Posted on 08/27/2002 9:11:12 AM PDT by marshmallow
More than 70,000 people in Australia have declared that they are followers of the Jedi faith, the religion created by the Star Wars films.
A recent census found that one in 270 respondents - or 0.37% of the population - say they believe in "the force", an energy field that gives Jedi Knights like Luke Skywalker their power in the films.
Most of the 70,509 people who wrote Jedi on their census forms were suspected to have done so in response to an e-mail encouraging all Star Wars fans to get it recognised as an official religion.
But the majority do not seriously tell each other: "May the force be with you", according to Australian Star Wars Appreciation Society president Chris Brennan.
"When you look at it you probably have got about 5,000 people in that 70,000 that were true hard-core people that would believe the Jedi religion carte blanche," he told ABC Radio.
"Then you would have 50,000 fans that said 'oh yeah we'll just put down Jedi for fun, we don't actually have a religion of our own'.
"Then you probably have 15,000 people who did it just to give the government a bit of curry," he said.
'Not defined'
An e-mail was sent around the world in 2001 saying that if 10,000 people declared they were Jedi, it would be recognised as an official religion.
But the Australian Bureau of Statistics said it would be categorised as "not defined".
Thousands of people in New Zealand and the UK also followed the advice of the e-mail - with Jedi Knight even being included on the list of religions by UK census authorities.
They were simply willing to die rather than deny their own eyewitness knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus Christ -- hardly something for which a man would be willing to die if he knew he was lying.
Just as other people were willing to die rather than deny their own eyewitness knowledge of other "facts" that are incompatible with the "facts" that the Apostles were willing to die for. Your "proof" proves nothing. People believe all kinds of wild things they claim to have witnessed, and many of them will die for these. It's just normal human psychology at work.
Sure... people who will die for a statement of fact which they know to be false are oh, so common.
Straw Man argument.
The truth is that more people were killed in the name of atheism in the last century than the sum total of all of the religion related deaths you can actually cite numbers for, which attests to the fact that religion has had an overall good impact on man's history.
Non-sequitor. It does not follow, that if religion killed fewer people than atheism, it must therefore have had an overall good impact on man's history.
Besides, we really don't have good data to work with: for instance, what kind of per capita killings are we talking about? There were a lot fewer people alive when religion was dominant, and the means to kill them were much more primitive. Give your average 4th century Christian fanatic, or your average 21st century Muslim fanatic, large populations to work on, with modern weapons and modern techniques of social control, and I think we'd see religion rapidly rival atheism in the body count.
If a man tells me he saw a piebald horse in Piccadilly, I believe him without hesitation. The thing itself is likely enough, and there is no imaginable motive for is deceiving me. But if the same person tells me he observed a zebra there, I might hesitate a little about accepting his testimony, unless I were well satisfied, not only as to his previous acquaintance with zebras, but as to his powers and opportunities of observation in the present case. If, however, my informant assured me that he beheld a centaur trotting down that famous thoroughfare, I should emphatically decline to credit his statement; and this even if he were the most saintly of men and ready to suffer martyrdom in support of his belief. In such a case, I could, of course, entertain no doubt of the good faith of the witness; it would be only his competency, which unfortunately has very little to do with good faith, or intensity of conviction, which I should presume to call in question.The fact remains that the Gallic Wars and the Annals of Tacitus are horses, and you're reporting a centaur.
--David Hume
I have little doubt that Jesus existed, as did the others.
Even that is not as simple as it appears. "Jesus" is simply our translation of Joseph (Y'shua), a very common Jewish name. There were several other Jesuses, before and after the time of the Jesus recorded in the Gospels. Some of these Jesuses were said to have performed miracles, raised the dead, and were crucified. How do we know that the stories about these other Jesuses were not later confused/comingled with the stories about the "real" Jesus? We don't know; the historical "evidence" is always more uncertain and incomplete than the True Believers would have you believe.
Heck, we can't even be sure we know who really wrote Shakespeare, and he is only removed 400 years from us. Don't laugh this one off: there is good evidence that Shakespeare is a pen name for someone else, but it takes a bit of time and patient scholarship to sift the evidence and to get past the prejudices ingrained by the "faith" of the dominant academic scholars, who also claim to be based on nothing but solid historical fact. "Fact" is never a sure thing when you are basing something on alleged eyewitnesses and the statements of people long dead who had motive to deceive or an ax to grind.
