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If you wanted to convert an atheist who wanted to believe....
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There's nothing necessarily wrong with the first step, the problem is when the entire focus is on the first step and there is an unspoken and incorrect assumption that once you accept the first step, you must accept every other step along the way. So I'm asking you to skip over the first step for the moment and give the rest of your arguments.
Sorry, what unspoken assumption is this? I spoke about finding truth. Despite the fact that you are speaking to a Christian in the Christianity forum in a thread about God, I don't believe I have made any assumptions (or declarations) that you must accept everything that is said to you. And while I accept that in a postmodern world the word "truth" is practically meaningless to some (maybe you do or don't subscribe to such a notion), I never stated or implied that you had to follow any given thought. This said, I'm certainly am not ashamed to say that I believe in objective intrinsic truths, and Christianity just so happens to be one of them.
Still, by way of clarification, if you hypothetically accept that there is a creator God, then it is up to you to decide which one it is. If you are willing to listen to the Christian message and later find you get something from it then that is fantastic. However, if you choose not to engage with Christianity then so be it.
Oh, I'm sorryThen why are you posting in the thread? If you don't want to that's fine. My request wasn't aimed directly at you
Is that because I'm unconvinceable or because theists generally give flawed arguments that that wouldn't actually convince anyone who was thinking critically do you think?
"Unconvinceable"?
Anyway, as you're making a statement and not asking a question, I think I'll forgo attempting to directly answer it. If you think you have cornered the market on critical thinking then that is just fine. But it does seem to confirm my position.0 -
Wasn't that what the executions were for?
Besides you have never explained why the Jews had the body in the first place?
According to one of the accounts, Joseph of Arimathea - a member of the Sanhedrin and secret follower of Jesus - requested the body of Jesus from Pilate. This request was granted and that is how he got the body. This would have been a bold step for Joseph of Arimathea to take because up until that point the fact that he was a follower of Jesus was kept secret from the Sanhedrin with the possible exception of Nicodemus.Wasn't he executed by the Romans?
YesWere Jewish leaders in the habit of protecting the dead bodies of executed cult leaders on the off chance that a month from now his followers would start preaching that he risen?
No. But then the Jews were not protecting his body were they? They would have been furious with Joseph of Arimathea for requesting Jesus' body. Which is why they prevailed upon Pilate to put a guard at the tomb, not because they believe that Jesus was going to rise from the dead but because they feared that the disciples would steal His body and claim that He had.In fact is there any historical record that the Jewish leaders have ever done this with any other cult leader who was executed?
Not to the best of my knowledge but like I said above they didn't do it in the case for Jesus either.Yes but that implies the high sight on the part of the Jewish leaders to know that this is what the Christians would be claiming.
Of course. They even said it to Pilate that Jesus claimed that He would rise form the dead after three days and wanted to have a guard at the tomb in case the disciples steal the body and start claiming that He rose.Seriously, you are claiming that it is strange that the Jewish leaders didn't mummify Jesus on the off chance that weeks or months or years from his dead a bunch of his followers would start rumors that he had risen and was talking to them?
What is the ball park estimate for the time from his execution to the time that the Jewish leaders actually knew this is what the Christians were saying? A week? A month? A year? A decade?
A day actually. "The next day, (after the crucifixion) the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. 63"Sir," they said, "we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I will rise again.'" Matthew 27:62-63Alien mind control ... you aren't bias against alien mind control are you Soul Winner?
Well yeah, but who is claiming alien mind control?What a bizarre statement. Thinking resurrections are highly implausible is being biased and illogical....ok then, yes I am highly bias against resurrections. Utterly biased against them. I tend to get that way with things that break all know laws of nature.
That was my point. You are allowing this bias to dictate your reasoning instead of logically deducing that what was reported to have happened didn't happen.
You reasoning goes like this:
A) Miracles don't happen.
Therefore miracles didn't happen.
C) So anybody who says that they do happen are liars or kidders because...
A) Miracles don't happen.
You start out with the a-priori assumption that 'miracles don't happen' which means that the explanation for what the gospel writers report as happening must be one that is not supernatural in nature, because 'miracles don't happen', which means that you will accept any explanation at all except the one that the writers themselves tell you is the actually explanation. Is that what you call logical deduction?I would remind you though that you are coming from this with apparent strong bias against liars and a whole host other natural phenomena I can imagine. Which kinda shows where you are coming from.
