Berthold

Isn't this declared to be a parable?

aa5874

Where did I contradict myself?

mountainman

And you dont see this as non objectivity? This is a sad admission. Its like having a certain mathematical problem and purposefully ignoring the existence of the subtraction operation in the entertainment of the computations involved in the solution to that problem.

The solution may indeed not involve the subtraction operation, but you dont know that until the solution is found and presented itself to your mind. Or do you have some evidence in support of this negative notion, which I have yet to understand? Is it 2008 this year?



Best wishes


Pete Brown

Iasion

Hiya,


Jesus H Christ !
My argument is right there in my post - that you don't respond to posts, you just preach.
And Johny's argument is right there in HIS post and repeated in mine - that the Gospel writers could not be liars, and still be wrong.
What is wrong with your reading skills ?


What's boring is your repeated preaching of your beliefs, while totally failing to engage in discussion - your repeated ignoring of questions put to you, your total refusal to actually respond to what is posted.
That's PREACHING - boring preaching, over and over, on and on ....


WTF !?
The OP specifically listed other possibilities - specifically pointing out HOW the Gospels writers could have NOT been liars, while not writing true history - his two examples being :
"and/or misinformation, and/or innocent but inaccurate revelations."

You replied with -
If this author was not a liar, where did he get the dialogue beween Gabriel and Mary from?

WTF !?
You asked the exact question that Johny answered in his original post!

There are 3 possibilities :
1. You don't actually READ posts before answering,
2. You don't comprehend what you read,
3. You deliberately ignore what you read.

1&2 don't seem possible, so I can only assume that you consciously and deliberately ignore what people write, and use every post as a platform to preach your beliefs again. You are the worst sort of troll.


See?
You are pathologically incapable of having a discussion on this discussion board.

Johny's position is clear, my position is similar.

But instead of RESPONDING to the argument (that the Gospel writers could be wrong without being liars) you completely ignore it!

You ask "what is your position"
after being specifically told
"here is my position -
(the Gospel writers could be wrong without being liars)"

It is this repeated, deliberate failure to engage in discussion here which places you in the top 3 for crackpottery.


Iasion

Johnny Skeptic

Joan of Arc claimed that she had a vision from God. Is it probable that she lied about about believing that she had vision? If not, then that is an example of an innocent but inaccurate revelation. Charismatic Christians frequently claim that they have visions. I doubt that most of them lie about believing that they have visions.

mountainman

This is an interesting point.

It appears to me that we need to separate "christian origins" from the period in which children were brought up under the authority of christianity. It is commonly agreed (wrongly or rightly) that the chronology of christian origins is a period of time covering at least the first two centuries of the common era. By at least the end of the fourth century, as a state religion, children were bing told by their parents, who had heard it on great authority, that the christian religion was to be believed at all costs.

By this epoch, we are dealing with a social psychology and a social authoritarianism which has extended unto this day, but it is a separate epoch to that of this issue of "christian origins". People of all walks of life have "religious experiences". Who can really explicate these things? Surely christian origins is a matter of ancient history, and needs to be distinguished from the ongoing authority and psychological acceptance that it received from (at least) the fourth century onwards.

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

spin

And the same place Tacitus and Josephus got theirs.


spin

Doug Shaver

A: The story is fiction.
B: The story is a lie.

A and B cannot both be true.

Doug Shaver

No, I don't see it that way. Objectivity does not require serious consideration of any hypothesis for which there is no good evidence.

I said nothing about purposefully ignoring anything. Failing to give a notion serious consideration is not the same as ignoring it.

mountainman

In which case you are incorrectly asserting that all hypotheses require evidence, which is not the case at all. That an hypothesis is required to be consistent with the known evidence implies that there is no evidence to immediately refute it, not that it requires specific evidence in support. A theory based on such hypothesis requires the evidence, the hypothesis is a "given" so long as it is not able to be disproved by the available evidence.

Accordingly, objectivity does require consideration of all hypothesis which are not able to be refuted by the evidence. At the moment, I do not see any evidence whatsoever to rule out the possibility that the new testament is simply a literary fraud. Do you have such evidence?

If you have such evidence, present it, and the hypothesis of fraud is impotent. But if you do not have such evidence, the hypothesis of fraud should seriously be considered by any and all objective assessments of the new testament literature.

I rest my case.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown