Extraordinary Claims

by Luther Reads

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The priest claims to own one car, and the bartender believes him. The minister claims to own four cars, but the bartender is skeptical until the minister brandishes a photograph of himself standing in front of a house and four cars. The rabbi then pulls out a photograph of himself standing in front of 400 cars and claims to own them all, but the bartender says, "You're gonna need more than a picture of yourself with 400 cars to convince me that they're all yours."

If you're expecting a punch line, there isn't one. So in a way, the joke's on you :)

The story is instead a parable meant to illustrate that extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary proof. Believing that a person owns one car requires almost no proof because it's an ordinary claim. But owning 400 cars is an extraordinary claim that warrants a far different level of proof.

I was told two extraordinary claims in my youth.

1. The Earth rotates around the sun, a belief known as heliocentrism. This is such a ridiculous claim because I can literally see the sun moving through the sky every day. The sun appears to move, not us. But yet I was told otherwise.

2. Two thousand years ago, the creator of the universe was born to a virgin, with himself as the father, and the subsequent brutal murder of this offspring allowed him to invite those of us who believe this story to come live with him for eternity with no more death or sadness.

Now what if, in a shocking twist, the bartender then claims to own four million cars, and all the other customers in the bar attest to it. And so do all the people walking down the street in front of the bar, and all the people in all the other bars along that street.

This is what it's like to be raised as a heliocentric Christian. Everyone around me believed that the Earth rotates around the sun, and that Jesus was born of a virgin and died for our sins. So as a child, I accepted both ideas.

But I also did something even more harmful, and this is the role of indoctrination. After hearing these claims so many times from so many people that I loved and trusted, I accepted the claims as being... ordinary. And ordinary claims only warrant ordinary proof.

But heliocentrism and Christianity are both very, very, very extraordinary claims. And I've found extraordinary proof for one but not the other.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a poet who's never actually written a poem.