Choosing a faith

Sorry to hear. Hope it's a mild case. Don't rush yourself resuming participation, get your rest.--Percy

You are correct. When there is no evidence you can reach no conclusions. You are incorrect. There is more than sufficient evidence of much ancient history. We know that Ramesses II, Sennacherib, Nebhuchadnezzar, Zedekiah, Alexandar the Great, Ptolemy, Caesar, Mark Anthony, Ptolemy and Genghis Ghan all existed because of the historical record they left behind. Of Jesus's historical record there is nothing, just inconsistent and contradictory religious stories. Even his primary evangelist never met him. Yes, deceptions are so obvious, especially back in 70 AD when people were so much more knowledgable, literate and perspicacious. It was prophecy:

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As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.
  —Luke 21:6

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My saying Pharisees when I should have said Sadducees didn't confuse anyone. So you're saying that in the years after the destruction of the Temple everyone forgot the Sadducees? I don't think so. And now you're contradicting what you just said about no one being left to explain a difference over theology with the Sadducees. You really should pick up a gospel synopsis sometime (puts the synoptic gospel passages side by side). It would be very illuminating for you. For example: All the synoptic gospels relate this story using the metaphor of the dove. They are not cross-correlative independent accounts. They aren't even contemporary sources but were written forty to a hundred years after the fact. Why are you seeking excuses for believing what you like? You don't need them. Everybody's fine with you believing whatever you like.The problem isn't what you believe but that you keep claiming evidence for what you believe, which you can't show. You instead keep making appeals for using dramatically reduced standards for what qualifies as evidence. If we applied your standards it would mean that all religions throughout all time are true, and many fairytales as well.--Percy​

It's as if you have no idea what evidence is. What you just described has no evidence. It's a rationalization you're offering in place of evidence. That was a reply to Tangle (Message 1105), not me, but I don't think you grasped my point because this isn't a response to it. My point is that you have no evidence. There's certainly no evidence Jesus ever spoke any of those words. You're using the fallacy of argument from authority. If N T Wright argues from evidence then your next move should be to describe that evidence in this thread. It's not possible that you believe I hold the same views as American fundamentalists, so I'm guessing that you're trying to say I'm arguing like an American fundamentalist. Or maybe you're saying something else, who can tell. You'll have to clarify. Reading it again, you pretty clearly said pretty much what I thought you said the first time I read it. You said that other messianic movements didn't make end times predictions but that Jesus did, and this is what you offered as answer to a request for evidence. Obviously making end times predictions is your yardstick for assessing the validity of a messianic movement. Your words were not twisted. Now you're adding an additional distinction, that Jesus's prophecies were not supernatural. That's absurd. Concerning the stories about Jesus it was all about the supernatural, from his faith healings to his walking on water to his turning water to wine to his prophecies. Rationalize all you like, but writing long after the fall of the Temple the words Matthew put in Jesus's mouth has him prophesying the fall of the Temple. What you actually said is quoted above. Now you're making a different point. Are you really going to claim Jesus was talking about only the Romans, not the end times? How about this passage that occurs shortly before Jesus declares the current generation will not pass away until it has all occurred:

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And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
  —Matthew 24:31

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Yeah, the Romans, right. The fall of the Temple was just one of the signs of the end times. The army behind the Temple's fall was unimportant to Jesus, especially the Romans. Render unto Caesar and all that.And you're stuck on drawing your evidence from the Bible. That is not a book of fact. It's full of both facts and fantasies. It's a typical holy book. What is prophecy but prediction in a religious context?By the way, if you click on the Peak Mode button of the message you're replying to you'll be able to quote the original markup. Couldn't find it in Daniel 7, but what you quote isn't what Mark quotes Jesus saying at all. Not even close.But for the sake of argument let's say that the words Mark has Jesus say actually appear somewhere in Daniel 7. Doesn't that make it even less likely that Mark is quoting what Jesus actually said? Then there's the question of how Mark, writing at least 40 years after Jesus, knew Jesus's exact words. Daniel 7 doesn't use the phrase "son of man." He uses the Aramaic phrase bar enash which means human being. Bible translators only used the phrase "son of man" because of its use in the NT. The connection you think you see is not for the reasons you think.But your purpose shouldn't be Bible analysis. You're supposed to be looking for evidence. Where is it? Is this to be your strategy, convincing people that the Bible is too evidence? Now you're forgetting about the Romans. Just earlier you were claiming it was all about the Romans. I never accept reading assignments, and especially not now. I've got a ton of coding to do when I finish this message. If N T Wright has evidence then you should present it in this thread.--Percy

