Posted on 12/04/2013 3:17:41 PM PST by servo1969
A sixty-seven year old proud atheist friend of mine recently interjected the sweeping statement “all religion is irrational” into one of our conversations. I replied, not with a direct rebuttal but, instead, with the unexpected question, “who is Jesus Christ?” He replied, “I don’t know.” If I were to ask some of you why I pulled that question out of left field you might also reply with a bewildered “I don’t know.” So keep reading. Please.
If you have never really pondered the question “who is Jesus Christ?” then you simply cannot consider yourself to be a committed intellectual – at least not yet. Let me say that in a different way: if you have never given serious thought to the true identity of the most important individual ever to walk the face of the earth then you are either a) suffering from severe intellectual hernia, or b) possessed of an intellect impaired by a fear of knowing the true answer to the question.
Let me begin by defending the assertion that Jesus Christ was the most important individual ever to walk the face of the earth. 1) We divide time using the date of Jesus’ birth. 2) More books have been written about Jesus than anyone else in recorded history. Case closed. Now we can move on to the issue of fear and intellectual curiosity.
The options we are given for understanding the identity of Jesus are so limited that no one who is truly intelligent can be behaving rationally if he just avoids the question altogether. Take, for example, my friend who has lived 2/3 of a century on this planet without so much as attempting to work through the options. I don’t want you to be one of those irrational people so let’s get to work.
When addressing the question of Jesus’ identity, there are only four available options. Anyone who has ever read C.S. Lewis or Josh McDowell knows that Jesus was either: 1) A legend, 2) a lunatic, 3) a liar, or 4) the Lord.
The idea that Jesus was merely a legend, as opposed to someone who actually lived, is simply not an option we can take seriously (at least not for long). Independent historical accounts, by that I mean accounts written by non-Christians, are enough to put this option to rest. Jesus is cited by 42 sources within 150 years of his life, and nine of those sources are non-Christian. By contrast, the Roman Emperor Tiberius is only mentioned by 10 sources. If you believe Tiberius existed, how can you not believe in a man who is cited by four times as many people and has had an immeasurably greater impact on history? You can believe that if you wish. But then you risk forfeiting any claim to be considered rational.
Nor is it rational to consider Jesus to have been a lunatic. Perhaps you could maintain that belief if you’ve never read the Bible. But how can a person claim to be educated if he’s never read the Bible?
World Magazine editor Marvin Olasky once entertained the notion that Jesus was a mere lunatic. But, then, in the early 1970s, as an atheist and a communist graduate student, he examined the words of Jesus for the first time. He was traveling to Russia on a ship and wanted to brush up on his Russian. But all he had with him to read (that just happened to be written in Russian) was a copy of the New Testament. And so he read. And he was transformed.
Marvin recognized immediately that the words of Jesus represent a profound level of moral understanding that rises above anything else that has ever been written. Read for yourself the words of Jesus. Then read the words of Charles Manson. Try to convince me that they are one in the same – merely two lunatics who mistakenly thought they were the Messiah. You have a right to that opinion. But you don’t have a right to be considered rational if you cannot detect a glaring difference between the teachings of Christ and Manson.
So, now only two options remain. And this is where the real trouble begins. If we call Jesus a liar (who falsely claimed to be God) then we cannot also call him a great moral teacher. One cannot be both. But many look at the final option of calling him Lord and panic. To go there means to accept belief in the supernatural. And surely that couldn’t be rational. Or could it?
Science has taught us a lot since the Bible was written. For one thing, we know that the universe had a beginning. It is expanding, it is finite, and it was not always here. Put simply, Carl Sagan was wrong. In fact, he was dead wrong. The cosmos is not all that is or was or that ever will be. It had a beginning. It is irrational to dismiss the obvious implications of this: that the universe was caused by a supernatural force existing outside of space and time.
People have to let go of the idea that the natural world is all there is because that is not where the science leads us. It instead leads us away from the philosophical commitment to only considering naturalistic explanations for the things we observe in the physical universe. This also leads us to one very important question: if a supernatural force was great enough to create the universe could the force or being not also reenter creation? And another related question: is the force or being responsible for creating life not also able to conquer death?
