wordy

I agree, that could be the very source for the cult. There could have been such congregations that Paul tried to dominate and that Constantine also dominated later. I doubt a physical Jesus ever existed, more likely it was the inner experience that is the real Jesus Christ. That makes more sense.

This would also explain why so few atheists care about such views. Both the fundamentalist believer and the activistic atheist wants something outrageous or extraordinary to support or debunk.

the inner experience "living" Jesus is too lame or wimpy or kind of natural. Not enough mystery. What the believers do is to project the inner to be identical to the Creator God, to make the inner experience to be of highest value, the very source of our existence. the highest there is. they want to get an eternal life and only the source of all that exist is powerful enough to promise such.

So it is very unlikely a real historic Jesus existed unless all stories about him is a kind of bragging by the supporters going over spin and making the historical Jesus look non-existent because the stories overdo the whole thing.

As an atheist I'm disappointed that so few fellow atheists see the merit in the inner experience Jesus as a good explanation why it works and why intellectual arguments are so hopeless.

We even fail to get through to Sam Harris cause he believe more in his inner experience of "mystical" experiences than in our arguments. Feelings win over intellectual logic almost always even for atheists.

I am happy we have Apostate Abe who propose ideatheism, that gods are imagined by the believers, that is much more likely than that gods are delusions. Gods are ideas, the claims that such an idea make could be delusion but the very idea is a material structure in our brain and to delete it one need a lot of work being done. It needs things like deprogramming and Cognitive Behavior Therapy to get changed. Ideas are at times very persistent and ideas are not nothing, they works cause people act on them.

Nylla

I think it's possible that the person Jesus existed. The son of a Jewish deity? No.

ETA: I didn't fully answer your question, sorry about that, quoting.

There really isn't a rational reason to believe he was the son of a god. It sounds quite silly to me. But, hey, I could be wrong.

Chris Weimer

Tears in the Rain - who are you talking to?

quoting

probably me...but im at work and dont have time to reply to one of those arguements again i will when i get home...preciate all the replys

mountainman

If you (or anyone else in this forum for that matter)
were to put in as much R&D on the ancient history
source material for the [purported] life of Apollonius
of Tyana as the [purported] life of Jesus of Nazareth
you will find that the former has a greater index of
historicity. This issue has been discussed in this
forum previously.


Prime evidence for the literary calumny and general
presentation of Apollonius of Tyana to the "christian
world" has been reserved to Eusebius of Caesarea,
for the last (2007-325 = ) 1682 years, by way of his
treatise "Against Hierocles".

Ammianus Marcellinus provides stoic and well-grounded
support for the existence of Apollonius. Do you want
the reference?

An ADD (Jesus) and a DELETE (Apollonius).

A new and strange Roman Religion is added in the 4th
century, at the same time the persecutions are
commenced against the traditional religions of the
empire. See Vlasis Rassias

mountainman

Unfortunately the situation is actually worse than this.
There is evidence of negative indications: fabrications and fictions.
For example, according to the person who wrote the history
of the "tribe of christians" in the prenicene epoch -- the only
such history in existence --- we have only this one man's
story in this instance ---- Jesus was an author.

We are told by Eusebius that Jesus authored a letter to
the King Agbar. Eusebius tells us this letter has just been
happily found in "the archives". Eusebius happily informs
us that he has just personally completed the translation
from the Syriac (to Greek) and quotes the letter.

This is negative evidence: shameless fraudulent misrepresentation
designed to fool the uneducated prospectives.

It is my considered opinion that the only type of evidence
that will be admitted to the full and complete picture of
ancient history of the Roman Empire in the preNicene epoch
will be non-christian, because of the perversion of Eusebius'
"Ecclesiastical" History on the true facts of ancient history.

Evidence forthcoming will establish Eusebius has actually
published a pseudo-history --- negative historicities ---
and that there was indeed no "history of christianity" prior
to its invention by the malevolent despot Constantine.

