Petergdi

People tend to be insufficiently critical of accounts that confirm their existing prejudices. I'm not the least bit convinced that atheists have any advantage over believers in this respect.

None. At least none of the sort of "proof" you are talking about. But exactly the same thing goes for atheists. Bogus claims and poor scholarship should have no sway over atheists. But it is manifest that these things plague both sides. The only solution is to be critical consumers of purported information.

Peter.

jgreen44

There are two relics which Calvin failed to identify and debunk: the Bible and traditional Church teaching about the Bible.

jgreen44

The Bible is outside evidence. The best evidence is inside of you.

patchy

Bogus claims and poor scholarship DON'T hold any sway with atheists, by definition.

Think about it: if you can label them as bogus claims, and poor scholarship, [in hindsight, naturally] they've already proven to be unreliable. And they will be discarded, by science, because that's how science works.

Religion works in almost the exact opposite way--bogus claims become institutionalized; canonized. Apologetics spring up to perpetuate them, defend them, hold them up as true even though they are impossible.

Science has a built-in correction mechanism which weeds out things that prove not to be true. Religion's built-in mechanism glorifies them and cements them all the harder into the minds of its adherents.

Petergdi

Of course they do, unless you are willing to play a no true scotsman game and claim that anyone who passes along anti-christian or anti-religious stuff that they ought reasonably to have known was highly questionable isn't a "true atheist." But since that eliminates Bertrand Russell and James Randi then I think you ought reasonably to agree that such a game on your part would be silly.

It isn't how atheist propaganda works, and like almost all propaganda its first aim is to reassure the believer - who in this case thinks of himself as an unbeliever.

Atheism does not equal science.

Peter.

patchy

<snicker>

...That's cute. Facts you don't like, because they happen to contradict your comforting little Bronze Age fairy tale, are propaganda.

How very precious.

There's one of us here who believes things to reassure himself, and...psst!

It ain't me.

Edit to add a reminder:

Photos from space of a round Earth are "propaganda", too....if you're a flat-Earther.

Survivor accounts of the Holocaust are "propaganda", too...if you're a Holocaust-denier.

In the real world, you can't just re-define away as "propaganda" anything and everything that contradicts some misguided notion that you hold on faith and faith alone, for purely dogmatic reasons and for which not one single supporting thread of evidence exists.

And, sorry, but, Holocaust denial, flat-Earthism, and Christianity are all in that same, exact boat. Christianity merely benefits from being believed by vastly superior numbers of people as compared to those other, "fringe-ier" notions--but the actual empirical evidence for them is the same (none) and the evidence against all of them is overwhelming and irrefutable.

Hanging air-quotes around a round Earth doesn't make it flat.

Solo

No, the news was they got some old wino claiming to be Noah prying open cages in San Diego ZOO.

Jiri

bacht

Let's see: we've got an ancient Near Eastern deity who needed to manifest on earth and be killed like an animal in order to ensure the hope of resurrection into eternal life for everyone except the original followers of said deity (the Jews). No-one actually witnessed this except for the authors of books that passed through centuries of editing and eventually imperial censorship.

Or, a bunch of anti-social eschatologists tranced out and saw visions of their coming saviour. Their ideas became the basis of a widespread non-apocalyptic salvation religion ultimately linked to imperial social policy.

Sorry, for this skeptic it's all too much to swallow anymore. Maybe it made sense to pre-scientific young-earth geocentrists with more superstition than rationality.

Huon

In 817, Pippin I of Aquitaine, a grandson of Charlemagne, received a relic which was said to be the head of John the Baptist. This relic was triumphally brought to Angeriacum, which is now Saint Jean d’Angely, near La Rochelle.

yalla

Interesting.
One of my favourite books of fiction is Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose".
In there somewhere the protagonist Brother William [aka Sean Connery in the film] tells his young acolyte that a particular place had the head of John the Baptist "as a young man".
It takes his protege a little while to pick up the absurdity but it prompted me to start a google search for J the B's head/relics.
I remember finding about 11 of them, all absolutely genuine of course.
I dunno why I did the search, must have been bored at the time.
But it was interesting and I found a few other fascinating ones as well but can't recall them offhand and I don't want to waste my time again.

There are some gullible people out there as Phineas T. Barnum knew.