Nature's Laws

[robvalue]

Thing is, even if it's all true, I wouldn't care. I wouldn't change how I act. I have nothing to gain by pointing out all the problems with Christianity and other religions, except to try and help people critically examine their beliefs.

[Freedom4me]

Jesus could read the OT and just act in ways he thought fulfilled prophecies. Or else most of his life is fictional, which is more likely, and the writers wanted him to appear to fulfil prophecies. You see, the gospels are just claims about what happened. We have next to no way to verify any of it beside mundane details. You're assuming everything in the gospels actually happened.

Does it make sense to you that many of the apostles willingly died for their faith in Jesus if it was so easy for Jesus to "fulfill" various prophecies simply by doing what He though the OT texts indicated that He must do in order to fulfill the OT Scriptures?

[robvalue]

If it happened at all as written, then yes. People can die rather than admit lies. But maybe they thought it was true.

http://youtu.be/bHEiBvB-Xu0

Even then, if they believed all that stuff, it doesn't make it actually true.

None of the gospels were written by eye witnesses, did you know that? And they most likely just made a lot of it up.

[Crossless2.0]

As paraphrased on Wikipedia, a fellow by the name of John JF Sawyer says, of that passage of Isaiah:

"Isaiah seems always to have had a prominent place in Jewish Bible use, and it is probable that Jesus himself was deeply influenced by Isaiah, and that he took it as his destiny to fulfill Isaiah ("a man of suffering, and familiar with pain... he bore the sin of many"). Thus many of the Isaiah passages that are familiar to Christians gained their popularity not directly from Isaiah but from the use of them by Jesus and the early Christian authors..."

And even that's assuming a lot that hasn't been shown...

But Jesus was tortured to death by way of crucifixion--a Roman form of torture and execution.  I don't think that Jesus (if He were not God in the flesh) could have known that crucifixion would be the method that the Jewish leaders would be using to kill Him.

Hasn't it occurred to you that Jesus' alleged prescience might have been attributed to him after the fact by his shattered and disappointed followers who had to make sense of an otherwise senseless tragedy?  And why must Jesus have been 'God in the flesh' to foresee a bad end for one such as him, who allegedly butted heads with the Temple leaders and by extension the Roman authorities?

"What, you mean that if the Romans think I'm preaching sedition I might be crucified?!?  You're kidding!"

"No, Jesus, I'm not kidding -- moron."

[SteelCurtain]

Freedom4me, the forum will automatically add quote tags for you if you hit "reply" or "quote," you seem to be adding your own every time, which is complicating the problem.

[robvalue]

The thing you have to appreciate, from our point of view, is that jesus is a character in a story.

I could similarly ask, "Would Boromir have died to protect Frodo if the ring of power and Sauron weren't actually real?"

You have to already accept the story is actually true before the question even makes sense. There is no good reason to think Jesus, as written, existed. Sure, he was probably based on someone around that time, but most of his life story is very likely fictional. It's like saying Harry Potter is real because he's based on a guy called Harry I know who goes to a school and thought he was a wizard.

[Freedom4me]

Where do our individual rights come from?

We assign them.

But are individual rights assigned arbitrarily?  If that is how it works, then how and why would the founders of our nation (or any nation) go about deciding on the way to form a "more just" society for all the citizens in the country?  There has to be some standard for determining what is more/less just before we can "assign" individual rights.  The founders of the U.S. believed that our basic individual rights are intrinsic to our humanity.  No one can legitimately deprive us our rights without due process.

[Cyberman]

What we call our rights have evolved as societies evolved.

[Freedom4me]

The thing you have to appreciate, from our point of view, is that jesus is a character in a story.

I could similarly ask, "Would Boromir have died to protect Frodo if the ring of power and Sauron weren't actually real?"

You have to already accept the story is actually true before the question even makes sense. There is no good reason to think Jesus, as written, existed. Sure, he was probably based on someone around that time, but most of his life story is very likely fictional. It's like saying Harry Potter is real because he's based on a guy called Harry I know who goes to a school and thought he was a wizard.

The story has not yet ended.  There are still followers of Jesus who are willing to accept death for their faith.  The ISIS terror group generally grants Christians and others the chance to renounce their faith and become Muslim.  So it is convert or die.  This story simply will not end!  

[SteelCurtain]

We assign them.

But are individual rights assigned arbitrarily?  If that is how it works, then how and why would the founders of our nation (or any nation) go about deciding on the way to form a "more just" society for all the citizens in the country?  There has to be some standard for determining what is more/less just before we can "assign" individual rights.  The founders of the U.S. believed that our basic individual rights are intrinsic to our humanity.  No one can legitimately deprive us our rights without due process.

No, they are assigned through collective human experience. Don't like having a monarchy decide your religion for you? Let's move somewhere else and take the good things we learned from that government and apply some new ones.

The founders of the U.S. believed that black people were a lesser species, and decided that a black man counted as only 3/5 of a person. What does that say about your idea of 'intrinsic human value?'