Dishonest Apologetics

[anEvilAtheist]

Hi, EvalAtheist,

I do have something to share with you … while we have not seen eye to eye on much … I would like to commend you for your polite responses. Ah…and now on to business…

Now, that is what makes a horse-race!

The cheese bit is probably from having the grandkids over and having a steady diet of “Wallace and Gromet” movies! But, this was a deliberate exaggeration and not to be taken literally.

I know you didn’t mean that my position is quite as silly as believing there’s cheese in the center of the moon. But where we differ is that I do not think my position is absurd at all.

By the way, good choice of movies. Those things never get old.

While not trying to beat the moon being made of cheese to death - here we have an unreal event and we have all of these silly stories running around. Your second sentence starts off with IF - and if you base everything on this - it is not materially different from the cheesy moon story. To turn your sentence around: “If it was a real event, there would have been people to say that the Christians were making false claims.” Does that make any sense to you? It certianly does not make any sense to me.

Me neither. What I was trying to say was that regardless of whether they were real events, I don’t think there would have been someone actively proclaiming that they were false.

Christ was a historic Person who appeared in the writings of Josephus, a Jewish secular historian writing for the Roman Emperor.

Well there is a lot of dispute over the various non-Christian writings which mentioned Jesus. I think that many of them are very questionable. It seems very likely that some, if not all, of the main Josephus passage concerning Jesus is a Christian interpolation. However, based on what I’ve read, there aren’t very good reasons for doubting the authenticity of the brief passage about James and Jesus.

People have been following and dying for Christ since 33AD. He just can’t be dismissed as some fraud.

This gets back to a point I was trying to make earlier. People are often willing to die for a false religion, as long as they don’t know it’s a false religion. Although the evidence for the deaths of many of the apostles is pretty thin, there are a few whose deaths seem to be pretty well evidenced. Based on what I’ve read so far, it doesn’t seem like you could construct a plausible theory in which Jesus was not a real person.

Yes, there are some serious questions about Hinn ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Hinn ) but the bottom line is look for the horses and not the zebras - look for the common-place and not the exotic. It is in the routine daily activity that the majority will show you where they stand. Flamboyant presenters are just that - and their show will continue to go on until they implode (do you recall Jimmy Swaggart? If not, here is a link: en.wikipedia.org/?title=Jimmy_Swaggart ) But, stop looking for the extra-ordinary to prove your point - the ordinary is out there for all to see without the distortions of fanfare, loud music and spotlights.

My point was just that Jesus being able to get a following does not show that he was divine. I didn’t completely get how your comments about the ordinary versus extraordinary relate to this.

Stop right there. Do you see how you are using yourself as the ultimate criteria for knowledge and discernment? Surely, this should ring some kind of bell that says, “Wait a minute, I can learn things for others. I can be shown a way I had not thought of before.” Your sentences totally excludes the possibility of self-deception … and we all know how our senses can be fooled - repeatedly by tricks and ambiguous pictures and shapes created by psychologists meant to see how you see things. Here is an interesting link on how the eye and mind can be easily deceived: alcohol-drug.com/opt_illus.html

That’s a pretty cool link, though I had already seen most of those. I agree with you that things like my senses may be unreliable and I know that my reasoning can sometimes be flawed. But I’m not sure exactly what conclusion you’re trying to draw from that. If my reasoning is imperfect, then I can’t just choose someone else to rely on because my choice of who to rely on could be just as flawed. So even though it’s imperfect, my own reasoning is what I have to rely on in the end. But if another source is shown to be trustworthy, then I typically believe what they say unless there is a reason not to.

Sorry, but I have run out of time … but you get the idea…I think. At least, I hope you do. If not, let me spell it out for you: God really does love you. And, I think a lot of folks are praying for you.

God bless

Thanks.

 

[twb1621]

Fair enough. The biggest difference is the incredible number of firsthand documents we have concerning King Henry. If he was only pretending to be male, it would be an unbelievably vast conspiracy, and it’s hard to imagine why so many different people would be motivated to say he was.

Do you see the arguement you are making here? The same applies to Christianity however the time it has survived is three times as long as King Henry but you do not give it the same open mindedness . I do believe a major part of it is your inexperience with life and although you may not think so, a substancial lack of information and effort to gather it all. This I say with no ill intended.

 

[Michael_Francis]

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