You are again providing the same rebutted answer. Things aren't true until someone proves them false. Witnesses don't exist until someone proves they don't. Evidence doesn't work that way. You still have no evidence of witnesses. That they existed is just something you've chosen to believe in the absence of evidence. Bauckham? The Anglican scholar? And he's got objective evidence of eyewitnesses that would persuade anyone regardless of their religious background or lack thereof? Bring it on, by all means. Are you daft? How can you keep thinking this anti-argument helps your case? Every writer of propaganda intends their writings to be believed. That is self-evident. It's not conjecture. I'm just repeating what is clear from Paul's epistles, which figure prominently in the Bible, relating his efforts at founding churches in the Jewish diaspora. What would have happened without Paul is conjecture. The only person engaged in conjecture here is you. There's nothing particularly bold about reminding you what your Bible tells you. When it comes to founding churches it's all about Paul. Peter didn't even agree that Jews and Christians should share food together, and sharing food was a fundamental teaching of Jesus. It's like Peter had never met Paul's version of Jesus. If you mean the very first Christian congregations then it was all Paul except for the one in Jerusalem led by Peter. Christian congregations then spawned other congregations, as has always been the case with all religions. Where in the Bible does it describe this? I'm just trying to hold you to what your book actually says. Just like always you're picking and choosing which portions of the Bible to believe true. Of course there is. This isn't the place for such a discussion, but if you truly want to know about the evolutionary origins of empathy then just start a thread.As I said already elsewhere, even if science had no explanation for the evolutionary origin of empathy, all you're doing is playing the game of "science can't explain this now." The big problem with this approach is that what science can't explain is a continually shrinking playing field. Use of this argument by religion has a long history of continual retreat to the outer limits of current scientific knowledge. I'd still like to see you back up your claim that you can argue the existence of God using the worst qualities of our world.--Percy

It's not a question of what I would agree to as historical evidence. If you want to claim historical evidence for your religious beliefs then you have to produce historical evidence, which would be cross-correlative independent contemporary accounts and/or archeological evidence. You haven't done that yet, and you're unlikely to, because nobody's done it yet. If you embed yourself in the Christian apologist echo chamber long enough it all begins to seem real. The claim that Jesus was a historically real person can only be supported with historical evidence, but all you're offering is religious apologetics. Tacitus was writing more than 80 years after the supposed time of Jesus. He's not writing contemporaneously, so from a historical perspective he can only draw upon cross-correlatrive independent contemporary accounts and/or archeological evidence. Does he have anything like that? He does not.Your quoted passage is missing crucial information. What historical evidence are "Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd" looking at that leads them to conclude that it is "firmly established" that Tacitus confirmed the crucifixion of Jesus? How exactly do you imagine that Tacitus would achieve this from the early 2nd century AD?How does the fact of Christians living in Rome in 60 AD and being distinct from Jews amount to evidence that Jesus existed? Those Christians had no more evidence of the existence of Jesus than you do today. If Jesus was real then the most amazing miracle worker in world history escaped mention in all contemporaneous reports.I don't understand why you're not getting this. You can't present religious apologetics as history.--Percy

