Mixed feelings.
I am sad that you have multiple personality disorder…but I am honored that you have chosen me as one of your personalities.
I find this conversation you are having with my pseudo-self interesting. Carry on.
The laws of physics and chemistry preclude corpses returning to life.
True, your argument is anything but academic. It’s simply handwaving and wishful thinking.
Every proton in your left leg could degrade at once. It’s unlikely, but it could happen. You however, are not coming back from the dead.
Like God? Or virtual particles?
What this argument shows is you are easily fooled by nonsense.
Existence from nothing isn’t impossible. Again, virtual particles. But in any case, I’m not a physicist, and you aren’t going to find rock solid proof of God in any physical model that people much more expert and more specialized than you have overlooked.
Your whole argument here is based on assumptions. Your assumptions are wrong. See how easy it is?
I brought it up because it is the same argument you are using. You accept nonsense when it involves the God you believe in (and I assume not the Gods you don’t believe in). Yet you reject nonsense when it doesn’t benefit you by reinforcing the religious beliefs that give you comfort.
As it happens, there is a testament to it happening. It is very sacred to my family.
Yes. My grandmother.
You’ve seen chairs before, right? It’s like one of those. It was revered for like five years, and then it was lifted into heaven. Weird, that.
Stop for a second and listen to what you’re saying. The chair is fake. But the resurrection is true. The difference is, decades after Jesus’ supposed death some guys wrote conflicting accounts of his life and magic powers.
Doesn’t it bug you that you have to devolve to such wretched gymnastics in order to buttress your religion?
They are perfectly analogous. You simply have a delusional devotion to the one and not the other.
It’s perfectly obvious to anyone watching. You want Jesus to be magic so no matter what anyone says, he’s magic.
As we are discussing resurrection here, it is highly unlikely to find a pagan reference to it, as someone who witnessed such a spectacular event will most probably become a Christian, therefore invalidating his account. Pontius Pilate, never knew about the resurrection either, so if a lost journal was found it could not provide us with any information. Remember we are not discussing whether Christ existed or not but if He resurrected.
If biblical skeptics what to question resurrection, they have science to back them up. People cannot resurrect once they’ve been dead for three days. Period. There is no need to make statements such as ‘There is no evidence the disciples believed in resurrection’, which is absurd. Actually it is very unlikely to assume that even one did not believe in resurrection.
But I would be very interested in seeing what you consider validate evidence of resurrection.
Well, not so much. First of all, Troy is real its been excavated. So is the Trojan war. Who can say that Patroclos did not really existed?
But all the above are immaterial as I deprive you of the one and only source that mentions Patroclos and besides the question was not if he was fictional or not but how he ended in Troy.
Taking your only source away and asking you to prove what I asked you is a neat trick isn’t it?
I am not so clear about what you mean by ‘Paul’s formula’. Paul teachings are also part of Oral Tradition (the ones that were not documented in Epistles)
Also, I completely disagree with your premise that we have nothing for an early tradition regarding resurrection.
Think about it for a minute. Resurrection is the single most important act Jesus performed.
It is the very foundation of Christianity. Death was defeated and Life triumphed. Through Jesus death and resurrection the whole mankind was saved.
Resurrection is a vital element in Christianity. If Christ was not God he could not come back to life and he could not abolish our sins. This is the mythology of Christianity. It is very clear.
Now, I don’t know at what date you believe John’s gospel was written but let’s say late first century or early second? Am I approximately right?
What you are saying is that for a Hundred years or so, Christians where not taught or knew this vital piece of information, what will be the corner stone of Christianity in years to come.
Please remember this is a vital piece of information there and not a trivial matter.
We are also aware that when people convert to a religion they feel very strong about it and try to absorb its teachings to the max.
A hundred years time is not so much in the largest scheme of things, but if my grandfather and father and all the people I associate with teach me something and believe in it fiercely and then out of the blue someone told me something else, a vital piece of information was withheld from me, I would be very reluctant to accept it. Nevertheless we know that resurrection was accepted through the ancient Christian world.
Taking to account the fact that Paul (and presumably other Apostles) were visiting the people they converted to Christianity and preaching to them on a number of occasions, if resurrection was never in the menu for a hundred years or so and then someone started serving it, people might get suspicious as to the validity of the statement. By the first century the Church was sort of organized with Bishops and whatnot and there was communication between Christians from different towns.
How did the Gospels became so wide spread and popular if there was something in them completely new to what they have learned? Even if some town decided to become ‘heretics’ and teach bogus stuff, the other Christians would call them on it.
And once more this is not a trivial matter, it is something of vital importance to Christianity.
Early Church had very VERY strict rules about what they believed and excommunicated everyone who deviated from that.
Do you have any reasonable explanation first as to HOW and secondly as to WHY someone a hundred years or so afterwards decided to include resurrection in the teachings and somehow get away with it, in all Christianity from Asia Minor all the way to Rome?
