Choosing a faith

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.

And how would you know that?But the important thong is that they all CLAIMED that God approved of them - just like you do. You're saying He's a monster. Your beliefs are irrational.

But that's exactly what we do have. And as I have tried to show Phat, Jesus was all for eternal punishment too.

What about subjective evidence based on experience?

All evidence is subjective because it's gathered by people. That's why replication by others is so important, because the subjective biases average out over many people.--Percy

Papias, Polycarp. Eusebius etc.
Patristic FathersTacitus a Roman historian wrote about Jesus and even His crucifixion. Here is a wiki piece on that which includes this quote.

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But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

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Tacitus on Jesus

This goes back to why I started this thread. Thank you.Certainly if you are born and raised in a Christian home or even a Christian culture you are more likely to accept Christianity than other religions, and of course the same goes for other faiths. We do know however that that isn't anywhere near 100%.You say that as you're baptized Catholic that you're ok. God isn't looking for who simply want to be ok by some magic ceremony or by saying the right word or prayer. If we are looking to be ok then we are on the wrong track IMHO. Too often religion has been thought of and used as a way to get a deity to get what we want. If someone is merely in it to be ok after death, then it is back to love of self.From a God perspective His concern isn't about which religion or denomination within the various religions we choose. It is all about the heart. God wishes people to love and serve one another even at the expense of the self.I'll let God worry about the next life. I find this life quite enough to deal with when I do look at all the issues we face in this life.As far as Christianity goes, (I know I already said this in this thread, in the Gospels Jesus only mentions two people who have great faith: a Roman Centurion and a Samaritan woman. He tells a story about the Good Samaritan.As a Christian I contend that it is all about the call by God on all humanity, to live a life based on hearts and minds that love sacrificially.

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

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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).

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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.

I wouldn't really call it an open question.
That sort of implies that there's no knowledge one way or another about it.
But there have been many, many other similar "open questions" in evolution (evolution of the eye, evolution of whales... the list is really, really long.)
All of these questions that received answers have all shown that "evolution does it" on its own - no external intervention.No external intervention from anything supernatural, and also no external intervention from anything natural even.
That is, the process of evolution (changes of inherited traits occurring as generations continue) has been identified to be more than enough to allow for such novelties over and over again.
It's so impressive that we've even used evolution to model our own creations of AI - which has been able to answer questions we couldn't before.
As all this evidence builds up, more and more points to evolution being quite capable of evolving through mindless particles to eventually evolve consciousness.It would, in fact, be extremely jolting to the science of evolution if it was identified that even an different natural mechanism was required in order to evolve consciousness... let alone an external supernatural intelligence. Although I do agree we'll disagree on which is more probable, only one side contains the requirement of belief. I'm simply attempting to use the available evidence to follow the same prediction curve that's worked for everything else that was deemed "impossible" until the study of evolution showed that evolution takes care of it just fine.It's like seeing the results of a dice and we don't know how many sides it has.
It's rolled over and over again... over hundreds of thousands of rolls... and it's always been a random distribution between the values 1 through 6.You can say "Stile has faith in the scientific system that the next roll will still be between 1 and 6 - assuming a 6-sided dice is all we have!"
You can say "GDR has faith in a supernatural intelligence that the next roll could even be a letter of the alphabet!"Sure... the word faith/belief can be used to describe both.
But, clearly, the words do not mean the same thing when describing both "sides" of this issue.

Arguments over the existence of Jesus of Nazareth ring hollow to me. It's not as if Christians are all converting to Mormonism because it is easily proven that Joseph Smith was a real person.

I don't believe that I have ever claimed an equal footing. Philosophical evidence are two very different things - apples and oranges. What is PhilosophyFrom that site

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Quite literally, the term "philosophy" means, "love of wisdom." In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other. As an academic discipline philosophy is much the same. Those who study philosophy are perpetually engaged in asking, answering, and arguing for their answers to life's most basic questions. To make such a pursuit more systematic academic philosophy is traditionally divided into major areas of study.

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However after reading thi and other material I think that worrying about either philosophical evidence, which seems kind vague anyway, and the reading on definitions of scientific evidence which seems to go beyond empirical evidence, then I should probably stop worrying about these terms.
In the end I think that the best term is subjective conclusions.It is my subjective conclusion that it is ludicrous to think that things such as consciousness and morality can evolve from collections of mindless particles, therefore requiring an external intelligence.As I understand it, the subjective conclusion of the majority of you is that it is ludicrous to involve an external intelligence when we can observe natural processes having occurred and continuing to occur. This also leaves open how an external intelligence came to exist.

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It is my subjective conclusion that it is ludicrous to think that things such as consciousness and morality can evolve from collections of mindless particles, therefore requiring an external intelligence.

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If you had a less “ludicrous” explanation for how this “external intelligence” could possess consciousness and morality you might have something.In the absence of that I think we are quite justified in following the evidence which points the other way. Which is much better than making things up because you don’t like the way that the evidence points.

Depends when and where you were born. Up to the age of fast transport, say 200 ago you had the religion of your parents - that’s pretty much 100%. Find yourself born tomorrow in a village in the Atlas Mountains and you’re a Muslim.You’re looking at this through the lens of a modern day Western Christian. It’s a very myopic view. But even so, the % of the population that pick a totally different religion than their parents will be very small. Even after the disgusting missionary works. I love it when you guys tell me what god thinks and wants. You realise that that is a relevant as telling me that god only likes Cadbury’s chocolate? You haven’t the first clue what even your god wants, let alone Visnu.But anyway, I’m going with what the various popes have told us: you can’t get into heaven unless you’re baptised Catholic. Sorry. There you go again, speaking on behalf of god. Isn’t that blasphemy or something? You’re speaking for yourself, what you want to be true; that’s not what all Christians believe is it?

I would suggest that instead of philosophical evidence, we should call them premises. As such, the overall strength of an argument is dependent on the strength of the premises.I would also suggest that "subjective conclusions" are equivalent to "personal opinion". Parsimony is more than just a subjective conclusion. It's a basic part of a pragmatic epistemology. Imagine if we had to throw out every natural explanation we have because it might be the result of some supernatural process that entirely mimics the natural process? Fingerprints at a crime scene? Nope, throw those out. God could have planted the fingerprints at the crime scene. Changes in pressure and temperature causes clouds to form? Nope, that one is gone to. After all, it could be leprechauns creating clouds in a way that just happens to correlate with pressure and temperature. As George Romanes put it 140 years ago:

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For, be it observed, the exception in limine to the evidence which we are about to consider, does not question that natural selection may not be able to do all that Mr. Darwin ascribes to it: it merely objects to his interpretation of the facts, because it maintains that these facts might equally well be ascribed to intelligent design. And so undoubtedly they might, if we were all childish enough to rush into a supernatural explanation whenever a natural explanation is found sufficient to account for the facts. Once admit the glaringly illogical principle that we may assume the operation of higher causes where the operation of lower ones is sufficient to explain the observed phenomena, and all our science and all our philosophy are scattered to the winds. For the law of logic which Sir William Hamilton called the law of parsimony—or the law which forbids us to assume the operation of higher causes when lower ones are found sufficient to explain the observed effects—this law constitutes the only logical barrier between science and superstition. For it is manifest that it is always possible to give a hypothetical explanation of any phenomenon whatever, by referring it immediately to the intelligence of some supernatural agent; so that the only difference between the logic of science and the logic of superstition consists in science recognising a validity in the law of parsimony which superstition disregards.
--George Romanes, "Scientific Evidences for Organic Evoution", 1882

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