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Well some admit church traditions into evidence on the basis that all that chatter counts for something, but most are relying on Roman historian and politician Tacitus who wrote that "Chrestus" was crucified by Pontius Pilate put together with a stele discovered that proves Pilate was in fact the Roman procurator in that area at that time (which is about as helpful as suggesting that Harry Potter must be true because it mentions real places like London). Beyond that there's not much. There's the Testimonium Flavium, widely agreed to be a "pious fraud"; there's mention of ChristIANITY which only demonstrates the religion existed, not its namesake.
What it amounts to is a weak consensus of historians toward historicity. When you consider that along with the fact that many studying the issue have tenure directly or indirectly from Christian institutions, it's not that impressive that they lean as they do.
And when we take in all this pathetically weak almost non-existent proof for Jesus I again have to ask: if the Christian god really wanted us to believe Jesus was his son who died for our sins would he really have done such a crapola job of leaving such skimpy evidence for Jesus, which in actuality doesn't amount to any evidence at all??
And when we take in all this pathetically weak almost non-existent proof for Jesus I again have to ask: if the Christian god really wanted us to believe Jesus was his son who died for our sins would he really have done such a crapola job of leaving such skimpy evidence for Jesus, which in actuality doesn't amount to any evidence at all??
I'm not sure what's been going on with you the past couple of days with these endless rants...but here you make a valid point.
I'm not sure what's been going on with you the past couple of days with these endless rants...but here you make a valid point.
Well, I made the point in the OP and several other posts but that aside, I will tell you where my head is at in this thread. I had made a statement a few months ago on this board, I can't remember to who, that atheists don't have to lie to get their point across like Christians do. All atheists and skeptics have to do is tell the truth. And that was the trigger. But I had been listening to Christian lies for years prior to this--in debates on YouTube about Christ's resurrection, and on Christian blogs and other sundry places--lies like "Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament" and "There's more evidence for Jesus than there is for Julius Caesar" and frankly the level of dishonesty spewed by Christians, particular their leaders who should know better, just made me see red. I decided I wasn't going to let the lurkers who read here who are on the fence about joining Christianity--I wasn't going to let them be lied to by the Christians here and get sucked into a religion that I know is toxic to the human mind and soul. And that is why I rant these truths...because people's quality of life is hanging in the balance if they fall for Christian's blatant lies about Jesus being the son of God who died for our sin.
Here's a joke: just for the hell of it I googled "Ten Biggest Lies about Jesus" and here's the kind of crap I pulled up on numerous websites
10. He wrote the Bible · 9. He is White · 8. Muslims do not believe in Jesus · 7. Jesus is a Christian · 6. Jesus was called Jesus. Jesus was born on December 25th
I mean can you imagine this kind of crap being offered on websites supposedly revealing the truth about Jesus. These pathetic lists could have been written by hardcore Christians pretending to be atheists so they could offer nonsense that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what the real problems are with Jesus. Where were the two I offered above, and "Jesus doesn't appear in any history writings from that time" and "God doesn't care if you believe in Jesus or not" and "Jesus fits the archetypal profile of a mythical god-man as devised by the Rank-Ragland scale of mythical heroes"? None of these show up, even though the real lies about Jesus would read like a royal's laundry list.
So this is just my attempt at full disclosure to the greenhorns who hang around here because the Christians here certainly won't breathe a word of the truth to them.
Last edited by thrillobyte; 09-03-2022 at 10:09 PM..
Well with respect to your "truth 1 & 2" I do not see the whole historicist / mythicist debate as productive. I happen to be a mythicist but if the historicists turn out to be correct, it presents zero problem for me as an atheist. This question is just an interesting side show because the real issue for devout Christians is whether "Bible Jesus, the Miracle-Working God-Man" existed, not just whether there was an actual itinerant Jewish preacher named Jesus bar Joseph who is the basis for the mythos. Historicists do not address that. They are arguing only that the canonical gospels are "based on" a real historical individual. The fabulist accounts are not addressed by the historicist / mythicist debate.
Exactly. My interest is in my study of the early history of Christianity, it has nothing to do with me being an atheist.
I place the 12 apostles on the same level of no proof of existence as I do Jesus. If no historian even mentions them, given that Peter and Paul traveled to Rome, were put on trial and martyred and no Roman record even mentions their trial, then there's no reason to believe they existed. Because what you basing your belief on, Harry, if nobody outside the extremely biased Christian scriptures acknowledges they even existed?
An apostle is simply someone who goes and gives a message, so apostles certainly existed. And Paul mentions the twelve and the three pillars, which matches the structure of the Essenes, so Paul indicates there are 12 high level apostles in his letters.
