Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!

[Confused Ape]

Do you deny the Holocaust too? As already discussed some historical facts are frankly beyond discussion. Even among atheist new testament scholars you'd find almost no one who actually believes that Jesus never existed.

No, I don't deny the Holocaust and my personal opinion is that there might have been a real man who was obscured by myths, legends and stories. The same goes for King Arthur but I don't find it disturbing that some people insist that he never existed.

Scholars who say that Jesus existed as an historical figure tend to portray him as an ordinary human being who didn't perform miracles and who didn't rise from the dead. Other people have come up with theories about how he could have survived the Crucifiction. I don't see how any of this is of value to Christians who believe that Jesus was the divine son of God who performed miracles etc etc.

I could understand you being disturbed if you were in an Anglcian discussion forum and some Christians there were trying to promote the views of John Shelby Spong.

Twelve Points

Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

PS: If I remember correctly, you refused to accept that the Antikythera Mechanism is an early computing device. Should I find that disturbing?