This sidetrack is interesting and deserves its own thread, but(to get back on-topic)have you a response to the question I asked in post #48?
Gnosticism existed in Persia and Egypt long before Christianity. I think you need to understand the distinction between gnosticism (a large umbrella term for a number of esoteric, mystery traditions), and Gnostic Christianity, which adopted some of those ideas. Exactly when and how is not clear, but there are elements of it in Canonical Gosepl of John, so that suggests it was there in 1st century. More significanly, though, there were multiple and competing Chistian movements from very early on. Paul himself admits that, and also admits that his own movement was at odds with the one led by Jesus’ own brother.
You are misinformed about Thomas and clearly misunderstand about what is meant by “primitive.” The general rule of thumb is that the less developed the theology is in a given piece of Christian literature, the earlier it’s liukely to be. For instance, a book which shows no awareness of the Resurrection (as Thomas does not) is not likely to have been written after Christainity had accreted that particular element into its mythology because it would be too important to ognore. In adition, GThomas’ entire conception of Jesus is theologically undeveloped, does not see Jesus as divine, does not even see him as the Messiah. He’s just a teacher. This indicates very early authorship. In addition, the fact that it’s a sayings gospel, with minimal narrative framings, is also indicative of early authorship. Even some of the sayings themselves are earler versions than the Canonicals, lacking the polish and spin put on them by those later editors.
Thomas also does not depend on anything written in 175. That’s just bullshit. It is a layered work, though, and some layers were added later, but the core layer likely predates mark.
This is not a fact. The dating of Thomas tends to be contentious (religious apologists tend to be highly resistant to dating anything before the Canaonicals), but the best evidence points to a mid 1st century dating for the earliest layers.
You’re the one making a bizarre claim that religious hallucinations are not the same as non-religious hallucinations. I work in the mental health field, and work with psychotics. Religious psychosis, including seeing visions or hearing voices of gods/angels/devils are very common abd are not recognized in the field as not being regular old psychosis. My cite is definitional. Psychosis is defined as distorted or delusional view of reality. People who see things taht aren’t there are having a psychotic episode by definition. Anyone who thinks they are talking to a sky god is having a psychotic episode by clinical definition. Your attempt to equivocate are baseless and not grounded in any real clinical distinction.
Actually, mu SOP is to ask for actual evidence, which you are never willing to provide. I’m not interested in your links to a bunch of woo books. I would like you to cite specific, verifiable evidence for any supernatural occurence. I gurantee you that (at least at the time I am posting this) no such cite is possible.
In regards to your demands that I expand my study, I have read many books on Bible scholarship from many perspectives, Christian and secular, liberal and conservative. I have found no book that comes remotely close to your viewpoint. On the question of whether Thomas is Gnostic Gospel there’s room for debate, but a typical list of the Gnostic gospels will include it. As for the “strong evidence that it’s a very early work”, show me the evidence.
Q should not be listed among document that “we have” because we don’t have it. Q is a hypothetical document; may be existed at some point, maybe it didn’t. If it did, we’ll never know exactly what it said, barring the finding of a copy. On the idea that Paul perhaps didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection, I’ve answered that before so I’m not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish by going over it again. Paul did not need to distinguish between a physical or spiritual resurrection because for the Jews at that time it wasn’t a question. To them, resurrection was bodily resurrection. There was no other. As for “Paul denies that physical resurrections are possible and calls people “idiots” for believing they can happen”, that’s not true.
Lastly, in a later place you claim that Luke didn’t write until the 90’s A.D. In a previous thread you tried to back that up by pointing to Dr. Bruce Metzger and Dr. Bart Ehrman. However, both of them say firmly that Luke was written before that date. Some, of course, [url=“When were the Gospels written? | GotQuestions.org”] argue for a much earlier date.
Obviously not, but I have studied them. Oddly, when atheists or agnostics press this line of argument, I see it pointing in the exact opposite direction from where they want it to go. Folks who want to argue against Christianity have made up quite a lot of untrue claims: events in the life of Jesus being copied from pagan mythology, the canonical gospels being selected arbitrarily from many others written at the same time, our religious experiences being hallucinations, plus a great many lies about history and other topics. By contrast, no one says that the Koran was selected arbitarily from a long list of Gnostic Korans. No one claims that the Mahabharata was plagiarized from the myth of Horus. Nobody claims that the Buddha was deluded by his temporal lobe epilepsy. If everyone truly believed that Christianity was just one religion among many with no more argument for it than any other, then why the necessity to tell so many untruths and tell them only about Christianity?
