Biff the unclean

Biff, you're ignoring the points I made altogether, focusing on two people.
You made points? I was so disturbed by your religious bigotry that I must have skipped over them

I simply assumed you would claim him as one of the holy humanists responsible for the AoR. Are you denying he was a secular humanist? Fine, no problem.
I don't recall that I was the one who first mentioned Voltaire. Sabine is correct his "religion", if one can call it that, was Deism. The main gist of which is "God is absent." It should be noted that these Deists lived a century before the natural sciences even started so any vague references to a mythical creator god are forgivable.
But obviously he was a philosophically a Humanist. The satire Candide is one of the great works of Humanism. Humanism is not a religion, which is why modern Protestants are able to incorporate it into their beliefs.

You're claiming Jefferson was what then? Who knows. You're just cutting and pasting irrelavant quotes and avoiding my points.
Jefferson was also a Deist and a philosophical Humanist. He co-authored some pieces with Franklin on the subject. It drove the church councils of the USA to distraction that he was. His quotes are extremely pertinent as they express his beliefs.

NOT ONE would blame him for the killing of heretics, or assert that Jesus told his disciples to burn them. It is you who are imagining things.
You still don't get it. You can't think outside of your tiny Xian box.
Jesus is a fictional character. He's a composite of several Hellenistic demigods.
We are talking about the Christians, real people doing real things in the real world--nonfiction. We are talking about their interpretations of the Christian religion and how they changed over the years. When you insist that Jesus meant something else by his dialogue in that silly novel than earlier Christian took the same passage to mean then you demonstrate that your religion has changed.

Jesus called Bacon, Locke and Newton the "three greatest men in history" for their accomplishments "in the physical and moral sciences." All Christians.
I take it that you meant Jefferson. I also take it that you don't know what the eighteen century term "physical and moral sciences" meant.
Of course they were Christians. Christians as opposed to whom? Atheists, Jews, Heretics perhaps? Atheists, Jews and Heretics were too busy being tortured and killed to devote much of their time to science. As opposed to today when most of our scientists (according to a poll taken by the AAAS in 1999) and all of our top scientists are not believers.

I don't hate anybody.
Then I would complain to the moderator if I were you because somebody is editing in a lot of bigotry and hatred into your posts. Damned hackers.

It is the skeptics here who are found personally condemning people, not the Christians.
I guess that wasn't "personal" condemnation, more along the line of "wholesale."

Biff the unclean

How is Jesus Christ allegedly raising someone from the dead any different from Apollonius of Tyana allegedly doing so?

I'd like to know how the "gift" (some gift! I hope you saved the recite) of "speaking in tongues" by Xians differs from the "speaking in tongues" that the Pythoness at the Oracle at Delphi or the Hindu monks of northern India do?

Biff the unclean

How is Jesus Christ allegedly raising someone from the dead any different from Apollonius of Tyana allegedly doing so?

Apollonius used a magic wand (there are paintings of his doing this on the catacombs under Rome that some try to pass off as a clean shaven Jesus) and Jesus just stood there and yelled. Also Apollonius brought a girl back from the dead and Jesus a guy. All the difference in the world…at least as much difference as between Catholic and Prod claims

Amos

In ancient art Jesus had a beard and Christ did not. So did the pharisees but not the scribes. A beard was a sign of sin so the redeemed Christ could not have a beard. It is also there that we see Mary with a halo as being part of the trinity.

Biff the unclean

If you are going to get to the "ancient art" in the catacombs you run into real trouble. The Catholic church says that the catacombs were constructed by early Christians. It also says that until 324 CE, when the rules changed, that the Christians painted rhetorical pieces of art that-as you have said-depict the ideal of the Christ and not Jesus. And metaphorical art that depicts concepts, like "the good shepherd." (I took the tour once)
However when you actually look at the art you find nothing of the sort. You find pictures of Hercules all over the place. You find the "good shepherd" is the demigod Mithra. You find that the halos are the sun shining from Mithra and Mazda's (God the father) heads. There are also the grape vines entwining dolphins that are the symbols of Dionysus all over the walls.
And quite a few paintings of Apollonius of Tyana raising the dead being called Christ raising the dead. (I can't help but note that the God that Apollonius preached was called Christna.)
So the claim is that the Christians painted nothing but Hellenistic gods in the catacombs until 324 CE when they suddenly stopped and from then on painted nothing but pictures of Jesus and pals.
Actually the catacombs is just an example. Apparently this painting only pagan gods was a rule through out Christendom because there are no paintings of Jesus (that survive at least) from before this date.

If I was the suspicious sort I'd think something strange was happening with these ancient Christian art stories.

Amos

Interesting and you seem to know lots about all this stuff. I have never really heard much about the catacombs but just saw a few paintings of what they called the Byzantine period (and maybe some earlier stuff). Nothing is strange to me. They were just making the most of what they could get their hands on and I see nothing wrong with that.

Biff the unclean

They were just making the most of what they could get their hands on and I see nothing wrong with that

What they got their hands on was paint and brushes, not finished art. What pre-324 CE Christians painted with them was Hellenistic Gods and not Christian symbols at the very same time that their stories say that they went happily to the man-eating lions rather than acknowledge these same Gods.

Is it just me or does this seem a strange thing for them to do?

Even the "Jesus fish" is not the ridiculously convoluted anagram that is sometimes claimed. It is the Zodiac sign Pisces, which was at that time a single fish and not the pair of today. It is the pre-Christian sign of the spring equinox, rebirth.

This is the problem with all the stories about the earliest Christians--the one some modern day Prods claim to be identical too. Every story we have about them, every thing that was supposedly written by them was retold and rewritten by post 324 CE Catholics. And everything makes them out to be exactly like Catholics…except for some bad heretics who were disposed of post 324.

Then when we get to 324 and have paintings of Jesus what we actually get are drawings of the God Serapis. Including his funny little gesture of touching his heart while casually pointing up with his free hand.
That's strange too.

Spaz

That's really interesting biff, do you have any links or anything I can go to?

the_cave

I don't mean to defend someone else's arguments for them, but this is surely false--Deism had it's origins around the time of Galileo, and Voltaire was an 18th-century thinker. Newton wrote his principia in 1687, several decades before the publication of "Candide". Just getting the facts straight. It's true that many natural sciences were not developed until the turn of the 18th/19th century, but it's false that the 18th century was altogether pre-scientific.



An assertion. You can refer me to however many modern works you like on the subject, I've read them all. It's still an assertion. It's equally possible that there was a real personage.

I don't understand how this is relevant.

Why not? He seems to be using the term perfectly adequately.



Oh, they were not--not by the 18th century in Europe. Name one. Persecuted, I'll grant you, but not "tortured and killed".

the_cave

I don't understand how this follows from what you've said previously. So the catacombs have pagan art--so what? Why does that mean it's the Christians making it? Why does it mean art that Christians make isn't Christian art?

Why? All art adapts the symbols, tropes, narratives, and representations of its time. Christianity is no different--as a Christian, I have no problem with that.