I'm lumping all my comments to Mr. Rea into one message -- I hope I haven't
deleted to much context.
"Johnny Rea" <matziq@airmail.net> wrote:
> Are you saying that if there was no such thing as Judaism that
> Jesus Christ would never have been born?
Jesus *might* have been born, but he certainly would never have been
recognized as the Christ -- that is a very Jewish term.
> Normally I would agree with you but we have revelation from our
> prophets that state firmly and matter-of -factly that Adam was
> the father of all mankind.
And you are willing to take what a bunch of long dead people have said over
the evidence of your own senses and reason?
There is no hope here virions -- *willful* ignorance is impossible to cure.
> If they had a jury trial to determine the existance of God and
> could use as many witnesses (eye and character, etc.) to prove
> it and could use a pool of all witnesses (past and present), what
> do you think the outcome would be?
I think one would have a pile of contradictions. From a shear numbers
standpoint, Catholicism would probably win, although it would probably only
be with 5% of the humans in it's favour. But then, one of the biggest
logical fallacies is concluding that what the majority believes is right.
>From a numbers standpoint, I suspect that the "flat earth" people out
number the spherical type. (I'm considering all people who ever lived,
here)
What *I* see, as an atheist, is that only the materialists have any
evidence. Where are the gods today? Where are the miracles?
"Some two-and-a-half-thousand years after its debut in Western culture,
materialism stands in the final decade of the twentieth century as a
complete and well-defined philosophy in many respects. Its core
assumption that there is no reality other than the material order
exhibiting itself in what exists around and within us distinguishes
it from competing philosophies today just as sharply as it did for
Lucretius. The notion of supernatural or immaterial states of being
that are alien to nature seems just as incoherent to materialists in
the 1990s as it did to d'Holbach, who first worked out materialism's
atheistic implications. The conviction not just that the laws of
nature are knowable but that human science is capable, at least in
principle, of knowing them is no less central now than it was for
Buechner. And the assumption that all thought and feeling, human and
otherwise, is a material process is still as key an element in
materialism as it has been for the mind-brain reductionists of the
twentieth century. In these four and many related ways, the
materialist vision is what it has always been: the clearest and most
consistent effort to comprehend and demystify nature and humanity's
place in it that human intelligence has ever made."
-- Richard C. Vitzthum, 'Materialism: An Affirmative History
and Definition' (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 176
> The reason I don't mind you guys beating me up is I am so firm
> and strong in my beliefs that I can talk to Satan face to face
> and wouldn't flinch. So fire away! :)
First religious rule: Never let facts influence faith.
gullibility + arrogance
Unshakable faith = -----------------------
common sense
> Well, you have to ask yourself is our only senses what we see,
> hear, smell, taste, and touch? Or is there other ways of finding
> truth? We have determined that personal revelation is a sort of
> sixth sense.
The five senses are like a window into the world -- they provide the
premises for arguments, they provide the ultimate justification (infinite
regressions do not happen in science for this reason). Once we have this
source of premises, we can put logic to work in what is called "reason".
Logic is a systematic way of extrapolating from what you know to the
consequences of that knowledge. Reason is the act of using logic and
knowledge to justify a theory.
For instance, consider the classic Argument from Evil:
"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot;
Or he can, but does not want to;
Or he cannot and does not want to.
If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent.
If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.
But, if God both can and wants to abolish evil,
Then how come evil in the world?"
-- Epicurus, 350-?270 BC
(I find it very ironic that the Argument from Evil actually predates the
specific god in question!)
It actually works like this:
premise 1) god is (possibly all) powerful
premise 2) god is (possible "all") good
>From premise two: therefore god would want to eliminate evil, if he can
>From premise one: god CAN eliminate evil
Conclusion: if god exists, evil would be eliminated, since god both
wants to and can eliminate it.
premise 3: evil still exists
conclusion: since the consequences of gods existence are contradictory with
the world we see around us, god does not exist.
> If you've ever cracked open a Book of Mormon you will find the
> testimony of the three witnesses and other witness accounts.
> Do eye witnesses have any weight when determining truth?
Some. Depends on who they are. In criminal courts, "false in one thing,
false in all things" is a good rule of thumb. That is why the gospel
accounts of Jesus are considered worthless as evidence of Jesus. For those
interested, Thomas Paine thoroughly debunked the entire Bible (both
testimates) in his book _The Age of Reason_, about 220 years ago.
