Absence of Evidence

This is relevant to our discussion:
A Silence That Screams.

Note that no mere historical analysis is sufficient in my mind to discount the mystical claims of a group of people alone, although I do, obviously, believe the evidence in favor of a Divine or even diabolical or otherwise magical Jesus is insufficient to support belief (whatever that means).

No, the other scissor in this logical implement is the bizarre conclusion we must come to that a God would incarnate out of love, suffer horribly (we are told), die, and come back to life and leave no physical evidence or any contemporary accounts by disinterested observers so that the end of all of this sacrifice and miracle, which requires that we Know Jesus, could be achieved. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Jesus never once tells an apostle or disciple to write anything down, to make notes, to find independent observers to corroborate the miraculous events happening. He never suggests means by which to organize The Church, the steward of the Good News, for the thousands of years that he will be missing from the material world. He never conjures from nothing elaborate technology to record his incarnation, sample his DNA, or provide, by some science unknown to us but certainly in the purview of a Divine Being, some confirmation of his nature.

The paucity of the material evidence is met by an equivalent paucity of the philosophical. Jesus never addresses ontology, science, philosophy. He never tells us how we can "know" anything at all. Never addresses the obvious rejoinder that a Buddhist would make to his claims, in the presence of miracles or otherwise, that one way or another Jesus, Yahweh, Sin, Suffering, are all illusions - a claim which, is more unshakable than any faith. The Gospels, if we are to believe them, are universally concerned with folk ontologies and folk psychologies local to the region of Jesus' life. There is nothing to indicate a larger view. The one ontological question posed in the Gospel "What is Truth?" (John 18:38) is posed and left shockingly, and honestly to me, quite sorrowfully, unanswered. These are stunning and irresolvable omissions on the part of a Divine Being who is on the road to profound torment to save us all out of love. How can he save us if he cannot even tell us how to know if the Universe is illusion or not? How can I begin to worry about his claims if I cannot even know Truth?

Crucial to this argument is the fact that all of the above is within the ability of the Divine Being. Could we make sense of it in any meaningful way, other than asserting that we simply do not understand God's Plan, but it must be Good and Just and Loving (even to the point of saying that we only have incomplete knowledge of the meaning of these words?). I don't think so, but I would hope that God's Plan would be better than to require us too. He knows how stupid and insane and ignorant and sad we are.