Is Christianity something other than a religion?

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by pjohns, Sep 19, 2017.

  1. DennisTate

    DennisTate Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    He has a good point because every religion on earth is about to go through some major changes as information continues to come out that gives us a new and I believe clearer view of all of the events at the time of Rabbi Yeshua - Jesus.

    www.ThomasTwin.com/
     
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  2. Greataxe

    Greataxe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There are dishonest people in all faiths, and many in faith healing "ministries."

    There are many grand shows put on by atheists that would leave me to wonder about their cause:

    Burning Man.

    Gay Pride marches

    Military parades by North Korea, China, Vietnam....
     
  3. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    False equivalence!
     
  4. Greataxe

    Greataxe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Socialism, and modern Cultural Marxism is an atheistic belief system. Not all socialists and communists are atheists. However ALL important Marxist and Communists are atheists.
     
  5. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    Assumes extremist theist disinformation NOT in evidence.
     
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  6. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    Hey me too; but that isn't the point. The point is whether, had he not been a firsthand witness, Thomas would have believed in the Resurrection.

    No one alive is in any position to know that.

    Never mind what it is, for the moment. Let's start with what it is not: firsthand knowledge such as Thomas allegedly had of the Resurrection. You weren't a witness to any of Hannibal's exploits; and even if you've laid hands on the original records of his exploits, you're dependent on the testimony of others for verification of their provenance. So your belief about Hannibal rests ultimately on your trust in the competence and integrity of mere mortals. Now whether such trust counts as blind faith I leave as an open question, but there's no sense in pretending any scripture provides anything like the sort of evidence Thomas had.
     
  7. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    [QUOTE="Durandal, post: 1068030925, member: 59223]
    What makes sense is that Yahveh is myth and Jesus is either fully myth or a mythically imbued man (or more likely, a number of real men and ideas combined through narrative and given a fictitious life on earth in the gospel narratives).[/QUOTE]

    Would you care to prove that, please?
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2017
  8. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    Are you suggesting that all Christians who are not fundamentalists (and I am not) simply wish to create a Jesus to their own liking?
     
  9. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    You seem to be assuming that all Christians have gravitated to Christianity because of some innate desire to be attached to it.

    Is it not just possible, in your mind, that some of us were convinced of the truth of Christianity--and therefore became Christians, due to that convincing?
     
  10. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member Donor

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    Prove he existed and that he was what gospels and clergy claim. Christians accept these outlandish claims not because they are factually supported, but because they come with religious promises of punishment and reward, and a belief system that often proves emotionally satisfying, especially in times of stress. My position is simply the default, skeptical position to take toward any fantastic claim. You prove it. It's your absurd claim that Jesus lived, was "half-God," performed miracles and floated off into the sky to live forever after being killed and then resuscitated three days later.

    One problem, I suspect, is that Christians tend to be taught this stuff at a young, impressionable age, and in a vacuum - they don't learn about other myths, religious or otherwise, so they think all of this stuff is unique when it is not, and they accept that there is some kind of historical record to support it, when again, there is none.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2017
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  11. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    Then just how did Jesus move the stone that entombed him?
     
  12. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    Really?

    That sounds much more like a dare than a genuine offer...
     
  13. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    Was Hannibal's crossing of the Alps an "unverifiable claim"?

    And I have no source to suggest that Jesus regained His strength "in those same 3 days."
     
  14. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    Their getting together (I would call it conspiring) to remove the stone, and thereby create a (false) narrative that Jesus had arisen from the dead--thereby forming the underpinnings of a cult--would certainly seem sinister to me.
     
  15. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    Absent some knowledge that the authors had some sort of motive to fabricate their stories, it seems reasonable to assume that they did not.

    I was not a "witness" to the American Civil War, either; but I believe the accounts of the three days of fighting at Gettysburg, in 1863; the fighting at Antietam; etc.
     
  16. Le Chef

    Le Chef Banned at members request Donor

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    This is wild. I didn't say anything about creating a false narrative.

    But in any event, you think this is more far fetched than the stone being moved by supernatural forces?
     
  17. Le Chef

    Le Chef Banned at members request Donor

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    No, but crossing a mountain range doesn't require supernatural forces.
     
