The Historical Jesus: Did He Create the Universe?

That is exactly what he's doing, because that is precisely how they roll.Two decades ago I was on a Google "origins" forum where a creationist inadvertently revealed their secret strategy; that was a real epiphany for me. After decisively refuting a claim he made (the old sea-salt claim, as I recall) such that he himself admitted that his claim was false, I asked him why creationists have so little to support their position (well, nothing actually) that they have to resort to such unconvincing false claims, to which he replied (from memory): "You only find them unconvincing because you are not yet convinced."That means that they don't care about the evidence, they don't care about the truth, and they don't even want to convince us about anything. All they care about is convincing themselves and keeping themselves convinced.I've posted this before from Quora, but it's been a year so here it is again:

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Why do people get angry when I try to share the word of God with them? I only do it because I care about them deeply and don't want them to end up in hell. I feel like some people avoid me because of this. Is there any way to get through to them?

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by Doug Robertson, studied at University of Maine
Updated Dec 11 2018

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The entire process is not what you think it is.

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It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn't about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can't leave yours.

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If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn't already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools.

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On the other hand, it is extremely effective at creating a deep tribal feeling among its own members.

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The rejection they receive is actually more important than the few people they convert. It causes them to feel a level of discomfort around the people they attempt to talk to. These become the "others". These uncomfortable feelings go away when they come back to their congregation, the "Tribe".

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If you take a good look at the process it becomes fairly clear. In most cases, the religious person starts out from their own group, who is encouraging and supportive. They are then sent out into the harsh world where people repeatedly reject them. Mainly because they are trained to be so annoying.

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These brave witnesses then return from the cruel world to their congregation where they are treated like returning heroes. They are now safe. They bond as they share their experiences of reaching out to the godless people to bring them the truth. They share the otherness they experience.

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Once again they will learn that the only place they are accepted is with the people who think as they do. It isn't safe to leave the group. The world is your enemy, but we love you.

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This is a pain reward cycle that is a common brainwashing technique. The participants become more and more reliant on the "Tribe" because they know that "others" reject them.

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Mix in some ritualized chanting, possibly a bit of monotonous repetition of instructions, add a dash of fear of judgment by an unseen, but all-powerful entity who loves you if you do as you are told and you get a pretty powerful mix.

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Sorry, I have absolutely no wish to participate in someone's brainwashing ritual.

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That's all that ICANT is doing with this topic: convincing himself. He has no intention nor interest on convincing us about anything, rather he is only interested in keeping himself deceived. BTW, that creationist on that Google forum who admitted that his claim was false. A couple months later he used it again on a new forum member as if he had never admitted that it was false. That was one of several instances of creationists engaging in deliberate lying. Of course I called him on it and of course he ran away immediately.Also, when I joined that forum it had a few administrators on either side of the issue. Then they started leaving until we were left with only one admin who was a creationist. Immediately he established his draconian rule in which he would arbitrarily suspend anyone who would challenge any creationist claim. Compared to that, Percy is a saint, so when creationists here complain about him all I can do is roll my eyes.

maybe you should let him explain his thinking instead of you trying to find rationalize his thinking.

Drunk. But not now.But that does not negate the fact that ICANT is just bullshitting us, jerking us around as he has a nasty habit of doing.Drunk or not, we reach a point of "Das reicht!" ("I have had it up to here with that nonsense!"). He needs to either shit or get off the pot.And if you think that's disrespect towards him, I assure you that he is getting all the respect that he deserves, more even.And as for his supporting your Jesus, he is being very effective in filling us with disgust. If he's a shining example of Christianity, then he confirms our decision to leave that sorry excuse for a religion.

So is your disgust with the religion itself or is it with creationist believers? I consider myself a cosmological creationist in that I believe that through Jesus, all things were created. That means all that is seen and unseen.Perhaps such a belief gives me hope. I would likely be scared to death if I found out that there was nothing...that is if it were possible.I was not calling you out in judgment but merely to stir up introspection. (Though i will admit that I *do like* to bust your balls a bit about your drinking! ) Quid Pro Quo, of course. I'd like to think that I care about all of you to a degree. We are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves! I'm a long way from that standard.

Is there any separation? Consult the Matthew 7:20 Test. By their fruits you will know them. A wicked tree bears wicked fruit, but a good tree can only bear good fruit. Christianity has most certainly born much wicked fruit.Of course, Jesus as depicted in the Gospels was applying an absolutist test that no religion could possibly ever pass, not even the purest form of Christianity (should such an impossible form actually exist). But it's still good for throwing it back into the teeth of stupid fundies. Especially when they act as if they have never ever read that part of the Gospels.It's not just creationists, though they are among the worst of religious hypocrites. Even more dangerous are the Christian nationalist types (who have gone by different labels since the 1980's, though a current very descriptive label is "Christo-Fascist"). Your bias towards associating my disgust for that religion with creationists is because of the focus of this forum. Rather, my disgust is because of the great evils that believers are zealous to commit (not just willing to commit, but rather foaming at the mouth in their zeal to commit those atrocities).Please remember that I am an engineer by my very nature: my first and foremost question is always, "How does that work?" Very little of my thought process is based on ideology, since I know that ideologies are flawed and not subject to examination, testing, or correction.BTW, a couple days ago I changed the occupation field of my profile to: Intelligent Designer (ret.)So I do recognize the functions that religion can serve within society and even for individuals. Sadly, it's a matter of trying to balance what little good and what massive damage, especially in the case of Christianity. This past year I came across a quote attributed to Hemingway (from memory):

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Write while drunk, then edit while sober.

