how about levitation and bilocation, two miracles he's supposed to have done.

From wiki:

Have you ever seen Chris Angel?

I think you're making my point. If you want to limit all of Jesus' miracles to parlour tricks you won't get argument from me.

What are you considering "lore" here? Are you considering the historic documents of the early church fathers "lore?"

I am talking about one specific miracle, the resurrection. As far as the water into wine and such, I would probably agree. But then you would have to admit at least that Jesus was the greatest and first magician ever!

or maybe the people who wrote about him just exaggerated a little.

Can someone copy and paste my earlier post so Jib actually has to respond to it and be intellectually honest instead of just ignoring posts he has no answers to

...<awaits reply>...

Which historically reliable documents confirm this?

ok, but answer or no answer tend to be equally explanatory.

i found this even more fascinating:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-rele...om-1144745.htm

if you can turn a minor flooding into a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_myth ...

This 'would you die for a lie' argument really needs to stop being repeated. Firstly, it ignores all martyrs for other religions. Secondly, the assertion that 'nobody would die for a lie' is nothing more than that - an assertion. I am sure there have been people throughout history who have died for what they knew was a lie. Thirdly, even if they would not have died for a lie, this is not evidence that Jesus was who he said he was. It is evidence that they believe he was who he said he was. And fourthly, as much as Jib would like you to believe, we do not have strong evidence that these martyrdoms actually occurred.

Jib, I want to ask this again because I feel it is very important in understanding why this argument fails; let us get rid of the timeline and the hearsay issues - if you saw somebody die, and then saw that person walking around a few days later, can you honestly say that you think the most reasonable explanation is that that person was resurrected?

the Haleys comet people all drank the poison kool aid, they were all willing to die for what they believed, so that means what they believed is less likely to be bull****?

So basically you're arguing the stronger someone, or a group of people, believe something the more likely it is to be true in reality? That is a stunning piece of idiocy

err... no

this ftw

also,

if you heard that somebody died, and then that somebody else, whom you don't know, saw that person walking around a few days later, can you honestly say that you think the most reasonable explanation is that that person was resurrected?

or

if you read in ancient manuscripts that somebody died, and that others saw that person walking around a few days later, but they had no way of verifying if the person actually truly died that day, or any way of verifying if it was truly that same person that they saw previously, and knowing that mystical stories and fabrications ran rampant during the time these stories that you believe in originated, can you honestly say that you think the most reasonable explanation is that that person was resurrected?

He is risen. God Bless you guys. nh gl

this just pwns the Bible

Are you a deist? just curious

no, I believe in God, or rather I know god is real, I just don't trust the imaginations personification.

Two different groups here. Heaven's Gate & Jonestown. But yeah mass suicide happens.

I no longer have you on ignore. But as I have said before until you start to give me respect (as many of the other atheists here have despite wildly disagreeing with me) I do not see it to be fruitful to converse with you.

There are some good questions here that I will get to, just have some stuff to do this morning (like trying to make money to pay my bills )

I haven't read the rest of the thread yet so apologies if this has already been addressed. I just wanted to comment as I was reading this.

The thing that struck me here, which applies very much to religion, is that intuition is quite often wrong. Theists are fond of talking about things like "emotional logic" or "feeling something is right" (and I'm lumping intuition into this area)... in the real world, when this stuff is tested, we learn that feelings/intuition and "emotional logic" are pretty unreliable. I think its important to stress this since its the answer we're given quite often as justification for beliefs.

First - charlatons are successful precisely because people rely on feelings, intuition and emotional logic. The difference (and we see it here on this forum all the time) is that followers of religion 'A' use their 'feelings' to know the truth... which happens to be their religion. They dismiss followers of religion 'B' who also rely on the same emotional logic. This alone should make bells go off that this is not a good method of determining the truth! Yet... relying on the "Faith" or "emotional" argument allows people to rest comfortable in the beliefs they have without applying those beliefs to any scrutiny. They can rest comfortably knowing they are right and everyone else is wrong because they feel good about it or their intuition tells them so. (again... the same way the followers of other beliefs approach it)


Again... no offense, people do this all over the world, come to radically different conclusions for believing things that don't without scrutiny more then they feel good and right about their beliefs... logic and science be damned.

plenty of atheists are spiritual. Let's not confuse spirituality with a belief in a particular religion or even a belief in a god(s)

Further to my other posts on this topic, do we need to look further for evidence that people make up religions from scratch and are still able to get followers than looking at Mormonism and Joseph Smith. We KNOW to an exceptionally high degree of confidence that he plain made up the Book of Abraham, which I understand to be a part of their doctrine.

We KNOW that people make up religious texts. It doesn't happen often, but it happens regularly enough.

Also, if we know that there were thousands of mystery religions around the time of Christ, then we know that people were making stuff up all over the place back then.

Humans have wonderful imaginations, and we are attracted to tales of wonder. Seen in this light, the story of the resurrection makes much more sense, doesn't it?

this is horrible logic. How many thousands (millions?) of people have been martyrs to there causes? Just because people are willing to die for a belief has no bearing on the validity of the belief.

If your logic was meaningful, you would have to give credit to the Heaven's Gate cult... since 39 of them killed themselves for their belief.

In any war, there are people who die because they believe in their cause.
In many religions, people die people of their beliefs. They can't all be right.

This is another horrible, horrible standard of evidence that we've seen on this forum many, many times. It makes me sad that it is continually offered up and bestowed significant meaning while ignoring the fact that people die for their radically different beliefs all the time. The fact that Christians have died for their beliefs means nothing. Look around today... Muslims are blowing themselves up with bombs for their beliefs. Does that make them more true?