Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

I disagree, even though what you say is evidentially logical...it shuts the door on belief and experience of said belief. In other words, if I claimed to have been born again...even if only to myself...your statement would disallow the possibility that Jesus or God exist outside of a book written thousands of years ago. Moreover, you are quite blatant in your disrespect for some well-learned apologists. Craig Parton is an attorney and I doubt you would win any argument with him. The real question the peanut gallery would ask at that point is whether Parton was being honest.

What does that have to do with what I said? You claimed that I was never a believer and I said, again, that that is false.

OK, lets again review what convinced you otherwise. Before, you have essentially claimed the reason in one word: Evidence. (or the lack thereof)So some questions:You and tangle both claim that all of what is known about the Christian God and/or Jesus is contained (and limited) to the books of the Bible. Thus, my question would be more specific: Did you ever at any time believe that God existed apart from the book and that Jesus was "alive" in a current context....awaiting further evidence for confirmation?

It's funny that you can quote me quoting the Bible where it says it isn't about taking a life - and still claim it's about taking a life. If you can pay a ransom, it is clearly not about taking a life; it's about giving back. Jesus gives a different opinion on what the law is supposed to mean. You're jumping the gun in assuming that Jesus was right and Moses was wrong. There is a strong tradition in Judaism of tolerating different opinions that are neither black nor white. "We" don't accept that. "You" can be confident that your made-up theology is "correct". The whole point of sanitizing the Bible is to make "you" comfortable, isn't it?

Winning an argument with an attorney is not the standard of truth.

As one of the people on "the other side," I'm saying something different. Like all other books the Bible was written by ordinary men. There is no such thing as being "inspired by God," whatever that means. This is the very simple and very obvious explanation for the Bible's many imperfect qualities, including that the person who created enormous turmoil in Roman occupied Judea around 30 AD somehow completely escaped the notice of history, just like Ivanhoe and Don Quixote. There's good reason for it: none of them existed. If by God you mean the Christian God, I assumed he was real just because there seemed no reason to question it. Raised a Unitarian, I never gave religion much thought - I think I stopped attending church around the time Sunday School class no long existed for my age group and I had to begin attending services, around age 12. Though my mind never consciously focused on religion, gradually through my teens I realized that the Christian God couldn't possibly exist and that the Bible must contain a great deal of fiction.I do believe in God, just not the Christian God. But what I believe is meaningless because I have no evidence. You and Faith have no evidence, either, you just haven't figured it out yet.--Percy

Of course I did. That's the world that I was brought up in, like most people in out society. Most children are brought up believing in Santa Claus too but they grow out of it.

I am well aware that I have nothing objective. All that I have is subjective experience...much of which would be questioned.

So your position is that unevidenced belief is a "childish" concept?Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

I wish you'd stop talking about "unevidenced belief". ALL belief is unevidenced. That's why it's belief.And of course, Jesus said that belief is childish:

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Matthew 18:2-3 And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

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He also suggested that we could learn to be like the children.

I apologize. You are correct when you said I had misread your post. I seem to recall you saying previously that you didn’t think He had existed at all. In the OT there are stories about the Israelites being told by God to go and attack their enenmies. As history I’m confident that these wars happened. However the idea that God told them to enter into these wars I would agree is political motivated. There were at least 12 messianic movements within roughly a hundred years either side of Jesus’ crucifixion. In each case the revolt was quashed brutally by the Romans and the hoped for messianic candidate was brutally executed by the Romans. Some of these movements had achieved a fair amount of military success but in the end when the hoped for messiah was executed he was just considered to be a failed messiah and they went on looking for another candidate.Jesus was executed in a way that was meant not only to torture and kill, but in a way that was meant to shame and humiliate. H was nailed and hung naked on a cross for people to taunt. The Gospels agree that His followers deserted Him not wanting to share the same fate. There is no benefit whatsoever for the disciples, or anyone else for that matter, to concoct a story that is completely contrary to Jewish belief, that Jesus had been resurrected. There is less than zero political motivation for them to do that.There are numerous people involved in the accounts and many would still be alive at the time of the first Gospels and of Paul’s letters. Nobody was able to produce a body. Paul who had previously been an enemy of the movement was convinced of the truth of the resurrection.Yes, the accounts are written by fallible men and no doubt some of the details are wrong and there likely are some exaggerations in some cases. However the various accounts are consistent that Jesus was resurrected. As I said, all of the arguments against the historical claim that Jesus was resurrected are based on the idea that it just couldn’t happen. Well, it does occur to me that if there is an intelligence responsible for our existence then it is not unreasonable to believe that this intelligence could have resurrected Jesus. I know that as an atheist you reject the whole notion so of course you would reject the resurrection as well. The bit in the Bible about it happening within a generation has been badly misunderstood. Jesus’ message was very much against the revolutionaries. He said things like those who live by the sword will die by the sword. He used typical Jewish hyperbole about stars falling etc to denote great upheaval including the destruction of Jerusalem and it’s temple. I am not even saying that He knew what would happen supernaturally but He knew that this is how the Romans always handled things. It did of course happen in 70AD. Science is a discipline that tells us how things happen and has gone to amazing lengths in doing just that. Philosophy and religion attempt to answer why questions. Science can tell us how we came to exist but it can't answer the question of why we exist. Science is agnostic as when it comes to religion. It can demonstrate as in evolutionary theory that some religious beliefs are wrong but that isn’t the point.The Biblical accounts show that as time went by that there was a progressive revelation about the nature of God right up to the time of Jesus. It only makes sense that we continue to learn and adapt. So yes, religion does adapt, as does science.

So you have to decide whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing.

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1Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

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Based on taking the message of Corinthians and applying the context of our discussion, the author would thus agree that we should throw God away (as jar has hinted at).

I think the point is that you can't just take one passage and throw the other one away. It was black-and-white thinking that Jesus was trying to correct. It was the spirit of the law that he was promoting as opposed to the letter. You and GDR both throw out the parts of the Bible you don't like instead of trying to understand the broader context. (And Faith just flat-out claims that the parts she doesn't like aren't there at all.)