  18. Le Chef

    Le Chef Banned at members request Donor

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    I don't know that Homer had any motive to fabricate his stories about the Cyclops and Achilles' heel. It doesn't make them true.

    You are coming across as a little defensive in these arguments, as though everyone who is skeptical about the historicity of miracles is accusing the writers of scriptures as lying.

    They could absolutely have been telling the truth; they could also have misinterpreted stories they heard from their forebears; exaggerated; been misinterpreted themselves; the stories could have become distorted over time; they could have been writing metaphor or poetry; and they could simply have been mistaken.

    I take much of the Bible as true, of course, but it's based on faith.

    What are you trying to accomplish here?
     
  19. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    It is and has always been a business.
     
  20. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    His followers moved the stone to give him a burial and promote the mythology.
     
  21. CourtJester

    CourtJester Well-Known Member

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    Since there has never once been any actual evidence or proof of supernatural forces the answer has to be yes. And to be blunt there is no actual evidence of miracles either.
     
  22. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    So had Thomas not witnessed the Resurrection, and assumed the testimony of the other Apostles was correct, would he still be your favorite Apostle?

    So what?
     
  23. pjohns

    pjohns Well-Known Member

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    This seems to presuppose that Christians are unaware of the claims of various religions.

    And I am certainly not of a "young, impressionable age."

    Nor was I when I first embraced Christianity.
     
  24. Durandal

    Durandal Well-Known Member Donor

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    I was brought up that way. It clashed with my love of science and that nagging voice in me that told me I was clinging on to lies that I had been told to believe on pain of eternal damnation.

    Science, whether it's a study related to the earth, to biology, or to anthropology or archaeology, is especially good at disspelling notions of the bible being a history book by any stretch, but it sure doesn't stop there. Just looking at gospel claims, for instance, there is no contemporary record of Jesus, the census was BS, Herod never had children killed, and of course there is nothing to attest to the crucifixion or its aftermath, and so much of the language is clearly symbolic anyway, such as the three hours of darkness, an event naturally unrecorded in history, not to mention the dead people coming back to life!

    Oh, and there's an epistle that says the "last hour" was occurring when it was written:

    Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.
    1 John 2:18

    Christianity was born at a time of crisis in Judea. The temple had just been destroyed and the old Jewish religion was subsequently at a crisis, as it was a messianic faith based around that temple. This is why the destruction of the temple was worked into the narrative; it had to be explained and mitigated as a perceived disaster. The Jesus of scripture and preaching had "predicted" that event and it was linked to the death and resurrection of himself, and his death and resurrection clearly follow the solar deity model, one that was rather common in the time and region, and had been around for quite a while. Such beliefs used astrology as a basis, or at least were related to it somehow. Solar hero Jesus was "dead" for three days as the sun "dies" for three days at Winter Solstice, for instance, after which it is reborn or resurrected. This describes its apparent motion to a low point in the southern sky (as per the tilt of the earth relative to the sun, as viewed from the northern hemisphere), where it appears to stop for about three days before beginning to move up (higher, northward) again, heralding the coming end of winter and start of spring. Then we come to Easter!

    But rather than go through all of that again, as I have actually done here on more than one occasion already in other threads, I will again link a great site about all of that:
    http://www.usbible.com/

    This fellow seems to have it all worked out pretty well, how the entire gospel narrative fits the Zodiac. Even the number of apostles is significant, as that's how many months and houses of the Zodiac there are. He argues that Judas is Scorpio, through which the sun passes in autumn (right about now, in fact), where it receives the scorpion's kiss and begins its downfall. Anyway, it's all very fascinating and helps explain how the narrative was put together and why it contains the various elements that it does. Why, for instance, have Herod try to find and kill baby Jesus, contrary to history? A: Because Herod was symbolic of the serpent (dragon) that astrologically waits near Jesus's mother in the sky (constellation Serpens Caput, right "below" Virgo). This part of the gospel story is also told in different, clearer imagery in Revelation 12:

    Revelation 12New International Version (NIV)
    The Woman and the Dragon
    12 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”a]">[a] And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

    ---

    It is beat for beat the same as the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, but as you can see, it's told using more straightforward astrological imagery.
     
  25. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    Your response does NOT address your contradiction that you asked to have explained to you.

    I have made no assumptions whatsoever so your inane strawman is duly noted and ignored.
     
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