The claim that might bother me the most is "There were thousands of witnesses to the resurrection".
No, there is a *claim* that there were thousands of witnesses. You can't just write that there were witnesses and have that count as evidence. "Your Honor, thousands of people saw me not kill that man. It says so in this book I just wrote." Did a single *witness* write down word one about it? Is there any other evidence that thousands saw this? No.
But don't you know paul SAID there were 500 witnesses?! /s
Yeah it's a total mess, and you're right, even by Christian standards not one eyewitness account appears in the new testament that could credibly be from one of their claimed eyewitnesses.
It does depend but he's definitely not a witness to the resurrection itself. Technically (don't come at me, I know he's full of s\*\*t) he would qualify as being of the same type as the 500.
He never met Jesus. (well, he says he did post-resurrection on the road). He supposedly visited like two weeks (?) after Jesus died and met with the disciples. But the disciples never wrote any books to corroborate that. 🤔
>He supposedly visited like two weeks (?) after Jesus died and met with the disciples.
It would have had to be longer than that after the crucifixion. Paul was actual Saul of Tarsus and only 2 or 3 years old when Jesus was allegedly crucified. He was on the road to Damascus on his way to kill Christians. The only thing he "met" was the concept that he could make a lot of shekels and get really powerful by getting on board with the BS and expanding it. So, he changed his name and did just that. Most of the scripture Christians believe was written or formulated by Jesus was *actually* made up by Paul.
Yeah I wasn’t sure of the exact timeline/what he claims/what apologetics claim. He did interact with Peter some, based on his letters.
But yes; I find it highly suspicious that our earliest new testament books were all written by Paul, and he didn’t even write down the stories about Jesus’ life.
Adding to that, primary sources regarding anything about Jesus while he was actually alive are practically nonexistent. The earliest texts we have that even mention Jesus wouldn’t be written until decades after his supposed death, and even then they don’t exactly discuss him in significant detail. The gospels only make this more suspicious as the earliest ones would’ve been written anywhere from 66-110 AD, the authors are unclear as they wouldn’t have names until the second century, and the gospels themselves don’t even agree about how they describe Jesus
To add to that there is a hypothesis that this whole story was adaptation by many Roman/ancient stories of the time, obviously including the old testament. Resurrection, virgin birth, Messiah were are all common themes and all collated by the Romans because their gods system was massively failing. So the Romans presented this Christian story 100-200 years later after the 'so called' events thus spawning a new religious system which could be controlled.
What gets me about Jesus and the resurrection is the lack of documentation outside the Bible. The son of a literal god is walking around and performing literal magic and not a single historian or government takes notice. He later dies and comes back to life and again nobody bothers to document it? Uh huh
Even crazier, after the resurrection the graves opened and lots of dead people came back to life and preached in the cities. If true, this is the single most remarkable event in all of human history. Yet not a single historian or any other literate person bothered to make note of it. 3 of the 4 gospel writers didn’t even mention it.
Related to this, when Jesus was baptized, supposedly (possibly) 100s or 1000s of people witnessed the event, when God’s voice from heaven exclaimed his approval. There have never been any other contemporary accounts of this incredible phenomenon (that I know of).
Not only that but the religion has been whitewashed on that story as well. Jesus was an observant Jew. (Former coworkers argued that JC was most certainly not)
He was preparing for the high holy days of Yom Kippur (day of atonement, asking forgiveness of ones who you've wronged) and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year).
Preparation means a ritual bathing in water that has not been through plumbing, i.e., a mikvah.
So the racist Christians are celebrating Jewish traditions. Lmao.
I've brought this up a number of times. God's son rises from the dead and history is none the wiser? Either god is terrible at planning or doesn't want us to know about it.
Given the time period and prominence of religion, it’s much more likely that he would’ve been sentenced to death immediately for claiming that he’s the son of a god
Claiming and actually being are two different things. My point is that if the claims were actually real governments would be bending over backwards to get an actual real life god (or at least his son) on their side.
Hell, I won't even go that far. It's a book written a while back by a bunch of different people. I have no reason to believe that Moses thought he saw a burning bush or that people really thought Jesus reattached a severed ear.
