Raf

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.

George Lucas JK Rowling JRR Tolkien Homer Siegel & Schuster Campbell merely identified the elements. He didn't invent them.

Russell Crowe Charles Laughton

No one is suggesting there were no believers in the first century. I would even go so far as to concede these two people existed, although there is no extra-biblical reason to make that assumption. So what? Paul talked them into Christianity. What does that prove? L Ron Hubbard talked oodles of people into Scientology. Why did they believe? because Scientology is true? Or because they were gullible as f? The existence of believers does not establish the authenticity of what they believed. If it did, literally all religions would be true!

No dispute there. There are people who believe Muhammad ascended into heaven on a winged horse, that joseph Smith received the book of Mormon on golden plates, that L. Ron Hubbard had ascertained spiritual information leading to the development of Scientology. The fact that people believed those things doesn't make them true. It doesn't mean they happened.

BELIEF doesn't mean it happened