Atheist, not trolling

[Soothfish]

I am skeptical of christ's existence.

From an evidence standpoint, all of ancient history is questionable. ALL of it. The fact of the matter is that ancient historians were not objective. They mixed reporting with poetry and personal bias and that's just the way it was.

Furthermore, even with a time machine we would have trouble determining if the event happened in our own timeline/universe.

At some point you just need to go with your gut instinct. If you're not sure, it doesn't hurt to dwell upon the subject frequently. We can't prove that the Jesus story wasn't an extraordinarily elaborate hoax. On the flip side, the documentation is too elaborate to be the work of a few hundred impoverished Hebrews and Greek exiles. Maybe the Roman empire could pull it off but the records indicate that they were the enemies of the Christians for a long long while.

 

[et superbum]

Pretty hard to get pregnant on abstinence as it turns out.

lol

As for why Christians support it -- it is that whole "Ten Commandments" thing about not committing adultery (See Exodus 20 in the Old Testament) as well as the"Sermon on the mount" by Christ starting in Matthew 5.

in Christ,

Bob

I understand your argument being that premarital sex is a form of preemptive adultery and that comprehensive sex education increases the rates of teen sex.

4 studies commissioned by the dept of health and human services on 4 separate abstinence only programs found that there the programs failed to affect their students sexual activity one way or another.

I don't believe that my sex education had an effect on my likely hood have sex one way or another, it just gave those who chose to engage the information they needed.

also according to the DHHS sexual activity rates among teens fell from 1991 to 2001 but have since leveled out. It has been suggested that this is a result of the Bush administration's increased focus on abstinence only education.

 

[bling]

Wikipedia actually cites the bible for the authorship dates of the books in the new testament.

I have heard multiple time from different sources that many of the gospels were not written for more than a century after the death of christ. I may be listening to biased sources for this information, but it can't be any worse than what wikipedia is currently doing.

I will look this up to try to find a less biased account.

There are books written on this subject, so I cannot respond to everything in a post.

What we have with the Old Testament is what we need. We know that the Old Testament is an excellent copy since the Jewish scholars were very meticulous in copying. It was unfortunate they burner the older copies each time a new one was made and for a long while the Oldest we had was a 1000 AD copy. The Dead Sea Scrolls in 1945 gave us most of the Old Testament in copies older than Christ and we found there to be very little differences between what we were using (differences were insignificant) and like Isaiah match almost word for word.

The New Testament had a miraculous way of being protected and preserved by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit did allow humans to be honored with involvement in the protection and preserving that also allowed the easy spread and easy translation into other languages. Today we have over 25,000 New Testament ancient manuscripts 8,000+ in Koine Greek and others in 16 different languages. No one felt they could not copy or translate these NT letters, yet today the ancient hand written copies we have are 93%+ word for word consistent and 100% consistent in content (the same Gospel message is found in all of them).

Where people get uptight about apparent contradictions in the Old Testament is pretty insignificant when it comes down to the bottom line. Everything in the Old Testament is to build to the coming of Christ and the New Covenant. God did not change, but there is a before Christ and after Christ situation.