RE: What do invented saints tell us about Christianity?
November 11, 2019 at 8:54 pm
(This post was last modified: November 11, 2019 at 8:55 pm by mordant.)
(November 9, 2019 at 2:45 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:(November 7, 2019 at 9:29 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote: “Historyforatheists.com”
That doesn’t sound like a propaganda site at all...
I went to look at it. Its a Christian site trying to take apart rational arguments. Its main thing is its obsession with people not thinking that jesus is real. It seems to offend them.
Hardly. He's just a historical Jesus proponent, which has nothing to do with a person being a believer. Many atheists hold that view. It is not the view that Bible Jesus / GodBoy was divine or raised the dead or walked on water. It is the view that a fabulist mythos was built upon a historical figure named Yeshua who was in fact crucified by Pilate. In other words that much, and ONLY that much, of the gospel narrative is based in reality. I don't personally buy it, but if true, it presents zero problem for me as an atheist.
He correctly makes the point that history is not a hard science and deals in preponderance of evidence according to its own specialist standards. By those standards, it is more, rather than less, likely that Christianity's central story is based on / originated with an actual discrete historical individual. I reject this as insufficient evidence on which to stake a knowledge claim or form a belief. Even historicists will admit that they can't PROVE their position.
So it's a tempest in a teapot. In my experience and observation, historicists who are also atheists and want to bother to argue it like the sound of their own voice and like proving their "rightness" and "objectivity" and also to elevate their status by citing "scholarly consensus". Over on atheistdiscussion.org there's a historicist going on for stem winding threads telling anyone who disagrees with him what utter idiots they are. And there are a couple of of atheist mythicists who take the bait and do the same thing for their side. I mostly stay out of it because Jesus mythicism vs historical Jesus is just an interesting mind game -- a game in which no one has any actual skin. And so to elevate it beyond a fun speculative project is to take it way , WAY too seriously.
