What if you consider arguments on Christianity and you are left with major doubt?

[rako]

Yes, people can have hallucinations, but you are claiming that a mass of people shared a collective mental vision and then mistook the vision for reality, then taught their children a hallucination was real, then their children also had these mass hallucinations. As a result of these alleged mass hallucination occurring, which are improbable, a nation adopted extremely burdensome laws. They necessarily created genealogies that are simply fabrications at some point in the lineage. Isn't that what you believe?

At what point do you believe the Jews started fabricating the genealogies, and why would their descendants go along with such an outrageous revision of their history?

It would be interesting to see you explain just how they pulled off the Red Sea con. Mass hallucination couldn't even begin to explain that one. You have to claim it was a story made up in retrospect by one generation, and their elders didn't object to the revision of their family trees and history.

Hello, Elohiym!
In my last email to you, I said that the 500 could be just having a mental vision like the Marian apparitions today, which many mainstream Christians don't believe in.

I was not talking about the Old Testament extreme miracles like God being in fire on Mount Sinai or the parting of the Red Sea. The truth is, the very ancient Old Testament legends, especially things like Noah's flood, are even harder to believe in than Jesus' resurrection. It's like talking about King Arthur or leprechauns with gold at the end of a rainbow or Santa Claus or fairies. I didn't even believe in them when I was 12 and got confirmed Protestant. The early Church fathers did not have a consensus that they were literally true either (but some church fathers believed in huge dragons).

In the story of Noah's Ark, pairs of all the world's animal species, from elephants to South American llamas walked onto the ark, and after forty days or so of God drowning the earth and killing everything else on it in about 5000-2000 BC, all the world was repopulated in a few thousand years. To accept this, one's view of reality is basically like a dream, where physics and geology are almost meaningless.

A host of questions arises:

• How and why did the animals from South America get to and on the ark? Did Noah go to collect them, or did the animals walk all the way from there to the ark because they wanted to?
• How was there enough space on the ark to fit all the animals? There are hundreds of thousands of animal species. That leaves only a few centimeters per animal.
• How was there enough fresh water and food fit on board to feed the animals? A single elephant eats a huge amount of food in one single day.
• How did the birds that are not able to swim or fly get to the islands in the south Pacific in ONLY a few thousand years?
• Did the mammals walk or swim to Australia in only a few thousand years?
• How did the trees survive? Seeds of the world's plant typically species drown after soaking for a few days. I suppose as per Noah's flood story, the plants' seeds had a special ability to survive drowning that they have since lost?

If Old Testament extreme miracle legends are being treated as real physical events and used as evidence of the resurrection, the conversation is already over. It's like using the Hindu stories of Hindu gods and their battles to prove that modern Hindu gurus work real miracles, as their witnesses claim.

 

[OCTOBER23]

rako,

Google all your questions and stop trying to fool us.

 

[rako]

Jesus did not write the story of his life that you are reading. And we don't know who did. So we don't know what the authors of these stories heard or did not hear, or what events or utterances they may have added or subtracted. In fact, we know that three of the four gospels are copies of a single common gospel that has never been found, and the author of that gospel is also unknown to us. The texts that we do have range from about 70 years after Jesus death to about 200 years after, so whoever wrote those were very likely not eye-witnesses. They were copying from other lost texts, or they were interpreting lost texts that they've read. Then the texts we do have were interpreted into other languages, and reinterpreted into yet more languages. And each of the interpreters had to develop their own understanding of the texts to put them in a new language. So there is a lot of opportunity for the various author's "spin", here, even if it's unintentional.

OK, well based on what we do have, we can say that they apparently presented it as if they were real miracles that physically occurred, not metaphors.

If what we have turned out to be definitely wrong when it comes to their presentation of the resurrection, we would have to reevaluate that.

Instead, what we have is that people in those days believed in real miracle healings, that the copies/versions we have from that era apparently claimed Jesus was one such miracle healer, and that the works from that era like Paul (40-55 AD), 2 Peter and Acts 2 (maybe from 60-100 AD), etc. presented that same conception of Jesus as a real miracle healer.

If we had sources from that time saying directly that Jesus or his healings were only metaphors, we would have a real direct basis to think otherwise.

It was much more difficult for them to grasp spiritual metaphor, so the religion settled for what it could get. And of course the Christian Church soon became a very powerful political entity that held that power based on the depth of fear and impressiveness of the promises it could manifest..
I do believe there are still a few glimpses of the real Jesus, there, and they can tell us a lot if we can spot them, and take the time to really contemplate them.
There are no "god-men". Nor did Jesus ever claim to be a god. He was simply trying to teach us that we are spiritual reflections of our divine creator (children of God) and that as such, we can find God's divine spirit within us, and we can live by that spirit (as Jesus did).

However, you do not have a concrete basis to say that Jesus did otherwise. In all the gospel traditions Jesus claimed or strongly implied he was a divine being, like when he was asked if he was God's Son and he said "I am", a reference to God's name Yahweh.

I am unaware of Jesus referring to anyone as "the" son of Man or "the" son of God. Jesus apparently claimed to have some special status in this regard. The Messiah in the ancient prophecies was presented as a semi-divine being, as it talks about "One like a Son of Man" in a heavenly context in Daniel's prophecies. This was the context.

Now you may want to counterargue that you don't believe this, and that the texts could easily have been corrupted. But regardless, that is how the texts and early Christian commentaries portrayed Him, and that's what we have to go on, as far as understanding how Jesus presented himself.

We can't just say that we like Jesus and that we don't believe he was an angelic pre-incarnate being, and that on these two foundations alone we conclude that Jesus would never have presented himself to be a miraculous, divine person of some kind.

I was raised a Catholic, and went to Catholic schools until 10th grade. Much of what I have learned about these various ways of understanding the Bible stories comes from those years in Catholic school, and from some years in a Lutheran Bible study group. You are mistaken if you think Biblical literalism and the "inerrant Bible theory" are requirements of religious Christianity. They are not.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the mainstream churches would "confirm" or baptise someone as an adult while they were openly declaring that they definitely believed that Jesus' resurrection was not physical and that Jesus' body definitely stayed dead in the ground, where his bones are probably still laying today.

I would be curious to know if I were wrong about that.

Like a lot of people, I simply can't allow myself to blindly believe in other people's religious fantasies and proclamations that deny and defy the truth of reality as I experience it. I believe that to do so is both dishonest, and mentally unhealthy. Yet at the same time, I am able to recognize the truthfulness, wisdom, and value of many of the stories in the Bible, so long as I interpret them as metaphors for the people and circumstances of my own life. So that's what I do. And the result is that I don't have to force myself to believe things that I don't believe.
I think resurrection IS the way to resolve them. But not by physically dying and coming back to life 'in heaven'. Instead, by being spiritually reborn here and now: by understanding that as the "children of God" we have God's divine spirit of love and forgiveness and kindness and generosity within us. And that if we will allow that spirit to guide our thoughts and actions, it will heal us and save us from ourselves. And it will! It's a promise that I have see and experienced manifesting in my own life!

I would like to click a reputation button for you, but I'm not a paid subscriber.
I like where you are going with this a lot. Maybe if I had tackled these kinds of issues this way when I was 12 or so and got "confirmed" I would have grown up better able to do so now, after instead spending decades in the mainstream churches being confused about the contradictions, and destructively obsessed about it for the last 7 years or so. That is, on one hand, the Churches constantly emphasise a few main ideas like Jesus' physical resurrection and unique sonship, when in fact if you divorce yourself from emotions, get a higher education, and look at the reasons pro and contra objectively it appears that these two claims were not physically real. Yet on the other hand, the Church is like a family, has beautiful history, teachings, love, and the teaching about the physical resurrection of the Co-suffering loving hero is full of hope and beauty too. I like your simpler, more relaxed way of looking at things, PureX.

 

[elohiym]

Hello, Elohiym!
In my last email to you...

In my last post to you I made some points and asked you a question. What is your response?

