seebs

I consider the God question independent of the Jesus question. I figure, there could well be a God, even if we just made all the other stuff up.

Personally, I think of the whole Jesus Myth thing as roughly in the same category as creationism. It's just sorta silly. The claim that there was a Jewish Rabbi named Yeshua is so utterly unremarkable that denying accounts of it just because you think some of the things in the accounts are wrong is sorta wacky. This is just my personal opinion; I am obliged to grant that there are some Jesus Mythers who are otherwise apparently sane, but then, I recently met a pretty cool and otherwise intelligent YEC. So it happens.

So. Onto the interesting questions:

I don't really expect to have solid empirical evidence for claims about small groups of people two thousand years ago; I'll try to evaluate them for plausibility... Now, to be fair, claims of miracles are a little unusual. I don't evaluate them on a strictly probabalistic basis, because I think this rather misses the point of the claim. After all, if it were commonplace or likely, who would call it a miracle?

Among the people I've met, I have seen:

* Atheists who think that the teachings attributed to Jesus are good ones to follow on their own merits, regardless of the source.
* Christians who believe that Jesus was just some guy, but that what He taught about God was true and important. I am aware that many people don't consider these people Christians, but judging by fruits I think they are.
* Non-Christian theists who think Jesus was just some guy.

To address the question of reasons to believe or not believe in God... It is one of the big hard questions, and I am currently a militant agnostic, firmly convinced that not only do we not have any way of proving either viewpoint, but that we never will.

Heathen Dawn

I’m a polytheist and I’m willing to talk about my faith with you, Moose, but only in private, not publicly on this board, because I don’t want my sacred to be mocked. If you want to talk with me, send me an e-mail message.

llamaluvr

Hopefully this is what you were looking for- let me know if it isn't. I originally had a lot more typed up, but I'm all about KISS. Basically, I think it's best at this point for me to frame my faith in reference to specific challenges over the years. To make a long story incredibly short, I grew up culturally Catholic and became Christian at either age 16 or 18, depending on your definition of "Christian" (i.e., someone who says they are vs. someone who actually acts like it). These points are the culmination of how my faith has developed over the last 3.5 years (I'm now 21). Each of these challenges represents a point where I could have either:

1) Continued believing despite the evidence apparently saying I shouldn't (just look the other way).
2) Stopped believing.
or
3) Really dug deep and found out if it really nullifies my faith.

I honestly think I've done #3 with all of these, and that I have been gratified every time. Of course, it's important for me to continuously check for #1's, and I'm by no means perfect.

Anyway, most of these are challenges that came to me, some are just headings, but they all explain a facet of why I believe, so bear with me! :-).

My personal experience and the experiences of others? (I guess the challenge would be "why should those carry any weight?"):

When I mention these, particularly the notion that God actually has words for me, and that he gives them to me, people far too often suggest that I have a mental illness. I want to retort, "Well, maybe it's YOU who has a mental illnesss!"- not because I think they do, but because, how would they know either way?

Personal experiences (i.e., "experiencing God") are the single most important reason why anybody believes. Nobody in the gospels believed simply on knowledge- they all experienced Jesus in some way and believed afterwards. I think it's got to be the same way. On the other hand, there were people who saw the man Jesus, and heard him speak, yet didn't believe. Jesus would contend that they either weren't listening (or rather, learning) or hadn't even put themselves in a state where they would be ready to listen (an unwillingness to surrender to God). John 6-8 expounds on this.

I wanted to get that out there because that's mainly why I believe- faith cannot simply be the act laching onto an existing belief system, or being born into the church- it is belief in reaction to the reaching out of God. Any knowledge or evidence that serves to reinforce my faith only does just that- it reinforces it. It did not initiate it.

Anyway, I understand that it's not good to just take a few experiences and assume a whole bunch. Some people do this, and they come up with drastically different arrays of deities, because you can't get a whole lot of information simply from one answered prayer, miracle, prophecy, a Bible verse really touching you, etc. Even if a person not actively persuing it like this, I think it is important to look at it in a scientific way.

