RE: Debate with a Christian
March 10, 2014 at 10:18 pm
(This post was last modified: March 10, 2014 at 10:19 pm by discipulus.)
(March 10, 2014 at 10:13 pm)MindForgedManacle Wrote:(March 10, 2014 at 8:36 pm)discipulus Wrote: C. Fabricate a lie (Jesus rising from the dead)
Lies aren't hard to start, especially amongst people who wanted such to be the case. No advanced fabrication necessary. But oh, I'm sure you think the disciples were above lying.
Quote:D. Go out and proclaim that He did indeed rise from the dead (something they knew was a lie)
Yeah, people have lied about supernatural claims. In fact, as the narrow-minded Christian you likely are, you HAVE to believe that aboit ALL other religions. Mohammed riding a flying horse(?) to heaven? Why would the Muslims lie? Buddha attaining enlightenment after an incredible feat of meditation? No way Buddhists could have lied about that.
Worse, you don't seem to consider that people's psychology can warp their view of reality to preserve deep-seated wants. You don't have to "know something is a lie" to defend a falsehood.
Quote:E. Boldy proclaim the remission of sins in His name in a Second-Temple Judaistic culture which would have earned them immediate ostracism
They were ALREADY ostracized. And according to the Bible, Jesus ALREADY claimed that he would redeem their sins, as being God he could do so.
And religious fanatics are no strangers to WANTIMG persecution. It often is validation that they are on the right path, and Jesus says as much in the Bible ("You will be persecuted in my name", and the like).
Quote:F. Be so effective in their proclamation of this lie that Christianity spread so rapidly as to have an immense multitude of followers 2,000 miles away in the capital city of a pagan empire...
A GROSSLY exaggerated claim, something Christians are no steanger to.
Quote:G. Be willing to die and suffer some of the most extreme forms of torture, and persecution and ultimately death for something they knew was a lie.
Sometimes people are willing to die for a cause. That says NOTHING about the veracity of what they're dying for, nor whether or not they "knew it was a lie". Certainly Muslims and Jews have suffered persecution and death for their faith. The Jews FAR more than Christians. Please, be consistent.
Quote:H. Inspire an immense multitude to also die and suffer the most extreme forms of torture
Again, people can be persuaded to believe something is true when it is in fact not. You are very simple-minded if you don't know that from... living.
Quote:And accomplish all of the above by basing their new religion on a complete lie?
Pretty much EVERY major religion EVER accomplished that. Or is Islam based on truth? Certainly you don't believe Hindus are right in revering the Vedas? There is no valid inference rule regarding people's belief in something and whether or not what they believe is in fact true. This is stupidly obvious.
Quote:Overnight they go from despondent, leaderless, cowardly, fearful men, to men who literally turned the world upside down so that today in 2014 nearly a third of the world's population (over 2,000,000,000) people worship Christ as God!
1) Wasn't overnight.
2) They weren't leaderless; they were fractured into mutually exclusive subsets with their own pioneers like Marcion.
3) They didn't "turn the world upside-down", at least not in any sense that Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism didn't, or Zoroastrianism before it died down.
Quote:To say that this is extraordinary would be a gross understatement. Not only that but the sheer improbability of this happening and all of it happening while Jesus lay dead somewhere is so staggering as to make one's mind reel when thinking of the improbability of it.
If the prophet Mohammed didn't receive the final revelation and meet Moses in Heaven, it is so improbable that there would be nearly 2 billion Muslims today, and for Islam to be the fastest growing religion...
Oh wait, I'm not using probability correctly, just as you weren't. You can't work backwards to retrodict things like that, especially when you have shown no awareness nor given any of the variable priors from which you could actually use Bayesian probability to determine the likelihood of something so complex.
Quote:Zealous men will oftentimes die for what they believe to be true, but I am aware of no one who would die for something they knew to be a lie. This is exactly what we have to believe if we are to believe that Christianity is based on some colossal lie.
Again, this is stupid. We know that people have died for falsehoods, regardless of if they knew them to be so.
Quote:Is it not more probable and in accordance with Occam's Razor( i.e the principle of parsimony or succinctness) that Jesus Rose from the Dead in accordance with scripture and that Christ was and is alive and well and building His Church as He said He would?
Oh joy, massacreing Ockam's Razor now are we? Dude, go read up on some damn philosophy, history and Bayesian inferencing PLEASE.
Do you expect me to address any of the above?
(March 10, 2014 at 10:16 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote:(March 10, 2014 at 10:15 pm)discipulus Wrote: It will soon.
1,984-ish years and counting.
No, I mean you will die soon and you will know the truth.