Is Christianity based on older myths?

[pocaracas]

And he's not even reading mine!

I don't know why people come here if they don't want an honest debate. Sorry you're being ignored.

I'm getting used to it...
Of all the times I mention him, no theist has picked up the subject of the Teacher of Righteousness... it's like it has thorns or something.
They just ignore my post completely. It's like I never posted it.
I'm not counting, but I guess this is now the third time this has happened... and three events starts amounting to some statistics...

[SteveII]

Steve: I give up. You're not even vaguely addressing my points. You're answering entirely different ones I didn't make.

And he's not even reading mine!

I wrote this earlier about that story:

The Teacher of Righteousness was interesting. If illustrates that the Jews were waiting for a Messiah. A moral teacher and the same political climate would result in similarities.

[Faith No More]

I wrote this earlier about that story:

The Teacher of Righteousness was interesting. If illustrates that the Jews were waiting for a Messiah. A moral teacher and the same political climate would result in similarities.

So, why don't you ask the Jews if that Messiah came?

[FatAndFaithless]

Man, God is one unoriginal plagarizing goof. Maybe he was smoking too much of the "burning bush".

[Faith No More]

Man, God is one unoriginal plagarizing goof. Maybe he was smoking too much of the "burning bush".

Yeah, I still want the answer to why he couldn't come up with something original.

[Minimalist]

The Teacher of Righteousness was interesting. If illustrates that the some Jews were waiting for a Messiah. A moral teacher and the same political climate would result in similarities.

Fixed that for you. Josephus bothers to mention 4 groups in first century Judaea but that does not mean that there were not others, flying below the radar.

BTW, every religious shitbag thinks his way is "righteous." The slimebag who just ordered that Jordanian pilot to be burned alive is sure as shit certain that he is "righteous."

That is what belief in fairy tales does to people. You should work on it.

[robvalue]

(edited)

If God wants me to believe in him, why is he presenting absolutely no credible evidence? A story book that a 5 year old can tell is mostly fiction? Hell, I was actually 5 and I knew it was fiction. It's really sad that I could think more clearly about this at 5 than some adults can. This isn't bragging, it's because I wasn't indoctrinated.

It's a book of nonsense, and the first mistake is to assume that any of it happened at all. To assume any of the characters are real.

I honestly think there are 4 reasons people believe, or claim to believe:

1) They are very gullible and will believe anything if enough other people believe it

2) They have been brainwashed so that they aren't event aware they are not making any sense

3) They know they are not making sense but they don't care

4) They are scared shitless not to believe

The only question is which category to put each person in. Maybe some sort of game show! What prizes will there be? I want a camper van! How many points for that?

[pocaracas]

And he's not even reading mine!

I wrote this earlier about that story:

The Teacher of Righteousness was interesting. If illustrates that the Jews were waiting for a Messiah. A moral teacher and the same political climate would result in similarities.

Ahhh... indeed you did... it must have been hidden from me, because it got joined with an earlier reply by the forum.
ok, sorry about that.

But that's not what the story illustrates.
It illustrates that about a hundred years before JC, there was a man (maybe. This too could just be a story) who did a lot of things against the established faith system.
And these things became a part of the story of JC.

That alone should, at least, raise a few red flags on the credibility that the story of JC has.
The very same event, on the very same place, and a few decades apart?

[Mister Agenda]

Don't make the mistake of combining them all into one book. They are not.

Gosh, we must really have given the impression that we're the ones who don't know the most basic things about the construction of the Bible. When did that happen?

Okay, to sum up whether Christianity is based on myths, I am hearing the following reasoning:

1. The gospels are not accurate or are complete fiction

'Complete fiction' seems a stretch. Even the Harry Potter books aren't complete fiction.

2. Paul, Peter, John, and James had motives other than truth to write their letters

We would have to know what they believed in order to assess their honesty. We don't know what they believed, and it doesn't really matter because we also don't know what of what they did believe was really true. One obvious possibility is that they were honest and writing what they believed to be true, but were just mistaken or misinformed. Another is that like many of todays 'liars for Jesus', they thought some exaggeration was justified if it promoted belief in the worship of Jesus. After all, people who don't believe will be tortured for eternity, surely God will forgive if you say there were 5,000 people in a crowd instead of 500.

3. Therefore the narrative is fiction and the source must be recycled myths.

I think the narrative is most likely the result of decades of Chinese Whispers between whatever the actual events were and writing them down. Some people's retellings may have been conflated with earlier myths, but I doubt there was any purposeful incorporation of earlier myths by the people who finally scribed the stories.

First, why would we not assume the 8 separate writers believed what they wrote until we have evidence or a plausible motive for a significant conspiracy?

It's not so much a question of whether they believed what they wrote as whether such belief leads to accurate reporting. You should know by now that it doesn't. Writing things down while they are fresh in your mind and finding points of agreement among disparate eyewitness writers is what we conisder indicative of accurate reporting. The writers weren't journalists, they weren't chroniclers of the events in question, when it comes to Jesus, they could only report what they heard. Everything about Jesus is, at best, hearsay.

I'm inclined to think there was a historical Jesus. I am not inclined to think his words or the events of his life have been recorded with a high degree of accuracy. If he existed, he's been misquoted and mythologized and without finding new sources of information about him, we will never be able to entirely separate fact from rumor.

Do we assign this type of scrutiny to other historical documents? Can you give me an example of even a group of 5 historical documents that are attesting to something that are all thought to be intentionally false?

You really should have used your Google finger before issuing this challenge.

Or is it that you think that a plausible motive for this level of falsehood and conspiracy was to start a new belief system based on self-sacrifice, love, and humility in a political climate that was hostile to it?

What is it about so many of the theists who visit us that compels them to speculate on our thinking rather than asking about it?

I don't see any deliberate falsehood or conspiracy, but if there were, I can't think of a better motivation for it than to start a brotherhood of love and understanding. Good people will do things for what they think is a good cause that they would never do for money or power.

Lastly, the conclusion 3 does not follow from the premises 1 and 2. To get to this conclusion, you would have to insert and prove probability of the premise that the early church conspirators had access to extinct and eastern religious characters, stories, and philosophies. I would argue that if premise 1 and 2 are true, it is far more probable that any similarity to myths is coincidence.

If that were our actual reasoning intead of the reasoning you imagined for us (strawman), that would be a really powerful point, but it's not our fault that the conclusion you imagine for us doesn't follow from the premises you imagine for us.

---

Belief is not truth. I don't care how much they believed what they are saying.

Can you understand the difference between a guy believing something, and the thing he believes actually being true?

Yet you are saying that somewhere in this causal chain of belief, multiple people were intentionally deceitful. This would include Paul, John, James, and Peter since they signed their letters.

Is he really saying that?

[Minimalist]

Stevie had best read Ehrman's "Jesus Interrupted" before he makes more of a fool of himself.