You see, that is what this thread is about, though. How does one choose from amongst the thousands of sects that currently exist? You, on the other hand, seem to think defending the one you picked absolves you from looking at others with the same eye you view your own. Nowhere in your discussions have you talked about how your beliefs compare to the beliefs of others.
As somebody who actually has done a lot of study, including quite a bit in a formal, academic context, not just surfing apologetic websites on the internet, I am highly dubious of how much you’ve really studied. You do not manifest a great deal of knowledge, but tend to regurgitate boilerplate apologia.
Yes, Thomas is usually included on lists of Gnostic gospels because it was used by Gnostics, and it’s a hard book to classify, but, in point of fact, it does not actually contain any gnostic theology. No dualism, no archons, etc. In content, it’s just a sayings gospel comparable to Q.
This is what I mean about you clearly having gotten everything you think you know from apolgetic books and websites and not really being educated. Q is clearly present in Matthew and Luke. They use a common written sayings source in Greek. That is not disputable. We do not need an extant manuscript of that source to know that they used it.
We might not know everything it said, but we know that it said, at a minimum, what is quoted by Matthew and Luke.
Once again, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Paul most certainly did make a distinction between physical and spiritual resurrections and definitely called people raka (“idiots,” “fools”) for believing that physical resurrection was possible.
No I didn’t. I back it up by pointing out that Luke knew Josephus.
Not true. Ehrman does not assign a hard date to Luke, only stating that it could not have been earlier than 80-85 CE, but that it could have been much later. He does not say it had to have before 90, only that 80-85 CE is the earliest possible date.
Nobody serious. It’s pretty well established that Luke copied Mark, that Mark is post 70 and that Luke therefore had to have been writing 10-15 years after Mark. That means Luke’s window starts at 80-85 CE at the earliest (but far from the latest).
I’m sensing a bit of defensiveness from you on this. But it’s a relatively innocuous question. Could you list some of the books and/or articles you’ve read about other religions?
No, not for the Koran. But there is a long list of disputed Hadiths (alleged sayings of Muhammed), and it’s not 100% clear which ones are legitimate or made up.
I practice Zen Buddhism. But I’d at least be willing to entertain the possibility that Buddha was epileptic. Like Jesus, it’s very difficult to separate the historical Siddhartha Gotama from the myth. I think Christianity is a lot more dependent on Jesus than Buddhism is dependent on the Buddha. Even if the Buddha was a mad man, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the Five Precepts are pretty good guidelines for living one’s life. But if you take away Jesus’ divinity, I don’t see what’s left that’s worthwhile about Christianity (you can feel free to correct me on this point if you wish). Buddhism isn’t quite as vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.
I think there are a couple factors at work here for why Christianity gets more criticism than most other religions (although I’ve seen Islam get plenty of flak also). For one thing, it’s the dominant religion in the West (both in America and the European Union) which is also where most secular humanists are located. It’s also a proselytizing religion, which means that atheists and agnostics are a lot more likely to encounter Christians in their day to day lives and thus feel moved to argue about Christianity.
I’m distinguishing force for the purpose of conversion from force for other means. The Crusades, then, do not count, and I am unaware of any Jewish use of force for conversion.
But it appears that you are saying that exclusive salvation through Jesus is a minor detail in Christian belief, which is just bizarre. What else is the point of Christianity? Christians did not invent love your neighbor, and the pagans ate shellfish without a holy dispensation. I wouldn’t think that a Christian has to be anywhere close to a fundamentalist to think that the part of the Bible which has Jesus dying for our sins is correct.
While we’re on the subject of picking a religion, I feel moved to post an exerpt from the Kalama Sutta (which is sometimes called the Buddha’s Charter of Free Inquiry), where the Buddha is asked how to judge which doctrine is the right one:
The Buddha’s response:
<Looking at the slums of Rio> Islam? Their founder was smart enough to put his holy city on the top of a crapload of oil, after all.
And Moses was pretty well respected too - and we are all doctors. 
[url tag fixed by me]
That site is hilarious. I looked at three of their pages, and came across this:
I snorted out loud when I read the first sentence of their answer!
Now there is real scholarship in action!
