Only one version?

Wordswordsman writes:

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Your simple denials of fact are pitiful and worth nothing. Respected archeologists, historians alike have and are verifying not only Jesus but much of the Bible, a fact denied by few scholars.

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More like a fact unknown to anyone except fundamentalists. This sounds a lot like that other Creationism claim, "Did you know that more and more scientists are rejecting evolution and accepting Creationism as the better model?"

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Can you prove Charles Darwin lived? PROOF. Not some website cut and paste. Do you have a witness that knew him, saw him, that can prove his claim?

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There is far more evidence of Charles Darwin than there is of Jesus. Of course, that isn't really a fair comparison since Darwin lived very recently. He's buried in Westminster Abbey, I suppose you could dig up his bones if you could get the picks and shovels past the guards.A more fair comparison would be with John the Baptist, who is featured far, far, far more prominently in contemporary accounts than is Jesus. In other words, Jesus gets barely any mention at all, and questionable and/or second-hand mention at that, while John the Baptist is written about all over the place.

John says:

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There are a very few references to a man named Jesus. Most of those references are questionable and none of them are detailed enough to justify the claim that they are "evidencing the same Jesus the Bible describes"

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You reply:

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There are many.

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There are few. Josephus (2), Tacitus (1), Suetonius (1), Thallus (1). They are so few we could quote them all in full in a short post. See this link that John posted on another thread:Scott Oser Hojfaq » Internet Infidels

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There are professionals in those fields who are in fact qualified to make that judgment. Few of them are so ignorant as to deny the evidences.

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And few are so incompetent as to claim evidence that doesn't exist.

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I doubt any Jew of the day was willing to contradict what the masses saw, touched, believed. Skeptics had to wait until all the original witnesses were dead.

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I don't know about that, but that's certainly what the gospel writers did.

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I think God used him to get in a word. Can you prove He didn't?

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The traditional scholarly approach is to accept those ideas that have supporting evidence. Lack of countervailing evidence cannot be construed as supportive for the simple reason that most ridiculous notions lack countervailing evidence. Find evidence that there aren't ethereal invisible elephants living in your refrigerator. I could claim that Jesus had a black mole on his left shoulder blade - prove that he didn't.

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The Bible, however, enjoys the support of many scholarly Jewish, Christian, other religious, and entirely secular archeologists and other scientists digging up and studying actual verifying relics in Bible lands that testify to the veracity of the Bible.

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I'm not sure you understand what is being claimed about the Bible. We're not saying it's a work of complete fiction. We're only saying that it contains some fact, some fiction, and some that we can't verify either way at this time. I don't know John's background, but he doesn't sound ignorant of Biblical issues. I read about Biblical archaeology all the time, and subscribe to Biblical Archaeological Review, so I'm constantly learning about all the recent discoveries. That the original Jericho has been identified and excavated lends no support whatsoever to the claim that, for example, Jesus was crucified, died, and was risen on the 3rd day.

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MOST scholars, even the most secular of them, agree on the harmony of the books of the Bible, though not necessarily the meaning of the contents.

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Most scholars are aware of the differences. The three synoptics are generally congruent but contain many substantial differences. Just check any synopsis, which places the three texts side-by-side in columns. Then there's John, which is totally unlike the other three and has a different chronology, for instance, of the last supper.

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Many just won't believe those words, many do. Your conclusion is lonely, baseless, pure opinion. Almost any search on the subject will turn up statements that verify what most scholars believe about that. What are you so afraid of? You put forth an agorophobic air about it.

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Unless you only visit Christian bookstores, you can find plenty of books in any large bookstore that discuss the incongruencies of the Bible specifically and Christianity in general. Taking a look at my bookshelf I see that I've got around 30 titles myself. Oh, and 7 Bibles, but unfortunately I don't think any inerrant ones.--Percy

I'm afraid that when your post went into full bold that I again was unable to follow who said what. I found the post pretty interesting up to that point, hope you can find time to fix it.--Percy

Hi Mammuthus,Finally got a chance to read it - thanks for the fix! I noticed something about an earlier request for banning that I must have missed (and I make up my own mind anyway, but I do appreciate emails to admin@ bringing possible violations to my attention - the activity level has gotten beyond what me and Moose can fully follow), but I saw nothing in the post you were replying to or your own post that violates the guidelines. Lively discussion is expected on this topic, and you guys are having a pretty interesting exchange.--Percy

Wordswordsman writes:

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A properly conducted poll of 20,000 Americans can easily represent the entire population of the US with high confidence and accuracy. If the sample size is increased for a large population, the improvement on confidence isn't significally improved enough to warrant the expense of taking larger samples than are customarily taken in polls, except in results of nearly 50-50 opinions from samples of only 5,000.

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It seems counterintuitive to most people, but for large populations the confidence level is a function solely of sample size. For example, whether the total population is one million or a hundred million doesn't matter, a sample size of around 1750 will give you a confidence level of 99%.Even though extremely small sample sizes yield high confidence levels, polling large populations is extremely difficult because you need to establish that the sample was representative of the total population. This is where increasing sample size is helpful, because it increases the probability that the sample is representative. For example, an instant poll conducted by a network after a presidential speech is highly unlikely to be representative not only because of the necessarily small sample size, but also because it is a sample of people who tend to be home in the evening and who answer "yes" to the question, "Would you be willing to answer a few questions?" Pollsters conduct background polls to correct for these factors, but you can see it quickly gets very complicated.The way a poll is constructed also strongly influences the results. For example, you'll get a higher "yes" response to the question, "Do you support the current bill before Congress increasing automobile emission controls?" if you precede it with, "Do you think it's important to preserve the environment for your children and your children's children?"Self-selection polls are meaningless. The polls at websites are an example of these types of polls.And lastly and obviously, the number of people adhering to a viewpoint is not well correlated with the correctness of a viewpoint, particularly for large populations on obscure or complex topics.--Percy

Wordswordsman writes:

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This is characteristic of discussion groups dominated by atheists.

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The evolutionists on this board are atheists, agnostics, deists and theists. No one classification seems to dominate from what I can see.The Meridian article by John P. Pratt about the September, 1999, Scientific American article on Scientists and Religion in America is misleading. The poll consisted of only two questions:

Do you believe in:

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1. A God in intellectual and affective communication with man...to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer?
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2. Personal immortality?

One respondent wrote, "Why such a narrow definition [of God]? I believe in God, but I don't believe that one can expect an answer to prayer." Another wrote, "I consider it quite possible to be a deeply religious person while rejecting belief in a personal God or in personal immortality."So it's untrue when Pratt writes, "only 40% of scientists stated that they believed in God."--Percy

You've are equating rejection of your arguments with rejection of Jesus Christ as Lord and savior. They are not the same thing. This is not to say that many, if any, evolutionists here are Christians in the sense that you would use the word, but for the most part the discussion has been about the defects in your arguments for your own particular Christ view, and not about the actual truth or falsity of conservative Christian theology.--Percy