 

[rako]

rako,

Google all your questions and stop trying to fool us.

You don't have the answers so you tell me to search Google. It didn't happen and it's impossible unless physics and geology's laws become slush.
And since the Church and New Testament don't ask me to believe that the ancient Torah myths were real and physical, I don't have to worry about it either.

 

[elohiym]

I was not talking about the Old Testament extreme miracles like God being in fire on Mount Sinai or the parting of the Red Sea. The truth is, the very ancient Old Testament legends, especially things like Noah's flood, are even harder to believe in than Jesus' resurrection. It's like talking about King Arthur or leprechauns with gold at the end of a rainbow or Santa Claus or fairies. I didn't even believe in them when I was 12 and got confirmed Protestant.

:sigh:

The idea that a man could be God, be killed and then rise from the dead is "like talking about King Arthur or leprechauns with gold at the end of a rainbow or Santa Claus or fairies," yet here you are.

 

[rako]

In my last post to you I made some points and asked you a question. What is your response?

Your points and questions emphasized the Old Testament extreme miracles like the Torah's claim about God in a fire on Mt Sinai.
My response is what I said in the last message I gave you:
That the extreme old Testament myths are legends like King Arthur or the Hindu and viking sagas. The legends like Noah's ark are fanciful enough, and the Church and New Testament doesn't ask us to believe them, that I am not going to spend my time debating them.

 

[elohiym]

the ancient Torah myths ...

Was Moses a myth?

People descended from him, and people descended from people who knew Moses personally.

Do you realize Jews actually exist and you are implying their ancestors were mythical?

 

[rako]

:sigh:

The idea that a man could be God, be killed and then rise from the dead is "like talking about King Arthur or leprechauns with gold at the end of a rainbow or Santa Claus or fairies," yet here you are.

In Jesus' case I have some uncertainty, because of the arguments I linked to in my first post.

However, if you are right, then the next question becomes: "How and where do we move on from here?"

 

[rako]

Was Moses a myth?

People descended from him, and people descended from people who knew Moses personally.

Do you realize Jews actually exist and you are implying their ancestors were mythical?

Scholars debate whether Moses was a real figure by that name in history or whether he was an embellishment or mythical figure:
Was Moses Real? Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/10/was-moses-real

Romans said that their city was created by two brothers who were raised by wolves. Is it true?

I don't know, and I don't know if Moses was real. But I am very skeptical of the Old Testament supernatural stories like God appearing to Moses in a cloud of fire, just as I am very skeptical of the Hindu written records of battles between gods in India.

I hope you can see why the debate is already over if one of the "evidences" for Jesus' resurrection is that the ancient extreme miracles in the Torah really happened.

 

[elohiym]

Your points and questions emphasized the Old Testament extreme miracles like the Torah's claim about God in a fire on Mt Sinai.

Yes. Here is a photograph of the altar at the base of Mt. Horeb made to hold the golden calf idol. Better photographs show bull petroglyphs on the stones.

 

[elohiym]

In Jesus' case I have some uncertainty, because of the arguments I linked to in my first post.

However, if you are right, then the next question becomes: "How and where do we move on from here?"

You need to explain why the events at Mt. Sinai were surely myths like Santa Clause but you have a reason to believe the stories about Jesus are possible enough to discuss. Fair?

 

[elohiym]

Here is a photograph of scorched peak of Mt. Horeb:

Here is a picture of the temple of Mars:

 

[elohiym]

Here is the split rock at Mt. Horeb which shows evidence that water came out of it:

What are the odds of finding all these things at one site? :idunno:

 

[rako]

You need to explain why the events at Mt. Sinai were surely myths like Santa Clause but you have a reason to believe the stories about Jesus are possible enough to discuss. Fair?

Yes.
I have reasons to think that Jesus' resurrection, the pillar of fire at Sinai, and a sleigh-riding Santa Claus going down chimneys are real - people have at times said that it happened. But that reason doesn't mean that those things happened.

