post tenebras lux

But FatherMithras, can you prove that "Buckshot23 wanting it to be true" isn't a good reason?

Or are you going to fall back onto that old "consensus" claptrap? :Cheeky:



By the way: has Buckshot23 managed to prove that these 10 'facts' haven't been disproven by sceptics?

MiddleMan

I would amend this only this way:

How about this... A thousand doctors diagnose ten people. The majority, those with the higher education who have found out the most in their careers, agree on the diseases. And when these findings are tested against the subject studied, their findings have a repeating pattern of agreement. A few, generally those with less academic credentials, disagree and tend to skew results into their favor, often ignoring the larger amount of contrary evidence advanced by their opponents. Who should we rely on? Easy stuff people.

Overkill

The burden of proof is not on the skeptic in this case, he doesn't have to prove or disprove anything. The burden is on the person who is trying to prove that there is a God who manifested himself as a human, lived perfectly according to a very strict moral code, was killed, sent to "Hell" and resurrected to save mankind from "sin". I know it gets said a lot but a good example is belief in aliens. Is the burden of proof on you to prove aliens don't exist? No, the burden is on me to show you that aliens do indeed exist.

The Bishop

I've been reading this thread for two days. I must say I'm not finding an enormous amount of credit on either side of the debate. So I'm going to respond to a few things said against Richbee which I consider fallacious, and I will also respond in what I feel to be somewhat more measured tones to some of the things Richbee and others have said.

The first substantial responses were from Toto and cgordon.

It's a debatable issue. I don't think it's useful to dismiss it as "utter nonsense", since the debate has continued for 11 pages.


And one person named Jesus had 27 books written about him, which were raised to the status of Scripture and which certainly have ancient provenance (more ancient than most other documents of the period) and which stories formed the foundation of one of the world's great religions with up to billions of adherents. You don't have to "believe" in Jesus, but lets not downplay the importance of the figure and what arose from him. It's hubristic.

Strangely enough, I find this of significance. It's precisely the very reason the Resurrection story (supernatural or not) potentially has some basis in fact. Crossan disputes the story on the basis of what would normally be expected. I'm bound to say that stories (true or fictional) are not derived from what would normally be expected. The description of something out of the ordinary happening is precisely what makes it a significant story or history element.
Picky, picky! Let the poor Christian put things his own way a little. It essentially amounts to the same thing, as would your view of, say, being imprisoned by the Bush Administration for sedition and "being against us" and "aiding the terrorist cause", when from your point of view, you'd have been imprisoned for "protecting the Constitution against tyrrany".

I'm afraid I'm not impressed. Christianity's explosive growth was matched by Islam's explosive growth six and seven hundred years later. But it just cannot be dismissed as "any old religion can spread this fast", when X-ity and Is'm are the only two that did. I haven't read Stark, but according to an amazon.com review one of the things he measured "religion growth" by was the spread of Mormonism over the last century and a half. Again, I'm not particularly impressed by a) a minority sect of an existing religion and worldview and b) comparing the 1st-4th Centuries (or any time up to 1850) with the world of speed-of-light media!!:huh:


Even I would classify Pauline Epistles as close enough to "the very beginning" as to be meaningless. Out of 2000 years, a 20 year gap is not really strong enough to make sufficient point in either direction. As it is, Paul writes about the Resurrection in terms that it is already known to existing churches and that what they believe is based on that, (or a rejection of it!).

Why do the arguments have to be "tired"?

Julian

What a useless and ignorant post. One of the stupidest I have seen in quite a while, actually...

Julian

The Bishop

cgordon takes a different tack, apparently believing that the Mythological Jesus is a cut-and-dried case. As with all such arguments, you pretty much see more arrogance than reasoned argument.
Automatic rejection of Scripture as historical text is not a valid view in my humble. Cgordon doesn't even provide any back up for his position, he just states the "Jesus = myth" as a fait accompli.

Well, at least he saved us some space!

