RE: Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!
October 24, 2013 at 9:41 am
(This post was last modified: October 24, 2013 at 9:43 am by Whateverist.)
(October 24, 2013 at 7:38 am)Aractus Wrote: This isn't a "legend". We have an early record of an even earlier creed. We think that the letter was written around 55AD. This is too early to allow for legend, and bare in mind the message that is contained is that Christ died for our sins; which by all accounts is the purpose of the crucifixion. The creed itself goes right back to within a few months or years of the crucifixion itself. There was no contradictory belief taught before this, and of that you can be certain.
Atheists tend to be unimpressed by these facts, mostly because they stubbornly don't believe any of them.
From that same epistle we also get this:
- 1 Corinthians 1:13: Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
1 Corinthians 1:23: but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
First of all thank you for the scholarship. I'm not a bible-phile but even I can appreciate the concise, even manner in which you've written this. I lack the background knowledge to form an informed opinion of whether you are completely correct. But I'm at least inclined to allow there was a man named Jesus who was crucified, if only to meet your politeness with my own.
But what the significance of this event may be is another matter. Even if there are characters in the bible who did in fact exist, there is no reason I can see to believe this Jesus died for anyone's sins or that he was resurrected. All of that does seem the stuff of legends and one which arises all over the world.
Sadly I have no scholarship of my own to give you in return. I have no evidence that Jesus was not the son of 'God', that he did not rise from the dead, that he did not die for our sins or that there is not a personified immaterial being corresponding to what you call 'God'. I am first and foremost agnostic toward these claims. I must confess that the way I understand the phenomenon of your belief is as an instance of a living myth. That isn't so much a position I arrive at by evidence as it is my trying to make sense of what goes on around me.
