(July 11, 2015 at 12:15 pm)robvalue Wrote: Please show me where they said it was "really important to them" to deny a HJ, and that they need to believe it so that they don't have to think about magic Jesus being real?

One last chance to provide evidence or retract the statement or I'm gonna give up on you, your strawmanning and dishonesty entirely.

So, it's okay for you to post ENDLESS reams of cheap shots at believers based on the motives that YOU ascribe to them, but I can't point out that the intuitively OBVIOUS benefit of being a myther is that you don't have to actually deal with any of the arguments is support of the resurrection?

What about X? Jesus never existed.

But what about Y? Jesus never existed.

But have you considered Z? Jesus never existed.

It's the ultimate one-size fits all answer that no lazy, unthinking atheist should be without.


So, go wow yourself.

So the tu quoque fallacy. Very good. Don't you ever get tired of using fallacies? Don't you care about them?

I try and analyze motivations for believers, yes. I always try and have a good reason to back up what I'm saying. If you'd like to challenge anything in particular, then feel free to do so.

And no, this doesn't give you the right to dictate to atheists what they think, when not one single one ever has given you any actual reason to think that. Well, you can do what you want actually.

(July 11, 2015 at 12:19 pm)robvalue Wrote: Wow! Well I'll take that as a retraction...

I have no idea if he existed. No one can possibly know.

I'm sure there were plenty of people around who would roughly meet the description.

This is a bullshit answer, rob. Cowardly even.

You can know if Jesus existed by STUDYING THE EVIDENCE.

Professional scholars do it all the time. It takes some effort. It takes some courage. But the evidence for Jesus' existence is there for your evaluation. If you don't think Jesus existed, then have the guts to say so. If you do think he existed, then show some stones and say so.

Why not just man up and admit that you LIKE being on the fence about whether Jesus existed or not because you don't want to commit one way or the other?

Because you know that once you admit that Jesus DID exist, then you're going to have to make some hard decisions about the minimal facts I'm presenting in this thread. And you don't want to face those facts, do you, rob?

I've had enough of your childishness Randy, you are deeply pathetic having to dictate my position to me.

Enjoy your straw, goodbye.

(July 11, 2015 at 12:22 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:

(July 11, 2015 at 12:02 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: rob-

I've gone back and read your interaction with Tim O'Neill in this forum.

I know you know there are Jesus Mythers out there.

Mythicism is intellectually lazy.

Why is it lazy?

Demonstrated in post #651.

Quote:There is insufficient evidence for an existing Christ.

Tell that to the professional scholars.

Jesus is a myth because fuckheads like you have no EVIDENCE that any such person existed, Randy.  If you find some, let me know.


Your bible is not evidence.  It is the claim.

(July 11, 2015 at 12:31 pm)robvalue Wrote: I've had enough of your childishness Randy, you are deeply pathetic having to dictate my position to me.

Enjoy your straw, goodbye.

Just for the record, I don't care if all the events in the bible did happen. I've said it before, and I've said it in this very thread, today! It would make absolutely no difference to me. I couldn't care less.

I have no vested interest either way.

(July 11, 2015 at 11:40 am)Randy Carson Wrote: Ooooooh yes, you do. Maybe not you personally, but you atheists, in general.

You want to be able to simply write Jesus off as a legend, a figment of someone's imagination, a conspiracy of delusional fools because that is the easiest way to respond to Jesus.

Otherwise, you have to think.

Come on, bro. We don't have to be able to write Jesus off as fictional to write the gospels off as myths. They're full of magical bullshit.


Let's try your line of argument with another historical character whose historicity itself does not cloud the debate: Abraham Lincoln.


Now, nobody with any sense will try to debate the historicity of Lincoln. There are plenty of documents and photographs to lead us to reasonably assume that he was a real person.


What most people don't know, however, is that he was a vampire hunter. You see, there's this book, and in that book we get a different picture of Civil War history. In this book, Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires.


The book contains references to various characters, events, and places that historians can agree are definitely real, so the events of this book must also be real.


Some people may try to argue that vampires do not exist. Well, let me ask you this: if vampires don't exist, why would Abraham Lincoln have been hunting them? Besides, you can't prove vampires don't exist. There's even some evidence that they do: many people openly claim to be vampires, and certain corpses have been observed to regrow hair and fingernails after death.


Some might claim that people who say they are vampires are really just humans, and that a medical exam will prove this. The truth is that vampires have magic powers and use them to seem human for medical purposes. They do this to create doubt. They're willing to tell us that they're vampires, but they also know that if humans could medically prove the existence of vampires, they would simply kill them all out of fear. Instead, they only choose to truly reveal themselves to humans who choose to believe in them without any evidence.


Some scientists (and people who blindly follow them) might claim that hair and nails don't grow after death. The scientists who claim that are obviously vampires themselves who are spreading doubt for the aforementioned reasons.


Now, this story is being touted as fiction by many people, including the author of the book. He claims to have made it up, but the truth is that his writings are based on historical documents that have been destroyed by the vampires since the modern version of the story was written. They destroyed this evidence because they knew that if humans found it and connected it to the book, they would know for sure that the story was true and vampires are real, causing the aforementioned problems of fear-fueled genocide. The author refuses to admit the story is real for fear of getting murdered by vampires, or possibly because he himself has been turned into a vampire by now.


