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Christian Defense: The Straw Man and Ad Hominem
mywisegeneration.blogspot.com — In a world filled with intellectuals, defense of the Christian faith and principles can become both a difficult and emotionally exhausting task. This is especially true when Christians are attacked with what are known as 'Straw Man' or 'Ad Hominem' arguments that aim to do three things: place the original arguer in a ridiculous position...
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- TFGeditor, on 04/25/2008, -13/+13If christianity and the god it favors are real, they needs no "defense" by puny humans. If christianity/religion is the delusional superstition its detractors claim, then it is no less subject to ad hominem and straw man arguments than are adherents to a flat Earth belief or organizations such as NAMBLA.
No religion, including christianity, is immune to criticism--even "unfair" criticism--just because they are religions. WItness the disdain with which The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is treated--yet you do not see or hear an outcry from Pastafarians.- InRussetShadows, on 04/25/2008, -9/+13You just proved the entire point of the article by using straw man arguments.
- SampleX, on 04/25/2008, -11/+4Damn... wish I'd noticed that... Could have saved myself a few hundred words there as a first round on the subject...
- KCLorelei39, on 04/25/2008, -9/+4just what I was thinking InRusset
and Samplex...say on, I appreciate your contributions
- Becca4RonPaul, on 04/25/2008, -5/+4TFGeditor:
Your "If-Then" statement ("If Christianity were true then it would need no defense") holds no water. In making it, you deny what IS a truly self-evident fact of human experience: that humans are easily deceived and prone to believe whatever they want to believe. By your logic, the Holocaust was not a historical fact, because some people dispute its occurrence! Truth in every area of life is a hotly-contested thing. Furthermore, you seem to be serving as an "apologist" for skepticism / atheism, which millions (many of them very well informed) eschew. Does this not throw doubt on your position as well? Obviously, your criteria for truth needs some reassessment. - Nannybell, on 04/25/2008, -7/+6While I appreciate what the rest of you are saying, I do have to agree with TFG's first sentence: "If christianity and the god it favors are real, they needs no "defense" by puny humans.'
That's exactly right. God does not need our defense. He rocks along without us. However, WE need HIS defense and HIS help, or else we are sunk in the next life. And this is why we tell others about Him. If they choose not to believe, that is the choice they make.
- InRussetShadows, on 04/25/2008, -9/+13You just proved the entire point of the article by using straw man arguments.
- SampleX, on 04/25/2008, -11/+15"WItness the disdain with which The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is treated--yet you do not see or hear an outcry from Pastafarians."
Indeed, and yet try to present Intelligent Design as an alternative to Evolutionary Theory, and scientists gasp with incredulity that someone could even imagine that what they regard as a fictional mythology could even be compared to what they regard as being 'proven.'
So, then, imagine how stupid you look, when you present a deliberately invented ironic/sarcastic demeaning representation of religious faith, and insist that it is the direct equivalent of a belief formulated on the basis of attested evidence, eyewitness testimony verified and stood the test of time, and two thousand years of scrutiny. You have invented a position which cannot be disputed because that which is not evidenced cannot be countered if someone is stupid enough to believe it fervently. That is not the case for Jesus of Nazareth, for whom there is a wealth of compelling evidence, and a history to be examined. You seem to fail to note that the 'Pastafarian' method of argument is in itself utterly equatable to those who believe in a Big Bang. It could apply to anything based on sheer belief alone rather than credible evidence. The simple fact remains that such a rebuttal is wasted on Biblical Christian faith, because such faith has far more to go on, historical evidence particularly, than a cult of sardonism invented by a self-confessed anti-Christian, atheist perpetual student who's aim in life was to make lots of money doing absolutely nothing, and by becoming the hero of the mindless atheist class, he has acheived his goal and can now sell the merchandising rights if he so chooses. What he invented is an in-joke that atheistic inbreeds think is endlessly funny, while genuine scholars shake their heads sadly, and wish to be utterly disassociated from such flippant idiocy.- Becca4RonPaul, on 04/25/2008, -8/+5WAY TO GO, SAMPLEX!! : D
- Ramble, on 04/25/2008, -4/+4I agreed with you until you resorted to a mindless attack against all atheists. Your argument is now worthless.
- alkajazz, on 04/30/2008, -1/+2So quick summary: All Atheists are stupid.
- SampleX, on 05/02/2008, -1/+1Intelligence is negated by its use to draw fallacious and poorly formulated conclusions in regard to obvious presentations of truth.
In other words, if the most intelligent man in the world uses his intelligence to choose, affirm, and then promote the most stupid, fundamentally idiotic viewpoint in the universe, was he the most intelligent man after all, or actually the dumbest. It would seem that the most stupid man, who makes the right decisions, for the right reasons would be well ahead of the most intelligent man who makes the most stupid decisions for all the wrong reasons.
And I did state that there were academics, even atheists, who refuse to be associated with 'popular atheism and humanism'.
- SampleX, on 05/02/2008, -1/+1Intelligence is negated by its use to draw fallacious and poorly formulated conclusions in regard to obvious presentations of truth.
- elcapitanp, on 05/14/2008, -0/+1For centuries there has been NO scrutiny of religious faith, that is why it has survived. All scrutiny was considered blasphemy. As for this evidence you claim to have, you should present it, because I have searched long and hard and have yet to find anything compelling that points to the existence of the christian god. If the christian god existed, then the world would be 6000 years old, there would be no evidence for evolution, everything would revolve around the Earth.
- InRussetShadows, on 04/25/2008, -4/+11Apologetics 101 is now in session! Whoo hoo!
- lydecker, on 04/25/2008, -0/+9Perhaps this will help some of the Christian Offense and Atheist Offense from further using Ad Hominem and Straw Man attacks as well.
...Except for Spiritblade.- Nannybell, on 04/25/2008, -3/+3Spiritblade no longer exists. He has been reincarnated as DoGod'sWill or something like that.
- ozydingo, on 04/25/2008, -1/+6GOD0S0WORD is the new handle I believe.
- StaticThunder, on 04/25/2008, -0/+7You're all [m00k]s.
- lydecker, on 04/25/2008, -1/+8OH NO! He's taken StaticThunder!
- alkajazz, on 04/25/2008, -1/+5wtf is a [m00k]?
- StaticThunder, on 04/25/2008, -0/+5I don't know. I only work here.
- StaticThunder, on 04/25/2008, -0/+7You're all [m00k]s.
- ozydingo, on 04/25/2008, -1/+6GOD0S0WORD is the new handle I believe.
- Nannybell, on 04/25/2008, -3/+3Spiritblade no longer exists. He has been reincarnated as DoGod'sWill or something like that.
- KCLorelei39, on 04/25/2008, -6/+5thanks Craig for laying down the basics so clearly. I am by no means a philosophy student, but it is convenient to know what these methods are called so I know what to call it when I see these arguments in operation : )
- Coven, on 04/25/2008, -3/+10So how does this differ from the way topics like evolutionary theory are treated by fundamentalist christians? The straw man and ad hominem are the most oft used tactics when trying to argue against scientific study.
- 5N00PY, on 04/25/2008, -2/+5That is the best explanation I've seen of ad hominem and straw-man arguments. Very, very good.
- Ramble, on 04/25/2008, -5/+5I have to say the people who most use straw man and ad hominem attacks are the creationists. Intelligent Christians and intelligent atheists don't tend to use them.
- lydecker, on 04/25/2008, -2/+5Intelligent Christians and Intelligent atheists can, and do, fall for occasionally using ad hominem and straw man attacks... but mostly only in response to non-logic. However, I haven't seen that one side is generally more responsible for their use and harbors more unintellectuals. People often misrepresent theism, when it comes up (rarely), and people very often misrepresent atheism... or evolution, the big bang, etc.
- Tugging, on 04/26/2008, -2/+3These people use their "creationist" method but I rest on the Statement of the
Maker of Heaven and Earth, knowing that all things are in His hands, the beginning and the end.- camelseye, on 04/27/2008, -1/+2And it's great to know, while increasing knowledge" that true scholarship always supports the Truth.
- Squidwalk, on 04/28/2008, -0/+4I noticed Craig added his "Educated Himself into Imbecility" post as a related one to this one. I thought he made a case that people should not be required to offer logical proof.
From Modern Man has "Educated Himself into Imbecility":
"My generation has embraced a world of intellectual elitism. The "uneducated" are no longer in a position to determine that which is right and wrong. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," a principle espoused by our founding fathers and written in the United States Declaration of Independence can no longer exist, intellectual evidence now reigns supreme."
In this section of his blog, Craig seems to want to educate other apologists to a level sufficient to argue with anti-theists. While I wholly appreciate this, I must point out the stark contradiction to his post just 8 days earlier. I really hope he continues down this path, as I enjoyed discussing religion with him until he broke from his solid reasoning skills and started to refer to religious iconography. - SampleX, on 05/02/2008, -2/+1Its nothing new... the Gnostics of Israel and Greece were doing it even in the Apostles' day. You can see, reading the letters, that even as Paul and Peter stood before crowds and said 'this is what we've seen, this is what we've experienced' there were those who sat in 'higher criticism' saying 'are you sure? perhaps you were deluded or mistaken... that couldn't have happened, because it didn't happen to me...' There is no answer to those people. They'll always know better. But like you observe, and as has been observed before, when we base our views on closing our minds to possibilities and formulate philosophies out of denial, we cannot, by definition, be any more open-minded, and therefore informed, than we were before, only less so. I'll bet not even one in a thousand professing atheists who claim that the Bible is nonsense have even done anything like the level of study conducted by those who have studied the Bible and said 'this is surprisingly accurate.'
- Squidwalk, on 05/02/2008, -0/+5Hold up.. so you're saying that when the apostles left the empty tomb and told people Jesus had risen from the dead, skeptics of this are unjustified? How can you possibly come to that conclusion? If I were to tell you right now that my friend died two days ago and has risen form the dead today, you'd be fine with that?
There's open-minded, and there's just crazy. If you follow a belief system as you just purported, you'd be required to believe every guy that claimed he was abducted by aliens. And you'd be required to believe people saying their non-Christian deities have committed unverifiable acts.- SampleX, on 05/03/2008, -4/+1"Hold up.. so you're saying that when the apostles left the empty tomb and told people Jesus had risen from the dead, skeptics of this are unjustified?"
