In Christianity, blind faith is good faith

[Randy Carson]

Would you accept being found guilty of murder on the strength of evidence the gospels provide? Reports written decades later by non-eye witnesses? Would you say that is fair enough and go down peacefully?

At best, such reports give you somewhere to look for other evidence. It is this other evidence that would then be used to make a conviction. Without it, it's worthless. A bunch of other non-eye witness accounts vaguely confirming a couple of minor details is again not good evidence. Or would you be happy to be sent down on that too?

It's up to each person to decide what is and isn't good evidence, from their own point of view. But my point is that I think theists make particular exceptions for their own holy books, and allow kinds of evidence they would normally dismiss out of hand with regard to any other subject in life.

Being incredibly charitable, the very best you could ever get from the bible is what eye witnesses believed happened regarding Jesus. Who cares? People can be mistaken, people can be fooled. It doesn't mean what they believed was true. With no way to verify their beliefs, it is again a case of blind faith to just assume they could all somehow not lie in their accounts, not be mistaken or deceived in their accounts and correctly identify supernatural causation which is something we can't do even today.

You can go talk to people who will swear they've been abducted by aliens, right now. Will you believe everything they tell you?

Believers today do not have that direct evidence; they must rely on the indirect or circumstantial evidence. And they are blessed for accepting that evidence without the benefit of actually seeing and touching Jesus the way the original apostles did. However, this is NOT "blind faith". It is faith based upon EVIDENCE provided by eyewitnesses.

Hey, don't worry about waking a dead thread.  Obviously had a couple more day's worth of life in it.  But if you don't want to talk about it here, feel free to make a new thread.

I'll just say that what you call evidence is what most of us would call appeals to authority, the authority of your priest or your parents or the bible.  It is the faith that those who came before you wouldn't be passing on a load of crap unless it was more than that.  There is no evidence.

No shame to have faith though.  I have faith too.  Faith in my wife and friends and dog.  Faith in my own abilities to understand and communicate and make things and be in relationships.  Lots of things.  But when my father tried to hand me a load of crap and call it the baby Jesus I said no.

There are MANY murderers in jail today who were successfully prosecuted by cold-case detectives who made convincing cases based on 20-30-year old evidence to an open-minded and properly instructed juries.