ZeitGeist

How would we know if Jesus was an actual figure of antiquity? How could we test the historicity? Well, I would say that you first have to give the benefit of the doubt-- reason being, if you challenge the historicity of Jesus, arguably the MOST prolific figure in all of human history, you would also have to consider most other figures of antiquity to be little more than fantasy.Why is it that the assumption of someone being an actual person is believed, even on scant evidence, where Jesus is immediately met with hostility? Perhaps its because of the claims He made.To that, I say, fair enough. There is good reason to question his deity. But his personhood? How does that hold up to scrutiny?Lets start off by using Occam's Razor: Virtually every myth has elements of truth in it, whereas time goes on, people add to that truth. By the end, it often winds up a muddled story where sometimes discerning fact from fiction becomes indistinguishable.Whether you think the metaphysical claims of the Bible to be hokum or not is inconsequential and superfluous. To deny that the Bible has a great historical significance is simply inject bias based on personal beliefs.Therefore, their is good reason to assume that, at least in part, the stories about Jesus found in the New Testament, with gospel after gospel, epistle after epistle, has at least some measure of truth. To deny that would mean there is some grand conspiracy to erect a figure that got people killed for professing. Why they would is anybody's guess.You have to ask yourself what they gained from it, especially since writing what they wrote would have taken a long time. I presume you realize that they didn't have ball point pens or typewriters with neatly printed paper in those days. Annotating information was an arduous process in and of itself.But lets say that the entire New Testament, from start to finish, is completed invented for no good reason-- that they sacrificed their very lives to keep this fantasy going.You still have to take in to account the myriad of extra-biblical sources, who thought poorly of Jesus, in to account. Perhaps you are unaware that various writers of those days wrote about Jesus, and in less than desirable terms no less. Why would they corroborate a story> Isn't far more reasonable, again, using Occam's Razor, that Jesus was in fact an actual person in history?On what basis do you doubt his existence-- a personal loathing of it?

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"It is better to shun the bait, than struggle in the snare." -Ravi Zacharias

I'll give you a little background information on me. I was born to a catholic/orthodox Egyptian family and was raised Catholic. My father was orthodox but not a religious man, so catholicism won.Since I was a child, I loved fantastical kind of stories and watched Jesus of Nazareth at the age of 7. By the age of 12 I had read the entire Bible, and had a decent understanding of the Muslim 'faith' as well, being born in Egypt.Of course at that age I understood nothing..it was mostly done to please my elders around me. However, I started to try to imagine what kind of person Jesus was...I mean the conceptualization that every human attempts when confronted with the figure of Jesus CHrist. I also thought about God.I remember my mother and I used to have all these conversations about the psychology of God and why (he?) did the things (he?) did and why was it necessary for Jesus to be born. Nothing that she uttered made a single iota of sense..nothing. What I got was that God is a paradoxical existence that has a maniacally selfish personality who created lesser beings in (his?) image so (he?) can indulge in (his?) narcissism. However, God, with all (his?) omniscience? and omnipresence? starts feeling sorry for what (he's?) done to humankind...this is the interesting part...and sends (his?) (only?) begotten (son?) Jesus to die an earthly death. Meaning he superimposed himself to the human form so he can experience the worst kind of human death?What the hell kind of divine soap opera is this? To me God seems to be a either very irresponsible being or a drama queen...I tend to go for the latter since he's Omnipresent Omniscient etc.So my point is this. What is more highly believable? A story about an insignificant man who was psychologically distraught regarding his own faith and decided to express to humanity that god is fake, grew a cult of followers and was crucified because he went too far? Or that Jesus was in fact the son of 'God' who was born of a Virgin, (btw the word virgin is contested in the bible as a possible misinterpretation) and was in fact God himself?Maybe the reasons the Jews had Jesus killed was not blasphemy but upon realizing he was truly God, decided to avenge all the bullshit they went through in the old Testament....lol!This is why Zeitgeist is more important to me than the non-sense spewed by any believers. Whether it is completely accurate or not doesn't matter to me. It invoked all the old questions I had about my beliefs when I used to believe, and it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. So since watching it I have been researching everything I could get my hands on to try to understand the true mystery of our existence and the metaphysics behind it.It is more likely to believe that there is no external being that controls the universe, and that what has been written in all religious books is really a testament to the creativity of the human mind. A creativity that was a crucial social catalyst in helping us evolve and continue to evolve.

Btw I love Alex Grey

i think it's a misunderstanding of any of the presented ideas of god. why are these the only options? old hat. unimpressed. the only source that suggests that the jews had him killed is the bible. why do you suddenly buy this part? so, you have an irrational psychological attachment to the presentation of your original doubts in this "film"?look. it's great that you're asking questions, but the truth is that people have been asking the same questions forever. long before this film and long after and separate from it. if you don't believe me, here's an excerpt from the code of laws from the massachusetts bay colony in the us (written 1628) it's not like they're hard questions to ask. all you have to do is read the book, speak a few extra languages, or have access to a good concordance, and be competent enough to observe contradictions, evil acts, random confusing crap, and scientific falsehoods.i was raised in a presbyterian family. i became a christian when i was three. i have been asking these questions since i can remember. of course, you'll think i'm a moron because i still identify as a christian, but i don't find faith and these questions mutually exclusive. i am most definitely no longer a presbyterian, as i am now quite theologically distant from them. but. whatever. i have better things to do than fret over whether you think i'm an idiot.it just really seems that you have traded in one attachment for another. you're really overly into this film and old, dead white guys.the thing is, religion isn't just a throw-away left-over from our superstitious past. by reading religious texts, we can understand a lot about ourselves and humanity... the best and worst of it. you can't really move past superstition until you understand it and why and how it works. some people try and then they become raging fundamentalists about whatever thing they try to pick up instead. it's a terrible shame.believe it or not, all religious people aren't brainwashed inbred morons. like i said before, sit back for a bit and meet the people on here and see who they are and what they believe and why and how. you will be pleasantly surprised. unfortunately, we all sometimes get a bit heavy handed and go nuts all over people, but that's the issue with the internet. in fact, somewhere there's a thread in which we all own up to our labels. i looked for it, but no luck. maybe someone else will find it for you.

