A challenge: debate the issue of religion with yours truly

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Lukecash12
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13 Apr 2012, 3:02 pm

Sweetleaf wrote:
Nah man, I don't want to roast christianity or theology.....people need religion like I need beer good beer. But be warned budweiser and coors are the devil's piss, one must avoid drinking either of those at all costs even though there is so much temptation......so many billboards, sports adds ect how can one not be tempted? well would you rather have the devils piss, or beer?


I'll take a black and tan, a port, or just a good stout, thank you. I'm definitely a Guinness type of man.


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13 Apr 2012, 3:04 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Nah man, I don't want to roast christianity or theology.....people need religion like I need beer good beer. But be warned budweiser and coors are the devil's piss, one must avoid drinking either of those at all costs even though there is so much temptation......so many billboards, sports adds ect how can one not be tempted? well would you rather have the devils piss, or beer?


I'll take a black and tan, a port, or just a good stout, thank you. I'm definitely a Guinness type of man.


I am a Guinness type of man to.



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13 Apr 2012, 3:05 pm

uhh double post, how did that happen.


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Last edited by Sweetleaf on 13 Apr 2012, 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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13 Apr 2012, 3:06 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Nah man, I don't want to roast christianity or theology.....people need religion like I need beer good beer. But be warned budweiser and coors are the devil's piss, one must avoid drinking either of those at all costs even though there is so much temptation......so many billboards, sports adds ect how can one not be tempted? well would you rather have the devils piss, or beer?


I'll take a black and tan, a port, or just a good stout, thank you. I'm definitely a Guinness type of man.


those all beat bud and coors...I personally prefer ales to any other kind of beer, I don't really like lagers, too light and bubbly.


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LKL
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13 Apr 2012, 3:27 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
1. There were two skeptics who attested to the resurrection.

According to the Bible, which is not an unbiased source.
Quote:
2. It's medically impossible for more than one person to share in a subjective vision.

Irrelevant and inaccurate; first, even in the Bible the 'witnesses' did not say, 'we saw exactly the same thing at the same time! Second, mass hysteria is a well-known, well-doccumented phenomenon.
Quote:
3. The theological nature of the claim, was unprecedented, and not something we should expect from someone who lived in 1st century Judea as a Hebrew, because the prevailing Jewish belief was in a different type of resurrection. Resurrection was an eschatological (end time) belief of the Jews, that in the end times Yahweh would resurrect His faithful. An individual resurrection was unheard of.

It was not unprecedented; resurrection cults have a long and dignified history in human religions. Furthermore, the human imagination has a long and dignified history of coming up with unprecedented claims. Cold fusion comes to mind.
Quote:
4. There is multiple, independent attestation of the resurrection.

source, please?
Quote:
5. The claim of an empty tomb stood unchallenged until the composition of the Toledoth Jesu, centuries later. If the tomb wasn't empty, the religious elite could have had Jesus' body exhumed, ridiculing the early Christians. Au contrare, though, Christianity as a movement started in Jerusalem and was based out of Jerusalem until the fall of the temple, AD 70
.
Inaccurate. There were skeptics of Jesus, and later of xianity, since before Jesus claimed to be the son of god.



Lukecash12
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13 Apr 2012, 4:01 pm

Sweetleaf wrote:
Lukecash12 wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Nah man, I don't want to roast christianity or theology.....people need religion like I need beer good beer. But be warned budweiser and coors are the devil's piss, one must avoid drinking either of those at all costs even though there is so much temptation......so many billboards, sports adds ect how can one not be tempted? well would you rather have the devils piss, or beer?


I'll take a black and tan, a port, or just a good stout, thank you. I'm definitely a Guinness type of man.


those all beat bud and coors...I personally prefer ales to any other kind of beer, I don't really like lagers, too light and bubbly.


Hahaha.... When someone tells me they like lagers, I ask them: "What's wrong? You don't like flavor in your beer?" Lagers and pilsners mostly seem closer to water than beer. But it depends on the lager, and ales are fairly light as well, but I'd say flavorful. Seeing as you're an ale person, what's your opinion on pale ales?


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Lukecash12
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13 Apr 2012, 5:12 pm

@LKL:

Quote:
According to the Bible, which is not an unbiased source.


Actually, that and a variety of other facts surrounding the resurrection, are facts that I can argue for without appealing to the reliability of the NT at all. The method that I use, before I begin to discuss the reliability of the NT, is called the minimal facts method. It is what it sounds like, a minimalistic method that focuses on the facts that we can confirm through heavy attestation, a scholarly consensus, and a variety of convincing evidences (Gary Habermas has described it like this: "Data that is (1) well evidenced, and (2) data that is accepted by virtually every scholar). I don't have to make any appeal to whether or not the NT is worthy of trust, in order to establish facts about the crucifixion and resurrection.

Critical NT scholarship,made up of both theists and atheists, skeptics and believers, by and large agrees with the following twelve facts:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. He was buried.
3. His death caused the disciples to despair and lose hope.
4. The tomb was empty (the most contested).
5. The disciples had experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus (the most important proof).
6. The disciples were transformed from doubters to bold proclaimers.
7. The resurrection was the central message.
8. They preached the message of Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem.
9. The Church was born and grew.
10. Orthodox Jews who believed in Christ made Sunday their primary day of worship.
11. James was converted to the faith when he saw the resurrected Jesus (James was a family skeptic).
12. Paul was converted to the faith (Paul was an outsider skeptic).

1. Of all the data to be examined, this is the datum least disputed by scholars. This is attested to by Josephus, Tacitus, Thallus, the Babylonian Talmud which is a Jewish rabbinical book (found in Sanhedrin 43a), the NT authors, the Pre-Pauline creed found in 1st Corinthians 15:3-7, and ten other confirmed creeds (Acts 2:22-36, 3:13-16, 4:8-10, 5:29-32, 10:39-43, 13:28-31, Romans 4:25, Philippians 2:8, 1st Peter 3:18, & Galatians 3:13). So, we can tally multiple, independent attestation, and enemy attestation on to this.

Also, from what we know of crucifixion, it is highly unlikely that He survived the event. Josephus writes of a flogging before a crucifixion, telling us of a victim whose bones were "laid bare". Floggings were typically administered with a short whip, called a flagellum or cat o'nine, which had metal beads tied to each leather strap in order to rend the flesh open with each strike. Repeated strikes could cause hanging ribbons of flesh and expose veins, muscles, and bowels. Victims normally underwent hypovolemic shock due to an immense amount of blood loss. Victims would then be placed on a cross, to die by asphyxiation. Whilst hanging upon a cross, one's intercostals, pectoral, and deltoid muscles are stretched and prevent one from exhaling as long as one is in the standing position. In order to exhale, the victims must push up using their feet, which have a seven inch nail driven through their heels.

There is only one account of someone surviving a crucifixion, and it was recorded by Josephus. He records that after pleading with Titus Caesar, Caesar took three of his friends off of their crosses and gave them the best medical treatment possible at the time. Yet two of the three of them still died.

2. Backing up the burial are the creeds, the NT, Matthew, Justian Martyr, and Tertullain react to Jewish polemic against the resurrection (polemic which admits the empty tomb), that Joseph of Arimathea buried Christ is very probably because of the principle of embarrassment (the principle of embarrassment being that when an author records something that seems to weaken his/her case, that record is probably accurate), their first testimony of an empty tomb came from women making the principle of embarrassment very applicable (women not having been allowed to testify in court at that time), and lastly the accounts surrounding the burial lack legendary development (legendary development being anything that strikes the reader as wild, embellished, strange, or atypical). Even Josephus weighs in yet again, pointing out how that Jews were very serious about burying the dead, and the Romans allowed them to bury even criminals.

