Mad Kally

Newsflash:
God is the only childhood myth carried over into adulthood..

lpetrich

Here's an analogy that I think is very reasonable; I hope that Hinduwoman doesn't object too much. In the current/recent India-Pakistan confrontation over Kashmir, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have been sending envoys to the highest levels of government in both countries, and according to a NY Times article, one diplomat described saying that the confrontation was leading to madness.

They certainly weren't revealing some message composed in murky, ambiguous language to inhabitants of out-of-the-way parts of those two nations -- they were going directly to the top, and doing so in unambiguous terms.

And as described earlier, an omnipotent being would have no trouble going to such important personages as the leaders of the Roman, Indian, and Chinese empires of the time.

And as Carl Sagan would have said, I don't want to believe -- I want to know.

As to SOMMS's scenario of someone who works miracles and rises from the dead, I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, I wish to ask where all the miracles have gone. There are plenty of accounts of miracles in ancient and medieval history; most of Jesus Christ's miracles are not especially remarkable by ancient-history standards. But why not nowadays?

How many people has Queen Elizabeth II cured of Scrofula lately?

Why does the Vatican have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for miracles to attribue to would-be saints?

By comparison, medieval saints could do much more. Here is Richard Carrier's summary in "Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection":

In 520 A.D.  an anonymous monk recorded the life of Saint Genevieve, who had died only ten years before that.  In his account of her life, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for two hours; while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously; she cast out demons, calmed storms, miraculously created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and lame, and several people who stole things from her actually went blind instead.  No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened--by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin.

Where is anyone at the present day with such capabilities???

Draygomb

Here's a thought.

If god want's us to just have Faith why did he send Proof?

If god wanted us to have Proof why doesn't he send Proof again and again?

Wyrdsmyth

SOMMS,

I knew somebody was going to try this... The evidence is already there, and I just can't see it! All of the criteria I outlined are fulfilled 2000 years ago by events recorded in the HOLY BIBLE!

Well, it is exactly because I don't consider the Bible to be adequate evidence that I am ASKING for evidence right now. You don't need to point out the Bible to me, I was aware of it before I made my initial post.

For years, believers have been saying things like God doesn't have to perform miracles anymore, since (1) plenty of them are recorded in the Bible and (2) we shouldn't need miracles to believe anyway, we should have faith -- a la Jesus's comment about "blessed are those who believe yet have not seen."

According to your religion, the reason people began to believe in a God in the first place was that they had direct experiential evidence, they experienced God or the power of God. People in the Bible, like Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, and the list goes on and on -- they all interacted with this God and had a relationship with him. And, allegedly, God did all of these overt things in the ancient world to display -- indeed to "prove" his existence.

But the thing is, now, we're just supposed to take it on faith that all of that old stuff happened. We're supposed to believe the Bible is true... just because it says it's true. When you say the Bible is the most well documented book in the world, what does that mean? Copied the most often? I'm sure it is. But, even if it has been dutifully translated all the way down from the originals that does not guarantee the originals were truthful. Also, even if the Bible makes references to historical events that actually happened and can be cross-referenced with other ancient sources that does not mean that every event given in the Bible is a historical fact. For example, the Bible makes references to actual historical persons, like King Herod and historical entities like the Roman Empire and Egypt -- but that doesn't mean the flood happened, or that the Tower of Babel story is true. Even if parts of the Bible are amazingly accurate that doesn't prevent it from being amazingly fabricated in other sections.

Which brings me back to my original point. The worldview given in the Bible looks archaic and dated to me. It is full of fantastical events and miraculous happenings. This worldview does not look anything similar to the world I live in now, 21st century America. In fact, the Bible strongly resembles the various myths and legends that people have made up throughout history, and continue to make up today (but today we call it fiction -- check out the fantasy genre, and you will see where spirits, ghosts, fairies, and gods went). That doesn't seem to cause a tension for a large segment of the population, who continue to ignore the discrepencies between the real world we live in and the fantastical world given in the Bible. Why does the Bible have to be true -- because it says it is? Because the Church "authorities" say it is? Come on, man, think for yourself! What do you do when the Bible does not fit in with the reality you live and breathe? For some of us, that tension cannot be ignored. Tell me, do you find this to be a cause of tension, or not?