Arguably, the resurrection is a pretty small accomplishment in comparison with the creation of the universe. But that doesn’t mean it happened. The evidence must be judged on its own merits. I recommend that serious intellectuals start here.
Of course, you could just keep avoiding the question while judging others to be irrational. But there’s no avoiding the plank in your own eye.
Why would one believe there was an empty tomb to begin with? Why even discuss it? Christians challenge skeptics to explain why the tomb was empty. But the only source that tells us there was a tomb are the very stories that are suspect. It seems Christians plug up one hole in a suspect story with another part of the same suspect story, without awareness that it is the story as a whole that is in question.
1. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. It was a sacrifice that somehow redeemed humanity from sin, a debt that had to be paid in blood. This doesn’t make sense to me for several reasons, including that God could have redeemed humanity simply by waving his hand (or would that have been too easy?). Second, if God loved humanity that much, why did he kill everyone but eight people in Noah’s great flood? Why did he kill off almost everyone the first time, but then send Jesus down the second time?
2. God wants to forgive us for being sinners. But when we humans forgive someone for, say, hurting us or stealing from us, it costs us in psychic pain. That is, forgiveness involves suffering on the part of the one who forgives, for you must repress your natural tendency toward retribution. And, like us, God had to suffer to forgive us our sins. Ergo, he converted himself into a human and had himself tortured on the cross. Again, it puzzles me why God had to undergo the same pain as do humans. And why such extreme pain?
3. The demonstration of extreme suffering by the crucified Christ helps us suffering humans identify more readily with Jesus.
4. The crucifixion was in some sense a magnificent failure. As Beginning with Moses explains:
[Jesus] could not even vindicate himself. He was in the right and he knew that he was in the right. But he allowed himself to be put in the wrong and to be seen only as condemned, outcast, despised and defeated. Not all suffering involves such rejection. Very often the sufferer is upheld by the knowledge that his suffering is acclaimed and appreciated and that although he is hated by his persecutors he is lauded by his peers. For Christ, it was far different. He suffered without admiration and without compassion.
But this failure to garner compassion and admiration was ultimately a victory, for it brought the chance of salvation to everyone:
His cross was an instrument of victory. It destroyed Satan and put the Lord’s enemies to an open shame. His weakness became the power of God. His foolish decision to be crucified became God’s wisdom. His servitude – even his servility – became the ground of his lordship. His dying released the spiritual forces of the last days and the word of his cross became the saving power of God.
None of this makes sense to me. My alternative theory, which is mine, is that the crucifixion, if it happened, was a big failure because Jesus’s followers (if he existed) all thought that he would bring them salvation in their lifetime, and didn’t expect the Messiah to be executed. But, as the story goes, he was, and the corpse rotted or disappeared. Therefore the story of the resurrection was invented to try to convince the disappointed masses that, like Jesus, they too would have eternal life, since obviously the messiah wasn’t going to come during their lifetimes, as he promised he would.
“Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
Boy, have I heard that a million times growing up and what could be more wholesome for a kid than singing about washing in blood?. It always made me think of some kind of demented Tide commercial, where the regular detergent is in a bucket on one side with plain ‘ol water, and there is a bucket of blood on the other side. A white shirt is pulled out of both and there’s still some stain on the detergent one, but a bright white shirt is, contra all expectation, pulled out of the bucket of blood.
Jesus preached a neverending stream of vicious hate wrapped in a sick and perverted parody of love. Even in the Sermon on the Mount! All men who’ve ever looked at a pretty woman and failed to immediately thereafter gouge out their own eyes are condemned by Jesus’s own judgement to infinite torture. All women who divorce their husbands, no matter how abusive, are likewise, are similarly condemned. As are not merely those who fail to accept Jesus as sovereign but those who have the temerity to love their own families more than Jesus.