It says nothing about 'unjustified.' We're not talking about what happened 'the day after.' We're talking about years later. We're not talking about an event that one person saw, and only one person had an explanation for. We're not talking about your unremarkable, very normal, very human friend, suddenly being the centre of a supernatural event for no apparent reason. We're talking about an individual who lived in the very public gaze for three years, performing supernatural feats, gaining a reputation for supernatural behaviour and activity, who was evidenced by so many people and caused such a stir that an entire city, it seems, was in uproar to such a degree that a vastly legalistic and well capable occupying Empire determined that it was better to execute someone they had declared innocent of all charges to satisfy the crowd, than to risk a city-wide uprising. We're talking about someone who was verified to be dead - not just slipped into a hospital morgue having died of a heart attack who happened to 'come round' or 'revive', and we're talking about someone who was buried behind an emperor's seal with a guard placed at the entrance - a guard that would have faced the death sentence for allowing the seal to be violated. And we're talking about an event that was prophecied before it happened, both within the lifetime of the individual, and without. We're talking about an individual who was eyewitnessed by thousands of people over the month following his death, who testified plausibly to witnessing and interacting with someone in bodily form - not visitation by a ghost. We're talking about plausible witnesses to a sequence of events, and very well educated people who had experiences which caused them to change their own skeptical and antagonistic beliefs in 180 degree revolutions.
We're not talking about Thomas, who said 'I'm not so sure about this... I could do with seeing this for myself.'
We're talking about people who have made a profession of insisting 'I don't believe, I can't believe' which actually translates 'I won't believe.' We're talking about people who aren't interested in facts, or plausible testimonies, people who could hear a thousand sound, safe attestations and still insist 'somewhere out there there's the one testimonial which will refute all of this wealth of inconvenient positive support.' We're talking about people who are not interested in 'reasonable evidence' or 'compelling case' but who have, for philosophical or ideological reasons, simply determined that they will not believe.
If you tell me that your friend is risen from the dead, you're right, I probably won't believe you. If you tell me that you and two friends have seen your friend risen from the dead, I'll think you've all conspired it. If you present me with an empty grave, and the news is awash with consistent, plausible, eyewitness testimony from thousands of people who had physical interactions with a dead man, and if I find that even the people who have staunchly opposed the spreading of such an idea, the antagonists, are also having experiences which change their minds, I'll be curious, and maybe start to think 'this is just hysteria, with no foundation, imitating the resurrection of Jesus.' If, however, your friend has a track record of performing innumerable works of the miraculous, which even skeptics and his enemies testify to, and he has a track record of being the subject of supernatural accounts, not just one or two, but a wealth, having gained a reputation for such, having been affirmed by eyewitnesses and without charge from skeptics, then I'll certainly be leaning toward the 'no smoke without fire' way of thinking, especially if, when I tell you and your friends and your 'eyewitnesses' that I will put every last one of you to death in horrible ways unless you stop lying, and tell the truth that the whole thing is just a hoax, I see every last one of you say 'I won't tell anything other than the truth of what I have seen - I have no doubt whatsoever' as you die in unthinkable ways... I think that might impress me. And I'd certainly wonder how on earth you could possibly profit from insisting on telling a lie so committedly as the truth, when I was capable of taking absolutely everything you have, including your last breath, away from you for doing so.
It is unprecedented in history, it is a unique sequence of events on such a large scale, and it stands without any plausible alternative explanation than the conclusion - these people saw exactly what they say they saw.
When you can provide that weight of compelling evidence to the story of the resurrection of your friend, then I'll believe you. If you can provide testimonial that this is not the first dead person raised to live as a result of the subject of the case, then I'll believe you.
When you'll stake your own life on what you're saying, and your eyewitnesses will too, then I'll believe you. But we'll probably only find out how serious you are after I've killed a few dozen of you in brutal ways first.
"There's open-minded, and there's just crazy."
THere's nothing crazy about examining the evidence for something unusual taking place, finding it voluminous and compelling, and using it to base a reasonable belief that the improbable did actually happen. What would be crazy would be to take pre-conceived notions of what is 'natural' or what is 'scientifically conforming' or what is 'conventional' and then use that as a rule by which all else must conform so that you can take the evidence for something occurring which was beyond that normality, and flush it down the toilet, not because you can disprove it, but because your train of thinking won't allow you to even consider it.
"If you follow a belief system as you just purported, you'd be required to believe every guy that claimed he was abducted by aliens."
You've never actually read the evidence for Jesus, or for the resurrection, have you? You've never studied the effects it had, the far reaching consequences of it? You've not actually noticed that history doesn't record every instance of some 'nutjob' claiming to have been abducted by a UFO as a major historical juncture, and never wondered why the life of Jesus had so much impact on two thousand years of human history - longer than most 'cultures' and 'empires' have ever lasted. You've clearly never wondered why what you seem to believe are false or phony claims and records, found in the compilation that is the Bible, have never been able to be disproven or even plausibly materially refuted in two thousand years of them having been committed to record (and longer if you include the history prior to Jesus). You think, somehow, that its smart to compare the life, death and resurrection of Jesus to 'some guy claiming he was abducted by aliens.' And you think its wise to think this is just a currency based on a 'belief system'?'
Belief system? What is that? I don't have a 'belief system.' I believe in Jesus. I believe he is who He said He was. I believe He died and Rose from the dead. And I believe the explanations he gave for why he did that. If a 'system' has arisen from that belief, it is merely my response to what I have found to be an undeniable truth which demands serious thought and full evaluation of the implications and thus, a full evaluation of how I stand in relation to the whole scope of what Jesus said and did, and the fact that I place some value in the knowledge and advice of those who knew him, those who were 'there' and those who had encounters of him in such a profound and undeniable way as to have something important to say about who He is, and what that means to me. I don't really recognise this notion of 'adopting belief systems' which makes it sound like finding an ideology is a trendy or fashionable thing, like deciding to wear shell suits in the 90's.
But there's something more concerning in your statement which says a lot about the philosophical position you take in complete detatchment from reality.
You don't seem to realise that in between 10-15% of so-called 'alien encounter' participants, the retelling of events is plausible and cannot be explained away conveniently. You don't seem to realise that in many of these instances, evidence can be found, anecdotal evidence, physical evidence, corroborative evidence, circumstantial evidence for 'something' unusual happening. You don't seem to realise that the people in that fractional number of cases do not have a history of psychiatric illness, nor of delusional behaviour, nor of being 'believers' beforehand, and that they pass lie detector tests. You don't seem to have an awareness of the fact that many of them end up profoundly psychologically affected by what you say is a delusion or a deception, nor that in the vast majority of those cases which cannot be explained, the 'victims' don't end up describing little aliens like the stereotypes would like to portray, but instead effectively describe sights, sounds and smells typically associated with paranormal research into 'the demonic', and often describe their 'assailants' as being other-dimensional, rather than inter-galactic, and that they conclude that whatever the nature of their encounter, whether it takes place in an entirely virtual kind of way, or whether it involves a crossover of dimensionality and suspension of space time as we know it, it is forced upon them externally and against their will, and it is malevolent (evil) in origin.
You seem to have the view that if mainstream science doesn't wave an issue around the place, there must be no issue, and that if these things were plausible and real, that somehow authorities, medical professionals, scientists, military researchers, and 'investigators' would make it front page news. You have a gross misestimation of the appropriate response to inconvenient truths, which is always this: if the powers that be stir up hysteria willingly, then its propaganda... if they sweep things under a carpet because they fear the hysteria response in the public arena, then there's no smoke without fire. Quit believing the misinformation and the disinformation, and try searching for established experts in the field, instead of the usually politically motivated ten-minute experts, almost always unqualified and having never studied such things a day in their lives, who present the 'official' response to 'X-FIles' fiction and laugh it off and try to tell us that there is nothing beyond our understanding, and that even if there was, it would mean no harm and 'come in peace', while they make sarcastic jokes about how rational, sane people don't really believe in Star Trek aliens. Just like rational, sane people don't really believe in triangulation of crossfire as being more plausible than bullets that turn corners and sustain no damage having been fired and having made several entry and exit wounds through skin, flesh and bone.
"And you'd be required to believe people saying their non-Christian deities have committed unverifiable acts."
By what logic is drawing conclusions based on profound, compelling historical testimony and the evidence of eyewitnessed events which changed the world as we know it for two thousand years comparable to having to 'equally' believe in a plethora of mostly 'chinese whispered' deific identities derived from Babylonian Paganism (the corrupt offshoot of original Hebraic tradition) just because some people believe pre-historical, unevidenced, mythologies pertaining to them? If the history that Moses penned, passed and preserved in oral tradition, was not compelling beyond 'mythology' in its own right, then certainly the historically recorded events which took place down the line from Moses, including the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the prophecy in between, did a bloody good job of confirming that 'mythology' as being utterly true. No other belief can make that claim - that even the most mythological parts, prehistorical parts of their tradition, have been confirmed without question since that time in supernatural but undeniable ways, and are corroborated by neutrally interpreted scientific data, and studies of plausibility and possibility. The history from Moses to Jesus is not in doubt, and Jesus of Nazareth is the central character of the whole, who confirms in his very identity, and in the proof of his ability to demonstrate the supernatural in ways never seen before, that he has sole authority in asserting which tradition of 'God' is true. What other 'deity' can assert that position, having made such an impact in history pacifically, without empire or agenda, by testimony and eyewitness evidence alone... The alternatives are simply impossible, not merely implausible.
I'm compelled to believe that which is demonstrated. I'm not compelled to believe that which is merely stated.- Squidwalk, on 05/03/2008, -0/+9Where to start, where to start.
Lets start with your ad-hominem attack of my Christian education. I've had 10 years of Sunday school experience, 4 years of Catholic High school, and 6 years of youth group study. Then in college I wrote my English thesis on the relationship between biblical themes and pre-Christian religious themes in early Anglo-Christian mythos. I've also done a great deal of independent study on cross-religious cultural themes, I was a bit Joseph Campbell fan for a while. Now may I ask what qualifys you as such a source on these matters that you feel justified in using ad hominem attacks?
As a short answer to your "what diety has had the historical effect of Jesus?" well, Budda. He's a pretty popular guy. And despite not having a direct name for a deity, there's a lot of passionate Hindus too. Now as for your argument that pre-historic gods are infirior to Christians gods, you're showing your own religious ignorance. The Christian (and especially the Jewish) religion wasn't a daily journal, it was based on oral tradition that continued on for at least decades before it was recorded. It has all the same flaws as other religions with oral histories, and to condemn others on those criteria is hyperAnglocentric.
Now lets talk about Occam's Razor. If I where around 2000 years ago to hear about an individual doing miracles, the simplest explanation is that he is spreading rumors or tricking people. If I heard about his arrest and call for execution, I would assume his treachery was found out. And if I heard a group of his friends were saying he rose from the dead, I'd assume they were doing it to ride out the popularity of their controversial friend. To immediately assume there is a new God that replaces all that I believe in should not be the first response to this evidence. That isn't even close to being closed-minded, that's just being reasonable.
So SampleX, you seem quite knowledgeable about religion. Maybe you can explain to me how you can feel epistemologically justified in following a foundationalist belief system. Or if that one's too hard for you, a simple refutation of the Problem of Evil will suffice. Show me this religion of your's that has gone refuted for 2000 years, I haven't seen that yet.- SampleX, on 05/07/2008, -4/+1"Lets start with your ad-hominem attack of my Christian education. I've had 10 years of Sunday school experience, 4 years of Catholic High school, and 6 years of youth group study."
