but that title would be a lie, while this one…
Um. What about it is “academically ridiculous”? Education was largely constrained to the wealthy elites of ancient societies. People without education are more likely to believe ideas which are demonstrably false - for instance, if a person is well-informed on genetics and why any human organism requires an egg and a sperm to be created (chromosomes and all that), he won’t believe in something as ridiculous as immaculate conception, or spontaneous insemination, or whatever. Guess what religion this hinges on.
There’s christians who’ve written pages upon pages trying to disprove the Buddha ever existed, so afaic, Jesus can be subjected to the same.
Cisco:
Pot, Meet Kettle.
Wow, I’m surprised this thread is still open.
All Catholics are Christian, not all Christians are Catholic.
That being said, religion is a crutch for weak-minded simpletons.
It only makes sense. He had 12 men follow him wherever he went.
Flips > gooks imo
Though, viets make some mean ass food, too bad most the kats I know think they are the reincarnation of Chow Yun Fat even though he isn’t dead yet.
Lol, I was so messing with my homeboys gay brother n law last night, poor guy didn’t know what to do. It’s funny cause his parents are super bible thumping, Sarah Palin loving weirdo’s.
i can verify 100% that jesus is a gimp because god is a ******
Ask yourself if that’s really necessary. If God spelled out “I am God!” in the stars, would it lead more people into a relationship with him? Sure people would know he would exist, but I don’t think this is God’s goal for salvation. It’s a relationship between God and a person. In fact in a world where God did do something like that, couldn’t you see people becoming resentful of how God was smashing himself in everyone’s face?
If you grant that God works through the Holy Spirit in nature and through people for salvation, then there is no guarantee that that would be a better world.
I think that would be a bad idea that would actually keep people from knowing who God is, honestly. Don’t you think that people would try to explain it away naturally as well?
I mean if you need help being convinced, have you considered the cosmological arguments, the teleological argument, the resurrection argument, the ontological argument, the moral argument, the argument from personally experiencing God, etc? You can look into philosophy and see what makes the most sense for God to be and see what’s consistent. Things are sufficient to rationally believe and I think there are just too many things that don’t make sense in a purely naturalistic view and things become absurd if God doesn’t exist.
Remember to consider if things could work out without your criteria. Ask yourself if your criteria would be something that is necessarily better or needed.
Am I not being rational because I’m a Christian? To tell me I’m deluded you’ll have to present me with defeaters of all the arguments and show me how my personal experience is a delusion as well. Don’t think that because there are false religious experiences that ALL religious experiences are false. (This isn’t some emotional experience, no light coming through my window, etc. either.)
I like playing God in the Sims. This sim refused to follow an order I gave her, so I smiteth her in a fire. That’ll teach the other sims who’s boss.
Honestly stfu. Are comments like these really needed? It’s amazing how people can’t hold a fuckin conversation when religion is involved without provoking others. What’s the debate right now? If Jesus existed? Are there credible evidence? Let’s just stick to that topic then. I don’t need to hear this bullshit about how they believe in delusional shit so they can deal with death later on. It’s been done and heard.
You can’t have evidence for God. People don’t understand what they mean by God and what exactly it is they believe in when they say “I believe in God”. It’s not possible to rationally talk about God because by definition he is a supra-rational entity. That is to say, he is usually constructed in such a way as to preclude him from finite categories of description. All the properties we ascribe to objects are finite and relative, God is supposed to be not-finite and independent. We have no frame of reference, no experience and no words that can capture “God”. So there is the problem of language being unable to say what we mean by God, because by definition he supersedes normal categories.
cosmological argument fails, you can’t go from a causal series within a set and then make a conclusion about the set as a whole. Also it’s based on empirical observations and tries to go beyond the empirical world, it’s broken.
teleological argument is again, empirical and based on human biases, not really worth talking about.
resurrection argument, come on. It’s based on hearsay and even if we grant that a man came back to life it doesn’t prove anything except that he came back to life. What caused him to come back to life would still remain a mystery.
ontological argument, the only worthwhile argument but it fails in various ways. For it to work you need to adopt a platonic theory of meaning, and if you subscribe to platonism you get a whole series of crazy problems. If you don’t then you can just use the “perfect island counter” or do what Kant did and show that existence is not predicate but a correspondence between a concept and the world. And you can’t prove that correspondence by appealing to some identity within the object, that would miss the point. Also, such an argument doesn’t say much about a Personal God, we can easily interpret the highest conceivable being to simply be the totality of all that exists, and not some particular, powerful, personal entity.
personal experience argument, only works for the person who had the experience, and only if it is structured on some preconceived notion of God based on some particular religion, otherwise one can’t interpret the experience in a religious way and might explain it away naturally or mystically…
Nope. But it doesn’t stop them from doing so even though people have better shit to do than responding. Like killing sims.