3. That the disciples lost hope and confidence, falling into despair, is taken to be true on account of just the NT (which is definitely tinged by the principle of embarrassment, what with the disciples "deserting and fleeing" from Jesus and locking themselves away from the Jews out of fear), adding the considerations that such an execution was literary a curse according to Jewish tradition (leaving the disciples little recourse for a positive outlook, see Deuteronomy 21:23), and that the disciples are recorded as not having buried Christ themselves (even though it was their customary responsibility). Scholars unanimously agree that within the NT alone, is plenty enough evidence to bar out skepticism that the disciples hadn't been in despair and hadn't been deposed.

4. That the tomb was empty, is supported by the following: the NT, the Jewish polemic against the aforementioned church fathers, the creeds, that women are the first witnesses to discover the empty tomb, the Jerusalem factor ("that the Christian fellowship, founded on belief in Jesus' resurrection, could come into existence and flourish in the very city where he was executed and buried seems to be compelling evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb"), Matthew reacts to Jewish polemic in Matthew 28:11-15, and the resurrection was a bodily notion. The Greek words anastasis and egeiro, used to refer to the resurrection, are explicitly physical words. Jesus' tomb was not venerated as a shrine, while in the time of Jesus there was an importance in honoring the tombs of Jewish martyrs, prophets, and others. When compared to apocryphal writings such as the gospel of Peter, it can be seen that the accounts surrounding the empty tomb are actually pretty dry and lacking in legendary development, for an account that has to do with a resurrection.

5. That the disciples had real experiences that they believed were literal appearances of Christ, is supported by the following: the earliest creeds contain the claim of a resurrection (with literally hundreds of people cited as witnesses within the creeds), the early church fathers commented at length about the disciples recounting their experiences, Josephus reports their claim, James (who was a skeptic) converted and rose to prominence in the early church, Paul (not only a skeptic but a persecutor) converted and rose to prominence in the early church, that Christ was completely deposed and cursed according to Jewish tradition (this basically being an appeal to no 3, and it being the normal trend for Messianic Jews at that time to just find another Messiah to latch on to), that Christ didn't fulfill everything the Messiah was supposed to fulfill (according to Jewish tradition), that the claim was original, their transformation into martyrs from cowards, and lastly the basic support that there is a belief that Jesus rose from the dead and it had to originate somewhere. Even the strongest skeptics such as Bart Ehrman will agree that the disciples must have had some kind of a novel experience.

6. Being largely similar to no 5, but supporting the actual transformation of the disciples, is the following: They were martyred (and are different from say, suicide bombers, because they weren't second hand adherents to a claim, they attested to something they personally experienced), that they came out of hiding to become martyrs, that this is attested to by the NT, by Cicero, Tacitus, Josephus, the early church fathers, and that they detail their own persecutions.

7. That James, a skeptic, was converted, is supported by the following: the principle of embarrassment regarding the fact that he was a skeptic, that James became prominent in the church according to Paul, the early church fathers, and Josephus, that his unbelief and conversion are mentioned by the earliest creed found in Corinthians 15, and that James was martyred (this attested to by Josephus, and the two early church fathers Hegesippus and Clement).

8. That Paul, a skeptic and persecutor, was converted, is supported by the following: The principle of embarrassment basically guarantees that he sanctioned and witnessed the persecution of Christians, as an opponent and skeptic, yet he claimed to have an encounter with Christ and underwent a variety of persecutions according to himself, Acts, Clement, Polycarp, and Tertullian (who mentions his being beheaded in Rome).

9. That the resurrection message was central in the earliest Christian preaching, is supported by the following: the creeds, that it survived amidst opposition in Jerusalem, and that it vindicated Jesus' claims.

10. That the resurrection message was especially proclaimed in Jerusalem, is supported by the following: Acts (especially the day of Pentecost), and Tacitus (enemy attestation).

11. That the Christian church was established and grew, is supported by the following: the epistles of the NT were addressed to locations all around Judea, Tacitus and many other Greek and Roman authors record their growth, and this is corroborated by the early church fathers up until Christianity became the official religion of Rome.

12. That Sunday was featured as the primary day of worship, is supported by the following: Justin Martyr describes how they switched from the normal Jewish day of worship on the Sabbath, and it has been the custom to this day.

If you notice, these last few ones are significantly shorter, because I didn't want to be too redundant. You may also notice how heavily complementary these twelve facts are.



Quote:
Irrelevant and inaccurate; first, even in the Bible the 'witnesses' did not say, 'we saw exactly the same thing at the same time! Second, mass hysteria is a well-known, well-doccumented phenomenon.


First, I was not referring to the idea that they all had the same subjective vision at exactly the same time. I was focusing more on the idea that several different people, with psychological profiles, dispositions, and personalities, that were fairly distinct from one another, all being presumably healthy minded, saw something that disagreed with their normal Jewish theology (making hallucinative projection less likely). Maybe it is less relevant to your own criticism there, but then again you aren't David Hume. Such criticisms were quite prevalent in the 19th century, and they have been gaining traction again, because of a few radical scholars and a lot of pseudo scholars and intellects who don't understand historical methodology and the medical issue of subjective visions.

Regarding mass hysteria, that would be a valid topic if the early Christians were hysterical. They weren't. If you would like to present that as an issue for contention, then I would like to see if you can substantiate that claim. I won't just do your research for you, of course.

Quote:
It was not unprecedented; resurrection cults have a long and dignified history in human religions. Furthermore, the human imagination has a long and dignified history of coming up with unprecedented claims. Cold fusion comes to mind.


That I do not take as a substantiated claim. Trust me, that once I have five days tenure here I will cite sources left and right in these debates. As for now, I would level these assertions:

It was in fact unprecedented, in that that was not an idea within Jewish theology. Resurrection cults certainly have been around, but few of them were centered upon a real historical person, and none of them were Jewish. Jesus' disciples were very Jewish, in fact they were so strongly Jewish that one of the original disciples was named Judas Iscariot, affiliating him with the Zealots (a fierce nationalistic group). Jesus being individually resurrected, would not be something that would normally occur to them. Truth be told, if they said anything about a risen Jesus, if they were to follow their Jewish roots they would have said that He is in Abraham's bosom.

Quote:
source, please?


Paul, the author of Luke/Acts, the authors of the other canonical gospels, the gnostics, Tacitus who tells us of the Christian claim of a resurrection, Thallus, and the creeds imbedded in the NT that have been dated to within five years of Jesus' death on the cross (1st Corinthians 15 being a prominent example). There's much more, too. I'll have access to my books after this Sunday, once I return home from the trip I'm on.

Quote:
Inaccurate. There were skeptics of Jesus, and later of xianity, since before Jesus claimed to be the son of god.


Inaccurate as regards to what? I was referring to a specific group of people, who were being challenged on their own turf, the religious elite of Jerusalem. Other than the Toledoth Jesu, written centuries later, they did nothing to combat the claim that the tomb was empty and Christ was risen. They could very easily have just gone to the tomb and had the body publicly exhumed, thus ridiculing the Christians with their claim that Jesus had been physically resurrected.

[b]This post is finished.


