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.
Which I notice you didn't do.
>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.
Trouble is that there is nothing outside the Christian tradition apart
from a couple of passages in Josephus that display obvious tampering.
Christians talk about "the evidence" but never provide any.
Which wouldn't even matter if they hadn't insisted everybody had to
take it seriously.
>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.
No. It is a rationalisation in the sense of an excuse not a reason.
Do you take the same attitude to all the other hero figures of the
other religions?
>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.
Nobody is denying anything.
There is simply no reason for non-Christians to believe what
Christians say.
It is merely part of somebody else's religion. Unfortunately too many
believers can't leave it at that.
If they kept it to themselves there would be no problem.
But instead they insist on telling us all about it.
So we ask for reasons to believe them.
And there aren't any.
So it remains merely part of somebody else's religion.
>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.
The problem with this is that early Christianity (as described by
Paul) didn't have a human Jesus, just a divine Christ.
The Gospels came later when the religion was repackaged for a Gentile
audience who expected thins like gods fathering heroes in mortal women
(Hercules, Orpheus, Dionysus, Perseus etc), and most of the other
things described for Jesus. In what their authors thought was a first
century Palestine setting.
>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.
Why don't you treat all the other baseless claims the same way?
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