And it’s relevance is determined by ?
by the fact that the discussion is about the merits of religion/god/theology/etc.
substitute relevant for pertinent, if you want.
If a discussion is about whether Jesus owned his sandals or not, jumping in to say that God is a lie doesn’t help. If the discussion is about the existence of God, creation, omnipotence, the role of the church in government, religious values in life issues, what-have-ya, then yes, by all means, don’t miss that chance.
And it is relevant/pertinant to this discussion. The question is why Jesus didn’t heal the wounds; since I don’t believe he had the power, the obvious answer is the needs of the storyteller. The major hijacker here, as I see it, it you; you are the one who kept harping on “pizza haters”.
Yes, how can you have a debate on how many angels dance on a head of a pin without determining whether angels actually exist? Does anyone know how big an angel is, or what its powers are? Of course not as no one has actually seen an angel and measured these things.
The rational answer to why Jesus didn’t heal the wounds on his hands is that he probably never existed as depicted in the Bible anyways. He wasn’t born of a virgin, he wasn’t the son of god, he wasn’t put up on a cross and then resurrected himself 3 days later. None of it happened other than in the imaginations of those who wrote the bible many years after the time these things were supposed to happen. The question should be ‘why do people ignore the most likely solution to their questions when there is no proof to say otherwise’.
I first clicked into this thread around Post #10. I thought it was pretty straightforward. Christ could have healed the wounds, but didn’t for whatever reason. See, e.g., Mangetout at Posts #2 and #4, Polycarp at Post #32 and Chronos at Post #48. BTW, I’m an atheist, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. Just sayin’ that this explanation makes sense to me. (As distinguished from Christian salvation theodicy, which doesn’t.) Most of the rest of the discussion, I must say, suffers from the defect, as Sapo argues, of attacking Christian theodicy (with which, I repeat, I disagree), rather than addressing the OP.
PBear, the OP itself is a tongue in cheek question already, delving into the question of how theology deals with it.
Arguing that the proffered theologies don’t make any sense, or don’t have any consistency, is well in line with the OP. Especially if the quick response to the OP is basically “its magic, so basically, make up any old stuff” which isn’t particularly interesting.
Contrary to Sapo’s account (which, unlike anyone else’s behavior, HAS been about trying to disrupt and question the discussion), responses haven’t just been “god is a lie” but challenging the coherence of the theology that claims to make sense of all these elements.
Wouldn’t it take a lot of blurring? I can recognize people if I am crying can’t you?
Monavis
Once when I got into big trouble at school, I had to come home and face up to my dad; I shuffled into the kitchen in tears, face downcast and started to explain myself to the man standing there. It was the boiler repair man. So no, I can’t always immediately recognise people visually if I’m really upset.
…so why are people suprised at his post-resurrection appearance? He HAD to prove that he had passed through the state of death-hence the wounds-he even commanded Thomas to view them. How else would he have given the message to simple, uneducated people (as were his apostles). Really, the the message of the resurrection was delivered in the only way the people of the time could understand. If Jesus were to appear in 21st=Century american, the message would have been presented somewhat differently.
Har har.
Are you suggesting that the OP was trolling? I think most people who made an attempt to answer the question were taking it at face value. If the point of the question was just drawing Christians out to take cheap shots at them, then well done, I guess (although I still fail to see how that is a GD and not a Pit).
I don’t think my participation here is disruptive. If challenging the framework of the OP is valid (as you say it is), then questioning the quality your challenge is just as valid.
As I answered on my post #73 (and you chose to ignore) the answers to the OP given were all very simple and in the lines of “because he had no need to” (in that they didn’t prevent him from doing what he had to do) and “because he wanted to keep them” (in that they served some purpose to his mission).
I have seen no specific objection to either, other than a broad attack on theism itself. The answer that those things are what they are to serve the purposes of the story teller is a total copout. If you want a literary discussion of whether that is character development, setting, plot advancement, deus ex machina or McGuffin, I guess that could be done, too.
If you want to discuss the properties of something you cannot start from the premise that that something doesn’t exist. If you think that theological answers are not interesting, then well.
I can easily see why you are not fascinated with “why did a miraculous being do something miraculous” being answered with “it’s a miracle”, but if you want to go further than that, you have to accept that first answer and take it from there.
If you wanted to “delve into the question of how theology deals with it” then you must argue from the perspective of theology and be ready to accept theological answers.
The only semblance to a discussion that is going on is on the off tangent of original sin (if you can call discussion an exchange where one sides replies to all with “that’s atrocious”).
A new line around the identifying Jesus under adverse circumstances just popped up. That one does make sense in the frame of the OP since one of the answers was “the marks were there for identification purposes”. I don’t see it going beyond the “different people have different experiences” stage but it seems worth the shot.
My preliminary answer to that is that people filter what they see to make it fit what they expect to see.
If you go to visit a tomb and see someone there, the last thing you will expect to see is that that person is the deceased. If you are walking home from a funeral and someone asks you the time of day, you don’t expect that person to be the deceased. If you drop a friend at the mall and drive to work and your friend is sitting in the desk next to yours, chances are that, on a passing glance, you won’t recognize him.
