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Annabea
Guest
Correction: If people found out god did not exist, the world would be in chaos.
And Please explain.
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And Please explain.
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CentralFLJames
Guest
Emotion comes from the mind? Are you sure? How do you know?
Where does your sense of morality come from? How do you get a sense of “good” or “bad”? Is what makes us “unhappy” or causes us pain always bad? Does what feels good now but might later cause us regret and anxiety good or bad? Is there any notion of objective truth? Is there any concept of infallability?
James
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jam070406
Guest
So when a person lays down their life so another person can live it’s because it makes them feel happy?
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Annabea
Guest
No, love is just another emotion. You can see that animals love other animals and pets love their owners. We in fact are animals ourselves (nothing to do with evolution whatsoever).
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oneGODoneCHURCH
Guest
Annabea
I have grown tired of this tread so more than likely will not be back to it. Before I leave I had to say something to you.
I seem to be a very bright young lady. I know that at age 12 being a very bright child you feel that you have a good grasp on what is true and what is BS. I knew everything when I was 12 now some 30 some years later there is very little I feel I know for certain. I ask just one thing of you if I may? Keep your mind and heart open to God. Don’t close Him out. He will never force himself on you.
I know that you have said that were you live the religious people around you make it really rough on those that do not share their beliefs. Belief in God does not always make one God like.
You said that you came her to hear what Catholic believe and why.
I believe that Bible is our salvation history. you can not read it a a history book though it does contain History. I don’t know how old the planet is I do know that if God choose to make it in six day, or in the blink of and eye, or over many billions of year He could do it as he wished. I know that God Loves me and wants me to choose to believe in him and follow his laws and commandments. I know that he know I can follow his laws complete and thus will sin and that to sin means to die so he sent His son Jesus the Lord to Die for me and all men so that if we believe in him will do not have to die be live forever with him. I can tell you why I believe these thing but as of right know you will no more believe them than you believe that Jesus died on the Cross for you.
Please not for me as I do not know you and it will not effect my life one way or the other. But do not let those that seem to talk about proof and logic and what we know and science and what utter rubbish religious beliefs are keep you from having a open heart to the possibility of God. they have been saying that for thousand of years.
science will give us the answers.
When all is said and Done the only answer that matters is God love you and the only thing he promised is his love and the only thing he ask is for your love. there is nothing else.
things to think about
Is there such thing as dark?
Answer no dark is the absence of light you can add or remove light but you can not make dark.
I have grown tired of this tread so more than likely will not be back to it. Before I leave I had to say something to you.
I seem to be a very bright young lady. I know that at age 12 being a very bright child you feel that you have a good grasp on what is true and what is BS. I knew everything when I was 12 now some 30 some years later there is very little I feel I know for certain. I ask just one thing of you if I may? Keep your mind and heart open to God. Don’t close Him out. He will never force himself on you.
I know that you have said that were you live the religious people around you make it really rough on those that do not share their beliefs. Belief in God does not always make one God like.
You said that you came her to hear what Catholic believe and why.
I believe that Bible is our salvation history. you can not read it a a history book though it does contain History. I don’t know how old the planet is I do know that if God choose to make it in six day, or in the blink of and eye, or over many billions of year He could do it as he wished. I know that God Loves me and wants me to choose to believe in him and follow his laws and commandments. I know that he know I can follow his laws complete and thus will sin and that to sin means to die so he sent His son Jesus the Lord to Die for me and all men so that if we believe in him will do not have to die be live forever with him. I can tell you why I believe these thing but as of right know you will no more believe them than you believe that Jesus died on the Cross for you.
Please not for me as I do not know you and it will not effect my life one way or the other. But do not let those that seem to talk about proof and logic and what we know and science and what utter rubbish religious beliefs are keep you from having a open heart to the possibility of God. they have been saying that for thousand of years.
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"we are to smart now to believe those old stories"When all is said and Done the only answer that matters is God love you and the only thing he promised is his love and the only thing he ask is for your love. there is nothing else.
things to think about
Is there such thing as dark?
Answer no dark is the absence of light you can add or remove light but you can not make dark.
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Annabea
Guest
Heh, guess that was a bad explanation, eh? Love is an attraction to someone else, someone who makes you feel happy or whatever other emotion. Define hate? Same thing. Love and hate are both emotions. Just as black and white are both colors (okay, I really don’t care if white is absence of color or not.).You my hate someone so much you kill them, or you may love someone so much you die for them.So when a person lays down their life so another person can live it’s because it makes them feel happy?
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josie_L
Guest
Yes, but we are animals with an intellect (and created in the image of God), anyways, annabea, do you think that animals love in the same capacity that humans do? Where is this emotion coming from? And please provide data for your hypothesis?