We also have a letter from Clement, who tells us Peter died in Rome, and Paul died in Spain, so the later fictional accounts of the disciples (people who follow someone) may be based actual apostles (people who go out and preach). Then there were Christians who were not apostles, such as James, the brother of the lord that Paul saw when he met Cephas / Peter, who Paul calls an apostle.
Letters are historical documents, so I am basing my position on those. What I do reject is the idea that they were actual disciples of a Jesus, and the later accounts of their deaths.
I think atheists have a problem sometimes separating spiritual from religious.
You can believe in and even experience God/a higher power and not be religious or associated with
any particular religion.
It seems on this forum that atheists always lump everyone not an atheist into the “religious†category. Maybe I’m wrong….
I think it is a convenience thing, because 1) most of the people who used to post here were religious, 2) it is only recently more spiritual people have started posting, 3) some of the spiritual people do not tell us this, they just talk about a god, 4) some of the spiritual actually follow a religion, and 5) it is quicker to type 'religion'.
One thing I DO believe, is that if we HAD the original documents, we just might have a competely different Bible than what we have today!
Especially Paul's letters, because the versions we have now are rearranged sections of his original letters. I am confident some his religious views have been lost because the second century AD Christians did not like them, so did not copy them.
Thanks Miss H. I think that's the "divine" is us. When people behave in selfless ways they are God in that moment. With 9/11 coming up I remember those fire fighters that marched up the stairs to help people escape probably fully aware they were not coming out.
Lovely to read first thing in the morning. Thank you L8
Especially Paul's letters, because the versions we have now are rearranged sections of his original letters. I am confident some his religious views have been lost because the second century AD Christians did not like them, so did not copy them.
I forget the particulars, but there was one instance where one of those rants about how women should shut up in church feels like a jarring insertion and sure enough there's an older manuscript where that is a marginal note that appears to have gotten inserted in the main text later.
There are only a VERY few small fragments of the NT that can be dated even to the 2nd century AD; most are considerably more recent copies than that. Most such alterations would have been made early on, during the Darwinian scrabble for orthodoxy, and manuscripts that old simply didn't survive, they have crumbled to dust by now.
An apostle is simply someone who goes and gives a message, so apostles certainly existed. And Paul mentions the twelve and the three pillars, which matches the structure of the Essenes, so Paul indicates there are 12 high level apostles in his letters.
We also have a letter from Clement, who tells us Peter died in Rome, and Paul died in Spain, so the later fictional accounts of the disciples (people who follow someone) may be based actual apostles (people who go out and preach). Then there were Christians who were not apostles, such as James, the brother of the lord that Paul saw when he met Cephas / Peter, who Paul calls an apostle.
Letters are historical documents, so I am basing my position on those. What I do reject is the idea that they were actual disciples of a Jesus, and the later accounts of their deaths.
I don't get your reasoning they were not Jesus' disciples. If Paul mentions having met Peter then certainly the other men he met would have been disciples of Jesus just like Peter.
But that aside, Harry you surprise me. For an atheist you display a remarkable degree of faith. Certainly you know that nearly half of all Paul's epistles have been judged frauds by most scholars. If we have that degree of uncertainty of about their authorship then how can we reasonably trust any of them are authentic? All we can ascertain is that one man wrote a group of 7 epistles because the writing style is similar. But can we be 100% certain even of that? Even Bart Ehrman says nothing with regard to this period is certain. The best historians can do is possibly to probably. That's not good enough for me.
I still maintain: if the Christian god wanted us to believe in his son--that Jesus was real and that everything he taught was truth and that he was the savior of world who had to die on the cross, this Christian god would have left behind a mountain of evidence for Jesus so compelling, so extensive and so powerful and most importantly, so irrefutable that nobody--not you, not Phet, not mordant, not even myself could deny it was real.
But the Christian god did NOT leave behind mountains of irrefutable evidence for Jesus. He left behind virtually nothing at all and left us to sort out the piddling scraps that history has scraped together on their own. SOME GOD!
I put this same question to Mink and Mystic and do you recall what their astonishing response was?
"It would violate their free will to choose"
Check it out: posts #82 and 83
Can you imagine such astonishing excuse-making for an all-powerful god? I've heard of putting lipstick on a pig but in Mystic's and Mink's case they were veritably SMEARING the lipstick on that pig!
I was dumbstruck that normally intelligent people could stoop that low just to defend their god's reputation when their god is negligent to a degree that would shake the very foundations of the Christian faith. Mystic and Mink should be ashamed of such pathetic God-whitewashing, but I realize even more so now than I did before that when it comes to Christians defending their god there is no bottom to which Christians will sink.
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