Well I mean what is the point of worshipping a deity in the first place? It is just doing its job. Do you worship the chef, in hopes that dinner will be really good? And if the country song is correct, “Og answers every prayer – sometimes the answer is ‘no’” then what the hell do you gain from the relationship? Some vague notion that you will not be tormented for eternity, if Og arbitrarily decides you are OK to some live in his kingdom-of-eternal-boredom?
Just read about that father of jesus. What an asshole. At least the Prince of Darkness never actually murdered anyone just for the sake of being a dick. The Bible provides a strong case in favor of Satanism.
I can accept it if they were mostly dead. Medical science being what it was (virtually non-existent) it was sadly all to easy to assume someone was dead when they really were not.
So what “clearly impossible” stuff is in the NT? Most of the miracles can be done by faith healers today. There is even medical science behind such cures.
Really? When a faith healer restores a missing limb, get back to me. That would be a miracle, not fakers throwing away their crutches and remissions. I had a badly swollen disk in my back (I have the MRI) shrink by itself. My doctor said it was too big to do that. No Jesus, no prayer.
There are the other miracles, but National Lampoon’s “Not the Bible” had ways of faking them.
Do you believe the zombies walked in Jerusalem?
Nope, no faith healer will cure a psychotic/schizophrenic person (which the “possessed” in the gospels most probably were) by laying their hands on them and mumbling stuff.
Some exorcism advocates insist that exorcism works. And it very well may. People undergoing exorcisms may enter hypnotic trances, during which time they may be much more suggestible, which means their behavior may later change. The dramatic ritual of an exorcism can also be cathartic for some deeply religious people, and may inspire a change in behavior or personality.
https://www.shsu.edu/~piic/winter2008/Thomason.html Clearly, it is possible that people who believe themselves to be possessed by a demon may benefit in the short run from an exorcism ritual. The ritual could work as a placebo treatment, resulting in the patient feeling calmer for a while (Cuneo, 2001). B
Mass hysteria.
Some scholars have held the view that while this event took place, it was not miraculous: Albert Schweitzer, for example, suggested that the disciples saw Jesus walking on the shore, but were confused by high wind and darkness;
That’s fine as a logical explanation for why they’re written in the Gospels as such, but the Bible presents such “clearly impossible” feats as factual things that Jesus did, and as evidence of his divine power.
I am not trying to make anyone believe in Jesus the divine being. I am what many would call either a Doubting Christian or even an agnostic.
But for some reason, people treat the Gospels as so much fiction (despite the evidence that they are about as reliable as anything from that period- which is not 100% by any means) and atheists keep trying to push the idea that Jesus the man did not exist.
If you choose to either believe or disbelieve that Jesus was the Son of God- fine. That is a matter of belief, not fact.
No doubt that Jesus was a legendary figure and as such myths could have cropped up even in the comparatively short time from His death to the Gospels. But most of the miracles were pretty small time for that age of miracles, messiahs and miracle workers.
Pretty much a strawman. Most atheists I know argue that we don’t know enough about the situation to say one way or another-he could be a single person whose history was puffed up beyond all recognition by followers with their own agenda, he could be an amalgamation of several wanderers of the time, his life could be a perfect example of a game of “Telephone”-We don’t know and, until some solid info comes in, we have no way of knowing. Atheists, for the most part, don’t do the “make the conclusion, then accept evidence that supports the conclusion” thing. That is more a game played by religionists.
I don’t know how “legendary” he was during his lifetime and it could be that, once his followers heard rumors of miracles and such, they would quickly claim that “Jesus did it too, only better!”. This is a pattern seen in religion where a god starts out as a local phenomenon then, through time, grows into the be-all and end-all “GOD” that leaves room for no other.
That was a response to your claim that faith healers do miracles today. Though raising from the dead is another thing faith healers don’t do, though I realize that you’d have to prove Lazarus was dead.
Faith healers don’t do miracles. Faith healers are scammers.
That’s what I was referring to when I mentioned zombies.
Atheists I listen to mostly say either that there is no solid evidence he did exist, but not that he didn’t, or that the claim that a person of his name did exist then is not extraordinary in any way. The supernatural claims are.
There are the mythicists, but they seem to be in the minority. By a lot.
Not really. In the fifth chapter of Mark the story is told clearly. Mourners are outside of the house. Jesus enters by the back way and finds a young girl who asks for her parents. He has the disciples get the parents and he tells them to care for their daughter and feed her. He then tells them and the disciples not to tell people it’s a miracle. The girl was not dead.
The miracle thing is a fabrication that was not promoted by Jesus.
Except that that miracle wasn’t the sort that I was talking about in my posts. I wasn’t referring to the “heal the sick/resurrect the dead” miracles, but ones like feeding 5000 people with five loaves and two fish, or walking on water.