@alan fraser said:
I never mentioned the resurrection. I did however notice that you earlier referred to evidence of the resurrection. There is none. There is no evidence (outside the pages of the Bible) that any Jesua Bar Joseph ever existed at all...no court records, no mention in any contemporary Jewish or Roman chronicles or records of anyone of that name travelling around the province, preaching to vast crowds, no legacy of followers resulting from those sermons...nothing at all. Most of the early christian groups were formed as a result of the later efforts of St Paul, who never even met Jesus....if he existed.
Is that your position? That Jesus never existed?
@unknownuser said:
I don't presuppose anything. You keep doing this...creating some kind of equivalence where none exists. You can't presuppose the absence of something. I don't presuppose the absence of a god any more than one presupposes the absence 300 foot statue of Marilyn Monroe orbiting Alpha Centauri. It simply doesn't figure in my philosophy. That is entirely different from presupposition; only theists presuppose.
My post above, addressed to Tom, touches on this.
Perhaps 'presuppose' was misleading in this case. A didn't mean that in an a priori sense in this case. Perhaps I should have said that you've 'concluded' there is no God and so the resurrection is, necessarily, impossible. My point is that I think you've made up your mind before you come to the table and so ANY possibility no matter the historical unlikelihood makes more sense than resurrection.
@unknownuser said:
Yes it absolutely does follow. You don't 'lose' something as profound as positive proof of god...and certainly not if that god is anything remotely worthy of the name. We're talking of an omnipotent being who takes the trouble to reveal himself, not some struggling grade teacher, striving to get her pupils to remember something as far as the next SATs.
How do you know that you don't "'lose' something as profound as positive proof of god"? Aren't you just assuming this? I've given you an example where a completely revolutionary technology (concrete) was essentially lost for some 1300 years. My argument doesn't rely on some lost proof, but I think you're being a bit illogical here.
As for God, many people have wondered, if He exists why He hasn't made himself more apparent. We can get into that if you wish but the general idea is that God wants to be known but He doesn't force himself on people. This isn't simply a cop-out, but fits very well with what the Bible teaches us about God.
@unknownuser said:
If you can give historical evidence of the Resurrection, I'd be delighted to see it. Like I said, I don't harbour presuppositions.
I'd be happy to, perhaps we can widdle the matter down a bit though so we don't take a tangent. You've, no doubt, looked into the resurrection to some extent and reached some conclusion or explanation. Would you care to share that explanation? That might better give me a direction to go.
@unknownuser said:
Concrete is a bad example. the secret was never lost, it just became scarcer for a while; but in any case, it's an irrelevant comparison.
As an architect by training, I quite like the example actually. I've never heard the theory, though, that you're referring to. Who was it, exactly, that you suppose had this knowledge which generally is believed to have disappeared with the Roman empire?
@unknownuser said:
Not in the least...just some of them. At the time of the history recorded in the scriptures, there were highly advanced cultures all over the planet. There was Egypt and Assyria, there was the Indus Valley and China. All these places had civilization, culture and writing.
You therefore have to ask yourself why on earth a god would reveal himself to a bunch of nomadic goatherders of no fixed abode and only an oral tradition of record keeping?
One certainly does need to raise that question. Similarly, when Jesus came he presumably could have at least chosen his followers to be well studied rabbis and leaders within the community and yet he chose a mixed group of fairly regular young jewish men and assorted commoners. But then throughout the Bible God is alwayspicking insignificant folks to get his purposes done. It's certainly a pattern we see over and over again.
@unknownuser said:
I mean, it's so easy to lose such a revelation isn't it? How terribly convenient...just like the tablets in the Ark of the Covenant.
I suppose if the people died out it would be easy. If there were a big catastrophe like the fall of Rome (yes I'm kicking the dead concrete horse) then it could be lost. Thankfully, that didn't happen though and I suppose God wasn't too worried about that perhaps.
@unknownuser said:
If you have any intellectual honesty, you also have to question the relationship between the primitive Middle eastern concept of the scapegoat, a blood-sacrificial animal which could be used to absorb evil and thus remove it from society; and the concept of a blood-sacrificial man who was also a son of god that could do the same thing for sin.
I think you're misunderstanding the Christian position. The idea isn't exactly that God created this cool sacrificial system with a scapegoat and lo and behold Jesus fit in there quite nicely. The idea is that the sacrificial system, including the scapegoat was sort of a 'type' or 'shadow' of what was to come. Much more could be said, but that's the jist of it.
@unknownuser said:
I presuppose nothing, but consider everything...something that definitely cannot be said of most christians...especially in the USA...and their incredibly parochial view of religion.
It sounds like I'm perhaps more of a perspectivist than you then. I think we all come at a question with our own presuppositions and biases. No one can be 'truly' and 'completely' objective in that sense. The trick to ascertaining the truth, from this frame of reference then, isn't not having presuppositions, but rather identifying what those presuppositions are in order to better deal with them. I suppose it's a bit like an alcoholic first needing to admit he is an alcoholic before addressing the problem.
@unknownuser said:
Apparently you presuppose that what you were taught in church and Sunday School is true, at least in part. I don't make any such presumption. I don't see why the beliefs of a Middle Eastern Bronze Age society should shape my life in the advanced industrial age any more than any other such society. There's good stuff in there and there's bad. I've generally found that all the good stuff can be found in just about every other society...of any religion or none.
My only predisposition towards being a theist was growing up in America. I didn't grow up going to church or sunday school. The point isn't whether or not the beliefs of an ancient society are good or bad. The reason to believe them or not is because they're true or false. If Jesus didn't exist or didn't resurrect, I don't much care how good the beliefs are or whether or not they make my life better or worse. I don't want to believe what makes my life better or easier, I want to believe what's true. In many ways my faith in Jesus makes my life neither better nor easier, but I stay faithful because it's true.
@unknownuser said:
Pretty much any religion on earth can be distilled down to "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." Atheists operate according to exactly the same rule. None of us need any deity to tell us the best way to get along; we're perfectly capable of working that out for ourselves. If we hadn't worked that out aeons before Biblical times we almost certainly wouldn't be here now.
I disagree, I think not only was it not worked out eons before biblical times, but by in large, it's not yet been worked out to this very day. Beyond that, though, I think you overestimate ancient morality. After all, it wouldn't have been necessary to suggest an 'eye for an eye' sort of morality had it not been acceptable to kill a person of lesser rank who gouged out your eye or knocked out your tooth.
-Brodie
