examining the information you're being presented.
All you're doing is going through a method of critical thought, of doubting and scrutinizing so that you can be sure that what you're being told is true.
Doubts and skepticism, these are not inherently bad things.
And in fact, I think that they are great things to have and great things that you can apply to any claims that people bring to you, especially when they come to supernatural or spiritual claims.
Doubt and skepticism are tools for critical thinking.
And why on earth would a religion or a god or anyone discourage you from thinking critically about what you believe?
Doubt is the recognition that you don't have all of the answers, that you need to ask more questions so that you can figure out what's true.
It's important to not just put your belief, put your faith into something that hasn't that you haven't been given a good reason to do so.
I think it's so interesting that Christians often accuse me and others who are posing these questions and scrutinizing this faith.
They accuse us of being egotistical, of being so stubborn.
And it's so interesting that they see our doubts, our skepticism as egotistical because I actually think it takes intellectual humility to recognize that what you believe might not be true.
And to be willing to step into that process of doubting, step into that process of applying skepticism to something that you truly believe.
It is the opposite of being egotistical to actually stop before you claim to know truth, especially about these very unknowable things like religion, to stop and say, I don't really know the answer to this and I don't think this is right.
Let me ask questions.
Let me kind of dig in further and let me really examine this to see what's true.
To me, one of the most egotistical things you could do is to claim that you have the answers to all of life's greatest questions, all of life's greatest mysteries, that you have the right answer, even though there's no real evidence for it and that everyone else is wrong.
To me, that is the stubborn position.
But so often we're called stubborn.
We're called egotistical for simply rejecting the claims that were being presented without any proper evidence or proof.
Doubt and skepticism should be in everybody's mental toolkit.
This helps drive us toward personal growth, drive us away from beliefs that might not be true.
And it helps us live a more authentic experience, holding beliefs that we have critically examined rather than beliefs that have just been given to us by someone else.
When we encourage people who have faith to think more critically about what they believe, they might see that as an attack.
They might see that as some sort of pushback against them.
But what we're actually doing is we are helping guide them toward a more confident position and where they stand.
To encourage someone with faith to think critically is really just to encourage them to make sure that where they stand, they are confidently there based on their own conclusions, their own process of figuring things out.
But so often people just want to follow along with whatever everybody else is telling them.
And I understand that you trust your family, you trust your pastor, you trust your church, you hope that they're going to lead you in the right direction.
But there are so many churches, so many religions out there, and they all disagree with one another.
How can you know that what you believe is true if you haven't actually sought it out for yourself?
What is the purpose of faith?
If you can't first be certain that what you're putting your faith in is true.
Is there anything outside of religion or spirituality that Christians would praise others for not applying critical thinking to?
Let's say you were raised by parents who taught you to ignore any and all medical advice, that every time you got sick, they just slathered you with essential oils and put potatoes in your socks.
And they said, do not go to the doctor.
Do not seek medical attention.
Instead, just put the oils on the potatoes in the socks and you'll be fine.
And then one day you got very, very sick and you were doing the oils and you were doing the potatoes and you kept getting sicker and you kept getting sicker.
And all these other people were telling you, hey, you might want to really question these methods.
You might want to question what your parents are telling you.
Go get some medical assistance.
And you respond and you say, but this is what I was always taught.
And I was taught to have faith and to believe in this method of curing my sickness.
So I'm just going to keep doing what my parents taught me to do because, you know, I trust them.
I believe them.
This is what this is what they say.
And it's true.
I don't think that that would be very wise, and I don't know why a God would praise you for not stopping to think, hmm, maybe what I'm being taught isn't true.
Maybe I should should find the answers.
Maybe I should confirm this information that I'm being given.
Maybe I should seek some medical advice.
What Thomas was doing was utilizing that process, these tools that we were given by God, if God created us to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about what other people were telling him.
You got to think these people, if this all happened, these people were grieving.
They had just experienced the loss of their savior.
They were probably going through a lot.
And for them to come up and tell Thomas when he wasn't even there, that Jesus showed up and he rose from the dead.
I think the most reasonable thing Thomas could do is say, wait a minute, that doesn't sound right.
So unless you can show me, I don't really have a good reason to believe it.
Why is that discouraged?
Why is that such a bad thing?
Why is Jesus rebuking Thomas for being reasonable and then claiming that he blesses those who choose their ignorance, who choose to just accept what other people are telling them?
We fall for things all the time.
We fall for bad beliefs.
We fall for bad information.
You know, you get on to social media and scroll for a little while and it probably won't take more than a couple of minutes to come across some bad information, some information that isn't true.
And so many of us just allow those things to just seep into our minds.
They become a belief.
And then we just kind of keep scrolling and go on about our lives.
And I think it's really important that every time we are presented with information, before we just put our belief in it, we should stop and go, OK, does this make sense?
Does this align with what I know about reality?
Where am I getting this information?
Who's giving me this information?
What are their intentions?
What could they gain by sharing this information with me?
Can I confirm it?
And if not, is it reasonable for me to just reserve my faith, reserve my belief until someone can actually give me good reason to believe it?
And that's what Thomas was doing.
He was reserving his belief.
He was hearing something wild, something ridiculous, something that people don't experience.
And he was saying, I just I don't know, I need you to show me.
And then Jesus comes and shows him and then rebukes him for wanting to be shown.
And I really wonder, you know, I know that Christians often say that Jesus didn't have to show him.
Jesus didn't have to show him the holes in the hands and do that whole thing.
