aChristian

Do you lie?

aChristian

From reading history.

Steven Carr

Sometimes. Your idol never lies, because you worship a being who doesn't exist and so can't lie.

Did the Gospel writers indulge in frauds?

Yes. http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm shows them perpetrating the same sorts of frauds that Joseph Smith and Muhammad did.

Game over , I'm afraid.

aChristian

I looked at the website very briefly. I saw they were claiming that Jesus feeding the 5000 was copying Elijah. That sounds kind of stupid to me. Honest eyewitnesses saw Jesus feed 5000+ once and 4000+ later on. Kind of shoots the Elijah idea to pieces.

Steven Carr

All I can do is produce the evidence that your Old Book is full of the same frauds as all other Old Books.

It is up to you to accept the evidence of your own eyes, rather than continue to worship an idol.

aChristian

It's not a game and lying is a serious sin.

Solo

Steven, you need to think this through. The mere fact that stories in the Quran or Book of Mormon appear to recycle older materials does not mean they are frauds. Fraud presupposes conscious intent to deceive by claiming something that the subject knows is untrue. In law you would have to prove this knowledge. Eg. a tobacco company which claims independently conducted studies show that there is no reliable correlation between smoking and incidence of lung cancer, would be guilty/liable in a fraud case if its internal memoranda show that the directors were aware the 'science' was faked. But in most of religious texts you are not really looking at 'fraud' at all. The beliefs in miracles appear to be deeply enmeshed in altered consciousness and the resulting cognitive 'maladaptation' which apprehend distorted reality as a divine order of things. We know beyond reasonable doubt that Joseph Smith suffered from paranoid delusions. He was not proselytizing to defraud prospects like some Ponzi scheme operator (eg Ted and Tammi Bakker who were overselling membership in their PTL resort). He believed his phantasmagoria absolutely, and his converts were proof to him (as they were to apostle Paul) that his delusions were reality.

Best,
Jiri

Steven Carr

Not a Ponzi scheme?

I had no idea that the Mormon church refuses to take money from converts, not even from the convert's children's pocket money.

You learn something new every day.

http://lds.org/churchmagazines/9-200...2005Friend.pdf has a nice picture of a kind Mormon, absolutely refusing to take money from a small girl.

Solo

But you see it won't help mixing things up: for example, the commercialization of Lourdes after Pius X. de-facto underwrote the cures as boon to the Catholic faith, tells us nothing about the psychology of the early Jesus cults. We need to examine the earliest communities on their own terms, without reference to later developments which they provoked.

Best,
Jiri

Horatio Parker

In imagination, there's nothing incredible about it.

But our knowledge of the world makes it highly improbable. Therefore it's not much a stretch to conclude the gospels exaggerate if not lie.