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Last edited by Lukecash12 on 13 Apr 2012, 9:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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13 Apr 2012, 8:50 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Actually, that and a variety of other facts surrounding the resurrection, are facts that I can argue for without appealing to the reliability of the NT at all. The method that I use, before I begin to discuss the reliability of the NT, is called the minimal facts method. It is what it sounds like, a minimalistic method that focuses on the facts that we can confirm through heavy attestation, a scholarly consensus, and a variety of convincing evidences (Gary Habermas has described it like this: "Data that is (1) well evidenced, and (2) data that is accepted by virtually every scholar). I don't have to make any appeal to whether or not the NT is worthy of trust, in order to establish facts about the crucifixion and resurrection.


This looks very scholarly at first glance, but other than quoting an Evangelical apologist (which is not exactly a reliable source), you don't say anything at all in this paragraph. It contains nothing but empty rhetoric that relies on the frequent use of the word "facts".

Quote:
Critical NT scholarship,made up of both theists and atheists, skeptics and believers, by and large agrees with the following twelve facts:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. He was buried.
3. His death caused the disciples to despair and lose hope.
4. The tomb was empty (the most contested).
5. The disciples had experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus (the most important proof).
6. The disciples were transformed from doubters to bold proclaimers.
7. The resurrection was the central message.
8. They preached the message of Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem.
9. The Church was born and grew.
10. Orthodox Jews who believed in Christ made Sunday their primary day of worship.
11. James was converted to the faith when he saw the resurrected Jesus (James was a family skeptic).
12. Paul was converted to the faith (Paul was an outsider skeptic).


I'm sorry, but skeptics and atheists don't see any evidence for the gospel stories. Neither do historians. There is no reliable historical evidence whatsoever for Jesus' crucifixion (not to mention his resurrection) or the events that allegedly accompanied it -- a solar eclipse, an earthquake, and a bunch of zombies wandering the streets of Jerusalem as described in Matthew 27:52-53.

These occurrences are so fantastic and unusual that historical writers of antiquity should have been all over them, but that is not the case. Which is very suspicious, because other solar eclipses in antiquity are well documented by contemporary scholars and historians. We don't even have non-biblical, undisputed evidence for Jesus' existence.

Quote:
1. Of all the data to be examined, this is the datum least disputed by scholars. This is attested to by Josephus, Tacitus, Thallus, the Babylonian Talmud which is a Jewish rabbinical book (found in Sanhedrin 43a), the NT authors, the Pre-Pauline creed found in 1st Corinthians 15:3-7, and ten other confirmed creeds (Acts 2:22-36, 3:13-16, 4:8-10, 5:29-32, 10:39-43, 13:28-31, Romans 4:25, Philippians 2:8, 1st Peter 3:18, & Galatians 3:13). So, we can tally multiple, independent attestation, and enemy attestation on to this.


Most historians agree that Josephus' Testimonium Flavianum was altered at a later point. There are two surviving copies with different entries about Jesus; the Greek copy contains sentences such as "He was the Christ", which can't be found in the Arabic copy. This makes the authenticity of the short entry about Jesus very doubtful. Josephus' reference to Jesus as "Christ" in his Antiquities is also strongly disputed and was probably a Christian interpolation as well. Historians believe that the text originally referred to Jesus bar Damneus, who was high priest in the year 63.

Tacitus wrote about the persecution of Christians by Nero, and briefly describes the beliefs of contemporary Christians (a guy called Christus sentenced to death by Pilatus. He doesn't even call him Jesus). This is not a historical account of Jesus' crucifixion, but rather a second- or third-hand telling of a story told by early followers of the Christian religion.

While there was a historian called Thallus, the surviving fragments of his works don't mention anything related to the Jesus story. I suppose what you are referring to are the writings of George Syncellus, a Christian author who quoted another Christian writer called Sextus Julius Africanus, who in turn references someone named Thallus, which was a common name back then. This unidentified Thallus supposedly mentioned an eclipse around the time of Jesus' crucifixion, which has not been mentioned in any contemporary text. That's about as significant as your reference to Gary Habermas.

As for the mentioning of Jesus in the Talmud, many historians see this as a reaction to early medieval Christianity instead of a contemporary reference. The Talmud was revised several times over the centuries, partially because of disputations with the Christian church in the Middle Ages. Ironically, some of those disputes were about alleged insulting references to Jesus and Mary :roll: Jewish scholars denied that the disputed passages were about the Christian Jesus, but nonetheless censored subsequent editions of the text. Positive mentionings of Jesus might have been added simply to appease the Christians.

The rest of your references are biblical sources. You can't prove the validity of a book by using the same book as evidence.



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13 Apr 2012, 9:01 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
WilliamWDelaney wrote:
And what makes you so special? Bull stubborn Christians who plant their feet and take on an attitude of, "you can't change my faith" and think that constitutes "winning a debate" are a dime-a-dozen. You would be worth having a discussion with if you could provide us with an interesting and refreshing perspective on Christianity. However, if all you intend to do is see how far you can go in playing rhetorical dodgeball, you are a waste of everybody's time. Present us with some evidence that you deserve to be taken seriously.

Also, I'm not your ordinary atheist. In fact, ordinary atheists find me appalling.


1. Nothing makes me all that special, but I do happen to be an expert in biblical scholarship and apologetics (making a rational case for Christian faith). I don't mean to boast.

2. I don't think that not having my faith changed constitutes having won a debate. When I have presented better arguments than my interlocutor, and only then, will I have won a debate.

3. Evidence that I deserve to be taken seriously? Well, I can list a few things that might peak your interest:

I have a working knowledge of the classical languages, being able to read and explain texts written in Koine Greek, biblical Hebrew, biblical Aramaic, classical Latin, and Arabic. I regularly read doctoral dissertations on the subject of history. I am up to date on philosophy, including natural philosophy (better known as science), all the way from the earliest Greek philosophers up to today, from Aristotle's Posterior Analytics to Arvin, Guth, and Borde's recent physics paper on inflationary models of the universe. I am capable of, and would enjoy, presenting arguments in the form of propositional equations. I have been classically trained in all other academic respects.

But those claims are empty until I demonstrate my knowledge, aren't they?


Yes, they are.



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13 Apr 2012, 9:09 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Lukecash12 wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
Nah man, I don't want to roast christianity or theology.....people need religion like I need beer good beer. But be warned budweiser and coors are the devil's piss, one must avoid drinking either of those at all costs even though there is so much temptation......so many billboards, sports adds ect how can one not be tempted? well would you rather have the devils piss, or beer?


I'll take a black and tan, a port, or just a good stout, thank you. I'm definitely a Guinness type of man.


those all beat bud and coors...I personally prefer ales to any other kind of beer, I don't really like lagers, too light and bubbly.


Hahaha.... When someone tells me they like lagers, I ask them: "What's wrong? You don't like flavor in your beer?" Lagers and pilsners mostly seem closer to water than beer. But it depends on the lager, and ales are fairly light as well, but I'd say flavorful. Seeing as you're an ale person, what's your opinion on pale ales?


I've had some really good pale ales actually... in fact I'm drinking soe New Belgium Pale ale its their seasonal spring one I guess. I also enjoy black IPAs even though I find it contradictory considering pale ale is usually pale so black pale ale is weird to me, but it's good. But yeah I think one thing I really like about ales is all the flavor and there are a lot of lighter ales but there's darker ales I've had to.