You summed it up for me. If I want to learn Islam, I don't go to a group which practices 95% Hinduism with a 5% Islamic tradition. If I want to study Satanism, I don't go to a group that practices 95% Jainism and 5% LaVeyan Occultism. If I want to study Biblical Christianity, I wouldn't go to a group which had spent a millenia and a half persecuting and murdering Bible believing Christians in order to forcibly conform them to an imperialistic theocratic religion which was provably anti-Biblical, Biblically additive or omittive, and observably pre-Christian pagan for my views on what constitutes Biblical Christianity. Talk about preaching by the perverted.
Your post sums up repeatedly why we're going to disagree. You think that intellectualism (the use of fancy philosophical terms) has some great bearing on universal truth and reality, and somehow that process justifies the ultimate end of making bad decisions.
"Then in college I wrote my English thesis on the relationship between biblical themes and pre-Christian religious themes in early Anglo-Christian mythos."
Ah yes, that's what must make you supremely knowledgeable and, indeed, right about your conclusions. Let me guess... you concluded, because of your prejudice, that Biblical themes FOLLOW pre-Christian religious themes, having rejected the possibility that pre-Christian religious themes follow and diverge from a pure Hebraic root preserved in Old Testament tradition. Still... seems about right for Catholic education... study how Christianity got its virtues from pagan demon worship.
"I've also done a great deal of independent study on cross-religious cultural themes,"
Good for you. That's the ticket... don't look at the trail of evidence pointing to truth, spend your life studying how people interpret what they hear and formulate ideas out of it without a just cause for doing so. I've done a great deal of independent study on the Bible and on Jesus of Nazareth. That's how I learned to speak with some authority on the subject.
"I was a bit Joseph Campbell fan for a while"
Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows the fool?
"As a short answer to your "what diety has had the historical effect of Jesus?" well, Budda. He's a pretty popular guy. And despite not having a direct name for a deity, there's a lot of passionate Hindus too."
This is an answer, is it? It's an educated answer? I present you with the historical impact of Jesus of Nazareth, and you come back with 'Buddha (you don't even spell it correctly) is a pretty popular guy.' VD's pretty popular too, given the number of people who partake in it. Oh, and 'Hindus are quite passionate.' Yeah, well flat-earth advocates in the Catholic church were pretty passionate also. They were also pretty wrong. And looked pretty stupid.
"Now as for your argument that pre-historic gods are infirior to Christians gods, you're showing your own religious ignorance."
No. What you're demonstrating is that under mythological conditions, on the basis of legend, you have equal respect for all deities, whether they were real, or whether someone invented them for any number of reasons, and they are, in fact, a fairy story. I'm taking it to the material level... if we're talking about evidence which appears to be historical record of a people's interaction (physical) with a deity, then the Judeo-Christian tradition has it... and if we're to take that evidence, and interpret it the way the people who were there at the time did, then we have a clear cut case of a deity confirming their existence, their potency and their power and ability physically, as opposed to mere ancient legends. We're talking about a historically corroborated tradition which is compellingly evidenced by Jesus of Nazareth - again, physicality, corroborated evidence, historical event, eyewitness account, as opposed to the historical record of some people worshipping wooden and metal statues, and attributing natural law to the intervention of their god, with nothing more profound than that to offer in evidence, and oddly enough, a history of deities which were slighted, belittled, or defeated by the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These deities have so much value, that they offer nothing to this day, and pale into insignificance when compared to the evidence relating to Jesus of Nazareth's supernatural identity.
"The Christian (and especially the Jewish) religion wasn't a daily journal, it was based on oral tradition that continued on for at least decades before it was recorded."
Several points to make here. Firstly, I'm not talking about a religion being a daily journal, and whether the Biblical texts are a daily journal or not is utterly irrelevent. They DO however, present a history which is of the utmost relevence. No historical precedent exists by which eyewitnesses to events are either disqualified, or become implausible, because they do not record their observations in journals, but instead enter into an oral tradition and ultimately commit what they have witnessed, or experienced, to record. This is the nature of historical documentation. It is not, however, safe to look at historical records and determine that they are just as likely to be fatally flawed as non-historical documents, as works of fiction. The way to prove your point is to prove your point, not to assume that you COULD prove your point if only you had some evidence to prove it with.
"and to condemn others on those criteria is hyperAnglocentric."
Irrelevent and indulgent use of 'conceptual intellectualism.' It's the invention of a 'name' to give a certain position, by which to imply inherent negativity in order to steer debate by means of some form of political correctness.
"Now lets talk about Occam's Razor. If I where around 2000 years ago to hear about an individual doing miracles, the simplest explanation is that he is spreading rumors or tricking people."
Idiocy. Pure idiocy. The simplest explanation never involves the plotting of complex motivations, and clever devices of trickery and the means to deceive people, not to mention the invention of purpose and opportunity. The simplest explanation is this: that it happened exactly as was said. The simplest answer, under this 'philosophical model' is that Jesus was exactly who he said He was, did exactly what was said of him, and that by means of the 'path of least resistance' as it were, it is more likely that Jesus acheived the flawless reputation that he did, and the physical manifestation of the miraculous by being as capable as the evidence, prima fascie, suggests.
"If I heard about his arrest and call for execution, I would assume his treachery was found out."
Under the principle of 'Occam's Razor', it is imperitive to make as few assumptions as possible. You do not need to make assumptions about the arrest and call for execution. The reasoning behind it, the connivance, and the outcome and process, are not matters of secrecy, they are corroborated matters of historically plausible eyewitness evidence and historical research by very compelling historians.
"And if I heard a group of his friends were saying he rose from the dead, I'd assume they were doing it to ride out the popularity of their controversial friend."
Illogical, and leaves too many unanswered questions, not only on the fact that neither Jesus, nor the disciples had a 'ride' on popularity at all (Jesus had just been brutalised and executed, hardly a hero's fanfare in this strange 'fame' you seem to think he had gained, and the least likely, least plausible, and least convincing explanation is the one that states that the disciples, who suffered terrribly and were murdered for their profession of eyewitness accounts, did so because they thought it would be a great ride... it would be utterly unbelieveable that there is no record, given the lengths to which the authorities went to try to stop the disciples, of a significant number of these 'eyewitnesses' collapsing under interrogation and spilling the beans on the 'conspiracy.' There were several hundred years before the Bastard of Catholicism raised its ugly head, in which the Gospel accounts could have been utterly disproven, had evidence existed, while Christians were a pacifist and powerless minority, fleeing oppression and dodging capture and incapable of forming an organised force of conspiracy or connivance. Again, this is not the simplest explanation. The simplest explanation, no assumptions or leaps of logic required, are that those who gave testimony told exactly what they had seen, and no further calculation or manipulation of the story is required in order to make the explanation 'acceptable' in a world which seems to have an opposition to the idea that absolutes exist.
"To immediately assume there is a new God that replaces all that I believe in should not be the first response to this evidence."
This was not a new God. Jesus Himself revealed from 1500 years of historical texts how, He claimed, those texts spoke of Him, predicted Him, prophecied Him, were indeed even inspired by Him. In your analysis you assume that the illusion of chronological age, and the illusion of 'cultural record', has any bearing on originality or authenticity. You assume that what you see as being deities older than the authorship of the Bible must inevitably be forerunners to Biblical tradition, and yet most of the claims of 'ancient religion' are unprovable, unwitnessed, undemonstrable, or are demonstrably amalgam from prior traditions, and none of the traditions in question have ever been ruled out as having been predacessorial to the 'original' Hebrew tradition, rather that Hebrew tradition, like Hebrew language, appears to be surprisingly 'original', and gives the appearance that parallel traditions, languages and cultures 'branched off' from an original root. Indeed, the earliest artifacts found in regions of China indicate that far from being the polytheistic, ancestor worshipping esoterists traditionally associated with Oriental religiosity, population groups in China actually had a monotheistic tradition, of Creator-God theology, which bore striking parallels in many ways with ancient Hebrew tradition. It should also be pointed out that a stone carving on a 5000 year old piece of rock is no proof of anything. The carving could be 1000 years old. I can go outside and etch my name on the side of a 10 year old car, it wouldn't be safe to assume that my name was etched on it from the time the car was manufactured. There isn't a single way that you can establish that what is conveyed in the Bible doesn't utterly pre-date everything you've come to accept as 'ancient religion', and indeed large portions of the 'evidence' for the age of ancient pagan traditions, particularly in the Middle East, either comes from, or is corroborated by the Bible. The Bible doesn't attempt to make an argument out of 'which statue came first' - that's an argument for deities that have been unable to demonstrate their existence, reality and power.
The earliest followers of Jesus were not believers in a 'new God', this was what made them unique... they were believers in a prophecied fulfilment, manifestation, of the God they'd had for thousands of years, in the form of the Messiah that they had anticipated, thanks to their prophets, for thousands of years, based on promises made thousands of years before. Jesus didn't win a single person over on the basis of 'hey, I'm a new God, and this is something funky to try on for size.' Everything He did was done on the basis of the fulfilment of prophecy and the Scriptures that the Hebrews already knew.
" That isn't even close to being closed-minded, that's just being reasonable."
Nothing remotely reasonable about it. When you hear the news, when you hear an interview, when you see eyewitness accounts on the TV, do you automatically and naturally disregard everything they say, conclude that they either don't know what they are talking about, or are somehow deluded or lying, and start trying to figure out their motive for doing such. If the position you're taking is that in mundane details, people must be being truthful, or are somehow more likely to be honest, but that if the details are extraordinary, it must be a hoax, then that's not a reasonable position at all - just closed-mindedness.
"Maybe you can explain to me how you can feel epistemologically justified in following a foundationalist belief system."
I could even tell you how I can feel anally relieved following a colonic irrigation, but what purpose would it have hypothesising, and theorising, and philosophising, when there are evident truths to respond to. In the light that Jesus was exactly who He said He was, and that the evidence is accurate, why would I give a damn about philosophising justifications for reason to believe. Such philosophy, like most philosophy, is an issue of effectively lazy thinkers justifying their own self-absorbtion by finding reasons to utter empty words, about subjects they don't understand, by inventing the appearance that their many words carry meaning, and are indicative of a process of unravelling truth. Philosophy never did anything but confuse fundamental issues. There are facts, or not. There are responses to make to truth, or the - Squidwalk, on 05/08/2008, -0/+4First, I'm going to count the ad-hominem attacks:
1. The attack on my Christian education: Firstly, my Sunday School time was Lutheran, and my youth group/bible study time was Baptist. The Catholic School was, of course, Catholic. I think this gives me a solid cross-divisional frame of reference.
