ZeitGeist

One slight problem with Lewis's "trilemma" (and the reason that Lewis is easily the most over-rated theologian ever) is that we actually have no idea what Jesus said or didn't say; none of the New Testament predates seven decades after the crucifixion.We have no idea what Jesus claimed or didn't claim; only what was written down decades later as his words. Were they? It's impossible to say. So Lewis's trilemma is false trichotomy; a fourth option is that Jesus was merely a Jewish religious leader who gained a following on some basis, and then much later a bunch of words were ascribed to him by their authors. Oddly enough all scientific tests work (or don't work) regardless of the attitude of the experimenter. It's only a feature of nonsense and woo that you have to be "receptive" or you won't see it. A demand of "receptivity" is a good indicator of nonsense. Oh, for God's sake. We're not atheists because we want to get laid, NJ. Anyway since when has belief in God been any sort of impediment to having a crazy sex life? You should probably ask Ted Haggard about that.

I do, actually. I don't think "the words attributed to Jesus in the Bible are actually his verbatim speech, even though it was never written down until 70 years later" constitutes one of those reasonable assumptions. Can you defend it, if it's so reasonable to you? Sex, drugs, murder, whatever you want. When has belief in God ever been an impediment to those behaviors? Hell, they make it easier to justify. You get a lot more out of rationalizing your behavior as something "God wants me to do" than by embracing some kind of purposeless life. With religion, you get to do whatever you want and you get a purpose, hand-delivered to you by an infinite cosmic being who's always on your side and is obsessed with your each and every action.How can atheism-for-rationalization's-sake hold a candle to that? People don't become atheists to justify their own behavior. For that they turn to religion, NJ. True fact. Not everyone is atheist for good reasons. Some people are atheist because their religion tells them to be.I can't condone that. You should be an atheist because you've accurately concluded that there's no such things as gods based on the abundant evidence this is so, not because you read "there are no such things as gods" in a book somewhere or your buddy told you.Skeptikal should believe what he believes because of the evidence, not because of what he wants to be true. Only he can tell us whether or not he's doing that.

WTF Bible are you reading? Jesus burns Thomas so bad in that passage:

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But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

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25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

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26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

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27 Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

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28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.

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29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

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As in "blessed are they, Thomas, and not you." What could be more belittling than the Son of God telling you that the people who did exactly the opposite of what you just did are the ones who are blessed?Do you simply not read the pique in that verse? The condescension? The disapproval?

That's a very good point. For instance, Ian Fleming didn't just make up the name James Bond; James Bond was an ornithologist and the author of a birdwatching book that Fleming had used quite often in the Caribbean.Now, of course, the real James Bond was not a secret agent, he neither had a license to kill nor preferred his Vespers shaken, not stirred.So regardless of the fact that we can find a whole host of documents corroborating the existence of one James Bond, including a number of his books, his birth certificate, his will, etc; it's still fair to say that James Bond as detailed in Ian Flemings novels is a complete fictional character.

I'm sorry, what? I don't understand your response.

If you insist on being obtuse, you won't see what is plainly meant. The fundamentalists are right about this, as they are about so much of the Bible. The Bible either supports fundamentalism or drives you into atheism. The only way it supports "moderate" Christianity is by moderate Christians not actually knowing what it says. It wasn't his disciples he was talking to. They had already seen and already spread the word to Thomas. It was Thomas he criticized for having heard but not believed, and everybody else by extension who would say "I need to see it to believe it.""Blessed are those who did the exact opposite thing you just did." How is that not criticism? Do you think Thomas bowed to Jesus because he was happy? No, it was the sting of his rebuke that drove him to his knees; it was the realization that he'd just pissed off Jesus that sent him down in supplication.

