(July 7, 2016 at 1:42 pm)SteveII Wrote:(July 7, 2016 at 12:29 pm)Constable Dorfl Wrote: No you want to redefine belief because pretending your beliefs are evidence based is easier than going out and finding whether your beliefs can be confimed by evidence or not.
I'm certainly not going to argue further over a definition of a word that can be looked up.
Nothing on the other thing?
Please present your scholarly backup for: "the fact that singificant early documents were destroyed because they didn't agree with later invented orthodoxy and even that significant events depicted in the current bible were fabricated to support this later orthodoxy." (when I say scholarly, something more than a 1-off, Christian bashing, obviously biased, never been published in academic journals, popular level book-writing, author). Then we can discuss it.
Steve, why appeal to scholarly work anyway? It's not like your views regarding the history of the early church are in line with the mainstream scholarly view anyway.
Now it's likely, as far as mainstream scholarly views go, that there were no intentional fabrication of significant events. But it's clear through analysis of the texts that certain events (such as the nativity events) were added later on to indeed support later orthodoxy. This does not imply fabrication, however, in the deliberate sense. More that later authors (e.g., "Matthew" and "Luke") heard about some additional stories about Jesus, and without verifying it for themselves in a proper skeptical manner, included them in their texts.
