Religious Background

[TheBeardedDude]

Pt 3) there are similarities. People claim (without evidence) to have witnessed/experienced something extraordinary that (as far as we are aware) can't happen

I'm not constructing a straw man in comparing Christianity with alien abduction or other religious mythologies. They are comparisons. I didn't equate them, I compared them. They share core similarities with respect to how people believe in certain things that are fantastical and for which there is no evidence.

And while some of Paul's writings might have been earlier than 70 CE, none of the gospels are. And despite being written by maybe around 50 CE, that still means that no one wrote about the supposed events of Jesus' life while he was alive. So (at best) all you still have are stories passed down through hearsay. If I don't believe an alien abductee who claims firsthand experience being abducted by aliens, why would I accept hearsay claims about magic from 2,000 years ago? It's nonsensical


Cheers
TheBeardedDude

The similarities between Christianity claims and alien abduction claims amount to using a few of the same words in the sentence. By your definition, every event ever witnessed by any number of people is "without evidence". Eyewitness testimony is the only evidence that could ever be available. The fallacy you are employing is called special pleading. 

First, you left out the very real fact that there were other documents that predate the letters of Paul and the gospels. Second, Mark most certainly was written well within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. The other three are on the outer edge, but since they were written by editors, who, in their lifetime would have had access to all the characters, are excellent documents by historical standards. 

Hearsay is a pejorative term that describes EVERY historical document. It would seem that your rejection of the books have more to do with their content then their historical provenance. So your argument seems to be:

1. Christianity is not true because there is no evidence of the miraculous events surrounding Jesus.
2. The NT does not count because they contain mention of miraculous events.

That is quite the circular argument.

You've still completely missed the point of my comparison of alien abduction with Christianity's claims. Each are a series of fantastical claims without evidence that are contra to everything we know about our world. Believing in them would require a lot of what we know to be wrong. Things for which we have evidence. It isn't special pleading. Special pleading would be rejecting the similarities I've listed for the reasons you've already posted (to be clear, it's special pleading you engage in when trying to reject one set of claims, alien abductions, but not another, the Bible's claims).

If someone tells me that they have a dog, I'd probably believe them. It requires no suspension of the way the world works to believe someone I know has a dog.

If someone tells me that they have a pink unicorn in their garage but it only appears to select people, I'm going to need to see some evidence before I'll believe any part of it. That's where the similarity is between Christianity and other fantastical claims (alien abduction, magic, out of body experiences, ghost haunting, etc).

There are documents that predate Paul, and none of them tell any of the stories written in the gospels. At best you have a couple of people who wrote about a guy named Yeshua who lived in the Middle East at the time. That observation doesn't corroborate any of the stories attributed to him.

And I'm not rejecting it simply because it's hearsay, I'm rejecting it because it is hearsay that is without corroborating evidence AND because believing the stories are true requires a belief in magic. If I ever see evidence magic is real or even possible, I'll reconsider.

And no, this isn't a circular argument. The straw man you've attempted to construct is.

Since you've mischaracterized much of what I've said thus far, let me break it down more simply:
1) literal interpretation of the Bible (new and old testaments) is not possible because we know things in the Bible could not have literally happened (no evidence of a flood or special creation or a man-god or angels or talking animals, etc)
2) individual interpretations without an objective standard to compare to are unreliable. Making anyone's interpretation as valid as any other and interpretations can be literal polar opposites. If these are interpretations about a universal truth, then it is nonsensical that they'd arrive at polar opposite conclusions when using the same means
3) given that one could make the same observations about other myths, it appears that the Christian religion is as much a myth as the Greek and Roman mythologies


Cheers
TheBeardedDude