Raf

Before this goes any further: the significance of number in scripture is off topic for this thread. The value of Bullinger in general is off topic [his views on the resurrection and the reliability of the gospel accounts is fair game]. Let's stay on topic please.

I want to know the source of this "only a computer" claim. Bullinger supposedly worked backwards, coming up with the significance of numbers through scriptural usage. To marvel at how well it fits is to marvel that a ring is in the exact same shape as the cast in which the gold was poured.

Bullinger believed the earth is flat. Are you SURE you want to rely on his judgment?

You actually don't get to tell us what to cite in retort. Especially if you worship a God who ordered a man's execution because he picked up sticks on the wrong day of the week. The same God to the Israelites that if they have a kid who explored other gods, they are to throw heavy rocks at the kids' heads until they die. Oh, but that was the Old Testament. I know.

Ok, so this ongoing series is part of a genre that everyone knows, but for some reason, no one in the show ever mentions it. No one ever says the word "zombie." The current lead male character does not appear in the source material. The character of Daryl, played by Norman Reedus, was a fan favorite from his first appearance in the second episode. You might still be able to find shirts that say "If Daryl dies, we riot." No one from the pilot episode is still with the show. The original main character was Rick Grimes. He wasn't killed off, but the other characters think he was. His partner, Shane, was killed at the end of the second season. His wife, Lori, was killed in the middle of the third season. His son, Carl, was killed in the middle of the eighth season.  If you're paying attention, time moves very slowly in the series. One character is pregnant for more than two years of our time. The show resolves this with a sudden time jump, allowing one toddler to age considerably while the baby is old enough for dialogue (not that we've actually seen the kid much, if at all). The character of Maggie learns she is pregnant in season 6. By the end of season 8, not only has she not delivered, but she is still not showing. A time jump starts season 9 and, yes, the baby is already born. The baby would now be about six years old, following another time jump. (still season 9).

Bravissimi. Edmond Dantes. Like the Three Musketeers, also based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas

You likely have not seen Gerard Depardieu in this role. I chose him because it's legit: he DID play this character, and because I needed you guys to get to exactly where WW went. But you picked the wrong story. Now look at the other actors, one of whom you never heard of, and the other who starred in the title role of...

That would be the same tree but a different branch. Same forest, different tree.

so close. same forest. different tree

it is. The word Zombie has never been spoken on the show

I am in love with the idea of invisible information. This is $#!t you get to make up and attribute to God even though God could easily have said it but didn't. It's a mystery. You have to take it on faith. None dare call it Horse$hit. More seriously, though: It is false that I do not accept "pertinent" additional information. Speculation is fair. Extrapolation is fair. The reasoning process is fair. What's not fair is making $#!t up to pretend the conflicting accounts are in harmony when they are not. Peter denying Christ six times when each gospel says three. That's not reasonable. That's grasping at straws. Five crosses on the hill when each gospel says three is not reasonable. It's grasping at straws. Reasonable is when you say Christ died on a Wednesday and rose on a Saturday, and the Thursday sabbath was a high holy day, not the weekly sabbath. It's consistent with the facts and it does seem to fit together. There's nothing wrong with learning from history or other sources and incorporating that knowledge into your analysis of the scripture. What's wrong is making up excuses because without them your thesis of inerrancy falls apart. What's wrong is bolstering the reliability of one book because you need it to be accurate, even when the actual subject of that book has left behind his own testimony that its account is incorrect. That's just dishonest. It's not "pertinent invisible information." It's a cheap excuse that might as well be signed by Epstein's mother for all its reliability.

nope

Oh I'm sure if you tried hard enough you would find it. Ok, so this ongoing series is part of a genre that everyone knows, but for some reason, no one in the show ever mentions it. The current lead male character does not appear in the source material. No one from the pilot episode is still with the show. If you're paying attention, time moves very slowly in the series. One character is pregnant for more than two years of our time. The show resolves this with a sudden time jump, allowing one toddler to age considerably while the baby is old enough for dialogue (not that we've actually seen the kid much, if at all).