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13 Apr 2012, 9:13 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Well, friend, I would say that the resurrection is historically probable and actually plausible. I would even venture to say that it has the status of a historical fact (I mean to say "fact" in the technical sense, that is: "something which can be proved or disproved").

The issue is that nothing would really meaningfully constitute a disproof of the resurrection.

Quote:
1. There were two skeptics who attested to the resurrection.

Good for them, but we can't cross examine them at this point because they are dead. So, we can't evaluate whether the story given of them is as accurate as what we'd like. We can't determine whether they are completely of sound mind, as they could easily have a mental issue, or even some existential crisis that made them easily persuaded.

Quote:
2. It's medically impossible for more than one person to share in a subjective vision.

And it's entirely medically possible for memory alteration to occur after the fact. It's entirely medically possible for these claims to be false. (And given that scriptural contradictions and errors do occur, such as the two different death accounts of Judas in Matthew and Acts, fact checking was not as good as would be desired. It's kind of a joke, but actual situations have had false claims get out of hand) It's entirely possible for more than one person to have a similar subjective vision. (The key issue is that shared consciousness isn't strictly possible, but similar hallucinations are possible)

The simple issue is that the claim of subjective visions is 2nd to 3rd hand, and given the number of 2nd to 3rd hand miraculous claims that are regularly rejected, this doesn't really constitute great evidence.

Quote:
3. The theological nature of the claim, was unprecedented, and not something we should expect from someone who lived in 1st century Judea as a Hebrew, because the prevailing Jewish belief was in a different type of resurrection. Resurrection was an eschatological (end time) belief of the Jews, that in the end times Yahweh would resurrect His faithful. An individual resurrection was unheard of.

We're talking about a Jewish cult though, as Jesus was clearly not a mainstream figure given his y'know death at the hands of Roman and Jewish authorities. Given the diversity of cult views, even with some nihilistic death cults today, it's hard for actually argue that "unprecedented views" is really radically implausible.

Quote:
4. There is multiple, independent attestation of the resurrection.

We really can't determine how independent or reliable this attestation is. I mean, either you're talking about the books of the NT, which were really not independent, or you're talking about proclaimed witnesses, which we can't really cross examine. We really don't know if they were delusional, whether something odd was going on, whether there was a false 2nd to 3rd hand account that somehow went unchallenged, or anything else like that. I mean, to this day, there are multiple attestations for various UFO accounts, and various faith healings, but for the most part, these are not taken seriously. We don't necessarily know in advance how these events really didn't occur either, but false claims of this sort are incredibly common, and often if we had the sufficient evidence to reconstruct what happened, we can actually figure out what was really going on. We don't have this for Jesus or anything close, but rather we have texts that are not entirely reliable. I mean, let's face it, Mormonism has a book of witnesses, who were actual people who claimed to have seen what Joseph Smith was talking about, this is in many ways more reliable than the NT, but it's not something I take seriously, and I doubt you'd take it seriously either.

Quote:
5. The claim of an empty tomb stood unchallenged until the composition of the Toledoth Jesu, centuries later. If the tomb wasn't empty, the religious elite could have had Jesus' body exhumed, ridiculing the early Christians. Au contrare, though, Christianity as a movement started in Jerusalem and was based out of Jerusalem until the fall of the temple, AD 70.

Only the case if the burial story of Jesus given is correct. It's entirely possible that he really wasn't buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, but rather was put in a pit, and if that's the case, there wouldn't be a body. Even if Joseph of Arimathea's tomb was used, the problem is that nobody could really tell if the body was taken, or a false body was planted, or anything else.

Quote:
There are many more points to be made, but these should do for now.

Honestly, it's just not even close to a plausible place of attack. Miracle claims are as common as copper, incredibly difficult to unmask as false in more than one occasion, and sufficiently unlikely at the basic level that ANY miraculous claim should probably be dismissed. I mean, miracles are in the same kind of category as pseudo-scientific claims, and conspiracy theories, while it is possible that one or more of these claims are correct, the basic probability of ever identifying a correct one is so vanishingly small that they hardly deserve serious attention. I mean, let's be honest, have you ever tried debating a truther?

I mean, the best rule of thumb is to say, that unless the evidence is downright miraculously good, we ought to dismiss these claims. 2000 year old texts containing 2nd to 3rd hand accounts by a cult, and where the documents also contain falsehoods and other gross improbabilities are sufficiently bad as evidence that while they prove something, they'd never amount to sufficient to prove a miracle, especially to a person with background reasons not to believe.



Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 14 Apr 2012, 12:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

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13 Apr 2012, 9:17 pm

@CrazyCatLord:

Quote:
This looks very scholarly at first glance, but other than quoting an Evangelical apologist (which is not exactly a reliable source), you don't say anything at all in this paragraph. It contains nothing but empty rhetoric that relies on the frequent use of the word "facts".


I wasn't looking to support anything in that bit. I was pointing out what my method was going to be.

Quote:
I'm sorry, but skeptics and atheists don't see any evidence for the gospel stories. Neither do historians. There is no reliable historical evidence whatsoever for Jesus' crucifixion (not to mention his resurrection) or the events that allegedly accompanied it -- a solar eclipse, an earthquake, and a bunch of zombies wandering the streets of Jerusalem as described in Matthew 27:52-53.

These occurrences are so fantastic and unusual that historical writers of antiquity should have been all over them, but that is not the case. Which is very suspicious, because other solar eclipses in antiquity are well documented by contemporary scholars and historians. We don't even have non-biblical, undisputed evidence for Jesus' existence.


You have entered some of the fantastical claims of the NT, into a criticism of my minimalistic approach. Do you see how counter-intuitive that is? I took pains to establish just those twelve things and to forward just them for discussion, but you appear to have responded before I could finish my work. I'd appreciate it if you could wait this next time around.

Also, skeptics and atheists do agree, by and large, with those twelve facts. A survey was taken of 2,400 critical NT scholars, great skeptics like Crossan and Ehrman being amongst them, who support those twelve facts. Your claim that there is no reliable evidence whatsoever, betrays an ignorance of the sources on the subject (both secular and biblical), and historical methodology. I would invite you to demonstrate your understanding of historical methodology and tell me how that the crucifixion isn't an established fact, when it is attested to by early creeds, the NT, Romans, Greeks, Jews, and later church fathers (which by the way I actually didn't go into much detail or mention all of the sources for all of these twelve facts).

And ironically enough, Thallus allegedly recorded earthquakes as having to do with Jesus' crucifixion. That is a secular source, friend. But of course, our material from Thallus isn't of much import.

Quote:
Most historians agree that Josephus' Testimonium Flavianum was altered at a later point. There are two surviving copies with different entries about Jesus; the Greek copy contains sentences such as "He was the Christ", which can't be found in the Arabic copy. This makes the authenticity of the short entry about Jesus very doubtful. Josephus' reference to Jesus as "Christ" in his Antiquities is also strongly disputed and was probably a Christian interpolation as well. Historians believe that the text originally referred to Jesus bar Damneus, who was high priest in the year 63.

Tacitus wrote about the persecution of Christians by Nero, and briefly describes the beliefs of contemporary Christians (a guy called Christus sentenced to death by Pilatus. He doesn't even call him Jesus). This is not a historical account of Jesus' crucifixion, but rather a second- or third-hand telling of a story told by early followers of the Christian religion.

