quantumspirit

I have already told people at TOL that I have, just a social experiment. However, I am reading Why Atheism by George Smith. I do consider the OT to be mythical. I want to do some more debating before I decide to deconvert or stay Christian.

Let me start with some Christian apologetic talking points! The authenticity of the Gospels. Jesus' resurrection and the many eyewitnesses to it, and there is no such thing as a collective hallucination. The gospelwriters' witness of miracles, and although written many years later, written by the same men. I do believe that one of the gospelwriters, John, lost his mind and as a result wrote the book of Revelation.

As a side note about Smith, so far he hasn't told me anything I don't already know. He's covered the topic of positive atheist, someone who is positive there is no God, really just a strawman invented by the Religious Reich. Most atheists will acknowledge the possibility that there is a God, however remote. The only one who strikes me as possibly a positivist is Penn Jillette, who once said the believes with all his faith that there is no God.

David B

Whether or not there is such a thing as a group hallucination, group reinforcement, and a wish to believe, can create large numbers of people to believe pretty dumb stuff.

Do you really believe that Hindu idols can drink milk?

Nor do I!

But lots of people did, when the idea got around a load of people who wanted to believe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_milk_miracle

David B (sees that as being one of your lines of argument fucked, and leaves the rest to others)

Asha'man

If the accounts of Jesus' life are just a fiction, written as a play perhaps, then isn't it obvious that the eyewitnesses are simply characters in the play? They don't add anything to the story's trustworthiness, since they are actually part of the story. It's like claiming that the last battle in Lord of the Rings must be real, since the Army of Gondor all witnessed it. However, the Army of Gondor is just part of the overall plot, they are exactly as fictional as the rest of the story.

The only way you can use the eyewitness accounts is if you actually had access to each and every eyewitness, or at least individual writings. We don't have that. Not a single gospel was written by an eyewitness. In fact, 2 of the gospels appear to be nothing more than simple elaborations on the 3rd, indicating that two different authors just wanted a longer play and were quite willing to edit the story themselves, fabricating additional details whenever they were needed.

Baalazel

Is this something you want to debate here on IIDB? If so, there are no written eyewittness accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. Your turn.

Baal

Cheerful Charlie

Collective hallucinations are real and do happen



http://skepdic.com/collective.html
Not all collective hallucinations are religious, of course. In 1897, Edmund Parish reported of shipmates who had shared a ghostly vision of their cook who had died a few days earlier. The sailors not only saw the ghost, but distinctly saw him walking on the water with his familiar and recognizable limp. Their ghost turned out to be a "piece of wreck, rocked up and down by the waves" (Parish, 311; cited in Rawcliffe, 115).


http://www.christian-thinktank.com/hallucn.html
MEMORY AND OCCULT PHENOMENA


Faulty Memory[indent]"The general term applied to faulty memory and memory distortions is paramnesia. .Expectations, sets, attitudes, prejudices, and values in general color our memories to such an extent that black can quite literally become white in remembering. . . .There is a human need for ego enhancement, to feel important, to do important things, or to be part of important events, even as only an eye witness. This need is so strong that a person may assert that he or she was a witness to an important or historic event that took place near where they live even though they may not have known at the time that the event was happening. A field study was once conducted by a journalist who fabricated a story about a naked woman, inhabitant of a small town, who got stuck to a freshly painted toilet seat. The journalist distributed the story through a newspaper wire service. On visiting the town and interviewing its citizens about the incident, the journalist found many who claimed to have witnessed or played part in it. There were refusals to accept the truth even after the true origin of the story was made public. Similar incidents are reported in connection with UFOs--that is, witnesses are found to UFOs that exist only in the rumors spread by the perpetrators of a hoax. NEVERTHELESS, THE REPORTS OF THE WITNESSES ARE NOT NECESSARILY LIES OR FABRICATION; THEY MAY ACTUALLY "REMEMBER" THAT THE EVENTS THEY DESCRIBE DID TAKE PLACE." {Emphasis added }



http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m..._95107633/pg_1
Rumours of angels: a legend of the First World War - Research Article