Expression isn't your problem. It's your lack of evidence. I agree with Stile on this, but I'd add that the reality considerations should be weighted. If the "reality side" includes "squeezes toothpaste from wrong end", "can't cook" and "terrible driver" then a 50-50 split or somewhere in that neighborhood seems fine. But if it includes "living in mother's basement" and "dealing drugs" and "done time", then the "feeling right side" better take a big step back.In general I agree with Stile that personal feelings should have greater weight in relationships and religion than in science and history, and the point we're making to you is that you're letting your personal feelings get the upper hand in an area where objectivity is required, namely history.
​ Subjective conclusions aren't worth a whit if your goal is to know something true about the world. When subjectivity plays a role then each person arrives at their own conclusions, and then you have no idea whether you've arrived at a conclusion that is true about the world.In your case you've reached a conclusion that you're happy with, and being happy is a good thing. Why can't you just be satisfied with that? Why do you feel it necessary that there be evidence for what you believe. Is the saving grace of Jesus Christ any less just because no evidence of his reality exists today?What you believe about God is a personal thing that is true for you. You'll never arrive at conclusions about God that are true for everyone, but that's what you're seeking. You actually believe there's objective evidence out there that supports what you believe religiously. That is just so wrong.There are many ways to show the fallacy in your thinking. One is to point out that every religion has adherents like you who believe there's objective evidence out there for what they believe. They employ all the same tactics you do in an effort to show that their religious beliefs are the true ones, but it's all just religious apologetics. You think a believer in the supernatural can be more objective than someone with the discipline to stick to the facts? Really? You're misstating this. The reality is that an atheist has seen no evidence or history of a "cosmic intelligence" and lets the absence of evidence guide his thinking. And atheists are just like you in accepting the possibility of historical evidence. But when someone like yourself says that such evidence exists but presents religious apologetics and says, "Here's your evidence," anyone capable of assessing evidence (not just atheists) would quite correctly point out that all you've presented is religious apologetics.We understand it feels very real to you, but the past is full of quite brilliant people who believed real things that were very much not real. Percival Lowell firmly believed there were canals on Mars. Arthur Conan Doyle firmly believed in ghosts and fairies and and so forth. But despite all the believers and all that's been written on the subjects, there's no more evidence for ghosts or Martian canals than there is for Jesus.--Percy

If you're referring to Mark 13, Matthew 24 and Luke21, I did a search and the string of letters "Roman" doesn't appear even once in any of these passages. You must think you see some kind of indirect reference. Can you describe it for us?Jesus also says that "this generation shall not pass away before all these things have happened," and even if we generously define a generation as 35 years then he was wrong. Some of that generation would still be alive when the Temple was destroyed, but Jesus described many other things happening while the current generation still lived, such as that his gospel message would reach the entire world. The reality is that it didn't reach the New World until 1500 years later, and I think that generation was all pretty dead by thenA response should keep the focus on history, no religious apologetics, which at heart is just making up explanations for differences between what the Bible says and the real world, and even for differences between what the Bible says in one place versus another.Don't like a particular explanation? Just find another apologist.--Percy

We can make progress on questions that are amenable to the approach of "gather data, analyze, present, peer-review, replicate." When you have no data, which is consistently your situation, then it isn't possible to draw real-world conclusions.What you wish for doesn't exist. You wish that questions lacking evidence could still be answered. They can't. It is still true that Christian scholars are heavily biased when it comes to judging the evidence for Christianity. Even if all the members of the Jesus Seminar tripled their output (not likely since Crossan is 88 and Borg and Funk (the founder) are dead) it would still be dwarfed by the production of the Christian scholarly consensus. The Jesus Seminar hasn't been active in nearly 20 years, and while it spawned a couple successor groups, they are so insignificant they don't even have Wikipedia entries.Even relativity, a spherical Earth and heliocentrism have dissenters, so of course there are dissenters from mainstream Christian thought, but they're a minute minority. What Tangle and I have both been saying is that the vast majority of Christian scholarship, which forms the bulk and bulwark of Christian scholarly consensus, is conducted by believers. Even the members of the Jesus Seminar were believers. They believed that Jesus existed, that he actually said many of the things attributed to him in the Bible, and that he was the true founder of the Christian church. Their most significant difference with the mainstream is in preferring a less eschatological Jesus. Members of the defunct Jesus Seminar? Does it somehow still exist in Canada? If there are any in the CoE then you're no doubt correct that it's a decreasing number because by now they're mostly in their decrepitude or dead. Being biased doesn't mean you're in error. Even lacking all evidence doesn't mean you're in error. It only means that you have no factual basis for what you believe. The combination of bias and lack of evidence also means that no critical thinkers would accept your conclusions. History is never "proven." It is only supported by evidence, and the more evidence the more likely the conclusions are correct. The evidence for Caesar? Massive. The evidence for Jesus and anything that is claimed to have happened during his ministry? Completely absent. There's as much evidence for Jesus as for elves and goblins. Aw, come on, enumerate your non-evidence again. It'll be fun! Wait. What? What about the Romans? You said there were Romans.--Percy

