achilles12604 wrote:Atheists please explain to me how you can continually claim there is no evidence when the theists here continually put forth the following:
Happy to.
1) The Gospels - These are the
claim. We know they were written no earlier than 70ce. We know Mark was the first one and that the others very obviously build from Mark. We know they make nonsensical claims which are obviously false and rely heavily on fallacious reasoning such as appeals to popular opinion and appeals to belief.
2) Paul's letters - Which? The ones we believe Paul wrote or the ones we're pretty sure the early church invented? Paul's letters are woefully ignorant of Jesus' alleged life. They don't mention entering Jerusalem. They don't mention any wise men. They don't talk about Mary or Joseph. They don't mention the Sermon on the Mount. There's nothing there of any real substance and very little suggesting Paul thought of Jesus as being a human who'd recently lived. If we look at the
Diachne and Athenagoras'
A Plea for the Christians we see the same thing: 2nd century Christians who are blithely unconcerned about a physical man-god.
3) Jospehus - The bit mentioning Jesus has been blatantly doctored by the church. What most Christians don't know or don't want to talk about is that Josephus mentions a whole slew of Jesuses (Jesi?) including but not limited to:
- Jesus ben Sirach
Jesus ben Pandira
Jesus ben Ananias
Jesus ben Saphat
Jesus ben Gamala
Jesus ben Thebuth
Jesus ben Stada
This bunch of rabble rousing rabbis all perform deeds very similar to certain deeds allegedly performed by the gospel Jesus. They form the evidence for some of the legends the gospel Jesus is based on.
If I were a Christian, I'd do my best to quietly sweep Josephus under the rug as he gives us a glimpse into where Christianity's real origins come from and demonstrates clearly the early church's eagerness to change history / lie.
4) Letters of church Fathers - Which? Oh... you mean the people who had doctrinal axes to grind and had a vested interest in helping to invent a new religion? Those church fathers? Again, like the gospels, these are
claims, not evidence.
5) First cause - Please. I'll let Richard Dawkins demolish this one:
- most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things.
6) Moral argument - No evidence here, either. Our morality changes over time. If there were a god who established absolute morality, it wouldn't change at all. We also have had numerous arguments on here which establish a darwinian context for our morality.
Furthermore, even if we did have a magic moral compass, this in no way ties to a Christian god. We could all be following the morality given to us by Zues or Vishnu.
7) Nazarenes - What about them?
8) Lime stone outside of Nazareth - What about it?
And many others. - EDIT: Like Tacitus? The Roman historian who lived far too late to speak with anyone who could have allegedly seen Jesus, never reveals his sources and calls Christianity a superstition? Tacitus is one of the first in a long line of people to see Christians and assume there was a Christ... but he doesn't even do that. He refers to Christianity as a superstition. What's funny about apologists arguments on Tacitus is Christians will talk about how accurate an historian Tacitus was and how if he wrote it, then it must have been true... but if they conveniently ignore Tacitus referring to their religion as a superstition. It's as though *gasp* apologists only believe what they want to believe!
Perhaps we are tripping over the defintion of evidence.
Indeed, you Christians are. You're using unsupported claims in an attempt to support other unsupported claims. This is a little like stating:
- "Magic dragons are real. Evidence? I have detected them on my magic dragon detector!"
The intellectually honest inquiry here is to say, "How do you know your magic dragon detector works?" This is a second level of inquiry where we challenge the evidence presented to us.
Christians don't do this.
They trundle out more claims and create special pleadings to allow these claims to be treated as evidence.
They do this because most have been indoctrinated since toddlerhood to believe the claims of Christianity... not only to believe them, but to believe holding them as true with a lack of evidence is meritous. It is the world's second most effective marketing technique (just behind Islam).
So... no, Achilles. There is no valid evidence for Christianity. Plenty of fallacies, though... and unsupported claims trying to support other unsupported claims.
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Sources:
www.jesusneverexisted.com
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins ... index.html
