From atheism to Christianity? How so?

[agapelove]

You did not reply to a lot of my previous post. I'm going to take it that you've conceded the points?

What did I miss that you feel needs to be addressed, that hasn't been addressed?

Pick a historian or an archaeologist that isn't an apologist by profession. Shouldn't be too hard if it's such an established "fact", should it?

I'll get back to you on this.

No but you definitely cannot claim that it happened. The source has to be discredited based on its own properties, not its claims. If it is a legit source, its claims still has to be supported by other sources.

The New Testament contains multiple accounts of the resurrection. You are lumping them all together when they were written by different people at different times. Flavius Josephus is a contemporary of the disciples and he mentions the resurrection as well. Even it were only a single source, it cannot be discredited for that reason.

Without archaeology you wouldn't be justified in saying that it does. Do you understand now, how this thing works? Just because I claim a I have a car doesn't prove I have a car but it doesn't prove I don't have one either. But without seeing an actual car it would be dishonest of you to tell someone else you know for sure I have a car. Well dishonest or gullible.

That isn't primarily how historical evidence is evaluated. You are making an erroneous claim when you say that if there is only a single source that is unverified by archaeology that we have no reason to believe it. There are other criteria for evaluating the reliability of a source. Here are some of them:

Human sources may be relics such as a fingerprint; or narratives such as a statement or a letter. Relics are more credible sources than narratives.

Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability.

The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate historical description of what actually happened.

An eyewitness is more reliable than testimony at second hand, which is more reliable than hearsay at further remove, and so on.

If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.

The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.

If it can be demonstrated that the witness or source has no direct interest in creating bias then the credibility of the message is increased.

Before you get mixed up, just because one part of the bible has some basis doesn't mean the entire thing is real. I want to point out once again that even though you found a Hittite civilization, it is not proof that what happened to the hittites in the bible happened in real life. Do you understand the level of evidence I require now?

You're right; just because one part of the bible has been confirmed doesn't necessarily mean it is totally reliable. Conversely, just because you doubt one part of the bible doesn't mean the whole thing is unreliable either.

I think having someone resurrected you would get at least a lot of different sources describing the same thing happening. (The bible is one source, which has been heavily altered to suit political purposes since it was first compiled, another reason why it should be discredited as a source altogether).

There is absolutely no evidence the bible has been altered to suit political purposes, or any other purpose. The bible is the most well attested document in history, with over 20 thousand manuscripts verifying its integrity going back to the 1st century. Could you please provide evidence for your claim?

By the way, isn't it dishonest to claim that something happen and then when asked to prove it, say, well it's the nature of this event to not leave proofs behind. Then how can you claim it happened in the first place?!

I never said there was no evidence; what I am saying is that your demand that archaeology verify the resurrection is unreasonable. My question is that if you demand such proof, what proof would satisfy?

One evidence that I feel is convincing is the martyrdom of the disciples. They were direct witnesses to the fact of the resurrection. Do you think they made it up and died for a lie? What is your theory about that?

In summary, you only have the bible for resurrection. Yet this qualifies as historical while the Qur'an which states Jesus is not god doesn't qualify as a historical and factual document.

The reason the New Testament accounts are credible is because it is written by eye witnesses to the resurrection whereas the Quran was written 600 years later. If the Quran was written by eye witnesses I would consider it.

Something else interesting to consider is that within the first 150 years you have over 40 extra biblical sources verifying the life of Jesus and absolutely zero disputing it. Why the lack of testimony to the contrary, do you think?

I provided a link in my last post: did you not see it? In it, there was a list of several quotations of the golden rule that predate Jesus.

I have only seen two which predate the Old Testament and the best connection you could make to the golden rule is superficial at best. The translation is also disputed in the case of the eloquent peasant. I don't see how they prove the case.

Right, but Christianity didn't get to China until the eighth century, after Confucius had died, which means he couldn't possibly have been inspired by the old testament when he said that, putting the lie to your claim that the teachings of christianity are so unique and wonderful as to be divinely inspired, because no mortal could have thought of them. Mortals did, and they did it without help from your god.

There has been trade between China and the Middle East well before Confucius. Some estimates put contact between Egypt and China at 1070 BC

Some remnants of what was probably Chinese silk have been found in Ancient Egypt from 1070 BC. Though the originating source seems sufficiently reliable, silk unfortunately degrades very rapidly and we cannot double-check for accuracy whether it was actually cultivated silk (which would almost certainly have come from China) that was discovered or a type of "wild silk," which might have come from the Mediterranean region or the Middle East.[11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road

I did that a few posts ago too: the concept of the dying and rising god, or even just the dying and rising protagonist, is a common narrative trope that was employed by numerous old gods. Baal, Baldur, Istar, Dionysus... numerous gods go through this, though Jesus is notable as being one of the few reported to actually be extant on earth after death. Wine as a symbolic instrument is notable in Dionysus' story too, and the idea of gods coming to earth in mortal aspects can be seen at the very least in Zeus' mythology.