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Alcohol does help the words flow in the mind, unlike cannabis. Though the older process of typewritten text getting published took much longer, providing a buffer to allow for more deliberation before posting. Computers shorten that time too much.It's almost Darwinian in a way. You can generate a lot of text which would then go through the selective sieve of editing the next morning.I remember the joyful liberation provided by a word processor program. I hated writing in school because the entire process was too laborious. First you write your first draft. Then you rewrite it as your second draft. Then the whole thing again as the third draft. And the fourth, etc. Writing and rewriting and rewriting over and over again. In order to avoid that, I tried to do all that work in my head before even starting to write the first draft. As a result, I could never get any writing done. Even with my jr. high school skill of touch typing.So, in 1984 I had access to a text editor at work and I was taking classes at night, basically cashing in on my GI Bill bennies (I had enlisted a few months before the old GI Bill, the really good one, was replaced). I had about an hour after work before I had to leave for class, so I typed out the notes from my research into the text editor. Copy and paste, edit, reorganize, etc. Within half an hour I had my 2/3 page assignment completed, something that earlier would have taken my more than a week to accomplish. I was sold on the technology.Actually, my primary writing tool is a text editor, not a word processor. Word processors are nice for formatting, but a text editor is the Swiss Army knife. I remember on a C Programming forum (now defunct) where someone had typed a simple sample program and could not get it to compile, rather it kept throwing syntax errors about the quotation marks. He posted the source code and my immediate question to him was, "Did you create that source file with a word processor?" Sure enough, he had. The word processor used special characters for the open and close quotes, whereas the compiler expected both to be the same as well as being an entirely different character.

Emacs.--Percy

Is there such a thing as a nation(especially a global superpower) that has only borne good fruit? By analogy... should Americans be collectively judged by what America the nation does?
Christianity as a religion has indeed borne quite a bit of wicked fruit. My focus, however, is on Christians as individuals and not on Christianity as one giant Groupthink.On Critical Thinkers: Critical thinkers throw away most if not all tentative conclusions. Most of he Christianity that I have grown with believes that God exists and that He initiated Creation. To them, God is a living character through Jesus Christ, whom we know by the Spirit. The only problem with my belief is that the peanut gallery's attempts to falsify it are widely popular.

Especially since we fancy ourselves as a government of, by, for the people I don't think our collective national guilt can be avoided. We, The People, produced our history of our own accord. Falsify your christianity? Already done decades ago. What we are doing here now is protecting ourselves and reality when you come in here going on about this jesus/god/satan fantasy thing you are so fixated on.

NoteTab Pro is what I've settled on for decades now. Every time I get a new computer, I install it.I've primarily only worked with PCs. First I upgraded from my TI-99 to an IBM XT clone, the difference between night and day (my original background was as an Electronic Computer System Repairman (AFSC 30574, from which I transitioned in the Navy Reserve to Data Systems Technician (DS), hence one of my email addresses, DSC30574) which led to my Computer Science degree while on active duty (school computer was an IBM S/370; I was fluent in reading hex dumps in EBCDIC to a degree far greater I ever could when I had to transition to ASCII, even the S/360 assembly was far easier to disassembly on sight than Intel 8086 code) since the MS-DOS utilities opened access to all levels of the computer, something that required special third-party programs on the TI-99. The point of that is that I was very comfortable working close to the metal such that I tended towards embedded programming.My first two civilian jobs were with defense contractors with the first had me using a Data General minicomputer and the second a VAX11. My third civilian job had me working on a greenhouse control system controlled by an XT running MS-DOS, so I learned to exploit the shit out of every possible feature in DOS and the BIOS. From that point on, every work station I worked on was a PC, the later ones with Windows.At home, we stuck with PCs since we were struggling to get by and a Mac was too expensive. We did work with the first generation of Macs at Hughes Aircraft for creating presentation slides that combined graphics and text; I loved that so much that I bought Windows 1.0 which was a disappointment (it only supported about 4 printers, none of which was mine). My next exposure to Windows was 3.1, which was actually useful. My experiences with later versions of Mac were rather problematic and left a bad taste.I did the UNIX classes at the local JC and even earned their UNIX certificate. I set up a Linux box at work, but most of our work was still with Windows. My favorite software on the PC were the GNU Linux utilities for DOS, but they were 16-bit and no longer worked when Windows went to 64-bit.When I started at my last job which lasted 22 years and from which I retired, we used a DOS version of vi in the lab computers, so I learned that editor (that was before my UNIX classes). But I never encountered emacs.With NoteTab Pro I have multiple tabs so I can keep many files open at the same time and switch between them easily. I even use it to create web pages, though I do so by writing HTML by hand.