I set as a target for all those who may wish to disagree
with this assessment, an emminently refutable case. All
that is required to destroy my case is to present one bit
of unambiguous scientific and/or archeological evidence
that anything whatsoever "christian" actually existed
before the rise of Constantine.

Gooch's dad

I'd also like to see Biff provide some evidence for this "Christna" ---->Krishna claim.

Amedeo

LIVE AND LEARN:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...10#post4536110

gurugeorge

I agree very much, to me as a rationalist who's had unwonted mystical experiences, it's blindingly obvious what religion is about. There are 3 aspects: there's a mystical aspect (a sense of oneness with the universe, and I think even Sam Harris is into this sort of thing, it's experiencable by atheists, and intellectually unobjectionable); then there's a "magical" aspect (the thing I'm talking about above - "visions" that seem hyper-real to those who have them); then there's a moral/psychological/philosophical/political aspect (this is the aspect that most rationalists focus on in their analysis of religion).

The third aspect (which one might call, for shorthand, the "memetic" aspect) has been well worked over by people like Dawkins, Harris, Dennet, etc. And it is indeed the most important aspect when it comes to religions to which masses of people belong. When a religion gets to a certain level, the original visionary, charismatic stuff becomes a bit of an embarrassment, because by that stage of Chinese Whispers, you've got people who are themselves not terribly religious by nature, but quite clever, involved in the structure of the organisation. Their interest is to further the organisation itself, and their interest in the religion may be only moral/philosophical (at the memetic level). Also the majority of people following the religion are doing it simply because "it's the done thing", because it's traditional, their family have always been of X religion, and probably in their heart of hearts they don't believe a word of it anyway (but get annoyed with people who criticize it just because it's "theirs").

But it's clear to me that with respect to the origin of religions, and especially with respect to the drive and charisma that attracts followers initially, that creates the initial "buzz" about a form of religion, there's something much more peculiar and interesting going on than the memetic aspect alone, and it's not insanity, not mere hallucination. It's the first two aspects: mystical and "magical" experience. The only rationalist who's ever taken a really serious look at this is William James, and I think it's a real shame that his work hasn't been expanded on more than it has. The only other rationalist I can think of nowadays who's worked in a similar vein is Susan Blackmore (who herself had OOBEs, which drove her to try and explain them rationally and scientifically - I think it's probably true that rationalists will have a blind spot to the importance of this until they've had some experience in the area themselves).

I do think it's understandable that that line of investigation hasn't been taken further - the fashion for behaviourism sort of knocked the wind out of the sails of that type of investigation for a long time. But now we are all older and wiser, and cognitive science is much more comprehensive, and not afraid to tackle the more subjective aspect of consciousness, etc. What with that, and the access we now have to, e.g., serious meditators in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and the Hindu and Zen traditions, I'm hopeful these factors will be weighted more in their correct proportion.

At the end of the day, the brain just seems to have this capacity to produce "visions" which somehow utilise the proprioceptive machinery and the machinery that produces dreams, but while the person is awake, and with the addition of a subjective sense of reality that's sort of like "more of" whatever the subjective marker we have for real things and real people (although of course, in terms of the materialist hypothesis, unattached, in this instance, to anything real - no real "entity" there, although there really, really seems to be, to the person having the vision).

These kinds of visions are more coherent than dreams, and have complex symbolism and occasionally profundity (that's presumably dredged up somehow from the "unconscious"). They're not like drug hallucinations, and they can be had by people who are quite lucid and rational.

Some mixture of this "magical" element and the mystical element of feelings of oneness, are at the root of the whole fuss. If it were mere memetics alone, there would be more variety in the types of origin, but it's always the same: someone claims to have "met" or "talked to", some "spirit" or "god" or some other form of supposed discarnate intelligence, and gets a "message" or "laws" or "cosmology" from them.

Godless Raven

mountainman, you're awesome dude. Thanks for those links.

GR