2. "don't look at the trail of evidence pointing to truth, spend your life studying how people interpret what they hear and formulate ideas out of it without a just cause for doing so."
So how is the methodical interpretation of ancient non-christian religious texts different from the methodical interpretation of ancient christian religious texts? How is your "independent study" of Jesus more valid when you've just committed against using secondary sources? That just doesn't make sense.
3. Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows the fool?
This is a simple ad-hominem attack on both Campbell and I, with no justification. If you decry the work of Campbell, you should show reason for it instead of just insulting a dead man.
4. "VD's pretty popular too, given the number of people who partake in it."
This is an ad-hominen straw man argument, as Craig said. You failed to refute my point that Eastern religion has had as large a historical impact as Christianity.
5. "if we're talking about evidence which appears to be historical record of a people's interaction (physical) with a deity"
You're going to have to make a case for the superior validity of "historical evidence" based off of oral tradition for anyone to take it seriously. Report is found to be on average 60% correct, and the written bible is the product of quite a few reports repeated for decades before they were committed to paper.
6. "whether the Biblical texts are a daily journal or not is utterly irrelevant"
Another combination straw man/ad hominem argument. The daily journal statement I wrote was a lead in to the greater point that the new testament started as an oral tradition, and hence carries with it the flaws associated with oral tradition. You chose not to respond to the actual point of the statement, and fail to refute it.
7. "It's the invention of a 'name' to give a certain position, by which to imply inherent negativity in order to steer debate by means of some form of political correctness"
Here you're accusing me of an ad hominem attack unjustly, as you have not in fact proven that your declaration of the the superior validity of the proto-biblical oral tradition has any greater validity than that of other oral traditions. My word is descriptive, and you failed to prove that the position it represents is invalid.
8. "Idiocy. Pure idiocy. The simplest explanation never involves the plotting of complex motivations"
Saying "idiocy" twice won't make it so, but it will make you guilty of your eighth ad hominem attack in that post. I was not describing complex motivations, those I described where quite simple. You need to show that is belief that a man spreading rumors is more complex than believing he is the human incarnation of the one true god. How can you even reach that conclusion?
9. "You do not need to make assumptions about the arrest and call for execution. The reasoning behind it, the connivance, and the outcome and process, are not matters of secrecy, they are corroborated matters of historically plausible eyewitness evidence and historical research by very compelling historians."
Again, you're acting as if your "historically plausible" situation is justified by as much. Plausibility and justification do not go hand in hand. And again, you are showing reasonless Angelocentricism. There isn't anything that makes your historical research any more valid than that of other religions. It isn't proof.
10. "Illogical, and leaves too many unanswered questions, not only on the fact that neither Jesus, nor the disciples had a 'ride' on popularity at all (Jesus had just been brutalised and executed, hardly a hero's fanfare in this strange 'fame' you seem to think he had gained..."
Lets talk about Jesus's fame in the new testiment. There's the palm sunday event, and the widespread trail/execution. Think about how celebrity gossip works. When Heath Ledger was cast in the new Batman this was touted, and when he died the first new reaction was to spread rumors of his association with child actresses in order to profit from his demise. Think of all the John Belushi stories everyone in the hotel sector has in LA. This is standard fare, and the lesser technology of the biblical era would make rumor-mongering even stronger.
On the other hand, you said that explanation is "Illogical, and leaves too many unanswered questions." I don't know what those questions might be, but I can think of a few logical fallacies with believing the whole "Jesus is resurrected" report. For one thing, people don't get resurrected, and never have. For another thing, there's no real reason he would need to exist, die, and be resurrected if the God he represents could accomplish the absolution of original sin without the pageantry. It's really hard to swallow that the resurrection leaves few unanswered questions and follows logic. You're going to have to prove that one.
11. "This was not a new God. Jesus Himself revealed from 1500 years of historical texts how..."
If Jesus doesn't count as a new god, then why didn't people worship Jesus before his birth? Why don't Jews and Islamics worship him? That religious forking sounds a lot like "new god" to me.
12. "most of the claims of 'ancient religion' are unprovable, unwitnessed, undemonstrable, or are demonstrably amalgam from prior traditions"
So you're saying the oral tradition-generated witness accounts of people two centuries ago count as reliable evidence? All research agrees that modern witness accounts of extreme acts do not meet the accuracy to use them as evidence. The only reason courts accept them is precedent. Surely oral history based 2000 year old accounts are at least less accurate than modern ones.
Secondly, I'd really like to see this evidence you have that suggests ancient religions descend from religion akin to Christianity. Please explain how the Christmas Tree came about, or the traditions of Mistletoe. What of the heavily published roman accounts of pre-Christian religion and it's subsequent modifications to the post-Christian empire? These are accounts more recent than much of the New Testament, and have gigantic sculptures to prove these gods were worshiped in such ways. You don't have any validity in your claims that Christianity was the precursor to other religions, because all available evidence contradicts those claims. Why is Joseph Campbell such a fool again?
13. "When you hear the news, when you hear an interview, when you see eyewitness accounts on the TV, do you automatically and naturally disregard everything they say, conclude that they either don't know what they are talking about, or are somehow deluded or lying"
YES! I don't follow news stories word for word, because there's usually a spin on things. Look at how many alarmist reports there are. The Fox News 4-chan one is a great example. These people are selling you stories as entertainment, and you need to cross reference these before you can believe them. Following reports without questioning them is sheepish.
14. "what purpose would it have hypothesising, and theorising, and philosophising, when there are evident truths to respond to."
You hit the nail on the head with that one! The purpose of using devices such as logic and philosophy is to make sense of existence. Your so-called "evident truths" don't have any content, they can't be used to justify anything because they are not justified themselves. All conclusions that come from your foundational beliefs are entirely meaningless. To commit to foundationalism is to commit to illogic.
15. "Such philosophy, like most philosophy, is an issue of effectively lazy thinkers justifying their own self-absorbtion by finding reasons to utter empty words, about subjects they don't understand"
So the best way to disprove philosophy is to arbitrarily assault it? How are people who spend their entire lives thinking "lazy thinkers?" Is it less lazy to unquestioning adopt foundational beliefs and leave it at that? Considering you disreguarded my challenge to defend foundationalism and solve the Problem of Evil, are you doing it because they're "subjects [you] don't understand"?
You are covering your ears and reciting arbitrary dogma, sir. Why do you even bother discussing things with people when you reject logic entirely? Isn't debate free of logic just a shouting match between buffoons? - SampleX, on 05/09/2008, -3/+1You can count 'ad hominem' attacks all you like. You're another shallow peanut-brained 'intellectual' who takes more pleasure in being able to give a name to a type of argument or discussion and attempting to rule it out based on insinuations about whether you approve of the methodology or not, than you are in having an authoritative grasp of a subject and getting to grips with the issues involved.
I'll address the point in the same order you did.
"Firstly, my Sunday School time was Lutheran, and my youth group/bible study time was Baptist. The Catholic School was, of course, Catholic. I think this gives me a solid cross-divisional frame of reference."
Utterly, utterly irrelevent. What you're saying is that if you sit in nominal education in some religion or indeed in any subject, that you will inevitably be qualified to be an expert in the matter. Rubbish. That's like saying that because you spent fifteen years of your life in a room with a photograph of a person you never met, you know everything there is to know about them and are somehow supremely qualified to speak with authority in respect of them. One only needs to look at the clueless 'nominal' Christians that emerge from so-called 'Christian education' who don't actually know what they believe, to realise that the churches don't know what they're teaching or why, and the students don't know what they're learning or why. Again, cite your perceived 'experience' all you like, it clearly hasn't stood for much, because far more educated (and far less educated) people than you have not found reason to safely conclude the kind of dismissals that you have.
"So how is the methodical interpretation of ancient non-christian religious texts different from the methodical interpretation of ancient christian religious texts?"
Which 'ancient non-Christian religious texts' are we talking about? Are we talking about the ones of unknown origin, unknown authorship, and dubious historical context? Are we talking about legends belonging to cultures long since died out, unpreserved in living tradition, events unwitnessed and merely rumoured? Because when I'm talking about Biblical record, I'm talking about a tradition which historically appears to be both original, and authentic, much of which ran concurrently in parallel with an observable, testable history of people, places, and events. I'm talking about living traditions, carried on in living generations, not based on remote and ancient antiquity, unwitnessed and unevidenced, but based instead on the audacious presentation of historical claims which could be traced, then and now - geneologies, histories, biographies, geographies, names, people and places. I'm not talking about mythical lands and mythical beasts. I'm talking about a tradition which is historically supported and for which no evidence has ever been presented which even remotely comes close to presenting a material reason for such a tradition to be implausible, let alone impossible. I'm not much of a one to rush to bow in reverence to an ancient tradition just because some modern revisionist wants to call it a major world religion of some note and reputation. The Biblical testament is factually head and shoulders above all others and would attain a ranking of material pre-eminence whether you chose to believe in its philosophical statements or not. There is no escaping that fact. We do not turn to the Bhaghavad Gita or the writings of Buddha or to ancient texts of Sumerian religions for historical information for one simple reason - we have no means of verifying their accuracy, their authenticity, their origin, or indeed their purpose. The same cannot be said for the Bible, which plays a valuable part in historical reconstruction and corroboration in the geographic region to which it refers.
"If you decry the work of Campbell, you should show reason for it instead of just insulting a dead man."
The dead cannot be insulted. They are dead. By contrast, their work and their passions are judged on the basis of the conclusions they drew. Campbell was another 'philosophical revisionist' on the subject of God, and treated a great deal of compelling argument as if it were mere invention of storytellers, without ever raising a single scrap of historical evidence to prove that he could safely call eyewitnesses liars, and debunk compelling truths as if they were just pattern and process repeating themselves. In short, Campbell, a self-declared expert in 'mythology' (which is a role which assumes from the outset that no truth exists in ancient storytelling and conveyance of tradition), participated in inventing a mythology which would be used by atheists and agnostics alike to dismiss and belittle the most compelling historical evidence we have for the existence, nature and identity of God, relegating vital information to the libraries of comparitive theistic legend. He spoke bollocks, his process was bollocks, and he is yet another example of 'populist' intellectualism obsessing over pre-determined philosophical postulation, rather than the weight of evidence and historical fact.
"You failed to refute my point that Eastern religion has had as large a historical impact as Christianity."
