Posted on 08/16/2004 12:16:13 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
You are using a lot of words in these discussions, and you are not saying anything...
I am going to stop now, because it looks like we just get further and further away from the questions I ask.
As I said, I do not believe in random chance...the outcome of your flips is known to God...it will appear random to us.
Thank you for your time.
Placemarker
Interesting point. So is the result because God controls it or just because He knows everything, including eternity?
I apologize if I did not answer your question. I thought we were trying to establish if reason and faith were mutually exclusive.
You can catch up on the conversation, if you wish.
> After all, is it not POSSIBLE that I flip a regular coin 1000 times each day and ALWAYS get heads? Yes. But is it LIKELY? Not even remotely. The possibility of always getting heads, in fact, is so remote that it is not even worth considering.
An interesting point: if you flip a coin 1000 times, you will most likely get a mix of Heads and Tails... something like HTHTHHTHTTTTHHTTHHTHTTHHTHTHTHTHTHT... and so on. But THAT EXACT RESULT is *precisely* as unlikely as 1000 heads or 1000 tails in a row. And yet... 1000 flips gives a one-in 1E301, every single time.
> it is not likely that the Messiah would fulfill ALL of those prophesies described HUNDREDS of years before His birth.
Consider... if these prophesies were well known, and people wanted to make a minor crackpot into the Messiah, would they not exaggerate for effect? If the prophesis were unknown and only discovered, say, in a clay jar in 1948, then... *maybe*.
> But given theier suffering and the good character they displayed, it is not likely. It is so unlikely, in fact, that it is not even worth considering. Having ruled out LYING as a likely possibility, that leaves us with the other options.
How bizarre... you claim that the suffering of followers rules out lying? Tell me... how many Nazis and Commies and Scientologists and Muslims and Mithraists and Mormons and Johnny Rebs and Kamikazes and Heaven's Gaters and Democrats and Ba'athists and Branch Davidians and Hari Krishnas and XYZ suffered for what you, I'm sure, would see as a pack of lies? History is replete with crackpot religious leaders who went down fighting for their bizarro beliefs.
In the case of Christianity, Paul has to be one of the most important figures, as he pretty much started the church really going. but he didn;t becoem a convert until some years (4?) after Christ was supposedly crucified. Consequently, he could easily not have been a liar, but could in principle have been *inspired* by liars. Had the crucifiction and miracles of Christ been a bunch of hooey, embellishments by the Apostles, Paul would not necessarily have known it.
And another point... by whose word do we have it that the earlist disciples suffered as they claimed? Or rather... woudl you believe me if I said that I had been turned into a newt by a Wiccan, but I got better? In an earlier, less skeptical era... quite possibly. But does your belief in my newt-nonsense make it Truth?
Consequently, LYING is back on the table, and in a big, big way.
No. Lying is not an option. The people you mentioned believe their assertions to be true. Thus, they are not liars. That doesn't make the information correct, but they cannot be lying because the intent of deception is absent.
I believe it is both.
> Lying is not an option. The people you mentioned believe their assertions to be true.
The *followers* might well believe the assertions to be true, but of the movements and religions I mentioned, a number were started by outright liars. Sometimes the liars grew to believe their own BS, but that doesn't change the fac tthat what they've got was born from lies.
As much of the New Age/mystical bullcrap of the last 40 years have shown, one liar can make an army of believers. One guy makes up a lie about being abducted by aliens, and then the abductees coem out of the woodwork, having found an "accepted" framework upon which to hang their lunacies. My own personal pet peeve are the claims of extraordinary Nazi aerospace technologies, like supersonic flying saucers; there are now multiple books and thousands of believers in this sort of thing, and it was basically born from the mind of a neo-Nazi about 30 years ago who wrote somethign he knew to be fiction... but which he also knew would grab him headlines, which was the point.
So, lying remains an option. If, for example, Christ was the 30 CE equivalent of Uri Gellar, then the Apostles need not have been liars, but averagely-gullible guys looking for a Messiah. But Uri Christ... would nevertheless have been a liar (unless he grew to believe his sleight of hand was in fact divine magic).
Here, we're only talking about the apostles. They were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah of Scripture. We can talk about gullibility or lunacy later.
It seems that if you can get people to believe in resurrection, then you can get pretty much anything out of them you want.
> They were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah of Scripture.
They are certainly described that way. But were they that way? There is room for reasonable doubt.
Okay. We're getting into doctrine and dogma here, which is, IMO, completely different from the central tenets of Christianity. I wouldn't mind discussing the difference between foreknowledge and predetermination later, if you wish.
I think that if we table the discussion about that premise for now, we can move forward. I will later present why I believe it is unlikely that they were not the way they were described. The point of this discussion, I believe, is to show how faith does not need to contradict reason, and vice versa.
> The point of this discussion... is to show how faith does not need to contradict reason, and vice versa.
No, it does not need to contradict reason. Frex, I have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow, despite the very real (though low order) possibility that at midnight tonight the sun will explode. This is faith based upon a vast wealth of prior experience.
However, some faiths *DO* contradict reason, or are unsupported by it, which is where this thread came from. Believing that in an era of bajillions of religions-du-jour and virtually no skepticism that a singular and wholly remarkable event occured that has not occured since and which would essentially wipe out all we know of physics... that requires faith unsupported by reason. Is that faith clearly wrong? No. But neither is it supported by a rational examination, given the far more likely alternatives.
Yes. It seems that way. And I think that's quite an undertaking for the skeptic--especially so many years after the fact. There are some people who have faith in spite of never having had to reason in this way. Jesus said to Thomas (paraphrasing) "Because you have seen, you believe. Blessed are those who have not seen, but still believe." Undoubtedly many such people exist. I hold no dominion over anyone's conscience, so I can begrudge no one for the conclusions they draw based on the evidence they've been presented. I just object to the assertion that faith is not reasonable.
That would seem to be the case. Circular reasoning seems to be king... we know Christ was resurrected because he's the Son of God, and we know he's the Son of God because he was resurrected.
> (paraphrasing) "Because you have seen, you believe. Blessed are those who have not seen, but still believe."
This basically sums up why many people believe that the Christ story is a bunch of hooey. Assume for the moment that you wanted to create a new religion, either for monetary gain or political purposes, but you knew that a close examination of the facts would tear through the facade you'vce built.
One easy way to deal with that?
Make it clear that damnation awaits the skeptics, that faith without examination was something that your god really got off on. Thus, it becomes the safer and easier route to simply believe... because if you don't, or even just ask for evidence, not only will you go to Hell, but you'll find yourself on the outside of society.
That depends on your assumptions. If, for instance, you automatically assume that there is no all-powerful God and, if there were, He would never interfere with human affairs anyway--if you completely dismiss the possibility and do not challenge the assumption--then sure, there is no way to reconcile resurrection with your assumptions. We're working our way towards the reasons I concluded that the resurrection had to have occurred, which, if it did, would disprove the notion that God does not interfere in human affairs; the resurrection is impossible without such interference.
Thomas was not damned for being a skeptic. Thomas believed because he saw something that he previously claimed was impossible. I think the passage refers to the reality that skeptics exist, but that it was also okay to believe without seeing. Now, we haven't really gotten into the predetermination stuff yet, but once we do, we'll turn this reason debate on its head.
You asked the question, I answered.
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