“If you were an evangelical, and you had told everyone you were going to be taken up to heaven on the rapture in the year 2000 and you were still here, wouldn’t you be a little embarrassed?” - Kate Clinton
You think it’s more arrogant to say “I’m the only one who thinks this guy is the Messiah” than “I don’t see why it’s not obvious to everyone that this guy is the Messiah”?
Nothing, except that they’re religious leaders. The point I’m making is that if the biblical version of the second coming is supposed to be a big broadway production, you’d think someone with a bigger audience would get the word.
Matt said,
I never said that. I just find it a bit overly-miraculous that Poly has not only had a couple “visits” from god, and now he claims to know a guy that will fill the bill for the messiah (I still say that’s blasphemous). There’s tons of good christians out there to choose from. Why Poly?? I suppose you could say, “Why NOT Poly?” but then I’d have to respond with a :dubious:
And I say, again, so what? So they’re religious leaders. You do realize what that means, right? They were chosen by human beings to represent their respective religions in some capacity.
For all we know, God may look at all the myriad of religious leaders in the world and chuckle at the arrogance of any human being thinking he knows what He wants. All a religious leader is is the embodiment of the hopes of a couple hundred generations of highly fallible and easily duped humans.
For all we know, the only person who’d be warned of the Second Coming could be an orphan living under a DC-area overpass.
I’m religion-neutral, as far as who has the Truth. I’m agnostic. I don’t know who’s right, or if anyone is. I consider the claims of the dirty little homeless boy from Washington as credible as the claims of that old Polish geezer in Rome. Polycarp would be eminently credible compared to either, in my view.
Cue the baby Jesus.
You mean the baby Jesus who was believed by a small group of Palestinian Jews to be the Messiah that was foretold generations before?
Exactly what are you getting at, Jayjay? Why are you getting confrontational with me? People needed a religious leader, and they picked Jesus. Do you think it was something bigger than that?
Diogenese
As this thread is killing time right now anyway, I’ll briefly continue the hijack.
You keep talking about “probability,” but that’s not really a correct interpretation of what we’re measuring. What we are measuring is confidence. It is, however, sometimes useful to think of these measures as probabilities especially in ordinary conversation.
For example, in the 19th century, the statement that “Newton’s theory of gravity is correct.” would have been assigned a high truth value. In other words, people were very confident that Newton’s theory of gravity was correct. However, new evidence came along and that truth value was re-evaluated. Now it is general relativity that has a high truth value.
Don’t get too hung up on calculating exact probabilities, either. You could, in theory, go back and evaluate every piece of evidence that confirms general relativity and calculate the probability that all of this evidence is due to measurment error. But that’s nor really the point.
Think of it as a way to view and evaluate evidence. Very often, you can easily evaluate which events are relatively more probable or, by extension, which beliefs are relatively less rational, even though you are unable to even guess as to what the numerical probabilites are when both events are very, very unlikely.
For example, go back to my coin-flipping example. While the coin is covered, you believe it to be heads. The person who flipped the coin looks at it – without showing you – and tells you it is tails. This is evidence that the coin came up tails and your continued belief that it actually came up heads is now irrational.
But, hey, she could be lying to you. The flipper calls someone else over to look at the coin and they, too, tell you it is tails. This is more evidence that your belief (which is based on no evidence at all) is irrational.
But, you know, maybe this second person is in on it! It’s a conspiracy! Three other people are called in and each tells you that the coin came up tails.
So which belief is more irrational – that the coin actually came up heads even though the person who flipped it told you it came up tails or that the coin actually came up heads even though five people told you it came up tails?
Suppose you call over a thousand people and they all say it came up tails. Now they could all be lying, but that is extremely unlikely. But we can confidently say that it is more unlikely that 2000 people would lie consistently than that 1000 people would lie consistently. Therefore, the statement “1000 people lied” has a higher truth value than the statement “2000 people lied,” albeit both values are extremely small.
Going back to just five people, suppose that the sixth told you that the coin came up heads. You now have five people telling you it came up tails and one telling you it came up heads. You now have some actual evidence that the coin came up heads, even though that evidence is outweighed by the evidence that it came up tails. How would you evaluate this evidence? How many people would now have to tell you it came up heads before your belief that it came up heads becomes rational (has a truth value higher than 0.5.)?
Good lord, I’m not getting confrontational…I’m just noting that from a neutral viewpoint, all religions which posit a supernatural reality are pretty much equally nutty, and have no exclusive claim to truth or acceptability. I found the hypocrisy of the “my unfalsifiable deity is more acceptable than his unfalsifiable deity because my unfalsifiable deity has more believers” to be irritating. That’s all.
If I were getting confrontational I’d already have called you names. 
Nope. That pretty much covers it.
Ah, but Truth Seeker, what if 5000 people came up to you and said that the coin came up tails because their great-(…)-great-great-great-grandfathers were there when it was flipped 2000 years ago and passed the truth down generation by generation?