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Annabea
Guest
I agree, I have grown tired of it too, but it seems a little odd to leave your own thread after it has done so well. I know I have a bad grip on what is true and what is not. I will not say “There is no god.” I will say, “A god is very unlikely, and if there is one, its probably not yours.” Nobody knows everything, all human beings know very little. You (and everyone else) probably knows all I know and more, but just look at it in a different perspective.
I will keep an open mind, but my mind and “heart” is proving to lean towards my atheist side.
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aileron
Guest
Where did I write that official RCC teaching condones murder? I wrote that they *did *it.
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Annabea
Guest
I have no idea. You can tell an animal can become depressed when another animal its close to dies. Elephants for example, morn there lost. If you care to look it up, please do.
I have no data for my hypothesis. Perhaps there is data, but I have no idea where it is. I have as much as you have.
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AnotherAtheist
Guest
And you and I are talking and writing about Jesus now but we have no firsthand knowledge of him. We are only repeating what others have said. That’s hearsay and is not generally acceptable as evidence in a court of law.
As far as Josephus goes I repeat, “the overwhelming majority of which question its authenticity in whole or in part”.
Pliny the elder left no know account of Jesus or even his followers. Pliny the younger did make a single mention of Christians in a letter asking what to do about the ones they had rounded up. No mention of Christ though and once again this was many years after Jesus’ time. Pliny the younger had no firsthand knowledge of Jesus. Only that he had followers nearly 100 years after the fact.
Yes I believe in Alexander the Great. However there is considerably more evidence for his existence than there is for Jesus. I do not insist that never Jesus existed. I am perfectly willing to concede that he might have been a real person. My point is that the evidence for his existence is thin and that some of the references you are using are either flat wrong or questionable at best. On the other hand I am so sure that if he did exist that he was not the son of God and my only chance for eternal salvation that I am perfectly willing to bet the soul I doubt I have by not believing.
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jam070406
Guest
Do you love your parents? Does the emotion of love switch off when you get angry at your parents over something, and you no longer love them? So if at that time that you were angry and they got hurt, like in a car accident, you wouldn’t care because you weren’t feeling that emotion of love for them during the time it happened, because you were still experiencing the emotion of anger or hate?
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aileron
Guest
None of these would stand scrutiny as historical documents. Historians aren’t too eager to point this out in public. Do I need to elaborate on why?
We have many of Washington’s documents that pass normal historical authentication procedures and even his own hand written documents and physical effects. Heck, we even have his body. What more do you want?
Proving anything outside of mathematics is really a probability of proof, i.e. not “is it proven” but “how certain are we.” For Washington, the probability is exceptionally high that he existed. For Jesus, it is inconclusive unless we accept classes of documents and evidence that are not normally considered historically accurate.
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mauricio0
Guest
Actually colors do not exist. They are imaginary. White is the combination of all visible wavelengths of light. (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.) This colors are made by our minds they just labes for different wavelengths) When light waves are observed by some objects you see them as black. So black is the absence of light. White is the combination of all colors (light wavelengths: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.)
Light is the absence of color and black the combination of all of them, this are just painting concepts. I’m telling you this because I found light to be a fascinating thing.
BTW you should see this video. Dawkins walking about how these labels came to be, because of evolution in our environment:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6308228560462155344
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CentralFLJames
Guest
So because we don’t have any birth certificates or family photos or other forensic evidence of your great-great-great-great grandparents we can conclude they never existed even though you swear to us that you are the living forensic evidence that you are the great-great-great-great grandson of Grandpa Jacob Aileron Sr. that proves he existed and somehwere along the lineage you were actually a descendent of the family you find yourself in? Do you see my point?
The Catholic Church has been in continuous 2,000 years of existence from the time of Christ. We have forensic evidence in Rome in the original papal residence and church that gets us back to Basilica of St. John Lateran in around the time of Constantine in 324 AD. We have other artifacts believed to be the bones of St. Peter under the altar in the Vatican.
James
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josie_L
Guest
These are the historical sources given that mention Jesus:
Letter from Pliny the Younger to Trajan (c. 110)
Tacitus (Annals, c.115-120) [The best current discussion on this passage is in my friend JP Holding’s site]
Suetonius (Lives of the Caesars, c. 125)
Lucian (mid-2nd century)
Galen (c.150; De pulsuum differentiis 2.4; 3.3)
Celsus (True Discourse, c.170).
Mara Bar Serapion (pre-200?)