We accept the plausibility of theories that we can't prove by looking at data points and figuring out if they fit an already fashioned model. This is how the study of evolution works. We have a lot of data points in 3 dimensions (fossils in the earth) and present-day biochemical experiments, and we fit it to a 4-dimensional map of the history of living beings. Certainly, the same evidence could fit other models equally as well, but, it fits the evolutionary model decently.

I think the same can be done with spiritual experiences. What I've experienced personally, what others have told me of, what my church has experienced, represent a slew of data points that can be fit to the model of how God should be interacting with our world. And my experiences really seem to fit the model for the Biblical God extremely well. Even when I hear of a non-Christian claiming similar experiences, I don't worry, because I know God is trying to reach out to everybody, and those experiences can easily be misinterpretted without the right view of them. And even when somebody claims to have no experiences, I don't worry, because I know they might be unpreceptible to someone who hasn't first prepared themselves to precieve. My sense of God is still quite dull, but I have seen it improve like I've seen anything improve- through practice. Living in faith and acting in it (usually by going out on a limb because of God) have helped me in that.

I'm sorry for being vauge by simply saying "experiences", but I wanted to state my philosophy behind "experiencing God" rather than trying to say I believe because of experience x, y, and z. I will say that the most damning evidence for me is how often I see faith + ordinary people + ordinary resources yielding extraordinary results. The whole always seems bigger than the sum of its parts. I feel that people who are skeptical of this really don't have the information to make an accurate determination. Such things aren't reported in the news, but they are reported in churches around the world.

Anyway, anything after that is secondary. If it is not even plausible that God is interacting personally with people, Christianity is a myth.

The historicity of Jesus
(what you asked specifically)

I find it odd that people conclude that a lack of 1st century external sources means that Jesus definitely didn't do what he said he did, let alone even exist. The fact is, we have hardly anything from the 1st century around when he died, and much of the rest of the 1st century materials we do have were not the sort that would be prone to mentioning Jesus. Christianity was far more popular early on in the more eastern provinces of Rome, anway, especially after Nero went about killing Christians in the city. At any rate, it was almost 2000 years ago- we don't have all the documents, and many were destroyed.

Once, you get into the late 1st and 2nd century, there are a number of wrtiers talking about Jesus- Tacitcus, Lucian, Josephus (even discounting his questionable manuscripts), Pliny the Younger, Thallus, Phlegon, and a number of rabbis. Oddly enough, none of these sources actually question the historicity of Jesus, even Lucian, who really didn't like Christians.

An interesting part of the text of the Bible, and some of the writings of the church fathers, is that they implore the readers to check the historicty of scripture. Justin Martyr implored emperor Antoninus Pius to check the ""Acts" of Pontius Pilate" for records of how his was crucified and the miracles her performed. Likewise, Paul, in at least one of his books, basically tells his audience that they can check with the others who saw Jesus after he was resurrected. I seem to remember another source by a church father (perhaps again Justin) which asked his audience to do fact-checking on the blocking of the sun when Jesus died, but I can't pinpoint that one.

Yeah, you can't prove he existed, or that he did all the things the Bible said he did, from this evidence, but, based on what we have, I find it doubtful that this was really just nothing.

The other thing that really bugs me about this is how the Biblical sources are considered to be absolute trash when it comes to historical value. People complain about wanting to find "unbaised" sources, but do those really exist for *anything*? Look at a book like Acts- the historicity of it is very good, and it collaborates incredibly well with the Pauline epistles, but, for some reason, it has no scholarly value.

When we look at the Bible as a whole, it was obviously not written by one man who went into a cave for a few days and supposedly came out with a complete revelation from God. The characters and events are immersed in real history, and the supposed revelation was to many people in many different times. There were a lot of checks and balances present in the composition of the Bible- more so than most histories published today.

The Hardness of the Bible

I love how the Bible is a hard book. My faith would be entirely different if it wasn't so. The basic message is so easy to grasp, but the whole book is nearly impossible to master.

I was first introduced to it by a pair of athiests on another message board, who would post difficult, often supposedly contradictory verses. I think far to o many people get to this point and go "Oh, s***! I guess my beliefs are wrong." But, for whatever reason, I decided to look these things up.

