Is the universe God?

[EvolutionKills]

There are different opinions on when and by whom the gospels were written. The early church passed on the information and traditions verbally and it wasn't untill[sic] around 300AD that the church made the decision about what writings to include in the new testament.

Right, so you're saying that you trust in a 300 year old game of telephone to get things perfectly right sans evidence? This is why 'faith' is synonymous with 'gullibility'.

So it was a matter of the church deciding which books were inspired based on the already accepted doctrine handed down through the generations.

Then how come these selected works quote from other works that were not the selected or inspired works of god or the apostles?

Another criterian[sic] was who was determined to be the author. According to my understanding, a necessary factor was whether the person had known Christ directly or had direct access to those persons. What was written in those books was already accepted as prevailing belief and was taught before it was included in the canon of scripture.

Right, so we already believe in this without evidence, and that counts as evidence for accepting the books as authentic? Doesn't sound nearly as reasonable when you spell it out like that, now does it?

Mathew and Luke did rely heavily on Mark for their gospels or they all relied on some othe[sic] common source. Obviously, they agreed with Mark and capitalized on his work or went to the same source Mark used. They were presenting the gospel to different audiences than Mark's and were relaying already written information.

That still doesn't explain why a supposed eyewitness (Luke) based his eyewitness account on Mark's, who was not an eyewitness and just got his information second hand from Peter. For fuck's sake dude, it's hearsay layered upon hearsay even within your own flawed and baseless assertions...

How do we know that Mark wrote the gospel of Mark? How do we know that Mark recorded the observations of an eyewitness?

The short answer is because Papias (< 70 – c. 155) said so. Papias was a bishop and an avid documenter of oral history from the early church. His book Interpretations was written after 120 CE.

Jesus died in 30, Mark was written in 70, and Papias documents Mark as the author in 120 (dates are estimates). That’s at least 50 years bridged only by “because Papias said so.”

But how do we know what Papias said? We don’t have the original of Papias, nor do we have a copy. Instead, we have Church History by Eusebius, which quotes Papias and was written in 320.

And how do we know what Eusebius said? The oldest copies of his book are from the tenth century, though there is a Syriac translation from 462.

Count the successive people in the claim “Mark wrote Mark, which documents an eyewitness account”: (1) Peter was an eyewitness and (2) Mark was his journalist, and (3) someone told this to (4) Papias, who wrote his book, which was preserved by (5) copyist(s), and (6) Eusebius transcribed parts of that, and (7) more copyist(s) translated Eusebius to give us our oldest manuscript copy. And the oldest piece of evidence that we can put our hands on was written four centuries after Mark was written.

That’s an exceedingly tenuous chain.

The sequence of people could have been longer still. Papias was the bishop of Hierapolis, in western Asia Minor. Mark might have been written in Syria, and no one knows how long the chain of hearsay was from that author to Papias. No one knows how many copyists separated Papias from Eusebius or Eusebius from our oldest copies.

It gets worse. Eusebius didn't think much of Papias as a historian and said that he “seems to have been a man of very small intelligence, to judge from his books” (Church History, book III, chapter 39, paragraph 13). Evaluate Papias for yourself: he said that Judas lived on after a failed attempt at hanging and had a head swollen so large that he couldn't pass down a street wide enough for a hay wagon. Who knows if this version of the demise of Judas is more reliable than that in Matthew, but it’s special pleading to dismiss Papias when he’s embarrassing but hold on to his explanation of gospel authorship.

Even Eusebius’s Church History is considered unreliable.

The story is similar for the claimed authorship of Matthew. A twist to this story is that Papias said that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew (or perhaps Aramaic), which makes no sense since Matthew used Mark, Q, and the Septuagint Bible, all Greek sources.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamin...s-account/

As for the question in one post about how they could know what Jesus said in his moments alone -they're probably not word for renditions. Jesus could have told them during the 40 days he was with them after the resurrection.

Then if they were being honest, why didn't they ever say that? There is a huge difference between a third person narration that consists of 'this is exactly what happened' and a first person 'later Jesus told us this is what happened while we were asleep'. If you grant that this is because of artistic license, how and when do you determine when this happens? How do you know when the Gospels 'authors' stop recording 'literal truth' and start embellishing things to make it sound better?

Was the crowd of 500 who supposedly saw the risen Jesus just another artistic license? What about the rending of the Temple veil, the earthquakes, the darkening of the Sun, the risen Jewish saints walking through Jerusalem? Considering no other historians alive in that time and place mentioned it, is this just more artistic exaggeration? How about in the Gospel of John after the woman found in adultery is brought before Jesus and the 'those without sin toss the first stone' bit happens and the Gospels say that the crowd dispersed leaving Jesus and the woman alone. If that is so, then surely the author wasn't there and this is another artistic embellishment?

As for the comment concerning my formatting - yes, it does suck.

Good, something we can finally agree on.

The universe is just the universe it isn't God. It can contain and is contained by God but that doesn't mean it is God in itself that would pantheism. If God and the universe are the same thing that's the same thing as God not existing.

Close, but not quite. If god and the universe are the same, it's not the same as god not existing. If god is the universe, and the universe exists; then clearly god exists. However this just makes god irrelevant, because he's no longer the anthropocentric, interventionist, voyeuristic, judgemental, genocidal sky-daddy.