He chose to.
And I'm wondering why Jesus doesn't choose to give the rest of us this same type of evidence that we are all expected to just believe in this ancient story written by ancient people that weren't even eyewitnesses at the time, these gospel accounts that were written decades after this supposed resurrection.
We're supposed to just put our faith in it because people tell us to, because a book tells us to.
To me, that's not reasonable or rational.
And I know there's all kinds of reasons people believe in the Bible.
They have their apologetics and that's fine.
But at the end of the day, it is an ancient book written by ancient people, strangers that you and I don't know.
And these these events took place decades before they were even written about.
The people that were writing about them were not eyewitnesses.
They weren't actually there.
They you know, if you look in Luke in the very beginning of Luke, he even admits that he didn't see it happen.
He wasn't there.
He's just writing down what people have told him.
And Jesus is saying, well, you're going to be blessed if you just believe what people tell you.
Well, people tell me all kinds of crazy things.
People tell me all kinds of stories about how they died and went to hell or how they saw a ghost or, you know, they they rubbed on a crystal and it brought them luck.
I don't know.
There's all kinds of things that people believe and people tell other people to believe.
And to me, the most reasonable reaction that we can have when people are telling us to believe something is to question it is to push back and say, well, why do you believe this?
Why are you presenting me with this information?
What is the proof?
Show me the holes in the hands.
I want to touch them for myself and I want to see that's reasonable.
But Christians aren't encouraged to practice that line of thinking, practice this methodology that we all use to come to conclusions about our reality or that we should use to come to conclusions about our reality.
So I would encourage you to read this story for yourself, to really sit down and think about it, to ask yourself these questions.
Why does Jesus reward blind obedience?
Why does Jesus reward ignorance?
Why is Jesus rebuking you when you have questions or doubts or skepticism?
Why would God create you with a brain, with the ability to think critically, but not want you to use that critical thinking for the single most important thing in your life, what you believe about God or what you dedicate your entire life to?
If you're going to dedicate your entire life to this thing, don't you think that you should really, really think about it and examine it and try to prove yourself wrong before you just invest your entire life into it?
What if you're wrong?
Christians love to ask that question.
They pose that to me all the time.
What if you're wrong?
But I would just turn it right back around on them.
What if you are wrong?
And a lot of them say, well, you know, oh, well, at the end of my life, I'll be wrong.
And, you know, oh, well, but you'll have wasted your entire life.
The one life that you know for a fact you're given.
We don't know what comes after this, but we know we're here right now.
We know that we're in this really special circumstance where we just happen to be alive and we just happen to exist.
And so many people want to waste that existence on a belief that they haven't even really closely examined, on a Bible that they haven't even read from cover to cover.
And I have no idea why God would create you with a brain only to encourage you to not use it, only to discourage you from exercising doubt, a tool that is crucial for not falling into the trap of beliefs that aren't true.
It seems like God wanted to create you just so you could be blindly obedient to him, but he didn't want you to have a mind of your own.
And isn't that a really big component of free will to be able to have a mind of your own, to think about things, to have doubts and to apply scrutiny and skepticism and all of that?
That should be a part of your exercising of free will.
And if God cares so much about your free will and your freedom, then he should want you to use your brain in these circumstances.
And if he wanted you to believe in these things that are completely nonsensical, he just he shouldn't have given you a brain with the ability to doubt them and to question them.
It seems like God does just want these kind of blindly obedient, ignorant robots for his glory.
Instead of autonomous human beings that have the freedom to think, the freedom to believe, the freedom to explore the claims that they're being given so that they can end at a place where they are confident and authentic in what they're claiming to believe and dedicating their entire lives to.
I just don't believe in a God that would want me to remain ignorant.
And so it's not really lining up for me.
It's not making sense.
So, you know, read through the story.
Let me know in the comments what you think.
Do you think that it's a good thing to have blind faith?
Do you think it's a good thing to just dedicate your entire life to something that you haven't critically examined?
Do you think it's fair that Jesus rebuked Thomas for simply asking for proof of the claims that he was being given?
Do you think that it was unreasonable for Thomas to push back on these claims and to ask for more information?
And what do you think about a God who creates you with a brain, with the ability to think critically, with the ability to have doubts and to apply skepticism and scrutiny?
What do you think about a God who creates you with with all of these tools and then tells you not to use them?
And what do you think this God would do if someone decided not to use these tools and to just blindly accept a different religion?
And I think if we look in the Old Testament, we know exactly what God thought of those people who didn't worship him, who didn't love him, who believed in other gods and worshipped other gods.
He sent his people out to slaughter them, to take over their cities and enslave them and to eradicate them.
I would be willing to bet that all of these people in the Old Testament that God commanded his people to eradicate, they were also just believing what they were taught.
They were believing the God of their culture, the God that their parents taught them.
And there are billions of people on this earth, and they are all operating from what they know, from their culture, from the information that they're being given.
They have parents and churches or religious institutions that they are a part of that tell them what the truth is and what they should believe.
And if they were to follow the advice of Jesus, they would just believe and not doubt and have faith in what they're being told.
But yet, if they do that and it's not Jesus that they're having faith in, they're threatened with eternal condemnation by a God who expects them to just believe what they are told.
And who rebukes them for having doubts.
So chew on that, let your mind kind of let the wheels spin, really think about this story and the implications of what Jesus said.
And do you agree?
Do you agree that it's that it's a bad thing to doubt?
Thank you so much for watching today.
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So see you next time.