The more I learn about Christianity, the less true it seems

Himalayan sea salt proves plate tectonics not a flat earth worldwide flood.

leftrightleftrightleft said:

Perhaps my comment was a bit too harsh. I believe the Gospels and New Testament (and Old Testament) contain a bunch of historical bits, but I also think that there has been a lot of mythologization and exaggeration.

There have been hundreds or thousands of "miracle workers" throughout history from every religion and walk of life. Were they all miracle workers? Wandering preachers or gurus are especially common in South Indian history. Many of them claimed to do miraculous things, have miraculous births and deaths, and even rise from the dead (see Kabir, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Sri Yukteswar, etc). These wandering gurus had disciples (or followers) who later promoted and wrote about the idea that their guru appeared to them after the guru had died. Many of these cases are well-documented by their followers and occur much more recently in time than Jesus.

So it just "makes sense" that Jesus' followers behaved and acted in a similar way to these other groups. Why would Jesus be the exceptional exception?

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I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist (that belongs in the conspiracy theory department), but I think his miraculous claims fall in line with other historical exaggerations of gurus by their disciples.

The alternative is that these miracle workers throughout history really did somehow perform these miracles. Perhaps their disciples aren't lying or exaggerating anything. But, what the disciples do is imprint their cultural and spiritual biases onto their leader. So, for example, a South Indian Hindu miracle worker will be considered a reincarnation of Shiva while a Mediterranean Jewish miracle worker will be considered the Messiah Son of God.

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leftright,
I have 2 questions:

1. How many of those "miracle workers" willingly gave their lives, died, for their cause. How many of their followers would have chosen to be disciples if they had known they were going to be killed for following their false messiah?

2. Why did Jesus' disciples & followers continue to spread the good news, the Gospel Message, knowing that many of them would be killed for doing so?

John

JackRT said:

Himalayan sea salt proves plate tectonics not a flat earth worldwide flood.

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The plates obviously would move during the Flood.

leftright,

Below is something you might want to think about.

If the bible is not true, there is no God, and Jesus is a myth, then there is no heaven and no hell. We live or lives, we die, and then we cease to exist.

or

If the bible is true, God is real, and Jesus did die on the cross & was raised from the dead, then there is a hell to shun and a heaven to gain. ETERNITY is a LONG time to realize you were wrong.

I considered those 2 possibilities and decided I wanted to know the truth. My testimony in post #26 explains the results.

John

JackRT said:

Himalayan sea salt proves plate tectonics not a flat earth worldwide flood.

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So it could only prove one thing? I know lots of places besides the Himalayan Mountains where there are seashells above what would normally be considered sea level.
But in the Himalayas, they had to be low enough at some point for there to be water covering them. With all the other evidence, I'll go with the flood. BTW, nobody said anything about a flat earth...

leftrightleftrightleft said:

Perhaps my comment was a bit too harsh.

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Not harsh just outlandish.

I believe the Gospels and New Testament (and Old Testament) contain a bunch of historical bits, but I also think that there has been a lot of mythologization and exaggeration.

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Please show us.

There have been hundreds or thousands of "miracle workers" throughout history from every religion and walk of life. Were they all miracle workers? Wandering preachers or gurus are especially common in South Indian history. Many of them claimed to do miraculous things, have miraculous births and deaths, and even rise from the dead (see Kabir, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Sri Yukteswar, etc). These wandering gurus had disciples (or followers) who later promoted and wrote about the idea that their guru appeared to them after the guru had died. Many of these cases are well-documented by their followers and occur much more recently in time than Jesus.

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What was the witness rate for all of the above gurus? Did hundreds see said guru's in the flesh with the wounds of their death? Were any of them claiming to be the Son of the One True God? Of course not. Did any of the gurus teach they were born of a Virgin and had no earthly father? Did these gurus breathe on their disciples and receive the Holy Spirit? Were they clothed in God's Glory and received the gifts of the Holy Spirit? Don't think so.

There are a multitude of tares in the world, false signs and wonders.

