(January 28, 2015 at 4:25 pm)SteveII Wrote: To summarize, if you can't impugn the beliefs of the people of the first century who really saw that Jesus was born, brought a radical message of love and redemption, died,To this point, there's not much to impugn. A group of people knew a person named Jesus who preached and stirred up the locals by claiming to be their god-sent savior, and was killed for his trouble.
SteveII Wrote:and rose again, then you cannot impugn those that hold the same view today.That's where you run into a problem. Since dead people aren't in the habit of bringing themselves back to life outside of myths and legends and the occasional Marvel comic, you need a lot more than just "I saw it." Considering some of the things written in the gospels, the fact that no one seemed interested in writing down what happened for decades afterwards is odd, to say the least.
And references to Jesus outside of those gospels, if we accept them all as genuine, are equally uninspired. If Josephus really did write was is attributed to him regarding Jesus, he seems utterly unmoved by it, relegating it to a single paragraph and then going on about his business after describing a man who was actually god. Jesus made a pretty lukewarm impression, it seems, before Constantine decided that he was a pretty convenient big deal.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould