Choosing a faith

LOL.I am not a fan of Richard Carrier.I do respect Tim O'Neill.(We may be drifting off-topic).

I'll point out that your quotes are just denial, with nothing to back them up.

How does making $6 million make him a liar?

Because they are marketing mythicism.

You gave ONE example of somebody making money. That does not justify using the word "they". Stop grasping at straws.And you have many, many, many unanswered posts in appropriate threads. You have no leg to stand on until you start to discuss the topics in good faith.

But O'Neill is a hack that has no more insight than I do. He expresses his opinions of what others have written and researched. Manyof his arguments are nothing more thanlogical fallacies. You will notice he uses a lot of straw man arguments. I have no idea what is agenda is but he has one.
As for Carrier. He is a vile human being, but still waiting for actual scholarly rebuttals of his scholarship. And no I do not worship him as you do apologists. Nice to see you resorting to personal attacks again. Exactly what I expect from a troll. Nice to see those good Christian values again.

I was criticizing your belief that parsimony is a subjective conclusion. It isn't. It is an axiom of almost every practical and pragmatic epistemology that exists.Addressing the beliefs in the quote above, it would look like you arbitrarily apply parsimony based on your own subjective criteria. There is no required correlation between what people think and what is actually true.

I sense a double standard. You tell me not to lump all of them in one basket, which is precisely what you do with the apologists.

I'll defend jar here. He (and several others of us) can see that you are making poor decisions. And he wants to see you making better decisions. It is that bad decision making that he particularly wants you to throw away, but he suspects that it is all part of the same package.

Why do you feel this?It is rejection of the squeamish concept of ... the void, isn't it?Without the physical body to encase it where does that living spirit that is you go on death? Where does that energy go?That is energy, actual physical photons, and it will obey the commands of the universe.That energy must dissipate back into the physical ecosystem, into the surrounding tissue and air as all gradients of thermodynamic excess must. The void is your consciousness' only future as a human living in this universe. To avoid this conclusion you conjure an emotional fantasy world where that spirit, where you, can continue to experience consciousness in a universe where everything else has an end.There has to be more!Sorry, GDR. We are not special. We are physical flesh and blood animals that evolved enough chemistry to think, feel angst and create fantasies trying to dispel the destiny of the void.

This already has a number of replies, including from me, but I find I have more to say. A premise is an assumption or hypothesis. It's strength depends upon how much evidence you have, and you don't have any. You're only playing word games. There are no amount of vocabulary changes that will suddenly make evidence appear out of thin air.
​ I don't believe you mean this for a second. Within some small number of messages you'll again be back to your claims of evidence. For example, you still believe that the mere existence of life is evidence of a "cosmic intelligence" or "external intelligence" or whatever term you move on to in the future. But it isn't evidence. It's your personal opinion.
​
--Percy

We have seen many, many, many apologists proven to be liars and thieves on this forum. You, on the other hand, showed ONE mythicist who made some money. By no stretch of the imagination is that a double standard.I have asked you many, many, many times to show us ONE apologist who is not a liar. Get to it.

Absolutely true.There have always been a few intellectuals arguing the toss about biblical issues - so long as they lived in jurisdictions and in times that didn't get you burnt alive for doing it.But the people were illiterate and the bible was not trusted in the hands of the laity. In England only latin bibles existed and those that tried to translate it for the people were burnt. The people got their knowledge of the bible from the pulpit and what they got was fire and damnation. A Guide to Bible Translations and Their Surprisingly Murderous History | HistoryExtraStuff like Noah's Ark and the Flood were being preached in ordinary churches and in bible classes back in the 60s when I was being forced fed the stuff.

I'm not going tgo take the time to respond individually to your critiques of the teachings and actions of the church over the years as frankly, I don't disagree.There is though this one comment that I'll comment on. I would agree that there is nothing new but our understandings continually evolve, which I is a positive thing even though in many cases IMHO, it evolved negatively.I read a book by Alan Kreider called The Patient FermentThe early church was evangelized by actually living the life espoused by the Jesus of the Gospels. People became followers because they were attracted to the life style of how the early Christians loved their neighbour and even loved their enemies. With was attractive as it was so counter-cultural in a society that was held together by military might and was largely consumed by individual status in the society.It went off the rails when the Roman church essentially declared Christianity to be a state religion. This evolved into seeing position in the church giving individual status and power. This combined with the Bible only being available in Latin, did two things. It corrupted the church and it gave the church the power to dictate doctrine. This held right up to the reformation with the low point being the indulgences.The reformation and the various translations of the Bible helped but the various denominations muddled along for centuries but was seeing some improvement. The last 50 years though have changed things considerably again, IMHO.A few things happened. Firstly there was an increase in ancient literature discovered resulting in a better understanding of the ancient Greek material leading to better translations of the Bible and other ancient writings.For years Christian scholars interpreted the Bible in the context of the culture at the time. About 50 years ago scholars began to look at the culture, the political situation and the beliefs at the time the various books of the Bible were written.Eventually the internet came along and now individual scholars had access to far more material, have a clearer understanding of what had been written and at the same time were able to collaborate with with other scholars.As a result the church now is still evolving in its understanding of the faith but it is a very different church in most cases than we grew up with. It is a work in progress, and interestingly enough, slowly returning to the ideals of the early Christians that Kreider wrote about. The focus is becoming more and more on Jesus saying that all the laws are based on loving others, and being far less concerned with doctrine.

Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses details, after considerable research, how all the NT was written either by eye witnesses or by writers with a first person connected to the eye witnesses.Also, as I have said before, there were a number of messianic movements within a hundred years either way of the life of Jesus, with many of them having some degree of success of raising an army and winning some degree of victory over the Romans. Eventually all of the messianic leaders were put to death and their followers, if not executed, understood that they had followed a failed messiah and went looking for another one.
In the war between of 66 -71ad Simon ben Giora led a messianic movement, with an army that had some success originally but he was taken to Rome and executed. He became simply a failed messiah.In the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 ad, they actually maintained power for about 3 years and even went so far as to print coins dating year 1,2 and 3. Simon bar Kokhba was eventually executed along with Rabbi Akiva, and bar Koknaba was then simply considered another failed messiah.Jesus whose followers were largely working class, without an army, and suffering a humiliating execution, and deserted by His followers suddenly started a movement which still exists today.If you weren't a follower of Jesus in the years after His life, then He was less than a footnote in history, and if you considered Him at all He would just be another failed messiah. You would automatically reject His miracles and resurrection. However there were numerous people with access to the eye witnesses who did write about Jesus. including those in the NT. Papias who lived from 60 to 130 AD insisted on writing only from eyewitness or from those with direct contact to the eye witnesses. Polycarp born 69 AD wrote extensively and had contact with the disciples.WE also know of many early documents written that haven't survived and so we have no real knowledge of how much was written about Jesus that didn't survive. We know that Papias wrote a considerable amount but what we have of that is what others transcribed into their writings.