What? Are we to believe those Jonestown Kool-Aid drinkers were Buddhists then?
Balrog, you truly are a demon of the ancient world! :-)
Aren't you admonished by the "socialists can't be Christians" argument? Why, it seems to work for those who make the "nazis were socialists, all socialists are left wingers, therefore nazis are left wingers" argument. Jim Jones wasn't a Christian! QED! Prove me wrong. After all, I'm making this up as I go along, like any good religionist. And, yes, Socrates was a cat.
But Jesus' friends didn't change their story
If that is the case, you would have thought that the gospels would not contradict each other or otherwise mesh so poorly. Not to mention the obvious evolution of the "story" as it changed from gospel to gospel. But then, anyone who writes as though he has documentary proof of everything that Jesus' friends did and did not say about Jesus, is impervious to any argument. Such as the argument that anyone compiling/editing the gospels would, naturally, omit anything that Jesus' friends said which contradicted the gospel being compiled/edited.
You speak as though we have access to the entire historical record. We do not. We have a few scraps of record, heavily edited, censored, rewritten, etc., compared to a mountain of information which was never written down, or if written, was later destroyed or lost. Those who control information control what gets recorded and what does not. The Christian Church had many centuries to "tidy up" the historical record.
No one really disputes the historical facticty of Mohammed.
That's because we have overwhelming evidence for the existence of Mohammed, that does not come from Mohammedan sources. Plus, it is not the existence of Jesus that is really in debate, but whether he was who Christians claimed he was, or not. Mohammed did not claim to be born of a virgin, did not claim to work miracles, did not claim to have risen from the dead. Mohammed's only supernatural claim is that he was the final prophet of God. Since one can only accept, reject, or ignore this claim, it's really only a question of religious faith; it's not a claim that appears to violate any of the basic fundamental laws of nature. One can write a history of Mohammed without believing in his religion, and do so without having to challenge any of the facts of his story. If one does not believe the claims about Jesus, however, it is impossible to take the claims of virgin birth, miracles, rising from the dead, etc., at face value, and remain intellectually honest. Believing in the Jesus of Christianity as a historical fact requires a lot more faith than believing in the Mohammed of Islam as a historical fact. We can believe more about the Mohammed story because it was written down as it occurred (not centuries later as is the case with Jesus) and because the story does not violate any of he fundamental laws of nature.
For many reasons, which I don't have the time to recite here. Suggest you go to one your local Veterans organizations and pose the question to them.
Is suicide virtuous?
No, unless you mean in the sense of someone doing an act of bravery which was "virtually suicidal".
It's no more unbelievable than the murder of Julius Caesar. Both are well-documented events, each of which had wide-reaching consequences, the historical facticity of which is acknowledged as obviously true by those who are rational.
If you believe that the assasination of a political figure is equivalent to the resurrection of someone from the dead, then you are in no position to be talking about what is "rational". People are assasinated all the time. Murder violates no natural laws. Coming back from the dead, however, does. We have no documented proof that it has ever happened; you want us to believe this miracle based on the eyewitness testimony of people whose veracity is alleged to stem from their willingness to die to prove their veracity, which is circular reasoning and proof of nothing. The assasination of Caesar is not an extraordinary event and requires no extraordinary proof. Not so the raising from the dead of Jesus, or any other alleged supernatural event. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.
It's not enough simply because it's not all that there is. To deny Facts in Evidence would be intellectually dishonest of me... it would be irrational.
Both Jewish and Roman sources and traditions admit an empty tomb. Those resources range from Josephus to a compilation of fifth-century Jewish writings called the "Toledoth Jeshu." Dr. Paul Maier calls this "positive evidence from a hostile source, which is the strongest kind of historical evidence. In essence, this means that if a source admits a fact decidedly not in its favor, then that fact is genuine." ~~ Josh McDowell
Paul Maier observes that " . . . if all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement."
Professor Thomas Arnold, for 14 years a headmaster of Rugby, author of the famous, History of Rome, and appointed to the chair of modern history at Oxford, was well acquainted with the value of evidence in determining historical facts. This great scholar said: "I have been used for many years to study the histories of other times, and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which God hath given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead." Brooke Foss Westcott, an English scholar, said: "raking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no historic incident better or more variously supported than the resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it." ~~ Josh McDowell
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