Why would the apostiles have lied?

And I suppose you're going to brag on your victory? I left because non of you could say something new. And, as you noticed, I got tired of repeating myself. I said what I wanted to say, and you simply ignore it. How many times would you like me to repeat myself???

Hanno writes:

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For this reason, I'm ending my participation in this debate, because it is going nowhere, and is a waste of time.

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Learning and discussing viewpoints with others is a waste of time? I'll have to remember that. Maybe it's best you leave while your misimpressions are still intact:

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Atheism is just as much a religion that any other.

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Boy, do you need a dictionary.Just because I don't accept a literally inerrant Bible doesn't make me an atheist. I believe in the same God you do, we only differ in the threshold of credibility we apply to the evidence for Christian mythology.--Percy

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Originally posted by Hanno:
Let's talk strait here.

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Oh frell.... he's witnessing....

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You want to believe that science is the only force at work in the universe, so you will be able to understand it.

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Science is a force?

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Your mind is not open for the possibility that our five sences and the power of our mind cannot detect everything that exists.

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My mind is quite open thanks, but open isn't the same as gullible. If you remove reason and evidence from the equation everything become equally true. Is this what you want?

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I have valid reasons to believe in the existance and sincerity of the apostles.

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No you don't, or you would have presented them here.

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I had hoped that it would at least make you think

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I have thought more than you can imagine. Why is it that when a fundie can't prevail by reason, they try to prevail by devaluing the cognitive abilities of the opposition?

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Remeber. Of all the religions in that time, none were more resistant to change than the jews.

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This is unsupported assertion. There were actually numerous sects of Judaism at the time. This isn't indicative of a religion unduly resistant to change.

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They would not have converted, had they not seen and heard Jesus for themselves.

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When people converted to Zorastrianism, does this prove the veracity of Zarathustra?

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After the priests interigated the apostles, one said: There were many leaders in the past that were called the Messiah. But their leader was killed, and the followers chased off, and nothing came of it. If this Jesus are the work of man, this cult will dissapear. But if it is the work of God, it will prevail. It prevailed.

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Bible story. The bible cannot verify itself.This argument also verifies Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism......{quoteWell, it's been fun. I must say this particular debate wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.][/quote]LOL.....Only the fundie can lose dreadfully and still claim victory....------------------
http://www.hells-handmaiden.com

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Learning and discussing viewpoints with others is a waste of time? I'll have to remember that. Maybe it's best you leave while your misimpressions are still intact:
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Boy, you guys can be nasty. You stated your view point, and I stated mine, but we seem to be speaking past each other. This debate runs around in circles. The first 360 degrees were good enough for me. How many times do you want to go around it?-------------------------------------------------------------------
Just because I don't accept a literally inerrant Bible doesn't make me an atheist. I believe in the same God you do, we only differ in the threshold of credibility we apply to the evidence for Christian mythology.
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How can you say in one sentence you worship my God, and in the next call Him a Myth? If you do not believe that Jesus Christ is God, who came to earth, to pay for our sins, you cannot call yourself a Christian. And there is a difference between believing in "a God" and believing in the Christian God.

I have valid reasons to believe in the existance and sincerity of the apostles.I have. You just cant put them all together. But since you have done so much thought on the origens on christianity, lets hear it. But please don't repeat the lies/non existance theory again. It cannot be proofed.

In the name of Allah,the most High, the beneficient, the merciful.Hanno, brother, please dont include Islam in your discussion with the evolutionists ,you could beacause of a lack in knowledge make a wrong statement.
If you have a question, or a doubt, dont make any ignorant conclusions before you have investigated the issue sincerely and with an open mind.