I just killed another one that I told to take out the trash, and he got distracted and put it on the floor. So I killed his wife. Stupid sim, clean up your shit.
Well various proofs have come out, so I’d say you can. I think it’s misplaced to say we can’t talk about God. Why can’t we just describe him as the greatest conceivable being? This is what the classical view of God is and the only one that really makes sense. The ontological was born out of this. Like for instance, God’s nature is necessity. Or God is eternal and transcendent of space and time. I think these things are realized through philosophy and logical thinking. For instance, in Judeo-Christianity God has these properties, so we just accept them. Then also it just makes sense given the impossibility of infinite regress and contemporary cosmology that the universe had a beginning, so God would be meaningless as a physical entity, such as in Mormonism. I don’t see why you can’t define who God is. He isn’t an physical object or anything, that’s for sure.
So, the evidence for God is basically logical and non-empirical. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I don’t really understand how the cosmological arguments are broken. Basically science only goes so far (can’t account for aesthetic judgments, moral judgments, logical or mathematical truths, ITSELF. It’s a way to gain knowledge with philosophy supporting it. It isn’t the only way to gain knowledge). So when science says the universe begins to exist we go into philosophy, or specifically metaphysics. So for example: that which begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause. Logically physical causes are ruled out because what IS physical begins with the Big Bang. Concepts or “rules” which I don’t think float out there as real things (for instance, I don’t think the number 1 actually exists somewhere or that Mario exists as an abstract object) do NOT stand in causal relations. So then you are left with either a universe coming into to being from nothing, or a supernatural cause from which some things can be known logically.
I think you’re looking in the wrong place when you’re asking for empirical evidence. Any empirical evidence must basically then be taken further in philosophy based on the nature of what we’re talking about.
Well, it’s scientifically accepted that the universe has a ridiculous fine tuning to it. Remember that fine tuning is NOT the same thing as design. Basically the universe and its constant could have ended up in a variety of more probable ways but somehow, unnecessarily, ended up specifically the way it did when the ‘infinitely’ more probable situation is that only one element would be formed, that the universe collapse back into a fireball, etc.
Since this would seem to beg intention because of it’s mass improbability and unnecessary-ness, it fits the criteria of what is designed. So I think it’s worth discussing because someone is rational to think so.
On page 4 or so I actually discussed these things in some decent detail. It’s based on historically accepted facts surrounding the crucifixion. These are NOT things that the historians accept due to philosophical or theological ideas. This is based purely on historical criteria. These are SECULAR scholars. Even the people that reject the resurrection hypothesis, or are neutral accept these facts.
I don’t think men naturally come back to life, especially after an ordeal like that.
Well, I’m not a Platonist (as you could probably notice from earlier in this post) and it doesn’t assume Platonism. The ontological argument doesn’t say that abstract objects must exists per se, and isn’t in this specific example. I don’t think God is an abstract object existing ‘somewhere’. The argument is discussing the necessity of an entity. By S5 in modal logic it is sound.
The perfect island is not a good defeater. For example, an island is a PHYSICAL thing that stands in relations to other things. There are plenty of possible worlds it could very well not exist in. It’s contingent on other relations as well.
Oh yeah, I know. As an argument to someone it’s obviously not a good one. My point is that if there are people that have had true and real personal experience of God, then it could stand above other defeaters. A person behind the Iron Curtain for example, even if everything looked as if it made God not exist by propoganda, they didn’t accept Big Bang and there was no real developed philosophy, you’d still be rational to accept your experience. In the first place I don’t think you deny experience unless you have good reason for doing so. For example, you wouldn’t reject your being physically at a computer or something to see this post, yet logically you COULD be hooked up in the Matrix. This is what philosophers call “properly basic belief”.
