MERGED: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part 1) & (Part 2)

[His_Majesty]

No no, you don't get to just bullshit your way through this. I'm not going to let this pass: you believe inanimate matter came to life and suddenly began to think and talk to each other. Adam and Eve were created from dirt and a rib, aka: inanimate matter/ And they really did just suddenly start talking and thinking, they didn't have billions of years to scaffold up to that point.

If what you said above is synonymous with my belief of life only coming from life, and consciousness only coming from consciousness, then yeah, I believe it.

So your own beliefs are patently more ridiculous than even the most simplified version of abiogenesis, but it gets worse for you too, because even straw-biogenesis doesn't involve a magical space wizard who can survive outside of reality doing magic to turn inanimate matter living.

So it makes more sense to you to believe that a mindless and blind process was able to create consciousness and vision? It couldn't think, but it created the mind...and it couldn't see, but it created vision?

If believing in that is the price of atheism, I will stick with my intelligent design theory.

And one could easily remind you that it is you who believes that all that inanimate matter came into being from nothing and magic too.

Actually, I believe it all came from something....God. I just can't get myself to believe that life can come from nonliving material...not just any life, but intelligent life. Can't do it.

Your own beliefs are far more ridiculous than the ones you're making fun of, so where exactly do you get off acting so condescending to everyone else? You don't get to pretend your religion is somehow more well founded a belief just because you've decided it's okay to pretend the answer involves an intentional agent performing a golem spell

Golem spell? You believe that nature performed a golem spell, too!!!! Your Mother nature is apparently more powerful than my god, because your mother nature was able to do it without thinking, or seeing. My God actually had to think and see to create...your's didn't.

; that belief is ridiculous, and there's no evidence for it.

You say that shit as if there is evidence for abiogenesis

It doesn't suddenly become rational just because it superficially corresponds with what we can confirm to be true about human creations and design. It still involves fucking magic from a genie.

Right...when I see or hear about magic, I expect there to exist a magician at the beginning/end of it. Since when have you seen/heard of a magic trick performed without the magician...makes a lot of since, doesn't it?

I've never seen life from nonliving material, or intelligence from non-intelligence.

So is your fucking god.

Looks like someone is upset. I understand, naturalism is very, very tough to defend.

... Assuming we take the bronze age verbal telephone game the early christians played to be an accurate source for these scattered, non-contemporaneous vague references to be accurate. My contention is that we have no reason to do so, you don't get to respond to me by just pretending that it is anyway.

Bullshit. It can't be a telephone game if we have testimony from someone that is right at the source of the message.

Have you ever played the telephone game? Now try doing that over unsourced magic claims, from uneducated folk, across vast distances. Written records at least have the benefit of being objective; you're relying on word of mouth, which is notorious for not only mutation, but inaccuracy, and you're trying to say that is clarity?

Bullshit. The Jews were people of oral tradition...traditions, speeches, sermons, songs, oracles, etc....all of these things were passed down from generation to generation in a time when there were no telephones, tape recorders, camcorders, television, internet, social media, etc. These things were carefully preserved and sacred...and Paul still remembered the creed that was given to him word for word, 20-25 years after he received it.

So keep on trying, boss man. Keep on with the feeble objections...you set'em up, and I'll knock'em down.

Are you that unaware of your own religion? Do you not know of the numerous interpretations of Revelations that place the antichrist as a deceiver styling himself after the messiah and performing great feats to lead the world astray? Your own fucking religion already has ideas about how one can discredit a messianic figure. Not to mention all the stuff about magic and witchcraft; all they'd have to do is claim that the source of his power isn't divine.

According to my own fucking religion, the messiah has already come...and we know and expect there to be clones of the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords...but we worship the innovator, not the imitators.

"This man is a servant of the devil! Yes, he may heal the sick and feed the hungry, but he does so to sway you! The source of his power is satanic, and though he appears beneficent now, his true desires are for you to turn away from god!"

Was that so fucking hard?

When the going its tough, change the context. We were first talking about Jesus and his situation with the miracles and stuff..now you are changing the context from that and putting it in the context of the antichrist.

So apparent, and so sad.

Here's that reference I don't have to back up my position. You really should, you know, think for a minute before you make declarative statements about what others do and do not have, you ignorant bullshit artist.

I can post material that back up my position...so what?

