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Why I am non-religious

RAMOSS said:
When someone resorts to "MIRACLE" to provide support of something, then all rationality is thrown out the window, because anything can be claims without support, and then proclaimed 'miracle'. It might be comforting to someone who already believes, but as a tool to demonstrate the truth of the claim, it is sadly lacking.
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What kind of evidence would be sufficient to prove a miracle to you? Especially a miracle from the ancient world?
 
zyzygy said:
Read your bible
“For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds. Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.“ (Matthew 16: 27, 28)

As for the impossible test you believe in the impossibility of a dead man coming back to mine.
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What happens immediately in the next chapter?
 
zyzygy said:
There are no miracles. That is wishful thinking.
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I'm glad to see that you've realized the impossibility of the test that you've set up.

So, how do you know that miracles are impossible?
 
Quag said:
If they actually though he was dead why would they document that he wasnt?
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Why wouldn't the Romans make that claim instead of persecuting the Christians?
 
phattonez said:
You should reword that, because it's obviously not true.
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Yes it is. Historians only considered the stories about the Trojan War to be true once they found Troy.
 
phattonez said:
Right, I can't envision you now going on a rant trying to disprove the existence of Socrates.
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I don't have to disprove anything. I only have to wait for advocates to demonstrate their claims are true.
 
zyzygy said:
It's called blind faith. If somebody has it fair enough, that is their business but they have no evidence.
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I don't think it's fair enough. I think people with blind faith are idiots and need to be called out on it. It doesn't matter what that blind faith is in, bad ideas are bad no matter how strongly the believer believes.
 
phattonez said:
Why wouldn't the Romans make that claim instead of persecuting the Christians?
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Again what religions did the Romans try to debunk?
Why would the? To what end?
 
Tim the plumber said:
The resurection of Osiris was confirmed by not only his wife(and she would surely know) but the fact that he sired a son after death and that he was witnessed by the whole kingdom of Egypt being back on the throne after he had died!

How much evidence do you want?
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Didn't you present this Osiris as a myth? Then why try to say it's "evidence"? Which is it?

What year was Osiris' resurrection? Who recorded it? What's the oldest document detailing it?
 
Cephus said:
Yes it is. Historians only considered the stories about the Trojan War to be true once they found Troy.
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Even though there wasn't evidence for it in the 18th century, it still had happened factually, whether or not historians believed it to be true.
 
Cephus said:
You're still talking about 700 years. Are you still missing the point?
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The point is that in the more than 1000 years that Muslims held the Holy Land, they couldn't find one document of someone contesting the crucifixion, resurrection, or anything? What, were the Muslims in on the con too?
 
Quag said:
Again what religions did the Romans try to debunk?
Why would the? To what end?
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What other religion made Rome look so bad?
 
RAMOSS said:
When someone resorts to "MIRACLE" to provide support of something, then all rationality is thrown out the window...
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You see, this is the type of drivel you wolf down all the time. Science has never proven that God and the supernatural do not and cannot exist. Your anti-supernatural bias isn't founded on fact or science.
 
Logicman said:
You see, this is the type of drivel you wolf down all the time. Science has never proven that God and the supernatural do not and cannot exist. Your anti-supernatural bias isn't founded on fact or science.
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It is.
 
phattonez said:
Even though there wasn't evidence for it in the 18th century, it still had happened factually, whether or not historians believed it to be true.
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Yes, but historians would have been acting irresponsibly had they believed in something without any actual evidence to back it up. That's how science works. Evidence first, then belief.
 
phattonez said:
The point is that in the more than 1000 years that Muslims held the Holy Land, they couldn't find one document of someone contesting the crucifixion, resurrection, or anything? What, were the Muslims in on the con too?
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Of course they couldn't find something that may have been destroyed centuries before they even arrived. Are you dense?
 
"These are just some of the reasons why we cannot trust extraordinary reports from that time without excellent evidence, which we do not have in the case of the physical resurrection of Jesus. For on the same quality of evidence we have reports of talking dogs, flying wizards, magical statues, and monsters springing from trees. Can you imagine a movement today claiming that a soldier in World War Two rose physically from the dead, but when you asked for proof all they offered you were a mere handful of anonymous religious tracts written in the 1980's? Would it be even remotely reasonable to believe such a thing on so feeble a proof? "

Which brings us to the second point: it seems distinctly possible, if not definite, that the original Christians did not in fact believe in a physical resurrection (meaning a resurrection of his corpse), but that Jesus was taken up to heaven and given a new body--a more perfect, spiritual body--and then "the risen Jesus" was seen in visions and dreams, just like the vision Stephen has before he dies, and which Paul has on the road to Damascus. Visions of gods were not at all unusual, a cultural commonplace in those days, well documented by Robin Lane Fox in his excellent book Pagans and Christians. But whatever their cause, if this is how Christianity actually started, it means that the resurrection story told in the Gospels, of a Jesus risen in the flesh, does not represent what the original disciples believed, but was made up generations later. So even if they did die for their beliefs, they did not die for the belief that Jesus was physically resurrected from the grave.

That the original Christians believed in a spiritual resurrection is hinted at in many strange features of the Gospel accounts of the appearances of Jesus after death, which may be survivals of an original mystical tradition later corrupted by the growing legend of a bodily resurrection, such as a Jesus that they do not recognize, or who vanishes into thin air. But more importantly, it is also suggested by the letters of Paul, our earliest source of information on any of the details of the original Christian beliefs. For Paul never mentions or quotes any of the Gospels, so it seems clear that they were not written in his lifetime. This is supported by internal evidence that suggests all the Gospels were written around or after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., well after Paul's last surviving letter, which was written around the year 58.

