Most People Insist That Two Separate Being Can Never Be One

[The Grand Nudger]

I think the last question has a pretty solid answer. Their lives weren't shorter and nastier because they told the story, they told the story because their lives were shorter and nastier. Whether we assume the story describes events or apprehensions of narrators in 0AD or 50AD - either one is squarely in the "getting our asses handed to us" territory.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It's pretty much universally agreed that Paul was writing in the mid 50s, so some of the dating here is...daring. Anyone who thinks that 25 years after the event is an issue should watch an episode of Rhod Gilbert's Growing Pains (example).

What evidence, exactly?
Boru

Thank you for asking.
Everyone has their own life, and so it's going to vary from person to person. People have had experiences that give more than enough evidence for them. My point to KerimF was that faith can be based on evidence (often in part), so he doesn't need evidence-free faith. The disciples certainly had enough first hand knowledge to make evidence-free faith impossible.

For me, it would be a mixture of personal evidence, experiences of those close to me, and the yet-to-be-solved question of how Christianity got going with the set of beliefs it did.

The return of God to Israel was supposed to be this great event, announcing the start of the Kingdom of God, the end of death, and forgiveness for God's people. Why did a group of Jews suddenly think that the death of their leader was all that? Why did they commit the rest of their now inevitably shorter and nastier lives to telling people about it?

Very eloquent, but not what I asked you. I’ll try again:

What evidence, exactly?

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

The “evidence” seems to be more of a supposition than evidence.  The supposition seems to be if people bothered telling it when it might seem, superficially and from 2000 years remove, to not be to their immediate material advantage,  then it must be true.

I am not sure verbal smoke screen, however thick, constitute eloquence.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Too many contortions to rationalize the fictions.

[Vicki Q]

Very eloquent, but not what I asked you. I’ll try again:
What evidence, exactly?
Boru

I think I must be missing something very obvious, because I thought I had covered your question. Could you unpack it a little further? Thanks.

Taking a guess at what you mean:

Personal experiences (things that convince 'me' because I have lived them).

Contemporary experiences (the lists are very long and break down into (a) experiences of people known personally, and (b) public evidence such as  this and  this .)

Historical evidence. The challenge above of explaining Early Christianity comes in two parts- (a) What motivated the resurrection Christians to talk about the Jesus events, especially given that large bald men with baseball bats would be presenting a broken-bones argument to challenging Christianity (b) why Early Christianity from Judaism took the form it did (see my previous post).

Some years ago I was planning a post about Jesus' resurrection. Randomly, I had a strange thought- what if, what if, my mother, dead a month previously, were to knock on my door right then. She cooked a meal for me, gave in her inimitable writing the lost recipe for beef mince, told me in conversation true stuff I couldn't possibly know myself, and all this was witnessed by a number of others in the house.

At some point I would ask her “Just before you died, you said you were curious, not scared, to find out what was beyond That Door. What is there there?”

Her answer would doubtless change my life, and what I did from then on.

This is what I see in the Gospels. A bunch of random people who have had experiences so strange, so personally undeniable, that they had to get them out there, regardless of the cost to themselves.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Personal experiences may or may not qualify as evidence. I have no doubt that you've had religious experiences, but they don't necessarily point to your attendant religious beliefs being true. By way of example, if I were to take a dose of hallucinogens and saw winged mermaids flying out of my bathtub, that's an actual experience that doesn't prove the existence of mermaids, winged or otherwise. The same applies to 'contemporary' experiences.

Your historical evidence isn't actually evidence, either. As Anom pointed out earlier, saying, 'That so-and-so did such-and-such proves that x is true', isn't evidence but speculation and supposition. I can think of plenty of reasons why the early Christians behaved as they did - politics, economics, fanaticism - that don't require the claims of Christianity to be true.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

It's a particularly threadbare rationalization when it comes to the contents of new magic book. Acts is a prime example of motivated storytelling.

[Vicki Q]

Personal experiences may or may not qualify as evidence. I have no doubt that you've had religious experiences, but they don't necessarily point to your attendant religious beliefs being true. By way of example, if I were to take a dose of hallucinogens and saw winged mermaids flying out of my bathtub, that's an actual experience that doesn't prove the existence of mermaids, winged or otherwise. The same applies to 'contemporary' experiences.

Your historical evidence isn't actually evidence, either. As Anom pointed out earlier, saying, 'That so-and-so did such-and-such proves that x is true', isn't evidence but speculation and supposition. I can think of plenty of reasons why the early Christians behaved as they did - politics, economics, fanaticism - that don't require the claims of Christianity to be true.

Boru

Yes, but I know I've taken hallucinogens beforehand, and therefore don't trust the results. The thing about personal experience is that I know I'm not lying and I know the circumstances, so when it comes to belief I have nowhere to hide.

With contemporary experiences, people I have known for a long time and/or trust implicitly are going to make powerful witnesses. With public evidence, external scrutiny can be applied (e.g. Lourdes is pretty strict).

That the disciples as a group signed up for a sharply reduced lifetime of pain isn't explainable by politics or economics. Fanaticism for sure, but given that we know from history that when a wannabe Messiah died it was game over, why was Jesus' death so utterly different?

Which leads to the wider question, why would His death lead the disciples to conclude that this long awaited earth shattering event had happened- the start of the Kingdom of God/forgiveness of sins/end of death/etc/etc? Why had resurrection moved from a fringe idea to a core belief and be split in two events? Why did they conclude that God had made his long awaited return to Jerusalem?




My posting over the next few weeks will be infrequent, but I'm keen to continue...

[Deesse23]

The thing about personal experience is that I know I'm not lying

Noone will acuse you of lying when referring to personal experience.
but
You simply can be wrong in ATTRIBUTING your experience to....whatever god you like. We all are wrong, all the time.

How do you know that *insert your favourite deity here*, and nothing else, is the SOURCE of your personal epxerience?

[Fake Messiah]

That the disciples as a group signed up for a sharply reduced lifetime of pain isn't explainable by politics or economics.

Again, there is no evidence for your claim that the apostles suffered for Jesus. Not even the Bible claims that. The only source for that are legends that Christians invented during later centuries along with thousands of other martyr saints they invented who never even existed.

Here are some invented martyrs who signed up for a sharply reduced lifetime, but, in reality, they never existed:

St. Eustace (general in Emperor Trajan’s army), St. George (dragon slayer who could pray so that God destroys pagan temples and kill its priests by fire rain and earthquakes), St. Christopher (Hercules-type guy who carried child Jesus over a dangerous river), St. Alexius Of Rome (son of a Roman senator), St. Philomena (who was so beautiful and devoted to God that emperor Diocletian killed her for not wanting to marry him), St. Catherine Of Alexandria (another one that was close to the Roman emperor who killed her because he couldn't win a debate with her and then her corpse flew in the sky to Mt. Sinai where there is a church devoted on her landing site), St. Veronica (who wiped Jesus' face and healed Emperor Tiberius with it, and is now practically depicted in every church on the Stations of the Cross, although she isn't even mentioned in the Bible), and hundreds more.