I still don’t think that you’ll necessarily know everything about God to have a salvation relationship with God, but I think some things are correct to know about God. For instance, if you were in some tribe that has no contact with any civilization I think that properly your concept of God would be a non-physical transcendent ultimate.
It’s not misplaced for the reasons I gave.
For the same reason you rule out physical causes we can rule out all causality in general since causes are not logically necessary but empirical phenomena. The parts of the series do not provide implications for the whole. As such, there is no reason why the universe as a whole can’t be acausal regardless if all the parts within it are experienced as having causes. Just cause a cat is completely made out of atoms and atoms are colorless doesn’t mean the cat as a whole is colorless. Applying causality to the universe as a whole commits the fallacy of composition.
We have no counter-factuals to this case so we can’t deal with probabilities. We have no other universes that failed or worked in order to compare ours with, and no other versions of our constants to analyze in other possible universe.
And again this goes back to the problem of looking at things in the universe in order to prove something beyond it. It’s an unjustifiable leap. Much better to explain “fine tuning” with mechanisms that exist in the system itself.
So what? A man’s resurrection does not validate every claim he makes. Coming back to life doesn’t mean 2+2 = 5 just because he says so and it doesn’t mean he knows how it happened.
Without a platonic theory of meaning the argument can be countered with the Island example. The perfect island would exist in every world by definition since it is the greatest conceivable island and since greatness implies existence. A platonic theory of meaning doesn’t allow this counter because “being” is interpreted in the most general way, the form of being itself, so we can’t use perfect islands or perfect unicorns as counters. If we don’t subscribe to plato then we just use Kant to refute him.
Well if God isn’t a deistic God and revelation could exist and this could be verified or built independently from philosophy, yes, you could know about God. That’s why it’s misplaced. You think that God can’t be defined and therefore talked about, but it’s been done.
Causes are logically necessary if something comes into being. For instance, something could be sufficient in itself and wouldn’t need a cause. Something that is contingent needs a cause or reason for its existence.
Your example really has nothing to with the fact that the universe is not a necessary entity and began to exist. This is a question of metaphysics.
Well you can, actually, because that’s exactly where fine tuning came from and this is universally accepted. The conditions of the Big Bang could have and should have probabilistically gone another way. You’ll have to complain about the fine tuning situation with contemporary science. They merely take the initial conditions and where it could have based on what it is.
More accurately: it’s looking at the universe and using logic to determine how reality is. I really don’t see how this isn’t justifiable. Again this is just a naturalistic assumption. The fine tuning is explained in that the universe should have been not life-permitting, probabilistically. The margin is infinitesimally small form a function and more specifically a life permitting universe.
Well, that would be illogical, so if truth has meaning of course it wouldn’t be true. What it does mean is that there was a supernatural cause of the resurrection and in the case of Jesus it looks extremely suspicious based on who he said he was and what he was supposed to have been doing.
You missed the point. There are conceivable worlds in which the island could NOT exist. Such as a universe where only hydrogen existed. No island could exist by definition.
In fact platonism would actually help the island idea by saying that it exist as an abstract object only with its pals, Mario, Donkey Kong, and the number 2.
So explain Kant’s refution in detail, please. Modal logic sure fucked up, apparently!
I’m “wondering” why the O.P. even posted this thread. Obviously to troll and gain huge responses and attention by saying "Jesus was Gay"
Closing it may be beneficial if it get’s too bad. In fact I don’t know why it survived this long. :bluu:
The answer to the problem:
The problem with religion is that people want more detail/proof than is given in scriptures, and it doesn’t provide it through imperical evidence. This almost makes it an opinion statement to say “I believe in god” in a social context. Add to the formula that most are born into religion without choice and their various reactions to that, and the sum is simply that it’s just one huge mess to bring up anything about it in public (or on a forum, apparently.) Despite this, I am a Christian-and I do believe in God. However, I am taking a rational stance because I do not believe in, nor wish to support inflammatory threads for the sake of one man’s joke.
/closethread, yo.
The thread got good. No need to close it!
I wanted to take time to craft a less troll like reply, so it took a while. unfortunately the thread has exploded. I won’t respond to later posts. At least the thread hasn’t been closed yet. Also, I won’t really take any time to address cisco’s posts because as others have pointed out, his posts are atrocious as usual, and as a result, nobody takes him seriously.
