Doug Shaver

According to the apologists, every alternative is less probable than magic.

If you really, really must know how they think about it, check this out: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billc...istorical.html

SkepticBoyLee

Why is the empty tomb even taken seriously at all? Its a gargantuantly moronic argument. Some guys wrote legendary accounts about a man decades after the supposed events which include him leaving his tomb therefore, "the tomb is empty"! Walaa! Jesus exists!

Ummm, yeah. How is there any strength at all in this steaming horseshit pile of an argument?

Is this a formula for inventing true historical accounts? Simply pen a claim that something existed, that it was stored somewhere and that its no longer there and sudddenly "it must be true".

Hey the Death Star was blowed up and you know what? We havent found it yet! The Death Star existed! Brilliant!

Am I really just a hardened, close minded atheist or are so many of these Christian arguments really actually astonishingly stupid?

Toto

I would say the latter. The arguments are astonishingly stupid. However, some of the people who make them are quite intelligent and accomplished, and can present the arguments as if they were valid, and it takes a great deal of patience and logic to untangle the arguments, and a great deal of tact to avoid calling them stupid because they believe this stupid argument.

Just remember that the Christians are not stupid, and they do have their pride. That's the problem.

Julian

Or to paraphrase Michael Shermer, "Smart people are good at defending claims they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

It is true that many christians are not stupid, yet many of their claims are. The only explanation that I can see is that they started to believe those claims well before they acquired the knowledge and experience they subsequently use to defend them. It has always seemed strange to me that some personal beliefs are sacrosanct to those that hold them, like we are somehow defined by our beliefs and not our actions. To make matters worse, we are somehow expected to respect those beliefs, forced to participate in the absurd idea that the attack on relious beliefs is taboo, that the religious somehow have special knowledge in the areas of morals and ethics when factual evidence leads us to the opposite conclusion.

Julian