Eh no actually I'm not. All I'm saying is that the best explanation for the empty tomb, the genuine belief of the disciples that Jesus was the Son of God and the post mortem appearances of Jesus, is that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Just because it is the best explanation for all three facts is not proof that He rose but it is strong evidence that He rose. Unless you can explain those facts better with logical deduction instead of bias against the supernatural then I'm all ears. But remember your explanation must explain all three at the same time, not just one, for instance saying that the disciples stole the body would explain the empty tomb but it doesn't explain the genuine belief that the disciples had in Jesus being the Son of God because stealing the body would make them liars and knowers that what the were professing was false hence they couldn't have been genuine believers in Jesus, but the evidence strongly suggest that they were genuine believers in Jesus as the Son of God.What is the point of saying the resurrection demonstrates Jesus was who he claimed he was when you engineer the resurrection as the only acceptable explanation?
The resurrection is what Christianity is based on. If that did not happen as a fact of history then Christianity is false. Even if you don't believe that it actually happened you cannot deny that it explains all the facts that are logically deduced from the evidence.Of course if you already accept that Jesus was the Son of God and God did resurrect him from the dead then that becomes the most plausible explanation. But you can't then say this story demonstrates that which you have already accepted as justifying the story.
The only way that you can accept that He rose from the dead as a fact of history is to study the facts in evidence. When you do you are brought to a crossroad. Where these disciples making up a lie or where they truly reporting what they experienced and saw? Placing the records side by side and cross checking them with a fine tooth comb you will inevitably come to an either or conclusion, similar to what you wold do in Jury duty. Draw a conclusion based on the available evidence. Most people who bother to look at the evidence invariably come away convinced that they were not lying, so if they were not lying then that means He rose from the dead as reported, and that His prior claims are also true, which means that He lives and is the Lord of Glory who we all must personally deal with, whether we like it or not.The explanation that best fits the facts is that He rose if you are determined to make that the explanation and ignore all others because they don't suit your religious beliefs.
Please give me one explanation that explains all the facts like the resurrection.I can think of thousands of explanations, none of them involve the supernatural, that could explain how the story of an executed cult leader coming back to life could be circulating ancient Palestine and be written down.
But if the resurrection explanation is not the right one, then the reporters who claimed to be eyewitnesses of Jesus alive after His crucifixion were liars, which means that they were not genuine believers in Him as the Son of God. But what evidence is there for this conclusion? There is none. I get the impression that you have some sort of mental blockage which renders you incapable of understanding anything that does not fit in with your naturalistic worldview.But you dismiss all of them as being "unlikely" ....
Yes because they don't explain 'ALL' the facts. Give me one that explains 'ALL' the facts and I will shut up, I promise. Or give me the historical evidence that shows that the facts themselves are wrong. That the tomb wasn't empty, that the disciples didn't genuinely believe that Jesus was the Son of God and that they didn't see post mortem appearances of Jesus alive and well. All these things can be individually explained with individual naturalistic explanations but not one of these naturalistic explanations can explain all of the facts at the same time like the way the resurrection can. So the simplest of explantions works out to be the best, where's Occam's razor when you need it?You should win a prize with that logic there Soul Winner.
I have to conclusively prove that your god does not exist before I can say that it is highly unlikely and implausible that he caused Jesus to rise from the dead?
Surely then you have to conclusively prove that Alien Space Mice don't exist before you can say it is highly unlikely that they rose Jesus from the dead.
*feel free to substitute "Alien Space Mice" with any other supernatural event or being you care to imagine.
Again no. The claim is that God raised Jesus from the dead, not that Jesus rose naturally from the dead. Which not only claims that Jesus rose from the dead but it also assumes that God exists. If the claim was that Jesus just rose from the dead naturally then that is a different issue. But we must stick to what the New Testament writers are actually claiming though. So until it can be conclusively proven that God doesn't exist, only then can it be said that He didn't raise Jesus from the dead. To be able to raise people from the dead one must exist in order to do so. So the the logic still applies, you must prove God doesn't exist in order to prove that He didn't raised Jesus from the dead. Or you could look at the evidence again and draw a logical conclusion from that which can adequately explain everything.Because that is the classic religious story, the conversion, the reason you (the rest of us) need the religion!! A religious story makes little sense if you start with a perfectly fine person and then end with a perfectly fine person.