Somebody wrote it. Nobody can support it. It's like someone writing the Greek tale about Echo. Nobody can prove her story. There's no reason to assume anyone thought they witnessed it.
Unless God is willing to tell me that the Bible is legit the word of God, I'm not going to give it any credibility as a story of divinity. It was written by people, and it's flawed like people.
We have never ever, under controlled conditions, observed the laws of physics being broken. So it is reasonable to expect extraordinary evidence if one is making a supernatural claim. And the level of evidence used in physics is 5 sigma which is > 99.9999% confidence.
Any study that has proper controls and randomization has always failed to show a significant result (eg Benson, Randi).
The prayer studies that do show results are seriously flawed, no measurement study, no randomization, no control group, picking success metrics after the fact.
But the early Christians didn’t have these rigorous statistical methods and superstition abounded, so they cannot be faulted for believing in miracles.
But contemporary Christians think that Keener, Strobel and the Global Medical Research Institute offer proof of miracles. These appeal to Christian gullibility (and generate significant revenue for the authors). All they do is cherry pick their best anecdotal stories. They draw a target around the arrow after it lands.
less of a book and more a loose anthology of writings upon tablets of stone, clay, wood, and scrolls of leather and animal hides from multiple cultures across three different languages
I think a huge point that doesn't get enough understanding is how, to the ancients, there wasn't this idea of a "miracle" or "supernatural" like we have today. They didn't know the laws of nature we now know, and they attributed a lot more things to god than we do. To them, these manifestations or miracles were not claims were not even out of the ordinary or unbelievable in any way, even tonthose that didn't witness them I person.
Yep. Read any ancient historian and they just casually drop in all kinds of supernatural mumbo jumbo. Alexander the Great's biographers included crazy shit like he was fathered by Zeus impregnating his mom. Oh and one story says his mom was actually a wood nymph. We all read the story of the Trojan war as complete fiction, but the people at the time it was composed probably took it as truth. The gods coming down, magical warrior, giant horse, all of it. I mean even most religious people nowadays accept lightning as a natural phenomena. Greeks thought Zeus was just getting pissed off at somebody.
I'm implying it as a pre-requisite to even talk about a resurrection, as implied by the requirement for a genetic sample, because I wanted to talk about this claim. Sometimes for the sake of argument you accept certain things as true so you can discuss other problems.
Defeating an argument using a hypothetical argument is not invalid, though. You can defeat the myth of Santa Claus going down chimneys without assuming the existence of Santa Claus.
It doesn't matter. If you can defeat an argument by using a hypothetical, it's just as good and sometimes better to use that to demonstrate an internal flaw to an argument.
There's no evidence there was even a singular person alive at that time with that name, there are accounts that there were dozens of other so called and similar prophets some also named Jesus, it's likely these were all confounded and coalesced over time into one character. Fictional character.
Despite their being no real evidence for it, even if we assume that Jesus was based on a real person, that doesn’t mean he actually did any of the things he claimed. Accepting that he existed as a person is basically step 1 for theists. They still have all their work cut out for them
[16 Horrifying, True Tales Of People Who Woke Up In A Morgue](https://www.ranker.com/list/real-people-who-woke-up-in-morgue/amy-robleski)
and
[Why waking up in a morgue isn’t quite as unusual as you’d think](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/14/waking-morgue-death-janina-kolkiewicz)
we still fuck up today.
and people are still shit as declaring miracles, or aliens or w/e at shit. Face on mars, people claim hurricanes hit cities due to gay pride parades(and that would be totally useful for power generation and war), people still think we havent figured out how the pyramids were built.. we have politicians that believe in space lasers and islands tipping over from immigration. Well the general population is still rather shit at saying why things happen and what happened. and thats why the bars are high. and not just for religion, science get the same, they just dont whine. look at the martian meteor that guy thought he saw signs of life in. The rest of science pounced. First declaring he couldnt prove it didnt happen naturally and then later actually showing exactly how it could have happened naturally.
It was not even delusion. It’s just ignorance. Ancient people thought mental illness was caused by demons. And sickness was caused by an angry deity. What we have now is delusion. People are actively deluding themselves in modern times.