Arguable. Christianity makes its impact on the basis of one individual being the fulfilment of thousands of years of prophecy, one individual performing the most amazing acts, one individual observed by history, one individual eyewitnessed and evidenced, one individual making amazing claims, one individual backing his claims up, and one individual dying in an extraordinary sequence of events, and one individual rising from the dead. Christianity is about one individual making a global impact for two thousand years, reaching even to this day, in massive numbers, into the grip of 'Eastern religion' and causing people to change their lives, change their beliefs, and risk their own right to breathe suffering persecution at the hands of those who follow 'Eastern religion.' Now, if that isn't 'impact' I don't know what is. To qualify your argument, what, exactly, do you mean when you say 'Eastern Religion' has had as big an impact as Christianity. It seems you're using a very large umbrella to explain why a massive and vague cluster of disparate traditions, when clumped together in a false collective, might appear by virtue of scale, to have had as great an impact as one individual through the words and deeds of a single lifetime. It also seems that 'Eastern religion' has a tradition of demanding that everyone born in 'eastern' cultures be born 'into' the religion, and therefore takes its numbers by enforced education, then, in many cases, threatening death against those who dare reconsider what they believe and change their minds. On the other hand, the impact of Christianity has not been found in how a few disciples of a guru could raise their children, and then grandchildren, and then successive generations in the arcane secrets of some old fool up a mountain who did not live and die a miraculous life, who was not eyewitnessed by thousands, who did not develop a following of those who changed their lives dynamically as a result, not of their life, or their death, but of their resurrection... it has been found not in the traditional inheritance of 'nominal' religiosity, but rather the impact is found in the dynamic changing of lives, the conversion by conviction, the testament of a resurrection. So how are you measuring 'impact', and what exactly do you mean when you say 'eastern religion.' It seems to me that what you're claiming is as vacuous as saying 'White-skinned population has had as great an impact as Christianity.' If you're going to measure the impact of Christ, the equivalent comparison is not a vague and unnatural western revisionist collectivisation of as many differing traditions based on geography and common themes as possible... the comparitive would be another individual. Did another man say and do the things that Jesus did in a real, material, eyewitnessed and evidenced way which caused the otherwise inexplicable impact that Jesus did?
"You're going to have to make a case for the superior validity of "historical evidence" based off of oral tradition for anyone to take it seriously."
Actually, 'historical evidence' speaks for itself sufficiently for me to know that I don't need to make a 'case' for anyone to take seriously. They won't take the evidence regarding this subject any more seriously than they have a will to do already - some of the greatest minds of all time have studied it and approved it, and verified it, and have been ridiculed, laughed at and ignored squarely by those who choose to reject. That will not change, irrespective of what hoops I jump through for you.
"Report is found to be on average 60% correct, and the written bible is the product of quite a few reports repeated for decades before they were committed to paper."
Utter garbage, and utterly irrelevent anyway. History is not philosophy. Historians don't assess their sources on the basis of spurious and unsupportable claims of 'statistics', and there's always the problem that 78.2% of all statistics quoted in debates are made up on the spot and have no supporting evidence. Historians don't deal in statistical approximations and percentages... they deal in facts. Here is evidence... Here is corroboration... Here is testimony... Here is eyewitness report. You may think that historians take vague, unconnected fragments of legend and thus assume them to be true until proven otherwise, or indeed need to 'guess' at whether they might be remotely accurate. The wealth of testimony and the evidence of the effect that the Gospel of Jesus had both locally and then globally in such a short period of time is compelling enough to allow historians to believe that the accounts are not falsified, nor mistaken, nor forged. The historian never makes the assumption that if he has a thousand accounts of the same events, that 40% of them must be inaccurate - and further, the statistic, if it applied, would do more to damn your own assumption that the reports must be untrustworthy, because by the statistic you present, 60% of the accounts are accurate, so if all the known plausible historical accounts of some of these Biblical events generally corroborate with each other, as they do, with a more than 90% corroboration rate, then it would be near statistical certainty that if 60% of the accounts could be expected to be accurate, and 90% of them say the same thing, then actually 90% of the accounts must be accurate. The need of 'statistical probability' in handling 'reports' would appear to draw a lot of questions about how much you actually know about your sources and where they came from, and whether they are authentic. The historian finds evidence that he can pin some degree of certainty with respect to authenticity and authority... only the philosopher accepts testimony from anywhere and everywhere in the hope that it supports his conclusion, without establishing whether the accounts can be trusted. This is the basis of the famed philosophical debates over whether non-Biblical (apocryphal) texts should be accepted as an authority on Biblical matters, in spite of the inability to establish the authorship, origin, timeframe, or even geography of so-called 'apocryphal' books. Just because something is written and appears to make claims on a given subject, does not make the author, or the source, authoritative and authentic. Anyone could sit down and forge a document or fabricate a point of view, and without being able to trace the history and origin of the text in question, you'd never actually know when some ignorant farmer discovered a miraculously perfectly preserved leather bound journal shoved in a dry stone wall in the Middle East before taking it to an antique market in Egypt, finding eager people who would happily date it to 'Biblical' times simply because it made reference to Biblical themes.
""whether the Biblical texts are a daily journal or not is utterly irrelevant"...Another combination straw man/ad hominem argument."
What? Where do you get that from? Or is the intelligent rationale cracking, and now you're so eager to conduct an entire argument based on semantics and dialectic that you see a 'straw man' in every closet and under every bed. Get a brain. Then turn it on.
"The daily journal statement I wrote was a lead in to the greater point that the new testament started as an oral tradition"
Irrelevent. I saw a car accident yesterday. The first thing I did was ring someone to tell them. When the police interviewed me this morning they did not say 'ah... your accounting of what you experienced is now diminished and invalidated because you told someone first.' Revisionist attempts to separate history into 'reliable' and 'unreliable' based on the flawed notion that 'instant documentation and textual dissemination' is any more trustworthy is simply idiotic, and a weak argument to form against sources which, however 'orally' they may have disseminated, have been historically demonstrated as retaining the utmost integrity, being unchanged, and are established as being the testimony of eyewitnesses who were around for long enough to verify that their words had not been twisted or mistaken. What you dismiss as 'oral tradition' was actually first hand eyewitness account from individuals sufficiently interactive and involved in the process b - Squidwalk, on 05/09/2008, -0/+6You aren't even paying attention or addressing any of my topics, and you're baseless insulting me. Years of religious education is equivalent to sitting in a room with one picture? Grow up. When adults discuss things, they need to use logic an reason to come to truth. I suggest you invest in some education beyond your foundational beliefs. No one will be convinced by them.
- SampleX, on 05/09/2008, -3/+1CONTINUED...
...before and after the events to be authoritative and authentic and indeed to justify the third hand retelling of the same testimony, in dissemination, on their behalf, indeed corroborating and commenting upon it. You talk about the 'New Testament' carrying with it the flaws associated with oral tradition. Vague and ambiguous, and without proof... what are these inevitable inherent flaws? This is lazy thinking, that because you don't like the conclusions drawn from what you call an 'oral' tradition that somehow you can dismiss the challenge they pose by implying that there must be some inherent fatal flaw which precludes oral traditions being accurate. This is simply not historically sound, in the light of the evidence, and is a prejudicial and baseless assumption to begin with, which becomes a self-satisfying circular argument, since you can present no material cause for why the prima fascie evaluation of the historical sources cannot be trusted, and thus claim that you don't need to, because your generalised assumption is sufficient.
"Here you're accusing me of an ad hominem attack unjustly, as you have not in fact proven that your declaration of the the superior validity of the proto-biblical oral tradition has any greater validity than that of other oral traditions."
The evidence is self supporting. No other 'religious book' has been found to represent history so plausibly and accurately, no other religious books have been able to sustain the chronological compilation of thematic, threaded, recurrent messages through cross-corroborative, disparate sources, from varied authorship, and varied geography, for a variety of reasons without any reasonable possibility of collusion or collaboration, and no visible signs or, again, plausible possibility of conspirance nor motivation, which so thoroughly accounted not only for a plausible 'prehistory' as well as a historically accurate account of historical events. The oddity here is that you primarily indicate that you object to the 'pre-historical' aspect of the Bible without noting that out of 66 books, only one of them pertains strictly to pre-historical events, so called. the other 65 books pertain to much more easily verifiable 'real time' history which is not in material dispute. What you're saying is that a volume which is historically valuable and 96% accurate must inevitably be fatally flawed because, according to you, the other 4% might have been carried in oral tradition. But there's another problem with that position - the fact that the overwhelming majority of the contents of that one problematic book are actually historically corroborated in some form or another as being either factual, or entirely plausible and supportable, without mentioning their inclusion, or reflection, in other traditions which appear to be divergent from, or parallel to the Biblical tradition in the first place. Further, given the startling accuracy of the most 'supernatural' part of the Bible, it's penchant for precise prophetic prediction, in such volume, particulartly the compelling prophecies pertaining to Jesus of Nazareth, it would seem ridiculous and churlish to conclude that the whole was not compelling, simply because you wanted to be pedantic about some minutia, which compared to the wealth of stunning eyewitnessed events in the Bible which are part of a much broader acknowledged history based entirely in fact, would actually not form reasonable doubt, but would actually be accepted as being 'likely' to be true given the accuracy of the rest of the material. In other words, based on the accuracy of what Moses wrote, and why, the parts which you claim exist only in oral tradition are actually incredibly likely to be utterly reliable. We may have no historical archives or artifacts to verify them TODAY, but don't make the mistake of assuming that such historical evidences were not a matter of record, a matter of fact, a matter of public knowledge 'back in the day' - one of the historical uses of the Bible, in actual fact, has been to present evidence of writings, events, incidents recorded in 'legend' as it were, but missing from the historical record, were it not for the fact that they are supported or corroborated in the Bible, giving strong indications of the past existence of such evidences long since lost to time and documentary decay. There is evidence of this between the four gospels alone, and that is only a two thousand year old set of texts - let alone the 3500 or 4000 year old documents that would have been necessary to 'justify' Moses. This is the historian's job - to piece together evidence, to suspend philosophical objections, and to make reasonable conclusions based on the burden of the evidence, its authenticity and its plausibility, not to mention its broader context and significance.
"Saying "idiocy" twice won't make it so, but it will make you guilty of your eighth ad hominem attack in that post. I was not describing complex motivations, those I described where quite simple. You need to show that is belief that a man spreading rumors is more complex than believing he is the human incarnation of the one true god."
Oh my God, no... I can't be guilty of an ad hominem! Say it isn't so... The world must be ending. Rather be guilty of that, than of idiocy, and depending upon philosophical argument and the analysis of the manner of debate, than be found unable to actually discuss an issue of substance intelligently without retorting to semantics, self-serving dialectic.
And yes, your idea might seem 'simple' to a simple mind... because you haven't considered the implications of where it leads and the complexity of what would be involved in a conspiracy so gigantic and complete that it would confound mankind for two thousand years, engineered by rough galilean fishermen and their co-conspirators, who were so desperate to propagate an unfounded myth that they would not only drag tens of thousands of people into it with them without having a single benefit from doing so, but would suffer horribly and die for it. No... this is not the 'simplest' answer... the simplest answer is that they saw what they said they saw, there are no lies involved, no conspiracy to unravel, and everything that appears to have happened historically happened in exactly the same context as it is recorded, and had the same effect as we can see witnessed in history. The invention of a conspirance will never be a more 'simple' answer than accepting the evidence and the testimony prima fascie. The disciples, the eyewitnesses to the events of the Bible, were not going to great lengths to invent a new God or create a new theology... that's the beauty of what the Bible represents. In the most part, they simply recorded what they witnessed, in the context in which it was witnessed, and drew conclusions by comparing continuity and themality based on their existing belief in a single deity. Continuity will also always be simpler than origination. So your argument for the 'simplest' solution to the problem also does not support the viewpoint that you take.