Ok one last try. But after this, no more merry-go-round, ok?Here are the facts:
-Jesus was a real person.
-After His death, Christianity spread throughout the roman empire in less than a cetury.
-For the first 300 years, Christians were violently oppressed.
-The are no documeneted proof that the spread of Christianity was aided by violence in the first 300 years.
-The New Testament which we have today is based on scriptures that were written only a few decades after the death of Christianity.
-No scrips refuting the existance of the apostles and documentation of the "actual" beginning of christianity exists.Save assumptions:
-Christianity was founded by Jesus.
-A lot of people had to spread the word accross the empire for it to be able to grow so fast. The only (Yes, biblical) evidence we have is that these people were the apostiles. There are no documentation found that explain the sudden growth and denies that it was the work of the apostles. Thus, in total, the only records we have, point to the apostles.
-If the teachings in the bible were indeed not that of those who spreaded Christianity, then this drastic change in Christianity had to spread drastically across the entire empire before the first litriture was produced. Probably even faster than the original version. This change would have been noted and documented by Christians. It is one thing to blindly believe something, but for a large group of people to blindly believe A, then harmoniously decide that B is actually to be blindly believed, and then to proceed as if A never existed, is impossible. It can therefore be assumed that the bible, even if not written by the apostles, are a very accurate account of what has been tought.
-Unless all of Europe suddenly had a blow of amnisia, I do not find it likely that the apostles were dreamed up. When the first Christian litruture that we know of was produced, it was well within the live time of the 1st and second generation Christians. They would have known who the apostles were, what they had tought, and how they lived. If these early scripts were falsified, Christians would've noticed. And seeing as they "blindly believed", it is unlikely that the large majority would have accepted this falsified version. It would have been recorded, like the many other false christian movements that has been recorded. And since todays bible is based on those early scriptures, any falsification should have happend before that. With all of this taken into account, I believe we can savely believe, if not anything else, that the bible is an acurate account of the words and deeds of the first missionaries.
- And if we take the above as the truth, we can clearly see from the apostles teachings and deeds that they WERE eye witnesses, and that, in fact, if they were lieing, they would have been the dumbest bunch of people to have ever lived, to through away their lives and well being like that for something they knew wasn't true. And if it wasn't the apostles, they would have been even dumber to give the credit to someone else, while suffering persucution.(Which they have had to, since Christianity was oppressed from very early on, even in non-Christian records.)All the counter theories that was proposed, ignored several of the above, which makes them not very convincing for me. If you want to claim you have defeated me, you have to refute ALL of the above, and do it holistically, and not in seperate unrelated arguments.If you still can't see my entire arguement, and just agrue against some of it, I really cannot put it more plainly.

It was not my intension to insult your religion in any way. I respect your religion, and I do have a more than average knowledge about Islam. However, I was requested to indicate why I believe in the Bible, and not the Qu'ran. This is a sensetive issue, and i did not want to publicly view my personal views on this matter, but I had to in order to explain to them why I believe what I believe.Regards

Percy wrote:

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Maybe it's best you leave while your misimpressions are still intact:

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Hanno replied:

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Boy, you guys can be nasty.

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Note the colon at the end of my sentence, meaning that it referred to the quote from you which followed that conveyed your misimpression that you're conversing with atheists. Among the evolutionists here we have atheists, agnostics, theists and deists. I'm a theist.

Hanno writes:

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How can you say in one sentence you worship my God, and in the next call Him a Myth?

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I didn't call God a myth. I referred to the stories in the Bible as mythology. Sometime it seems as if rather than worshipping God and Jesus that Creationists worship the Bible with some form of idolatry.

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If you do not believe that Jesus Christ is God, who came to earth, to pay for our sins, you cannot call yourself a Christian. And there is a difference between believing in "a God" and believing in the Christian God.

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Ah, yes, I know, there is but one path to God, and that is by accepting Jesus Christ as lord and savior. And how do we know this? Because the Bible says so. And how do we know the Bible is true? Because the Bible itself says so.The passage supporting this view of Jesus as the pathway to God is John 14:6:

I am the way, and the the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

The Reverend John Killinger has this to say about the passage:

That sounds unequivocal enough, and would be, if we could accept the literalist point of view that everything in the Bible means exactly what it says and carries the divine imprimatur on it. But it overlooks completely the semi-fictional character of the Gospel of John and the rhetorical situation in which Jesus speaks these words. Actually, the saying is one of the famous "I am" sayings of Jesus in the Gospel e.g., "I am the bread of life," "I am the good shepherd," "I am the true vine" all of which serve to establish a Christology considerably higher and more supernatural than that of the other three Gospels.

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John's Gospel begins on an exceptionally high note, proclaiming Jesus as the Word of God who existed with God from the very beginning and helped to create the world, and proceeds with the story of a savior always a little more divine than human to a dramatic series of Resurrection accounts at its end. The Jesus of this Gospel always appears more self-aware than the Jesus of the other Gospels, if not transcendently arrogant. Unlike the Jesus of the other Gospels, he doesn't bother to teach in parables and collections of sayings. Instead, he regards it as enough that he speaks to people at all, and almost everything he says and does is heavily freighted with symbolism. For example, his ministry opens with the story of the wedding at Cana, where he changes water to wine, connoting the improvement of his spiritual gift over that of Judaism, for the water stood in six vats (a number suggesting incompleteness) and was used for ceremonial cleansing under traditional Jewish law (John 2:1-11). Then Jesus cleanses the temple in Jerusalem, denouncing the money changers and sellers of sheep, cattle, and doves for making his Father's house a marketplace (John 2:12-22).

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Why has John moved this story of the temple from the end of Jesus' life, where it was placed by the other Gospel narrators? Because it seemed to him a fitting public act, after the story of the water and wine, for commencing the ministry. It served notice on the spiritually crass and greedy merchants who occupied the holy city that something higher and better was about to displace them!

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The point is, this favorite saying of the conservatives about Jesus' being the only way to God the Father occurs in a completely histrionic and somewhat unreliable Gospel unreliable from a factual standpointwhere it is obviously the product of an evolution in Christian teaching from the simpler, more unretouched portraits of the earlier Gospels to the iconographic picture of this one.

