Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

Woah! The belief is supposed to come from the book, you can't just reinterpret the book to suit the belief you'd prefer. Well you can, and you do, but it self-deception.

Once you rule out innerancy you're in grievous difficulty because you have rejected the idea that the bible IS the word of god. So the innevitable happens - people make stuff up about it and you have the 38,000 formal interpretaions now representing Christian beliefs and who knows how many personal interpretations - probably as many as there are believers.My mother, for example, was a protestant who converted to Catholicism but refuses to believe in the devil because she was nice and thought everybody ought to be nice too. Quite sensible in my view. Sure, which is what GDR is doing inorder to suit his preferred belief. But that just means his belief is not based on the bible, it's based on his version of it. I'm not sure about lesser nonsense, it's stark staring bonkers; hopelessly irrational. But ir is at least honest. The only way a semi-rational person can stick with his/her beliefs in the face of a flat out contradiction is to invent his/her own 'truth' to suit his/her pre-existing personal beliefs. That's intellectually dishonest.

Yeh, that's rather our point. Yeh, that's rather our point.And you can't escape with the 'that was the OT, Jesus changed all that' trick. The OT god is a violent, vengeful, psychotic god, Jesus is a nice guy, it's not just a contradiction it's two utterly different things. And the NT has it's own contradictions and prophecy failures that are central to the belief system which you also can't explain.Your belief is based only on the bible, eveything else - the traditions and conventions, philosophies and interpretations are all man-made derivatives from that single source. Show that source to be wrong in crucial parts and the house of cards falls. In your terms, it's built on sand.

They don't respect the scholarship because it isn't scholarship - it's called making shit up. Anyon3 can do it, Faith and creation do it all day long. All you and they have is the bible - they have nothing no more than that. We can all read that bookk, it's a simple set of stories for simple folk. This isn't structural engineering, it's a single, simple book. No special education is necessary to read it. We understand the tale. Sure, it's very obviously tosh. Well it's one good reason, there are several others - it's like RAZD's dating concilliance, all roads lead to Rome. We can't trust them because they have no more knowledge than anyone else - all the available knowledge is held in one book. Just read it and you have the lot. Everything else is people making shit up that can't be verified. Read the crap creation writes, that's ho2 daft it is.

Everything that can be known about Jesus is in that one simple book. No-one knows any more than that. There are no more sources of information, no special knowledge and no secret messages. I don't care how much respect you and Faith give to apologists, they're just people making stuff up. It's even a formal fallacy.

Yeh, and that's it. How does that help with your biblical apologetics?

Tacitus provides much needed independent evidence for your guy's existence and death. Personally, I think it more likely than not he did actually exist.But everything you know about him and his teachings are in the bible, so if there's stuff in their that you can't accept because it contradicts your beliefs you're simply rationalising.

You either don't understand what CD is or you misread my post (your own CD?); I said that I think it more likely than not that a man called Jesus did exist. And yet again I'm agreeing with you. The bible was written by fallible men; and is fallible. Actually, it's only falible if you believe it to be actual reported history. If you see it for what it is - politically motivated fiction - it's just propoganda. Sure, you can say whatever you like, and you do. Your problem is that the only thing we know about the alleged resurection is written in your very fallible book by very fallable men. As you agree. You just did! Yes they do have to do that and they do do that. You see it here being done.And you do the same but in a different way. You say that the bible can't be taken literally and that it is full of flaws but you believe it literally about the resurection. And even when it's not just contradictory on stuff but just plain wrong - like Jesus's return with a generation - you rationalise it away.And here you go again in another thread in a flight of non-biblical total fantasy supported by another fantacist making up stuff to suit his own beliefs

quote:

---

I however don't believe that God does know the future in the way that we think of it as I believe that the future is unknowable. One of my Christian influences is John Polkinghorne who was a renowned physicist and changed his career path in his late 40's to theology. Here is a portion of an interview he gave a few years ago.

---

This is totally unbiblical and you can't know that this is true, you're both just making it up. Your only knowledge of your faith is contained in the bible, everything else you invent to suit. Your belief about god is so far away from the only source of the original belief that you'd be burnt at the stake as a heretic if you ever met historic believers.It's totally understandable, you have to maintain a primitive belief in a modern age. This has been happening for 250 years, through the age of earth and evolution discoveries and a growth of real knowledge. The fight of belief versus science can only result in either the loss of belief or an adaptation of the belief to fit real knowledge. Religion is a master of adaptation and rationalisation.

It doesn't shut the door, it just says that such things are irrational. People will carry on being irrational forever. I'm saying that all that anybody knows about the Christian god is contained within the bible and that's open to anybody. Everything else is speculation. Why does being an attorney give him more knowledge of god than me or you or a chemical engineer?

There's your political motivation. They work out that their messiah's all get killed, so when this one gets killed too, you claim he came back from the dead so your little revelution can continue. It's straightforward. To make it something else requires you to turn logical and literary cartwheels. It doesn't work.

It makes total sense; it may not be what you want to believe and it may not even be true, but it makes total sense. It's just as likely that it was invented ad hoc and grew from there. Either way, the very least likely is that the resurection actually happened - that's magical nonsense spun into political oportunism. You've already admitted that there are chunks of the bible that you can't explain - or explain away. And the major one - the return in the generation of the listeners - is the killer for you and yours. You have to shut your ears to that one.

Fine, but also keep in mind that whatever it is that you find using that 'method' it can't be evidence. Evidence, or facts, are independent of belief and subjectivity. Your method will force you to ignore or undervalue contrary evidence. Which is what you routinely do, just as Faith did in her rapture belief here. It *won't* and can't ever happen. You're quite safe.

Is this what you call a skeptic?

quote:

---

The Very Reverend Edward Gordon Selwyn (1885—1959) was an English Anglican priest and theologian, who served as Warden of Radley College from 1913 to 1919; Rector of Red Hill, near Havant; and then as Dean of Winchester from 1931 to 1958. He wrote sermons and other books and was the editor of the liberal Anglo-Catholic journal Theology from 1920.[1]

---

There was no need to remove a body - the stories about the resurection were written decades after the fact. There's no evidence about the removal of a body except what is written in the book. Who is going to be looking for this body decades later and if it was found why would the authors tell us? It's a political yarn. Fake news.

No shit! I wonder why? Don't be so naive. Political opportunism has existed for as long as there's been human societies. But even without it, people who really believe things will do a lot of seemingly crazy things dictated by their beliefs - cf 9/11; what's in it for them? Heaven perhaps? Belief is every reason to make stuff up.I'm certainly biased against magic and spiritual thinking because there is no evidence for any of it. Um, insane is nearer the mark for our latest entrants. Or maybe you think they're fully rational? My pseudo-psychological analysis is that you have a addictive personality that latches onto simple solutions to your problems. It's bizarre - and wrong - that despite your gambling you think it's not chance.

Yeh, we can all quote stuff, here's Matthew, all in total context. You have to turn multiple cartwheels to make the plain words into something else.

quote:

---

Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. "Do you see all these things?" he asked. "I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down."

​

as an aside, this didn't happen either, the Wailing Wall still stands brick on brick

​

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. "Tell us", they said, "when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" So when you see standing in the holy place 'the abomination that causes desolation,' spoken of through the prophet Daniellet the reader understandthen let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now-and never to be equaled again. Immediately after the distress of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door. I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. (Matthew 24)

---