Killer Mike

What about all those "eyewitnesses" who have seen Santa Clause is stories about him? Santa must be real!!!!

Alf

One problem is that this story is described twice. In one version the other people with him saw Jesus but heard nothing and in the other version they didn't see anything but heard everything.

I guess they are both partly right. The one version they saw nothing and in the other version they heard nothing - so I think both stories are partly right.

Alf

Alf

This is the old argument set forth by CS Lewis - if you know the story of Alice in Wonderland etc, it is the same guy. Narnia series for example.

He put up this that Jesus is either Lord, Liar or Lunatic and since we don't think he lied or a loonie we have to conclude that he really is the lord.

This argument appear very solid to many christians but it is in fact rather problematic.

First off, the three choices is put forth as these are the only alternatives and that is simply not true.

For example Jesus could be mistaken. He could think he was God but although he was not in fact he might still claim it without lying. CS Lewis might then force you to say he was a loonie but people aren't lunatics just because they are mistaken. Just because you are factualy wrong about something, we don't call for the people with white coats and lock you up in a straight jacket.

Another option - which is even more probable is that he has been misrepresented. Jesus himself may never have claimed to be God. It is the gospels and other biblical writings that might make that claim and even them do not do it straight out. Even in the bible you never see straight out "Jesus says: I am God". You never find that bible quote anywhere. All who conclude that Jesus claimed to be God do so based on interpreting various quotes and sayings and there are a number of reasons why this might go wrong. Something could have been translated wrong or taken out of their proper context and modern translators have no way of reaching that original context because it is lost etc.

We also know that the bible has been repeatedly changed and modified during the early years so as to fit with whatever thelogy fleshed out. The early church took some time before the various core beliefs were "frozen" and set in stone so to speak and during that time the biblical writings changed a lot.

So we really cannot say for certain that Jesus even existed, we certainly cannot say for certain that he ever claimed to be God. It is also actually quite hard to believe. Jews would be adamantly opposed to him if they knew so, to them Yahweh simply couldn't be in human form and no human could claim to be god - that would be blashphemy. True, christians claim that Jesus was eventually crucified on blasphemy charges but the point is that if it really were true that Jesus walked around claiming to be God, he would have been strung up long before he actually were.

Here is the story as the christians tells it:

Some guy walk around do miracles and claim to be God. He really does miracles. Lots of other people claim to do miracles but they are fake, this guy is real.

The jews want him punished for blasphemy, for some strange unknown reason they do not stone him as a jewish court would do but rather let the romans crucify him as romans do. The romans crucify him for being a trouble maker but the jews want him dead for blasphemy. Pilatus find no guilt with the man as he doesnt appear to be a trouble maker but crucify him anyway because the jews pushes him to do it.

some day and a half later (on the third day as the bible count) they find the tomb empty and they even claim to see him walking around and they see him with the wounds from the crucifiction and he is ghostlike since he can walk through walls etc. So the disciples says "Wait a minute, he really did get up from the dead, so he really must be god" and so they run out and tell the good news and win people over to their new religion.

This is the story the christians wants you to believe but there are many problems with it. One is that if he really did say he was god, they would have stoned him long before. Also, they would have stoned him, not crucified him.

Secondly, romans would not have put him in a tomb. If he was crucified it was because he was a criminal and they didnt waste a tomb for criminals and certainly not spent guards on it. Here the bible claim that some jew who were sympathetic to Jesus arranged the tomb but that is also hard to accept even. Also, many of the stories about Jesus after having been resurrrected doesn't ring true, they appear to be ghost stories and some appear to be theological constructs to score a theological point rather than being actual stories. For example doubting thomas doesn't appear to be a real person, he appear to be a "stereotypical doubter" and so the story appear to be made as a way to "if anyone doubt like Thomas, then listen to the gospels words: Those who do not see and yet believe are the good guys".

There is also many other things that makes that particular story not ring true - for example the fact that many cults and sects in the eastern part of the roman empire in those days worshipped some demi-god or son-of-god who had gone down to a lower heaven to sacrifice himself by crucifiction in order to redeem man from sin. Did it just so happen that Jesus actually did what these cults had believed in several years before Jesus happened to do it or is it rather that someone believed in this myth and legend and then some guy who got crucified by the romans for being a trouble maker appeared to fit the description if you change a bit here and there and then he of course had to rise up from the dead or otherwise the legend would not be fulfilled.