While there was a historian called Thallus, the surviving fragments of his works don't mention anything related to the Jesus story. I suppose what you are referring to are the writings of George Syncellus, a Christian author who quoted another Christian writer called Sextus Julius Africanus, who in turn references someone named Thallus, which was a common name back then. This unidentified Thallus supposedly mentioned an eclipse around the time of Jesus' crucifixion, which has not been mentioned in any contemporary text. That's about as significant as your reference to Gary Habermas.

As for the mentioning of Jesus in the Talmud, many historians see this as a reaction to early medieval Christianity instead of a contemporary reference. The Talmud was revised several times over the centuries, partially because of disputations with the Christian church in the Middle Ages. Ironically, some of those disputes were about alleged insulting references to Jesus and Mary Rolling Eyes Jewish scholars denied that the disputed passages were about the Christian Jesus, but nonetheless censored subsequent editions of the text. Positive mentionings of Jesus might have been added simply to appease the Christians.

The rest of your references are biblical sources. You can't prove the validity of a book by using the same book as evidence.


1. Regardless of what was obviously some dubious Christian scholarship when it came to editing the TV, scholars still agree with the material I use from the TV to support the twelve facts. They obviously edited an already existing passage. So, while latching on to "most scholars" you have not faithfully represented their views, or are demonstrably ignorant of them. I intend no offense, and will start supplying plenty of citations here when I am able to after I've returned home on Sunday.

2. My mention of Thallus was little more than a tally. I probably discredit the source just as much as you, so we basically agree that that source is of little affect.

3. Tacitus worked for the Senate and had their resources at his disposal. Clearly, he didn't need to rely on hearsay to get information on one of his own Praetors.

4. As for your last comment, that's really rich. I mean that. I don't know where you learned historical methodology, and I'm now going to hazard the guess that you simply haven't. If you had, you would be familiar with the idea of internal criticism in historical methodology, and you would hopefully be familiar with the subfield of textual criticism, which has esteemed professors holding posts in it worldwide. Face it, you don't actually agree with or even represent very well, a vast majority of scholars.

And I'm just being perfectly frank to get a point across. I actually think you are an intelligent person, and I intend the utmost respect. However, your statement there warranted some pointed statements in return.

Moreover, disparaging Gary Habermas is just silly and old hat when it comes to online discussions, because his esteemed publishers and fellow scholars take him plenty seriously. Try telling me he's just another hack apologist after you've read his doctoral dissertation. The guy is a landmark in two fields, the history and philosophy of religion. He follows in the tradition of Pannenberg, whose staunch critics such as Ehrman and Sanders pay respect to.

5. The mention of Jesus was not positive. Establishing some motive and contriving how it is that someone edited the compilation like that, does not actually support that view. If you would refer to me those Jewish scholars, I'd be happy to take a look at their arguments. However, arguing to the negative of a claim, using a hypothetical, does not warrant a conclusion like that. The Masoretic scribes are renowned for their scholarship and editing. Respected historians don't just contrive that a Masoretic text was dubiously edited for the purpose of polemic. That particular quote comes from the Mishnah (a compilation predating the Talmud), during the Tannaitic period. You really think they would edit Mishnaic material on a whim?


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Last edited by Lukecash12 on 13 Apr 2012, 11:18 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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13 Apr 2012, 9:36 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Actually, that and a variety of other facts surrounding the resurrection, are facts that I can argue for without appealing to the reliability of the NT at all. The method that I use, before I begin to discuss the reliability of the NT, is called the minimal facts method. It is what it sounds like, a minimalistic method that focuses on the facts that we can confirm through heavy attestation, a scholarly consensus, and a variety of convincing evidences (Gary Habermas has described it like this: "Data that is (1) well evidenced, and (2) data that is accepted by virtually every scholar). I don't have to make any appeal to whether or not the NT is worthy of trust, in order to establish facts about the crucifixion and resurrection.

The credibility of the NT can't be dismissed as important. The question will always be "Is the source MORE implausible to dismiss than the claim". If the NT or early Christians or whatever have you, are pretty unreliable as sources, we can rightly dismiss them if the claim is way too extreme for the kind of evidence they provide.

Quote:
Critical NT scholarship,made up of both theists and atheists, skeptics and believers, by and large agrees with the following twelve facts:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. He was buried.
3. His death caused the disciples to despair and lose hope.
4. The tomb was empty (the most contested).
5. The disciples had experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus (the most important proof).
6. The disciples were transformed from doubters to bold proclaimers.
7. The resurrection was the central message.
8. They preached the message of Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem.
9. The Church was born and grew.
10. Orthodox Jews who believed in Christ made Sunday their primary day of worship.
11. James was converted to the faith when he saw the resurrected Jesus (James was a family skeptic).
12. Paul was converted to the faith (Paul was an outsider skeptic).

[/quote]
None of which is really powerful enough to persuade a skeptic of an event like a resurrection. None of these claims strictly requires a resurrection nor are evidences of these claims strongly better than the background improbability of any given miracle. Miracle claims, if one has noticed, are astoundingly common, whether it's a coworker who thinks they were healed by some old wive's tale, to psychic claims, to non-Christian miraculous claims, and so on and so forth. Even Dianetics claims to cause miraculous occurrences. So, our base probability should be astoundingly low, and none of these claims actually really should be considered offsettingly likely. Sure, they are very likely true, but even with the history we have, it's entirely possible(even if implausible) for some or many of these claims to be false, and that's not sufficient for the kind of event a miracle represents, ESPECIALLY if it's to be taken as the supreme source of divine revelation, ESPECIALLY if there are background reasons for us to be skeptical towards Christianity, whether it is theological problems(like hell, Penal Substitution, the trinity) or philosophical(problem of evil, faulty design, success of naturalistic explanation, etc).

Quote:
First, I was not referring to the idea that they all had the same subjective vision at exactly the same time. I was focusing more on the idea that several different people, with psychological profiles, dispositions, and personalities, that were fairly distinct from one another, all being presumably healthy minded, saw something that disagreed with their normal Jewish theology (making hallucinative projection less likely). Maybe it is less relevant to your own criticism there, but then again you aren't David Hume. Such criticisms were quite prevalent in the 19th century, and they have been gaining traction again, because of a few radical scholars and a lot of pseudo scholars and intellects who don't understand historical methodology and the medical issue of subjective visions.

Regarding mass hysteria, that would be a valid topic if the early Christians were hysterical. They weren't. If you would like to present that as an issue for contention, then I would like to see if you can substantiate that claim. I won't just do your research for you, of course.

Subjective visions are an issue, and frankly, they're a difficult issue because our perception isn't as solid or concrete as we tend to think it is. This issue is shown with many illustrations by Dan Dennett.

Actually, the burden of proof is on you to prove that early Christians were not hysterical, should not be hysterical, etc. You're the one who put forward a resurrection as plausible, and for a resurrection to be plausible, we have to have reason to consider it more probable than any other possibility.

Quote:
It was in fact unprecedented, in that that was not an idea within Jewish theology. Resurrection cults certainly have been around, but few of them were centered upon a real historical person, and none of them were Jewish. Jesus' disciples were very Jewish, in fact they were so strongly Jewish that one of the original disciples was named Judas Iscariot, affiliating him with the Zealots (a fierce nationalistic group). Jesus being individually resurrected, would not be something that would normally occur to them. Truth be told, if they said anything about a risen Jesus, if they were to follow their Jewish roots they would have said that He is in Abraham's bosom.

