(September 16, 2019 at 10:12 am)Acrobat Wrote: But they didn't just believe Jesus body was missing. But that he truly rose again. They believed in the reality of the resurrection as much as they did in the reality of an empty tomb. The depictions of the resurrection may be mysterious in nature, but people truly did believe in it, as a real as believing touching human flesh.
Yes, and all that takes is seeing an empty tomb where they thought Jesus' body was supposed to be and a viral faith-based interpretation of that. Note that in the earliest copies of Mark, no one witnessed the risen Jesus; they believed on faith.
Quote:The community defies the sort of expectations and reality of other communities of disappointed expectations, like those communities that thought the world was going to end on an exact date. They go from a communities of high hope and expectations, to communities of disappointment, at at best a haggard hope, that's been shot and dismembered. They have a mortal wound that they've never able to recover fully from, that the drains the life out of them.
Um, no, not necessarily.
See Millerism and the Seventh-day Adventists. If there is enough trigger(s) to keep the community's faith going, then the community can recover in no time and be even more strengthened in their faith. You should read Influence by Cialdini, where he tells a story among many of how a faith-based group will go out of their way to validate their faith after a crisis of disappointment and falsified prophecy and be even more strengthened in terms of their faith.
Quote:Quote:Ultimately, however, as I said in the OP, we don't have sufficient relevant information to go by to make any confident claims about what may have happened back then. Even if we were to be very charitable and grant that supernatural events are possible and that the Gospels were not entirely myths. We can speculate, but that's about all one can do. The case for the Resurrection just doesn't have a good basis, and it doesn't help that it's supposed to be a supernatural event (even if we grant that such events can be possible).
This is where our different presuppositional elements lay. I'm not into epoche (The Pyrrhonists developed the concept of "epoché" to describe the state where all judgments about non-evident matters are suspended in order to induce a state of ataraxia (freedom from worry and anxiety)), like many atheist. Rather than withholding a conclusion, I look for one that smooths it all out. One which the pieces fit more comfortably in, than ones that leave more nagging suspensions about certain pieces of the puzzle.
The resurrection exists as such a conclusion, because any naturalistic explanation that has ever been offered, or that I can imagine, never seems capable to doing that. It's make sense only when one contemplates the question less, but not for someone like me who wants to contemplate it more and more, till something is revealed. Epoche may relieve the anxiety for you, but not for me, who needs to contemplate and contemplate more, about what happened.
Nice try but this has nothing to do about relieving anxiety (maybe for you it is, but not for me). For me, this is about intellectual honesty. If we don't have enough details to go by, we can't come up with a confident conclusion. The fact of the matter is that, given what we do have, the case for a supernatural Resurrection is pretty weak and the case against it is stronger. Otherwise, "Mark" would not have shied away from giving the full details of what happened. Instead, we have a very minimalistic account of the resurrection in the earliest copies of the Gospel.