Is it completely out of the question that you are incapable of grasping the concept? You have to consider your alternative, because there are a few points that need to be addressed. Have a listen.

The conclusion

As C.S. Lewis poignantly explains, there are only three possibilities about Jesus. Either he was deluded, a liar, or was exactly what he said he was. You are coming about this from the standpoint of ignorance. You've felt nothing significant. Have you ever actually committed yourself to any kind of real investigation? Have you ever earnestly sought God? Or do you come with hostility and incredulity? Do you expect to be receptive with such a stance?There is a dichotomy-- a crux of sorts. In order to know God, you must come with faith. In order to have that faith, you must have a reason for believing in the first place. And so you find yourself wondering. But have you ever noticed within your heart the questions you ask concerning the existential? Whom are the arguments made against? Is it not the Judeo-Christian God? You seem so troubled about it, which only leads me to wonder how little you actually do disbelieve. What shred of hope still lingers in you. And how do you know that isn't God? The reasons are listed why they did as they did. Jesus exposed them, just like he exposes us. And we hate being called out on our sins. We despise it. Acknowledging Jesus is the acknowledging of all of our faults and hang-ups. We'd rather pretend it doesn't exist. Are you even aware that you are really just looking for something to confirm what you wanted to affirm? Listen to what you just said: You don't even care if its the truth or not. You want to believe in Zeitgeist, and so you shall. Reminds of something else I've read in the past.“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently, assumed that it had none and was without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption... The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to provide no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do... For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation I desired was simultaneously liberation from certain political and economic system and liberation from sexual morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” -Alduous Huxley Except that you have a chicken and an egg problem. Everything that exists is due to causation. You only exist because your parents procreated, who exist because their parents procreated, and so on. The casual inference of man in his understanding is based on the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come from absolutely nothing. A pure potentiality cannot, in it’s own right, actualize itself. In the case of the universe, whether we speak of boundary lines, fixed points or the infinite, there was not anything prior, to the singularity.How do you reconcile those notions without evoking something beyond the material?

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"It is better to shun the bait, than struggle in the snare." -Ravi Zacharias

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.

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.

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.

Ok to brenna...I don't think you're an idiot and honestly I was gonna mention that I agreed with you in the other thread when you mentioned that we should just look at things from a scientific perspective period. This I completely encourage and by no means was it my intention to bring Zeitgeist into this to obscure minds.To Jugger...I do not BELIEVE in Zeitgeist. See the problem with believers is they project how they feel and think onto others because religion encourages egocentricity. It stops the mind from thinking or questioning things. I believe in NOTHING...meaning I don't have any beliefs period. You should also understand that language itself has been tainted by religious superstition.You mentioned why are there no other options besides the ones I mentioned. My retort to you is why haven't YOU provided an option yourself.You also mention that Jesus exposed the Jews and exposes us. Have you read the description of crucifixion? Have you any idea how that would feel for any human to experience. We should be mourning and gasping at what humans do to each other rather than dream a god up and feel guilty or morally responsible to him because 'he went through that'. We should be praising the thousands of innocent souls who were crucified for petty reasons like theft or adultery. We should also worry about the real issues in life like how unbalanced it is. Poverty, the middle east crisis (which is completely clouded by religious beliefs). Stem cell research, abortion. I could go on forever naming things that need to be addressed and changed in this world. But of course that wouldn't matter to a person who believes that Jesus is coming back to take all who believe in him with him to heaven.Believing IS the original sin.Also, why the hell is God a he? Does that not strike you as strange?
I mean forget Zeitgeist and all its claims. The fact that God is a HE should explain that the whole thing is a tool for the social structure.

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.

So why not feminine?

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

Then you would have to apply your rationale to every human being that has come and gone since you didn't physically witness them write it. You know as well as I do that we base history upon reasonable assumptions. I say reasonable because most knowledge is an assumption. In some small way it gives credence to nihilists. And if nihilists believe that there is no justification for any knowledge claims, it should not take long to see the fatal flaw in their basic premise. How can the nihilist even purport such a claim if he hasn’t the ability to know that knowledge is unattainable? If knowledge is unattainable altogether, then what gives any justification to question or make truth claims? If you thought the quote was about sex, then you missed the over-arching theme. The theme is that he wants to believe in something for personal reasons rather than logical reasons-- something atheists commonly, and vociferously, charge against theists, which I find both interesting and hypocritical.You heard what Spektical wrote. Paraphrasing, he said he didn't matter to him whether it was actually true or not. All that mattered was it conformed to what he wanted to believe it was about.

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"It is better to shun the bait, than struggle in the snare." -Ravi Zacharias