I KNOW these things to be true because as I was reading the story, I realized it was true and accepted that into my heart. I already kind of believed in vampires anyway, so it wasn't that hard. When the vampires sensed that I had truly accepted their existence on faith, they knew it wasn't dangerous to approach me. It was at that time that they reached out to me with vampiric telepathy, sharing with me all of the information I just shared with you. They have given me permission to share this because they have seen with their magic that nobody of consequence will believe me.


Even though I have never seen a vampire in its true form, nor have I seen the documents I've mentioned, I still believe the things these vampires told me. In my head. With their magic powers. You can't really disprove anything I'm saying, so you believe me...right?

(July 11, 2015 at 12:29 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: You can know if Jesus existed by STUDYING THE EVIDENCE.

Professional scholars do it all the time. It takes some effort. It takes some courage. But the evidence for Jesus' existence is there for your evaluation. If you don't think Jesus existed, then have the guts to say so. If you do think he existed, then show some stones and say so.

Why not just man up and admit that you LIKE being on the fence about whether Jesus existed or not because you don't want to commit one way or the other?

Because you know that once you admit that Jesus DID exist, then you're going to have to make some hard decisions about the minimal facts I'm presenting in this thread. And you don't want to face those facts, do you, rob?

Randy,
I've had about enough of your ignorant baseless proselytizing on behalf of this supposedly superior fucking scholarly community you keep referencing. I suppose it's inconceivable to you that Christians who dominate the field wouldn't at all have any reason to be biased. Here are some quotes from a blog, repleat with links to the source material:

Quote:- It (emotional interest in Jesus) is always present as an invisible hand guiding interest, commitment, choice, judgement, and the framing of meaning.
- While each may make the claim that they are simply after the facts and simply trying to figure out what Jesus was really like—and while most don’t quite say this, most do think this is what they are doing— nearly every one of them presents what they would like the church, or others with faith, to think about Jesus.
- As it stands presently, NT scholarship will always get largely Christian results
- The overall result of such bias is to make the description of New Testament Studies as an academic field a dubious one.
- Would the participants of nontheological conferences even believe that other academic conferences do such things?
- the differences were ultimately harmonized under the umbrella of Christian faith . . .
- he lack of a significant number of non-Christians or even scholars deliberately attempting to see beyond their Christian background has prevented serious secular alternatives to Christian origins being properly discussed.
- It should be clear that Christian stories can be treated differently because of Christian dominance,
- In the field of Jesus research, however, one person’s bedrock is another person’s sand. I cannot honestly think of a single supposed bedrock event or interpretive stance that somebody has not denied.
- Dodd’s words, however, constitute not an argument but an opinion
- His method is similar to my own in that he enters the circle from generalizations about Jesus and the Jesus tradition.
- A scholarly assumption may look like a legitimate argument, but contrary to genuine argument, it cannot be falsified . . . It is characteristic of such cases that there is no [i]tertium comparationis, no external evidence that may prove the argument to be correct and not a baseless assumption.
- So the conclusion that certain apocalyptic sayings go back to Jesus is not just a product of the premise: the final conclusion also fortifies the opening supposition.
- But there is another problem: most scholars of the New Testament have religious loyalties: they want the text [Bible] to be orthodox, or historical, or preachable, or relevant. So any new interpretation which does not fulfil these conditions is not likely to be approved.
- There is a hankering after putative lost sources and oral traditions which would take us back to the historical Jesus.
- Therefore, it was theology’s need that reasserted the historical reliability, in part, of the gospels with respect to Jesus, and sought to re-establish the historical continuity between the preaching of the man Jesus and the preaching of the first primitive Christian communities about Jesus
- There is probably no Jesus scholar writing today who is not explicitly and keenly aware that all historical research is colored and influenced by the personality of the historian. But this awareness never seems to penetrate deeply into the overall approach and methods that shape the historical writing of the scholar.
- Instead, most have an overall representation of Jesus in mind and go about looking at evidence and making judgments about what is genuine from what is not genuine and, at times, revising the overall representation.
- The answer is that both the conservative and liberal historical Jesus scholars still share religionist and bibliolatrous bonds. They believe that Jesus’ words matter or should matter.
- Intellectual honesty should compel at least the liberal scholars to announce aggressively to the world that Jesus cannot be found, and that any notion of following actual words or deeds of Jesus is vacuous.
- . . . a recognition that [Jesus’s] existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.
- And he measures his words. Besides, it is unusual, in biblical scholarship nowadays, to speak plainly about a negative attitude in another scholar. But there it was: ‘It is hard to argue against such determination not to see what is in fact there in the text’.
- That goal was to rewrite the gospel story as a plausible “life of Jesus.” It was taken for granted that the proper account of Christian origins would be a biography of Jesus.
- Thus it is the case that most reconstructions of the historical Jesus have started with prior assumptions, unexpressed, about the importance of a certain kind of Jesus. With this assumed profile in mind, textual material has then been collected in its support.
- The quest for the historical Jesus . . . seeks, on the model of the Protestant reformation, to leapfrog over the “wrongheaded” myths and rituals of the Christian churches to land at the beginning where the pure, clean impulse of an uncontaminated Jesus can rectify and rejuvenate Christian faith. That is mythic thinking with an apron-string attachment to Christian mentality. It will not produce a scholarly account of Christian origins

http://vridar.org/2015/04/17/unrecognize...n-origins/

Now, quit using this aforementioned nebulous academy of scholars as justification of anything. They clearly aren't what you've made them out to be. It's just a fatuous canard tossed out in a dishonest attempt to shelter your baseless assertions from criticism. These scholars of yours are nothing more than intellectually dishonest vermin circle jerking themselves in a petri dish of delusional shit.