The present paper examines the origin and socio-historical context of the Angels of Mons, a belief-legend that was a source of inspiration for British civilians and troops serving on the Western Front during the war of 1914-8. I trace the source of the legend to a fictional story that was in itself inspired by traditions of supernatural intervention in battle that were of great antiquity. During 1915 two versions, one based upon fiction and the other created from the cauldron of rumour and popular belief, became combined and transformed during oral transmission into a belief-legend that continues to survive in English folklore. My conclusion is that the Angel of Mons can only be interpreted within the context of what Fussell describes as "a world of reinvigorated myth" that appeared in the midst of a war characterised by industrialism and materialism (Fussell 1975, 115).

Not to mention related madnesses such as dancing manias, demon possession manias and other odd happenings well documented since the middle ages.

Not to mention folie a deux and related weirdness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux
http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/5/1/11

You can play around in these deep waters for years collecting different such examples of related phenomenon.


CC

GenesisNemesis

Don't forget, in the ancient times...

People were ultra-superstitious about pretty much everything.

patchy

Go godless, don't go godless, but in neither case should you think that the gospels are in any way "authentic." They are ALL anonymous; not a single person alive knows who they were written by. The authorship traditionally ascribed to them is simply the guesswork of much later Christian leadership.
They are internally contradictory, were not written in the language they would have been expected to have been written in, and are littered with inaccuracies and later redactions. Not a single NT document represents an eyewitness account of any Jesus miracles--not one.

The OT was ransacked for "prophecies" that were magically applied to this character of Jesus, and in the process, several bloopers were inadvertently written into the NT.

In short, the gospel account is an absolute train wreck.

Ellis

Sure there is. There's a certain function of your brain--see this article in Wired magazine-- that causes mystic or religious experiences, and the way you interpret the basic function depends on what you believe. If you believe in the Christian god you might interpret the experience as talking to God. If you're an hippie stoner you might experience it as feeling some groovy vibes and moving on to the next plane of existence. This is where "visions" and the like come from. A religious experience can be the result of drugs (my boyfriend, who has used psilosybin mushrooms, say the things described in Revelations fit the experience to a tee), sex, serious illness or injury (hence, near-death experiences), extreme emotional states, or certain religious ceremonies which whip the adherents into a frenzy (what often happens in Pentecostal churches, and quite possibly what inspired the Gospels.)

Many events in the Bible can be explained scientifically rather than miraculously. For example, Moses' burning bush was probably caused by an underground pocket of natural gas that leaked and caught fire; he was probably so confused and frightened that it's no wonder he thought God was talking to him (see the above about mystic experiences.) Some people have proposed that the star guiding the Wise Men to Jesus was a supernova--the star would usually be so dim as to go unnoticed, and when the light from its destruction reached Earth, it would appear to be a very bright star.

Face it, the Bible was written thousands of years ago, and everything in it was based on an ancient understanding of the world. Things that were profound or revolutionary back then may no longer apply.

aa5874

Many religions have witnesses for their Gods. Witnesses are never the problem, the problem is always the Gods. Gods that have been discarded were at one time thought to have answered peoples prayers.

The Roman Emperors appeared to have some success from Apollo, Vesta, Jupiter, Hercules and other Gods in battle, in fact, many of the Roman Emperors are believed to be in 'heaven' with their Gods, so. too are the Pharoahs of Egypt.

There are so many heavens and so many Gods, yet we have witnesses for all of them.

Chris Weimer

Are they authentic? Can you show this?

Who eyewitnessed it? In fact, all the gospels agree that no one eyewitnessed Jesus' resurrection. They do say that they saw a resurrected Jesus, but not the resurrection.

As anyone could tell by looking at the Greek, there's no way that the author of the Apocalypse and the Gospel of John were written by the same person. And what sort of God would let the beloved disciple lose his mind? Doesn't make any sense at all.