Ok, and so the issue is whether syncretism could occur. The issue is that a theological innovation could occur. The issue is that people who are distraught about the death of Jesus could have confabulated something to blunt the cognitive dissonance of this, as cults have done in the past. Hell, it could even just be Greg Cavin's "twin" idea, as while it's not evidenced, it's not impossible Jesus had an identical twin who was separated from him at birth and this follows a large set of causative pathways that are already possible in our background, and everything else. I mean, the simple issue is that you are trying to argue a miracle. Miraculous claims, at this point, are something where we are already epistemically justified to IGNORE YOU, simply because the claims are as common as copper, difficult to outright refute, have some form of evidence for them, and can't all be true. Miracles are the ancient world's Nigerian spam mail, as while it's not impossible that an African bank wants to transfer you money, you're still well in your right to press the delete button once you realize what's going on.



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13 Apr 2012, 11:32 pm

In any case, as to your original issue just seems like a bit of a waste. Trained apologists seem like creation scientists to me. I don't really care how many degrees you have, it doesn't take a degree to delude yourself pretty thoroughly. Sure, some are great scholars, but..... that doesn't change the fact that they are arguing for an obvious absurdity.

So, here are the issues:
1) Christian theology is pretty obviously crap.

So, for instance, central to Christian theology is the idea of the atonement. This is usually considered penal substitution theory. The problem is that this idea just doesn't make sense. Here's a Christian presentation of an analogy to this:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0027/0027_01.asp

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that justice simply isn't being done in this case. So, in "The Execution" Sonny gets out of suffering for his crimes because his mother just dies for him, so under a justice system with a substitution ability, we could potentially have Al Capone getting away with murder so long as he has enough cronies to take the hit. That's simply not justice though.

Now, under Penal Sub, the unjust substitution isn't just something God wanted to do, it's actually necessary to fulfill justice. It's clear from the issue earlier that it simply doesn't work. However, additionally, it's just not actually necessary for any real forgiveness anyway. As much as apologists will say that forgiveness is taking on the pain to oneself, at BEST this is figurative, and many people manage to forgive without really thinking of it as incurring anything close to a literal cost. So, God literally sacrificing himself... just doesn't make sense even if this is a model of forgiveness, ignoring that it doesn't even serve justice.

Now, going from that to eternal punishment, this just ends up creating a system where justice isn't even CLOSE to a consideration. So, with salvation through faith, the issue is that anybody who has faith in God gets out of hell. Now faith in God may not necessarily be a cake-walk, but it certainly doesn't entail y'know, actually being a good person, it's salvation through faith where (assuming Lordship Salvation) good works eventually flow from this, but the thief who died beside Jesus who had not had any time to spend improving his character to be a good person still gets into heaven. That's simply not a system of justice, or even close to it, this is just plain and simple cronyism. It's just like if your boss gives the fat raises to the people who brown-nose, instead of the high performers, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that there is something obviously wrong about this. It just takes a trained apologist to contort himself into arguing that the obviously wrong is a theological virtue.

And of course, the eternal punishment itself isn't even close to reasonable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dehxX-wWPxM The simple issue is that the mere existence of something like this as a possibility is a very strong and obvious sign that something within an ethical system has gone wrong. It's kind of like how this comic illustrates a problem with utilitarianism http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db ... 2569#comic So, what we have is a system in which billions of people are going to suffer forever in an eternity of torment in the system that God designed for how the world should work. The error rate is astounding, and if we listen to some Christian theologians(Like Jonathan Edwards), we are just going to DELIGHT in seeing Gandhi, our unbelieving relatives and friends, and all of those people suffering forever. This is just obviously wrong though, there should not be a system in place where a certain set of people are going to suffer forever, without possibility of escape, and with a perfectly good and ultra-powerful being doing nothing to stop this, or reform the system even more to make sure EVERYBODY gets out. However, the idea of this as ethically plausible, given our basic ethical intuitions, is so hard to justify that honestly, genocide and mass murder is easier to swallow. People are hurt LESS by the Holocaust than Hitler ALONE will suffer from hell. And frankly, there is no clear need for this. If God is omniscient, and omnipotent, and if he could create any world he so chose, he could easily have prevented hell. There's an infinite number of possible worlds(even if just differing by the placement of one atom), just as a matter of sheer probability, at least one of them is going to have no hell, regardless of how much transworld depravity one wants to throw around. (And that's not even getting into how hell is poorly justified in it's internal reasoning. I mean, usually there is some notion of free will going around, but there is little reason why people suffering in hell from their sins are going to be LESS amenable than people actually alive, and these free will notions themselves are pretty downright questionable. I mean, free will is itself kind of philosophically problematic in that it violates the principle of sufficient reason.)

And since we have on our minds the concept of mass-murder, the issue is that even ignoring hell, the image of God we see in scripture is itself not really that clearly very moral. I'm going to do a block quote of Deuteronomy, just to see how massive, extreme, and outlandish some of the things in scripture can be.

Deuteronomy 28:16-68 wrote:
(16) Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. (17) Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. (18 ) Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. (19) Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. (20) "The LORD will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me. (21) The LORD will make the pestilence stick to you until he has consumed you off the land that you are entering to take possession of it. (22) The LORD will strike you with wasting disease and with fever, inflammation and fiery heat, and with drought and with blight and with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish. (23) And the heavens over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you shall be iron. (24) The LORD will make the rain of your land powder. From heaven dust shall come down on you until you are destroyed. (25) "The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them. And you shall be a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. (26) And your dead body shall be food for all birds of the air and for the beasts of the earth, and there shall be no one to frighten them away. (27) The LORD will strike you with the boils of Egypt, and with tumors and scabs and itch, of which you cannot be healed. (28 ) The LORD will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind, (29) and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways. And you shall be only oppressed and robbed continually, and there shall be no one to help you. (30) You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall ravish her. You shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not enjoy its fruit. (31) Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat any of it. Your donkey shall be seized before your face, but shall not be restored to you. Your sheep shall be given to your enemies, but there shall be no one to help you. (32) Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and fail with longing for them all day long, but you shall be helpless. (33) A nation that you have not known shall eat up the fruit of your ground and of all your labors, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually, (34) so that you are driven mad by the sights that your eyes see. (35) The LORD will strike you on the knees and on the legs with grievous boils of which you cannot be healed, from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head. (36) "The LORD will bring you and your king whom you set over you to a nation that neither you nor your fathers have known. And there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone. (37) And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the LORD will lead you away. (38 ) You shall carry much seed into the field and shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it. (39) You shall plant vineyards and dress them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worm shall eat them. (40) You shall have olive trees throughout all your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil, for your olives shall drop off. (41) You shall father sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours, for they shall go into captivity. (42) The cricket shall possess all your trees and the fruit of your ground. (43) The sojourner who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. (44) He shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. (45) "All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that he commanded you. (46) They shall be a sign and a wonder against you and your offspring forever. (47) Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, (48 ) therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness, and lacking everything. And he will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you. (49) The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the end of the earth, swooping down like the eagle, a nation whose language you do not understand, (50) a hard-faced nation who shall not respect the old or show mercy to the young. (51) It shall eat the offspring of your cattle and the fruit of your ground, until you are destroyed; it also shall not leave you grain, wine, or oil, the increase of your herds or the young of your flock, until they have caused you to perish. (52) "They shall besiege you in all your towns, until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down throughout all your land. And they shall besiege you in all your towns throughout all your land, which the LORD your God has given you. (53) And you shall eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters, whom the LORD your God has given you, in the siege and in the distress with which your enemies shall distress you. (54) The man who is the most tender and refined among you will begrudge food to his brother, to the wife he embraces, and to the last of the children whom he has left, (55) so that he will not give to any of them any of the flesh of his children whom he is eating, because he has nothing else left, in the siege and in the distress with which your enemy shall distress you in all your towns. (56) The most tender and refined woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground because she is so delicate and tender, will begrudge to the husband she embraces, to her son and to her daughter, (57) her afterbirth that comes out from between her feet and her children whom she bears, because lacking everything she will eat them secretly, in the siege and in the distress with which your enemy shall distress you in your towns. (58 ) "If you are not careful to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, the LORD your God, (59) then the LORD will bring on you and your offspring extraordinary afflictions, afflictions severe and lasting, and sicknesses grievous and lasting. (60) And he will bring upon you again all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. (61) Every sickness also and every affliction that is not recorded in the book of this law, the LORD will bring upon you, until you are destroyed. (62) Whereas you were as numerous as the stars of heaven, you shall be left few in number, because you did not obey the voice of the LORD your God. (63) And as the LORD took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the LORD will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you. And you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of it. (64) "And the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. (65) And among these nations you shall find no respite, and there shall be no resting place for the sole of your foot, but the LORD will give you there a trembling heart and failing eyes and a languishing soul. (66) Your life shall hang in doubt before you. Night and day you shall be in dread and have no assurance of your life. (67) In the morning you shall say, 'If only it were evening!' and at evening you shall say, 'If only it were morning!' because of the dread that your heart shall feel, and the sights that your eyes shall see. (68 ) And the LORD will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey that I promised that you should never make again; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but there will be no buyer."