Except in the stories where Jesus makes grand appearances (entering locked rooms), people recognize them when he speaks or does something “Jesusy”. If your friend at the office calls you by your name and plants himself in front of you then “Hey, what are you doing here?” follows.
It’s not just as valid, because it doesn’t involve actually discussing the issues. Criticizing the coherence of the explanations given is still part of that discussion of that subject. Trying to shut down the discussion entirely by running around saying “a pox on this!” is not.
Yes, but these questions don’t really give us a final answer for anything, and there is no reason the discussion has to end there. Because anything is possible, any answer at all is sufficient, but delving into the reasons given for why a particular answer is still fair game. And, in fact, many of those answers had, in addition, some basis in some alternate theological assertions, like the idea that Jesus has some sort of special spiritual body, or that the wounds were somehow unavoidable for him. There are also claims made about God’s justifications for this or that. All of that is precisely what I keyed off of.
You keep bringing this up, but it is, simply put, a lie on your part. Most of my responses were based on, in fact, first taking seriously the things claimed but then teasing out the further implications of those claims.
The discussion was going fairly well (as far as these go, that is) until we started hearing the words “emo cry”, “zombie Jesus”, “switcheroo”, “mumbo jumbo”. It is here where I say the discussion breaks. You are free not to agree with other POV’s but I don’t think that calling them names makes for a serious effort at discussion.
Even this last post of yours is just trying to ridicule my response by condensing it into a “a pox on this” instead of showing some effort for understanding what I said and responding to it.
I am saying that those answers (e.g #27, 32, 33) are not good and I expect you to either give better ones or explain why they are good.
Would you like to go back to, let’s say, Polycarp’s post #32 (which I found to be very good and went unanswered) and have a reset under more civil terms? or are you satisfied thinking you have proved something here?
I dunno: someone made a lame joke about how holes in the feet would be bad for walking on water. That was pretty… oh wait, that was YOU. Your first contribution to the thread. Nice job.
The fact is, the discussion was and is going fine. This tangent about whether or not the thread is going well, however, is profoundly silly and a waste of your and my time.
Apparently, you thought this was “polly prissypants has the girls over for some tea and a light titter about the weather.” This is Great Debates. A little snark is perfectly permissible. Even, as it happens, jokes about walking on water are tolerated… to an extent.
Isn’t this the forum for witnessing?
As has been explained to you before, using the pizza analogy (mainly because it’s lunch time and I’m hungry), if you walk into a room and a group of people are discussing whether they want pepperoni and sausage or Hawaiian pizza or Veggie Lovers, it is a waste of everyone’s time for you to come in with, “Pizza is evil! Pizza makers are evil! Anyone who eats pizza is evil! Evil evil evil!”
Shut up and let them decide what they want to eat for lunch.
And apparently so is cherry-picking your battles. A real shame since I would have liked to hear your responses to posts #2, 4, 15, 24, 28, 32 and even 48 (you can add the second half of 112 so we stick to the substance and not just the he-said-she-said).
Anytime you are ready (and FWIW since most everybody else seems to have lined up at the track sides)
Added: but if you are commited to the trainwreck, I would like to hear your answer to the first paragraph of #110
And to continue the analogy, as far as I’m concerned, I and other atheists are saying “You idiots ! Haven’t you heard about all the people who died from food poisoning here ?!” Religion isn’t harmless stupidity; it’s an immensely destructive force.
No Sapo. Your account of the discussion I already engaged in: that it didn’t take the theology on its own terms, is dishonest. I’m not picking my battles: I’m refusing to start a new argument based on a false premise about the old one. Sorry.
Which is irrelevant to this thread ands is nothing more than a petulant claim that you can interrupt any discussion to insert your own beliefs (or lack thereof) ijnto any discussion at any time.
Wrong!
The purpose of discussing specific topics is to examine them from multiple angles to discover any number of ways of thinking, of approaching the world, of understanding other people, of learning how other people believe or how their actions proceed from their belief. Charging into such discussions like a two year old charging into a flock of birds on the ground to see them scatter promotes none of those things. Even if you believe that you are 100% right that their belief is in error, shutting down the discussion does not make them stop believing and prevents more open individuals from discovering the nuances that other people bring to life.
Even such a frivolous topic as the OP of this thread can be used to illuminate subtle differences of approach to life. Shouting down the discussion prevents those discussions from happening without actually achieving your purported goal of eliminating religion; they just make you look rude and tone deaf.
“It would make you look close-minded” would be a better fitting description.
Wrong.
It’s evil people who invoke their “religion” that are immensely destructive and they are no different than evil people who do not invoke any religion that are just as capable. A religion, specified in book form sitting in a library somewhere in Cucamonga, California is not evil in itself, it is the evil person who picks it up, reads it, and uses it as a tool/reason for committing atrocities. Much like a book sitting in a library in Kiev; it’s harmless until an evil person uses it as a tool/reason to persecute enemies of the State. You know the line…“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” YMMV.
Religion has been a immense constructive force through out history. Much of what remains of societies have religious significance.
OTHO nuclear science is an immensely destructive force