Overstating the case for Athiesm.

[Minimalist]

On a related basis, what evidence do you have that Ra (the Egyptian sun god) was not real in jewish theology.

Asking for evidence that something did not happen or did not exist is a rather pointless exercise.

Neither I nor you can provide evidence that "jesus" was not merely a trumpet player in a mariachi band in Judaea. We can point to the date when the trumpet was invented and when mariachi became a particular style in Mexico but to someone who insists he was such a musician on the basis of 'faith' there is no tangible evidence against it. That does not make it true or the believer less delusional. Probabilities have to enter the equation at some point.

The archaeological evidence we do have points to an indigenous origin for the cultures which ultimately became the polities of "Israel" and "Judah" in Canaan. They seemed largely indistinguishable from any other Canaanites. They had the same pantheon of gods and spoke dialects of the same language. These cultures began to arise as Egypt began its millennium long slide into oblivion which came at Actium in 31 BC.

Archaeology has largely dismissed any of the Exodus stuff as much later bullshit. It is far more likely that it was the Babylonians and Persians who were the main role models for what later came to be known as Temple Judaism.

I would recommend Donald Redford's Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times as well as Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

On a related basis, what evidence do you have that Ra (the Egyptian sun god) was not real in jewish theology.

Asking for evidence that something did not happen or did not exist is a rather pointless exercise.

Neither I nor you can provide evidence that "jesus" was not merely a trumpet player in a mariachi band in Judaea. We can point to the date when the trumpet was invented and when mariachi became a particular style in Mexico but to someone who insists he was such a musician on the basis of 'faith' there is no tangible evidence against it. That does not make it true or the believer less delusional. Probabilities have to enter the equation at some point.

The archaeological evidence we do have points to an indigenous origin for the cultures which ultimately became the polities of "Israel" and "Judah" in Canaan. They seemed largely indistinguishable from any other Canaanites. They had the same pantheon of gods and spoke dialects of the same language. These cultures began to arise as Egypt began its millennium long slide into oblivion which came at Actium in 31 BC.

Archaeology has largely dismissed any of the Exodus stuff as much later bullshit. It is far more likely that it was the Babylonians and Persians who were the main role models for what later came to be known as Temple Judaism.

I would recommend Donald Redford's Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times as well as Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed.

The Jews never had an independent kingdom. They were always under the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, or Romans thumbs.

[Aractus]

Argument for Christ never existing.
Starts invariably with "Romans were good record keepers." BS really better than us because we don't track all births and destroy many records after a retention schedule. But Ok, show me the list of records you have reviewed, you do read Latin right? Oh wait this is a faith based wives tale told by you? Ok sorry I mistook it for an actually attempted factual statement.

Actually no, the sum of their argument is that you can't use the 5,800 ancient Greek or the 20,000+ ancient Latin Biblical manuscripts as evidence because they "don't count" or "aren't high quality" or whatever other bullshit they use, despite the very good quality early manuscripts that do exist, etc.

Moves on to "only so and so mentions the crucifixion outside the christian fake works". Ok this is a good one. Please show me the comprehensive list of crucifixions where Jesus blah blah blah is missing. No? In fact that guy you mentions is the only mention of a specific Crucifixion in roman records, wow that actually seems to argue for the possible existence of a guy calling himself Christ and making wild claims about being a king.

Well more importantly there's direct archaeological proof, many crucifixion nails have been found - even one that was still embedded in the victim's heel bone. Also many crucified bodies have been excavated.

Now the stuff about the 3 wise men, and lack of tax records showing any order of the journey to Bethlehem is plausible and credible, and the history of the origin of the older forms of this story is well established, but why pollute this stronger message with the earlier faith based attempts to "convert" that more resemble religious tactics that rational thought?

The Bible never mentions "three wise men", it mentions "wise men" which means two or more.

Same thing with evolution vs. origin of life, the truth is we have absolutely no idea how life originated or even if we were seeded from space. Anyone saying otherwise is simply speculating or worse, outright lying.

Incorrect.

Evolution is just like gravity - we know what it does, but we do not know what it is. Einstein believed that gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time, and thus postulated his theories special and general relativity. We put satellites into orbit, we send rockets to land on the moon - and don't use either of those two theories. What we use is Newtonian Mechanics, despite the fact that we know for certain it's wrong - we use it because it's "good enough".

The evidence for evolution is rock solid and super strong, why pollute it with speculation about origins and not simply admit it is a mystery?

Yes the evidence for its existence, but not the evidence for how or why it actually works. Another question I could easily ask you is why does a subatomic particle have spin - what mechanism causes it to be?

