Debate with a Christian

[discipulus]

Unreasonable?!

Precisely.

Unreasonable.

Damn, I thought you were talking about a god, an entity capable of doing anything it wishes.

God can do anything logically possible and anything in accordance with His nature. God cannot do "anything". That is a common misconception of divine omnipotence.

Clearly, if it exists, it does not wish that existence to be acknowledged by everyone.

Then again... why would it allow people to acknowledge it under many different guises and to then make war over which guise is the correct one?...
It's odd, to me...

So, I reckon that, if such a being exists, it just simply does not wish us to acknowledge it... and all gods that have been worshiped by mankind have all been equally man-made.

The reasoning here is nothing less than horrid.

You essentially argue that since people have different views of who God is that therefore He does not want them to know He exists...



How does that follow? It seems to me to be a classic non-sequitur.

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I think you are quietly stepping around the elephant in the room, discipulus. And that is...YOU need to prove that Jesus even existed, let alone that he was Divine, died for our sins, and resurrected from a tomb. Your only measure of doing this, is through the Bible, for that is the only place that it's ''recorded.'' I put recorded in quotes, because I believe the Bible to be a farce, and not a reliable source of proving God exists, or anything else, for that matter. So, you are going to use it as a reliable source, but the truth is ...it is your only source. Which should tell you something.

I do not need to prove Jesus existed at all. Jesus' existence is as axiomatic as that of Tiberius Caesar or any other notable figure of ancient history.

Where have you been living Deidre? The moon? Mars?


In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart Ehrman wrote, "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees". Richard A. Burridge states: "There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church's imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more". Robert M. Price does not believe that Jesus existed, but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars. James D.G. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus' non-existence "a thoroughly dead thesis". Michael Grant (a classicist) wrote in 1977, "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary". Robert E. Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted.