Posted on 11/07/2015 9:04:37 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
“Nobody knows who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history. . . . The gospels are ancient fiction.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
If Dawkins is correct, one might imagine the following conversation . . .
Luke: Let’s have another round of drinks. I’ve an idea I want to run past you.
John: Sure. What’s on your mind?
Luke: You probably heard about the Nazarene named Jesus who was crucified yesterday. I think he could be the perfect candidate for our fake Messiah project.
Mark: One tiny problem: he’s dead!
Luke: Yes, but that means we’ll control the narrative. We’ll be in charge of his reputation.
Matthew: Who would follow a dead Messiah?
Luke: Nobody, so we’ll begin with a resurrection myth. We’ll hire some thugs to fight off the soldiers guarding his tomb so we can get rid of the corpse.
John: But a missing corpse isn’t the same as a resurrection.
Luke: You’re right, so we’ll have to persuade Jesus’s friends to spend the next 30 years telling everyone he’s risen from the dead, even if sticking to that story means they’ll be imprisoned or killed.
Mark: Okay, then what?
Luke: Well, to make a conspiracy credible you need precise details. So we’ll invent stories where Jesus interacts with people in specific locations.
Matthew: Won’t people just disprove the stories by visiting those places and asking around?
Luke: There’s no need to worry about that. We could invent a story about a synagogue ruler’s terminally ill daughter being healed, give the synagogue ruler a name, set it all in a particular place, and still no one—absolutely no one, not even the people living in that place—would trouble to fact-check. Everyone would simply swallow the story whole!
Mark: It sounds like we’re on safe ground there. But if we want people to follow Jesus, he’ll need a message. People have been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. He’s got to be worth listening to when he finally appears.
John: Good point. I’ll cook up some deep quotes.
Luke: Thanks, John. Mark’s right: you’ll need to put profound wisdom on Jesus’s lips that theological scholars can happily study for their entire careers.
John: Not a problem.
Luke: Guys, it will take us a while to put these documents together. We need to get communities of people worshiping Jesus in the meantime so that when our books come out they’ll get a good reception.
Mark: There’s a guy I know called Saul, he could help with that.
Luke: Saul the Pharisee? I can’t imagine him getting involved with this kind of thing.
Mark: Trust me, he’s our man. I see him leaving behind everything he’s been trained to do and planting congregations of Jesus worshipers throughout the Roman Empire, whatever it costs him personally—beatings, shipwrecks, and the like.
Matthew: Awesome. But Luke, can you just remind me, what’s the point of all this? I mean, what exactly do we get out of this?
Luke: Come on, Matt, it will be so much fun. We’ll watch people being brutally martyred, and we’ll know they’ve been deceived by our dishonest fiction! What’s not to like about that?
John: I agree with Luke. This is definitely worth years of effort on our part. Count me in.
Mark: Me too.
Matthew: I’ll do it if my name comes first in all the promotional material.
Luke: Deal. Let’s get to work.
Me, too.
Dawkins proves he doesn’t “know” anything——his “faith” is bizarre and IRRATIONAL-—as all atheism is. It is MORE rational to believe in a Designer-—science proves Design 24/7..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoncJBrrdQ8
LOL! He admits there was probably an intelligent designer out there somewhere. (alien of course)
I think this is a great video .....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHEjqvmQIZg
From the website: www.allaboutGod.com
Great website!
The Godless believe everything magically came from nothing, and life magically sprang from this matter that came from nothing.
Real life FACTS have no influence on their make believe universe. They are delusional!
Dawkins is building a humongous fire for himself. Looney stuff like this illustrates that book learnin’ and WISDOM are in no way interlocked with each other. IMHO.
He is not exactly up there in the pantheon of great minds.
Who gives a shi...er...Obama what he thinks?
Funny thing is, L Ron Hubbard set out to create a religion, and he did it! And Jim Jones proved you can get people to do anything. Oh,and Joseph Smith’s Mormonism? It’s so common, it might be easy.
Yes, and each one of the people that you cited had a possible motive to do it (power, money, nutty). Also, they did not provide any evidence to back up their claims (like rising from the dead or other miracles). They don’t really resemble the circumstances of the birth of Christianity, but nice try.
It’s interesting that all 3 of those belief system administrations rely/relied on high levels of secrecy, and with two of them, have/had severe reprisals against those who left or stopped believing.
Richard Dawkins says that life on earth came from aliens.
Paraphrase from the following interview...
Aliens seeded the planet [earth.]
Possibly a designer from aliens, a higher intelligence, from elsewhere. From our molecules here on earth, we could probably find a signature of a designer from elsewhere in the universe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoncJBrrdQ8
Dawkins cohort Michael Ruse goes even further to say specifically that “one popular theory is that [life on earth] started of on the backs of crystals”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUetJ3umTWU
LOL. It is exactly what he “thinks”! The “earth was seeded by aliens”.
All people have “Faith” and they lie if they say they don’t. You can NEVER separate Faith and Reason-—if you do—as atheists have—you get irrational, bizarre “faiths” like Dawkins or Darwin’s-—were life came from rocks and “natural selection” can create more complex systems (LOL) and little green aliens dropped their eggs into a soup.
I had no idea Newkirk was so....
OOPS....no bullets...
(never mind). :-)
“Nobody knows who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history.”
Dawkins is right here. The Gospels, like much of the Bible, are pseudepigraphic. The earliest writings date from at least 90 AD, making it VERY unlikely that they were eyewitnesses to any of it, and the Gospels are evangelism, not strictly history. They differ in their accounts because they’re written to spread the news of Jesus to different audiences. In some cases, the details of their accounts contradict each other.
That doesn’t make Dawkins’s larger argument correct; in fact, he’s a closed-minded, militant bigot whose argument makes absolutely no sense and is notable only for its volume.
But he is correct on this particular point.
“Nobody knows who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history.”
Dawkins is right here. The Gospels, like much of the Bible, are pseudepigraphic. The earliest writings date from at least 90 AD, making it VERY unlikely that they were eyewitnesses to any of it, and the Gospels are evangelism, not strictly history. They differ in their accounts because they’re written to spread the news of Jesus to different audiences. In some cases, the details of their accounts contradict each other.
That doesn’t make Dawkins’s larger argument correct; in fact, he’s a closed-minded, militant bigot whose argument makes absolutely no sense and is notable only for its volume.
But he is correct on this particular point.
Preaching atheists are as boring as anyone or anything God ever created.
Exactly. As Thomas Sowell wrote in his book on Intellectuals-—Real Life Experience is essential to understand most things. Great Books can enhance knowledge, but only with human interactions and with much debate of ideas and actually putting those ideas into action.
Pride and arrogance is what so many students are fed today, so they remain just simply morons. They “think” they know everything like God, when they have been fed so many lies and misunderstanding of “Life” in front of tubes or screens-—they “think” they are brilliant....LOL-—when farmers 100 years ago were so much more brilliant than they are-—and could actually survive on their own.
Blind leading the blind, for sure.
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