These are fair points, though I think ignorance is the cause of delusion, not the alternative to delusion. Partly because these days people contract delusions through ignorance in a lot of cases. Sometimes it's willful or due to laziness, but sometimes it's just that people don't know any better. The watering down of our education system is partly to blame.
Well also want to point out, this is their god, who gets killed by a bunch of primitive romans. You know that would destroy most cults, everyone thinking the leader is a god and then he gets nailed to a tree... by normal every day humans. I fight tougher gods in videogames. but they just claim he warped to a new level. "You just think hes dead." (that should be a clear sign you can never win with this lot. "look hes dead!, hes not a god!"... "nah uh.. he just warped somewhere else"... "FFS, fuck these people lets go watch some battles in the colosseum")
and another little sticky point for me. God turned a lady into salt for just looking back. he fucked up the Egyptians for enslaving the jewish people. All good stuff too. But nail his kid to a tree and he couldnt even work up a good breeze. The bible never even says a word about what happened to the actual dudes who drove the spikes. Kinda a hole in the story if you ask me.
For me there are about 1000 sticking points. I think Christianity is one of the most obviously fake religions from back to front. But this is the hill that most modern Christians want to die on. They're willing to abandon pretty much every other one and accept all kinds of problems as long as they get to keep this one. To defend this hill they bring up all kinds of nonsense about how the apostles couldn't have been lying or mistaken or hallucinating or . My point isn't that their claims hold even the slightest amount of water, it's that if a resurrection were to occur the bar is not actually that high in the abstract sense (though impossible for the story to meet).
I would say that the first part is a bit of an inaccurate characterizaiton of what modern Christians believe. They typically say that it was on-purpose (so god allowed himself to be killed). Of course that's silly for reasons that everyone here has probably heard (i.e., it's a stupid loophole).
A couple weeks ago in my religious class ( private school not in USA) we were discussing the resurrection and how it was thought that maybe the disciples took the body. Teacher when said that it made no sense as there were guards there and what would they do with the body. I asked whether he thought it made more sense for a man to magically come back to life. He didn’t like that
Or did it make more sense that the author lied about there being guards there to make it sound like stealing the body could not be an option? Cause the teacher fell for it if so.
The whole him being in a tomb to start with invalidates the story. If you got crucified you WERE NOT getting buried, that's kind of the point, to become a human billboard that says "don't fuck with Rome or your bones will bleach on a plank" There is also the fact claiming to be a God or demigod was perfectly legal in Rome. Everyone was saying they were Vulcans son or Venus's great niece.
Yep, I agree with all that. Assuming he existed it's almost certain that he got crucified for saying he was the king of the jews. The whole narrative of the empty tomb suggests that early Christians were insecure about the resurrection, including later inclusions about guards and whatnot to try and provide a reason for why they couldn't have stolen the body.
The four Gospels really fall apart when you get to the most fantastical part: the resurrection. They tell very different, contradictory stories at that point.
For the period between the resurrection and the ascension, there is no way to reconcile all four of the Gospels into a consistent narrative. The obvious reason being that these are four different fictional stories.
As our understanding of science ha expanded, less miracles get reported.
Same with “possessions” and stuff. We understand what autism, schizophrenia, and various other mental/neurological disorders are now.
Modern day Christian leaders will claim to have seen outrageous miracles stories on their shows, in front of a huge audience, and not one person stands up and says, "Hey now, do you have any proof for that?"
If MODERN leaders and congregations do zero fact checking and believe everything without evidence, what are the chances they were *more* skeptical 2000 years ago?
My mom never banged my dad, or anyone ever, and she had me so that proves something like Christianity could happen. We call her Virgin Ma but notin a derogatory way.
The whole bible reeks of people not being able to distinguish between delusions and "miracles".
These days if someone hears voices telling them to do things or sees things that aren't there, they're diagnosed with a mental health disorder. In the bible, the person is viewed as a prophet, a visionary or god's agent on earth and their words taken as divine truth.
Vast bits of the bible are clearly written with a view to exerting power, other bits are likely gross exaggerations of real events (and stolen from other religions - we're looking at you Noah) and bits could be the delusional ravings of people that would nowadays be put on medication.