Now the issue is that this is clearly a horrific threat. If I wrote something like this to another person, I'm pretty certain I could be arrested for saying these kinds of gratuitous things. It's not really clear that this is just, or even that it COULD plausibly be just, loving, or anything else like that. I mean, if this could be implemented by the government, could you even imagine a law that made this the punishment ever being just? I... really have a difficult time.

How about Noah's ark? It's a cute story to imagine as a kid to think of the giraffes and everything, but the story is really about God committing actual genocide. Now, I recognize that God's claiming that the world is just TOO TERRIBLE, so everybody's gotta die. Honestly, I don't really believe these kinds of things are plausible in a narrative. The being who has the MOST OPTIONS of every possible being decides that human beings are so corrupt, so intractibly resistant to any form of persuasion, that the only way to solve the problem is to just kill everyone. I don't think I've actually seen real living, non-psychotic people, so intractibly bad, that the only logically possible way to deal with them would be to kill them. I mean, I know some are so difficult it's hard to imagine a government handling them, but a God?? No F in way(well... except maybe for Christian apologists and fundamentalists).

But since we're on the flood, a major problem is that the story really isn't true. There is no good geological evidence for a flood. The genetic bottleneck caused by a flood is way way so extreme that the entire ecosystem would fall apart due to inbreeding.(and this bottleneck also isn't found by genetics research at all) The ecosystem would be so destroyed by a flood like this that it also wouldn't recover at all. And yeah... how would kangaroos gets to the ark and then back to Australia? I mean, maybe we can argue that the flood didn't happen, that it was a local flood, etc, but... that's not really what was traditionally thought, or what is straight-forwardly presented. In fact, a major problem is that the way the world works doesn't really make a lot of sense with an existing God. I mean, all life evolved from simpler origins. Great, but the problem is that evolution entails flawed organisms be created, which.... is exactly what we'd predict a God would avoid at all costs. It explains human evils and failings already... which undermines the need, desirability, or explanatory use of Original Sin, even basically undermining any reason to believe in a historical Garden(which is considered historical by many Christian groups and apparently by Paul). It simply violates any notion of rational and purposive action in the first place, as it entails massive wastes with no apparent aim, it can only justify a theory of the world that a Christian God would not want to be considered true, and quite frankly if we're going to treat God as a plausible cause for how the world works we do have to assume some notion of rationality, which is going to entail God taking actions for legitimate reasons and if we can't do that, God pretty much just exists to be an ad hoc notion to fill a gap, rather than a reasonable theory for how or why the world works the way it does.

And yeah, there are other issues, like Satan is an utterly implausible agent in a narrative. He just suddenly goes against a being that by all rational accounts could beat him down? I mean, the only real justification for this is insanity, but if Satan's insane, he fails to be as evil. It basically just goes under "plot hole". And yeah, the trinity? I mean, you have three persons, one being, no parts, it's easy to express this as a literal contradiction, and the best philosophical explanations are sketchy at best. (Statues made of clay? Really? Personhood occupies the same domain. There are entities imbued with one trait but not others, like Jesus is the son, but not the Father or the Holy Spirit, but he is still fully God and God is all three. I mean.... the entire issue is just an obvious logical tangle where all solutions have sketchy elements whether drifting too far into over-monotheism or too much like tritheism(like social trinitarian ideas).

2) The entire matter is a bit of a philosophical mess.

So, God is a perfectly good, all-powerful and all-knowing being, but there's lots of evil. Not just the occasional blip, but loads of it. I mean, the evils are just staggering. So, we have natural evil, which is the result of the laws that God put in place. God could have put any law in place he wanted to. He could made babies all bounce like rubber. He didn't, but he could have. But yet, tornadoes are rampaging, hurricanes strike, earthquakes occur, etc. God could stop all of that, and hell, we'd really not actually be the wiser if he did, so he wouldn't intrude on our free will in doing this.(Not that knowledge actually intrudes on free choice anyway, but that's to avoid that lame apologetic) The issue is that on the face of it, this is rather absurd. We have reason on the face of it to think God would do this, and yet he didn't do this, and the explanations aren't that great. (I mean, Plantinga's FWD uses demons. wtf?) And the lists of evil things go on and on. God could basically stop almost EVERY evil event through some possible action, as there is pretty much a near infinite series of worlds he could actualize, but he really doesn't. He picks an arbitrary level of evil, rather than just going for no evil, which really appears quite logically possible.(I mean, there's a thousand quibblings many have given, but this is a God.) (Note: I skip past a log of things like soul-making, but there really isn't a sodding point. God and the angels had pretty "made" souls without the struggle. Babies apparently get a free pass too. And similar loopholes pretty much exist for all of the other excuses)

Now, the big excuse is that there are some goods that we just don't know about, and that basically we should withhold judgment on the entire question because of this possibility. The problem is that the same kind of argument from the unknown could be given for literally ANY fact. So, sure, it looks like you're bedding a woman, but really, she could just be a really REALLY convincing transvestite, you could have been drugged, all of that. We don't actually buy into those kinds of skeptical epistemic intuitions in other contexts, without a great rationale, we shouldn't buy into them in this context, as the mere logical possibility is not sufficient. Not only that, but if skeptical theism is true, then moral knowledge of God is shot to hell anyway, as if we can't know that something is net evil, then how can we know that something is net good much better? A lesser good could easily lead to a greater evil, and if we can't really evaluate the divine character, this gets shot to hell, but not only that, if an evil God is basically implausible, and we can't distinguish between the good God idea and the evil God idea, then both should be assigned equal plausibility.