And the horrific nature of Jesus’s terrible corruption is made most plain in the story, for his crowning glory is his triumphant return from the dead…as a walking, talking, rotting corpse. He even has one of his thralls thrust his hands in the gaping chest wound so as to make it absolutely clear that this truly is your worst possible nightmare come to life.
Really, how anybody could possibly see the Jesus story in the Bible as anything other than the archetype for every horror (especially zombie) story in all of history utterly escapes me.
Man can put geosynchronous satellites in orbit around the earth but God can't do that with a star?
And nobody said how long the star was up there anyway.
We know there can not be an eclipse of the sun when the moon is full. We know it can’t do that because to be full, it must be on the side of the earth away from the sun. To be an eclipse, it must be on the side of the earth close to the sun. The moon can’t be in two places at the same time.
If you made sense it might help. Where in Scripture is an eclipse of the sun by a full moon stated?
Well, talk about sick and perverted.
That kind of thinking is as demonic as it comes.
You’ve got real problems and lots of company.
Well, you’ll be spending eternity with them.
Have fun.
If the problem with “liberal” scholarship (the name itself suggests the fallacy that guides the work) is that a flimsy, fact-free, wordless Jesus could be a magician, a bandit, an eschatologist, a radical, a mad prophet, a sane one, a tax revolutionary, a reforming rabbi (anything but Jesus the son of God)–the mythical Jesus could be Hercules, Osiris, Mithras, a Pauline vision, a Jewish fantasy, a misremembered amalgam of folk tales, a rabbi’s targum about Joshua. In short–the mirror image of the confusion that the overtheoretical and under-resourced history of the topic had left strewn in the field. If the scarecrows concocted by the liberals were made from rubble, the mythtic Jesuses were their shadows. If the bad boys of the Jesus Seminar had effectively declared that the evidence to hand means Jesus can be anything you want him to be, there is some justice in the view that Jesus might be nothing at all.
Stars have to be large enough to give off light in order to be seen. That size is larger than Jupiter. The geosynchronos orbit distance is less than the radius of Jupiter. That means that, no, there can be no geosynchronos star.
Glad I could help you with that.
So how many times have you gouged out your eyes?
Did you do it to your children to safe them from sin?
Don that was quite a series of invective. Irrational rantings.
Be honest are you a Satanist? Or did some priest, rabbi or pastor do you wrong somewhere in your life? It is one thing to be a skeptic, yet another to broil in anger and hatred. Perhaps you should take a powder for a bit.
It’s no wonder you don’t accept the Bible.
You can’t even get it right.
And for that reason, all your scads of posts on this thread which call into question historical documents, are now so much BS as you’ve just so clearly demonstrated your complete and total inability to accurately recount historical facts and documents.
I reject your interpretation and recounting of Scripture as well because they are lies and I reject them as such.
Try the real truth for a change.
And rlh, I think you have it close, although I fully expect it to be denied.
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
If that’s what you really want to cling to, have at it.
Shaking dust.......
You don't have the credentials to qualify as an expert witness regarding the veracity of the documents in question. I do.
I challenged it based on its failure to correctly report reality, such as the reported behavior of a star, the reported behavior of the moon (eclipse during full moon) various miracles, or the dates of the Jesus birth.
Firstly, please show us where the Bible mentions and eclipse, it doesn't.
Secondly, I answered the questions regarding the dates of Jesus birth.
Based on containing false statements, the gospels are thrown out as evidence of anything.
Your knowledge regarding the Scriptures is far below junior high school level. You don't have the authority to throw them out...except in your own mind.
Nice invention of credentials.
I am so proud of you.
Heavy handed appeal to authority. I am so glad the divine contacts you on a daily basis.
Creation.com article cited previously - items 51-56:
Radiometric dating and the age of the earth:
Carbon-14 in coal suggests ages of thousands of years and clearly contradict ages of millions of years.
Carbon-14 in oil again suggests ages of thousands, not millions, of years.
Carbon-14 in fossil wood also indicates ages of thousands, not millions, of years.
Carbon-14 in diamonds suggests ages of thousands, not billions, of years.