Do you deny the inquisitions, crusades and commands to kill those of other religions from christianity? They're pretty well established, historically. Not to mention, as I fucking said to begin with, I wasn't just talking about straight up violence, but missionary work, indoctrination, and so on. I know strawmen appeal to you for whatever reason, but when I literally say what I meant in the very next paragraph, and you quote that paragraph too, it's not like you can pretend not to know what I said. Everyone knows that you're lying.

I understand that you are not used to be corrected when you spew your false shit...I understand...but, you've been wrong and corrected on so many other occasions, we may as well go ahead and keep the party going...first off all, I mentioned the fact that Christianity spread fairly quick back then and is now the #1 religion in the world with just over 2 billion followers...

You then came up with some nonsense about how the only reason it spread so fast was because of the crusades, violence, and blah blah blah...

I had to then inform you that the Crusades was stuff that happened hundreds of years after Christianity began and that Christianity had already had its fair share of followers before that, so you can't use the Crusades as a reason why Christianity is where it is today (quantity-wise) if it was already in the millions before the crusades.

And now above you completely ignore what I said by going on some irrelevant tirade yet again about how violent the crusades was...

sigh

People, people.

I posted the previous paragraph you responded to here so that everyone else can see it too. Does anyone else know what this lunatic is going on about, calling this the genetic fallacy? Do you even know what the genetic fallacy is, H_M?

Yes, and I call it how I see it.

---

What happens now?

I told her she didn't have to get smart and all she had to do was say "I don't know".

[Cyberman]

Is all this supposed to have some relevance to the "resurrection of Jesus Christ", or are we chasing the herrings again?

[Minimalist]

So it makes more sense to you to believe that a mindless and blind process was able to create consciousness and vision? It couldn't think, but it created the mind...and it couldn't see, but it created vision?

If believing in that is the price of atheism, I will stick with my intelligent design theory.

You are falling into the Argument from Personal Incredulity which, briefly, means that you are too fucking stupid to understand the concepts involved so you invent your own bullshit.

We already figured that out about you.

The formation of organic molecules is beyond you but a 'god' playing in the fucking dirt makes sense to you.

You are a typical jesus-freak asshole and are summarily dismissed as such.

[The Valkyrie]

Is all this supposed to have some relevance to the "resurrection of Jesus Christ", or are we chasing the herrings again?

Only the red ones.

[Cyberman]

Yum, my favourite.

[His_Majesty]

Is all this supposed to have some relevance to the "resurrection of Jesus Christ", or are we chasing the herrings again?

I'd like to move on but apparently there is still some pockets of resistance that needs to be taken care of.

[The Grand Nudger]

A lot of rambling going on in there. Not sure how you drew the conclusion that those accounts have competing views.

But.....you...should....be. It's your "case for christ". I shouldn't have to bring this to your attention since you deigned to include it, but..

....like so-

Pliny the younger was the nephew of Pliny the Elder - a military officer (and famous author in his own right) who probably ended his career sometime during the waning years of Nero's reign. You might remember him, supposedly he persecuted christians (so sayeth tacitus and suetonius) to some hilarious degree. Pliny the Younger (and his uncle) were well educated members of the aristocracy and so between them both a number of important positions were held. P the Y was particularly accomplished - he's essentially a case study in roman social strata (due to his being so well documented), who wound up the governor of a place in modern day Turkey.

In case any of this has flown over your head lets sum this up, in reference to the text you hope to use to establish the existence of some "jesus christ".

A well educated and well placed man who was the nephew of a senior military officer during the reign of Nero - who lived and governed in modern day turkey (after a successful legal career all over the region)- didn't seem to know a godamned thing about the christians - and had certainly never been to a trial of a single one of them- who are supposedly all the way to Rome by the time of his writing, being persecuted (and having been persecuted)- and just generally causing trouble all over the place with their well attested and famous ideology and messiah.

But it gets deeper, what was Trajans response to Pliny regarding christians? Calm and tolerant jurisprudence. He told him not to seek them out, he told him not to condemn them on the finger pointing of others, and he told Pliny that if they so much as paid token to Rome all would be dismissed.

-and you'll get every fucking ounce of that from your own source......that you clearly never read.

Any questions?

[dyresand]

Is all this supposed to have some relevance to the "resurrection of Jesus Christ", or are we chasing the herrings again?

I'd like to move on but apparently there is still some pockets of resistance that needs to be taken care of.

Still chasing herrings. we live in a modern day world with modern day ways of thinking of things sadly religion is a way of thinking that needs to go and get upgraded.

[Minimalist]

Pliny the Elder - a military officer (and famous author in his own right) who probably ended his career sometime during the waning years of Nero's reign.