You keep saying this but have yet to defend it. What is it about plague, cancer, earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, wars, turning someone into a pillar of salt, raining death and destruction down upon Sodom and Gomorrah, pandemics, guns, parasites, injurious and/or fatal accidents, birth defects, blindness, deafness, slavery, poverty, famine, retardation, cystic fibrosis, Down's syndrome, myasthenia gravis, Hodgkin's disease, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, ALS, muscular dystrophy and so on that says love to you? The last time you tried to answer this was woeful. Though no such choice exists, you claimed we had a choice concerning these things and that that meant God is love. Do you have an actual answer yet? Those who argue that the resurrection couldn't have happened because such things are physically impossible have a pretty strong argument. What is N T Wright's argument, or Polkinghorne's for that matter? I haven't read Wright but I have read Polkinghorne and I found his writings a bunch of twaddle.Have you read Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell or any of the books by Sam Harris like The End of Faith.--Percy

You're repeating your same mistake of seeking evidence of God in things science cannot yet explain. This approach is a continuous retreat for religion because of constantly expanding scientific knowledge.Since we don't know how life began, how do you know it began in a physically impossible way and could only have been brought about by a miracle?How do you even know there is any such thing as a miracle? We certainly have no evidence of miracles, so why are you advocating for something you don't even know is a thing?--Percy

Atheism is just an opinion about God, not a single group, club or organization. There's no unanimity of opinion regarding materialism among atheists who think about such things. My daughter's an atheist who never thinks about atheism or materialism.I think you're viewing yourself and your protagonists through the wrong lens. It isn't theists versus atheists but theists/fantabulists versus critical thinkers.Most critical thinkers understand that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Though there is no evidence of anything beyond the material, they don't conclude the immaterial doesn't exist. There's also the definition of the immaterial to consider. Isn't it the same thing as the supernatural or the divine? I'll use the word supernatural for the rest of this message.A critical thinker might say, "Because there is no evidence for the supernatural, it would be improper to categorically state that it doesn't exist. However, given the properties implied by the term 'supernatural' one would have to wonder how it would interact with the natural world. Wouldn't anything supernatural that could interact with the natural world have to be reclassified as natural? Doesn't anything truly supernatural have to remain forever undetectable by the natural world?"--Percy

I think GDR agrees with you and that that's what he's saying at the top of Message 1578. He interpreted your claim in Message 1547 that "Bauckham says outright that Jesus did not give the Sermon on the Mount" as meaning that Jesus didn't say any of the things Matthew says he said. He didn't realize you were only saying that there was no such event as the Sermon on the Mount.--Percy

