Still a Christian - ask me questions/tell me about yourselves

[pocaracas]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you won't help people "come to Christ" here.



You know it's not true when you make up a reason for the made up thing. It's one of the ways to spot a con artist - if they try to sell you a solution to a problem only they know exists, then the problem is not real... and the solution is snake oil.

Define sin without referring to a god.



Josephus only ever mentions Christians. It's as if the myth was already existing... As if it didn't really originate on 33ad, nor 60ad.... but 100~200bc... and only got renamed... hmmm, kinda around the time of the Teacher of Righteousness... and a very similar message.


A Teacher and his disciples.... interesting...


How about all the gospels that didn't make the cut?
Many more than the ones that actually made it to the NT.
Aren't those representative of such "alternative events"?

There's a book detailing some of them called "Lost Christianities" by Bart Ehrman. It would do you good do educate yourself before perpetuating false news.


Perhaps parts of it, yes.
But the whole thing?? I'd take extreme caution with such blanket statements.


Was that the part written after Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire?


Could it be that the man was never a real man, but a mythological figure?
Could it be that the real man behind the myth lived well before the events portrayed?
Could there have been various real men, whose stories got cobbled together into a single person, with some extra magical glue to account for the extraordinary miracles?



Yes, a real person that held that real position... not exactly when the book claims... by quite a few years.


And New York exists for real, hence Spiderman stories must also be real, huh?

You've clearly put a lot of thought into your replies to various comments, so allow me to do some of the same (I won't address every single thing):

Well..... to tell the truth... if any thought was put, it was a long time ago... now I just rinse and repeat.

First, you can't know other people and where they are at all the time, least of all over a forum. Whether or not someone comes to Christ is very hard to predict, and can take years in some cases, in which I may only play a very small role, which I'm very okay with. 

True, I can't know other people... And I can't speak for any people who only browse the forum, but never even singup, let alone reply.
But, from those that do reply... I'm yet to see one that ends up following christ due to something someone writes on here.

Second, I didn't invent Christianity, obviously - as a religion, it exists to worship God, who didn't create sin, we did. I would define sin as all forms of evil, at all levels, within our existence and world, that we are all guilty of. Of course, we can't know what is considered sin without God, but that's not part of the definition I gave. 

So.... sin = evil?
What is evil?
Under whatever definition of evil you'll come up with, is any one person truly evil? Is any action truly evil?

And actually Josephus does mention Jesus, so ... 

As the person who the "chrestians" worship. He gets his info from believers... and not even directly from them.

I assume the "gospels that didn't make the cut" refers to ones that were clearly contradictory and inconsistent, both internally and in comparison with the others (aka Thomas' and Judas'). That's literally why they're not in the Bible canon.

Not all were so clearly contradictory.
The gospel of Peter, I think, is one that occupied much of that book I mentioned.

And Revelation was written somewhere between the year 70-85 whereas Christianity was officially adopted past the year 300 (I looked it up, honestly was surprised it took so long). 

Yep.... as the Roman Empire was falling apart, and would brake in two pieces, the western Roman empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. This ERE would eventually become known as the Byzantine Empire and had its seat of power, not in Rome, but in Constantinople, where, some time before, the Emperor Constantine organized the First Council of Nicaea with the unofficial purpose of uniting the people of the Empire under one god and make the Empire great again. HAHA!

In THEORY, we could be talking about more than one man or what you described, but it's highly unlikely. Honestly it takes more faith to believe that His closest disciples all lied about who He was to their deaths for something they didn't believe in and were able to write that consistent of a character considering their lack of educations. There are some educated screenwriters today can hardly write a consistent character, it seems. 

Aren't you mixing things up?
Were the disciples in the story real people? or fictional people? People representing the disciples of one or more teachers?
As with any cult, the teachers would be following pretty much the same recipe, so they could be virtually indistinguishable from each other.... but I digress into speculation...

As far as I'm aware, none of the gospels was written by any of the actual claimed disciples. None of them is written in first person. All the attributions came after the fact.

And lastly, there's basis in reality for Spidey, but we're talking about a work that was presented as intentional fiction to get across a point. The Bible is presented as reality, so your comparison works only up to that point.

Indeed spidey doesn't claim to be reality. Nor does Harry Potter. Nor does Star Wars.
But much that is presented to us, in book form or as online pages, is presented as reality, when it is not reality.
I can give you an example I have given before on this forum. A friend of mine once showed up with a story he'd been sold by a friend of his who he trusted to have made his homework. The story was that eating peach kernels, about one a day, would aid in warding off cancer and many other ailments. And you can go on your favorite search engine and you will find hundreds if not thousands of pages claiming exactly that! But none of them will give you a reference to the research that they claim exists. NONE! So, then I put my google-fu to work and found the wiki page about the matter and that one has a reference to a study performed that found no correlation between the administration of the compound found in those peach kernels and cancer. And it seems that this study came about due to the existence of so many people claiming it.
So, where did the claim come from? no one knows.
A gag, or a hoax perpetuated by the lack of ability of the common people to verify it and our very human trait of better safe than sorry.

The god claim, with the bible being presented as reality, is really not that different from this case. It just has the extra help of us being unable to perform any study on the nature of any god.
Anything that's presented as reality needs to pass the reality filter. Many things exist for which I don't really care if they pass or not. But the claims that believers make for their gods make me care for it. And, thus far, the bible (or any other holy book) hasn't passed through the reality filter.