This character was played by: Gerard Depardieu Robert Donat Jim Caviezel

I submit that what you need to do is ask yourself, what is the most reasonable explanation for the set of facts presented? Is it a. When Luke said "many days," he meant more than 1,000. b. Paul was knocked off his horse by Jesus Christ himself, received a life changing revelation, went to Jerusalem, met with the actual apostles who actually walked with Jesus... and showed no interest in talking to them about his life, his teachings, or the details surrounding the resurrection. [Later add: This would also entail the apostles being completely uninterested in discussing anything with Paul, who just "many days" earlier was persecuting the church and, at least, standing idly by while their brothers in Christ were being stoned to death. No one wanted to question him. They took Barnabas' word for it. They had him right in front of them, but saw no point in quizzing him about the gospel he learned from God to see if it squared with what they learned from Jesus Christ himself]. c. Paul lied or was in error when he said he did not go to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles. d. Luke lied or was in error when he said Paul met the apostles at the onset of his ministry. Which is the most likely? No doubt someone can think of an e. f. and g. Personally, I don't find it necessary, but feel free. a. and b. defy reason. They are the kinds of answers you'd come up with if you were determined to find no error or contradiction, facts be damned. You can insist they are plausible and call me names for pointing out their absurdity, but it's hard to take you seriously if you believe them. c. and d. are equally plausible. Mistakes are easy, but lies need a motive. Two plausible motives come to mind. Paul wanted everyone to know he got his revelation straight from God. He could be expected to downplay any interaction he had with the apostles. Luke would have the opposite motive: to show that Paul didn't lock himself in a room and manufacture the gospel. To demonstrate that Paul learned about Jesus from the apostles, you need a story that puts them in the same room. Luke gives us that story. The problem is, why doesn't Paul want us to know this? Paul would have us believe he was so tight with God that he got the gospel without having to talk to the apostles. Either way one of these guys is, to put it charitably, wrong. But each has such a good reason to be wrong that it's hard to imagine it's an accident. Someone's lying.

Only if they're REALLY gullible. Because if you think Paul met with the apostles shortly after his conversion and did not discuss the life, teachings and doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth, and that explains the obvious discrepancy between Galatians and Acts, you're gullible as a toddler who really thinks I got his nose. But anyway, you can say what you want about my insidious spin, but you are the one in this discussion who actually came out against facts. So if I were you, I wouldn't be so quick to cast aspersions.

You do not accept facts as a common ground from which we can compare notes. You are dismissed. Thank you for playing. If "many days" is a euphemism for "three years," then any generality is a synonym for any specificity. That's not honest. But you COULD see a contradiction and still deny it because you deny facts as a common ground from which we can draw conclusions. It is POINTLESS to debate with someone who puts "facts" in quotes when they are inconvenient for his predetermined conclusion. Send someone whose debate tactics are honest.

