Posted: Feb 27, 2010 1:32 pm
TimONeill wrote:Agrippina wrote:For me, not having been raised as a Christian, and having only learned about Christianity as a teenager when my mother became friendly with some SDAs and then a boyfriend who belonged to a Calvinist church, the whole thing just sounded like a mythology story. My studies in Ancient History haven't changed my belief that the story was a made up one of the dozens of preachers who were in the region at the time and that their stories were combined to make up one and about one person.
As an atheist who has no emotional attachment to the idea that Jesus was a single person who lived in the 30s AD (as all the evidence seems to indicate), I regularly ask people who claim he was based on some combination of many people to show me some evidence this was the case. Given we are all rationalists here, I don't regard this as an unreasonable request. I've yet to get an answer.
Can you answer or is this more vague, hopeful, pathetic bullshit?
No the pathetic bullshit is a almost cult-like belief that Josephus was telling the truth. There was no proper 'scientific method' in research at that time. Anyone could write any amount of crap and call it history and because people believed in mythology, anything that vaguely confirmed their particular brand of mythology was simply acceptable. Give me some evidence that Josephus and Paul and all the mindless bishops of the Empire weren't all repeating 'broken telephone' type stories.
I don't care what your involvement is either emotional or otherwise, your emotional defence of the historicity of Jesus makes you appear to be a believer, but hey, you have your beliefs, and I have mine. From a totally objective point of view, it looks and sounds like mythology to me. If i were interested in researching it and writing a biography of Jesus, I would want more than the boken telephone accounts as my 'evidence.' I'm not and therefore i have no interest in doing anything other than expressing a personal opinion.
I know that a lot of historians who are atheists don't agree with either this or the theory that he simply didn't exist, and I'm fine with that. I'm not going to argue. For me to just sounds too far-fetched, too convenient, and too mythological to be the story of a real person who really existed.
Great. So - evidence? Produce something other than fundamentalist-style statements of cosy faith please. This is a "rational skepticism" forum. Your statements of faith don't cut it. Try harder or, to be brutally frank, butt the fuck out.[/quote]
This is not faith, it is merely observation of the evidence presented. I don't believe that a real person existed, any more than I don't believe the exodus or the flood or the creation happened, to me, from my own personal point of view, it's all the same kind of mythology.
You believe whatever your particular cult tells you to believe and I'll follow what my rational logic tells me.