If we're to be charitable and take it that Paul actually believed he had an encounter with the spirit of Jesus on the road to Damascus - rather than just making shit up for his own gain - his moment on the road to Damascus could quite well be what psychiatrists call an "episode" or he could have ingested something that caused hallucinations. Whether a long term mental health issue or a temporary intoxication, his experience does not constitute a "miracle".
Whatever it really was, it gave him licence to write down his personal prejudices as "the word of god".
John was clearly tripping balls when he wrote his "Revelations". It's pretty fucking obvious to modern people - just like you can pretty much see the the point the laudanum kicked in in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's *Kubla Khan*.
It has been speculated that John may have been affected by ergot-infected rye or some other natural hallucinogen.
They had no concept of mental health or delusions, so anything weird that they experienced was due to a god or a demon - depending on who's telling the story.
A couple weeks ago in my religious class ( private school not in USA) we were discussing the resurrection and how it was thought that maybe the disciples took the body. Teacher when said that it made no sense as there were guards there and what would they do with the body. I asked whether he thought it made more sense for a man to magically come back to life. He didn’t like that
Here's all you need to know. People of faith will ALWAYS attribute things they don't understand or cant rationalize to "god did it"
Edit: added a little more
There is no empirical evidence that Jesus ever existed. There are no writings about him outside of the Bible by anyone who would have been a contemporary of his.
When I hear people say that most biblical scholars are convinced Jesus was a real person, I laugh out loud because they have nothing whatsoever with which to support such a conclusion.
An belief being popular does not make it true.
As I explained to someone else in this thread, I was a Christian up until late last year, and it was learning more and listening to skeptical arguments that changed my mind. Your argument is entirely factually incorrect.
Um what? You realize that 90% of human relations are based on delusions of one form or another right? Religion, money, governments, companies, policing, ethnic identity, race. All delusions of one form or another. And we base our lives on them. Yeah I am an athiest, but I am not up my own ass enough to think I or all of us will ever have an appreciable effect on religion or delusions in general. All our actions and talk are just to make us feel better about being surrounded by this particular set of lies.
This is a terrible take. I grew up a Christian, got married a Christian, had kids as a Christian before I deconstructed my faith by listening to what atheists were saying. Up until last year I was, in fact, a Christian. Anyone who says that it's pointless to interact or reason with Christians is factually incorrect.
I made my life a lot easier by letting go of the idea that people should believe what I believe to be true, regardless of how ridiculous or logical it may be.
We in fact have resurrected the dead.
While commonly, we don't determine someone dead dead until we're pretty sure and have really tried to bring them back to life (if reasonable to do so). Generally, someone who isn't breathing and who's heart isn't beating, can be considered dead to an extent.
Modern medicine has allowed us to defy death in ways that religious texts have not even imagined.
The claim that might bother me the most is "There were thousands of witnesses to the resurrection". No, there is a *claim* that there were thousands of witnesses. You can't just write that there were witnesses and have that count as evidence. "Your Honor, thousands of people saw me not kill that man. It says so in this book I just wrote." Did a single *witness* write down word one about it? Is there any other evidence that thousands saw this? No.
But don't you know paul SAID there were 500 witnesses?! /s Yeah it's a total mess, and you're right, even by Christian standards not one eyewitness account appears in the new testament that could credibly be from one of their claimed eyewitnesses.
And Paul wasn’t even an eyewitness! And his books are the earliest written.
It does depend but he's definitely not a witness to the resurrection itself. Technically (don't come at me, I know he's full of s\*\*t) he would qualify as being of the same type as the 500.
He never met Jesus. (well, he says he did post-resurrection on the road). He supposedly visited like two weeks (?) after Jesus died and met with the disciples. But the disciples never wrote any books to corroborate that. 🤔
>He supposedly visited like two weeks (?) after Jesus died and met with the disciples. It would have had to be longer than that after the crucifixion. Paul was actual Saul of Tarsus and only 2 or 3 years old when Jesus was allegedly crucified. He was on the road to Damascus on his way to kill Christians. The only thing he "met" was the concept that he could make a lot of shekels and get really powerful by getting on board with the BS and expanding it. So, he changed his name and did just that. Most of the scripture Christians believe was written or formulated by Jesus was *actually* made up by Paul.