"Again, you're acting as if your "historically plausible" situation is justified by as much. Plausibility and justification do not go hand in hand."
Of course they do. Plausibility is justified by the revelation of historical evidence and eyewitness accounts. The two are not disparate. And you dodge the fact that the 'historically plausible' situation IS justified - by historical evidence.
"And again, you are showing reasonless Angelocentricism."
False, irrelevent and erroneous charge. The Gospel of Jesus is primarily Jewish, and Greek. It existed entirely in the same form as it does now, before England was even a national identity, and before English was even spoken. You've latched on to a snippet of worthless rhetorical terminology, and are trying to play with it like a new toy, trying to look smart. Consider yourself called on lazy and pointless tactics.
"There isn't anything that makes your historical research any more valid than that of other religions. It isn't proof."
Validity does not depend on 'proof.' The fact that more historical evidence exists which can be used to attempt to demonstrate 'proof' for the Christian faith gives that faith infinitely more 'validity' than any other faith for which there is less 'historical evidence', by interpretatation or otherwise. A faith based on a book which simply tells an unverifiable, unconnected ancient mythology which cannot be confirmed in any way, and has not been demonstrated over time, being historically documented, is vastly intellectually disadvantaged when compared to a faith based on a set of writings which demonstrate actual interaction in human history, real individuals, real events, tangible threads, prophetic fulfilment and continuity. On the intellectual level alone, if truth and evidence are what we seek, the Biblical tradition is head and shoulders above every other religious faith just on the evidence and the compelling argument it makes, alone.
"Lets talk about Jesus's fame in the new testiment. There's the palm sunday event, and the widespread trail/execution. Think about how celebrity gossip works."
I'm not thinking about celebrity gossip, because you're on the one hand trying to accuse me of the invented philosophical notion of, as you put it, 'anglocentricism', while on the other hand your revision of history depends entirely on your projection of modern phenomenon into an historical context. No, the Gospel of Jesus is not the same as 'celebrity gossip', these are eyewitnessed events which changed the world for a vast number of people of varied cultures, ethnic origins and religious backgrounds. No celebrity gossip, even in the mass media age, has made the difference to humanity on such a scale that the Gospel of Jesus has. Your argument doesn't even hold theoretical water, because it relies entirely on complete ignorance of the historical context, the historical evidence, and as is typical of that ignorance, you insinuate that the 'legend of Jesus' was the result of a couple of relatively isolated events in a single week of Jesus life, while failing to observe that the whole thrust of the momentum behind that week was the result of something that had been happening on a daily basis for several years longer than that. It would be preposterous to believe that Jesus could work the miraculous for three years, but then only became consequential because a few simpletons who held him in some regard concocted a 'legend' to keep his 'fame' alive or the notion that his popular support turned him into popular legend. What popular support? If you're not basing views on what we do have of the historical evidence of what took place, and instead are basing views on imagination, then you're dealing in a currency of pure fiction, while I'm dealing in a currency of what appears, prima fascie, to be factual and accurate. Oddly, my accounting of events fits the 'what happened next and how it happened' sequence of tidal-wave like 'ripples' that emanated from those events ultimately across the planet and to every population group over a really long period of time. Your explanation defies justification, because it is both unprecedented, and utterly unrealistic in the light of the historical evidence.
"When Heath Ledger was cast in the new Batman this was touted, and when he died the first new reaction was to spread rumors of his association with child actresses in order to profit from his demise."
For the record, no Hollywood celebrity has every been subject to the kind of claims that Jesus made about Himself, nor had I even heard of 'rumours of association with child actresses', and I also did not hear that he had spent three years healing the sick, making the lame walk, making the blind see, casting out demons and performing miracles, before being publicly brutalised and executed in order to rise from the dead having prophecied his own death and resurrection, all in fulfilment of prophecies, specific prophecies, which were all over 400 years old. This, therefore, is not the same thing. It isn't even a comparison of two sports which happen to use balls. These ideas are so far removed from each other, that you could row a boat for your whole lifetime in order to reach one from the other, and barely leave the dock.
"Think of all the John Belushi stories everyone in the hotel sector has in LA. This is standard fare, and the lesser technology of the biblical era would make rumor-mongering even stronger."
Actually, it wouldn't. 'Rumour mongering' over large areas requires mass media dissemination. In a lo-tech age, the relevence of the rumour would be lost the instant you reached a population group that had not already heard chapter and verse about the subject. If it were not for the compelling nature of what was actually going on, the idea that anyone outside of a few local towns in Galilee would have ever heard of Jesus, let alone his disciples, would be so implausible as to be impossible. A trickster would not be regarded as a miracle worker. It is arrogant modernist revisionism to assume that only a technologically advanced civilisation can spot charlatans and tricksters, and to imply that somehow more ancient peoples were duller and more stupid and easily duped. They were not. Some of the greatest movements of intellectual material gnosticism occurred in that age, and within that geography, and it appea - SampleX, on 05/09/2008, -2/+1CONTINUED...
...before and after the events to be authoritative and authentic and indeed to justify the third hand retelling of the same testimony, in dissemination, on their behalf, indeed corroborating and commenting upon it. You talk about the 'New Testament' carrying with it the flaws associated with oral tradition. Vague and ambiguous, and without proof... what are these inevitable inherent flaws? This is lazy thinking, that because you don't like the conclusions drawn from what you call an 'oral' tradition that somehow you can dismiss the challenge they pose by implying that there must be some inherent fatal flaw which precludes oral traditions being accurate. This is simply not historically sound, in the light of the evidence, and is a prejudicial and baseless assumption to begin with, which becomes a self-satisfying circular argument, since you can present no material cause for why the prima fascie evaluation of the historical sources cannot be trusted, and thus claim that you don't need to, because your generalised assumption is sufficient.
"Here you're accusing me of an ad hominem attack unjustly, as you have not in fact proven that your declaration of the the superior validity of the proto-biblical oral tradition has any greater validity than that of other oral traditions."
The evidence is self supporting. No other 'religious book' has been found to represent history so plausibly and accurately, no other religious books have been able to sustain the chronological compilation of thematic, threaded, recurrent messages through cross-corroborative, disparate sources, from varied authorship, and varied geography, for a variety of reasons without any reasonable possibility of collusion or collaboration, and no visible signs or, again, plausible possibility of conspirance nor motivation, which so thoroughly accounted not only for a plausible 'prehistory' as well as a historically accurate account of historical events. The oddity here is that you primarily indicate that you object to the 'pre-historical' aspect of the Bible without noting that out of 66 books, only one of them pertains strictly to pre-historical events, so called. the other 65 books pertain to much more easily verifiable 'real time' history which is not in material dispute. What you're saying is that a volume which is historically valuable and 96% accurate must inevitably be fatally flawed because, according to you, the other 4% might have been carried in oral tradition. But there's another problem with that position - the fact that the overwhelming majority of the contents of that one problematic book are actually historically corroborated in some form or another as being either factual, or entirely plausible and supportable, without mentioning their inclusion, or reflection, in other traditions which appear to be divergent from, or parallel to the Biblical tradition in the first place. Further, given the startling accuracy of the most 'supernatural' part of the Bible, it's penchant for precise prophetic prediction, in such volume, particulartly the compelling prophecies pertaining to Jesus of Nazareth, it would seem ridiculous and churlish to conclude that the whole was not compelling, simply because you wanted to be pedantic about some minutia, which compared to the wealth of stunning eyewitnessed events in the Bible which are part of a much broader acknowledged history based entirely in fact, would actually not form reasonable doubt, but would actually be accepted as being 'likely' to be true given the accuracy of the rest of the material. In other words, based on the accuracy of what Moses wrote, and why, the parts which you claim exist only in oral tradition are actually incredibly likely to be utterly reliable. We may have no historical archives or artifacts to verify them TODAY, but don't make the mistake of assuming that such historical evidences were not a matter of record, a matter of fact, a matter of public knowledge 'back in the day' - one of the historical uses of the Bible, in actual fact, has been to present evidence of writings, events, incidents recorded in 'legend' as it were, but missing from the historical record, were it not for the fact that they are supported or corroborated in the Bible, giving strong indications of the past existence of such evidences long since lost to time and documentary decay. There is evidence of this between the four gospels alone, and that is only a two thousand year old set of texts - let alone the 3500 or 4000 year old documents that would have been necessary to 'justify' Moses. This is the historian's job - to piece together evidence, to suspend philosophical objections, and to make reasonable conclusions based on the burden of the evidence, its authenticity and its plausibility, not to mention its broader context and significance.
"Saying "idiocy" twice won't make it so, but it will make you guilty of your eighth ad hominem attack in that post. I was not describing complex motivations, those I described where quite simple. You need to show that is belief that a man spreading rumors is more complex than believing he is the human incarnation of the one true god."
Oh my God, no... I can't be guilty of an ad hominem! Say it isn't so... The world must be ending. Rather be guilty of that, than of idiocy, and depending upon philosophical argument and the analysis of the manner of debate, than be found unable to actually discuss an issue of substance intelligently without retorting to semantics, self-serving dialectic.
And yes, your idea might seem 'simple' to a simple mind... because you haven't considered the implications of where it leads and the complexity of what would be involved in a conspiracy so gigantic and complete that it would confound mankind for two thousand years, engineered by rough galilean fishermen and their co-conspirators, who were so desperate to propagate an unfounded myth that they would not only drag tens of thousands of people into it with them without having a single benefit from doing so, but would suffer horribly and die for it. No... this is not the 'simplest' answer... the simplest answer is that they saw what they said they saw, there are no lies involved, no conspiracy to unravel, and everything that appears to have happened historically happened in exactly the same context as it is recorded, and had the same effect as we can see witnessed in history. The invention of a conspirance will never be a more 'simple' answer than accepting the evidence and the testimony prima fascie. The disciples, the eyewitnesses to the events of the Bible, were not going to great lengths to invent a new God or create a new theology... that's the beauty of what the Bible represents. In the most part, they simply recorded what they witnessed, in the context in which it was witnessed, and drew conclusions by comparing continuity and themality based on their existing belief in a single deity. Continuity will also always be simpler than origination. So your argument for the 'simplest' solution to the problem also does not support the viewpoint that you take.
"Again, you're acting as if your "historically plausible" situation is justified by as much. Plausibility and justification do not go hand in hand."
