Raf

you know, i am sick and tired of your misreprentations. I did not say throw all scripture out. I said you cannot use scripture to prove itself. That Exodus and Noah's flood did not happen are historical facts. They do not entail throwing all scripture out. David, for example, probably existed. Solomon almost certainly did. Nebuchadnezzar absolutely did. The book of Daniel actually does record some history. Daniel himself is a fictional character. Psalms and Proverbs make no historical claims. The Prophets contain some stories that in all likelihood actually happened (probably not Jonah, which we can explore separately if you wish). But I never said toss out all scripture and I would seriously appreciate it if you would STOP LYING ABOUT ME. As for the rest of your ignorant comment: i have done nothing but produce evidence for my position, which itself required me to change my mind and abandon decades of preconceived notions. To suggest that I'm the one who has "shut the door" on examining the evidence with an open mind and heart is the height of hypocrisy. YOU are the one who has stubbornly shut the door refusing to consider evidence that conflicts with the myths you hold dear.

"So, you want everyone to believe he was just plain stupid?" I literally said the opposite of that. I never said he was a fool. But gullible? Sure! You say that about the followers of literally every religion other than your own! You believe Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon on Golden Plates? How gullible are you? You believe Mohammad flew to heaven on a winged horse? How gullible are you? You believe Buddha did this, Confucius did that, Thor did the other thing? Oh my God. Scientologists believe WHAT? You have no problem dismissing the claims of every other religion except your own. Everyone can fall victim to gullibility (a point that was raised earlier in a post by Rocky). EVERYONE. No matter how intelligent. No matter how skeptical. No matter how discerning. It doesn't make people stupid. It makes us human. My kid still believes in Santa. He's not stupid (and he's figuring it out on his own, by the way, which I think is awesome). My wife never told her daughters "the truth" about Santa. They're in their 20s now. They play along. But they figured it out. There is nothing "foolish" about faith. I have never called anyone here stupid or foolish (at least not without a reprimand). I know many believers who are brilliant. That doesn't make what they believe true. Whether the specific people you mentioned actually existed or not, real people in the first century became Christians, and they weren't stupid. You know what they were? Superstitious as f---. Seriously, how did Paul convert those very people. By appealing to the statue of the "unknown God" that they had erected, just in case they missed someone in all the statues they had erected. Huh? How gullible do you have to be to believe in the gods of Greek mythology? But they did, and they were just as smart when they believed in Zeus and Apollo as they were when they believed in Yahweh and the resurrected Y'shua.

Ok, couple of things going here. First: the existence of Yahweh would not preclude other cultures from making up their own gods. Second: Noah.... you know that never happened, right? You read Actual Errors in Genesis? Because I'm not going to relitigate that b.s. story here. Third: Even assuming that story to be true, it still remains that Yahweh would be perfectly capable, post-flood ESPECIALLY, of revealing himself to more than one culture. This notion that he chose Israel because no one else would listen is a little convenient, no? An Almighty God can't reveal himself to more than one culture? Everyone else said no? Must not have tried very hard. Jehovah's Witnesses get doors slammed in their face all the time. Know what they do? Move to the next house. They're persistent that way. And the fact that a Jehovah's Witness congregation popped up in Fort Lauderdale and another congregation popped up in West Africa, with the exact same doctrine and reading the exact same Bible, is proof that there is such a thing as "Jehovah's Witnesses." You mean to tell me Yahweh himself, THE ALMIGHTY, is less persuasive than one of the most irritating groups of people on the planet? They can spread his message to multiple cultures but HE can't? Please.

Right. There was something other than intelligence at work there. We actually agree on that. Except you JUST SAID... You seriously need to make up your mind if you're defending his intelligence or not. So to be clear: it doesn't take intelligence to be faithful, nor does it take intelligence to disbelieve. You can be intelligent and hold either position. Who said otherwise?

The parting of the Red Sea... never... happened. That is a fictional account. Do you really want to go there? The Egyptians kept terrific records. Losing their entire slave population of more than a million people and having your army drown in one fell swoop would have been recorded. It never happened. LUKE is the account you are trying to prove. You cannot cite it as evidence of its own accuracy.

No, that is a false assertion. If there were multiple gods with multiple intents and purposes, it does not follow logically that each one would reveal himself to one and only one culture. If Yahweh existed, quite frankly, it makes no sense that no other culture anywhere on earth heard of him except for those that developed in the middle east. It doesn't matter if Satan is planting stories of false gods all over the place to confuse things: Yahweh would still have the ability to reveal himself to a culture that had no prior contact with Israel. What you're doing is taking what I said and coming up with a tangential reason there would be other gods without addressing the central point of my comment, which is that no two cultures have independently developed the same God. It doesn't matter if 5,000 cultures develop 5,000 different gods. The bizarre thing is that no two came up with the same one. A god who EXISTS could have done that easily.

What about all the members of the council who called B.S.? You can't cite him as a model of intelligence and ignore all the other intelligent people who said no! That's just dishonest. So you have a member of the Athenian judicial council who believed Paul, and how many member of the council did not buy it? How many said this is nonsense? Why does one person's acceptance outweigh everyone else's judgment that this was bunk?