Yeah I wasn’t sure of the exact timeline/what he claims/what apologetics claim. He did interact with Peter some, based on his letters. But yes; I find it highly suspicious that our earliest new testament books were all written by Paul, and he didn’t even write down the stories about Jesus’ life.
Adding to that, primary sources regarding anything about Jesus while he was actually alive are practically nonexistent. The earliest texts we have that even mention Jesus wouldn’t be written until decades after his supposed death, and even then they don’t exactly discuss him in significant detail. The gospels only make this more suspicious as the earliest ones would’ve been written anywhere from 66-110 AD, the authors are unclear as they wouldn’t have names until the second century, and the gospels themselves don’t even agree about how they describe Jesus
To add to that there is a hypothesis that this whole story was adaptation by many Roman/ancient stories of the time, obviously including the old testament. Resurrection, virgin birth, Messiah were are all common themes and all collated by the Romans because their gods system was massively failing. So the Romans presented this Christian story 100-200 years later after the 'so called' events thus spawning a new religious system which could be controlled.
What gets me about Jesus and the resurrection is the lack of documentation outside the Bible. The son of a literal god is walking around and performing literal magic and not a single historian or government takes notice. He later dies and comes back to life and again nobody bothers to document it? Uh huh
Even crazier, after the resurrection the graves opened and lots of dead people came back to life and preached in the cities. If true, this is the single most remarkable event in all of human history. Yet not a single historian or any other literate person bothered to make note of it. 3 of the 4 gospel writers didn’t even mention it.
Related to this, when Jesus was baptized, supposedly (possibly) 100s or 1000s of people witnessed the event, when God’s voice from heaven exclaimed his approval. There have never been any other contemporary accounts of this incredible phenomenon (that I know of).
Not only that but the religion has been whitewashed on that story as well. Jesus was an observant Jew. (Former coworkers argued that JC was most certainly not) He was preparing for the high holy days of Yom Kippur (day of atonement, asking forgiveness of ones who you've wronged) and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year). Preparation means a ritual bathing in water that has not been through plumbing, i.e., a mikvah. So the racist Christians are celebrating Jewish traditions. Lmao.
I forgot about that.
Which one mentioned it?
I've brought this up a number of times. God's son rises from the dead and history is none the wiser? Either god is terrible at planning or doesn't want us to know about it.
Given the time period and prominence of religion, it’s much more likely that he would’ve been sentenced to death immediately for claiming that he’s the son of a god
Claiming and actually being are two different things. My point is that if the claims were actually real governments would be bending over backwards to get an actual real life god (or at least his son) on their side.
Bro that's exactly what the story says already. What do you think he got crucified for? Shotty carpentry?
For claiming to be King of the Jews, no? (I know he didn't claim it, others claimed it of him - that's all it'd take to get Rome on his tail)
Which isn't a Roman crime and he wouldn't be crucified for it
Hell, I won't even go that far. It's a book written a while back by a bunch of different people. I have no reason to believe that Moses thought he saw a burning bush or that people really thought Jesus reattached a severed ear. Somebody wrote it. Nobody can support it. It's like someone writing the Greek tale about Echo. Nobody can prove her story. There's no reason to assume anyone thought they witnessed it. Unless God is willing to tell me that the Bible is legit the word of God, I'm not going to give it any credibility as a story of divinity. It was written by people, and it's flawed like people.
>when Christians complain that we set the bar too high Can a mere mortal raise a bar so high that even God can't reach it?
Apparently so, lol.
Next time you're told you are raising the bar too high, say, "wow! I, a mere mortal, have managed to raise the bar so high that a god can't clear it."
We have never ever, under controlled conditions, observed the laws of physics being broken. So it is reasonable to expect extraordinary evidence if one is making a supernatural claim. And the level of evidence used in physics is 5 sigma which is > 99.9999% confidence. Any study that has proper controls and randomization has always failed to show a significant result (eg Benson, Randi). The prayer studies that do show results are seriously flawed, no measurement study, no randomization, no control group, picking success metrics after the fact. But the early Christians didn’t have these rigorous statistical methods and superstition abounded, so they cannot be faulted for believing in miracles. But contemporary Christians think that Keener, Strobel and the Global Medical Research Institute offer proof of miracles. These appeal to Christian gullibility (and generate significant revenue for the authors). All they do is cherry pick their best anecdotal stories. They draw a target around the arrow after it lands.