Of course they do. Plausibility is justified by the revelation of historical evidence and eyewitness accounts. The two are not disparate. And you dodge the fact that the 'historically plausible' situation IS justified - by historical evidence.
"And again, you are showing reasonless Angelocentricism."
False, irrelevent and erroneous charge. The Gospel of Jesus is primarily Jewish, and Greek. It existed entirely in the same form as it does now, before England was even a national identity, and before English was even spoken. You've latched on to a snippet of worthless rhetorical terminology, and are trying to play with it like a new toy, trying to look smart. Consider yourself called on lazy and pointless tactics.
"There isn't anything that makes your historical research any more valid than that of other religions. It isn't proof."
Validity does not depend on 'proof.' The fact that more historical evidence exists which can be used to attempt to demonstrate 'proof' for the Christian faith gives that faith infinitely more 'validity' than any other faith for which there is less 'historical evidence', by interpretatation or otherwise. A faith based on a book which simply tells an unverifiable, unconnected ancient mythology which cannot be confirmed in any way, and has not been demonstrated over time, being historically documented, is vastly intellectually disadvantaged when compared to a faith based on a set of writings which demonstrate actual interaction in human history, real individuals, real events, tangible threads, prophetic fulfilment and continuity. On the intellectual level alone, if truth and evidence are what we seek, the Biblical tradition is head and shoulders above every other religious faith just on the evidence and the compelling argument it makes, alone.
"Lets talk about Jesus's fame in the new testiment. There's the palm sunday event, and the widespread trail/execution. Think about how celebrity gossip works."
I'm not thinking about celebrity gossip, because you're on the one hand trying to accuse me of the invented philosophical notion of, as you put it, 'anglocentricism', while on the other hand your revision of history depends entirely on your projection of modern phenomenon into an historical context. No, the Gospel of Jesus is not the same as 'celebrity gossip', these are eyewitnessed events which changed the world for a vast number of people of varied cultures, ethnic origins and religious backgrounds. No celebrity gossip, even in the mass media age, has made the difference to humanity on such a scale that the Gospel of Jesus has. Your argument doesn't even hold theoretical water, because it relies entirely on complete ignorance of the historical context, the historical evidence, and as is typical of that ignorance, you insinuate that the 'legend of Jesus' was the result of a couple of relatively isolated events in a single week of Jesus life, while failing to observe that the whole thrust of the momentum behind that week was the result of something that had been happening on a daily basis for several years longer than that. It would be preposterous to believe that Jesus could work the miraculous for three years, but then only became consequential because a few simpletons who held him in some regard concocted a 'legend' to keep his 'fame' alive or the notion that his popular support turned him into popular legend. What popular support? If you're not basing views on what we do have of the historical evidence of what took place, and instead are basing views on imagination, then you're dealing in a currency of pure fiction, while I'm dealing in a currency of what appears, prima fascie, to be factual and accurate. Oddly, my accounting of events fits the 'what happened next and how it happened' sequence of tidal-wave like 'ripples' that emanated from those events ultimately across the planet and to every population group over a really long period of time. Your explanation defies justification, because it is both unprecedented, and utterly unrealistic in the light of the historical evidence.
"When Heath Ledger was cast in the new Batman this was touted, and when he died the first new reaction was to spread rumors of his association with child actresses in order to profit from his demise."
For the record, no Hollywood celebrity has every been subject to the kind of claims that Jesus made about Himself, nor had I even heard of 'rumours of association with child actresses', and I also did not hear that he had spent three years healing the sick, making the lame walk, making the blind see, casting out demons and performing miracles, before being publicly brutalised and executed in order to rise from the dead having prophecied his own death and resurrection, all in fulfilment of prophecies, specific prophecies, which were all over 400 years old. This, therefore, is not the same thing. It isn't even a comparison of two sports which happen to use balls. These ideas are so far removed from each other, that you could row a boat for your whole lifetime in order to reach one from the other, and barely leave the dock.
"Think of all the John Belushi stories everyone in the hotel sector has in LA. This is standard fare, and the lesser technology of the biblical era would make rumor-mongering even stronger."
Actually, it wouldn't. 'Rumour mongering' over large areas requires mass media dissemination. In a lo-tech age, the relevence of the rumour would be lost the instant you reached a population group that had not already heard chapter and verse about the subject. If it were not for the compelling nature of what was actually going on, the idea that anyone outside of a few local towns in Galilee would have ever heard of Jesus, let alone his disciples, would be so implausible as to be impossible. A trickster would not be regarded as a miracle worker. It is arrogant modernist revisionism to assume that only a technologically advanced civilisation can spot charlatans and tricksters, and to imply that somehow more ancient peoples were duller and more stupid and easily duped. They were not. Some of the greatest movements of intellectual material gnosticism occurred in that age, and within that geography, and it appea - SampleX, on 05/09/2008, -2/+1CONTINUED...
appears that at least three prevailing and prominent cultures were present in the vicinity of these events - Greek, Roman and Hebrew. Jesus and John Belushi do not bear comparison - I'm shocked that your lack of historical perspective leads you to believe that these two are a reasonable comparison as a means of revising and inventing an explanation in order to reject the simplest explanation of all - that the accounts are true.
"but I can think of a few logical fallacies with believing the whole "Jesus is resurrected" report. For one thing, people don't get resurrected, and never have."
Not true. Jesus was famed in his own lifetime for raising the dead to life before eyewitnesses. Had he not done so, then when those claims were made about him, they would have been easily refuted by the people that the followers of Jesus were claiming as eyewitnesses. Hebrew history also tells the account, written in the midst of very compelling although relatively mundane historical details, of a man being buried as a foreign army was invading, and in a rush to finish the burial quickly, the 'undertakers' lowered the body on top of the bones of one of Israel's most famous prophets, and the record states that the man returned to life and stood up to get out of the grave. These things might not seem to fit into your preconceived notions of what you call 'logic', but that does not make them untrue or unprecedented. I'm endlessly concerned with the notion that isolated unusual incidents and phenomena cannot happen simply because skeptics and 'rationalists' are uncomfortable that they either aren't common place and comprehensible, or because they do not conveniently map to a profoundly closed-minded and ignorant world view. The raising of the dead to life is a well-documented, if inconvenient phenomenon, which is found frequently in the Bible, before Jesus, and also after the death and resurrection of Jesus - one of the greatest minds of all time, Saul of Tarsus, testified to the dead being raised to life in his own ministry. If you think that it is unsafe to accept those statements as statements of truth, the only position more unsafe than that is to assume out of ignorance, and without evidence, that they must inevitably be false statements.
"For another thing, there's no real reason he would need to exist, die, and be resurrected if the God he represents could accomplish the absolution of original sin without the pageantry."
This is a theological point, not a logical point, and one could conclude that if you had received the remotest benefit of seriously studying the Bible in all your so-called 'Christian' educational experience, this wouldn't even be being raised as an issue. 'Pageantry' doesn't come into it - that's just flippant antagonism from someone who is inventing reasons to justify unbelief and opposition. You band around the term 'original sin' like a Catholic... like it means nothing to you, except something you go to confession for, and take sacraments for, and pray prayers for... You don't seem to understand what sin actually is, what its relevence is, and what God thinks of it and why. Quite simply, you just don't understand, in spite of all the claims of your knowledge... As I've stated already, you could have nominally brushed against these ideas your whole life - it appears you've come away no closer to truth or to understanding than if you'd never bothered.
"It's really hard to swallow that the resurrection leaves few unanswered questions and follows logic."
Logic rarely has bearing on truth. Who the hell are you? Mr Spock? It's not logical Jim... Of course it's not... it just is. Logic is a flimsy excuse which invariably means 'what I as an individual can accept about the world around me.' This is, of course, just an extension of 'what I choose to believe, and what I choose to reject.' Is love logical? Is dying trying to save a complete stranger logical? Is fighting for a set of principles even though you know you face certain death 'logical.' Nowadays 'logic' is merely a philosopher or scientists lazy excuse for the cessation of open-minded thought - a faster way to draw conclusions that you've never had to prove and barely had to research.
"You're going to have to prove that one."
The testimony and the evidence that a resurrection is exactly what took place speaks for itself, and by virtue of being an older accepted tradition than the philosophical refutation of the resurrection, you'll find intellectually speaking that it is the 'rationalist' who is burdened to prove that his notion of 'irrationality' actually translates into as compelling a set of historical disproofs of the resurrection as the wealth of compelling historical evidences of the resurrection. I'm not introducing a new idea to the debate, or trying to disprove a foregone conclusion - check out your 'preChristian' histories and mythologies... ancient people were happily fluent with the supernatural and the notion of resurrection from the dead is thematically recurring in parallel traditions. It is relatively modern revisionism which refutes it for fear of losing naturalistic control over society by conceding authority to supernaturalists.
"If Jesus doesn't count as a new god, then why didn't people worship Jesus before his birth?"
Again, demonstrating how much of your theological education was spent studying irrelevence or daydreaming. Define what you mean by 'worship.' From the time of Moses, Jews anticipated a Messiah, prophecied to Adam, to Noah and to Abraham - ancient Hebrew scripture is packed with it, and since Hebrew tradition (and language) is the closest this planet has to 'original', you see the same anticipations chinese-whispered into the diversification of divergent cultures running off in parallel to the Hebrew traditions and thus witness recurring themality of vague hints of Messianic anticipation. From around the birth of Jesus to around the time of his appearance as a boy in the Temple, independent histories (non-Biblical) in Israel noted a shift in the culture of Temple-leadership amongst the priesthood, and noted that despair had set in - the Romans were in occupation, and the prophecies of Messiah had not been fulfilled at the appointed time in exactly the way that the 'establishment' thought they would, the establishment being utterly corrupt and anticipating materialist fulfilment of Messiahship, rather than the Mosaic model, God's model. It is noted in the excellent historical research that Luke conducted as an historian, that when Jesus was presented as was the custom as a baby, not one but two 'spiritual leaders' recognised Him as the fulfilment of the prophecy. Indeed, by the time Jesus was two years old, Magi from ancient Babylon had trekked across the desert following an astral phenomenon, and had turned up in palaces explaining that they too knew the prophecies, and were convinced that the fulfilment had come to pass, and were looking to pay their respects to the Messiah. How did they know the prophecies? Easy. Because more than 400 years before a Hebrew prophet of God named Daniel, famed in latter Babylonian history, was granted exceptional respect, unprecedented respect, and appointed the leader of a prophetic tradition in Babylon which was taught to prophet initiates and maintained as if a precious and arcane treasure - yes indeed - Babylon had in its archives the prophecies of Daniel, and of the Messiah, and 'wise men' took them seriously enough to see the signs, to know the times, and to go off in search of what they clearly had no doubt at all had taken place. So indeed, Israel, and beyond, were anticipating who Jesus would become - perhaps not in the same ways that Jesus became the fulfilment, but that's the beauty of studying to understand why... When Jesus said 'who do men say that I am', men were talking in terms of the fulfilment of prophetic tradition. When He asked Peter, 'who do YOU say that I am', Peter answered unequivocally... 'You're the one we've been expecting.' He was not the only one to do so, and in the same period another prophetic phenomenon was recorded - John the Baptist, who was out and about preaching the ancient prophecies and announcing that now was the time that the Messiah would come... These are not even possibly connivances and conspiracies across thousands of years to get five minutes of fame which somehow backfired and resulted in anguish and death... these are beyond coincidence... Occam's Razor - the simplest interpretation is the most straightforward one, and the truth, however mundane or exceptional, is far easier to maintain than a lie, because it requires no creativity and no effort in continuity, it just is, and cannot be stated any other way.
