Existence of God v Science ( Locked) (655)

Da10th: Very common among the political threads.

trish123:
I was reading this earlier and found it pretty interesting;

Did The Biblical Jesus Ever Actually Exist?” pitted American Atheist editor, author, and scientist Frank Zindler against Dr. Carolyn Thomas, a Catholic professor at the Pontifical College Josephinum and the author of several books herself.

As I’ve mentioned before – and as Zindler pointed out in his opening remarks – we actually have very little information about Jesus. If he existed, he doesn’t seem to have written anything. If he existed, nobody seems to have bothered to note what he looked like, let alone draw his picture. If he existed and did any of the things the Bible credits him with, nobody at the time seems to have cared enough or been impressed enough to write about it. It’s a very odd situation, to say the least.

The oldest reports concerning Jesus seem to be the letters of Paul. These letters seem to have been written years after Jesus had died by a man who never met him in the flesh. Paul is alleged to have had a vision or hallucination of Jesus, but it’s hard to accept that as proof that Jesus actually once existed even if that vision did unfold as the Bible reports. The same Bible tells us that those who allegedly had known Jesus in the flesh didn’t much care for Paul and at times angrily disputed his interpretation of Jesus’s message, which does little to bolster Paul’s credibility or authority. Some of the letters attributed to Paul and have made their way into the Bible are now recognized as forgeries written by people claiming to speak for him. Dr. Thomas herself granted this, claiming that it was a common and acceptable thing to do back then. She went on to claim that these unknown forgers nonetheless accurately conveyed Paul’s beliefs – a claim that begs for lots of supporting evidence. Alas, she gave none.

Virtually everything else people claim to know about Jesus comes from the four Gospels. As virtually everyone seems to agree, these Gospels weren’t written as objective reports of events but are the passionate attempts of Christians to sway others to their point of view. They are, to put it simply, theological propaganda written by unknown authors decades after the events they claim to describe. That’s at least three huge strikes against the Gospels right there, and here are three more: These Gospels disagree on many key points; they’ve clearly been tampered with by later, unknown people with their own agendas; and there’s virtually no independent collaboration for anything important that they have to say (other than for such trite things as yes, there was a Rome, and yes, there was a Jerusalem). For example, the Gospel of Matthew claims the Temple curtain was rent the day Jesus died, and a three-hour darkness fell over all the land, and an earthquake occurred, and saints rose from their graves and wandered Jerusalem. Not even the other Gospel writers noted these things, let alone the Romans. Dr. Thomas didn’t even attempt to defend what Matthew says as being historically accurate – she merely said one had to read it as symbol and poetry. If that’s the way we’re supposed to read the Bible, however, it’s hard to understand why we ought to believe Jesus actually existed anymore than we ought to believe the gods mentioned by Homer really existed.

contd;

trish123: A good deal of the debate centered on Flavius Josephus instead. Josephus was a Jewish historian who seems to make reference in his works at least twice to Christ, if not Jesus. Alas, Josephus, too, seems not to have been born until after Jesus had allegedly died, so whatever information he gives us about Jesus is secondhand, at best. That information’s reliability seems completely undermined by the fact that it’s been tampered with. As the Britannica summarizes, what was written “has been heavily revised by Christian scribes, and Josephus’s original remarks cannot be discerned.” According to Zindler, Josephus’s comments about Jesus violate the flow of his writing the way a meteorite violates a bowl of soup. In the works that Josephus wrote which specifically address the time and place Jesus allegedly lived, no mention of him is to be found. Jospehus does mention Herod, and his dislike for the man apparently caused him to catalog his many sins and faults; unfortunately for Bible-believers, however, he makes no mention of the Slaughter of the Innocents which Matthew quite famously ascribes to him. In the end, not only are we left with no independent corroborating evidence for what the Gospels say, we end up with good reasons to doubt their claims.

As Zindler pointed out at the start of his talk, it is not up to us to prove Jesus didn’t exist – it is up to those who claim that he did to prove it. Dr. Thomas barely even tried. At one point she lamely resorted to saying “People have believed in Jesus for almost two thousand years now, and no atheist is going to change that fact.” She may as well have said people have believed in astrology, or Hinduism, or the inferiority of women for even longer, and no amount of fact and logic will ever convince people to reject those things. Such comments about what people are likely to do are utterly irrelevant to the question of what they ought to do.

It’s possible that some of Dr. Thomas’s colleagues might have been able to offer a better defense of the claim that people ought to believe Jesus really existed, but a local newspaper tells me that they declined to enter the fray at all. “It would be hard for me to take the position [that Jesus didn’t exist] seriously,” one is quoted as saying. “I might have come out a little too strong.” A bit later, he’s quoted as saying “Our positions are diametrically opposed…. I wouldn’t know how to do it.” Do what? Debate someone who disagrees with you?? Why is it that Christians so often refuse to talk to those who disagree? Exactly what are they afraid of?

Mr_Popplewick: The world exists because I exist. Everyting that is around me or outside of me has been created for my benefit and my benefit alone. Through this mathmatically pure simulation i learn to show the values needed m,ost by the creator and his angels in the fight agaisnt the forces of chaos..

How do we know the world exists. One thought is I was created physically when my father inseminated my mother. At that moment consciousness was born in me physically. Kind of like the BIG BANG. The world was created around me and everything including you reading this is not areal, just a creation of the false world. Fact is, I know that I have existed before and will exist again. I am after all a great actor, whom in his existene has worn many different faces and costumes. As the great Shakespeare once said "all the world is a stage". Too true. Think about it. Why do situations, circumstances or people often seem the same? Because we have obviously played out this role before but in different costumes on a different background, because everyone is basically the same person....there are not trillions of souls, just a few million perhaps whom have lived and will live again....or perhaps just a few basic archetypes to whom we all adhere too.

One thing is for sure..There is a creator and there is a destroyer. there is a positive and there is a negative, there is a male and there is a female. These are basic truths. All it requires now is for us to work out the other issues, such as why are there reacurring numbers that seem to be the key to this whole matrix we live in?

The creator created this beautfiull world not only for our enjoyment but so we might learn something so that when we venture home, after we have found our way home we may be able to write a chapter each in the book of creation, that great bvolume of knowledge handed down from time immemorial which is all about the great dventure namely life in this realm. Of course we m,ust first make it home. We are all it seems bound to a perpetual quantum leap untill such time as we get thing right here in this plane. If we want to get things right we need to probably pay heed to our own "AL" whom is our spirit guide from our real world come to try and guide us home in this world, after all we are perpetually leaping from one existence to the next trying to find the way home wheresoever that may be. A place where we will all have to write someday our own chapters in the great Book of Life.