God's foreknowledge basically also creates a huge problem. Why? Because God's foreknowledge alongside his creator status, basically makes everything a part of his divine plan, which he has full control over. His full control necessarily extends to our actions. (If these were exempt, SO MUCH would be unpredictable and unable to fit into the plan it'd fail) The problem is that if one being controls the actions of another being, that other being lacks responsibility by our moral intuitions. I'm trying to find the philosophical argument, but it's failing me, so instead I'll have to refer to the Boys from Brazil thought experiment by Cohen and Greene: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/Gre ... ans-04.pdf (starts at the end of page 5 and developed on page 6) The issue is that moral intuitions basically tell us that these planning situations, kind of like the divine plan one in many many ways, ultimately the issue is that this destroys a moral intuition in some utterly horrific manner. (And note: We can get into transworld depravity, but if there is an infinite set of possibilities, some of which involve atomic shifts, it's pretty easy to just manipulate yourself past them. The issue is that "divine plan" is pretty standard and orthodox)

God, whatever it is, is just either a really complicated or really bizarre entity. God is a being capable of designing a universe, that is capable of expressing and containing a moral law, so on and so forth. The problem is that this means that God as an explanation for any event becomes pretty unlikely at the basic level. Either we're talking about the most complicated being ever devised, one worse than any physical equation one could come up with or simpler set of explanatory functions, or we're talking about something very bizarre and utterly unlike anything we've ever seen. (And note: that isn't to get into the problems with divine simplicity itself)

3) God's just not what we really see in the world.

I got at this a bit with issues of creation and evolution, but it deserves some more attention.

I mean, evolutionary explanations tell us why there are problems with the design of things but God has no real reason or justification for allowing or accepting these. God has no good reason to want bad designs to exist. He has no good reason that we can really identify why he wanted giraffes to have nerves that stretch all the way down their necks just to loop back to where they started from. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0 He has no good reason why he'd give the human eye a blind spot due to it's structure. There is just not really a transparent good reason for a lot of this. On the face of it, it is absurd to say "God had this happen as part of his divine plan".

The issue is that these design issues don't just go to the bodies of ourselves and other organisms, but also to how the mind works. The workings of the mind are increasingly found hostile to traditional conceptions of free will. The most famous experiment involving this is the Libet experiment, where the mechanism of choice is found to be separate from that of conscious awareness of decision-making. The problem for this is that our intuitive notion of free will is conscious choice, and yet this is really just not how the brain appears to work on these issues. The issue is that other findings radically undercut the degree to which the kind of rationality that justifies a divine system involving free will really works out, so in a number of situations, it's found that human beings really actually don't know why they're making the decisions they do and that their efforts are post hoc confabulations. http://onthehuman.org/2009/04/john-dori ... 9re-doing/ The problem for a divine system is that in order for "choice" to be the morally inflated thing that can justify evil, that we can hang salvation upon, and all of that, there has to be a solid moral dimension, and so conscious rejection really satisfies, but unconscious urges pushing away without our knowledge? That creates a lot of difficulty. And even further, as neuroscience further unravels decisions, as it is already doing, the room for any libertarian free will diminishes in scope without just being an ad hoc philosophical add-on, and the philosophical problems grow and grow. (a point gotten at with the earlier article on law by Greene and Cohen) Psychological determinism isn't a presupposition, it's simply the finding of neurological study, and it's not very compatible with traditional theisms. (And note: Before somebody even THINKS to try the argument from reason on me, here's a little display about how reason works or fails to. http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson ... 201996.pdf Now, someone can go about on the special nature of Reason, but honestly, we have empirical facts, they give us information on how the human mind and human reason works, and a supreme metaphysic doesn't make sense given the kinds of problems we see, as how does it even function in a causative model? I mean, I know the continual efforts to put out dualisms, but these dualisms have to actually CAUSE material events to occur, and interact to gain knowledge from the brain, and creating a model that really makes sense given the kinds of weird data we ALREADY HAVE is kind of a chore and is likely to lead to a lot of ad hocness, and non-dualist models have issues with life after death anyway.... so yeah....)

False religions are as common as copper. That's a common phrase I've been using, but it's still very true. I mean, the problem is that if there are so many false religions and so many deceived people, what God would really want that? The issue is that these false religions are not likely the result of demons, but they do likely just tell us something about religious processes, and frankly, what they tell us really gives us reason to be skeptical towards religious ideas. Basically, what we learn from the prevalence of religions, of the emergence of cults, and from our natural religious thinking tendencies is that human beings are really damn gullible towards religions, and that our religious processing faculties really don't strongly orient themselves around theological truths, meaning that their existence isn't even that great to a religious standpoint in many ways. So, the problem is that religions existing doesn't actually seem to be a result of a lot of good reasons, but rather really just the confluence of a lot of flaws, including superstitution, hyperactive agency detection, weird treatment of our ontological categories, an ability for odd memes to persist, an ability to engage in spiritualistic behavior, etc, as false religions exist for reasons, and the reasons we see are not very good, but we don't have a strong reason to believe cultic belief is much different than normal belief. Not only that, but the cognitive faculties we have involving religion do actively think,(religion isn't JUST indoctrination) but they don't necessarily think in theologically correct ways, but rather people spontaneously come up with certain kinds of theologically incorrect answers and these theologically incorrect answers really don't seem to be a matter of something as nebulous as "sin", but rather of a cognitive process that poorly fits highly theologically developed religion. Our religion inclinations exist, they think, but they're sloppy thinkers. (And there is a good book on this)

Finally, naturalism just works too well. I know the response to this is "Well, who designed the laws", I already pushed this back by saying "maybe the laws are complex, but the designer is also a pretty bad explanation for them in terms of complexity and all of that". The issue is just that we don't really find much value or use or fit of a God and all of the natural facts we do find. I mean, we don't have "Thor did it" ever become seen as a good explanation. Rather, science ends up working, it finds the knowledge and our trust in science is so long-standing, and well-founded, that the status of something as science practically establishes it as true, and regardless of your view of scientific methodology, science is in practice naturalistic, meaning that we continually investigate and find naturalism true. So, the ongoing issue is that God just isn't a good explanation for anything we do find to be an issue, and naturalism as a working hypothesis is the best we've ever discovered. For that reason, we're justified in sticking to our working hypothesis whenever we come to a new kind of problem. Naturalistic explanations work, they are useful, they do everything we need to without any problem, and God only offers a meaningless additional regress to fill a gap, but this explanatory gap doesn't really need filling because these regresses don't need to go on endlessly anyway, and should only go to the point where we can actually do real investigation, and God is only invoked when we really don't have a lot of information to work off of.

So, at the end of the day, Christianity and ideas like that are pretty much just absurd. Christianity is pretty much a load of crock in and of itself. Theism is pretty much a load of crock in and of itself. The kind of world we see really doesn't match a theism very well either, but rather we increasingly see naturalism as just the way to go.

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And with that, there is no reason for the thread to even continue. All I can see going forward is just apologetic blathering just being answered by actual sense. That may seem a bit arrogant, but the surface plausibility issues are just massive, enough so that I just don't take apologists seriously.



Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 14 Apr 2012, 12:23 am, edited 4 times in total.

Joker
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13 Apr 2012, 11:37 pm

Hmm am I the only one seeing the Irony of Theists and Atheists debating religion :lol:



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13 Apr 2012, 11:43 pm

Joker wrote:
Hmm am I the only one seeing the Irony of Theists and Atheists debating religion :lol:


Huh? What am I missing? That's like the least ironic thing in the history of the world. It's like saying that it's ironic when people who like cats and people who like dogs argue about whether cats or dogs are better.