Sometimes my answers were good and they agreed with me, sometimes they sucked and I knew it, and they were quite willing to let me know :-). Eventually, I learned that you don't just believe the first reasonable answer you find on the internet, because there are some legitimately sucky answers from legitimately well-meaning people out there.

At least I then would look around to see if there was a more reasonable answer. Eventually, as I started to learn more about formal logic and language construction, so I could start deducing most-likely meanings of passages on my own. I hardly use external sources anymore when people ask me about the logical consistency of Bible verses, because I have a much better understanding of the nature of contradiction, or lack thereof.

Everytime I found an answer that justified my faith, it was a boost to my faith. Everytime I was able to construct a reasonable answer on my own, it was an even bigger boost to my faith. Basically, my faith grew in tandem with my knowledge, and it still does today. In fact, sometimes I too often treat the knowledge I've acquired as the reason for my faith- this leads to me not at all struggling with belief, but stuggling greatly with trust in God.

At this point, I've processed a few hundred supposed Biblical contradictions, and have found a reasonable answer for every one of them. When you get to that point, you really don't count on somebody actually finding one, because you think you would have seen the silver bullet by now. Nonetheless, proving there's no contradictions in the Bible is too much like trying to prove there's no gold in Alaska. I am trying, though- I've recently started cataloging them...maybe I'll have a book full of refutations ready for publishing by about 2020 :-).

Science

For some people, science is a sticking point, and, by some people, I mean theists and non-theists alike. Some vigilantly defend one side to justify lack of a belief in God, while others choose to do the same to affirm belief in him. I don't strongly choose either side- I'm more prone to believe that the story of natural history is some spectacular combination of both angles that we've hardly scratched the surface of yet.

Once I shook off the need to try to defend young-earth creationism nearly as vigilantly as the notion that Jesus saved me from certain spiritual death (note to any Christians reading this: only YOU can prevent flame wars. DON'T quote Kent Hovind), I could finally really start appreciating science for what it is.

I wish my copy of [u]The Weight of Glory[/b] wasn't out on loan, because CS Lewis has this great quote in one of the articles towards the end that explains my position better than I can. Basically he says that his faith allows him to enjoy scientific discovery without letting it rule his beliefs. He comments that he is able to think more freely about it because it doesn't dictate his worldview. Science is rooted in reason, but it's only a subset of it, so I choose to employ other types of reasoning as well, and I've found that there's no scientific discovery that has nullified my beliefs.

Logic

Going back to the Bible, I've found that freeing myself to enjoy other sorts of reasoning has greatly enhanced what I get out of the Bible. I am astounded by logic set forth by the Biblcal writers. I feel like Hebrews reads more like a master's thesis than a sermon! d I just can't envision a God who isn't a God of reason, so, when I saw that he was, that was affirming.

In fact, one of the things I lament most about the church today is that the sermons delivered inside of them are often just emotional blather- little reasoning is involved. Paul was a master at constructing a logical argument, as was Jesus. Why have we lost that ability? Why does the preacher have have to scream nonsense to convince the congregation of something? Why are only the people who have "Holy Spirit orgasms" (you know- scream, dance, bark like a dog, speak tounges) considered spiritual?

This is also my lament about a lot of the arguments against my faith- I think they're far too emotional, and lack logical persuasiveness. Some people might say the same about what I say, but, hey, I'm just saying how I feel about it.

The World

A common argument against God is how the world really works. I continuously find the present state of the world, as well as the history prior to it, as affirming of my God.

Some people see a lot of religions that have similar concepts and say that that means that Christiany is just a copycat. I feel Christianity wouldn't make sense without the similar themes- if some sort of salvation is what all people really desire, then that belief should be observable universally. Even if that person wants freedom from Christianity, at least they want that freedom.

Some people see the downtrodden and suggest that they're desperate and stupid, so that's why a lot of them covert given the opportunity. I went and visited some "downtrodden" at Cook County Jail in Chicago last spring. They're not stupid. They are desparate- but not because they suddenly became so. They were always desparate, and now they're at a point where everything has been taken away, so they're aware of it. I saw Matthew 19:16-30 play out in real life. When I see 2000-year-old Bible verses playing out like that today, I'm impressed.