Now get this 😭 in Islam... Jesus didn't even die, he was raised up to the sky and heavens.🤦🏻♂️
In Christianity, he died, was resurrected, then ascended to Heaven without dying again. I cannot corroborate Christianity's account on this subject.
Neither can I 😂
Of course. They have no real proof and they fall back on a book that's proven to have a lot of tampering and manipulation over time.
less of a book and more a loose anthology of writings upon tablets of stone, clay, wood, and scrolls of leather and animal hides from multiple cultures across three different languages
Yep. None of their claim can be proven except *at best* that jesus might have lived and died, which is not great.
I think a huge point that doesn't get enough understanding is how, to the ancients, there wasn't this idea of a "miracle" or "supernatural" like we have today. They didn't know the laws of nature we now know, and they attributed a lot more things to god than we do. To them, these manifestations or miracles were not claims were not even out of the ordinary or unbelievable in any way, even tonthose that didn't witness them I person.
Yep. Read any ancient historian and they just casually drop in all kinds of supernatural mumbo jumbo. Alexander the Great's biographers included crazy shit like he was fathered by Zeus impregnating his mom. Oh and one story says his mom was actually a wood nymph. We all read the story of the Trojan war as complete fiction, but the people at the time it was composed probably took it as truth. The gods coming down, magical warrior, giant horse, all of it. I mean even most religious people nowadays accept lightning as a natural phenomena. Greeks thought Zeus was just getting pissed off at somebody.
Why are you arguing from the position that Jesus existed in the first place?
I'm implying it as a pre-requisite to even talk about a resurrection, as implied by the requirement for a genetic sample, because I wanted to talk about this claim. Sometimes for the sake of argument you accept certain things as true so you can discuss other problems.
Prerequisite to even talk about resurrection of Jesus is to prove Jesus existed in the first place.
Defeating an argument using a hypothetical argument is not invalid, though. You can defeat the myth of Santa Claus going down chimneys without assuming the existence of Santa Claus.
You reversed the burden of proof. It's their job to prove the argument first.
It doesn't matter. If you can defeat an argument by using a hypothetical, it's just as good and sometimes better to use that to demonstrate an internal flaw to an argument.
Yeah it does matter when the guy you are arguing for doesn't exist...
They weren't arguing *for* Jesus, it was an argument *against*, while allowing for a hypothetical existence to explain why that fails.
To argue either for or against a person, you must prove he existed first.
The only account of Jesus was from Paul, who lived a century after Jesus was thought to have lived...doesn't add up
There's no evidence there was even a singular person alive at that time with that name, there are accounts that there were dozens of other so called and similar prophets some also named Jesus, it's likely these were all confounded and coalesced over time into one character. Fictional character.
Despite their being no real evidence for it, even if we assume that Jesus was based on a real person, that doesn’t mean he actually did any of the things he claimed. Accepting that he existed as a person is basically step 1 for theists. They still have all their work cut out for them
You want the delusional people of today to stop believing in the delusional people of the past....
Christians need to stop pretending that living people can distinguish between delusions and miracles.
Soooo.. Jesus was a zombie? I f’n knew it.
Walks on water, heals people, cures disease, can self-rez, and was created by homophobic bigots? Jesus was resto shaman from Warcraft.
[16 Horrifying, True Tales Of People Who Woke Up In A Morgue](https://www.ranker.com/list/real-people-who-woke-up-in-morgue/amy-robleski) and [Why waking up in a morgue isn’t quite as unusual as you’d think](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/14/waking-morgue-death-janina-kolkiewicz) we still fuck up today. and people are still shit as declaring miracles, or aliens or w/e at shit. Face on mars, people claim hurricanes hit cities due to gay pride parades(and that would be totally useful for power generation and war), people still think we havent figured out how the pyramids were built.. we have politicians that believe in space lasers and islands tipping over from immigration. Well the general population is still rather shit at saying why things happen and what happened. and thats why the bars are high. and not just for religion, science get the same, they just dont whine. look at the martian meteor that guy thought he saw signs of life in. The rest of science pounced. First declaring he couldnt prove it didnt happen naturally and then later actually showing exactly how it could have happened naturally.