Remember even the priests of Pharaoh were able to do some of the miracles in which Moses did by YHWH's Power. False signs and wonders.

One obvious point people who bring up these matters up is that they fail to see Jesus Christ came in Word and Power. He confirmed both in action and deeds.

So it just "makes sense" that Jesus' followers behaved and acted in a similar way to these other groups. Why would Jesus be the exceptional exception?

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I think you know the answer to that if you have truly searched the Scriptures like a Berean. Your conclusion invokes some sort of moral or historical relevance where there is truly no comparison.

Jesus said "“If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Also:

“You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”

I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist (that belongs in the conspiracy theory department), but I think his miraculous claims fall in line with other historical exaggerations of gurus by their disciples.

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How did you come to this comparison? What were the purposes of the guru 'miracles?' What did those signs and wonders confirm? You cannot make such a comparison without actually comparing.

Again, the Gospel accounts show in some cases thousands witnessing the miracles of Christ. The Miracles provided the witness of what He was saying and what He was doing. In Word and Power.

The alternative is that these miracle workers throughout history really did somehow perform these miracles. Perhaps their disciples aren't lying or exaggerating anything. But, what the disciples do is imprint their cultural and spiritual biases onto their leader. So, for example, a South Indian Hindu miracle worker will be considered a reincarnation of Shiva while a Mediterranean Jewish miracle worker will be considered the Messiah Son of God.

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Again how do you assert a comparison without actually comparing?

Matthew 24:

“Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There!’ do not believe it. 24 For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. 25 See, I have told you beforehand.

26 “Therefore if they say to you, ‘Look, He is in the desert!’ do not go out; or ‘Look, He is in the inner rooms!’ do not believe it. 27 For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. 28 For wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together.

leftrightleftrightleft said:

Supposedly, if you seek, you will find. I have been poking at Christianity for many years and I have read a whole list of books from both sides. I have read the New Testament in full and all 4 Gospels multiple times. I have read Mere Christianity, Case For Christ, A Skeptics Guide To Faith amongst others. I have also read other critical books such as The God Delusion, The Rise of Christianity, and The Evolution of God. I have been open to Christianity and have no hostility towards spirituality. I have attended church semi-regularly. But, the more I learn, the more the following seems clear:

1) The Bible is not historically or literally accurate. There are parts that are likely based off true events and true people, but I would say the majority is either exaggeration, allegory, myth or poetry.

2) Jesus is not the literal "Son of God". I do not know what this means outside of some sort of metaphorical context.

3) Church sermons do not depend on the historical truth of the Bible. Many sermons that I have heard are simply literary analysis of a passage which is independent of the historicity of the passage. For example, just this past Sunday, the pastor at my church preached on Mark 5:21-43 in which Jesus heals a bleeding woman and restores a dead girl to life. He used this passage to talk about spiritual healing in our lives and even mentioned how the writer of Mark set up this story in such a way to contrast Jairus and the bleeding woman. The way he spoke made me realize that the historicity of the passage was irrelevant. You could provide the same literary analysis and spiritual application by reading any myth.

4) Christianity is a 2000-year old evolving misunderstanding; a group of conflicting opinions on God, Jesus, spirituality, and paganism. It was warped so thoroughly by the Roman empire, that it is difficult to try to reconstruct what the "original" Christianity looked like. We look at Jesus, Paul and the Bible through a 2000-year lens of history with all the associated theological and historical baggage.

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Strange. I see your post as the mirror image of the truth that I believe. But, you see, we are both wishful-thinkers. Why ? Because God never intended for the truth to be a 'slam dunk', otherwise all the academically-inclined, worldly-wise would get to heaven, including the likes of Mengele, Hitler et al. God has the more than enough sense and decency to despise such a choice. He prefers rather to judge our hearts, not our heads, and so He leaves enough wriggle-room for the 'less than well-disposed' to find reason to reject his teaching, in favour of what, in their pride, they consider a perfectly neutral, objective truth, a reality that is cold, hard, ugly not to be wished for, not to be hoped for, undesirable.

