Aspirin99

I had dinner with my brother-in-law last night. It didn't go as I had hoped. Since we had not seen them since they returned from their stay in Spain over the summer, we were required to look at an amazing number of photos of Spain and France. Apparently, gone are the days of taking a judicious number of photos because of the cost of film and development.

We had to leave by 8:00 PM so he could get his kids in bed. We did talk about the need for a future discussion. He told me he's a fan of Greg Boyd, who is a local pastor and writer here in Minnesota. I should probably study some of his writings.

On a side note, I discovered that my other brother-in-law has recently become involved in a multi-level markeing scheme called "Genesis". It's basically a nutritional drink "made from the ingredients God recommends in the book of Genesis."

Deconverting him would do the world a huge favor I think.

Thanks, to all, for your contributions to this post.

jakejonesiv

That is a good idea. Here is one of Boyd's book.
Letters From a Skeptic.

...

Jake Jones

Aspirin99

Thanks, Jake. I've seen that book before. His son must have been an pansy skeptic. How can he fix theological problems before addressing the exegetical ones? Cart > Horse. He has one tiny section on "Why Trust the Gospel Accounts" at the very end. Nonetheless, I think I'll get the book. Thanks.

yalla

I face the "dinner with a fundy relly" situation often.
My mum-in-law.
When she visits here she stays in this room, the room with the computer AND all my books on Christianity. But she never reads them and we NEVER talk about Christianity at all, at all.
I mean she's 82 years old and a nice old duck so why stuff her mind up now?
But I did notice that she left one of her books on Christianity lying around during her last visit. I suspect I was supposed to pick it up, read it and see the light.
It was by Malcolm Muggeridge!

Ruhan

I have the same thing with my parents in law. They are close to being ordained. We have to do a bit of house cleaning every time they visit. The theological books remain but all the Playboys go into hibernation.

couch_sloth

Some Christians insist that Christianity must be true because the disciples wouldn't have later risked their lives for a 'lie'.

But there are problems with this view, for example:
(Assuming, for the moment, that some sort of historical Jesus existed)
1.) These disciples may have, in fact, believed they were dying for the 'truth'. We just can't know *exactly* what they believed the truth to be. e.g. Perhaps they did not believe Jesus was literally the 'son' of God, maybe they just believed he was a 'prophet' or the messiah (in the conventional sense).
We can't even say what the predominate belief about Jesus was in the years just after his death (Conservatively 1 to 15 years after his death).
We just know the 'belief' about Jesus that caught-on (or evolved over a period of time) and lasted in the long run.

2.) We don't know how much danger these disciples perceived they were putting themselves in (i.e. We can't assume that all the martyred disciples would have known the risk. In other words: hind-site is better than fore-site).
It could be that by the time these disciples perceived they were putting themselves in real danger, it was too late to escape.

3.) We can't even know if more than one or two of the 'disciples' died for their beliefs; let alone, that they all agreed with each other as to Jesus's 'nature'.

4.) We can't even assume that the majority of Jesus devout followers(while he was alive) would have agreed with those 'disciples' who formed the early Christian church.
It could even be that *most* of Jesus's closest followers decided it was 'all over' when Jesus died; or, some of them could have been in profound disagreement over the significance of Jesus's ministry and death.

aChristian

I agree that you don't need to fear to have your faith challenged. I also agree that you should use your logic. In fact, because Christianity is true, you don't need to fear honest investigation. You sound like you are a fundie, I wasn't sure, and I apologize for being overly condemning. I personally think that you can establish the Bible as reliable using your logic and after you have established that, you can accept what God tells us there on matters we have no way to know or even understand. (You gave good examples of truths that we cannot understand.) I think the only thing that you left out and which I don't know if you believe or not is that although Christianity is based on accepting the Bible, accepting the Bible is based on facts and logic that cannot be denied.
Actually, I don't believe any man has ever answered the problem of evil. The Bible implies that we have a free will and this answers it. It answers it in a way that appears true to life (I don't feel like a robot), but it has answered it with something else that doesn't make sense - how can God create a free will. How can he create something that to act other than how he created it. As I said, this answers the problem of evil, but does it by shifting the problem to how God could create a free will. No man has answered the problem of evil, so as far as determining truth, this is not a strike against any theory since no one has answered it.
That said, most of what I read on this site whenever I visit it is people speaking as if they know more than they do, ignoring the indisputable evidence for the truth of Chistianity and the Bible.