Are you claiming that Jesus is a myth? The connections are superficial; Jesus came to Earth as a man and lived as a man, not as a God. He wasn't killed incidently and then brought back to life: his entire mission was to die for the sins of the world. Dionysus was the greek god of wine; is it surprising wine is symbolic in his story? Wine was also symbolic in the Old Testament and some of it had messianic undertones.

So the christians and their unselfish prayers weren't following god correctly because they... expected to see results? Of the prayers that you have said in the past would yield a result.

What I said was, trying to test for Gods existence by monitoring answered prayers will not yield results. God will not allow Himself to be approached except by faith.

Tell me, other than the fact that these prayers were conducted in such a way that their potential failure could be publicized with more weight than you christians could brush off with platitudes, what was it that these praying folks did to deserve not getting an answer?

I gave you a theory which was that the prayers themselves were always going to be answered yes or no the way they were, but that God simply brought a combination of people who would yield a nominal result into the study. He did not answer them differently because of the study.

My problem is that you then go on to say that if my prayer is unanswered, that too is god's will: you've set up a demonstration in which you believe god can be shown to exist, and then configured it so that no matter the result, or even if there's no result, the existence of your god is the only answer you'll accept.

I don't think you can prove Gods existence through answered prayer, or any other way. God has to reveal Himself to you individually.

It's not a valid question if you're willing to string it out to perception, because that's just a way to make your beliefs unassailable. Maybe you just fell victim to having a strikingly similar argument to the one Sye Ten Bruggencate would use, but the point is that at a certain level, what we've got to deal with is confirmation and corroboration: the commonalities between our shared perceptions, the things we both experience? Those can be said to be verified. The physical objects that look, smell, sound and feel like they should if they physically existed? Same deal. When you ask us if our perception could be faulty, we know it is, in part. That's why we don't always trust the things we experience exclusively; police continue investigating crimes beyond the testimony of their first witness, for example. But when you try to extend that out, to imply that multiple people corroborating the same events could be mistaken, simply because they're using their perception and that might be false, you enter into useless territory: we only have the sensory apparatuses of ourselves and others. There's no other method by which we can experience the world.

Well, my experiences of the supernatural are confirmed and corroborated by the vast majority of people on Earth. I believe around 80 something percent of all people believe in God. According to you though that doesn't matter so how do we determine whether our experiences are accurate or not? At some point you're taking a leap of faith in what you believe.

Yeah, the moment you start presupposing anything, beyond very basic axioms, you've discarded rational discourse.

God is a basic axiom, being a self-evident truth and the only guarantee that reality is actually real.

If you're referring to Leviticus 19:18, (“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against . . . thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”), then I must point out that Leviticus reached its final form between the 3rd and 6th centuries BCE. While some of its composition predates the 6th century BCE, because it was edited up until that point, no single passage can be dated to before the 6th century BCE. Confucius was writing at this same period in time, during the 6th century BCE, so there is no way to claim that any passage in Leviticus in particular predates Confucius' quoting of the golden rule. And given that some of Leviticus may date to after Confucius, it's entirely possible that the editors of Leviticus got the idea from Eastern philosophy rather than the other way around.

I also notice you just completely ignored that rules of reciprocity similar to the golden rule occur in both the code of Ur-Nammu and the Eloquent Peasant, which I pointed out earlier. In particular, the Eloquent Peasant which dates to the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040–1650 BC) includes the admonition: "Do to the doer to cause that he do thus to you." Predating even the oldest of the Mosaic texts under the most liberal dating. Convenient of you to ignore it.

The first millennium BCE in China, India, and Persia, was a time of great advances in philosophy and religion, in which many of the ideas that appear in Jewish religious lore also found expression in other cultures. The first millennium BCE is in the middle of what is loosely referred to as "the Axial age" as there appears to have been a simultaneous blossoming of culture and philosophy across diverse cultures around the globe about this time. There is plentiful evidence that similar philosophies sprung up multiple places across the globe almost simultaneously, and the example of it springing up in first millenium BCE Judaism is therefore unremarkable and underscores Esquilax's point that your Judeo-Christian ethical philosophies are not unique and original to the Jews and Christians.

I've got numerous source books of both Chinese and Indian philosophy from this period, but I'm not going to waste my time looking up examples if all you're going to do is cherry-pick which evidence you respond to, and even then claim more than your evidence actually shows. The apologetic store house that you're dispensing these pearls from contains nothing but sand and rotten grain.

I've replied to a lot of different people; my apologies if I have not addressed something. Let's say that you're right and that the Golden rule predates the Old Testament, which I am not conceding; what does that prove to you? The bible says God has given every culture in every time revelation of His existence and divine nature through the Creation, and of His laws through their conscience. Therefore every culture has a certain knowledge about God and that may have included some basic knowledge of the golden rule. Citing this one instance does not make the case that Jesus borrowed His teachings from elsewhere; you would have to prove it was systemic and not one or two isolated incidents.