Well at least you’ve finally admitted that the only cite you’re able to offer is a long version of “because I said so”. Earlier in this thread you ordered me to “read the papers” on this issue. Now, it looks like you’re ready for a de facto admission that the papers you ordered me to read don’t actually exist. If so, perhaps you should be a little bit more cautious the next time you order me to read certain things which you can’t actually link to. A cite is a link to an outside source of wide reputability, not just yourself repeating yourself.
First of all, you’re trying to reduce the entire category of religious experiences to just those involving seeing and hearing. This is invalid and you know it, since you’ve participated in a previous thread in which I mentioned that only a small percentage of religious experiences are visions and locutions.
Moreover, Dr. Mario Beauregard and Dr. Vincent Paquette have studied brain activity during religious experience and found activation in a wide variety of brain regions not associated with hallucinations. (In the thread already cited, you called Dr. Beauregard a crackpot but you didn’t offer any reason why his conclusions were invalid.) There is ample other evidence against your claim that all religious experiences are psychotic episodes. Dr. Abraham Maslow, perhaps the leading psychiatrist of the later 20th century, concluded that there is a strong positive relationship between religious experiences and mental health, not a negative one as you describe, so I guess you’ll have to call him a crackpot too. Many others have confirmed his viewpoint with experimental research. But hey, since you work in the mental health field you know this stuff already.
I predicted that you would call them idiots or crackpots. You called them woo books. So I wasn’t precisely on the money, but I was certainly quite right in predicting the tone of your response.
I just cited several supernatural events with specific, verifiable evidence. You responded by saying that you were not interested in my links. Then you say “I would like you to cite specific, verifiable evidence for any supernatural occurence”. How can you not be interested in it and simultaneously want me to provide what you’re not interested in? And, if your response is that you find those links and books to be of insufficient quality, I ask you to cite specific, verifiable reasons for juding them to be so.
No, the cite is dfinitional. You are the omne who is actually making the claim that there is some kind of clinical difference between hallucinating spiders and hallucinating angels.
Since you are typically in these threads trying to cite what you believe are revelatory experiences as evidence for God (and have done so indirectly in this thread), then the only kind of relevant experience to this conversation is that which the subject perceives as imparting some kind of information from an external, supernatural source, i.e. “seeing and hearing.” A warm cozy feeling from prayer is not psychotic, but is not very interesting either, and certainly has no evidentiary value.
These studies you’re so in love with are base on a fake, tendentous contrived set of criteria for what constitutes a “psychotic experience.” It has nothing to do with brainwaves. If you are seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, that is a psychotic experience by clinical definition. “Psychosis” means you are not perceiving reality accurately. If you think angels are talking to you, you aren’t perceiving reality accurately.
“Religious experience” has no clinical definition, by the way, and can refer to a wide variety of mundane activities, so the assertion that not all religuous experiences are psychotic is not a very meaningful observation.
What do you expect when you cite woo? Prove it’s not woo. Show me evidence that people who think they are talking to angels are in fact, really truly talking to angels. Show me actual evidence of the supernatural. Citing book titles is not citing evidence.
No you didn’t. You linked to a bunch of books. I don’t want to see a bibliography. I want to see the actual hard evidence.
You tried to slip the noose on my question by deferring to a list of books. I want you to actually tell me what the evidence is, not gesture vaguely in the direction of the new age section of the bookstore. I mean, come on, Lourdes? That’s the best you can do? Give me a break. Show me a peer reviewed study verifyimg miraculous cure at Lourdes (and please do not try to cite miracle certifications by the Catholic Church. That is not scientific evidence).
Here is the reality: not a single example of any supernatural or “miraculous” event has ever been proven to have occurred in the history of the universe, and that includes Lourdes and Fatima.
How can anyone take visions as proof of the divine? The types of visions have changed throughout time. Did pre-Christian Romans have visions of Yahweh or angels? Of course not. The concepts didn’t exist, but presumably both god and his angels did. Instead they had visions of THEIR gods and demi-gods. But according to your beliefs, these are mere fictions.
It seems to me that no matter what sort of contorted pretzel logic you try to use, the fact remains that you can’t have it both ways. I think that is the point Diogenes has tried to make and it is self-evident. It is the most basic sort of Aristotelian logic.
Well that’s trolling. To say that religion/spirituallity cannot be combined with intelligence is extremly arrogant.
Keep accusations of trolling and other insults in the Pit, please.