Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
and author of "Letters to a Young Progressive: How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand."
Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
and author of "Letters to a Young Progressive: How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand."
Is there a condensed more concise version of his perspective on this topic? If not, I’ll just come back when I have more time.
Strongly recommend reading “Religion on Trial,” by Craig A. Parton, wherein “a trial lawyer well schooled in the laws of admissible evidence brings insight and clarity to matters normally thought to be solely in the domain of philosophers and theologians.”
We don’t divide time using Jesus’ birth. We divide it using a convention begun by a forgotten monk who made a mistake.
We seize on that error, recognize that the time stake is essentially arbitrary (The Romans used the legendary founding of the city the same way) and then reference the agreed upon error tainted moment.
With regard to the legend, of those 42 sources, how many actually met the man.
The author of Matthew was not matthew, and probably didn’t meet Jesus.
The author of Mark was Paul’s secretary, and probably didn’t meet Jesus. It is likely that Paul never met Jesus.
The author of Luke was commissioned by one Theophilus, and probably didn’t meet Jesus.
So many of the ‘sources’ are not sources at all.
I like to point out the paradox of Jesus.
With great care and concern, his followers and scholars point out to great detail how he conformed to the prophecies of the Jewish Moshiach, Messiah. And yet, once in that role, he did little or nothing a Moshiach was supposed to do, but went off in his own direction.
While he created a new religion, the old one ignored him so much that over the years, several others rose up to claim the role of Moshiach. And some of them were far more persuasive to Jews that they were indeed the Moshiach.
However, this does not matter to Christians, because in their view, Jesus wrote his own rules and was not bound to Jewish traditions of what they thought he should be.
“...the obvious implications of this: that the universe was caused by a supernatural force existing outside of space and time”
Or it was caused by the nature of that which existed before, a different kind of natural process, not a supernatural force existing otherwise. See “A brief History of Time” by Hawking.
As for the supernatural force, I don’t get phone calls from it nor emails. Why would its rules be be “Jam yesterday and Jam tomorrow but never Jam today.”?
I have to object to using Charles Manson as the exemplar “lunatic”. I don’t dispute that Manson is a lunatic, but there have been who knows how many thousands of lunatics in this world? I, myself, have know several.
None of the ones I personally knew were vicious serial murderers, as Manson is.
Chose some peaceful loon, I don’t know who, but I didn’t write this piece. To choose Manson is just inflammatory and weakens the argument.
Yes, religions are irrational. At least Christianity is. It requires, by definition, transport out of the realm of reason into the dominion of Faith. One cannot reason one’s way to salvation, nor a communion with God. Those defy reason, and gloriously!
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.
***When CS Lewis wrote the trilemma, most people understood that by saying Jesus was Lord, they were saying “Jesus is God”. That is not the case today. The word “lord” has almost completely lost its meaning in american society today.
Jesus was put to death for claiming equality with God. His friends said it, indifferent sources said it, even His enemies said it. There was no contemporary source which contradicted this claim to deity.
And, yes, I need to insert here that just because He made the claim it doesn’t prove that He was God. People who are confronted with the claim to deity seem to have to go through this step as they process the information, even though it is incredibly obvious.
Either He was God, or He wasn’t.
Tiberius is a pretty well-documented guy...the notion that he is “only” mentioned in 10 sources is a little too cute by half.
Wow. This thread just kinda took on a life of its own, huh?
>> proud atheist
Is there any other kind?