Well, "See #1" seems to indicate that the argument is that there never was a Jesus, but the first part appears to acknowledge there were real Apostles whose testimony has been discredited. Not sure, but this looks inconsistent to me.

Christians would claim that thousands of people were inspired to believe because of the Holy Spirit. A skeptic can note that there was nothing miraculously fast about the spread of Christianity (if that was the point made by Toto and Stark above), but should not deny the obvious fact that it must have made considerable headway, and at a greater rate than anything previous. The fact that the Celts of North West Europe were Christians as early as 400CE, nearly 200 years before St Augustine came to Christianise England - is a remarkable fact, whether it was due to miraculous means or not!

I've done my research and nothing I've seen has ever convinced me of anything of the sort. In any case, if Jesus existed, was apparently executed and then appeared alive afterwards, the fact that some old mythology had the same elements is irrelevant.

Utter, utter arrogance. Nobody but Christians accept that Jesus even existed in the first place? This is factually incorrect, as Jews and Muslims both accept the historical reality of Jesus. Their basis for doing so is no better than that of Christians, of course, but it's just stupid to pretend that only Christians even believe in him. This particular atheist has actually studied the texts and read the arguments, and believes that there was a real person called Jesus who was the person being written about. There are many others, including the majority of skeptical scholarship.

I'm afraid I'm also quite unimpressed by the list of links provided. The first one deals with God's existence, which is irrelevant, and certainly couldn't touch the faith of someone with faith (if there is proof there is no God, I'd like to hear it!) The Skeptics Annotated Bible deals with contradictions. Not a bad thing for any Christian to read, but again not relevant as a whole to the Resurrection or the existence of Jesus.

Atheists.org article simply starts straight in with a fallacy:The Burden of proof weighs upon those who make the extraordinary claim. Of course, the gospel accounts contain extraordinary tales in them, but it's still reasonable to suppose that there was a guy about whom they were writing. If you state that the whole thing was a put up job, a myth created out of whole cloth and put onto a fictional Galilean carpenter, than that becomes the "extraordinary claim" that carries the burden of proof. On The Old Testament Evidence he states, "Despite the claims of Christian apologists, there is absolutely nothing in the Old Testament (OT) that is of relevance to our question" - ironically, isn't this the opposite of the case? OT writings only don't have relevance if Jesus was a real person who was born and lived. If he was a fictional construct, then the OT has signficance - particularly to Matthew, if he's the one who wrote the original story! When he gets onto the Pauline letters, he keeps referring to St. Saul - which betrays a loss of impartiality.

I have written elsewhere about the religioustolerance page, mainly about how it puts reasonable opinions into the mouths of "conservative Christian scholars" which automatically removes them from serious consideration. That's not playing as fair or balanced as the article ("Both sides of the question") claims. I was also disturbed by this section, about which I don't have any more information that is provided:Now, I don't know that much about Mithraism, except in relation to the MJ hypothesis, and presented here it certainly sounded convicing. Until, that is, you check out the only two references cited:I mean, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets is the source for the Augustine quote? That puts the whole thing in doubt - maybe he never said anything. And as for that astrologer Acharya S, the more I see her cited by supposed rationalists, the more it seems the lunatics have taken over the asylum. In any case, the article is eight years old, and needs a good revision, imho.

So, onto nobeliefs.com:Amazingly enough, since a person's liberty isn't at stake, historical evidence is quite happy with a slightly lower standard than that which would be acceptable in a court of law! Why is, as usual, the historicity of the Gospel account being held to so much higher a standard than other historical sources? Substantial amounts can be deduced from Hearsay, and very few historians of any period were eyewitnesses to the periods they describe. They are frequently based on interviews with the participants to this day!

Marshall Gauvin's article right here on Infidels.org promotes the viewpoint that the gospels were not eyewitness accounts. See above. Also a lot of argument about how long it took for hte Gospels to reach their "present form" - but if their original form was less than now, they still weren't so substnatially different.