Who is "he" here? Jesus? There are no roman records of Jesus travels anywhere. He didn't appear to travel a lot in fact. He was mostly in the judea region and hesitated even to go to Jerusalem, he was - if the bible is correct - mostly in the smaller villages and out in the country side.

In fact, I don't think you find any roman records of Jesus at all. The closest we find is some writings in Josephus about Jesus but those writings are so obviously fake that it is impossible that Josephus could have written them as we read them now. They appear to have been "modified" by later christians when they copied Josephus' works.

Very flimsy.


I think people usually spell it Saul - same name as you find some kings etc in OT.

He was a Jew from Tarsus and Tarsus was in modern day turkey and so it was a bit away from Judea. However, Paul travelled a lot and it was appearantly on a trip to Damascus that he converted. As someone said earlier, he got an eliptic seizure.

In the early days they only fooled the simple minded and gullible people. The educated people were generally NOT christians in the early days. Christians was considered a cult for the poor and uneducated in the early days.

The big change happened several years later when an emperor saw the political benifits of christianity and converted himself to christianity and also made it the favored religion of the roman empire. Villages changed status from Village to City (which had tax benifits and other benifits) by simply dropping their statues of Jupiter and put up crosses instead.

There are many intelligent atheists. Dawkins for example. However, it doesn't really say much how smart a person is. Many smart people can believe many silly things. It all depends on when they acquired this belief and under what circumstances etc.

As I said, thinking along this way is actually faulty logic. It makes more sense to trust your own sense and follow your own nose than to be a blind lemming and follow after whoever you deem to be smartest. True, other people can in some situations lead you and if they are more experienced in the mountain you would be a fool to walk away from them and not pay attention to their advice. However, we are not talking about mountains here, we are talking about things which not even the smartest guy who read the bible a million times can possibly know. They claim there is this God out there but you cannot see him, hear him or smell him or touch him and the only thing you know about him is what he is not. You know he is not material, he is not finite, he is not lacking. YOu don't really know what he is - yes, they say God is "love" but that is by itself a very fuzzy thing and doesn't really describe someone in the same way that you can describe Joe and say he has brown curly hair.

Yet, even though we know absolutely nothing about this god and only know all the things he is not we are supposed to be certain he exist and that he divinely inspired this BIble and the bible is true because it is god's word and God exist because the bible says so and we know the bible is right because God says so. Well, we never hear God make the claim but we hear some christian claim that God makes the claim.

Since it is inherently impossible to know these things they claim, this is not like the mountain. No matter how experienced or knoweledgable you are, you are still just on the same footing as the fcomplete novice. A person can study theology all his life and he knows no more what God is than you do.

So, smartness doesn't matter in this question. Thus, it is irrelevant.

True, if you could see that the average IQ among christians was 140+ then you might think that it might have something going for it. Especially if you found that people joined christianity as they started to question things and learned more.

Problem is that it is the opposite that is the case. Average IQ among atheists is generally way over christians and people tend to leave the church as soon as they learn more and start to question things. It is also a one way traffic. People who are fundamental christians or hard core christians some times deconvert and become unbelievers. I have yet to hear of a credible story of someone who is unbeliever who become christian with the exception of one single story which I personally know nothing about, I just saw someone throw up a name here once in a thread that discussed this very thing.

Science has questions which might never be answered.
Religion has answers which might never be questioned.

Alf

Agemegos

Nope. Alice in Wonderland was by Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, and it was published in 1865.

CS Lewis was not born until 1898.

alexjohnc3

Thanks a lot for your post Alf! And you were right, that argument was made by C.S. Lewis, probably in Mere Christianity.

I'll show my father the arguments you made, thanks again!

To TedM: No worries, I couldn't hate my father.