If you are not interested in debating honestly, then I have better things to do with my time than to respond to someone that is not interested in an actual debate. It is obvious that you, nor no-one else believes in your contrived chair. Your own posts in this thread contradict your story about the chair. All that is being demonstrated by this is how you don’t really have any serious argument against my position, and so have to resort to stupid tricks.
Calculon.
How is the chair any more stupid than God?
All you are doing is ignoring the obvious comparisons he is making so you can handwave anything he says away. You make ridiculous claims; he makes a ridiculous claim and asks how that’s any more ridiculous than what you are saying; but that’s a question you don’t dare address.
Not my job, or anyone’s, to say if Patrocles really existed. Based on the evidence we have at present, he did not. End of story. He must be discussed, if at all, as a fictional character.
What Pilate knew or didn’t know about the resurrection, or what a Roman witness to it later became is immaterial–the point is that that these are bits of evidence for your case. So far, you have none, and all the handwaving in the world doesn’t give you any.
So what, Troy actually existed? I’m surprised you don’t build a case for Jesus on the fact that Jerusalem actually existed.
Not at all. It’s a stone fact that we don’t have any evidence that anyone who knew Jesus ever claimed he had been physically resurrected. If you wish to dispute this, please tell us what that evidence is.
His appearance recitation in 1 Corinthians. Scholars refer to it as a “formula” because of its rote construction.
Cite?
All you have to do is show the evidence then.
Moroni giving Joseph Smith Golden Tablets was the very foundation of the LDS Church. Therefore it must have happened?
Forty years or so until the empty tomb, and we don’t know what they believed, exactly, but the movement could function just fine with a spiritual resurrection. That actually wasn’t the most important thing in the beginning anyway. Originally, it was an apocalyptic movement. The most important thing appears to have been the imminent return of Jesus (which Jesus had promised would happen in their lifetimes), the reversal of the social order and the advent of the “Kingdom of God.”
Joseph Smith’s claims must be true then.
Not for the first several decades, we don’t, at least not for a physical resurrection.
Paul only said that Jesus had “appeared” to people. The hook was not the appearances, but the promise that he was about to come back.
New to who? Christianity was a splintered movement from the start. Paul himself was a splitter. Some group somewhere eventually literalized the resurrection, but this didn’t happen until after the original Jerusalem movement had disappeared in the Jewish-Roman war.
They weren’t inventing a resurrection, just literalizing it to make a better story. Some groups liked that bette, some didn’t. Eventually the physical resurrection group won.
Calculon said:
This is the weakest part of your argument, Calculon. I can think of a much, much better explanation off the top of my head that takes into account all the facts (I’m not disputing them for the purposes of this post):
Jesus was the Criss Angel of his day. Everything you say is true, except that instead of being crucified and rising from the dead, he FAKED being crucified and buried (through any number of methods that are more plausible than actually rising from the dead) and then returned three days later. Maybe he hung out in the tomb in the meantime.
But the point is, even an elaborate, technologically advanced (for the time) scheme is pretty much infinitely more plausible than him rising from the dead.
I’m not saying this is what happened. I’m saying your “best explanation” is wrong, because I have a way better one.
Or in this case, the Christ Angel…
I can top that-Someone told a good tall tale, people bought it, and the story grew in the telling.
Well, that just explains Paul.
I believe that for the Jesus story there is a kernel of actual history.
To follow up on this statement:
Just one person’s personal theory, of course, but the point is that it is a perfectly reasonable and plausible theory. The fact that the Israelites were probably not yet anything like a kingdom during the 12th century BC makes it, in fact, more likely than any alternative where Deborah was an Israelite.
ETA: At least three people’s theory, actually:
Yeah, a lot of the Psalms were derived from Ugarit literature as well, and other OT literature too. The Ugarit discovery reveals a lot about the Canaanite origin of Israelite religion and literature.
A lot of the debate over Jesus or the Exodus or whatever misses the big picture issue that there’s sufficient evidence that Judaism is, clearly, a man-made invention. Jesus may have been a real person who existed, but if he had a private line to God, that god’s name was El and El wasn’t anything like a monotheist – he ruled over a pantheon of gods largely translatable between Egyptian and Grecian gods of the same time period. That Jesus preached otherwise demonstrates that he didn’t have any particular knowledge beyond what anyone else of his time did, just the same as Paul or Joseph Smith Jr.
I’d like to see evidence that the small number of Christians living in Jerusalem believed in the resurrection. They were remarkably unsuccessful about spreading their cult there - those further away did much better. You’d think that a city full of people hearing about this miracle would be more receptive.
This idea that the further out in time and distance a story travels, the more accurate it is, just doesn’t sit right with me.
It appears that you don’t know what a physical law is.
From here
So, by definition natural laws exist since they have been observed. Like anything else in science, they can change with evidence. And there is nothing that says laws must be deterministic - see the gas laws, which are statistical.
You’re still wrong. There is plenty of evidence that dead people don’t come back.
All you have to do is to show us evidence that this so-called supernatural stuff ever happened. Or happens. You not understanding what a law of physics is in no way implies that the rest of us don’t, or that the concept is fuzzy in some way.