And finally, the Liberator article bases some of its conclusions on accepting the "scholarship" of the Jesus Seminar. I have no pro- or anti-Christian bias when I say that the Jesus Seminar's techniques are utterly worthless. Only a pro-science bias. See Richard Feynmann on basing any kind of scientifically based conclusion on a voted outcome!

I have more. I will be back tomorrow.

darstec

Yes, of course. I am also aware of the use of maggot larvae to get rid of dead tissue.

But I was referring to the common practice of cup or bowl bloodletting which got out of hand as late as the 1850s.

It is the education itself I am questioning. That is still controlled by religious institutes. And compounding the problem is that what we read from the scholars is not necessarily what they actually know and believe. I have first hand knowledge of at least a few of those scholars that publish the party line garbage replete with an Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat but would have flunked us if we dared translate a passage with the "consensus" translation. Yet since their entire livelyhoods depend upon that Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat, they will continue publically to toe the party line. Maybe a few like Dan Brown can say what they want because they are financially independent (note: this is not an endorsement of his ideas) but look at the credentials of most scholars. They were taught (usually at a time when alternate opinions were forbidden) in religious institutions and are either members of a religious ministry/order or teach at one of their institutions. If every institution teaches the world is flat, it doesn't matter what the consensus opinion about the shape of the world is, it would still be wrong.

Amaleq13

I'm not sure what you mean by "prove" (ie certainty is a pipe dream, we can only deal with likelihood) but it seems foolish to ignore such a consensus since it would appear to say something very significant about the nature of the evidence leading to the shared conclusion.

That makes no sense given a consensus that changes due to new evidence or argument. Agreement across differing backgrounds and biases is not typically derived on a whim.

This completely ignores that a consensus, as I clearly indicated, is not limited to only scholars who share a particular background or potential bias.

Angrillori

A few issues here.

First, postulating a conspiracy which suppresses dissent is not a particularly compelling case. If it were, we'd all be creationists, eh? (That's a friendly smiley, I really don't want this to come across as snarky as it possibly could, but I can't think of a better way to write it! My bad, not yours!)

Second, in re: "If every institution teaches the world is flat, it doesn't matter what the consensus opinion about the shape of the world is, it would still be wrong."

The important thing to note is that it would take more than: "maybe all the experts are wrong, and there's a conspiracy suppressing dissent" to provide strong enough rationale to dismiss the expert's testimony.

Yes, they could be wrong, but, it's reasonable and rational to believe they are right until and unless a good reason for believing they ARE wrong comes along.

IOW: The fact that they may be wrong is NOT a reason to believe they are wrong, and the fact that they are experts, acting in the appropriate field, with consensus behind them, is good reason to believe they are right.

It is rational, and reasonable, and just good practice to accept the testimony of experts, subject to the guidelines above, unless there are at least equally strong, equally good arguments countering the position. Needless to say: "sometimes experts might be wrong, and maybe there's a conspiracy suppressing dissent," is not a strong enough, or compelling enough argument to warrant dismissing the consensus of the experts.

It wasn't accusations of conspiracy, and a contention that the experts of the day might be wrong that caused the fall of geo-centrism, it was data, and evidence. You could say the same for flat-earth-ism.

FatherMithras

Ridiculous and inflamatory. According to you we shouldn't trust the people most qualified and should instead rely on whatever we want to believe? Very nice.

It's NOT atheist scholars. How hard is that to get across? How hard is it to simply tell the truth? Scholars of every faith and creed who aren't "faith first" scholars have shown how unreliable the claims are. Oh yes, and atheism isn't a faith. It requires only the examination of the evidence that best fits. We don't HAVE to force belief.

Wow buckshot, I really don't understand your position. We shouldn't believe the almost universal consensus of the experts because...... No reason. Because sometimes new evidence changes the consensus. WOW. Until there's a simple, single shred of evidence, your worldview fails the burden of proof. You can still believe it, but pretending there's evidence for it is simply being dishonest and pretending because it's what youw ant tob elieve.