I guess I understand why some people have characterized science and skepticism as being so "negative." They make it harder to believe in myths anymore. It's not like the old days, when there was no science, no video and audio recorders, no radio, no computers, when everyone got their news and information from word of mouth and personal testimony.

When it was easier to tell big whopping lies, and be believed.

lpetrich

Also, why believe the miracles of the Bible and reject all the other miracles? I prefer to follow the eminent theologian Origen, who argued that if one believes stories like the Romulus and Remus story, the siege of Troy, and so forth, why not also believe similar stories in the Bible? Actually, I follow him in an inverted sort of fashion; I think that if one rejects Romulus and Remus and similar stories, why reject those and not reject similar stories in the Bible?

Koyaanisqatsi

Why do I sense this "question" is going to be predicated on a ludicrous and hopelessly vague (therefore pointless) hypothetical scenario?

I'd ask, "Which god and how would you know and what's your current dosage, do you think you could get it increased?"

I'd say, "Good guess."

I'd say, "You make an excellent doctor."

I'd say, "You make an excellent paramedic."

I'd say, "The doctors who proclaimed you dead were clearly not very good at diagnosing death."

I'd say one of two things:
(1) "Where exactly are you going?"
(2) "Careful of the exosphere. Once you traverse it, your body will implode and then freeze in the vacuum."

Am I wearing rose-colored glasses or just tripping on LSD?

Let me follow up with another hypothetical for you, okay little clubber?

If some guy came up to you TODAY and said:
he heard a story about a messenger from the Great And Powerful Too RAH Loo, who told the future and it came true, went to the hospital and repeatedly cured people of AIDS, lukemia and cancer, brought a dead person back to life, got shot and was proclaimed dead, ascended into the cosmos

...all in front of this person's own eyes who was telling you this story, you still would not believe in the Great And Powerful Too RAH Loo? Is that right?

Well? Would you? Hunh? Would you? Hunh? Well?

Let's put it back into your own invalid hypothetical. It's you that were visited by the Great And Powerful Too RAH Loo and you that personally witnessed all of those "miraculous" things. Where does that put you? A believer in the Great And Powerful Too RAH Loo? Who the hell is the Great And Powerful Too RAH Loo?

You use words like "God" and "Messenger of God" as if they are a fait accompli, a given, an assumed truth, which is why you will never be able to establish any truth state at all about your beliefs and we will always be able to easily demonstrate your position to be childish nonsense.

That is not, by the way, an insult. To believe that such creatures as the Great And Powerful Too RAH Loo (aka, "God") factually exist and "ascend into the cosmos" is to literally believe in childish nonsense.

Enough already. You've been posting here for long enough to have every single one of your arguments roundly demonstrated to be incorrect and baseless over and over and over again. What's the point?

"I believe it's true, therefore it's true?"

No. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how many different ways you try to say the exact same thing, it will never be true. Never. There will never be a situation where believing something is true is equivalent to it actually being true. Never.

This means you have two choices. Shut the hell up or simply state, "I believe it's true and that's good enough for me," and then shut the hell up. We already know cult members aren't capable of rational thought or correctly applying logic to the question of their fictional creature's factual existence so enough already!

What is the goddamned point?

Not to mention the fact that your hypothetical is in no way analogous to the Jesus myth. He didn't predict the future. If you'll recall, the NT takes great pains to always state, "in order for the prophecy to be fulfilled," which means that, at best, Jesus deliberately orchestrated everything possible in order to make it look like he was fulfilling OT prophecies, none of which were actually prophecies about Jesus and many of which he did not fulfill. He wasn't the only one who could either rise from the dead or raise others from the dead nor was he the only one who could heal the sick.

