jeffevnz

But you claimed that Jospehus recorded the sky darkening. Where did you hear that?

jjramsey

Errm, you wrote, "Jesus wasn't the first Jew crucified by the Romans for publicly saying he was the messiah," and then cited Apollonius as an example.

Well, Penn & Teller are fallible, and unfortunately, religious misinformation often spreads in "skeptic" circles, as Gerald LaRue pointed out. Shermer has spread misinformation about Apollonius, such as saying, "His followers later said that he rose from the dead and appeared to them," but again, this is not in the sources. My guess is that P&T got their misinformation from him.

This is from a book claiming that the image on the Shroud of Turin is Apollonius of Tyana, which is pretty silly since the Shroud is a forgery and not old enough to have the image from anyone in the first century on it. You shouldn't rely on it as a source.

Chuckling Atheist

It was unintentional, but I can see how it might be interpreted as such.





There's still a lot of debate in the skeptics circle on many related subjects.





Who's to say it's misinformation? The shroud was damaged in a fire and some experts have stated that this could be causing inaccurate carbon dating results.

mdarus

Early on in the thread there was the threat of excommunication for atheists holding the wrong beliefs!
Denominational lines are forming. There are suddenly boundaries for acceptable free thought.
Is purging a post the same as burning a book?

Then, I really like the discussion about whether a true atheist could really lose unsalvation?
:rolling:

fromdownunder

As a long time member (who has also been away for a long time), I have seen threads on this board between atheists and agnostics over "non-belief" principles, that had they been held in person could have led to murder.

And this thread does seem to becoming a "more atheist than thou" type discussion in places.

I don't really have a problem with that per se. I just think it is a waste of energy.

Norm

Thomas II

Oh,they were sacrifice happy!

www.evilbible.com/Ritual_Human_Sacrifice.htm

But I thought that by the time Jesus came into the scene they had finished with these human sacrifices...
Let's see: God father sends his son to Earth...to be tortured and sacrificed... as a present to God himself...in order to apeace himself...because people were sinning too much...
Is that fucked up or what? :huh:

Or was Jesus sacrificed to apeace Satan?

In any case they are back to the "god of the volcano is angry, push the virgin into the volcano to apeace the volcano god"!!!

And then they all say AMEN!

I tell you, sometimes...

jakejonesiv

Atheism and disbelief in HJ are often assumed to be bundled, but this is far from correct. The implicit assumption many times is that Christianity=Religion. This is simply not true. there are many other religions than Christianity that believe in some sort of concept of the divine.

I would argue that one can be an atheist and believe in HJ, since HJ is by definition only known by historical methods. Once you bring in faith and theology, you aren't talking history anymore.

I would also argue that one can be a non Christian deist, theist, pantheist, etc. and not believe in HJ. The issue is simply irrelevent.

I would also argue that one can be a Christian and still not believe in HJ. This might be rare, but I know some Unitarians that come pretty close to this position. Jesus arose and exists in the faith and community of the church, and anything else doesn't matter.

Jake Jones

RPS

Don't forget that you're also necessarily irrational, delusional and perhaps even mentally ill if you don't toe what they perceive to be the ideological line.

No Robots

The traditional Unitarian position is that Jesus is a man, not god:

Historic Unitarians believed in the moral authority, but not the deity, of Jesus.

Wikipedia

To obscure this point is to slight the sacrifices of people like Michael Servetus.

jjramsey

Skeptic's Dictionary on the Shroud of Turin.