(September 27, 2015 at 3:41 am)ignoramus Wrote: Tell the mods to get the "big hammer", someone call Thor.

Is using one god to take out another god something like "the best weapon against a sniper is another sniper"?

It depends how much collateral damage you're happy with. I find the best weapon against a sniper is to nuke the whole country.

This does also take out the sniper's target who I'm meant to protect, but you can't have everything.

(September 27, 2015 at 4:21 am)robvalue Wrote: It depends how much collateral damage you're happy with. I find the best weapon against a sniper is to nuke the whole country.

This does also take out the sniper's target who I'm meant to protect, but you can't have everything.

(September 26, 2015 at 11:14 am)Aractus Wrote:

(September 26, 2015 at 7:41 am)Redbeard The Pink Wrote: No, it's far more likely that it was ...

Provide a scholarly reference please.

No thanks. Have fun in church on Sunday.

The point we're making (or the point I'm making, anyway) is that it does not matter one fucking bit what real person/people originally told those stories and offered those teachings, even if it was a guy named Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph son of Thrane son of Eventually King David and Adam.


The fact still remains that the magical action-figure zombie version that's actually in the Bible stories did not exist as is written in those stories because humans do not have magical powers or rise from the dead, and because it's a completely nonsensical premise that the Creator God of the Universe birthed himself onto Earth to sacrifice himself to himself to asuage his own anger over the inherent spiritual stain of humans butt-fucking each other, but he can't be bothered to say in the Bible that slavery is actually wrong.


If the OP wants an argument against Christianity, that is one general tack I routinely use. Even if a guy named Yeshua Yosef von Nazareth really did exist, the Bible version did not exist in the same sense that Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter did not exist.


What amazes me is that atheists who positively believe in a historical Jesus are willing to sweep aside the magical/miraculous portions of the Gospels as garbage, but will then try to parse out what a historical Jesus might have actually said from the same second- and third-hand, partially forged, religious testimonials that fabricated the stories of the miraculous behavior. It sounds exactly like any cherry-picking Theist. "Ok, I don't necessarily believe in this, this, this, or this, but come ooooon...some part of this has to be true, right? I mean, a lot of people really, really think so, and there's all this writing and stuff, and are you just gonna dismiss all historical evidence for everyone's existence? Do you think John F. Kennedy didn't exist? Are you stupid?"


If I treat the authors of other fairy tales as historians, I can make the same general argument about, say, Hansel and Gretel. Ok, maybe witches with magic aren't real, and maybe she didn't live in a candy house, and there are so many versions of the story it's hard to tell exactly what happened, but most of those stories have in common that there were two children, a boy and a girl, that they snuck away from their father, and that they met an old woman in the woods who eats little children, and that the boy tried and failed to use bread crumbs to find their way home, so those things probably did happen. Oh, and everything Hansel said during the story was definitely said by an actual boy named Hansel, because who but a boy named Hansel could come up with those things to say? Are you suggesting that some mere author or storyteller just made all that up? Do you think fiction just comes from inside people's heads out of thin air or something? Cite your sources, please.


Really, Rake? Get ahold of yourself.

(September 26, 2015 at 7:00 am)pocaracas Wrote:

(September 25, 2015 at 5:04 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Essentially the same that we see today and for this reason: Jesus founded an infallible Church which existed long BEFORE the NT was written or formally canonized. So, even without it, the Oral Tradition of the Church would be sufficient to pass along the core message just as it was long before the invention of the printing press.

However, if you are asking whether there are any doctrines that would be missing as a result of removing specific books from the Bible, again, I say that because the writings of the NT were a reflection of what the Church was preaching and teaching orally (ie, baptism of infants, confession of sins to a priest, the real presence in the Eucharist, etc.), everything that we have today was present in the Early Church before inscripturation.

IOW, the NT authors captured on paper what the Church was already preaching; they did not add to what the Church already knew.

yeah... but there were several alleged bishops/priests preaching a slightly different message, on several places.

<clipped for clarity>

how can we tell that the true teachings of Jesus are the ones preached by the catholic church?
The notion of the trinity comes well after the fact - would this view still be held, if the roman christians hadn't accepted Paul's teachings?

And yes, I know I'm mixing a bunch of stuff into one bag, but, like you know so well, it's a broad subject.

Simple enough, poca.

The bishops who disagreed with one another held councils to consider these matters. After much discussion and debate, some ideas were identified as orthodox and others were judged heretical.

It isn't like Rubio, Cruz, Trump and Bush all espousing slightly different variations of a "conservative" message that you can pick and choose from. In the case of theology, some things are right and some things are wrong. Others are uncertain and left as open questions.

When Arius put forth his ideas, Athanasius stood against him. It took awhile, but Athanasius' views ultimately carried the day.