Posted: Feb 27, 2010 1:50 pm
Agrippina wrote: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.
Okay. So your evidence that he was lying (for some unknown reason) would be ... ? Please present it here and now.
There was no proper 'scientific method' in research at that time.
Okay. And we could point that out for any statement or claim made by Josephus, or Tacitus, or Polybius, or Suetonius or any ancient historian you care to mention. So do we (a) throw them all out and decide we can't know anything about the ancient world at all or (b) accept what they say unless we have good evidence that indicates we shouldn't?
Every professional historian on the planet goes with (b). Are you going to go with (a) or are you going to make some sense?
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.
Ditto for Tacitus, Suetonius, Polybius or any other ancient source. So what you are seriously trying to say to a forum of intelligent rationalists is that we should reject all ancient sources in particular and all historical sources in general and totally abandon any idea of having any understanding of the past? Is that the rational statement you're making to rational people? Really?
You believe whatever your particular cult tells you to believe and I'll follow what my rational logic tells me.
My "cult"? What the fucking fuck? What part of "I'm a fucking atheist" have you failed to grasp, pal? I have no "cult". I do have a whacko devotion to things called "objectivity" and "reason". Perhaps you could acquaint yourself with them.
Do so before you bother me with a reply. Clear?