Clutch

Cha-ching!

And why is he so scrupulous about keeping it this way? Why are contemporary miracles never of the "man with leg amputated at thigh has it grown back by morning; all captured on hospital videotape" variety, while the really whiz-bang miracles -- saints rising from the grave en masse -- are conveniently located in the unverifiable depths of time with no independent record of anyone noticing?

leonarde

Posted by Peter Kirby:Okaaaaay, but unless you have a second identity
by the name of Dargo, that's your fantasy evidence not his. Imagination is a wonderful
thing but one shouldn't mistake it for a serious
argument-----when unconnected to anything plausible/rooted in experience, tradition etc----in politics,
sports, metaphysics......heck, just about anything. In fact one can see, in the above, your
higher gear imagination ("or better yet multiple ones" taking over, in mid sentence, from your lower gear one. But no, I doubt that even that would influence your religious position (and you didn't state that it would!).

As to the "age-old scribbles": someday even these
words will be "age-old"; that hardly has bearing
on their truth/falsity.

Cheers!

leonarde

Partial post by Clutch:But Dargo's complaint is: oh, just old STORIES
written in OLD BOOKS! I WANT 10 minutes with god
(doing what we still don't know) PERSONALLY!! But, unless one posits a constantly appearing god (new
people by the millions are born every day)this scenario is just silly and unlikely. Indeed it (the fantasy evidence ostensibly "requested") is selected precisely for its unlikelihood).

Cheers.

leonarde

I see Dargo did repost after all. I'll think about what he said.

Cheers!

Clutch

By "silly" you appear to mean "lethal to Christian evidential arguments."

As I've told you: Your allusion to "new people by the millions... born every day" is utterly irrelevant, unless you mean to suggest that it would somehow be annoying, time-consuming, difficult or awkward for your god to manage this. Cognitive dissonance kicking in yet?

Peter Kirby

To remove all doubt: that would influence my religious position considerably.

best,
Peter Kirby

leonarde

Partial post by Clutch:Well, the Christian traditions I am MOST familiar
with don't claim that god does---or even ought to be-- constantly intervening on a daily basis to give each person a 10 minute interview.
Nothing like that is in the "evidenciary arguments" that I'm most familiar with; that type
of thing, as I alluded to earlier, is mostly a manifestation of certain non-theists in some of their most self-dramatizing moments.

Or more succinctly: you're trying to turn god into
one of those annoying, seen-it-a-million-times tv
commercials which you have long ago memorized the
words to.

Theists and non-theists alike are stuck with whatever real evidence is out there.

Cheers!

Benjamin Franklin

Jeffrey Jay Lowders essay is on the empty tomb, not on the resurrection.

You are not interpreting what I wrote accurately. I would like to reiterate, it is not necessary to explain the empty tomb if it is not historical in the first place and the resurrection is not a explanation of the empty tomb since the the two stories (resurrection and empty tomb come together)


BF

GreggLD1

This seems to be the pattern:

Xtian: "If the resurrection didn't happen, how do you explain the empty tomb?"

Skeptic: "Well, there are lots of ways we can think of that don't involve angels and dead bodies coming back to life! Perhaps someone stole the body?"

Xtian: "No, you see, the Jews got the Romans to send a guard along with Jesus' body and to watch at the tomb to make sure that didn't happen."

Skeptic: "Curious that Mark, Luke, and John don't seem to know anything about it! All we have is Matthew's word on this. And come on--suppose a crime suspect said, 'I couldn't have robbed the Brinks truck! There was a guard right there!' Would you just take his word for it?"

Xtian: "No, of course not. But that's just it, you see. There wouldn't have been any reason for Matthew to lie, because anybody could have checked out his story."

Skeptic: "You're aware, aren't you, that 'Mark,' which doesn't mention the guards, is believed to be the first gospel written, and that most scholars date it after the first Roman-Jewish War? At that time it certainly wouldn't have been easy for 'anybody to check out his story'."

Xtian: "Well, I don't believe Mark and the rest of the gospels were written as late as the scholars say. Anyway, all this talk was going back and forth between the Jews and the Christians, you know--the Jews saying the Christians stole the body, and the Christians saying there were guards, and the Jews saying the guards fell asleep, and the Christians saying Jews bribed the guards to say that."

Skeptic: "Uh, what documentation, outside of Matthew, do you have for this contentious, back and forth debate? Shouldn't there be references to it in Josephus and other Jewish chroniclers and historians? Heck, I'd even be impressed if there was some sign of it in a couple of the epistles. And anyway, don't you know that if the guards had admitted to falling asleep, they would have been executed? What good's a bribe if you're too dead to spend it?"

Xtian: (Folds arms and thrusts out lower lip) "God said it! I believe it! That does it!"

Skeptic: "If God said it, why don't we have just one, consistent, well-corroborated account of Jesus' trial, crucifixion, and resurrection?"

And so on!

GreggLD1

This seems to be the pattern:

Xtian: "If the resurrection didn't happen, how do you explain the empty tomb?"

Skeptic: "Well, there are lots of ways we can think of that don't involve angels and dead bodies coming back to life! Perhaps someone stole the body?"

Xtian: "No, you see, the Jews got the Romans to send a guard along with Jesus' body and to watch at the tomb to make sure that didn't happen."

Skeptic: "Curious that Mark, Luke, and John don't seem to know anything about it! All we have is Matthew's word on this. And come on--suppose a crime suspect said, 'I couldn't have robbed the Brinks truck! There was a guard right there!' Would you just take his word for it?"

Xtian: "No, of course not. But that's just it, you see. There wouldn't have been any reason for Matthew to lie, because anybody could have checked out his story."

Skeptic: "You're aware, aren't you, that 'Mark,' which doesn't mention the guards, is believed to be the first gospel written, and that most scholars date it after the first Roman-Jewish War? At that time it certainly wouldn't have been easy for 'anybody to check out his story'."

Xtian: "Well, I don't believe Mark and the rest of the gospels were written as late as the scholars say. Anyway, all this talk was going back and forth between the Jews and the Christians, you know--the Jews saying the Christians stole the body, and the Christians saying there were guards, and the Jews saying the guards fell asleep, and the Christians saying Jews bribed the guards to say that."

Skeptic: "Uh, what documentation, outside of Matthew, do you have for this contentious, back and forth debate? Shouldn't there be references to it in Josephus and other Jewish chroniclers and historians? Heck, I'd even be impressed if there was some sign of it in a couple of the epistles. And anyway, don't you know that if the guards had admitted to falling asleep, they would have been executed? What good's a bribe if you're too dead to spend it?"

Xtian: (Folds arms and thrusts out lower lip) "God said it! I believe it! That does it!"

Skeptic: "If God said it, why don't we have just one, consistent, well-corroborated account of Jesus' trial, crucifixion, and resurrection?"

And so on!