What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Esquilax]

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.

I'll stop you right there and say that while I agree with the sentiment, I disagree with your conclusions. I am open to the possibility of the supernatural, but the time to believe one actually exists is when it is demonstrated to be true. Having it written in an old book that you want to believe just doesn't cut it.

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.

Odd bit of anthropomorphizing here: from the perspective of a universe not made for life, there are no "right" numbers. If there's no design, then this argument of probabilities has no meaning, because there was nothing aiming for this situation at all. It just turned out this way because that's where things fell; if I roll a hundred die, the combination of numbers that come up will be very uncommon, but that doesn't imply a designer pulling the strings to come up with those numbers, no matter the odds.

In short, without a designer, there's no optimal set of circumstances, and thus no reason to think that these specific ones were being aimed for.

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.

I don't outright deny it. He could have been one real man, one fictional man, several real men combined into a gestalt for the purposes of narrative, or one real man embellished. There's plenty of possibilities beyond the binary exist/does not exist, and none of them are discounted by the evidence we have, either.

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.

Um, no: rainbows were a distinct act from god, so you're at least partially wrong. But also, so what? All that means is that the bible answers one question those primitive people didn't know an answer to, rather than many. How does that refute anything I actually said?

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.

So, except for the instances in which a person did willingly sacrifice themselves to an older god, nobody sacrificed themselves to an older god? Okay, got it.

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

No, but I am saying that many apologists are on record as playing fast and loose with the facts, spinning things to suit their agenda, and working from an established bias at a much higher rate than atheist sites.

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.

Sure, but also, none of them were alive when Jesus was, so you can hardly call them contemporary. Lucius in particular was alive over a hundred and fifty years after Jesus' coming. Everything they wrote were reports from others, and as I pointed out, several of them never mentioned Jesus even in the passages pointed out as mentioning Jesus. Essentially, you have a single "contemporary" source in Josephus, and the authenticity of his works is still debatable.

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.

Or the story was embellished to the point that it no longer reflected the truth. Or the witnesses saw something they didn't understand and ascribed a miraculous or magical source to it. Or the entire thing was fiction. Or Jesus is a composite character made up of many different people, and so each individual claim could come from a different source.

All possible. Stop leaping to the conclusion you want to be true, and start looking at the facts objectively.

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.

Sure, but fictional characters can be selfless too. And manipulated accounts can be too. Again, you're leading the evidence and assuming the bible is true, which isn't rational.