The historical fact of Jesus’ death on the cross
One of the most basic things to understand about Christianity is that Christian beliefs are rooted in what has actually happened in the world. Christianity is rooted in history.
This is also one of the main differences between Christianity and Islam because Muslims do not believe in the historical fact of Jesus’ death on the cross. Muslims reject Jesus’ death on the cross based on what Muhammad recited but never observed.
The following TED Talk by Kathryn Schulz “On Being Wrong” is a helpful look at our internal feelings of rightness versus what actually goes on in the external world. She illustrates the danger of this with the story about a patient who went in for surgery and the surgeon operated on the wrong leg. (8:14-9:36)
A couple of years ago, a woman comes into Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for a surgery. Beth Israel’s in Boston. It’s the teaching hospital for Harvard — one of the best hospitals in the country. So this woman comes in and she’s taken into the operating room. She’s anesthetized, the surgeon does his thing — stitches her back up, sends her out to the recovery room. Everything seems to have gone fine. And she wakes up, and she looks down at herself, and she says, “Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages?” Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one.
When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting. He said, “For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient.” (Laughter) The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous.
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. (emphasis added)
Watch Kathryn Schulz’s entire talk because much of what she has to say applies to Christianity and Islam.