Pliny the Elder died during the 79AD eruption of Vesuvius. He was commander of the Roman fleet at the naval base of Miseunum on the Bay of Naples at the time and tried to rescue a friend at Stabiae. He didn't make it.

Anyway, he was still going strong right up until the time he met an angry volcano!

[Esquilax]

If what you said above is synonymous with my belief of life only coming from life, and consciousness only coming from consciousness, then yeah, I believe it.

But you don't believe life always comes from life, or consciousness from consciousness; you believe god didn't come from something else that was alive, and he's conscious without coming from another consciousness.

So it makes more sense to you to believe that a mindless and blind process was able to create consciousness and vision? It couldn't think, but it created the mind...and it couldn't see, but it created vision?

It doesn't matter what makes sense to me, or to you, or to anyone. Like Min said, that's the argument from personal incredulity, but what you believe makes sense isn't the arbiter of reality. It doesn't make sense that light can be both a wave and a particle, but the double slit experiment still exists. What intuitively makes sense to an untrained single person is not an accurate reflection of reality.

What matters is what the evidence supports, and we simply have no evidence anywhere of an intelligent designer. We do have evidence that nature exists, and that evolution happens, so the balance of probability favors the latter over the former, right now.

If believing in that is the price of atheism, I will stick with my intelligent design theory.

Oh, it's not. It's a false dichotomy made up by assholes like you so they can peddle the argument from personal incredulity to other dullards like themselves. I'm glad to see you're both a shill for it and a dupe of it yourself; your credibility could always go lower than it already is.

Actually, I believe it all came from something....God.

... Who itself came from nothing. Don't forget to finish the sentence next time, conman.

I just can't get myself to believe that life can come from nonliving material...not just any life, but intelligent life. Can't do it.

Argument from personal incredulity again. Since when were you the dictator of what is and isn't possible? And if you aren't, then who the fuck cares what you can or can't make sense of? Astrophysics doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I don't have the arrogance to proclaim that therefore astrophysics doesn't exist. When did you stop trying to learn things, by the way? And what was the motivation that got you to stop and decide that anything you don't understand after that point just doesn't exist? Let me guess: it was religion, right?

Could you imagine if you behaved this way earlier on in your life? Like say, if you arbitrarily decided to stop learning and decided you understood everything that exists when you were a toddler? You'd be sitting here telling us that toilets must not exist because you can't get yourself to believe that there's a special kind of chair filled with water that makes poop disappear.

See how ineffective your argument is now? "I don't understand it, therefore it doesn't exist" is not even a cogent thought, unless you actually think that you understand everything that exists. And if you're not going to claim that, then what basis do you have for arguing that something can't be true because you don't get it?

Golem spell? You believe that nature performed a golem spell, too!!!! Your Mother nature is apparently more powerful than my god, because your mother nature was able to do it without thinking, or seeing. My God actually had to think and see to create...your's didn't.

No, because my position is that we don't know how life formed on earth just yet. Unlike you, I haven't thoughtlessly subscribed to the nonsensical blitherings of bronze age goat herders. Of the two of us, only one has the ridiculous view that golem spells are real, and it's not me.

You say that shit as if there is evidence for abiogenesis

Miller-Urey experiments, John Oros' experiments. That is literally one hundred percent more evidence for abiogenesis than there is for intelligent design, even though the experiments themselves only resolve the initial building blocks of life.

Now, instead of just sneering like a jackass while everyone else presents the scientific evidence you keep saying is so important, how about you present some yourself for the first fucking time?

Right...when I see or hear about magic, I expect there to exist a magician at the beginning/end of it. Since when have you seen/heard of a magic trick performed without the magician...makes a lot of since, doesn't it?

Never seen a mirage, or optical illusion?

Which is, of course, beside the point that you're making an apriori assumption that magic was, indeed, involved in the development of life on earth.

I've never seen life from nonliving material, or intelligence from non-intelligence.

Every single baby that was ever born started out as non-living atoms before the formation of a zygote- the biological matter for sperm and eggs didn't just appear, after all- and every single developing fetus started out non-intelligent before the brain and nervous system develops. Child development is a natural process, and we see it happen all the time; your contention is that it's only possible due to magic creation spells.

Demonstrate this, or admit that you have no justification for believing that it is true.

Looks like someone is upset. I understand, naturalism is very, very tough to defend.

I'm not a naturalist. I'm a rationalist, and it's not my fault that you and the entire history of theological endeavor has failed so miserably at providing a single indication for anything divine.