Truth:
i don’t understand how your coin flipping example relates to impossible events. Please tell me how you can calculate a difference between “confidence” my car will spontaneously levitate 11 feet in the air or that a baboon will fly out of my ass?
Or to relate it to the OP, by what empirical method can you calculate a difference in “confidence” that Jesus will return in flames in the sky or that he will incarnate as Justin Timberlake?
I never said one was more acceptable. All I said is that if I were a believer, I’d expect the messiah to make himself known in a big way (per the bible) via a more visible mouthpiece. They’re all equally deluded – from the dude with the tinfoil hat right up to the dude at the Vatican City. Ya big so-and-so 
(Note: I believe my coding is going rather well, don’t you???)
I don’t understand this either; if something is determined to be impossible, then discussing the likelihood of the impossible event (absent any verifiable evidence that “impossible” is an improper label for said event) is an excercise in futility.
Kalhoun, very nice!
Niiiii coding, Kalhoun.
If Polycarp is right, who’s to say that this fella won’t make himself known in a big way. All we know is that he hasn’t yet. Jesus V1.0 didn’t get started on the whole preacher circuit until he was about 30. Poly’s hunch is still a teen. He may not be ready yet. Perhaps he has acne and is still too shy to be seen in public.
Nice coding. :rolleyes:
For the probability disscussion please go here where it is well hashed out.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=221737
Going back to Poly if the person had a web site, then he did reveil himself to a huge number of people, all churches seem to have some members with internet connection available to them. 
Amish?
jayjay
You simply evaluate it like any other evidence. The method of transmission may cause you to give less weight to the evidence, but it remains evidence nonetheless. Standing alone, the new testament is not less reliable than Tacitus. You may find that other evidence weighs against assigning a high truth value to the events described in the bible, but that question is logically distinct from the question of whether the bible is itself evidence.
Well, let’s take the easy one. Break this down into its several propositions and assign them relative truth values. Work with me here.
Prop 1) The new testament is correct. Jesus was god and the miracles really did happen. There is some evidence for this, i.e, the new testament itself. However, there is lots of countervailing evidence for this, too. Eyewitness accounts can be flawed, the events may have been mistranslated, what we know of the physical universe makes these events improbable, etc., etc.
Prop. 2) There is a universal supreme being but he/she/it has got nothing to do with the bible or any other world religion. However unlikely you may find proposition one, this proposition is even more unlikely since it must be weighed against all the counter evidence tending against proposition one but has no emperical evidence of any sort, not even the transmitted eyewitness accounts of the bible, to support it.
So Prop 1 has a relatively higher truth value than Prop 2.
Now consider the following propositions
Prop 3) God can manifest himself any way he likes
Prop 4) God has manifested himself as Justin Timberlake.
Assuming, for the puposes of this argument that there is a God, Prop 3 has a high truth value. If there is a God, he can show up in a cloud of fire or whatever.
Assuming there is a God, however, Prop 4 has a low truth value. First, just in general, under proposition 2, there is no particular reason to believe that god happens to be manifesting on earth at the moment or that he would ever bother to do so. Thus, assuming prop 2, prop 4 is always relatively unlikely at any particular point in time.
Assuming Prop 1 is correct, Justin doesn’t fit the bill. He doesn’t conform to the description in the new testament. There is some probability, of course, that everything in the new testament is correct except for the bits about the second coming. But we can see that that has a relatively lower truth value than the whole thing being correct. If the bible is correct and if it has been miraculously preserved, it is relatively unlikely that god futzed up one bit of it while leaving the rest intact.
We also have additional evidence about Justin Timberlake in particular. He hasn’t done anything particularly god-like. In fact, he’s done a lot of stuff that would not be god-like by anyone’s definition. This is evidence suggesting that Justin Timberlake is unlikely to be God.
This raises an interesting, yet obvious point. The truth value of the statement “God is physically incarnated on earth right now” always has a higher truth value than “X, who is currently on earth, is God.”
So now we can re-assemble our statements and assign them relative truth values.
God will return at some future date in flames in the sky. Assuming there is a god (which both statements do) God can return any way he likes. There is some evidence that he has said that this is the way he will return. Moreover, and more critically, there is an infinite, or at least extremely large period of time for this event to occur. In other words, the low probability of this happening at any given time must be integrated over a long period of time in order to arrive at the true probability of this ever occuring.
God has returned as Justin Timberlake. Being all powerful, etc., God could return as Justin Timberlake. However, there is no evidence that God has said he will return as Justin Timberlake. Justin Timberlake has done nothing god-like. In addition, it is simply generally unlikely that god happens to be manifesting just now.
We can therefore conclude that it is relatively more likely that god will return in a dramatic fashion per the new testament than as a member of a boy band.
I still don’t understand how you can claim the New Testament is evidence for itself and assign it any truth value above 0