Posted on 12/04/2013 3:17:41 PM PST by servo1969
Oh you poor poor person.
The exact date of Jesus’ birth as s not recorded. So, ultimately, it is not important. But does not knowing the exact date or day render celebration of that day impossible?
I would opine that it does not. We have that day/date to celebrate an event, the birth of the Savior of the world.
Good luck shopping at Wal-Mart for all your winter solstice gifts.
You can’t fool me. It’s turtles all the way down.
I do doubt ... that the universe "willed itself into existence", as suggested by Steven Hawking.
Were they killed for a scam? Or were they also invented?
We just don’t have a lot of evidence. Peter’s corpse is not available to us, nor is that of Paul. Forensics are pretty much out, and Roman justice of the time is mostly not documented. How old is the oldest actual scripture document reporting the New Testament? As the distance increases from the time of the events it reports, it is less useful as evidence.
At least with Augustus or Tiberius we get some statues.
Enjoy your celebration, but please don’t imagine that the world revolves around your celebration.
Merry Christmas!
What caused that which existed before?
Does that question apply to G-d too?
No.
God has existed always.
It’s easier to accept that as an article of faith, one of the Great Mysteries, than to believe the universe willed itself into existence using the laws of gravity.
http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/papyrus/texts/manuscripts.html
Depending on texts that date from AD 200 texts would be like having no documents of the American Revolution that were produced until 1950.
Or the Universe has existed always, and it changed into its current form by natural law that we can perhaps understand.
“If you don’t doubt, then you are not thinking. Faith is what happens when you don’t doubt.”
No, that isn’t what faith is, at least not to Christians. Faith is believing in spite of room for doubt, not choosing to ignore doubts. Faith can be informed by reason, but isn’t based on reason alone, so doubts which may arise using a purely rational approach are not insurmountable obstacles to faith.
In fact, everyone, even those who believe they are purely rational, still put faith in some things. They just do not realize it, or refuse to admit it, so they can keep up their personal conceit of rationalism. So, since we all have faith, we obviously cannot use your definition of faith, or we would have to conclude that nobody can think.
I have no illusion of the world revolving around anything Godly. You stand as evidence. You use the holiday name Christmas (Christ Mass) and then deny Christ. Good luck with that.
“Or the Universe has existed always...”
Nope, no luck with that approach if you are trying to be rational. It’s been proven to be mathematically impossible to have an eternal universe that is also expanding, as we have observed this universe to be:
So, you’re saying that we can’t trust the textbooks of today about what happened 200 years ago?
To me the paradox of Jesus is that, on the one hand we are told that God so loved the world...,etc., etc., whose love is embodied in Jesus. And on the other hand, Jesus is going to judge some day and consign the vast majority of humanity to a never ending torture, the likes of which would horrify Torquemada.
Its ...Religion.....its based on FAITH.
For what its worth...I believe it.
Would you rather have a God who let evil go unpunished?
No, I would prefer a God who would, if he decided punishments were necessary, provide punishments that fit the crime. If a father spanked his child for hours on end, we would agree that father is a monster. Yet we are told to believe that a infinitely loving God is going to punish most of the people who ever lived for the crime of failing to believe in Jesus. The fact that huge numbers of people down through history never heard of Jesus and therefore had no opportunity to believe doesn’t matter.
Is failing to believe in Jesus really a crime that deserves everlasting teeth-grinding pain?
Oh, yeah. And...
(Tagline)
;<)
Jesus is the Lord...Period. Concise enough?
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