Choosing a faith

Talk about missing the point. That was not what I meant. You don't even understand the arguments people are making. How can you even discuss something when you don't even understand what people are saying? I am not going to hold your hand and spoon feed you what people are saying, but I will laugh as you get more and more ridiculous and become more of a caricature of yourself.

You are mentally ill. Get help. Leave this forum and get help.

So all woo.

Damn, I thought it was leprechauns.

Not playing baseball is not a sport.

Yeah, your counselor is doing great.

CS Lewis should have stayed with fantasy. I slogged through Mere Christianity. It is painful and logically fallacious. The arguments are just not good. I can see Lewis in all of GDR's attempts at an argument.

Percy makes a good point in Message 380Maybe you should start with a definition of god. That way we might at least have an idea of what you mean.

You don't need to reply to everything. Nobody gives a rat's ass what a troll thinks.

There is no contemporary historical evidence for the existence of the character Jesus Christ of the christian scriptures. Using the bible is problematic as there are multiple versions, translations(through multiple languages) and interpretations. Many are contradictory to others and also self-contradictory. Also, you can not use a source to prove itself.We have been through this before on this forum.
The Existence of Jesus ChristMessage 7
Explores the lack of historical evidence. If you feel like defending the historicity of the dude, post on that thread. I would love to read your argument. If you have one.

I see you did not bother to follow my link to a previous conversation we had on the historicity of the Jesus dude.
The Existence of Jesus Christ

quote:

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TACITUS (c.112CE)
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Roughly 80 years after the alleged events Tacitus allegedly wrote a (now) famous passage about "Christ" - this passage has several problems however:
* Tacitus uses the term "procurator", used in his later times, but not correct for the actual period, when "prefect" was used.
* Tacitus names the person as "Christ", when Roman records could not possibly have used this name (it would have been "Jesus, son of Joseph" or similar.)
* Tacitus accepts the recent advent of Christianity, which was against Roman practice (to only allow ancient and accepted cults and religions.)
* (No-one refers to this passage for a millenium, even early Christians who actively sought such passages.)
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Thus, even if the Tacitus passage is not a later interpolation,
it is not evidence of a historical Jesus based on earlier Roman records,
but
merely a few details which Tacitus gathered from Christian stories circulating in his time (c.f. Pliny.)

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POLYCARP (c.155CE)
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Polycarp wrote in mid 2nd century, but :
* he is several generations after the alleged events,
* he gives many sayings of Jesus (some of which do NOT match the Gospels),
* he does NOT name any evangelist or Gospel.
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So,
Polycarp knew sayings of Jesus,
but
provides no actual evidence for a historical Jesus.

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EUSEBIUS
Eusebius was born over 200 years after the supposed death of the Jesus of christian scripture. Not historical evidence.PAPIAS
Even Bart Ehrman who rarely disavows a bad historical Jesus dude argument has no faith in anything Papias supposedly wrote(We have none of his writings).

quote:

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And so Papias is not himself an eyewitness to Jesus’s life and does not know eyewitnesses. Writing many years later (as much as a century after Jesus’s death), he indicates that he knew people who knew people who knew people who were with Jesus during his life. So it’s not like having firsthand information, or anything close to it. But it’s extremely interesting and enough to make a scholar sit up and take notice! . . . .

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There is, though, a still further and even more compelling reason for doubting that we can trust Papias on the authorship of the Gospels. It is that that we cannot really trust him on much of anything. That may sound harsh, but remember that even the early Christians did not appreciate his work very much and the one comment we have about him personally from an educated church father is that he was remarkably unintelligent.

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It is striking that some modern authors want to latch on to Papias for his claims that Matthew and Mark wrote Gospels, assuming, as Bauckham does, that he must be historically accurate, when they completely overlook the other things Papias says, things that even these authors admit are not and cannot be accurate. If Papias is not reliable about anything else he says, why does anyone think he is reliable about our Gospels of Matthew and Mark? The reason is obvious. It is because readers want him to be accurate about Matthew and Mark, even though they know that otherwise you can’t rely on him for a second.

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Does anyone think that Judas really bloated up larger than a house, emitted worms from his genitals, and then burst on his own land, creating a stench that lasted a century? No, not really. But it’s one of the two Gospel traditions that Papias narrates. . . .

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The only traditions about Jesus we have from his pen are clearly not accurate. Why should we think that what he says about Matthew and Mark are accurate? My hunch is that the only reason readers have done so is because they would like him to be accurate when he says things they agree with, even when they know he is not accurate when he says things they disagree with.

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Ehrman, Bart D. (2016-03-01). Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (pp. 95-96, 100-102). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

GDR refuses to respond to my posts. Probably best as he has no rational, evidenced argument for a historical J-dude.

GDR seems to have no interest in discussing the topic of the historicity of Jesus in the christian scriptures. As he is wont to do he just throws crap out and gets offended when people point out his errors and fallacies. I really had hope that he would turn out to be an honest debater. He is better than Phat, but that isn't saying much.

I use the same argument with my ghost hunter friend. If any of it were true, if there was anything supernatural or paranormal, it would have to overthrow the laws of physics. Causality would be destroyed and the universe with it.

And in six months GDR will think he has another revelation and start another topic and we will rehash it all once again. He will again realize his arguments are worthless and slink away again. Rinse and repeat