lpetrich

Then why make an issue out of it?

I should have stated that I also meant 0% god, someone whose parentage was 100% human and 0% god, someone who worked no miracles, and who stayed dead after he died.

Roger Pearse

Because it is tactically convenient to a man who decides to do it? Get your enemy running around trying to prove something that no-one really doubts, and, when he comes up with evidence, lift the barrier and demand more? That way you can keep him running around, while your own position remains unexamined; and if by some miracle he gets you to agree that there must be something to what he says, you can laugh because he STILL hasn't made an inch of progress.

Even better, fools will suppose that, just because you say it, there must be something to it, and the fact that the matter is being debated is enough to convince people that there is something in the debate. Tertullian refers to the same trickery of "debate" in De praescriptione haereticorum 8.

Nor forgetting the Goebbels tactic of "the big lie" repeated incessantly; fools again will believe anything they hear often enough.

And you can always deny it all, when tasked with it!!!! You don't even have to admit what you're doing.

For a determined liar and scumbag, the tactic is a dream. What's not to like?

We mustn't confuse this with people being wrong; all of us are, in good faith, sometimes. People being dishonest from motives of political or religious hate is another matter... it says that, for them, rational discussion is dead, and power is all that matters; let the mightiest, dirtiest, most determined, best connected, most cunning prevail, and let reason, evidence, logic, and honesty go to hell.

Certainly there are people like that. People to whom nothing matters but their own convenience, and for whom reason is merely words. I would hope that every liberal minded man would despise such people. To deliberately make oneself less than human...? Wow. Dogs fight in a sack, howling and biting each other in just such a manner. But a man should be someone who is above such things, for whom it is important to be right, logically and morally, and to do what is right, logically and morally, not merely what is convenient. Surely?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

PS: by "you" I do not mean anyone here; I mean the person operating the fraud. The argument works whoever's historicity is being denied. Anti-Islam people try it on Mohammed, which should surely give the game away.

Steven Carr

Roger likes to lay on the abuse doesn't he?

If only he had a word from somebody who actually saw Jesus on earth, apart from the Christians who saw Jesus body on earth when they drank his blood and ate his flesh.

Toto

The tactics do not seem to have worked out that way.

You are describing the way certain religious fundamentalists act in the US. It doesn't sound like the Jesus Myth argument, where no historicist has actually produced any reliable evidence.

Yes, those church fathers knew how to sling the insults and anathemas. Those were the good old days, no? :Cheeky: But I'm not sure why you mention chapter 8, in which Tertullian says not to debate heretics because they are just wrong

We have no Need of a scrupulously nice Enquiry, after we have found Christ Jesus, or any curious and earnest Search, after we have learned the Gospel. If we believe, we desire nothing further than to be Believers. For this is a very distinguishing Property of our Belief, that it contains in it all things necessary to be believed. . .

Godwin's law! you lose!

How convenient to decide that your opponents are evil and frauds.

(But most anti-Islamic ideologues accuse Mohammed of being a terrorist pedophile, not of being a myth.)

All the best to you too.

Roger Pearse

You asked why people would do such a thing. I outlined the ways in which it was tactically a perfectly sound move, always supposing that we don't believe in absolute morality but instead live by convenience.

I think, judging from your reply, that you misunderstood what I was saying. Read the PS!

All the best,

Roger Pearse

gurugeorge

Oh for heaven's sake, it really is quite simple. If your researches lead you to conclude that there was no historical Jesus, then you have to account for Christian origins in some way other than "a guy called Jesus started it". The two questions are interconnected not "contrasted".

spin

Be-he-he. Roger opens his trench coat and shows his ugliness in all glory. Thank you for your honesty, Roger. It's very entertaining.:thumbs:


spin

Chili

But wait a minute Earl, with all respect must I say that Jesus was on earth but not in human form as earthly man but in heavenly form as man without the human condition or even a slave to that conditon. This form was first presented in the nativity parables that are absent from [literal] Mark and [wholisitc] John for that reason. Then later this infancy grows to be a son-of-man to young-man and finally fully man as Christ.

One must always remember that whatever exists in the imagintion must exist in reality as well, either in whole or in part, and it is wholistic if we come full circle in those parts, which then is what Paul has come to know first hand and therefore can communicate with Christ = basis for our communion with the saints in heaven that precedes our inter-course with the saints in heaven that is often proclamed with the ecstatic "yes" when we are consumed by nature wherefore also 'science' is known to be exhillerating.

Chili

Let me add that this reality is wherein it is not fiction and I am not talking about figments of the imaginatin but 'full circle' and therein have the mind of Christ . . . that was already promised in Genesis 2:14 with the river Eu-phrates that means "bright mind.

Steven Carr

Actually, there is definitive evidence that Paul really did think of Jesus as existing on earth.

1 Corinthians 10
They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.

It could be argued by mythicists that this reflects the way the earliest Christians found their Jesus in the Old Testament, but that would be a strained reading of the passage. Paul is clearly stating that Christ had existed on earth, putting Jesus in a distinct historical context.