A simple challenge for atheists

[downbeatplumb]

[SteveII]

If you want to study up on the census question in Luke, this guy makes a documented case for the apparent discrepancy.
http://www.comereason.org/roman-census.asp

[FatAndFaithless]

If you want to study up on the census question in Luke, this guy makes a documented case for the apparent discrepancy.
http://www.comereason.org/roman-census.asp

Try a better source, please. The tagline of that site is literally "Convincing Christianity".

[Crossless2.0]

SteveII, I'm still curious to know why you don't apply your loose standards to evidence to writings outside your religious tradition. If the nonsense in the NT gets a pass from you, why not the miracle claims in the Quran, or the Gita, or the Book of Mormon? You don't get to say, "Well, that's all bullshit and false religion" because you've already thrown out any standard of rational discrimination that might be of use. Special pleading doesn't cut it around here. Save that shit for the rubes at your adult Sunday School lesson.

[Esquilax]

If you want to study up on the census question in Luke, this guy makes a documented case for the apparent discrepancy.
http://www.comereason.org/roman-census.asp

Gee, I wonder if a website which has a statement of beliefs affirming their presupposition that the bible is completely accurate, before they even start writing, might be biased in some way...

[SteelCurtain]

[Tonus]

Right? Even if we take the most liberal timeframes of these gospels being written, we would still be doing the equivalent of trusting someone's parent's eyewitness accounts about James Dean's life, followers, and death 60 years ago---then making a religion out of it where every word of it is literal truth.

And without the ease of researching his life that one would have in the modern era. Most likely any writings about people who had been dead for decades would have been based on stories passed down orally and perhaps a few written pieces. In other words, the Gospel of James Dean would be written by someone who never saw any of his work and interviewed the sons and daughters of people who'd read a few articles about him.

[Losty]

Woah :o

I got 42 kudoses in just 2 posts in this thread. The kudos whore in me thanks you for creating this thread, Bob. The rest of me isn't as sure.

[SteveII]

In the Bronze and Iron Age LEB was 26 years

The most commonly used measure of life expectancy is life expectancy at age zero, that is, at birth (LEB), which can be defined in two ways: while cohort LEB is the mean length of life of an actual birth cohort (all individuals born a given year) and can be computed only for cohorts that were born many decades ago, so that all their members died, period LEB is the mean length of life of a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed since birth until death of all their members to the mortality rates observed at a given year

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

From the same article, if someone lived to age 10, then the average increased to 45-47. That means for every age 10-20 death, people were living 70 to 80 years.

[FatAndFaithless]

Holy fucking math, batman.