I hate religion, don't need it at all, can live quite a happy life without it, but when I become convinced that God raised Jesus from the dead then what else would you have me to do? I'm convinced so sorry for not willingly ignoring what to me has been made clear.Why does John Travolta go on about being an actor who couldn't make it before he found Scientology? Because he is selling Scientology to the rest of us, just as the New Testament authors were selling Christianity. Heck Travolta might even believe this stuff, in which case he is simply a cog in the machine.
How did the New Testament authors profit from selling Christianity? They lost family, friends, jobs and property, they were ostracized form society, ridiculed, laughed at and spat on, flayed to death with whips, pierced with swords, crucified, dragged to death, hanged and so on and you want to draw analogies with them and the multi millionaire John Travolta/Scientology?Of course they would have.
If they had left these points out what effect do you think the propaganda would have had?
2000 years later we have people like you saying it must be true because look how Jesus changed these people! How could he have changed these people if it wasn't true!
You Soul Winner are the point of these story elements! They convinced you didn't they?
Yes they did but not because they were changed for the better, that is just incidental and can be used to show that what happened was powerful enough to change their lives.
If they were lying about what they saw then they did not know that what they were saying was going to become the worldwide movement that it is today, so their motivation for telling the story would have been very different, which means that they would not have included the embarrassing elements into the record in the first place.
If they were actually lying then the only motive for it was because they had followed Jesus for over three years and with the fact that He was now dead made them look really silly, so now they must make up as story that makes them look good somehow, but then they come along and do a stupid thing adding these embarrassing sketches about themselves into the narrative. If they were really lying then it just doesn't make sense to me that they wold include this kind of embarrassment, they are trying to save face remember, or do you think their motivation was based on something else other than saving face?So 2 then, at the most. Hardly a lot now is it?
Can we see these eyewitness accounts for ourselves that the authors had access too?
Let me guess ...
Two is good. If it was just one then we would be in trouble but we have two directly from eyewitnesses and then we have two by two separate sources who were able to interview and write down the testimony of other eye whitenesses. Mark with Peter for example. Unless you can show how they contradict each other on the primary details of their report in their accounts then we can leave them in as valid sources. But even without any of the Gospel records we still have Paul's letters which are dated even earlier than the Gospels and from these letters alone we can paint a very vivid picture of what the earliest Christians believed about Jesus. You will not find anything like this in any other ancient writings, writings which are accepted without a whimper as being valid and reliable.Please explain how a man comes back to life using a plausible, natural, non-supernatural, explanation.
Without supernatural intervention I would submit that merely natural resurrection from the dead is absolutely impossible.If you can't I'm going to use "alien space mice" to explain why someone would suffer a hideous death for holding to a lie they know is a lie. Or maybe some killer virus spread through bees ... who knows, I might just let my mind run wild ...
Well I can't so 'Alien Space Mice' it is.Only because you are perfectly happy to ignore every and all other possible explanations, from the natural and plausible to the utterly supernatural and ridiculous (a group I count the resurrection in)
So I think a far more important question than why am I bias to resurrections is why are you biases to all other supernatural explanations?
Because I believe the original explanation is the best explanation. The Alien Space Mice explanation doesn't make sense, not because I don't believe in them but because that is not what is claimed. If that was what was claimed then I would have to be convinced that they exist before I could believe that they raised someone from the dead.
The claim that the writers of the New Testament make is that the God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead, a God their people worshiped and served for centuries. And to turn away from Him with a blasphemous false doctrine made you an apostate an accursed in their religion. Which means if the resurrection claim was false then these disciples did knowingly, and willingly forsook everything they held dear and openly expressed worship for a Man who was publicly humiliated and condemned as a heretical blasphemer by their own strict religion just so they could also suffer a hideous death.
The only difference between you and me is that you believe that that is a better explanation than the resurrection explanation and I don't. You accept any explanation as being more plausible than the resurrection explanation because you start out with an a-priori assumption that God does not exist, and that miracles don't happen. Obviously any other explanation will be accepted by you, the thing is my mind is still open to the possibility that God exists and therefore the only explanation that makes sense of the facts is that God actually did raise Jesus from the dead.0 -
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The Mad Hatter wrote: »'[H]e was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens!' -Herman Melville
Yes, sailors on whaling ships were renowned for the sincerity of their Christian piety and for their deep Christian fellowship.
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