Talmudic References( written after 300 CE
“Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first- or second-century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.”
christian-thinktank.com/jesusref.html
Also:
Let me also just mention something about the Josephus issue. Every now an then I get an email about someone abjectly ‘dismissing’ the data from Josephus, without even interacting with the data and the positions of solid scholars. This is inappropriate. By far and away, the bulk of modern scholarship accepts that Josephus makes two independent references to Jesus–to argue otherwise requires the objector to dismantle the historical consensus, and this requires argumentation instead of simple assertion (and disallowance of Josephus as a witness!). One of the leading scholars, translators, and commentators on Josephus is Steve Mason. In his book on Josephus and the New Testament (Hendrickson:1992), he discusses the two references to Jesus in Josephus’ writings, and concludes that “if it were needed”, they would provide independent testimony to the existence of Jesus. He writes:
“Taking all of these problems into consideration, a few scholars have argued that the entire passage (the testimonium) as it stands in Josephus is a Christian forgery. The Christian scribes who copied the Jewish historian’s writings thought it intolerable that he should have said nothing about Jesus and spliced the paragraph in where it might logically have stood, in Josephus’ account of Pilate’s tenure. Some scholars have suggested that Eusebius himself was the forger, since he was the first to produce the passage…Most critics, however, have been reluctant to go so far. They have noted that, in general, Christian copyists were quite conservative in transmitting texts. Nowhere else in all of Josephus’ voluminous writings is there strong suspicion of scribal tampering. Christian copyists also transmitted the works of Philo, who said many things that might be elaborated in a Christian direction, but there is no evidence that in hundreds of years of transmission, the scribes inserted their own remarks into Philo’s text. To be sure, many of the “pseudepigrapha” that exist now only in Christian form are thought to stem from Jewish originals, but in this instance it may reflect the thorough Christian rewriting of Jewish models, rather than scribal insertions. That discussion is ongoing among scholars. But in the cases of Philo and Josephus, whose writings are preserved in their original language and form, one is hard pressed to find a single example of serious scribal alteration. To have created the testimonium out of whole cloth would be an act of unparalleled scribal audacity.” (p.170-171)
“Finally, the existence of alternative versions of the testimonium has encouraged many scholars to think that Josephus must have written something close to what we find in them, which was later edited by Christian hands. if the laudatory version in Eusebius and our text of Josephus were the free creation of Christian scribes, who then created the more restrained versions found in Jerome, Agapius, and Michael? The version of Agapius is especially noteworthy because it eliminates, though perhaps too neatly, all of the major difficulties in the standard text of Josephus. (a) It is not reluctant to call Jesus a man. (b) It contains no reference to Jesus’ miracles. (c) It has Pilate execute Jesus at his own discretion. (d) It presents Jesus’ appearance after death as merely reported by the disciples, not as fact. (e) It has Josephus wonder about Jesus’ messiahship, without explicit affirmation. And (f) it claims only that the prophets spoke about “the Messiah,” whoever he might be, not that they spoke about Jesus. That shift also explains sufficiently the otherwise puzzling term “Messiah” for Josephus’ readers. In short, Agapius’ version of the testimonium sounds like something that a Jewish observer of the late first century could have written about Jesus and his followers.” (p.172)
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jam070406
Guest
I stated that the Church killed nobody, which it hasn’t. You thought that was funny, as if I was wrong in my statement .
So either you can provide the documents that endorse or condone such behavior or you can admit that you were merely being condescending, and that in actuality, people who commited any atrocities were not in line with Jesus or the Church?
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josie_L
Guest
**Are you a historian to say such? ** And secondly, the historical data (we have) referencing Alexander the Great was written 3 or more centuries after his death. In other words, how do we know he existed and if the information we have is correct? Don’t get me wrong (I believe he existed) but if you can accept that Alexander the Great existed, then shouldn’t you accept that Jesus existed as well? We know that the NT was written entirely within the first century.
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aileron
Guest
I see your point, but it’s an invalid analogy. We have good reason to accept the induction that all people have two parents. This means that as long as there have been humans, we can trace our lineage back to branching (and eventually forking) sets of ancestors. Most people have no idea who even one of their ancestors that distant is, let alone all of them. So in the first part of your analogy, you’re claiming that obviously there’s *some *lineage.
Later in the second part of your analogy, you’re claiming that that a *specific *person in the line must be correct, Jesus of Nazareth. The two parts of the analogy are materially different and so the analogy invalid.
Still, I see where you are going. Obviously, somebody must have gotten the religion going, and what more obvious candidate than the one man everyone was writing about? That’s why I think it’s inconclusive. Faith or dogma may settle the matter once and for all, but lacking these, I really can’t be sure either way on the historicity question.
Hmmm… Should I let the Protestants reading this attack this one? Suffice it to say that this is an even more tenuous claim than the historicity of Jesus, and one that very few Protestants accept. It’s not so much the timing here as it is the line of succession. Although Christians were probably around in the 1st century, there are good reasons to doubt that there has been a continuous line of Bishops of Rome since the 1st century. That in and of itself in a Catholic v Protestant issue nearly as old as the Reformation Schism, and I’ll leave it at that.
I don’t think anyone reasonably doubts that the church had been established by the time of Constantine. We’re still about three centuries removed from the NT accounts.
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josie_L
Guest
There are also animals like lions that kill their own cubs.
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