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| Re: nonsense about atheism (241809) | |||
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Re: nonsense about atheism |
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Posted by RonInBayside on Tue Aug 28 09:57:07 2007, in response to Re: nonsense about atheism, posted by soton si on Tue Aug 28 08:18:43 2007. If you were secure in your faith, you would not have to wear it on your sleeve and stick it in other people's faces to convince yourself of its value. If you're looking for my approval to be a Christian, you don't need it - but the converse is true too - I don't need your approval to not be one.Ultimately, the issue is that you fear that somehow your faith will be taken from you, or that you will fail, or that, like the reformed whore (the most pious and yet the most obnoxious among us), you will fail to "save" us from some heresy - never mind that heresy is a religious concept that not everyone feels bound by. Maybe a better approach is for you to go to a church of your liking, attend a religious school of your liking (you seem to favor the Christian equivalent of a madrassa, or perhaps a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church) and not worry about forciby converting other people. I should point out something else -Mel Gibson's views on Catholicism are an excellent example of someone who advocates as you do. It turns out, though, that what he's realy expressing is his ethnic and cultural hatred more than anything else. He (mis)uses religion to justify his own phobias. Are you sure you're not doing the same thing? "The New Testament is by far the most aatestable 1st Century Document. The sheer number of manuscripts and their date make it far more reliable than anything else we have, such as Julius Caeser's 'Gallic Wars'. " False statement. The sheer number of manuscripts simply meant somebody was writing a lot. Anne Rice and Stephen King are very prolific - doesn't make their works non-fiction. One of the strengths of the Old Testament is that there is corroboration for various events in it. For example, the exodus from Egypt, though suffering from mistranslation, describes a very wet year in the Nile Delta, the biological consequences of a flood, and a military victory by the Jews over an Egyptian Army not suited to infantry combat in the reeds. By contrast, you rely solely on the New Testament to support itself - therefore, it collapses on itself. "If they were secular documents, no one would have any problem with their accuracy," See above. You're getting paranoid. however because they aren't people are instantly prejudiced, and despite the evidence, by faith (with no proof), reject them out of hand as historical sources." There is no such thing as evidence by faith. Evidence by faith is an oxymoron. The New Testament, unlike the Old Testament, is not primarily a historical text. It is a political text, an advertisement for one brand of monotheistic religion. "He chose the sky darkening for three hours from noon to 3pm, on Good Friday. He claimed that this wasn't God showing he was bringing down judgement, but a solar eclipse. It seems he couldn't deny that for three hours in the middle of the day it was like night, but his weasel words to try and debunk it failed - Good Friday was when solar eclipses couldn't happen, as the moon was on the wrong side" So we can conclude the darkening didn't happen at all, or it was allegorical. "Several Roman Soldiers were dispatched to be guards on the tomb. On the Sunday morning, several of the women that saw Jesus' burial returned to finish off the job. The massive stone sealing the tomb was rolled away, the grave clothes were left as-was, just with no body inside. The guards had fled. The women went and got some of the followers who had deserted Jesus two days before - all of them were surprised and scared that Jesus wasn't there. Over the course of the next 6 weeks Jesus appeared to many people, ex-followers and those who hadn't followed him, doubters and cynics." Very similar to modern fantasies. Hundreds of people claim to see aliens coming out of spaceships. They all describe the aliens the same way - slanted eyes, particular kind of face, etc. All the drawings look similar. There are repeated "eyewitness accounts" of being taken up in the spaceships. The only trouble with the story, though, is the "aliens" were originaly drawn by an artist for NBC, who was creating a character for television show. The rest was hucksterism gone out of control amid a scientificaly illiterate audience. A professor of Law and Humanities states the obvious "The only way we can know whether an event can occur is to see whether it has occurred. The problem of miracles, then, must be solved in the realm of historical investigation, not philosophical speculation." You have no evidence. As to Edward Clarke, you do him an injustice. His accomplishments are well-known, but they are in politics and law: Link here |
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