I see the same sort of thing happening in my own life. If Christianity is true, then I should experience some real change that has a foundation in the Bible. If it doesn't affect me, and it's just a belief I hold, then it's probably not correct.

The bottom line here is that, if God really brought off of this about, this world should bear his fingerprints, even in its fallen state. We should be able to read the Bible, and not be suprised by what we see today, and have something relevant to say about it. And I see that as being true.

-----

I hope that gives you some idea of what it's like in my shoes. Christianity affects my entire life, so there's a lot more areas where my faith is relevant than that, but that's all I can really type for now. I gotta get up and exercise or something! :- )

(PS: I got a lot of work this weekend, so I might not get back to this thread (or any other in IIDB, for that matter) until Monday or so...have a good weekend!)

IamMoose

Heathen Dawn I don't seem able to PM you .. do you have PMs disabled or am I just having an especially dense moment? Could you send me a PM?

IamMoose

Yes this is entirely possible .. in fact I think that it's probable that if there's a creator, He is not the Christian one.

I haven't got a clue what you mean by this ?

So. Onto the interesting questions:

Seebs, me dear, you've totally lost me, I thought you were a Christian .

You're right that in this life there's no way of ever proving if there's a God or not .. that is one reason why I wonder if there is even any point in people having religious faith, or in any deity expecting them to.

IamMoose

Hi LlamaLover - I love em too btw; went to a llama farm a cpl years ago, excellet stuff - thanks for that testimony. I don't have time to answer the entire thing now so if you like I will chuck down some thoughts about some points that jumped out at me as I was reading .. this isn't a thorough answer though.

I am glad firstly that you seem to have really spent a lot of time thinking about this, thinking about science and language interpretation. It might sound really patronising of me to say that but really, I've encountered some Chrisitans who've never bothered.. either they feel they don't need to, or they are scared of what they might find. I know it's easy for detractors - hell I have done this myself - to post contradictory bible verses to try and 'miff' Christians; really, I think the main reason we (agnostics) do that is to annoy the irritating strict literalists. Obviously, if you're not a strict literalist, it doesn't play nearly as well, and I suppose that's a good thing too. Strict literalism seems like a crock of doo doo to me .

I am rather a big fan of CS Lewis too although Weight of Glory is one of his books that I haven't read. I am not always a fan of the logic behind his apologetics - he can be remarkably fuzzy at times - but he was obviously a highly intelligent deep thinker. I am fascinated by his conversion story.

I think the reason we agnostics and atheists don't regard the bible as a historically viable text is because it is unashamedly partisan .. I mean, would you, honestly, regard the sacred Hindu creation stories as valid historical documents? It bothers me that the bible is so often contradicted by written history, or that written history entirely ignores large chunks of history that the bible obviously considers greatly significant.

Anyway i want to reread your message tomorrow and see if I have any further thoughts - I am sure I will - but that will do for tonight I think. Thanks for replying!

Rational BAC

I am a very excellent Christian and here are my beliefs---Very basic, but is all anyone needs to call himself a Christian.

Jesus existed

Jesus was a deity come down to earth to experience humanity.

Jesus had some tips about how to live a "good" life. ----"Good" in the sense that a higher power thought a "good" life should be like for humans. A very practical way of living life without doing harm to others. For a God it probably made sense. For humans, used to warfare, rape and carnage it probably made little sense at all.

Humans won in the long run and God lost in the long run.

And so we have adapted and corrupted the essence of Christianity into the very weak relative it is today.

Read the 4 Gospels and only the 4 Gospels and you will not find the absurdity that Christianity has become.

Jesus died and was resurrected to prove that there actually does exist a life beyond this one.------And for no other reason. No other reason is there.

Most of the Canon is politically influenced crapola dating from the 4th century---not the 1st century.