"Why don't Jews and Islamics worship him? That religious forking sounds a lot like "new god" to me."
Nonsense. And get your facts right... Some Jews DO 'worship' him, whatever your ritualistic notion of 'worship' actually means... They're called 'Messianic Jews' and they believe that Jesus, Yeshua, is the fulfilment of the prophecies. And some 'Muslims' (or rather, former Muslims) believe it too, having been shown from ancient scriptures, and indeed from their own Quran, that Jesus is a far superior prophet, and is the Messiah that even Muslims anticipate. You should learn about these religions and the nuances and intricacies of their Messianic predictions before you make sweeping statements about what they do, or don't, believe and why they believe it.
"So you're saying the oral tradition-generated witness accounts of people two centuries ago count as reliable evidence?"
In English please... You're talking about 'oral tradition' generating witness accounts. I'm talking about eyewitness accounts in which conveyance in 'oral' form is as irrelevent as me seeing a profound event yesterday and telling someone else about it today. The entry of eyewitness testimony into oral conveyance has no bearing at all on accuracy, authenticity, or authority. If it did, then we should know absolutely nothing about absolutely anything, because all of it has been spoken and conveyed before it was ever committed to historical archival. You're dealing in attempts at pedantism in which you have faked, invented, falsified some non-sensical standards of 'information' and evidence, which do not bear any resemblence to either reasonableness or reality. And for someone arguing that solely oral traditions which predate Christian tradition which is, overwhelmingly, historical and evidential, are just as compelling, or more compelling, you seem to be undermining your own position with this notion that 'oral tradition equals extreme total informational corruption.'
"All research agrees that modern witness accounts of extreme acts do not meet the accuracy to use them as evidence."
No it doesn't, and it never has, and no plausible 'legal' or historical institution would even dream of commissioning such research because individual cases are ruled by individual evidence weighed and assessed on their own merits in context with corroborating (or refuting) evidence and ALL those who testify are assumed, under law, to be telling the truth unless it can be proven otherwise. It would be a fatal prejudice to begin to evaluate evidence on the unprovable and unsupportable notion that all eyewitness accounts of significant events are untrustworthy and cannot be soundly used as evidence. I'd go as far as to say that you're inventing lies to justify the fact that you don't have a clue what you're talking about, and are struggling to have something to say in order to look smart, while having nothing to say which would prove your purpose. Eyewitness testimony to 'extreme acts' is of the utmost importance and is always assumed to be valuable in ascertaining the truth of the situation in one form or another.
"The only reason courts accept them is precedent."
Incorrect. Courts accept them because eyewitnesses are the best means of obtaining testimony about things which have taken place. Want to know what happened? You ask the people who were there, and by doing so you start to get a picture - if a multiplicity of witnesses appear to have seen the same thing, you either have to prove collusion and conspiracy, or you have to accept that what they all said they saw, they did see. It is not safe, nor legal, to assume the opposite from the outset, no matter how much vested interest you have in being contrary.
"Surely oral history based 2000 year old accounts are at least less accurate than modern ones."
You're still working on 'oral histories' as an idea in order to imply that they are hearsay. The Gospel accounts come from eyewitnesses. It is primary source evidence, and historical analysis conducted in the day by interview and evaluation of wider evidence and context conducted by an individual called Luke confirms this, having set out to establish the truth behind the rumours and testimonies. And no, there is no evidence whatsoever that 'modern' eyewitness testimony is any more reliable than 2000 year old eyewitness testimony. This is arrogant modern revisionism, assuming that people 2000 years ago were gullible, stupid, prone to mistakes, and incapable of recording what they saw with accuracy. This position holds no water. Much of this evidence has been compelling and immensely valuable, and the work of Luke was exhaustive and thoroughly professional, commended to this day, even by modern aca - SampleX, on 05/09/2008, -2/+1CONTINUED...
appears that at least three prevailing and prominent cultures were present in the vicinity of these events - Greek, Roman and Hebrew. Jesus and John Belushi do not bear comparison - I'm shocked that your lack of historical perspective leads you to believe that these two are a reasonable comparison as a means of revising and inventing an explanation in order to reject the simplest explanation of all - that the accounts are true.
"but I can think of a few logical fallacies with believing the whole "Jesus is resurrected" report. For one thing, people don't get resurrected, and never have."
Not true. Jesus was famed in his own lifetime for raising the dead to life before eyewitnesses. Had he not done so, then when those claims were made about him, they would have been easily refuted by the people that the followers of Jesus were claiming as eyewitnesses. Hebrew history also tells the account, written in the midst of very compelling although relatively mundane historical details, of a man being buried as a foreign army was invading, and in a rush to finish the burial quickly, the 'undertakers' lowered the body on top of the bones of one of Israel's most famous prophets, and the record states that the man returned to life and stood up to get out of the grave. These things might not seem to fit into your preconceived notions of what you call 'logic', but that does not make them untrue or unprecedented. I'm endlessly concerned with the notion that isolated unusual incidents and phenomena cannot happen simply because skeptics and 'rationalists' are uncomfortable that they either aren't common place and comprehensible, or because they do not conveniently map to a profoundly closed-minded and ignorant world view. The raising of the dead to life is a well-documented, if inconvenient phenomenon, which is found frequently in the Bible, before Jesus, and also after the death and resurrection of Jesus - one of the greatest minds of all time, Saul of Tarsus, testified to the dead being raised to life in his own ministry. If you think that it is unsafe to accept those statements as statements of truth, the only position more unsafe than that is to assume out of ignorance, and without evidence, that they must inevitably be false statements.
"For another thing, there's no real reason he would need to exist, die, and be resurrected if the God he represents could accomplish the absolution of original sin without the pageantry."
This is a theological point, not a logical point, and one could conclude that if you had received the remotest benefit of seriously studying the Bible in all your so-called 'Christian' educational experience, this wouldn't even be being raised as an issue. 'Pageantry' doesn't come into it - that's just flippant antagonism from someone who is inventing reasons to justify unbelief and opposition. You band around the term 'original sin' like a Catholic... like it means nothing to you, except something you go to confession for, and take sacraments for, and pray prayers for... You don't seem to understand what sin actually is, what its relevence is, and what God thinks of it and why. Quite simply, you just don't understand, in spite of all the claims of your knowledge... As I've stated already, you could have nominally brushed against these ideas your whole life - it appears you've come away no closer to truth or to understanding than if you'd never bothered.
"It's really hard to swallow that the resurrection leaves few unanswered questions and follows logic."
Logic rarely has bearing on truth. Who the hell are you? Mr Spock? It's not logical Jim... Of course it's not... it just is. Logic is a flimsy excuse which invariably means 'what I as an individual can accept about the world around me.' This is, of course, just an extension of 'what I choose to believe, and what I choose to reject.' Is love logical? Is dying trying to save a complete stranger logical? Is fighting for a set of principles even though you know you face certain death 'logical.' Nowadays 'logic' is merely a philosopher or scientists lazy excuse for the cessation of open-minded thought - a faster way to draw conclusions that you've never had to prove and barely had to research.
"You're going to have to prove that one."
The testimony and the evidence that a resurrection is exactly what took place speaks for itself, and by virtue of being an older accepted tradition than the philosophical refutation of the resurrection, you'll find intellectually speaking that it is the 'rationalist' who is burdened to prove that his notion of 'irrationality' actually translates into as compelling a set of historical disproofs of the resurrection as the wealth of compelling historical evidences of the resurrection. I'm not introducing a new idea to the debate, or trying to disprove a foregone conclusion - check out your 'preChristian' histories and mythologies... ancient people were happily fluent with the supernatural and the notion of resurrection from the dead is thematically recurring in parallel traditions. It is relatively modern revisionism which refutes it for fear of losing naturalistic control over society by conceding authority to supernaturalists.
"If Jesus doesn't count as a new god, then why didn't people worship Jesus before his birth?"
Again, demonstrating how much of your theological education was spent studying irrelevence or daydreaming. Define what you mean by 'worship.' From the time of Moses, Jews anticipated a Messiah, prophecied to Adam, to Noah and to Abraham - ancient Hebrew scripture is packed with it, and since Hebrew tradition (and language) is the closest this planet has to 'original', you see the same anticipations chinese-whispered into the diversification of divergent cultures running off in parallel to the Hebrew traditions and thus witness recurring themality of vague hints of Messianic anticipation. From around the birth of Jesus to around the time of his appearance as a boy in the Temple, independent histories (non-Biblical) in Israel noted a shift in the culture of Temple-leadership amongst the priesthood, and noted that despair had set in - the Romans were in occupation, and the prophecies of Messiah had not been fulfilled at the appointed time in exactly the way that the 'establishment' thought they would, the establishment being utterly corrupt and anticipating materialist fulfilment of Messiahship, rather than the Mosaic model, God's model. It is noted in the excellent historical research that Luke conducted as an historian, that when Jesus was presented as was the custom as a baby, not one but two 'spiritual leaders' recognised Him as the fulfilment of the prophecy. Indeed, by the time Jesus was two years old, Magi from ancient Babylon had trekked across the desert following an astral phenomenon, and had turned up in palaces explaining that they too knew the prophecies, and were convinced that the fulfilment had come to pass, and were looking to pay their
- SampleX, on 05/07/2008, -4/+1"Lets start with your ad-hominem attack of my Christian education. I've had 10 years of Sunday school experience, 4 years of Catholic High school, and 6 years of youth group study."
- Squidwalk, on 05/03/2008, -0/+9Where to start, where to start.
- SampleX, on 05/03/2008, -4/+1"Hold up.. so you're saying that when the apostles left the empty tomb and told people Jesus had risen from the dead, skeptics of this are unjustified?"
- Squidwalk, on 05/02/2008, -0/+5Hold up.. so you're saying that when the apostles left the empty tomb and told people Jesus had risen from the dead, skeptics of this are unjustified? How can you possibly come to that conclusion? If I were to tell you right now that my friend died two days ago and has risen form the dead today, you'd be fine with that?