The point I was hoping would get across is that Carrier applies the scientific method to history and as such is a far more impartial evaluator of evidence than are evangelicals. No, Bauckham did not focus on the evidence. Bauckham is a Christian apologist while Carrier is a historian. But I'm just pointing out how different the two are. I definitely have no interest in applying the fallacy of argument from authority.If Bauckham has evidence supporting your position then present it here in the thread. Don't just claim he shows "how all the NT was written either by eye witnesses or by writers with a first person connected to the eye witnesses." (Message 510). We dispensed with that claim already, yet here you are a thousand messages later still pushing Bauckham. Please describe these "multiple contemporary historical references" about Jesus. Previously you had conceded that there weren't any, that the earliest historian writing about Jesus was Josephus sometime around 93 AD. Definitely not contemporaneous, and the one accepted reference is actually to the stoning of James: "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James."Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, and was resurrected, but all Josephus knows is that James who was stoned had a brother Jesus who was called Christ. If the gospels were true accounts then Josephus would have had a lot more to say, and so would a lot of others writing in the first century.But consider Menahem ben Judah. He was a contemporary of Josephus and an earlier leader of the Jewish Revolt in which Josephus also fought. According to Josephus he took Masada but died shortly after. We know all about Masada after that from Roman records.But nothing that Jesus ever did or said or that is a direct result of anything he did or said is mentioned historically anywhere.
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--Percy

Tangle replied to this in Message 1437 by producing his own similar quote, but I read through the first part of your link, written by Tim O'Neill who *is* an atheist but not a historian. I found it flawed. Concerning the lack of contemporary accounts he argues that the historical record is very spotty a long way back, and he provides the example of Hannibal, a famous general from the 3rd century BC for whom there's no surviving contemporaneous references.But O'Neill is not telling the full story. Sosylus was a Greek historian who served under Hannibal and produced a lengthy history. The history as a whole hasn't survived, but we have multiple fragments as well as numerous references to it or quotes from it. Silenus Calatinus was was a later Greek historian of the 2nd century BC who wrote a history of Hannibal's campaigns that also hasn't survived except in fragments and passages quoted by other authors. But Polybius, another 2nd century Greek historian, also wrote of Hannibal's campaigns that has survived. Both Silenus and Polybius likely drew up Sosylus.O'Neill's next point argues that it isn't odd that Philo Judaeus, a philosopher/theologian who was a contemporary of Jesus, never mentions him. I agree that he would have no reason to mention some random itinerant Judean preacher, but Jesus was supposedly the greatest miracle worker of all time, plus he rose from the dead. This would have set the ancient world abuzz. Many literate people would have written about him. But they didn't. Because he was just a random itinerant preacher, or he never existed at all.If Jesus and everything about him in the gospels were true then Jesus's fame would have exploded out of the gates. But it didn't. It instead took decades before the early Christian evangelists hit upon a set of stories that captured people's imaginations.--Percy

Your post begins as if you were going to embark upon a more scientific and disciplined approach than so far, but I fear your going to ignore one of the key "contexts of the times", indeed of any times in which a man or a group is constructing a new religion, and that's the significant role that fiction plays. Because you haven't a shred of evidence you're unable to tell fact from fiction. The best you can do is label as questionable all contradictory or nonsensical passages. Contradictions could be in the same passage, with other Biblical passages, or externally. Rephrasing this, you're basing your understanding upon Biblical passages whose truth and accuracy is unknown, in which case your "understandings" are unlikely to correspond to anything true. Why are you putting all your eggs in such an unreliable basket?Look at in this way it's obvious you're doing the opposite of what you're claiming. You're not conducting a careful and objective examination of the Bible. Your picking the parts you like best, that make the most sense to you, that best speak to you. There's no evidence standing behind what you're doing. Probably true. The OT tells the story of the Jewish God, and the NT tells the story of the Christian God. They are not the same God.But they do share some of the same qualities. There's the example of Ananias and Sapphira, but hey, they had it coming to them, right? God can't let love stop him from punishment by death for stealing from the church and then compounding matters by lying about it. Killing them was therefore an act of love, right? In fact, can't all the OT rage be reinterpreted as expressions of God's love of mankind?The principles you've expressed for living a good life are fine. The belief that you've expressed elsewhere that there is evidence for the events related in the NT has no foundation.--Percy