I'm sick and tired of this.. please be advised: the following is a rant!

[Minimalist]

Also, let's say I believe cows are "holy." Does that mean I should do what they say?! Moooo!

It would make you a hindu. Between them not eating cows and muslims not eating pork the sub-continent is a pretty safe place for livestock.

I guess you really have to watch where you step, though.

[Lizzle]

Also, let's say I believe cows are "holy." Does that mean I should do what they say?! Moooo!

It would make you a hindu. Between them not eating cows and muslims not eating pork the sub-continent is a pretty safe place for livestock.

I guess you really have to watch where you step, though.

Exactly.

[Gilligan]

If Jesus had schizophrenia with delusions, why did the first Christians die slow and horrible deaths for something they would have KNOWN to be a lie (Virgin birth, sinless life of Jesus, His death and resurrection)? People will die for what they think is true but really isn't. But no one will do so for what they know is a lie, including the disciples.

Why would the ones who died have known? In the first century gods were everywhere, unsophisticated people believed every one of them. Men are said to be gods by official doctrine. Caesar and Augustus were both deemed to really be gods by imperial policy, would the gullible find it hard to believe that another from some exotic eastern fringes of the world was also a man who is a god? Imperial Rome was also a most cosmopolitan place. Cults of all sorts from all parts of the empire, death cults, resurrection cults, cults of local deities from the east and west, foreign deities granted elevated status by association with roman deities, foreign deities granded respect because they have particular traits that cater to particular emotional needs, permeat the lower reaches of the entire society to ensnare the gullible, the insecure, the wishthinking, and down right foolish.

Given 1st century sophistication of truth finding, only those who lived within perhaps 1 life time of 1st century of 1AD could reasonably have gone to the origin of the myth and pieced together what had happened to a obscure preacher of no import in his own life time. At the beginning of most religions and cults, when the cult was still on the fringes, most of the converts would have been the uneducated, the uncultured, the impressionable, or the emotionally or psychologically troubled elements of society. Would they have bothered to check if the straw they think they grasped was based on reality? And in the 20th and 21st centuries, how many people have died for what are patently rediculous lies? Heaven's gate? Jim Jones? Branch Davidians? And how many of those would have become heroic martyers had circumstances existed to catapult one of these to the status of religion?

Only once a critical mass of hysteria has been achieved, could slightly more skeptical and educated people be gradually entrained into the mess. By the time increasing amount of skepticism would have been needed to defy prevelent conventional "wisdom" and verify the basis, the resources available for an ancient to check the real life history of some long dead preacher, obscure in his own life time, would have been gone.

They would have known because they would have had first hand knowledge of whether it was true or a lie. It would not have been hearsay. If the disciples stole the body, they OBVIOUSLY would have known. If the Jews or Romans did so, they would have displayed the body around Jerusalem in order to prove Jesus didn't rise from the dead, and Christianity would have died on the spot. And the early Christians would not have been willing to be tortured and died if either scenario happened, because they would have KNOWN the resurrection didn't happen.

[Anomalocaris]

It is not very hard to find a small handful, say a dozen, devoted nuts who are genuinely capable of believing anything about a guru and do anything, say anything, go to any lengths to follow what they might conceive to be the will and bidding of their guru. The way to harden the resolve of these sort of nuts, to push them to vouch for ever more extreme positions, is to threaten to kill them for it. There are similar holyman at the beginning of many other religions, Islam, for example, who also apparently saw supernatural acts on the part of their gurus with their own very eager eyes that convinced, without much resistance, them of direct link between their guru and god.

Even now, followers of Fulunggong cult in china, for example, endure torture in chinese detention, some are said to have died under the treatment, and refuse to denounce their guru, an ex- chinese army NCO who claims access to divine truth through an imaginary divine wheel of the way and the law. And they too disseminated outrageous tales of their guru which they claim to have witnesses, like raising the dead, healing the terminally ill with touch, levitating objects, sight that see through mountains much less walls, reading thoughts, etc, and showed proven, it is said, willingness to sacraficed themselves in devotion to their guru. Hitler, mao and Kim, who didn't even explicitly claim to be gods, had more than just a small handful of such die hard devotees claiming to witness evidence oft divine selection, and show willingness to die for this selectee. Christians have the intellectual integrity to elevate the founder and saints of other religions to equal status as their Jesus based on the same willingness of some to die in false testimony?

How long did it take from resurrection to ascension? 40 days? How long will it take for Jesus's corpse to completely decompose to unidentifiable bones under the hot judean sun, thus unable to contradict and embarasse the ascension story? a month? 40 days?

Get it through your head, Jesus's disciples were few and they were nobody in the society. Jesus was a minor criminal the Romans have executed. RThe Romans were done with this nuisance, which didn't bother them and they only took on at the behest of local secular and religious authority anyway. besides the apostles any other following of jesus might have had probably melted away with the crucifixion, and the romans were probably well pleased with the result, to the degree they cared. The few diehard Jesus followers would not have been on roman radar screens during the time jesus's dead body rotted to nothing, and for many years afterwards. So no, the Romans would not be expected to have paraded the rotting putrefying corpse of Jesus - not the only one they executed about that time - around in hot Judean sun to dignify it with notice, and upset local Jewish customs, increase the tension with the locals, just to refute a few out there nuts of Jesus.

The local secular and religious authority also would not have violated Jewish custom to desecrate the dead body just to spite a small group of nobody. Jesus was what annoyed them. As far as they were concerned the head of the snake of this annoyance has been cut off by the Romans, the body will wither and die of it's own accord.

[little_monkey]

I didn't even know that part was a myth. Thanks for enlightening me, seriously.

It's amazing the kind of lies that have been perpetrating throughout the centuries, and dying for Jesus is just another blatant one.

[Minimalist]

They would have known because they would have had first hand knowledge of whether it was true or a lie.

Except there is no indication that any of it ever happened. That is the fly in the ointment of your bullshit religion. The gospel of Mark was an anonymous story written between 40 and 100 years later and the follow up stories of Matthew and Luke were embellishments of it. "John" is even later and a pile of miraculous crap obviously written after the thing got going. Not only would the lapse of time argue against "Mark" being written by an eye-witness ( and eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable to begin with) but the Great Revolt resulted in countless deaths among that very population. In the first century life expectancy was not what it is today: 40 was old. Add that to the fact that "Mark" does not claim to have been written by an eyewitness and what you are left with is a load of xtian shit that has been concocted over the centuries.

We live in an age of almost instant and limitless communication and we have 25% of Americans who think Obama is a muslim born in Kenya. As Chuck noted above, in antiquity things were a lot simpler but people were just as stupid.

[Gilligan]

If you're an atheist, how do you know about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ?

[Minimalist]

Because I've read your bullshit in order to refute kooks like you![/quote]

[Anomalocaris]

If you're an atheist, how do you know about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ?

Because you guys tried for 19 centuries to shove it down the throat of everyone you can get your hands on by hook and crook, and because many Atheist believe knowledge is knowledge, even if its about a sickening fantasy.

[Lizzle]

If you're an atheist, how do you know about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ?

It is because we're educated in regards to beliefs of different religious groups. It doesn't mean that we believe in them.

Atheists don't hate "god" (how can you hate something you don't believe in?), nor are many of us uneducated on the religious front. It is often quite the contrary.

Gilligan, are you educated in regards to other religious groups? I also want to ask you another question - when and why do you believe in god? (Purely out of curiosity here).