To Killer Mike: http://venganza.org/sighting/index.htm - Ramen exists...

funinspace

This claim could be some sort of reference to Paul, but certainly not Jesus. Most people think the majority (not all) of his letters in the Bible are genuine. Though I don't know of any outside contemporary records of his life either. This lunatic, liar, or Lord thing is also something used by Josh McDowell. It sets up a false dilemma, in that it excludes other possibilities, like he never existed or he was a heretical Jewish sage. The heretical Jewish sage is my preferred guess. He would have still been hated by the Pharisees, and could easily have been stoned. Or if he caused enough trouble, the Romans could have actually killed him too. The main problem is that there is just almost nothing outside the Bible to cross reference anything. Paul never met Jesus outside of this claimed roadside blinding/miracle. The Gospels were written 30-90 years after Jesus death. Our earliest significant copies start at the end of the second century, a 100+ years later. This provides plenty of time for religious zealots to massage the story. We have evidence that history was tampered with over time: the several endings for Mark, the additions to first century Josephus's History of the Jews to mention a holy Jesus. There are a bountiful supply of contradictory things within the NT to establish its failure to be God breathed. It does not match of with Hebrew canon prophecy for a coming Messiah, regardless of what Christian apologists claim. Noah's flood, Moses' Exodus, and Joshua's solar object demands, have not a shred of evidence in history or archeology. There are failed prophecies in the Hebrew canon like Tyre. Just take your time and spend some time reading around here.

Your just in 8th grade, cut yourself some slack on the intelligence thing. Arguing based on numbers of believers really doesn't mean much. Many predict that Islamic followers will out number Christians within 20-30 years, so maybe their faith should be the one. A large majority of the world is not Christian either. I spent 20 years as an adult Christian before I deconverted.

Berthold

Fama crescit eundo. The rumor grows by going around.

Terrible Heresy

Well, I am new at this....but lets see....

That number seems very inflated. I say this because even in debates I've seen about Paul's mythical Jesus there are only a select few proofs of an historical Jesus that I see come up.

I am guessing that you are equating anything that shows Jesus to have physical properties to being proof against a mythical Jesus. It's not. The realm in which a mythical Jesus would have gone about his bussiness, it is not unusual that he would have been said to have physical properties. It is a common theme of the other messianic religions at the time. This was another realm, but it was not heaven. It was somewhere in between.

Correct me if I am wrong guys....but this is a very, VERY misleading statement. It makes it sound like Paul was just vague on the exact circumstances on when Jesus told this parable....or when Jesus performed that miracle.

The real issue with the mythical Jesus argument is that Paul's writing is totally devoid of nearly every important aspect of Jesus's life! Everything Jesus is known for is left out of Paul except for the death/rebirth story.

From The Jesus Puzzle

The Gospel story, with its figure of Jesus of Nazareth, cannot be found before the Gospels. In Christian writings earlier than Mark, including almost all of the New Testament epistles, as well as in many writings from the second century, the object of Christian faith is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem. There is no sign in the epistles of Mary or Joseph, Judas or John the Baptist, no birth story, teaching or appointment of apostles by Jesus, no mention of holy places or sites of Jesus’ career, not even the hill of Calvary or the empty tomb. This silence is so pervasive and so perplexing that attempted explanations for it have proven inadequate.

Now, I am not the most knowledgable person out there about this stuff. So I am not claiming that I know how right or wrong Earl Doherty, along with other myhical Jesus proponents. But at the very least you seem to be misrepresenting the other side in this debate. The claims made are not that Paul is vague on some of Jesus's doings. It's that there is almost total lack of anything that makes Jesus...well....Jesus in Paul's epistles!

All pretty much good advice

As someone who's whole family and most of my friends are Christian, I will agree that, for the most part, relationships with fellow human beings are more important then which beleif you have or don't have.

I would just say that you should not sacrifice critical thinking, or doubt for the comfort of living in total agreement with your father or family. I just hope your father is the type of open minded religious person that will allow you to go your own way without making a huge issue out of it(as many Christians will)

Good luck And have confidence in yourself. Just because smart people think something doesn't make it right.

2.1 billion people think Christianity is right

1.3 billion people think Islam is right

There are a lot of intellegent people in there...but they can't both be right.

Barbarian

If I was you, I would start reading up right ahead on Jim Jones and on Heaven's Gate, because your father will say soon something like "The apostles would not have died for a lie", and it will be nice to have the counterreferences ready.

I would not mention the 9/11 terrorists just now (dying not exactly because of their faith but because their faith made it possible for them to die for something else). Also, the apostles dying for their creed is later Church tradition anyway.

TedM

Hi Terrible. Here you will find a list of all (within a handful) of Paul's references to Jesus/Christ that could have applied to a man on earth. Some (such as the reference to betrayal) may not be as I've portrayed. I don't want to debate the issues, but you may find some of this to be of interest for seeing the "other side" of the debate:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...83#post2518883



Sorry, I didn't mean for it to sound like that.

take care,

ted