@Natural Enquirer
Again, much of this is probably due to fielding so many questions all at once. Patience!
I hope you’re right. But when confronted with the recurring trend of
A to ask for evidence, then ignore evidence which has been provided, and to keep on making claims that have been soundly refuted… I guess my charity’s running thin.
This is an attempted shifting of the burden of proof. I am not required to try to provide evidence of the non-existence of anything. I will, however, try to explain why I find some evidence compelling or not. As mentioned before, and I hope I described my reasoning coherently enough, for me the existence of Jesus as a real person is undecided. I am confident enough to say that if he existed as a human he wasn’t born of a virgin, and he wasn’t resurrected because I have the entire field of biology to back me up.
Well, I did provide a specific non-Christian historical source for
A to consider: Josephus’ Testimonium Flavianum. I made the claim that it would be sufficient to demonstrate any other contemporaries’ historicity. So I was asking for a specific rebuttal to that
evidence, which
A had repeatedly demanded.
As for the biology quip - that’s really irrelevent. We’re talking about a situation where God is directly intervening, so the fact that virgin births or resurrections are atypical is neither here nor there.
See #1. Also, see my description of evolutionary morality, which takes into account that our morality changes with time, some of the things that Jesus taught are certainly still moral, certainly some of the things in the bible are good messages, but the very fact that we cherry pick the good parts to follow demonstrates that these aren’t the sources of our morality.
I was unclear. For my point #2 (these embedded quotes are becoming tricky), I wasn’t claiming necessarily that we would find his teachings moral, just that one of his goals was moral/religious teaching. The evidence I provided here was various non-Christian historians’ testimony that Christians were in fact following Christ’s teachings. Which is almost, but not quite, self-defining.
Please note that c659smith’s claims that the original findings placing the shroud in the medieval period had been refuted were also unsubstantiated. Even those proponents of the bacterial contamination hypothesis said that their dating might add a thousand years to the dating of the shroud, which still doesn’t match up with the correct time period.
That’s cool. I don’t know much about the Shroud myself. I’m glad you’re looking into it.
I do find this claim (Lanciano) quite interesting, and want to read more, but the evidence presented for this so far is extremely shakey, as mentioned in a previous post.
I’m a few pages behind in the thread - if no one has provided a link to a non-wikipedia source, I’ll try to dig one up. Shouldn’t be hard to google something “reasonably” credible (by Internet standards, at least).
Agreed, but I will prefer to believe in that which causes me to make the least assumptions. Are people mistaken far more often than the laws of physics are broken, oh yes.
This was in response to my “God didn’t do it the way you think he should have”, if I recall. Yes, I certainly agree with you. But
70,000 eyewitnesses. It’s stretching credibility to suggest that they were “mistaken”. I think you’d be on stronger footing to suggest some weird localized atmospheric disturbance causing an illusion – but that raises plenty of other questions.
Perhaps you’d like to explain [the Tilma of Guadalupe] in your own words?
You got me.
I don’t remember the specifics well enough to provide a reasonable description. As I recall, quasi-photographic images were found on the eyes of the Tilma. Something about the optical details of the images has not (yet) been naturally explained.
If you’re interested, I’m sure Wikipedia has a good article.
Me:
"I’d like to see a court throw out 70,000 eyewitness reports, on the grounds that they disagree with the court’s preconceptions. "
You:
Well, there would have been several million eye witness reports from the same day indicating that the sun did not go for a little joy ride anywhere. I know which makes more sense.
Absolutely. But, this only invalidates Fatima if we assume that the miracle has to be seen all over the Earth. It was only promised at that one particular location. Certainly God could do that, right? Even if we don’t understand how.
cont’d…
Why such a flat tone with your reply? I have not replied to you in like kind.