The Tension of Faith

Yes they do. They go to a fireworks show because they expect to see something they've seen before. Try advertising a fireworks show and then doing nothing for two thousand years. No they don't. Hope of future fireworks doesn't hold a candle to actual present fireworks. They voted for Trump based on stupidity.

I think He was definitely here to drum up support for Judaism (the spirit, not the letter). And the people who wrote about him definitely made show business an aspect, or they needn't have mentioned the miracles at all. It isn't always about money. Look at Trump. Hoping for the wrong things is not good.

How do you know that your fundamentalist friends aren't the ones who have departed from the faith?

How is that even possible?

All I propose is that we should be good to each other. That's something we should be doing with or without any religious considerations, with or without any God. It isn't fiction. There is no evidence. I don't know why you're so fixated on evidence that you pretend to have it when you don't.

I didn't say that absence of evidence = probability of zero. If you find a dead body in the living room without a mark on it, the probability that it died in a train wreck is low. The probability that God did it is even lower because there really are trains.

You picked a fine time to take an interest in evidence.

That seems to be backwards. How can you know the intentions and honesty of the messenger without knowing whether the message is true or false? What other evidence of the messenger's character do you have?

So Faith's enthusiasm is evidence that creationism is true? I don't think so. He claimed that he did. Many Christians today claim that they did but if there is no change in their behavior - and there often isn't - then the claim is empty. Did Paul really change? Or was he just the same jerk with a different agenda? What reason do we have to think that he did? Did he convey Jesus' message accurately? There are messages older than Paul's that have survived. Are the Iliad and the Odyssey true?

How is that obvious?

They talk about miracles. Historical accounts don't talk about miracles. So does a lot of fiction. Take The Day of the Jackal as an example.

But how would you determine whether it "actually happened"? Your claim in Message 1010 was that, "The style in which they are written gives no indication that the accounts are anything but historical." In fact, the style in which they were written, including the description of miracles, doesn't distinguish them from fiction such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some of the events may have "actually happened" but that's no guarantee that the miraculous ones did.

So somebody might have come to Jesus for healing and He failed? Doesn't non-repeatability kind of dilute the notion of divinity?

There can be evidence that an unexplained event happened. There can not be evidence that it was a miracle.

Yes, that's the problem - too much certainty.It was certain that the earth was flat. It was certain that the earth moved around the sun. It was certain that all life forms were instantaneously created in their present form. All certain. All wrong.And look at all of the people throughout history who were so certain of their convictions that they were prepared to kill anybody who disagreed.Better to be uncertain and not wrong.