sometimesisquint

Well, with all due respect, I don't know how this gets Jesus (and his "self-identfication" with spirit) off the hook for supposedly making such statements.

We don't have to discuss it further...I have no desire to derail this thread for a dialogue on what he meant by a punishment of "fire". However, thanks for keeping it civil.

Gamera

I guess I'm an unusual Christian in that I believe Paul when he says the gospel saves (i.e., not Jesus per se, but his role in this narrative about God's love and its ability to transform the self).

So from my perspective the narrative itself is suffient. It exists and it is transformational, if accepted. Thus Christianity to me is the practice of the transformation of the self through acceptance of God's love, which takes the form of this little narrative. It doesn't involve creeds or believes in propositions about theology.

I also accept the historicity of Jesus, but on unrelated evidentiary grounds. The bulk of the evidence supports his historical existence the same way similar evidence supports Socrates' historicity.

But I guess if it came right down to it, it wouldn't matter to me if Jesus's historicity were disproven. The narrative speaks for itself, and Christianity is based on that narrative, not on historicity.

sometimesisquint

So, even without a basis for such a belief system you'd accept it as truth? Just because some of the ideas are applicable in life circumstance, does that mean that they should be accepted with such religious (pun) zeal?

I guess I don't understand why (or how) someone would follow a religion based upon a figure they knew was fictional. You could just as easily accept various teachings from differing sources and mash them together to form your own personal philosophy or accept the good versus evil merits and teachings of one Harry Potter series. Why would following a fictional-based Christianity be more appealing or practical than that?

Gamera

I think our dispute revolves around what you mean by "truth." You seem to mean apodictic truth, that which can be proven as absolute.

There is that kind of truth (appropriate for science and mathmatics). And there are existential truths. These truths revolve around what it means to be an authentic free person. So, for example, I accept the message of Shakespeare's Hamlet or Eliot's Four Quartets as true, even though there probably never was a Hamlet.


Frankly I don't see why either rationalists or Christians should take offense at this. Rationalists are rational enough to know there are other kinds of values besides imperical knowledge, and Christians should realize that if God can work salvation by coming as his own son into history, well, he can save people through a story about the same, whether real or not.
The gospels are like Hamlet, not like Newton.

Also, I don't know quite what you mean by "follow" a religion. I accept the gospel and go from there. I don't need to follow any precepts to make me a Christian.

lpetrich

First, No Robots, can you tell us what you mean when you once claimed that Jesus Christ might have been "the greatest of the atheists"?

Does that mean that he was a bigger atheist than (say) Richard Dawkins?

That's right. I recall Richard Carrier being interviewed about Jesus mythicism one time, and he brought up a comparison to Aesop of fable fame. Some people consider him mythical, a name to hang those fables on, with biographies of him being invented or elaborated by various fable collectors.

People of several places claimed that he was born there: Thrace, Phrygia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Samos, Athens, Sardis and Amorium. Something like how people of the cities of Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athens, and Ephesus all claimed that Homer had been born there. And Homer himself is often considered to be more-or-less mythical; as far as anyone can determine, the Homeric epics were passed down through generations of bards before they were written down, and had no single author.

Johnny Skeptic

To be sure, all has not yet been discovered, such as how frequently Bible writers might have spoken for themselves and not for God. For instance, there are not any good reasons for anyone to assume that Jesus ever said anything about divorce and tithing. You most certainly approach this issue with bias. I am willing to change my mind if certain kinds of information were to become available. Are you?

ComestibleVenom

But that relates to the most interesting thing about your post. Even if he could walk on water, inspired everyone around him and raise people from 'the dead' - we still could not arrive at the authoritativeness of the bible.

Chris Weimer

This is actually more common than you think, and I don't think that many modern Christians follow the Medieval church. Jacob Neusner himself believes both that Moses received the Torah on Mt. Sinai and also the Documentary Hypothesis.

Chris Weimer

Is that because you can't defend the charges? You did hack up his quote. Tsk tsk. What lengths they go to...

post tenebras lux

Tsk tsk yourself, oh invisible one. You are not blind and you're quite capable of reading the thread to see what I was asking No Robots, but instead you seem to prefer joining him in attempting to derail the thread.

It was a question, and for part of the question I cut and pasted from gurugeorge. You can call it 'HACK UP' if it makes you feel better, but unless and until gg chides me for doing it, I'm not going to consider it as a 'hack up'.

There was the :huh: - asking "What?", and then "So you're not disagreeing that these 'sayings of the Christ' could be [and then I quoted a phrase from gg] a bunch of sayings from different hands in different times"


So - even though there was no "?" at the end - I feel it's pretty obviously a question.

I wonder if No Robots will answer it?

No Robots: do you agree that these 'sayings of the Christ' could be a bunch of sayings from different hands in different times?

Please notice the could be part. I'm not asking you to agree that they actually were, but just that they could be.

I'll also repost my original question to No Robots