Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[Pat Mustard]

Well, I cannot speak for Steve, but in my own case I think people need to look at the type of literature containing miracle accounts. Works of mythological or allegorical literature describe vague seemingly timeless settings and begin with phrases like "a long time ago in a gallexy far, far away...once upon a time" or even "in the beginning" like in Genesis. The Vedic texts, Sutras, and so-called Gnostic gospels are pretty much all like this. The canonical gospels are very different.

No they are not, Wooters. And will I tell you why, Wooters, you unintelligent little lickspittle?

Because they describe events which didn't happen (e.g. the thousands of zombies that rose from the dead after Jebus died), which were retreads of older events (pretty much every "prophesy" about Jebus in the nt is a retelling of ot "prophesies" taken out of context, like the virgin birth bullshit), or they were simply events for which people at the time didn't understand but we now have perfectly reasonable and verified naturalistic explanations for (like all the people Jebus "rose from the dead", most likely weren't dead but unconscious or otherwise incapacitated. There is a reason why people seeming to come back to life become less common the better medical knowledge becomes).

The fact that the nt "miracles" have the same vagueness, the same snake oiliness, the same hucksterish qualities and the same impossibilities as all other non christard "miracles" points to the salient fact that they are as bullshit as any other religious shitology.

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Because there is not evidence for these other religions in which to examine!!!!!!

The evidence for islam, for nordic paganism, for brahmanism, for jainism, for plains shamanism, for east African fetishism, for JonFrumism is of the exact same quality and quantity as the evidence for christianity, viz "somebody in the pub told me once".

You cannot escape this fact, no matter how hard you scream, no matter how hard you shout, no matter how hard you plead, no matter how hard you whine. There'll always be that little voice in the back of your head, your scepticism, your rationality, your intelligence, whispering, whispering "what if". There'll always be doubt, because you cannot know you cannot prove and you cannot refute.