The Resurrection

[joer]

[Zzyzx]

[Cephus]

A more rational explanation of the "resurrection" is, in my opinion, that "believers" and "followers" made up tales about their dead leader and that those tales were exaggerated over time before being recorded decades later and incorporated into a book centuries later.

Probably the most rational explanation is that early Christians "borrowed" attributes from the pagan religions around them at the time, most notably from the story of Attis, who supposedly died on Black Friday and was resurrected three days later each year as part of a fertility ritual. We already know that Christians "borrowed" many other elements, such as the timing of Christmas and Easter, to appeal to pagans that they wanted to convert, why is it unreasonable to think that this element of the Jesus myth wasn't likewise borrowed from the common elements of pagan religions extant at the time?

[joer]

[Zzyzx]

[joer]

Actually Zz the truth is this:

I recently(over the last few weeks) saw several Discovery Channel and PBS documentaries describing similar historical detail as presented in these stories of the Resurrection written over 75 years ago. BUT I hadn't found evidence with that same historical detail until recently.

And the question is this:

I was just wondering how others have seen the development of historical evidence surrounding details of The Resurrection in recent times. It seems as we continue to develop our historical understanding of the times of Jesus, more and more details of his life and death fall into place in terms of validity.

The rest is information relayed to us from sources that some people question and other people believe in.

So my question to people with interest in this thread is "how others have seen the development of historical evidence surrounding details of The Resurrection in recent times?" It appears from your answer and consistent with your position of destroying any belief in God or anything to do with God that you DO NOT RECOGNIZE "the development of historical evidence surrounding details of The Resurrection in recent times."

Would you say in terms of the original question posed that is a fair assessment of your position in regards to that question?

[Zzyzx]

[Cephus]

[twobitsmedia]

The question is, how do you determine just what is "truth", especially how do you do so without reason? There is nothing about the resurrection that would point to it being demonstrably and factually true so there is nothing reasonable about it not being recognized yet.

Based on your response, the question is how do you define reason? Reason does not have to be demonstratable in order to be factually true. .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason#Reason_and_logic
In western philosophy, reason has had a twofold history. On the one hand, it has been taken to be objective and so to be fixed and discoverable by dialectic, analysis or study. Such objectivity is the case in the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Alfarabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas and Hegel. In the vision of these thinkers, reason is divine or at least has divine attributes. Such an approach compelled religious philosophers--Aquinas, for example, Gilson more recently--to square reason with revelation, no easy task.

On the other hand, since the seventeenth century rationalists, reason has been taken to be a subjective faculty, or rather the unaided ability (eg., pure reason) to form concepts. For Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, the effort resulted in significant developments in mathematics. For Kant, in contrast, pure reason was shown to have the ability to form concepts (time and space) that are the conditions of experience. Kant made his argument in opposition to Hume, who denied that reason had any role to play in experience.

Discussion about reason especially concerns:

* (a) its relationship to several other related concepts: language, logic, consciousness etc,
* (b) its ability to help people decide what is true, and
* (c) its origin.

Also see practical reason and speculative reason.

The concept of reason is connected to the concept of language, as reflected in the meanings of the Greek word "logos", later to be translated by Latin "ratio" and then French "raison", from which the English word derived. As reason, rationality, and logic are all associated with the ability of the human mind to predict effects as based upon presumed causes, the word "reason" also denotes a ground or basis for a particular argument, and hence is used synonymously with the word "cause".

All you have is faith that the resurrection happened because you need it in order to hold particular religious beliefs.

I don't understand this definition of faith. Having faith in something does not make it so.

Faith, however, is just the permission we give ourselves to believe things that we have no good reason to believe, so that's not much of a reason to accept it as true.

Also, a definition I dont understand. Faith is nothing more the a conviction or belief in something that has not occurred yet. I am not even sure of how one might or (want to) have faith in the ressurrection since it is a past event.

[joer]