Bullshit. It can't be a telephone game if we have testimony from someone that is right at the source of the message.

But you don't, because you don't know what the original source was. Do keep up.

Bullshit. The Jews were people of oral tradition...traditions, speeches, sermons, songs, oracles, etc....all of these things were passed down from generation to generation in a time when there were no telephones, tape recorders, camcorders, television, internet, social media, etc. These things were carefully preserved and sacred...and Paul still remembered the creed that was given to him word for word, 20-25 years after he received it.

And if you trace the lineage of oral traditions even today, when we have technology to record stuff like our urban myths and so on, what do you find? Mutations, divergences, and area specific iterations of various myths and stories. We can barely keep a story straight today, and here you are baselessly asserting that they somehow got it perfect back when there wasn't the ability to record them in even half the clarity we can today. Are you saying every single Jew had perfect recall? And if not, isn't it feasible, even likely, that the content of their traditions would change over time as certain segments were misremembered, or fell out of favor, or were lost to time?

Don't just assert what is convenient for your argument again: actually think and justify it if you're gonna say it, or at least say something realistic instead.

So keep on trying, boss man. Keep on with the feeble objections...you set'em up, and I'll knock'em down.

Bravado is the last bastion of those with nothing worthwhile to say.

According to my own fucking religion, the messiah has already come...and we know and expect there to be clones of the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords...but we worship the innovator, not the imitators.

So you're aware of the exact things a person could say to attempt to discredit a putative messiah... you just pretended not to know earlier to be an asshole.

When the going its tough, change the context. We were first talking about Jesus and his situation with the miracles and stuff..now you are changing the context from that and putting it in the context of the antichrist.

So apparent, and so sad.

I'm not changing the context at all. I said originally that what we'd expect would be Jewish denouncement of Jesus, not total silence like you claimed. Your response was that there was no possible way to spin the accounts of Jesus' actions as anything other than positive, meaning an attempt at denouncing Jesus would only backfire on the Jews who tried. I responded to that by providing a context in which the Jews could denounce the man without doing so, proving you wrong... and because you simply cannot admit that you're wrong about anything, you deflect.

Either that, or you're incapable of remembering a conversation thread that's three posts long and exhaustively archived in quotes.

I can post material that back up my position...so what?

You haven't once, in all the time you've been on this board, which means you probably don't have any. And you just asserted that I had no references for my claim, which I did, so you're wrong. That's what.

I understand that you are not used to be corrected when you spew your false shit...I understand...but, you've been wrong and corrected on so many other occasions, we may as well go ahead and keep the party going...first off all, I mentioned the fact that Christianity spread fairly quick back then and is now the #1 religion in the world with just over 2 billion followers...

Bravado isn't that effective as a deflection when everyone else has already caught on to your arrogant nonsense.

You then came up with some nonsense about how the only reason it spread so fast was because of the crusades, violence, and blah blah blah...

Oh, so now you're lying? Interesting.

Your claim was that your entire religion was the legacy of just one man, which is something everyone else can look up, since it's here in this thread. My response was to remind you of all the religious violence, missionary work, preaching... you know, all the religious things that maybe, just maybe, contributed to the spread of christianity a bit. Ever since then, your responses have either been total strawmans, or yet further demonstration that you're unable to read.

I had to then inform you that the Crusades was stuff that happened hundreds of years after Christianity began and that Christianity had already had its fair share of followers before that, so you can't use the Crusades as a reason why Christianity is where it is today (quantity-wise) if it was already in the millions before the crusades.

Yes, you either missed the point or strawmanned me, even after being corrected twice now.

And now above you completely ignore what I said by going on some irrelevant tirade yet again about how violent the crusades was...

sigh

People, people.

It's interesting that you even quoted my second attempt to correct you, but apparently didn't get the message and barreled on with your misrepresentation of what I said, despite an explicit response saying that's not what I'm saying.

So, is it that you're lying, or not reading the blatant, blunt corrections I'm writing? Which is it, H_M? Asshole, or idiot? Arrogant applies either way, but you're either lying about what I'm saying, or too stupid to read an obvious correction, starting with "I wasn't just talking about straight up violence," in the very paragraph you quoted up there.

Yes, and I call it how I see it.

How so? Explain what the genetic fallacy is, and how my quote falls into it.

Oh, and if you can't? If you attempt to dodge with another snide, arrogant remark? It'll just be evidence that you don't know what it is, and are talking out your ass.