On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:46:44 -0600, Midwinter
<midwinter_m@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Christopher A.Lee <calee@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> said :
>
>> Feel free to provide as much evidence as there is for Elvis, Diana
>> etc.
>
>I suspect you'll find considerably greater capacity for information
>recording, storage and retrieval in the lifetimes of Elvis and Diana than
>existed in first-century Galilee, so I would not be surprised at the
>disparity.
>
>Even so:
>
>> Until you do it is just a rationalisation because there isn't any.
>
>It is a rationalisation in the sense that I am appealing for rationality.
>As I said, there is little reason to deny the possibility of his
>existence as a man - that a man might have existed is, as I said, nothing
>out of the ordinary and does not in itself stretch the bounds of physical
>possibility or imply the existence of God.
More im****tantly, there is nothing that leads to the conclusion that
there was one.
Indeed the evidence is against it. Paul describes a divine Christ, and
knows nothing of an historical Jesus. That came later when the Gospels
were written for gentiles. They re-tell the sort of things expected of
any self-respecting demigod by the Mediterranean cultures, retelling
the same stories told about Hercules, Orpheus, Adonis, Perseus etc in
a first century Palestine setting that manages to get basic historical
and geographic details wrong.
There is nothing outside the Christian tradition apart from a passage
in Josephus whose obvious tampering places it in doubt.
We wouldn't even know this if they hadn't presumed it to people they
know don't share their beliefs and been asked to prove it. And having
offered this we looked at it.
>The question of whether such a man could have been God is of course
>another matter, and for myself I see no reason to assume that he was, if
>he existed. And I don't say that he existed: I say only that I see no
>reason to assume that he must not have existed. There are sources dating
>from closer to his lifetime than I am, and although those sources may
>well have been created as stories with no factual basis at all, it's
>equally likely that they grew up - or were built - around an actual
>person, whose true nature, personality and beliefs are probably now
>entirely lost to us.
Trouble is that gets things the wrong way round.
One doesn't come up with something and then say there is no evidence
against it therefore there is no reason to assume it didn't exist..
When there is no evidence for something, then one has no reason to
believe it.
It remains in the realm of "this is what somebody else believes" until
they provide the missing evidence.
Which given the evidence against and the time they have had to come up
with something, is going to be very unlikely.
>In short, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a source having some
>element of historical validity simply because I didn't like the religion
>built on that source. Nor would I take the source as gospel (pardon me)
>truth when I know that it has undergone enormous changes throughout its
>history.
I don't think anybody else does - but it is too easy to forget that
there are zillions of other things that can't be ruled out, however
unlikely they are.
It is a mistake to single any one of them out because this usually
leads to emotionally prejudicial misrepresentation.
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