Note that attempts to explain away carbon-14 in diamonds, coal, etc., such as by neutrons from uranium decay converting nitrogen to C-14 do not work.
Incongruent radioisotope dates using the same technique argue against trusting the dating methods that give millions of years.
Incongruent radioisotope dates using different techniques argue against trusting the dating methods that give millions of years (or billions of years for the age of the earth).
Neither the eye nor the hand is the root cause of sin.
Take captive every thought to discern whether they be good or bad. Sins has it’s birth in our thoughts. Get it?
Somehow someway I’m sure you won’t quite get it. sigh...
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years old. The technique was developed by Willard Libby and his colleagues in 1949[7] during his tenure as a professor at the University of Chicago. Libby estimated that the radioactivity of exchangeable carbon-14 would be about 14 disintegrations per minute (dpm) per gram of pure carbon, and this is still used as the activity of the modern radiocarbon standard.[8][9] In 1960, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for this work.
One of the frequent uses of the technique is to date organic remains from archaeological sites. Plants fix atmospheric carbon during photosynthesis, so the level of 14C in plants and animals when they die approximately equals the level of 14C in the atmosphere at that time. However, it decreases thereafter from radioactive decay, allowing the date of death or fixation to be estimated. The initial 14C level for the calculation can either be estimated, or else directly compared with known year-by-year data from tree-ring data (dendrochronology) up to 10,000 years ago (using overlapping data from live and dead trees in a given area), or else from cave deposits (speleothems), back to about 45,000 years before the present. A calculation or (more accurately) a direct comparison of carbon-14 levels in a sample, with tree ring or cave-deposit carbon-14 levels of a known age, then gives the wood or animal sample age-since-formation.
So Carbon 14 tests are referenced to tree rings, giving a way to calibrate results. Tests on coal or anything can be inaccurate, if contaminated. That is why, reference the Shroud, the testimony of the workers that the samples did not come from patches, procedures were used to avoide contamination.
>> proud atheist
Is there any other kind?
Sin has its origin in religious people who want power over others.
They say “I can tell you what you should do because you have sinned.”
They say “I have gone through the rituals to free me from sin.”
They say “Pay me, so that you too can be free from sin.”
It seems a great scam to me. You should pay me for explaining sin to you.
*THEY* are all wrong. It’s not that sin is an invention of religious people to gain control over others, it’s the wrong solutions they offer to take care of it that’s the problem.
Sin is real. People have consciences and there is right an wrong. You have even appealed to a standard of morality on this thread, showing that you acknowledge it.
The real solution for sin is asking God for the forgiveness He offers as a free gift because of the penalty Jesus paid for it.
Throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Then you’ll be free, free from the consequences of sin and free from the deception and control of those who would lord it over you pretending to offer you what they have no power to.
Or perhaps virtue is positive, upright behavior?
we can measure our own behavior and character, and we can strive to better understand and practice them in our everyday lives.
Auctoritas “Spiritual Authority” The sense of one’s social standing, built up through experience, Pietas, and Industria.
Comitas “Humour” Ease of manner, courtesy, openness, and friendliness.
Clementia “Mercy” Mildness and gentleness.
Dignitas “Dignity” A sense of self-worth, personal pride.
Firmitas “Tenacity” Strength of mind, the ability to stick to one’s purpose.
Frugalitas “Frugalness” Economy and simplicity of style, without being miserly.
Gravitas “Gravity” A sense of the importance of the matter at hand, responsibility and earnestness.
Honestas “Respectibility” The image that one presents as a respectable member of society.
Humanitas “Humanity” Refinement, civilization, learning, and being cultured.
Industria “Industriousness” Hard work.
Pietas “Dutifulness” More than religious piety; a respect for the natural order socially, politically, and religiously. Includes the ideas of patriotism and devotion to others.
Prudentia “Prudence” Foresight, wisdom, and personal discretion.
Salubritas “Wholesomeness” Health and cleanliness.
Severitas “Sternness” Gravity, self-control.
Veritas “Truthfulness” Honesty in dealing with others.
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