It's the only source that says what it says, NJ. There's no other source of Jesus's words except the Bible, and the people who are quoting the Bible. So, no, it's not consistent with any other source; in fact, it's completely inconsistent with all other sources. Consistent with what? Other sources? There are no other sources that corroborate the Bible, just other writers who quote the Bible. Consistent with itself? We've dispelled that myth around here long ago. (Are good works required to get into heaven? The Bible offers two different opinions.) The only prophecies the Bible lives up to are the ones that are in the Bible; that's hardly indicative of anything. Hell, even in Lord of the Rings Tolkein writes prophecy in the beginning that is fulfilled by the end. Why would that be significant? Even the ancient Greeks knew that "prophecy" was a mug's game, and there's a hundred books on how to fake prophecy. (Hint - be as vague as possible.) Should you drink, or not? Some people read the Bible and say "no, not ever." Some people read the Bible and say "Jesus drank, so we should have wine at communion."Exact same moral schematic? NJ, there's more than 30,000 different Christian churches, each with their own idiosyncratic moral schematic. Is homosexuality wrong or right? Is divorce ok? Smoking pot? Having sex?Do you think that Christian internet boards talk about these issues any less than we do, simply by virtue of everybody reading the same Bible? I assure you that they do not. Jesus, how many times here do you find yourself arguing with other Christians, NJ? Or do you just make the hilarious assumption that anybody who disagrees with you is a secret atheist pretending to be religious? NJ, I am denying that's the outcome. People typically don't change their behavior after becoming atheist, except maybe to stop going to church.All that happens is that you stop using religion to justify your behavior. For some people and some behaviors, that's enough to get them to stop the behavior altogether. For others, they change the justification. Where going to church was justified by "it's what God wants me to do", now it's justified by "I like the music." Most of the atheists I know in real life haven't stopped going to church. It really doesn't make that much of a difference in your behavior - because religious people do what they want to do, anyway. You do. Being religious hasn't ever stopped you from bearing false witness all over this place. In the words of Samuel Johnson, "I refute it - thus!"Ok, well, that doesn't work so well on the internet because you can't see me kicking a stone like Johnson did. My world does contain things that are concrete - the things that are in the world. (Like actual concrete.) You've had every opportunity to prove that, and have failed each and every time. Excuse me if I ignore your empty assertion here. Lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Everybody knows that.

Yes, I know that, Honey, but it's irrelevant."Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe." Is that passage just not in your Bible, or what? Open it. Read it. I quoted it so that you didn't even have to look it up. Why aren't you reading it? And Jesus burned his ass for it, in front of all his buddies. Told him he did exactly the wrong thing. How could that not be clear to you yet?

Damned by faint praise.

Except that wives exist; if you don't believe mine does, I could potentially present her birth certificate, master degree, driver's license, and other legal documents that testify to her existence.You can't be gleaning evidence that leads you to the conclusion that "god loves you" because there's no such thing as God. QED. Faith and evidence are an inverse relationship. To the degree that a certain proposition has evidence to support it, less faith is needed to believe it. To the extent that a position must be taken on complete faith, it has no evidence in its favor.And if one makes an effort to believe only in that for which there is sufficient evidence, then one is, by definition, living without faith. I agree completely. Which is why your continued reasoning:

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Why then scoff at it, as if nature was conspiring against us?

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is completely specious. We scoff at it because evolution doesn't optimize. It doesn't perfect. And it isn't human-centric. Human beings get tapeworms, too, but we wouldn't say that "we get tapeworms for a reason, and so we shouldn't scoff at them and try to have them removed from our bowels, but rather we should all ingest tapeworm eggs to have one of our own."But that's exactly what you're suggesting here. We don't know that human beings evolved to have religion. Maybe religion evolved to have us, like a parasite or a disease. We don't know that religion constitutes a survival benefit for the humans that believe in it. It may very well be the case that human belief constitutes a survival benefit for religion.

Actual infinites do exist, such as the set of all real numbers.

Oh, really? What people? The people that wrote the Bible weren't even alive during Jesus's ministry.How can a text written as much as a century later possibly be "testimony"? What sources? What do they corroborate?As I said, you can find James Bond's birth certificate. That doesn't mean that Casino Royale is a true story. Indeed - during their day and for a whole century afterwards. The earliest parts of the New Testament weren't written for 100 years (about) after Jesus had supposedly died. Apologies, but I don't see the relevance. The people who wrote the New Testament were surely aware of the prophecies from the Old. Obviously, when it was decided that the person of Jesus should be made to be the Messiah, they fabricated the stories that fulfilled Old Testament prophecy.So what? You really wasted your time on all that, I have to say. You spent so much time proving that the last part of the Bible was written to "fulfill" the first part that you, apparently, didn't realize that just proves how fraudulent the whole thing is. Funny, where have I heard that before? Oh, right - for the past 2000 years, every year, from Christians. You all have been predicting the End Times for millenia.Funny, of course, that you never mention the most abject failure of prophecy in the Bible, which it repeats at least three times:

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So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand.

