Why is Faith a Virtue?

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Say you were to stumble across a dusty old box in the attic of your old house. And you open it up and inside there are some old letters and you read them. They are love letters.

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Could you form the impression that the person writing the letter loved the recipient of the letter. Could you form the sense that they were not lying in what they wrote? Most justice systems I know of hold to the idea that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty (which makes sense in general: someone will tell the truth unless they have some motivation to lie - truth is the motiveless default).

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If you wanted to know the "truth", you would try and explore further and establish the context in which those letters were produced. It could well be that the person writing them was a con artist, trying to scam a poor old lady of her money. They could be the writings of a young man trying to get into the bed of large-breasted young lady. Or they could be the honest account of two people in love - it's hard to say from two letters in isolation?It's the same with the bible, if you take it as your sole source, you can say - well this all appears to be true, but when you take the wider context - then quickly you realise that most of the things described either cannot have happened at all or did not happen as described.Circular reasoning of "It's in those letters and therefore it must be true because it's in those letters" is of no use at all.Edited by CK, : No reason given.

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They were surrounded by THOUSANDS who had witnessed the events.

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So those people wrote about what they had see? in other text besides the bible - are you thinking about a particular source? just the first three or four really strong ones will be fine.

So if they influenced so many people of the time - SOMEONE must have recorded those events. What do you think is the best secular source recording the actions of Jesus?

em, no. It's not a "semantic" hang-up, in many cases, if the witness is unable or willing to appear in court to back up their statement (which I guess is what you are calling a "witness report"), it's ruled inadmissible to the court.So it's a BIG difference and not something that you can cal a "Big fat semantic hangup you created for no good reason".Edited by CK, : No reason given.Edited by CK, : No reason given.

removed by author.Edited by CK, : no point stating the obvious.

This is where Iano and others lose the rest of us. Let's say you got up tomorrow and decided "yeah got to more to this universe", what's the next stage?this happened to a friend of mine, who came to the conclusion there must be a god. However the leap he didn't make was saying well, that must mean the bible is true, - in actual fact he is more convinced than ever that the bible is a load of old chuff.The other problem, as you have pointed out, is that christians who try and promote their god via a mixture of needy pleading and threats (hell insurance) just tend to make their god appear a sad pathetic little creature full of ego and malice.