ZeitGeist

Alexander the Great:* had portents associated with his birth and death
* suffered from epilepsy
* was bisexual
* claimed divine ancestry
* owned a horse with vestigial toes
* was a great general
* founded an empire
* visited Egypt
* was murdered by his colleaguesTherefore, Julius Caesar is a myth.

Well, there's this guy I read about in some old books.* He lived a life of poverty
* He went about preaching about morality
* He said that God was perfect
* He taught that we should return good for evil
* He taught that there would be a reckoning in the afterlife
* He punctured the wise men of his time with sarcastic questioning
* He liked to illustrate his ideas with stories about daily life
* His statements were often gnomic in form
* He gathered disciples around him
* He is said to have "loved" a male disciple ...
* ... but it was entirely Platonic.
* He preached submission to the secular authorities
* He was tried for blasphemy
* His behavior at his trial bordered on the suicidal
* He was condemned by his countrymen
* He was executed
* His last words were an invocation to a deity
* The surviving testaments of his opinions are not consistent
* His message was distorted by his followers after his deathHe's so like the "mythical Jesus" that I guess we have to conclude ...... that Socrates did not exist.

Do you know what is meant by the "Argument From Bedtime"?If I fail to answer your question, it might be because I'm running scared, or alternatively, I might momentarily have something better to do with my time.---As for Jesus' existence, it seems much more likely to me that he is a man mythologised than that someone just made him up. With him being God incarnate well down my list of possibilities.People get myths ascribed to them. Look at L. Ron Hubbard. The incredible stories attached to him by Scientologists don't prove that he didn't exist, it proves that, OMG, people make stuff up.The evidence for Jesus is, in fact, the gospels and the existence of Christianity. Now, I don't accept the gospels as entirely historically accurate, which is why this message is not coming to you from some kind of monastery. But all my knowledge of history, which is considerable, tells me that although people make up stuff about people, they don't make up the people themselves. Every significant person from 2000 years ago has all sorts of myths attached to them, but that's no reason to doubt their existence.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

C. S. Lewis was not in fact a frickin' idiot, and if you go and read what he actually said, he did not actually say that.There are at least two other possibilities. That Jesus is entirely a mythological character is one. That he was grossly misreported is another.So C. S. Lewis addressed his "lunatic, liar, lord" trichotomy to people who accept the Gospels as a correct historical account and then are wondering what to make of it.Lewis was not, perhaps, the sharpest knife in the box, but he wasn't a moron.His argument doesn't come near to applying to someone like Spektical, who doesn't even believe that Jesus existed.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Here's the actual quote from C. S. Lewis:I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse .... You can shut him up for fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.But as you can see, this can only be addressed to someone who thinks that the Gospels are accurate.And to someone who thinks that Jesus claimed to be God, something that he does not in fact do anywhere in the Gospels.

The dubious proposition that every material thing has a material cause does not make me leap to the conclusion that all material things have an immaterial cause.As for, "intuition" that would be the stuff that tells us that the Earth is stationary and flat, right? I wouldn't trust my "intuition" to answer the simplest question in physics, so when you appeal to my intuition, which does not in fact tell me what you think it tells me, to tell me about the origin of the Universe, the word "bollocks" springs to mind.---As for Aldous Huxley ... how snide can you get?Do you want me to trot out Hitler's arguments for Creationism again, or can we not just agree that this is a fallacy?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hebrew is like French, everything has to be either masculine or feminine.

Because their God was invented by men, and everyone makes God in their own image.

So, tell me, when you do exactly the same thing that you whine about atheists "commonly" doing, is that "both interesting and hypocritical"?Or is your own personal hypocrisy of the dull and boring variety?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Where? I don't understand the question. What are you getting at?

YES.Do you suppose that I believe all the miraculous stories about Roman emperors in the Twelve Caesars of Suetonius?Every purported historical document must be subjected to the same critical analysis.

—

So why are you doing the same thing you condemn? And condemn as hypocrisy, no less.What was that thing ... "Glue onto mothers ..." ... no it's gone.Perhaps you could remind me.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes. Usually when I have this debate, which comes round now and again, I use both King Arthur and Robin Hood as examples.Robin Hood definitely existed, as (IIRC) did Will "Scarlet" Scathlock, and Much the bleedin' Millers Son. OK?I shouldn't be at all surprised if "John Frum" was (a corruption of) a real name. Which is more likely, that, or that one day a bunch of cargo-cultists just drew a name out of a hat? The Illiad was not written by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name ...Yes, I see your point. In the case of "Merlin" for example, there may have been a man, but by now he's entirely a myth, it would be silly to claim that he existed. In the case of Jesus, I think it reasonable to call the guy "Jesus", and maintain that he existed.I also think that Buddha existed, but I discount the story that at the moment of his birth, he exclaimed: "I alone in Heaven and Earth am the honored one". He did, however, found a sramanical religion around 2500 years ago, it would be silly to doubt it.

I didn't say that the question was illigitimate.But the answer you're implying, yes, that's rubbish. By cherry-picking one atheist saying something stupid and pretending that that's the basis for all atheism.Which is, indeed, snide.