Facing the Morally Bad Future

[FallentoReason]

I'm puzzled, since you have given up your belief as you say, how is it that you can say you were a true Christian. As far as you are concerned now there's no God, so how is it that anyone can be a Christian in your view if as you say, there's no God. I can't seem to understand what you're thinking, this is probably my fault, I do not know how to look at this situation other than the black and white of it.

It's simple. A belief is just that, a belief. I could say to you I believe pigs fly and all people that believe that are a part of Porkism. Whether the facts tell us this belief is justified or not, i.e. there's evidence for it, doesn't actually matter. It's the same with a Christian. I call my friends Christian because they believe in Christ, just like I did. I cannot call myself a Christian now because I lack that belief, therefore not making me a Christian.

You call your friends Christians, yet you can not really believe they are, if there is no Christ there are no Christians, you believe they are wrong in their thinking/belief and yet you fail to let your friends know what you believe about them, is this truly fair to them. I know personally that would not set well with me, but I'm a lot older than you and your friends, and through the experiences of life know not to get bent out of shape if a friend told me he quit believing, younger folks haven't always acquired a sense of rational. I'm not saying that you should tell your friends that is a choice only you can make.

Well, I'm still weighing up the moral issues of telling people what I think of what they believe. Some could take it really personally, I can't say for sure though.

So how do the Gospels function?

They're partly quoting the Old Testament and these quotes form the basis of the life of Jesus and sometimes what he said. There's other areas where they're using allegory to explain the hardships they, the Jews, were going through. So it's a blend of philosophical teaching with respect to the OT (when compared to Philo, a Hellenistic Jew) and hidden historical content in the form of allegories (which are revealed when compared to the works of Josephus).

You say you were preparing yourself to be a defender of the scriptures, did you take into account the OT, or only the NT. There are prophecies in the OT that were actually penned hundreds of years before Christ's birth, and they were fulfilled to the letter, some maybe Jesus could have brought about Himself, others like not having a broken bone in His body. After the beating He took and then being crucified, the Roman soldiers broke the legs of those crucified so they would die before night. If Jesus were just another man there is no way He could have prevented this from happening. For what ever reason the Father was not going to allow it.

This cuts both ways. Either the Gospel authors did use the OT as a source for what Jesus would do in their stories OR Jesus fulfilled all 323 prophecies. Given that the evidence for a historical Jesus is lacking, the most probable is that the Gospel authors used the prophecies as a basis for Jesus and therefore could explain their philosophical understanding of the OT through Jesus.