As to the book of Mormon -- which I have not read -- I withhold judgment.
However, I suspect that, with it's foundation gone, the book of Mormon
doesn't amount to much. If god does not exist, can a book about him
possibly be true?
> And what I say is when a prophet of God says something it is true
> not because he says so but because my heart physically burns with
> the knowledge. I pray for personal revelation and I get a physical
> feeling inside that tells me it is true. Everyone has this ability.
> It is called the Holy Ghost.
This is about the most fallacious argument that theists use. Allow me to
quote some scholars:
"Since experiences of God are good grounds for the existence of God,
are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the
nonexistence of God? After all, many people have tried to experience
God and have failed. Cannot these experiences of the absence of God
be used by atheists to counter the theistic argument based on
experience of the presence of God?"
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification,
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 159.
The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to
strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions."
-- Bertrand Russell
If you've been following my posts, you must know by now that I too have
these experiences -- indeed, all humankind does -- the problem is that
everyone interprets the experience differently. Certainly my experiences
don't make me conclude that any god exists -- quite the opposite. Your
god is one among many, and any theist will tell you that their experience
gives them evidence of *their* god. Me, I'm not so egoistic. My
experiences are mine, certainly -- they can never be used to justify the
existence of something outside of myself.
"OK, I seek to eliminate the meme: "There is one subjective truth".
Therefore I'm against churches and institutional religion in every
form I have encountered it. I'm absolutely not against spiritual
experience... I just want my delusions to have equal weight with the
Pope's. After all, I have as much proof."
-- Reed Konsler konsler@ascat.harvard.edu, on the CoV mailing list
> If you can show me facts that disprove what I believe then I
> will be the first to abandon the church.
I refer you to _The Age of Reason_, or to _Atheism: A Philosophical
Justification_, or to _On the Origin of Species_, or to _The Book your
Church does not Want you to Read_, or to _Losing faith in faith_, or to any
other of a thousand books containing arguments which destroy the
foundations of theism.
> Who wrote the bible? Do you believe it was one persons work of
> fiction? Or that all the writers who mention Jesus were making
> it up?
A lot of different people wrote the bible -- this is the first step in
understanding what it has to say. Frequently, the writers of the bible
disagreed over major issues -- for instance, the famous contradiction
between Paul's "we are saved by faith, not by works" and James's "faith
without works is dead". Once you begin to understand that each of the
writers had his own opinion on things, that they each wrote about *their*
*own* god, many peices fall into place. This is why there are such major
differences between the gospels -- especially between matt/mark/luke and
john. The first three are all basically the same story (to the point of
plagiarism), while the last represents a completely different school of
thought among early Christians. Most biblical scholars consider the book
of John to be the product of the early church, which is to say, not related
to the man called Jesus in any factual way.
As to whether they were writing the truth, that is anybody guess. However,
I will point out that in addition to the 27 books of the New Testimate
which (I assume) you are familiar with, there are in excess of 150 other
books about Jesus -- many of which are wildly divergent. The early years
(till +300 or so) of the Christian church were very turbulent.
For those interested, I do recommend reading some of the other literature
about "Jesus" which has survived to this day -- specifically, The Gospel of
Thomas (collected saying of Jesus), The Infant narratives (where you can
learn about Jesus's early life), The Gospel of Nicodemus (which describes
the trial in great, and amusing, detail)
All should be available at
http://wesley.nnc.edu/noncanon.htm
Given that the church itself views all of these as utterly false, I cannot
help but feel that the other stories, the ones in the bible, must similarly
be false -- after all, the only difference is that a group of Christians
*voted* to keep the ones we are familiar with.
So, in conclusion, yes, I think that by and large, the gospels are
fiction. It's possible that a man by the name of Jesus existed -- indeed,
likely -- but nobody will ever know now how much is legend and how much is
truth.
> We don't question God's motives.
If your god asked you to pick up a gun and kill people, as your god
apparently often did in the past, would you do it?
> Obviously you've never had personal revelation since you are
> an atheist.
I too am an atheist -- and there are certainly things in my past I would
call "personal revelations". Obviously, I haven't had the one you had --
but then, you haven't had mine, either.
Such arguments over personal experience prove nothing other than the fact
that we are both human. Surprise surprise!
ERiC