In fact, the only unique claim specific to Jesus was the "bodily" ascension into the "cosmos" as you put it, which, as I pointed out, would make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Why would a supernatural creature ascend bodily into our sky only to then implode and freeze in outer space, assuming he had the ability to do such a thing? What would be the point of such a journey from a supernatural standpoint?

It only makes sense if you take into account the people who wrote the myth were naive, superstitious people who actually thought that "Heaven" was "in the firmament," aka, "God" lived in the clouds/sky.

Above everything else, this remarkably childish addendum proves conclusively that the whole thing is nothing more than a fictional aggrandizement of an earlier myth; a "Paul Bunyan" story that just became more and more ridiculous with every retelling, until finally we've got a dead body physically rising up into the clouds on its way to, where? Not Heaven, obviously, unless our U2 flights in the fifties accidentally destroyed it. So, where? The Oort Cloud? Ios, perhaps?

And don't you think that's a rather difficult and clumsy manner of travel for a being that can trifurcate into flesh and make human beings out of dirt and magically blink the entire universe into being ex nihilo?

After all, we know from Jesus own lips (as told to us anonymously by thousands of unknown copyists over two thousand years) that there would be no signs given unto this generation, so the bodily ascension could not possibly be a "sign," it must have been a literal journey that God had to take in precisely that manner in order to get to "Heaven," right?

You should, quite rightly, be ashamed for positing such a ludicrous hypothetical without any form of critical analysis whatsoever.

Utter, childish, nonsense. Literally.

(edited for formatting - Koy)

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>

TollHouse

You'd think SOMMS would learn that he's no match for Koy

Anyway, SOMMS, I'd be extremely interested to hear your response to Koy's excellent question:

Well? Would you believe this second-hand account? Why not?

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: TollHouse ]</p>

Panta Pei

Koy, I'm 37 years old and I have never, I repeat never had beer shoot out of my nose...until today.

Just thought I would share...

Echo

SOMMS doesn't even need to hypothesize any what-if scenarios because there are already plenty of miracle workers around, performing all sorts of outlandish supernatural feats.

I believe the founder of Aum Shinrikyo is still around, and his followes claimed he could levitate, walk through walls, heal illnesses, and read minds. And these people were so convinced that what they were seeing was genuine that they drank the man's dirty bathwater in adoration of him. So it must be true..right? Because all those people certainly wouldn't make up all those stories or drink someone's dirty bathwater for a hoax, would they? And they definitely wouldn't spray nerve gas onto a subway at his command unless they were pretty convinced that he was who he said he was...would they? So what's to doubt?

And I'm sure Hinduwoman could tell us lots of stories about the Hindu fakirs and their incredible supernatural powers. Too many people have seen Sai Baba materialize rose petals out of thin air for SOMMS not to believe it. Sure, a few cynical skeptics say he uses trickery, but it's because they just don't want to believe.

Then, of course, there is the New Age community. I'm sure SOMMS could wander over to some new age usenet newsgroups and find PLENTY of witnesses who would just LOVE to share their astral projection experiences, their past-life memories, their ability to channel entities from supernatural realms, their visitations from Ascended Masters....

Despite witness testimonies, anyone think he'll buy any of those claims if they don't fit into a Christian framework?

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Koy,

So to recap:

You wouldn't believe in God even if somebody came up to you TODAY and...
-said he was a messenger from God
-told the future and it came true.
-went to the hospital and repeatedly cured people of AIDS, lukemia and cancer
-brought a dead person back to life
-got shot and was proclaimed dead, but then came back to life himself
-ascended into the cosmos
...all in front of your own eyes.

This is not an example of 'free-thinking' or unbiased reasoning. It is an illustration of blatant ignorance.


In essence you simply believe ONLY what you WANT to...regardless of what the actual facts are.


Isn't this the same claim you level against the most ignorant of fundamentalists?

Satan Oscillate My Metallica Sonatas

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas ]</p>