These songs are more than 20 years old.

old fogey!!!!

New song, same era Anytime i need to see your face i just close my eyes and I'm taken to a place where your crystal mind and magenta feelings take up shelter at the base of my spine sweet like a chick-a-cherry cola I don't need to try to explainI just hold on tight and If it happens againI may move so slightly to the armsAnd the lips and the faceOf The Human Cannonball thatI need to I want to Come stand a little bit closer breathe in and get a bit higher you'll never know what hit you when i get to you

No more torture you old fogeys.

The original singers still perform the song on occasion. They sound almost nothing like the original singers, naturally.

wrong and wrong Though "instant" would be synonym for the title, which is not a word.

Russell Crowe and Geoffrey Rush starred opposite Hugh Jackman and Liam Neeson, respectively. I'm out of actors

You have so many relationships in this life Only one or two will last You go through all the pain and strife Then you turn your back and they're gone so fast Oh yeah And they're gone so fast, yeah Oh, so hold on the ones who really care In the end they'll be the only ones there And when you get old and start losing your hair Can you tell me who will still care? Can you tell me who will still care? Oh care ... Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose You can plant any one of those Keep planting to find out which one grows It's a secret no one knows It's a secret no one knows Oh, no one knows ... In an [title] they're gone In an [title] they're not there In an [title] they're gone In an [title] they're not there Until you lose your hair Oh but you don't care, yeah ... Can you tell me? Oh No, you can't 'cause you don't know Can you tell me? Oh yeah You say you can but you don't know Can you tell me? Oh (which flower's going to grow?) No, you can't, but you don't know Can you tell me? (if it's going to be a daisy or a rose?) You say you can but you don't know Say you can but you don't know You don't know how, you don't know how

Apologies for my unusual lack of wordiness. Yes, that is what I meant by bzzt. Moving on from Die Hard: Bonnie Bedelia Presumed Innocent Greta Scacchi

It's an argument against the historicity of the resurrection. Anyone who suggests it actually happened in history is interested in the evidence for it. For the birth of Christianity, all that is required is that people believed it. That is not in dispute.

*Your. And yes: Christianity cannot simultaneously refer to the resurrection as the most historically significant event of all time and say there would be inadequate evidence for it unless you accepted it as a precondition for seeing the "spiritually attained" evidence. That is inconsistent with the alleged arguments of the earliest Christians and only comes now when people recognize how inadequate the actual evidence is. The contradictory, mutually exclusive and clearly fictional accounts of non-witnesses written a generation or two after the alleged events took place and citing "evidence" (such as the empty tomb) that no one could possible check decades later is not adequate evidence. What kind of evidence would be valuable: eyewitnesses. We have none. We have fourth and fifth hand accounts of people whose very existence is questionable (why did Mary Magdalene disappear? What happened to Jesus' mother? Where was Arimathea, and why was Joseph the only one in history from there? Where did most of the 12 go?) Records? We have none. The records we DO have contradict the gospel accounts. Jews didn't hold trials on the day of Passover (as implied in Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Pilate never had a tradition of releasing a condemned prisoner on Passover. Pilate would sooner put down a mob than succumb to its demands to execute someone for heresy. And if the Jews convinced him Jesus was an insurrectionist, he would not have needed any further convincing to execute him. There was no Arimathea. Crucified men were not given private tombs. There was no earthquake. There was no darkness covering the land. Graves didn't open up and release their dead. The funny thing is, any one of those things is more likely than a dead man getting up three days later. But we know they did not happen. Yet we're too believe the resurrection, the least plausible element of the story, is history. Bunk.

yes. Gods do not exist independently of the societies that create them. If you would like to argue that point, start a new thread. It is off topic on this one.

of course independent societies have come up with gods. My point is that no two independent societies have ever come up with the same God.

I think I need to be clear here. Whatever is behind religion was most certainly created by man. Whether you can boil it down to a single person is debatable, and you almost certainly cannot identify that person. But it was certainly people who came up with the gods. I've often said that if people did not come up with gods, then the same gods, actually existing, would have had the power to make themselves known to multiple groups of people. Europeans would have landed in the New World and told the natives here about Jesus, and the natives would have said, Jesus? We know him. Son of God, raised by a carpenter. We know all about Jesus. Crucified, right? Yeah. You mean you've been to Israel? WOW! What's that like? No two independent societies have ever concocted the same God with the same name and the same set of rules and worship requirements/preferences. But archetypes? Archetypes are elements that good stories have in common. People don't "come up with them in the explicit sense. They come up with stories.

Not what anyone said. Myths follow a basic pattern. The story of Jesus follows that pattern. Period. We cannot conclude the story of Jesus is a myth merely because it follows the pattern, nor can we rule out that possibility. That we don't know the identities of the people who invented the earliest stories does not mean they were not developed by people. All without exception were.

Might even win a prize

I was anticipating a "how could Jesus fit Campbell's mythic hero archetype when Campbell didn't come up with it until the 20th Century" argument. It is significant to note Campbell merely identified the archetypes. They didn't originate with him. Like Isaac Newton developed a theory of gravity; he didn't create gravity.

I understand, but it needs to be said out loud. Trust me on this one.