Original sin is crapola. The idea that you have to "accept" Jesus as your saviour to reach heaven is a St Paul oriented piece of crapola. The idea that a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Shintoist or a Confucionist an agnostic or an atheist cannot enter heaven is complete crapola.

Jesus died and was resurrected for ALL of us. There really is an afterlife you know.

The idea of a wondrous afterlife for most all of us no matter our personal belief system, assuming we have at least tried to live a "good" life--------is the very essence of Christianity--and is all you need to know about Christianity.

Because --that is all there is to it.

socratoad

Versions Of The Golden Rule In Different Religions
__________________________________________________ _______________

HINDU: This is the sum of duty; do naught unto others which if done to
thee would cause thee pain. (inclusive, partial)

ZOROASTRIAN: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto
another whatsoever is not good for itself. (inclusive, partial)

TAOIST: Regard your neighbour's gain as your own gain, and your
neighbour's loss as your own loss. (selective, complete)

BUDDHIST: Hurt not others in ways that you would find hurtful.
(inclusive, partial)

CONFUCIAN: Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto
you. (inclusive, partial)

JAIN: In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard
all creatures as we regard our own self. (inclusive, complete)

JEWISH: Whatever thou hatest thyself, that do not to another.
(inclusive, partial)

CHRISTIAN: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them. (inclusive, complete)

ISLAMIC: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother
that which he desires for himself. (selective, complete)

SIKH: As thou deemest thyself, so deem others. (inclusive, complete)


This is all you need to know. All the rest is merely rhetoric and add-ons.

Eldarion Lathria

Hear are the four pillars and the three laws.

1: What is hateful to you do not do to another.

2: What is above is like that which is below. If a thing is honorable for a man, it is honorable for a god. If it is dishonorable for a man, it is dishonorable for a god.

3: Whatever you do has consequences, though you may not see them. Even if you do nothing, there is a consequence to your inaction. So think.

4. There is no outside. You cannot escape the consequences of your actions.


1: Mind Your own Business.

2: Keep your nose clean.

3: Keep your hands to yourself

To which I add the words of Aznar, Lord of Orreaga. "Give you word but rarely, and keep it."

Eldarion Lathria

seebs

I tend to assume that all of us have partially-wrong beliefs about the nature of things. So, in one sense, I think it's pretty obvious that God is not "the Christian God", or any given person's conception of God.

But then, I think that the actual physics of the universe is distinct from every theory any human has... But I still think the study of physics is productive, because we can reduce our errors with study.

I think the idea that there wasn't an actual person named Yeshua (aka Jesus) is just plain silly. I can understand people rejecting the miraculous claims, but going a step further and saying "so there was never any such person" seems silly.

I am. I'm just, uhm, not very mainstream. I am a Christian because I believe in God. I am a militant agnostic because I don't think anyone will ever know.

Hmm. This is where I diverge from the mainstream. I see "faith" as more a question of a thing you do than a thing you believe. I'm a faithful spouse. (Well, actually, I'm a sorta mediocre spouse a lot of the time. But I'm maybe a little above average, I like to think.) Faithfulness isn't a question of sitting around saying "Wow, Jesse's very real" or trying to convince all you folks that there's Jesse. It's a question of, for instance, not cheating on my spouse. Or taking my spouse's needs and interests into account when making my own plans.

Faithfulness includes things like "if I stop at Wendy's on the way home, call Jesse to ask whether a cheeseburger would be appreciated".

So. I try to be a faithful Christian. I don't see this as a question of militantly adhering to some arbitrary set of beliefs. I see it as a question of, assuming for the sake of argument that there is a God, and Jesus is somehow a part of how we understand God, trying to decide how I should act.

If you read the articles I linked, you'll find more stuff along these lines. For a simple example... Instead of sitting around yelling "THE CAVE WAS EMPTY!!!" as though I could even tell you where the cave was, let alone as though I had been there to look around in it... I form theories like "my religion teaches that everyone is worth dying for". That's a much more interesting line of investigation. My religion implies that every single person I meet, if evaluated by a truly perfect judge, would be found to be worth dying for. Can I find out what in them it is that makes this so? That's something I can do. Seeking that is a kind of faithfulness.