“Prove the Bible wrong” is kind of a misstatement of what intenal criticism can do. Much of it can certainly be proven to be ahistorical with external evidence, but if you want to confine things to internal evidence, contradictions abound.
Here’s a few easy questions for you:
[ul][li]Did God make animals first or people first?[/li][li]How many of each animal did Noah take on the ark?[/li][li]How did Judas die?[/li][li]Was Jesus born before or after the death of Herod the Great?[/li][li]What were Jesus’ last words on the cross?[/li][*]Who was the first person to see Jesus after the resurrection?[/ul]
Jesus Christ was killed by his evil twin and arch-rival, Cheeses K. Reist, who then took over his identity. For the past 2009 years everybody’s actually been worshipping Cheeses K. Reist, without even knowing it. You think you’re all going to go to heaven, but when you pass on to the afterlife you’ll be in for quite a surprise. I won’t spoil the fun for you, but let’s just say it involves barbed-penis-wielding hellhounds.
That possibility seems covered by option 6, though it’s poorly phrased in an effort to emphasize Jesus’ innocence. It reads like “Pilate killed Jesus, because Pilate decided to kill Jesus,” which is redundant at best.
I guess “Pilate killed Jesus, because Jesus was making a nuisance of Himself” doesn’t flow as well.
Of course, I don’t get point 4. The Romans “let” it happen? They were right in the thick of it with the hammers and nails and spears and junk, getting all whack-whack and stab-stab.
Knock off the frivolity. This thread is long enough and I am already tired of having to keep opening it to see who might have broken the rules against insults, lately, without having to open it only to read silly attempts at humor.
[ /Modding ]
tom, I’d be grateful if you’d not close the thread for a while yet. I would like to see if the OP is going to respond to my post about internal contradictions in the Passion narrative and the geneology of Christ.
I’ve no intention of closing the thread. My specific point was that I don’t want it derailed further.
(It is not as though I am in the habit of cutting off attempts at humor in GD; I’m not even going to come down on anyone who finds a way to inject some humor in the midst of an otherwise serious post. I just sensed that this thread was about to be derailed and it is already long enough without adding more off-track stuff to its length.)
This thread never had any rails to begin with. But in the interest of trying to be civil, fine, I’ll stop joking and I’ll say how I really feel. The Christian religion is a sham and Jesus, if he was a real person, would be ashamed of the destruction and violence that has been perpetrated in his name. All of the notions of the Christian religion are ridiculous. The idea that you can be “saved” simply for believing in some man who is supposedly the son of God (which is an utterly absurd concept in the first place) and be absolved of all sins. The idea that anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus will go to hell, even though there are people all over the world who have never even HEARD of Jesus (what did they do to deserve going to hell?) The endless, endless contradictions in the Bible and the fact that people still take it literally even in this day and age, after two thousand years of religious wars and people being senselessly slaughtered all over Europe because of some stupid fucking difference in their interpretation of the Bible. It’s bullshit, and I’ve had enough of it. Fuck “witnessing,” the only think I’m witnessing is a bunch of people quibbling over something that doesn’t even deserve to be treated as a valid discussion.
Christianity as practiced does seem far from the protocommunism put forth in the New Testament. The Jefferson Bible is a useful read for comparison to the standard model.
Buddhism has built into it the idea that the Buddhas teachings will become more and more corrupted with time, and eventually a new Buddha will arise and rediscover everything. This is why Shakyamuni Buddha is sometimes referred to as ‘the historical Buddha’, that is, the Buddha of our age, to discriminate him from past and future Buddhas. Aside from the Hindu belief in a massively long scale cycle of regeneration of the cosmos, it’s the only rebootable religion of which I know. Most other ones seem to be one-time-only offers.
I don’t think they’re all evil; I do think they are all deluded.
I also resent the Christian religion in general. They persecuted my people (the Jews) for so long, and for no reason whatsoever. All over Europe, the Jews were just trying to live normal lives; the Christians didn’t let them. The Jews wanted to own land and have farms like everyone else, or be in the trade guilds; the Christians didn’t let them. Then the Jews, out of necessity, turned to moneylending, because it was the only job they could do, and then the Christians still persecuted them, even while borrowing money from them the whole time. The whole problem could have been avoided if they just let the Jews have normal jobs, but they couldn’t do that because of their stupid fucking religion. They went around massacring Jews for the stupidest reasons imaginable. They accused Jews of every absurd crime under the sun, and then as if that weren’t enough, they massacred Jews by the thousands as scapegoats.
But this is what pisses me off the most of all: they blamed Jews for “killing Jesus,” and massacred them in huge numbers for “killing Jesus” after watching their stupid “passion” plays that got them all worked up; and yet, by their own religion’s stupid, illogical reasoning, IF JESUS HADN’T BEEN KILLED, then the CHRISTIANS WOULD NOT BE SAVED. So what the fuck?
Add to that the Crusades, the Inquisition; the fact that the Jews were expelled from every Christian nation in Europe for no goddamn reason other than that the stupid, irresponsible, corrupt kings didn’t want to pay back the giant loans that they took from Jewish moneylenders; and it just makes my skin crawl to think about Jesus and the gigantic disaster that he created.