Well yeah, but if you don’t know the facts and are not likely to be able to independently ascertain them, which kind of story would you be inherently more skeptical of under normal circumstances?
I’m reminded of a comic book that opened with a narrator describing Superman as “a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good.” It of course goes on to portray that super-powered do-gooder as making the occasional error, and of course surrounds him with other fictional characters who (a) come across as pretty brainy, but (b) maybe fail to realize the bespectacled guy in front of them is, uh, him.
Except the office worker doesn’t write notes to the family man, and actor doesn’t force the sacrifice of the office worker.
This whole thing is easier to understand as a hack. A human Messiah, especially one who didn’t leave Judea to freedom, wasn’t very impressive in an environment where the emperor was divine and people believed in demigods. So, make him a demigod. Still not good enough, so promote him to god also. But that makes Christianity not monotheistic, which is kind of the whole point of Judaism, so hack the two gods into one.
I’m not saying Paul and friends sat down one night and worked it out, but it’s a pretty clean explanation.
My point is that the evidence doesn’t lead to the conclusion-The conclusion is assumed then the evidence, no matter what it may be, is said to fully support the conclusion.
I yield the point. No style of writing makes its characters more or less believable than any other style. Hagiography is just as believable as anything else.
All I am stating is that, especially when it comes to deeply held beliefs, any evidence is secondary to the belief itself and will either be ignored, or viewed in such a way as to make it supportive of said belief.
I thought the Holy Spirit is the divine presence that exists within people. So if somebody does something like faith healing or speaking in tongues, it’s actually the presence of God that exists within them that’s performing the miracles. Humans alone don’t have the power to perform miracles.
Of course, this is the most obvious manifestation of the Holy Spirit. For most people, the Holy Spirit does not reveal itself in an outward manner. It’s just quietly there as your personal connection with God.
This bring up an important point. There’s a subtle but important distinction between what’s believable and what’s true. Unfortunately, a lot of people ignore that distinction and treat them as being the same.
To address the specific point you raised, consider James Bond and George Smiley. Smiley may be a more believable character than Bond but both characters are fictional. Believability doesn’t make something true because you can fake believability.
My parents belong to an Episcopalian parish whose rector teaches that it’s far more important to follow Jesus than to worship him.
I’m not a member, being an atheistic humanist, but I think their congregation is pretty sincere - they do a lot of good. It’s churches like that which make it hard for me to condemn Christianity root-and-branch, a la the New Atheists.
That was Marshall Applewhite, mentioned by Darren_Garrison, a few posts above yours.
The monotheism of Judaism is pretty shaky. The first commandment, “… have no other gods before me …” is problematic. And the variety of lower-level superbeings that do magical things further weakens the claim. Baal was never explicitly stated to be not an actual deity. And look at Job: there is an enormously powerful critter involved in that story that clearly points toward pantheonism.
In that case, you weren’t replying to my post at all, but rather to something in your own head.
Amen to that. Just the evening I was looking at Blacktail Canyon online. On the Colorado River just outside west end of Grand Canyon park at mile 120, it is considered pretty nifty because the Great Unconformity, where a quarter of the earth’s history is missing, is at eye height and quite evident. Canyon Ministries sees it as evidence of the Great Flood in Genesis.
To the everyday geological community the Great Unconformity presents a major mystery. Some geologists see the Great Unconformity as a massive missing period of time in the earth’s geological record. In Blacktail Canyon, they would say the Great Unconformity represents about 1.2 billion years in earth’s past, for which they have no record.
This mysterious feature of geology is represented by a huge erosional plane, where a tremendous amount of rock appears to have been sheared off, and sitting directly above it, the flat-lying Tapeats Sandstone begins the bottom-most horizontal sedimentary rock layer visible at the Grand Canyon.
When we study and understand the Great Unconformity from a biblical perspective, we see the same features, and the same rocks, but we have a different perspective. What we’re seeing we believe represents NOT millions to billions of years of slow and gradual erosion and missing time, but MASSIVE erosion on a grand scale, in a short amount of time.
This massive erosional plane would be precisely the kind of feature you would expect to see if there really was a worldwide flood as described in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible.
I guess my understanding of the dynamics of geology is shaky. There was a month and a half of rain, all over the Earth. The water level rose more or less uniformly. Then the water receded, to, somewhere. More or less uniformly. How does an inexplicable geological formation point to the great flood? The geological dynamics of the recession of the flood are not given in detail – the water just went away. Why and whither? The geological “evidence” of the flood seems just as fanciful as the flood itself.
Goddidit.
That’s true, but Judaism was monotheistic by the time of Jesus. I doubt many Jews living at the time were aware of the origins of their religion.
And early Judaism not only accepted the existence of other gods, but seems to evolved from a polytheistic religion. There is a term for worshiping one god while accepting that there are more, but I can’t think of it at the moment.
It isn’t pantheism, if that is what you meant to write.
Henotheism?
This feature would have to exist all over the earth, not in one place, to be the slightest bit convincing. Kind of like the iridium layer.
There are lots of amusing disproofs of the Flood, like calculating the kinetic energy of even a fraction of the water supposedly falling from the sky. It would cook the earth. The density of water falling would smash the ark. Some flooders claim that the animals got to their homes post flood by riding on moving landmasses. The landmasses moving as fast as they’d have to would also cook the earth.
And we’re not even getting into the way the gas from the animals would suffocate Noah and kin.
My favorite, kangaroos got transported to Australia by volcanic eruptions.
Interestingly, what you propose is ridiculed by Kent Hovind's followers while appearing on Ken Hamm's Answers in Genesis.
Not at all.
Sure the whole Father, Son & Holy Ghost: Trinity came about fairly later, but Jesus being the Son of God was even while He was alive.
Cite?