Hanno writes:

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But please don't repeat the lies/non existance theory again. It cannot be proofed.

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One more time, the traditional scholarly approach is to accept those ideas that have supporting evidence. One doesn't go about accepting any and all ideas simply because they can't be disproved. You can't prove the apostles existed and I can't prove they didn't, but the onus falls on you.--Percy

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Originally posted by Hanno:
I have valid reasons to believe in the existance and sincerity of the apostles.

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Then post them. Cite some evidence. Show me where my logic is faulty. Restating your proposition over and over does no good. I have given you a long string of objections and you choose to brush those off and ask the same question again.

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But since you have done so much thought on the origens on christianity, lets hear it.

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I told you what I think is the probable origin back in post #22, but since you were not paying attention:

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I doubt that Christ is 100% mythology. That is, a character something like Christ probably did exist. What I don't believe is that the Bible tells an accurate tale of his life and death. What has grown up around the man is myth, and sadly all that we have left is the myth.

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But please don't repeat the lies/non existance theory again. It cannot be proofed.

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I don't have to prove that he didn't exist, any more than I don't have to prove that there are no flying pigs. You do have to prove that he existed or accept that he may be myth. And you have come nowhere near proving Christ's existence.------------------
http://www.hells-handmaiden.com

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Then post them. Cite some evidence. Show me where my logic is faulty. Restating your proposition over and over does no good. I have given you a long string of objections and you choose to brush those off and ask the same question again.
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I can pretty much say the same thing about you, John. Which is why I wanted to end the debate. I have stated my objections for the last time. If you're not going to respond to them, I'm not going to repeat them again.

Hanno writes:

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Ok one last try. But after this, no more merry-go-round, ok?

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The merry-go-round nature of this thread is because you keep restating your initial premises instead of moving the discussion forward by replying in some substantive way to the replies. Stop making declarations of "this is fact and that is a fact" and instead address the points we're making about why we don't consider them facts.For example, do you understand that it is the presence of evidence for something, rather than the absence of evidence against, that causes ideas to become accepted? You haven't replied to this directly, but what you write indicates that you don't understand this. You keep asking us to prove the apostles didn't exist. That can't be done. You can't prove such negatives. Try proving that there aren't little green men living on a planet in a galaxy far, far away and you'll get an idea of the problem.Or for another example, do you understand that the Bible cannot attest to its own veracity? I'm telling the truth, here, trust me?

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Here are the facts:
-Jesus was a real person.

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Was Jesus a real person? Perhaps, but Paul never explicitly claims to have laid eyes on the living Jesus, and he's the only Biblical author of whom we have any knowledge.

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-No scrips refuting the existance of the apostles and documentation of the "actual" beginning of christianity exists.

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As explained several times, this is backwards. Refutation of such things isn't possible.

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-If the teachings in the bible were indeed not that of those who spreaded Christianity, then this drastic change in Christianity had to spread drastically across the entire empire before the first litriture was produced.

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Nobody here is saying anything like this. We're not saying that stories about Jesus were spread by the early Christian ministry and then were replaced by a different set of stories later on. The stories developed once and were spread once.

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-Unless all of Europe suddenly had a blow of amnisia, I do not find it likely that the apostles were dreamed up.

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There was nothing for "all of Europe" to forget. Before the Christian ministry reached their area they had never before heard the stories of the apostles.Remember that Paul split with the Jerusalem church because he wanted to evangelize to the Gentiles. The growth of Christianity was due to Paul's ministry to the Gentiles, and not due to the apostles work among the small Jewish population of Palestine. When they made the bargain in Jerusalem (Gal 2:6-10) Paul got by far the better deal. He got almost the entire world, while the Jerusalem church got only the Jews. After the fall of Jerusalem there was nothing left of the Jerusalem church's ministry. In effect, the ministry of the 12 reached an evolutionary dead end. --Percy

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Originally posted by Hanno:
That was not my intension. I was mearly pointing out that no amount of evidence will ever be sufficiant for you. By the way. All people, including all Christians are sinners. Did you not know that?

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Actually, it wouldn't take all that much to prove that your god is real. All it would take is for your god to appear in the so-called "flesh". BTW, believing that something exists is not the same as worshipping it.Sin is the breaking of Church Law and thus only applies to those who believe in it. Morality and sin are two different concepts.

quote:

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Originally posted by Hanno:
And I suppose you're going to brag on your victory? I left because non of you could say something new. And, as you noticed, I got tired of repeating myself. I said what I wanted to say, and you simply ignore it. How many times would you like me to repeat myself???

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You mean that you couldn't convert any of us. You brought nothing we haven't heard already, and like all of those like you refuted countless times. How can one ignore something which hasn't even been shown to exist? It is like ignoring the Easter Bunny.

Wrong. It is asumptions on your part. You only believe because you want to believe, you have no other reason to.