In order of likelihood from most to least likely, I would put it this way:
- Saint Nicholas existed
- Jesus existed
- There was a real Moses who led Israelites' ancestors
- Jesus bodily ascended
- God was in a fire with supernatural real body parts like feet and instructed Moses directly and miraculously
- somebody went down a chimney miraculously and left somebody presents at Christmas time
- Noah's ark story

 

[rako]

Here is the split rock at Mt. Horeb which shows evidence that water came out of it:

What are the odds of finding all these things at one site? :idunno:

Or the Israelites found these things, made others, and made a myth out of it.
The fire burning on top of the mountain could be made by people and then get turned into a myth centuries later.

The vikings had myths that they discovered America, and their myths said that they found Indian tribes with one foot only. For a long time many people were skeptical that the Norse found America. it turns out that it had a grain of truth. the Norse sailed to Canada, but the part of their legends about the tribe of one legged Indians we believe is a myth.

Drawing of the monopod. The vikings said this was a real race of people in America. We did not find them. Maybe in dream world monopods are real but if we try to be realistic only, they were not real and were legends.

If I am forced into an argument about whether the ancient extreme miracles in the Old Testament are real, like Noah's flood or the pillar of fire, the debate is so over for me. Everybody loses.

 

[PureX]

OK, well based on what we do have, we can say that they apparently presented it as if they were real miracles that physically occurred, not metaphors.

All stories do that. Fiction, myth, legend; they all present their "miraculous" events as if they actually, physically occurred. That doesn't mean we are expected to believe that they actually, physically occurred. But we accept them as literary devices; intended to help convey the story, or in the case of myths and legends, to help convey the ideals that these stories are meant to represent.

Instead, what we have is that people in those days believed in real miracle healings, that the copies/versions we have from that era apparently claimed Jesus was one such miracle healer, and that the works from that era like Paul (40-55 AD), 2 Peter and Acts 2 (maybe from 60-100 AD), etc. presented that same conception of Jesus as a real miracle healer.

If we had sources from that time saying directly that Jesus or his healings were only metaphors, we would have a real direct basis to think otherwise.

Because George Washington is a revered figure in recent history, legends have developed and spread over the years claiming that he never told a lie, and that he threw a dollar across the Delaware River (a half mile). In a time when people were uneducated, superstitious, and had little grasp of the limitations and processes of physics, such legends would often be taken as fact. Most people in the current United States, however, are educated and worldly enough, now, to know that these claims are untrue. But this does not take anything away from the great contributions of George Washington to the founding of this nation. It don't diminish our respect for him.

However, there are likely still a few folks here and there that do believe these legends about George Washington, because their level of intellectual sophistication remains limited to the levels equivalent of people living hundreds of years ago. So that for some people, these legends are still "true", while for others, they are metaphorical. And the legends themselves can function either way. Which is why they are presented as being factual even though most of us now know they are not. And who knows? Maybe the people who first heard these stories and wrote them down actually believed them to be factual, too.

However, you do not have a concrete basis to say that Jesus did otherwise.

We have the laws of physics. And they are astonishingly "concrete".

In all the gospel traditions Jesus claimed or strongly implied he was a divine being, like when he was asked if he was God's Son and he said "I am", a reference to God's name Yahweh.

You need to study what it means to be 'the son of' in that culture. It's very different than what it means in ours. When Jesus called himself a son of God, and more often, the "son of man", he was talking about an ideological chain of authority. Not blood relativity. He was not claiming himself to be a god. And he told people that on a number of occasions. He was claiming himself to be a human manifestation of the 'living God'.

I make sculptures. Those sculptures are physical manifestations of my mind and spirit. And this is what Jesus was trying to teach us: that we are human manifestations of God's divine mind and spirit. My sculptures are not me. And Jesus was not God. But they are OF ME, as Jesus was OF GOD. It's an important difference even if it is somewhat difficult to articulate it with words.

He also did not claim himself to be the Jew's Messiah. Others did that.

Now you may want to counterargue that you don't believe this, and that the texts could easily have been corrupted. But regardless, that is how the texts and early Christian commentaries portrayed Him, and that's what we have to go on, as far as understanding how Jesus presented himself.