Regarding Alex, there is plenty of archaeological evidence, which kinda offsets the lack of contemporary written evidence. For example, the city of Alexandria, Egypt, which he founded. Or the fact that the Persian empire was brought to its knees. Then there is the consistency of the accounts. The gospels on the other hand, lack this consistency (I’m not even taking into account the miracles either). Their accounts contain factual errors, and their accounts also conflict with one another in a serious manner. Quirinius is but one example. The death/resurrection is another. I’ll have to dig the essay, but basically trying to harmonize the events of Jesus crucifixion and resurrection is a hopeless task (the common argument that its just differing eyewitness accounts does not apply, as the “eyewitness” accounts are so ludicrously different).
Also, in addition to the three criteria I mentioned (contemporary references, contemporary references by enemies, archaeological evidence) there’s also contemporary writings by the person in question.
There are obviously no canon gospels written by jesus himself. And AFAIK, there are no non canon gospels written by jesus either. that’s yet another strike. Paul for all intents and purposes, is the inventor of christianity, and he never even met jesus (while jesus still lived anyway).
Lets grant that Mark was written earlier, it still wasn’t a record of things as they happened. After all, Mark was not even a disciple. So his info is already second hand source, and would have happened long after the fact. We’re talking at least years later. Ditto Luke. Matthew and John were written much later, and its not at all clear that those were truly the authors of the gospels, its just church tradition to attribute it to them.
the points 1-4 are only documented in the gospels, which again were either written decades later or by non eye witnesses, or both. But lets grant them as historical records, you still have to deal with the problem that the accounts of death/ressurrection are ridiculously contradictory (still looking up essay). as for point 3, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Muhammed allegedly ascended into heaven as well. Big deal.
So to recap, if we are generous and accept that Mark was based upon an earlier source, his would be the only contemporary account. But it wouldn’t be by an eyewitness, in fact it’d be based on an earlier source, so the information has already been diluted. All the accounts are either internally inconsistent, or contradict each other in ways that are difficult or impossible to harmonize. Admittedly, I’m not too familiar with the non canon gospels, which there are quite a few, but I’m pretty sure none of those were contemporary either. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.
To define is to make finite. God is infinite. He can’t be defined. His properties are qualified as infinite. He is not just Good not just powerful, he is infinitely good, infinitely powerful. Such qualifications render him ineffable, since we have no frame of reference for such qualifications. It is just metaphor, poetry, and word games at this point.
Science breaks down at the singularity. The singularity has infinite energy of some sort. It didn’t “come into being”. As far as I’m concerned the universe is the totality of all that exists. Contingency and non-contingency don’t apply to it. If all that existed at one point was a singularity, then that was the universe.
Where are you getting these probabilities? We only observe one universe, and it has life. Seems to me like the probability of life is 100%. If we observed 100 other universes with our exact physical laws and yet had no life, then we could say our universe has a 1 out of 100 chance to permit life, which is still good.
Look at the universe as a whole, or earth, it isn’t very life permitting, at least not our form of life. It doesn’t look very finely tuned for us. In fact it looks like we adapted to our environment instead of having our environment finely-tuned for us. And we still are adapting.
Nope. Being resurrected doesn’t validate all your claims about yourself. You can’t know if it was supernatural since you don’t know all the phenomena of the universe that could account for resurrection. Supernatural doesn’t make sense and there is no way to distinguish a supernatural event from a natural one. It could be out of the ordinary, very rare, and amazing, but since we don’t grasp all the mechanisms of nature and all that is possible, we can’t rule out what is natural. For all we know Jesus might have been resurrected by aliens, by trans-dimensional beings, by himself due to some amazing biological mutation, by a group of super-beings, etc…Even if we say he was resurrected it doesn’t validate his claims, it doesn’t lead to one necessary conclusion. It still fails miserably.
No, because in platonism particulars are at a lower level of existence than the general forms. The greatest conceivable being would be Being itself, the form. Not a particular substantiation of it. Not a unicorn or mario or a perfect island.
Existence isn’t a property of an object. Existence is a correspondence between a concept and something in the world. You can’t define things into existence. Existence doesn’t add to an object new info to an object: Kant argued that existence cannot be a predicate because it does not add any new information to an understanding of the subject. To be told that John is bald, that he is eating, and that he is angry is to add three things to the stock of information about him. However, to be told that he exists does not genuinely communicate anything about him. Likewise with ‘God’.