(May 14, 2011 at 9:58 am)SleepingDemon Wrote: Every civilization on every continent believed in dragons at one point or another, not as a source of mythology, but in a "We don't go up that mountain, dragons live there" sort of belief. But we have to go with what we know, what is most likely. Is it possible that fire breathing, village destroying reptiles existed? Or did people find dinosaur fossils and extrapolate from that fantastic creatures? There is a great series of documentaries about that btw. Anyway the point is that the fact that it is widely accepted doesn't mean that it is more credible. The gospels are easy to dismiss man, none of it was written while Jesus was alive. And if you look at 1st and 2nd century christians, you will find that there was no uniform doctrine, some christians didn't believe Jesus was a real person around the time the gospels were being written. How could something be true when people whose parents and grandparents were alive when he was raising the dead?
Your first point is made with the full force of history behind you. I think it likely that if I were living in a village, at the time when the orthodox view was belief in Dragon's, given the state of man's knowledge at the time, I think I would face the mountain with some trepidation (and I suspect that, if you were brutally honest - so would have you)
Dismissiing the Gospels on the grounds that they were written after the events would mean dismissing most historical records. The earliest Gospel is said to have been in existence by approximatley 65AD. If Christ died at age ~ 30, then this was written ~35 years after the event. Not so long really, I can easily remember incidents that ocurred in the mid 1970's, so there is no real reason to belief that the authors were not recording events in good faith. (Unless you belief that they set out to create one enormous lie). But would such a lie become so easily accepted by huge masses of people - who knows? This is the problem - who knows?
