(June 2, 2014 at 10:21 am)alpha male Wrote: I addressed most of them by noting that they will be fulfilled in the second advent.
Except the source material never stated there would be a second advent. They stated that the messiah would bring about all these things in his lifetime. Jesus, supposedly, died. If you believe the resurrection thing, that means he had a second lifetime. Yet there was no mention of there being a second lifetime. You'd think that'd be a major thing for the prophecy to mention: "He'll do this stuff in his second lifetime, and in his first, he will just sow the seeds for all this." And then he floated into heaven...literally floated. Into the sky. I guess that's where heaven is. Pity the writers of the tale never foresaw the ability of humanity to use science and innovation to fly above the clouds, huh?
(June 2, 2014 at 10:21 am)alpha male Wrote: Whoa, where did that come from? Seems desperate to try to change the conversation to historicity of Jesus.
I'm not trying to change the conversation. I'm stating that what is known of the miracles Jesus performed are confined solely to the bible. There's no outside confirmation of these miracles that should have attracted the attention of at least one of the almost OCD-like historians. It's hard to believe he performed all this stuff when all we hear is crickets chirping from the rest of history. I'm willing to concede that the messiah could have had 'magical powers,' for lack of a better term, but if he did, there's no mention of it from anyone at the time, and was only mentioned well after the "fact." My point here is, if then the messiah was supposed to have those powers as the Rabbi said, and the only word of these abilities was written by his followers and nobody else [despite supposedly being known far and wide], do we simply just take the second-hand accounts of these abilities at their word, with no corroboration from any other source of these things that would have utterly blown the minds of anyone in those days, or hell, these days? Dude walks on water and turns it into wine and does a bunch of things by just touching them and...nobody else cares? What, was this just a common thing? Maybe so many people were claiming they could do such absurdities around that time period that it was simply a "cry wolf" effect...and if that's the case, then all that shows is that they were plagiarizing stuff that tons of other people were claiming to emphasize the supposed power of their cult-leader.
Quote:That's your shortcoming. While you can disagree with people, if you can't understand the mindset of a really big group of people, there's something wrong with you. I can understand why people might be atheist or Muslim. Politically I'm a little right of center, but I can understand the far left and far right, while disagreeing with them.
I should clarify and correct what I said. I can understand WHY. But I can't understand HOW.
