RE: People in bible never existed according to head of Theology at a university in UK!
January 1, 2018 at 8:28 pm
Quote:While most people today don’t believe Hercules was actually born of a virgin or was half god, there is universal agreement among Zeus-worshiping scholars that there was a real historic Hercules. In fact, only those who have an anti-Zeus bias reject the historicity of Hercules.
University of Notre Dame Philosophy professor Gary Gutting, recently wrote an article in the New York Times arguing against the atheistic view toward Zeus. He argues that Zeus very well may have actually existed. I think that if Zeus existed, than Hercules must have existed too. If we were to reject the historicity of Hercules, then we would also have to reject the historicity of Socrates, Plato, Jesus, and Bill Clinton.
Gutting has a PhD. in Philosophy of Religion. He studies religions for a living. This isn’t just a faith-based opinion; he is an expert and a scholar. So Fox News should stop embarrassing itself by questioning his faith. ....
Hercules was at least alleged to be a half person, but still there is no reason to believe that his exploits were based off any real person. Yahweh and Jesus are much the same. They are purely fictional characters – who are we going to look for next, the historical Superman? You don’t know that there wasn’t someone named Clark living in Kansas.
Despite the fact that there are zero contemporary accounts of Jesus and all we have are the Gospels and some vague references to someone called “the Christ” in writings written many years after his alleged death (which may have even been forged), there is nothing and yet we have scholars and experts (mostly Christians) who assert that there must have been a historical figure that these fanciful tales were based on. Why?
Okay, where is the evidence? The answer is the authoritative word of PhD scholars like Reza Aslan and others. In fact, the belief in a historical Jesus is apparently “universally accepted” by theologians and Christian historians. There is more evidence for a historical Jesus than there is for Socrates, Plato, Hercules, and Bill Clinton!
Okay, where is the evidence? Repeat. These people have PhDs! They are scholars and therefore have authority. There is just one problem; the evidence is where the real authority lies and there is no evidence that Jesus or Hercules were anything more than fictional characters. If you strip Hercules of his half-godness, why would anyone accept anything else about his exploits as possibly true? Same thing applies to Jesus. If you strip him of his supernatural magic, then why would anyone take seriously anything else from the story?
https://www.skepticink.com/dangeroustalk...-hercules/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