[Minimalist]

The Jews never had an independent kingdom. They were always under the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, or Romans thumbs.

Incorrect.

Judah, which had prospered under the Assyrian economic sphere, had a brief flirtation with independence c 610 BC as the Assyrians were forced to withdraw in the west due to the pressure of the Babylonian revolt. The Egyptian pharaoh, Necho II, advancing to the aid of his Assyrian allies put an end to that and until the Babylonians came rolling through Judah seems to have been a puppet between the two sides with various factions trying to claim the throne in the name of one side or the other. The Babylonians won and Jerusalem was sacked and burned.

As you say for the next few centuries the land - which reverted to the status of an underpopulated shithole that it had been prior to the Assyrian economic miracle - was held in a dizzying array by the Babylonians, Persians, Alexander's Greeks, Ptolemy's Greeks and Seleuchus' Greeks.

In 190 BC the Seleucid Empire was crushed by the Romans at Magnesia. This set off a chain of rebellions against Seleucid authority and when Antiochus IV was killed fighting the Parthians a revolt broke out in Judea (as it was by then known ) which even assuming that the Maccabee tale is a pile of shit does seem to have been successful. From c 140 BC to 63 BC a largely independent Jewish kingdom did exist and became something of a regional power by 100 when it overran Itrurea, Idumea, and Galilee.

Shortly thereafter the kingdom dissolved in dynastic squabbling/civil war which continued until Gnaeus Pompey, exceeding his orders but the Senate didn't care, came along and swept the entire region up for Rome.

It is to this very period, c 100 BC, when the whole notion of a powerful Davidic kingdom makes the most sense in a politically. The OT is less about some fucking god and more about the ruling pretensions of the nobility.

[Whateverist]

Actually no, the sum of their [atheists I'm assuming] argument is that you can't use the 5,800 ancient Greek or the 20,000+ ancient Latin Biblical manuscripts as evidence because they "don't count" or "aren't high quality" or whatever other bullshit they use, despite the very good quality early manuscripts that do exist, etc.

I'm not sure who says that but I don't. By all means use them. However I don't think you can get any more out of an ancient book than you can a modern one. You'll find people's sometimes motivated accounts of events they've witnessed or heard about (not always correctly labeled as the one or the other). You'll get peoples theories and explanations and predictions and musings and imaginings. Fine, study those as you see fit.

What exactly were you hoping to use them for and why should we care?

[Minimalist]

Poor Danny....blinded by all these "texts" that he doesn't understand.

There is ONE jesus story. (g-mark)

Two others are expansions for different audiences in different places ( matty and luke ) and the other is representative of a whole other tradition.

They are little more than fanfics. So it doesn't matter how many times this happy horseshit was copied and re-copied and edited, either accidentally or intentionally.

[LastPoet]

Mabe their god can't communicate with its creation very well

[Minimalist]

Seems that way.

[*Deidre*]

Argument for Christ never existing.
Starts invariably with "Romans were good record keepers." BS really better than us because we don't track all births and destroy many records after a retention schedule. But Ok, show me the list of records you have reviewed, you do read Latin right? Oh wait this is a faith based wives tale told by you? Ok sorry I mistook it for an actually attempted factual statement.

Actually no, the sum of their argument is that you can't use the 5,800 ancient Greek or the 20,000+ ancient Latin Biblical manuscripts as evidence because they "don't count" or "aren't high quality" or whatever other bullshit they use, despite the very good quality early manuscripts that do exist, etc.

Moves on to "only so and so mentions the crucifixion outside the christian fake works". Ok this is a good one. Please show me the comprehensive list of crucifixions where Jesus blah blah blah is missing. No? In fact that guy you mentions is the only mention of a specific Crucifixion in roman records, wow that actually seems to argue for the possible existence of a guy calling himself Christ and making wild claims about being a king.

Well more importantly there's direct archaeological proof, many crucifixion nails have been found - even one that was still embedded in the victim's heel bone. Also many crucified bodies have been excavated.

Now the stuff about the 3 wise men, and lack of tax records showing any order of the journey to Bethlehem is plausible and credible, and the history of the origin of the older forms of this story is well established, but why pollute this stronger message with the earlier faith based attempts to "convert" that more resemble religious tactics that rational thought?

The Bible never mentions "three wise men", it mentions "wise men" which means two or more.

Same thing with evolution vs. origin of life, the truth is we have absolutely no idea how life originated or even if we were seeded from space. Anyone saying otherwise is simply speculating or worse, outright lying.

