What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Sword of Christ]

Oh, sure! The difference being that the attendant claims for Socrates and Hannibal don't violate the physical laws of the universe. They aren't even in the same ballpark; extraordinary claims necessarily require more evidence than mundane, physically possible ones.

If God exists, if he can interact with the universe through humanity, if Jesus was fully one as God himself then Jesus wasn't violating anything at all. Just because we don't know for certain that these things are possible it is not an argument to suggest that such things are impossible or ridiculous. There are many miraculous claims and experience right the way across the world and the right the way through the full extent of human history. Yes they may be comparatively rare for any given individual to experience, yes they may be hard for science to pin down. That in itself is not evidence against these claims and they are therefore reasonable to believe providing they have a rational foundation with a cause that produces an effect.

You have to understand, not use an argument from ignorance, that science has it's limits and even the sciencific knowledge we have so far is fairly shit, we don't even know what 96% of the universe is made from. We're in no position to begin arbitrarily discounting the claims of miracles on a whim, just because they are well outside of everyday experience. I mean we're all going to die some day that's going to be something that will be beyond our everyday experience one way or the other. We're not made Lords of creation itself the moment we have a slither of scientific understanding. This scientific knowledge is something we derived from being made in Gods image as we can rationally understand the universe God made, and he made it for a reason/purpose. This wasn't some kind of random roll of millions of dice and they all happened to turn out at the right numbers, you can forget that.

I don't really understand this argument. Do you often find historical documents that tell us about what wasn't happening?

But we can date and time of the events of Jesus life and the the very first Christians to a very specific geographical location and time period. You can't do that with Thor, Mithras, Krishna or anyone else like that. Jesus or Yeshua as he Hebrew name would have been was a real historical figure there shouldn't be any real doubt about this. Yes we can doubt whether he was divine or not but that's a different subject to his actual existence. To deny his existence is getting into conspiracy theory territory.

But necessarily lacking our current knowledge of how the world works. It's how humanity has always explained things it doesn't understand: lightning was from Zeus, or it was from Thor. Rough seas were the anger of Poseidon, etc etc...

The Bible does not at any point suggest there are any supernatural entities controlling any natural events. There is God and God created the natural order of the universe to be self contained and sufficient, no gods are required just the one. The Bible is not comparable to Greek myths, Jesus is not comparable at all in any way to a Greek god.

If they were that passionate about the man- and I agree that seeing his miracles for themselves would be impressive enough to inspire- why did they wait twenty years to begin telling his story? Especially if they thought he was the son of god and that people were doomed to hell without accepting his sacrifice?

They didn't wait 20 years to tell the story that was just when Saint Paul put the story they were telling to parchment. Hell is a separation from God through sin and through Christ our sin is washed entirely clean. You may be able to accept this gift after you die as C.S Lewis suggested but you can accept it just as easily as well this side of eternity as well. And this would be a positive life changing experience for you.

Was it just a busy couple of decades for them? Also, how do you know nobody ever martyred themselves for another, older god?

I think it would be up to you to provide evidence for this actually happening. No-one gave up their lives willing for the pagan gods with the exception of human sacrifice, say when a servant girl was killed to be with her master in the next life. But this isn't what Christians did so it isn't really comparable.

Well, thanks for that, but I get kind of wary when people point me to places like carm.org, or answers in genesis, or places like that. For one, an apologetics website can hardly be considered unbiased; there's a definite presupposition involved there... not to mention apologists have a proven track record of being liberal with the facts...

So what you're saying is that a non-Christian or atheist site would have no bias at all?

But I took a look anyway. Now, I'm hardly well versed enough to speak with authority here, but the first four references are Josephus, whose authenticity is hardly accepted as true. The fifth is Tacitus, who mentions Christus, not Jesus. Thallus' writings only exist in fragments, Pliny only mentions Christians, not Christ as an existing person. I won't even go into why the Talmud is a bad reference to use, and Lucian was a second century satirist, so hardly a contemporary, either way.

None of these guys were Christians or supported Christianity and they lived in a time when the events of Jesus life was still fresh in living memory not thousands of years later. It would have been so easy for them to undermine Christianity by suggesting that Jesus didn't exist to begin with, if there was ever any doubt. Apparently there wasn't as it didn't occur to anyone to mention it.

Anyway, I guess it doesn't matter, regardless; even accepting the existence of a Jesus character- and on balance I'm willing to accept one or many inspirations for this- there's simply no reason to accept the miracle claims associated with him. All the questions I asked Disc apply here, too.

If you do what Jefferson did and cut away all the miracles from the story you're not left anything much at all. It doesn't mean all of the claims are true but certainly he must have had healing and some other paranormal capabilities to some extraordinary degree. What he is said to have done goes well beyond what David Blaine could do, these won't have been conjuring tricks. And certainly Jesus doesn't appear to have been trying to fabricate or deceive for his own benefit he was entirely selfless to the point that he gave up his own life. He was raised back to life afterwards by God yes but so will we all be that's the point.