(January 14, 2015 at 10:58 am)Davka Wrote:

(January 14, 2015 at 9:52 am)Nope Wrote: I was agreeing with you.

Were Not!

Uh huh

(January 13, 2015 at 8:10 pm)Nope Wrote: Some Christians say that the bible must be true because according to tradition, several of the apostles were killed spreading Jesus's message.

Here are some groups, according to Wikipidia, that died for a lie:

The People's Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana, killed themselves, 909 in all, after Congress began investigating the group. A siege by federal agents resulted in the deaths of 76 follows of David Koresh in Waco, Texas. Common believe was that cults 'exploded' because of outside forces.

Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious Millenarian group based in San Diego, California, founded in the early 1970s and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985).[1] On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group who had committed mass suicide[2] in order to reach what they believed was an alien space craft following Comet Hale–Bopp.

Solar Temple A few days later, Di Mambro and twelve followers performed a ritual Last Supper. A few days after that, apparent mass suicides and murders were conducted at Cheiry and Salvan, two villages in Western Switzerland, and at Morin Heights — 15 inner circle members committed suicide with poison, 30 were killed by bullets or smothering, and 8 others were killed by other causes. In Switzerland, many of the victims were found in a secret underground chapel lined with mirrors and other items of Templar symbolism. The bodies were dressed in the order's ceremonial robes and were in a circle, feet together, heads outward, most with plastic bags tied over their heads; they had each been shot in the head.


The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was a breakaway religious movement from the Roman Catholic Church founded by Credonia Mwerinde, Joseph Kibweteere and Bee Tait in Uganda. It was formed in the late 1980s after Mwerinde, a brewer of banana beer, and Kibweteere, a politician, claimed that they had visions of the Virgin Mary. The five primary leaders were Joseph Kibweteere, Joseph Kasapurari, John Kamagara, Dominic Kataribabo, and Credonia Mwerinde. In early 2000, followers of the religious movement perished in a devastating fire and a series of poisonings and killings that were either a group suicide or an orchestrated mass murder by group leaders after their predictions of the apocalypse failed to come about.[1] In their coverage of that event, BBC News and The New York Times referred to the Movement as a Doomsday cult.[2][3]



All of this has been copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

Yes, people will die for a lie

their is a sharp contrast that your thread is missing. The proposition usally deals with The apstoles dying for a lie, not just random people who dont know anybetter.. The idea being none of the subsequent martyrs would have died if the apstoles didnt die for the truth..

(January 14, 2015 at 1:02 pm)Drich Wrote: their is a sharp contrast that your thread is missing. The proposition usally deals with The apstoles dying for a lie, not just random people who dont know anybetter.. The idea being none of the subsequent martyrs would have died if the apstoles didnt die for what they believed to be the truth..

Bolded mine, fixed that for you.

4.3 million Wehrmacht personnel died defending Naziism.

The problem with the "would they die for a lie?" question is that it is malformed, intentionally so in my view, in order to force the discussion into a direction it shouldn't, and that a correctly formulated question of this sort wouldn't address the truth of the belief at all.

Why do the believers insist we stick with "lie," as the only other option? It's clearly not; you can believe wholeheartedly in a false claim, and that's just another possible solution that grants every other spurious element of this claim, such as the accuracy of the events depicted on the deaths to begin with. When we get asked about dying for a lie, the conversation is being shaped so that we're considering the apostles as either believers in a true claim, or knowing accomplices in a fraud, for which the rational course of action, all things being equal, would not have been to die for their fraud if it could be safely recanted. Therefore, they must have been in possession of the truth when they died.

But that's not the discussion we should be having.

Even if the apostles died for their faith because they believed it honestly, that says nothing at all about the truth of the propositions in which they believed, only about their conviction that they were true. And we know human subjectivity leads us to entertain false beliefs all the time. If they died for their beliefs, that still doesn't mean the premise that christians begin their false dichotomy with is true. At base this is the same fallacy that presuppositional apologetics is based on, the idea that certainty of belief directly correlates with the truth of that belief, and it just doesn't. If an argument would fit perfectly well into Sye Ten Bruggencate's personal repertoire, it's probably just worth discarding.

(January 14, 2015 at 1:02 pm)Drich Wrote: their is a sharp contrast that your thread is missing. The proposition usally deals with The apstoles dying for a lie, not just random people who dont know anybetter.. The idea being none of the subsequent martyrs would have died if the apstoles didnt die for the truth..

I agree with you that the "who dies for a lie" requires a special type of religious martyr:
- the martyr must be given an opportunity to reveal the alleged lie to save himself/herself
- the martyr must have been in a position to know about the alleged lie

Even if the apostles existed and were executed, there are many explanations:
- maybe the apostle was executed for causing trouble
- maybe the apostle was never given an opportunity to escape death by revealing the alleged lie
- maybe the apostle was himself deceived by other apostles and believed the alleged lie
- maybe the apostles died for an earlier form of Christianity that never claimed the alleged lie
- ...

(January 13, 2015 at 9:06 pm)professor Wrote: I remember watching an army tank shooting fire into the wooden Koresh compound.
These people were murdered,and Janet Reno accepted responsibility but never went to prison for it.

Liar! It did no such thing.

The crazy kooks inside set the fires.

Quote: Who started the fire that erupted a little more than six hours after the FBI began inserting the tear gas on April 19?

Although several of the surviving Branch Davidians insist that they did not start the fire, a panel of arson investigators concluded that the Davidians were responsible for igniting it, simultaneously, in at least three different areas of the compound. Unless they were deliberatley set, the probability of the three fires starting almost simultaneously was highly unlikely, according to fire experts. Furthermore, the videotapes show the use of accelerants that strongly increased the spread of the fire. Although one Branch Davidian stated that a FBI tank had tipped over a lantern, videotapes show that the tank had struck the building a minute and a half before the fire began. Also some of the surviving Davidians' clothing showed evidence of lighter fluid and other accelerants. In addition, FBI listening devices seemed to establish that the Davidians were overheard making statements such as, "Spread the fuel," some six hours before the fires began. (Joint Hearing of the Crime Subcommittee July 1995.)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...ml#started

(January 13, 2015 at 9:06 pm)professor Wrote: However, there is a big difference between dying (or dying in the process of being a murderer- in the case of Islam) in the belief that action will (by itself) will warrant Paradise, verses being willing to die rather than reject one's belief.

The issue in either case is that if the belief is wrong, you wasted your life (and potentially that of others) on something with less value than a stick of gum.

Quote: The proposition usally deals with The apstoles dying for a lie, not just random people who dont know anybetter.

Apstoles? Why don't you call them Assholes? Anyway, you can't prop up one part of fiction by citing another. When you can provide evidence that there ever were any fucking apostles get back to me. Right now, they seem as likely as Robin Hood's Merry Men, drippy.

Simple answer: those who believe it.