Incorrect.

Evolution is just like gravity - we know what it does, but we do not know what it is. Einstein believed that gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time, and thus postulated his theories special and general relativity. We put satellites into orbit, we send rockets to land on the moon - and don't use either of those two theories. What we use is Newtonian Mechanics, despite the fact that we know for certain it's wrong - we use it because it's "good enough".

The evidence for evolution is rock solid and super strong, why pollute it with speculation about origins and not simply admit it is a mystery?

Yes the evidence for its existence, but not the evidence for how or why it actually works. Another question I could easily ask you is why does a subatomic particle have spin - what mechanism causes it to be?

So for my own clarification here, are you saying that you follow Christianity because you believe the Bible to be historically factual?

[rsb]

On a related basis, what evidence do you have that Ra (the Egyptian sun god) was not real in jewish theology.

...
Asking for evidence that something did not happen or did not exist is a rather pointless exercise.
...

That is exactly the point of this thread.

It is absolutely pointless to use weak arguments that was not some random guy named jesus claimed to be the king of the jews and was crucified.

The arguments against the OT/Torah are actually stronger, and equally undermine both jewish and christian theologies.

---

Actually no, the sum of their argument is that you can't use the 5,800 ancient Greek or the 20,000+ ancient Latin Biblical manuscripts as evidence because they "don't count" or "aren't high quality" or whatever other bullshit they use, despite the very good quality early manuscripts that do exist, etc.
Well more importantly there's direct archaeological proof, many crucifixion nails have been found - even one that was still embedded in the victim's heel bone. Also many crucified bodies have been excavated.
The Bible never mentions "three wise men", it mentions "wise men" which means two or more.
Incorrect.

Evolution is just like gravity - we know what it does, but we do not know what it is. Einstein believed that gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time, and thus postulated his theories special and general relativity. We put satellites into orbit, we send rockets to land on the moon - and don't use either of those two theories. What we use is Newtonian Mechanics, despite the fact that we know for certain it's wrong - we use it because it's "good enough".
Yes the evidence for its existence, but not the evidence for how or why it actually works. Another question I could easily ask you is why does a subatomic particle have spin - what mechanism causes it to be?

So for my own clarification here, are you saying that you follow Christianity because you believe the Bible to be historically factual?

Starting at the end and working backwards, I am not christian at all. Parts of the bible may be slightly factual, such as the existence of ancient empires, however mostly not as proven by real history.

You are completely wrong on evolution, at it is not a good comparison to gravity. We can calculate gravity to exact detail in every case we can observe. We are actually building massive and complicated machines the size of our whole solar system (earth orbit) to hope to catch some error in our precision. But we really have no basic understanding of what it is. It is really confusing.

By contrast, we have evolved animals over and over by our own intention. We have made new dog like creatures from foxes over 50 years. We have incredibly detailed evidence of many modes of evolution, ranging from gene switching, all the sex related stuff that is quite literally not overstated by saying sex is an focused alien evolution machine. We have inside the body evolution of immune responses by yet another alien evolution machine. We have observed and used artificial radioactivity to create single base mutations. The freaky part is there is so much evolution that we keep finding over and over and over again. I am not sure when if ever we will stop finding new alien like evolution machines hidden in life, or what new ones we will create. So more like a massive landscape we have explored, but which shows no visible boundaries to further exploration.

As to archeological evidence absolutely, just no execution records. Fossil is not record. Science remains are not historical writing.

As to your observations regarding historical religious writings, I basically agree with your characterization of the serious study and I think the argument is basically silly, you cant presume the validity of one theology's historical records to disprove the validity of another regarding fairy tales of prophecy and saviors or future events at all. ADDED In fact, all words are fundamentally meaningless, in my version of the Buddhist philosophy. You are actually just seeing me, relating metaphors and and parables about my existence in the universe, and somehow we babble these nonsense words similarly without fully understanding how our brains work.

Regarding spin, no I can't explain it at all, it is simply a new observable that some math approximates, and it is quite simply beyond our older and larger observable universe. Trying to use flatland like parables about it fundamentally misses the point, that we only have limited observables, and we know it exists, and correlates to certain math, and that is really all we know. I look forward to new observables like proton decay and monopole particles. All observations of it are also clouded by another effect, which is that electrons are not points, they are more like fluffy clouds. They don't have a probability of being in many places, they actually are in many places at once and only change to a new cloud like form when interacting with other things. And both things are like nothing in the larger more historically observed universe, no mater how many parables and metaphors I use.