I can think of no logical reason to declare the text or the men who wrote them magically inerrant. In fact, I believe that to be both dishonest and a form of idolatry.

We can't just say that we like Jesus and that we don't believe he was an angelic pre-incarnate being, and that on these two foundations alone we conclude that Jesus would never have presented himself to be a miraculous, divine person of some kind.

We can say and believe anything we want to. As many of us do. But I prefer to use logical reason, the facts of history as I know them, and as much common sense as I can muster in determining what I choose to believe about Jesus. And I can't think of any reason at all why I should have to believe what others have believed, and claimed, simply because they believed it. Can you?

I could be wrong, but I don't think the mainstream churches would "confirm" or baptise someone as an adult while they were openly declaring that they definitely believed that Jesus' resurrection was not physical and that Jesus' body definitely stayed dead in the ground, where his bones are probably still laying today.

Perhaps that's why they've had to resist logical reasoning, the evidence of history, and the use of common sense so adamantly all these centuries. And why many in the church still are.

I would like to click a reputation button for you, but I'm not a paid subscriber.

Thank you, I appreciate the thought.

I like where you are going with this a lot. Maybe if I had tackled these kinds of issues this way when I was 12 or so and got "confirmed" I would have grown up better able to do so now, after instead spending decades in the mainstream churches being confused about the contradictions, and destructively obsessed about it for the last 7 years or so. That is, on one hand, the Churches constantly emphasise a few main ideas like Jesus' physical resurrection and unique sonship, when in fact if you divorce yourself from emotions, get a higher education, and look at the reasons pro and contra objectively it appears that these two claims were not physically real.

It is sad that the Church based their presumption of divine authority on such superstitions, instead of being honest and just saying they didn't know. But at the time it was established those superstitions were very powerful tools for controlling people, and unfortunately the "Christian Church" has been a huge political entity for nearly all of it's existence. And that ability to control lots of people through superstitions and fears and promises of salvation was it's stock in trade. They turned the ideals of spiritual healing and salvation into hammers and nails, and used them to crucify the people they ruled over (when they were supposed to be serving them).

Yet on the other hand, the Church is like a family, has beautiful history, teachings, love, and the teaching about the physical resurrection of the Co-suffering loving hero is full of hope and beauty too. I like your simpler, more relaxed way of looking at things, PureX.

We are all both good and evil. Often at the same time.

 

[elohiym]

Yes.
I have reasons to think that Jesus' resurrection, the pillar of fire at Sinai, and a sleigh-riding Santa Claus going down chimneys are real - people have at times said that it happened. But that reason doesn't mean that those things happened.

In order of likelihood from most to least likely, I would put it this way:
- Saint Nicholas existed
- Jesus existed
- There was a real Moses who led Israelites' ancestors
- Jesus bodily ascended
- God was in a fire with supernatural real body parts like feet and instructed Moses directly and miraculously
- somebody went down a chimney miraculously and left somebody presents at Christmas time
- Noah's ark story

:sigh:

Where does God existing rank on that list?

Please explain why you believe God exists.

 

[elohiym]

Or the Israelites found these things, made others, and made a myth out of it.

You ignore the law of parsimony.

 

[rako]

You ignore the law of parsimony.

I'm making a mistake if I keep arguing on this thread whether extreme miracle stories like Noah getting the world's animals on board are true. Is that really one of your strongest arguments? That you can prove that the fantastic sounding stories the Torah says happened were real, and that based on this proof the resurrection was real?

Parsimony/Occam's Razor?
We found elements in Saudi desert matching the story - an altar of rocks, a burned mountain top, a divided stone, so therefore the easiest, most credible way to explain it is that the ancient stories of God being in a mountain fire where people could see he had real feet are historically real?

If a kid finds presents at the bottom of a chimney and it says "from Santa Claus", does that mean.... never mind.

Sorry I shouldn't go on. Like PureX said, it's not mentally healthy to get boxed into these kinds of mental constructs.