Yet Paul never mentions Jesus having been resurrected in the flesh. He never mentions empty tombs, physical appearances, or the ascension of Jesus into heaven afterward (i.e. when Paul mentions the ascension, he never ties it to appearances in this way, and never distinguishes it from the resurrection event itself).


https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html
 
So we start with Mark. It is little known among the laity, but in fact the ending of Mark, everything after verse 16:8, does not actually exist in the earliest versions of that Gospel that survive. It was added some time late in the 2nd century or even later. Before that, as far as we can tell, Mark ended at verse 16:8. But that means his Gospel ended only with an empty tomb, and a pronouncement by a mysterious young man that Jesus would be seen in Galilee--nothing is said of how he would be seen. This was clearly unsatisfactory for the growing powerful arm of the Church a century later, which had staked its claim on a physical resurrection, against competing segments of the Church usually collectively referred to as the Gnostics (though not always accurately). So an ending was added that quickly pinned some physical appearances of Jesus onto the story, and for good measure put in the mouth of Christ rabid condemnations of those who didn't believe it. But when we consider the original story, it supports the notion that the original belief was of a spiritual rather than a physical event. The empty tomb for Mark was likely meant to be a symbol, not a historical reality, but even if he was repeating what was told him as true, it was not unusual in the ancient world for the bodies of heroes who became gods to vanish from this world: being deified entailed being taken up into heaven, as happened to men as diverse as Hercules and Apollonius of Tyana, and Mark's story of an empty tomb would simply represent that expectation.

A decade or two passes, and then Matthew appears. As this Gospel tells it, there was a vast earthquake, and instead of a mere boy standing around beside an already-opened tomb, an angel--blazing like lightning--descended from the sky and paralyzed two guards that happened to be there, rolled away the stone single handedly before several witnesses--and then announced that Jesus will appear in Galilee. Obviously we are seeing a clear case of legendary embellishment of the otherwise simple story in Mark. Then in Matthew a report is given (similar to what was later added to Mark), where, contrary to the angel's announcement, Jesus immediately meets the women that attended to his grave and repeats what the angel said. Matthew is careful to add a hint that this was a physical Jesus, having the women grovel and grab his feet as he speaks.

https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html
 
Then, maybe a little later still, Luke appears, and suddenly what was a vague and perhaps symbolic allusion to an ascension in Mark has now become a bodily appearance, complete with a dramatic reenactment of Peter rushing to the tomb and seeing the empty death shroud for himself. As happened in Matthew, other details have grown. The one young man of Mark, which became a flying angel in Matthew, in this account has suddenly become two men, this time not merely in white, but in dazzling raiment. And to make the new story even more suspicious as a doctrinal invention, Jesus goes out of his way to say he is not a vision, and proves it by asking the Disciples to touch him, and then by eating a fish. And though both Mark and Matthew said the visions would happen in Galilee, Luke changes the story, and places this particular experience in the more populous and prestigious Jerusalem.

Finally along comes John, perhaps after another decade or more. Now the legend has grown full flower, and instead of one boy, or two men, or one angel, now we have two angels at the empty tomb. And outdoing Luke in style, John has Jesus prove he is solid by showing his wounds, and breathing on people, and even obliging the Doubting Thomas by letting him put his fingers into the very wounds themselves. Like Luke, the most grandiose appearances to the Disciples happen in Jerusalem, not Galilee as Mark originally claimed. In all, John devotes more space and detail than either Luke or Matthew to demonstrations of the physicality of the resurrection, details nowhere present or even implied in Mark. It is obvious that John is trying very hard to create proof that the resurrection was the physical raising of a corpse, and at the end of a steady growth of fable, he takes license to make up a lot of details.

We have no primary sources on what was going on in the forty years of the Church between Paul in the year 58 and Clement of Rome in the year 95, and Paul tells us almost nothing about what happened in the beginning. We only conjecture that the Gospels were written between Paul and Clement, though they may have been written even ten or twenty years later still. But what I suspect happened is something like this: Jesus died, was buried, and then in a vision or dream appeared to one or more of his Disciples, convincing them he had ascended to heaven, marking the beginning of the fast-approaching End Times as the first to be raised, and then what began in the simple story of Mark as a symbolic allusion to an ascended Christ soon to reveal himself in visions from heaven, in time led some Christians to believe that the resurrection was a physical rising of a corpse. Then they heard or came up with increasingly elaborate stories proving themselves right. Overzealous people often add details and color to a story they've been told without even thinking about it, and as the story passed from each to the next more detail and elaboration was added, securing the notion of a physical resurrection in popular imagination and belief.
 
phattonez said:
What other religion made Rome look so bad?
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When Rome started to persecute Christians, they were at worst a minor annoyance. Rome followed its tried and true tactics. Why would they change them? Did they have actual oracles that were telling them if they didnt debunk Christianity their religion woudl be overthrown and replaced?
I mean seriously you are looking at this with modern eyes, modern values and modern ideas, using a knowledge of how history turned out to come up with what YOU personally think would have been the best course of action for Rome, a course of action that was never ever used or even cosnidered by them before.

The idea that Rome would have tried to debunk the ressurection is absurd. Heck if they actually thought of doimg that they could have dug up ANY corpse and say it was Jesus, There was NOBODY that could dispute their claims

Now do you have any actual evidence the ressurection was real?
 
Logicman said:
You see, this is the type of drivel you wolf down all the time. Science has never proven that God and the supernatural do not and cannot exist. Your anti-supernatural bias isn't founded on fact or science.
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Religion has never proven or even provided 1 single piece of evidence that their supernatural beliefs are true.
 
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