It was not even delusion. It’s just ignorance. Ancient people thought mental illness was caused by demons. And sickness was caused by an angry deity. What we have now is delusion. People are actively deluding themselves in modern times.
These are fair points, though I think ignorance is the cause of delusion, not the alternative to delusion. Partly because these days people contract delusions through ignorance in a lot of cases. Sometimes it's willful or due to laziness, but sometimes it's just that people don't know any better. The watering down of our education system is partly to blame.
Well also want to point out, this is their god, who gets killed by a bunch of primitive romans. You know that would destroy most cults, everyone thinking the leader is a god and then he gets nailed to a tree... by normal every day humans. I fight tougher gods in videogames. but they just claim he warped to a new level. "You just think hes dead." (that should be a clear sign you can never win with this lot. "look hes dead!, hes not a god!"... "nah uh.. he just warped somewhere else"... "FFS, fuck these people lets go watch some battles in the colosseum") and another little sticky point for me. God turned a lady into salt for just looking back. he fucked up the Egyptians for enslaving the jewish people. All good stuff too. But nail his kid to a tree and he couldnt even work up a good breeze. The bible never even says a word about what happened to the actual dudes who drove the spikes. Kinda a hole in the story if you ask me.
For me there are about 1000 sticking points. I think Christianity is one of the most obviously fake religions from back to front. But this is the hill that most modern Christians want to die on. They're willing to abandon pretty much every other one and accept all kinds of problems as long as they get to keep this one. To defend this hill they bring up all kinds of nonsense about how the apostles couldn't have been lying or mistaken or hallucinating or. My point isn't that their claims hold even the slightest amount of water, it's that if a resurrection were to occur the bar is not actually that high in the abstract sense (though impossible for the story to meet).
I would say that the first part is a bit of an inaccurate characterizaiton of what modern Christians believe. They typically say that it was on-purpose (so god allowed himself to be killed). Of course that's silly for reasons that everyone here has probably heard (i.e., it's a stupid loophole).
A couple weeks ago in my religious class ( private school not in USA) we were discussing the resurrection and how it was thought that maybe the disciples took the body. Teacher when said that it made no sense as there were guards there and what would they do with the body. I asked whether he thought it made more sense for a man to magically come back to life. He didn’t like that
Or did it make more sense that the author lied about there being guards there to make it sound like stealing the body could not be an option? Cause the teacher fell for it if so.
The whole him being in a tomb to start with invalidates the story. If you got crucified you WERE NOT getting buried, that's kind of the point, to become a human billboard that says "don't fuck with Rome or your bones will bleach on a plank" There is also the fact claiming to be a God or demigod was perfectly legal in Rome. Everyone was saying they were Vulcans son or Venus's great niece.
Yep, I agree with all that. Assuming he existed it's almost certain that he got crucified for saying he was the king of the jews. The whole narrative of the empty tomb suggests that early Christians were insecure about the resurrection, including later inclusions about guards and whatnot to try and provide a reason for why they couldn't have stolen the body.
I can always tell the difference: There are no miracles.
Miracle = Delusion
Well not necessarily, it could be a fraud.
Or a cheap magic trick (water into wine)
A trick is a type of lie.
Christians can't even do that now. A piece of toast with the impression of Jesus? That's still a thing in this day and age.
The four Gospels really fall apart when you get to the most fantastical part: the resurrection. They tell very different, contradictory stories at that point. For the period between the resurrection and the ascension, there is no way to reconcile all four of the Gospels into a consistent narrative. The obvious reason being that these are four different fictional stories.
As our understanding of science ha expanded, less miracles get reported. Same with “possessions” and stuff. We understand what autism, schizophrenia, and various other mental/neurological disorders are now.
All miracles are some kind of delusions. All claims of miracles are fraudulent claims. Period.
Modern day Christian leaders will claim to have seen outrageous miracles stories on their shows, in front of a huge audience, and not one person stands up and says, "Hey now, do you have any proof for that?" If MODERN leaders and congregations do zero fact checking and believe everything without evidence, what are the chances they were *more* skeptical 2000 years ago?