Comparing Galatians to Acts, we learn that Paul and "Luke" did not agree with each other at all on what happened after Paul's conversion. Paul insists that he was not taught the gospel by men. This doesn't square with Acts at all. In Acts 9, Paul goes to Jerusalem days after his conversion. Not months. Not years. Days. (You might squeeze weeks into it, but not more than that). And Paul stays with the disciples. Not so, according to Paul. Well, someone's lying! Is it Paul, who would have you believe he learned the gospel straight from Jesus? Or Luke, who at the least implies Paul was a student of the disciples before striking out on his own? Because whoever you believe, the other one is a liar. Unless you want to try to squeeze the three years of Galatians 1:18 into the "many days" of Acts 9:23. But if you can say "many days" = "three years," then you can say any general amount of time means any specific amount of time. Many days might mean weeks, if you're being charitable, but three years? That's just not honest. Are we seriously to believe that Paul did not learn about the life of Jesus from the apostles? What becomes clear when you realize Paul wrote before "Luke" is that Paul sets himself up as equal to the apostles, while the gospels combine with Acts to demonstrate he is a later addition to the Christian message, not an initiator. He is subject to James' council. He doesn't dictate to the 12 that he gets his revelation from God and therefore they should heed him. THEY, through James, tell PAUL what to do, where and when to do it, and how. The writer of Acts puts Paul in his place, very much unlike Paul himself, who, while declaring himself least of the apostles, also makes it quite clear that he has a line of communication to God unmatched by the other apostles. So what does this mean in context of our discussion? Paul would have you believe he did not learn about the death and resurrection of Jesus, or its meaning, from men. He learned it all "from God" and "from scripture." Perhaps this is why Paul doesn't mention the empty tomb. Perhaps this is why he does not know Judas is dead by the time of the resurrection, so Jesus can be seen of The 12. Perhaps this is why Paul doesn't mention the women who saw Jesus first after the resurrection. The "apostles" had not yet invented any of those stories when Paul was writing. The first gospel, Mark, is compiled by a man whose knowledge of Palestinian geography is so laughably bad that even later gospel writers who plagiarized him still found it necessary to fix his blunders. The next gospel, Matthew, copies so much of Mark that it is abundantly clear to any fair-minded person that it could not have been written by an eyewitness. What eyewitness plagiarizes someone who wasn't there? We know Luke lied through his teeth about the Nativity, because the census he references didn't happen until Jesus would have been at least 8 or 9 years old. And Matthew and Luke provide us with Nativity narratives that conflict with each other in irreconcilable fashion -- meaning neither of these men got the account firsthand from witnesses. Secondhand, maybe. Thirdhand, more credibly. Made it up, probably. John, whoever he is, comes along and invents stories that are so compelling that Jesus MUST be the Christ, raising but never answering the obvious question: why on EARTH would the other gospel writers have omitted these stories from their accounts? You mean to tell me that no other gospel writer found it noteworthy that Jesus raised a man from the dead after he had been buried four days? NONE of them? You're straining credibility here! See, that's the thing about making up stories and placing them in verifiable history: the more fantastic the story, the less likely the event or character is to have gone unnoticed by history. Take Daniel, for instance. Here we have a book that blends fiction with actual history. Nebuchadnezzar, for example, actually existed. History records a lot about him. Which means the writer of Daniel, who came along a few hundred years later, needs to be careful about what he makes up. You can't have him lose his mind and eat, sleep and live in the field with cattle, because history has a tendency to record s#!t like that when kings go mad. Ask George III. And you can't make Daniel SO charismatic that he becomes one of only three head administrators of the Persian empire. Because history has a tendency to record those names. And they are recorded. And it wasn't Daniel (or his Biblical alias). When your fiction becomes too grand, it becomes impossible to pass off as history. Like the Exodus. Egyptians did a real good job of recording their history. Losing a couple of million slaves and their families soon after the firstborn of every family, livestock included, die of mysterious causes on the same night... that never happened to Egypt. Jesus is an interesting character, for sure, but it's hard to say his fame spread throughout the land AND, at the same time, argue that one would not have expected him to be noticed by the historians of the day, who recognized and mentioned oodles of claims to the title of Messiah. In Palestine. Missed the real deal, even after a few thousand people converted to his new faith in a single day. This is not credible. When you make huge claims, you need huge evidence to support them. Or at least SOME evidence. Conflicting accounts from people who were not in a position to know and who get verifiable facts wrong don't amount to a hill of beans as evidence, especially for an extraordinary claim like the resurrection.

You don't accept facts as an agreed upon common ground. You are dismissed.

When I say the atheist was underprepared, what i mean is that he did not adequately challenge the Christian's premises. Luke was not written by Luke, nor was it written by a companion of Paul, nor was it written by someone who interviewed eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Matt never challenges these assertions. That is when and why he loses. Luke 1:1-4 never claims he interviewed eyewitnesses. And it is crucial that we realize how much he plagiarized Mark because he considered Mark a reliable source. Mark was exceedingly unreliable Mark would actually have you believe that Jesus traveled from Texas to Florida but, along the way, stopped in Chicago. If Mark were relying on the testimony of eyewitnesses he would never quote Mark, with or without proper credit. In the debate above, the Christian's point of view is demolished with the credibility of Luke. Matt also fails to mention the degree to which Acts conflicts with Paul's letters in a way that is disqualifying: one of them is lying. More later.

Nice video. I give the win to the Christian. I think the atheist was underprepared.