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32 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.

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This generation; that is, the generation of the people he was speaking to. Since the world didn't end 2000 years ago, it's safe to say that's unfulfilled prophecy. (I'm sure you have some kind of sophistry about what "this generation" is supposed to be retrodacted to mean. That's the trick with prophecy, you can interpret it to mean anything if you want to believe in it.)

It was from your article that I got the example. Did you even read it? Here's the part that proves you completely wrong:

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The mathematical meaning of the term actual in actual infinity is synonymous with definite, not to be mistaken for physically existing.

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"Actual infinity" doesn't mean physically existing, it never has. It means infinities that are conceptually real. The set of all real numbers is an actual infinity, and real numbers do exist.They just don't exist physically. Of course, space and time aren't physical, either, just the things that are inside them.I really do wonder if you even bother to read things, NJ.

It's always astounding to meet someone who is honestly completely ignorant of the fact that the gospels aren't named after their authors. Why do Christians always know so little about their own Bible?Wherever did you get the idea that they were, NJ? How could they be? The earliest gospel wasn't written till 100 years after Jesus had died. All of the disciples were dead by the time the first one was written. How could they have written any of the gospels?The epistles are different; but the thing is, the epistles were written by people who never knew the person of Jesus. They'd all learned Christianity from the Gospels. I mean they were dead. Kaput. No longer among the living. Pining for the fjords. Yes. I'd be very suspicious of the accuracy of any account given after so long a time. And in the case of the gospels it's more like 80 years later.Memory is absurdly unreliable. Which sources? Except that you still haven't presented anything that corroborates that. Where's Jesus's birth certificate? Where's the execution order? Where is any single contemporary document that lists the guy? Do you understand the example? I'm not sure how I'm not getting through to you. Even if there was a real person called "Jesus", if he never did any of the things recorded in the Bible in what sense, exactly, is he Jesus the Christ?For the record, I think there was a man called Jesus, just like there was a man called Arthur Pendragon. Jesus Christ is as mythical a figure as James Bond. They were vague. What's the relevance? NJ, your cut and paste never addressed the central issue. Why would I have spent time on an irrelevancy? The destruction of Jerusalem had already happened in David's time. How is it a prophecy to write down history? It doesn't say "Romans" in David, does it? Oh, for God's sake, NJ, the Jews were always going to do that. Plus they were helped by people who wanted the prophecy to be true. How is it prophecy when people who know about the prophecy and want to make it happen make it happen?If I predict your death in a crystal ball, and then I find you and shoot you, am I a prophet? No, of course not. Oh, for god's sake. Jesus is never coming back for you, NJ. It's all a fairy tale that wouldn't convince a child if adults didn't make them believe it. I don't hold out any hope that you'll be convinced, of course. Honestly, though, the prophecy stuff is really stupid. A 2000-year-long week? Please.

NJ, do you have a reading problem? Like, a learning disability? Your paraphrase bears absolutely no relationship to the paragraphs you've quoted. Look, it says as plain as day:

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"In mathematics, actual infinity is the notion that all (natural, real etc.) numbers can be enumerated in some sense sufficiently definite for them to form a set.

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You highlighted "natural", and that maybe makes me think that the presence of that word is confusing you. "Natural numbers" is simply a subset of the reals - all integers greater than 0.It has nothing to do with "nature" or the physical world or anything like that. It's just a set of numbers defined as all integers greater than 0. Right. Not to be mistaken for physically existing. "Actual infinity" as a mathematical concept has nothing to do with physical objects, it's a statement about certain classes of numbers. NJ, that's not what it says at all.There's the paraphrase - actual infinity is the idea that some infinite sets can be defined in such a way that you can tell, definitely, which numbers are a member and which aren't. Some of those sets include the natural numbers, the real numbers, the integers, etc. These are all classes of numbers which can be defined. NJ, the article you quoted gives both the natural numbers and the real numbers as examples of actual infinities. How can you say they don't exist when the article itself is telling you precisely that some do?