As I said: IOW, that test, which Christians believe came out of Jesus' own mouth, is unrealistic. Yet Christians (not I) believe that it must be taken literally, especially the fundies. They will apply it, but only to others and never to themselves, which hypocrisy is the reason I keep throwing it back at them, as I clearly said.Actually, I knew one fundamentalist who applied it to his own religion, though that was before we met. My friend at church (UU), Gary, whose story I've told here several times. He now describes himself as "a complete atheist and thorough humanist" and that he is now far more spiritually fulfilled than he ever was as a Christian. There's always the matter of people being themselves regardless of their religion: good people will always tend to be good and bad people will always tend to be bad. Indeed, bad people who join a good organization will tend to use that organization as cover for their misdeeds.So when we find those "bad apples" in a religion, why are they there?

• Is it just the luck of the draw and the religion itself has no effect on their numbers? When recruiting from the general population, we would expect to find roughly the same percentages of certain types in the religion as in the general population. Of course, other factors keep this ideal case from appearing.
• Does the religion attract those bad people? That could be either deliberate (eg, a sexual predator seeking to exploit access to victims) or despite original good intentions (eg, they want to become good and the religion claims to be able to do that, but once in they discover ways to exploit the system -- eg, a local creationist uses "because I love Jesus" as cover for his pathological lying, calculated deception, and abusive conduct).
• Does the religion actually create bad people? Does its teachings and practices actually groom members to become abusers, deceivers, bigots, fascists, or traitors (eg, what we currently see rearing its ugly multiple heads in Christian Nationalism)? Does the religion give people the justification and excuse to express their worse impulses?

Christianity is supposed to make people better, yet we repeatedly see it making them worse. And stridently so as they proclaim that they're committing their atrocities for Christ. And their "Brothers in Christ" provide them with a church community that reinforces and nurtures their worse tendencies and motivates them to sally forth to wage culture war against everyone else.So the Christian religion is not a neutral factor here.

Not every member of the peanut gallery is an atheist or an antitheist.
So no...no "WE". Sorry, Charlie. Again, you may have falsified it...we certainly have not. Its all a matter of untangling the hope from the hype. Why are you protecting yourself from sometthing that allegedly does not exist? Lets cut to the chase, schoolboy.

• Name me 5 alternative theories for how something came from nothing, or how the Universe originated.
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Lets examine each of them. Being in a Faith & Belief thread we can speculate.

Either I use that as a royal "we" or I carry a mouse in my pocket. Depends on the subject, my attitude and whether the mouse, an intellectual confidant, has had enough exercise. What, and spoil ICANT's "Jesus is Shakti" thread? No way!

The best editor is the one you like. TECO was the most common editor in the DEC TOPS-10 universe, but then Emacs came out of MIT around 1977 and many programmers switched over because it was WYSIWYG, even though it had a steep learning curve. As other simpler WYSIWYG editors became available (EDT around 1980 on VAX/VMS, for example, and later a raft of others) Emacs lost popularity, but it continues to have a core of diehard users who love its power and configurability.Control keys perform most basic operations, and this reliance on the control key caused most Emacs users to employ key swappers as the world switched over to IBM style keyboards where the capslock and control keys were reversed. Macs have this keyswap as a selectable option through the settings page.I've become so familiar with the Emacs key definitions that I define them globally so I can use them anywhere, like browsers, messaging tools, email and IDEs like XCode. The keyboards shortcuts are set using AutoHotkey on Windows and Karabiner Elements on Mac.​I currently have 269 buffers open in Emacs.--Percy

Since ICANT is too busy to run his own thread, I will step in for the moment. In reviewing this topic, The Historical Jesus: Did He Create the Universe?
I can see right away that the peanut gallery (evidence-based) will disagree with the pulpit gallery(Faith-based) as to the character of Historical Jesus. That being agreed upon, and proceeding in a Faith & Belief topic, let us quote each other and try to advance the conversation/post rate. Objective evidence is not formally required in these Forums, but to arrive at any consensus rationally, we need to sharpen each other.So Indeed, a majority of church-going Christians do not understand their Bible.Moreover, we disagree with each other. jar used to always say that he preferred logic, reason, and reality over the Creeds themselves. While it is fine to frame an argument dispassionately, it sells out mainstream Christianity's relationship with the Bible and apologetics. Assuming for a moment that the story was/is true, let us discuss Jesus in the Gospels. Before we can claim that He created the universe, we need to examine the character in the book.

It really seems pointless. As I’ve said before the Jesus of History must be Jesus as revealed by the methods of history. And that can only show Jesus as a man living 2000 years ago. The historical Jesus can no more create the universe than the historical Julius Caesar.