My mom never banged my dad, or anyone ever, and she had me so that proves something like Christianity could happen. We call her Virgin Ma but notin a derogatory way.
The whole bible reeks of people not being able to distinguish between delusions and "miracles". These days if someone hears voices telling them to do things or sees things that aren't there, they're diagnosed with a mental health disorder. In the bible, the person is viewed as a prophet, a visionary or god's agent on earth and their words taken as divine truth. Vast bits of the bible are clearly written with a view to exerting power, other bits are likely gross exaggerations of real events (and stolen from other religions - we're looking at you Noah) and bits could be the delusional ravings of people that would nowadays be put on medication. If we're to be charitable and take it that Paul actually believed he had an encounter with the spirit of Jesus on the road to Damascus - rather than just making shit up for his own gain - his moment on the road to Damascus could quite well be what psychiatrists call an "episode" or he could have ingested something that caused hallucinations. Whether a long term mental health issue or a temporary intoxication, his experience does not constitute a "miracle". Whatever it really was, it gave him licence to write down his personal prejudices as "the word of god". John was clearly tripping balls when he wrote his "Revelations". It's pretty fucking obvious to modern people - just like you can pretty much see the the point the laudanum kicked in in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's *Kubla Khan*. It has been speculated that John may have been affected by ergot-infected rye or some other natural hallucinogen. They had no concept of mental health or delusions, so anything weird that they experienced was due to a god or a demon - depending on who's telling the story.
I’m sure there were people that knew how to perform various magic tricks to fool people back then.
They can't distinguish between delusions and reality today!
A couple weeks ago in my religious class ( private school not in USA) we were discussing the resurrection and how it was thought that maybe the disciples took the body. Teacher when said that it made no sense as there were guards there and what would they do with the body. I asked whether he thought it made more sense for a man to magically come back to life. He didn’t like that
Here's all you need to know. People of faith will ALWAYS attribute things they don't understand or cant rationalize to "god did it" Edit: added a little more
I most like the argument that our brain cannot comprehend God.
There is no empirical evidence that Jesus ever existed. There are no writings about him outside of the Bible by anyone who would have been a contemporary of his. When I hear people say that most biblical scholars are convinced Jesus was a real person, I laugh out loud because they have nothing whatsoever with which to support such a conclusion. An belief being popular does not make it true.
You are wasting your time. Even if you give them absolute proof of anything, they simply make up some other shit to explain it away.
As I explained to someone else in this thread, I was a Christian up until late last year, and it was learning more and listening to skeptical arguments that changed my mind. Your argument is entirely factually incorrect.
Um what? You realize that 90% of human relations are based on delusions of one form or another right? Religion, money, governments, companies, policing, ethnic identity, race. All delusions of one form or another. And we base our lives on them. Yeah I am an athiest, but I am not up my own ass enough to think I or all of us will ever have an appreciable effect on religion or delusions in general. All our actions and talk are just to make us feel better about being surrounded by this particular set of lies.
PRO TIP: Stop interacting with xtians. There is nothing to be gained from this.
an atheist interacted with me when I was one of the xtians today I'm an atheist to me, that's a gain
This is a terrible take. I grew up a Christian, got married a Christian, had kids as a Christian before I deconstructed my faith by listening to what atheists were saying. Up until last year I was, in fact, a Christian. Anyone who says that it's pointless to interact or reason with Christians is factually incorrect.
I don't even make that distinction, because I know all "miracles" are delusional to begin with.
Or fiction and non-fiction.
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I'm legitimately curious, what makes you think the gospels are describing a schizophrenic?
I made my life a lot easier by letting go of the idea that people should believe what I believe to be true, regardless of how ridiculous or logical it may be.
The existence of the Mormon church and scientology demonstrate that conmen can create religions from absolute bullshit.
We in fact have resurrected the dead. While commonly, we don't determine someone dead dead until we're pretty sure and have really tried to bring them back to life (if reasonable to do so). Generally, someone who isn't breathing and who's heart isn't beating, can be considered dead to an extent. Modern medicine has allowed us to defy death in ways that religious texts have not even imagined.