aChristian

If you read some good conservative scholarship, you will find that the gospels are very reliable and that they contain eyewitness testimony. How you know Matthew and Luke copied? I have not read of a person writing back then, closer to the facts than we are today, who said Matthew and Luke copied Mark. Matthew and John were both eyewitnesses. Mark may have also been an eyewitness or at least taken eyewitness testimony from Peter. Why would you consider John not an eyewitness account? We have writings of people who lived then (eg., Papias one of John's disciples) and they say John wrote John and Matthew wrote Matthew, Luke wrote Luke and Acts. (Luke says he carefully investigated everything from the people who were there, in addition to being present for some of Paul's missionary journeys.) I think that the only thing you will find on this site are attempts to discredit the historical writings and substitute their own fabricated 'history' that no one in the know back then believed. Note that you have to rely on 'anonymous writers', but the historians (Eusebius for example, the father of church history) had libraries and information on who wrote them. The typical attempts to show contradictions have to assume that the people who wrote them and that the people who believed them were too stupid to see the errors (eg. the three days that Jesus was in the grave). It is much more reasonable to assume that the early Christians knew more about the situation than we do now and saw no contradiction or errors in the accounts because they were more familiar with all the facts that we don't have today. The people on this site are writing 2000 years later and just claim there are errors because they do not understand something. All of the claims of errors I have seen on this site have been given reasonable explanations .

spin

What you refer to conservative scholarship will certainly be different from most other people mean here.

Most scholars accept the relationship between (if not dependence on) Mt & Lk on one hand and Mk on the other. That includes most if not all conservative scholars.

This is a claim by a non-eye witness.

Same non-eye witness source.

Why would you consider the writer of Jn to have been an eye witness? The text indicates a long development of its own.

Well, we have Eusebius claiming to tell us what Papias may have said.

The writer of Jn never identifies himself.

Neither does the writer of Mt.

Neither does the writer of Lk or Acts.

I don't see any sign that aChristian has any thought about historiography to be able to credibly make this statement.

aChristian of course has access to back then.

I wonder what makes aChristian think that, hmm?

Don't you just love these false dichotomies: if the writer wasn't 100% accurate he must have been too stupid.

What about it? You mean that he only spent a day and a half in the grave, not three days and three nights, the sign of Jonah?

Including than do modern christians.

What's wrong with contradictions? They are quite common. The most interesting thing about contradictions is to what absurd lengths fundamentalists go to try and uncontradict them: the cure becomes worse than the disease.

You mean if two texts claim that Joseph (husband of Mary)'s father was two different people, that 2000 years will make it not a contradiction?

They were written by more than one person. They were the conflation of different sources from different perspectives so contained different information including bits that contradicted. Nothing wrong with that unless one wants to make a book written 2000 years ago for a particular audience in particular circumstances necessarily meaningful to a modern public. Then you don't shoot the book, you shoot the people who try to con you with the idea.


spin

Aspirin99

Well, it happened. My father-in-law, who is a 70 yr-old missionary who is here in the states gathering support for a trip to Germany, was at my house for the weekend. I spent a lot of time with him and his Christian son over the weekend. I explained my views on everything from evolution to inerrancy. I even wrote out my views on why I thought the resurrection was not historical (using the Richard Carrier approach to it).

Last night, my father-in-law basically admitted I was right - or at least that he could not offer a defense. However, he stated "Look. I'm 70 years old. All I want to do it help people who are empty inside fill that void with God. If people knew what I believe, I could not do that." Then he started telling me stories of disadvantaged people he had helped to find meaning in life, and he cried as he told stories.

In one sense, I felt it was his way to get me to stop attacking his faith. It was pretty effective.