On the other hand, why would he not have made the world to correspond with the wishes, dreams, hopes, BELIEFS, with which He, himself, has chosen to inspire the hearts and minds of his sheep, through the indwelling of his own Holy Spirit. A new creation, embryonic God/men through that adoption by the Holy Spirit, as a result of Christ's taking on our mortal nature and suffering in it to the point of death. The death of his mortal body, and ultimately the defeat and death of the forces of darkness. He, himself,as God, could not be killed.

You started off with a 'laundry list' of criticisms of the Christian faith, much of it, as atheist 'scientists' are wont to, couched in terms of a string of alleged probabilities, always negative, with which, though uncertain about them, you have no problem, tacitly accepting them as the assumptions upon which to build your next atheist castle-in-the-air of straw men.

Yet, once you start off with a false premise, even the most intricate filigree of flawless logic can only lead you to the madhouse - further and further from the truth.
You have done this by dismissing the origins and most of the rest of the basis of Christian belief, in favour of coulda, woulda, shoulda. We start off with the acceptance of what we call mysteries, and in physics are known as paradoxes - completely imponderable since repugnant to logic.

You see, since the discovery by Max Planck of quantum mechanics, your black and white world of classical mechanistic physics, where you pull a lever and you can see how it affect various other solid items to achieve a final action, is no more. In astro-physics, too the world just gets weirder and weirder. Our Christian and other theistic scientists have discovered all the major paradigms, by accepting that even the physical world is way too sophisticated for human beings ever to do more than scratch the surface. No one spoke about that more than Einstein, though all of them believed in intelligent design (and implicitly a designer).

Today, we know that for the universe to have been created from the Big Bang (first posited by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest) a host of physical criteria had to be met, and for human life to exist, even more. We know it as the 'fine tuning' of the universe. It was the argument that converted Anthony Flew, the Richard Dawkins of his day, though rather more intelligent than the man who envisages a blind watchmaker - while his fundamental premise is scientifically impossible. In any case, to quote from the article below : 'There is no evolutionary answer to the origin of information in all living things.'

https://answersingenesis.org/eviden...onse-to-richard-dawkins-the-blind-watchmaker/

To get the facts and figures and readable format, you should buy Stephen Joseph Williams' inexpensive paperback : What Your Atheist Professor Doesn't Know (but Should).

JackRT said:

It was a later generation of gentile Christians who re-interpreted these phrases in a very different religious sense.

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Please show how the later generations re-interpreted.

The NT clearly defines all of the royalty terms and titles clearly as both spiritual and physical.

For example:

Isaiah 61 New King James Version (NKJV)

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord has anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
3 To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”

Compare:

Luke 4:

16 So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. 17 And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
19 To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

20 Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. 21 And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”(NKJV)

The truth of what Messiah would be was in their own TaNaKh. However, like modern and post-modern skeptics they only read what tickled their ears or fit their agenda of what Messiah "should be."

I will also note, Jesus stopped reading at "To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord," as that was His mission for the first advent. His second advent will be very uncomfortable for those who do not submit to Him as Lord and Savior, King of kings.

leftrightleftrightleft said:

Perhaps my comment was a bit too harsh. I believe the Gospels and New Testament (and Old Testament) contain a bunch of historical bits, but I also think that there has been a lot of mythologization and exaggeration.

Click to expand...

If the gospels are a fairy tale, how come there is so much information about the idiots and doubters he chose for his closest apostles?

There have been hundreds or thousands of "miracle workers" throughout history from every religion and walk of life. Were they all miracle workers? Wandering preachers or gurus are especially common in South Indian history. Many of them claimed to do miraculous things, have miraculous births and deaths, and even rise from the dead (see Kabir, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Sri Yukteswar, etc). These wandering gurus had disciples (or followers) who later promoted and wrote about the idea that their guru appeared to them after the guru had died. Many of these cases are well-documented by their followers and occur much more recently in time than Jesus.

Click to expand...

Did any of them claim to be God?

So it just "makes sense" that Jesus' followers behaved and acted in a similar way to these other groups. Why would Jesus be the exceptional exception?

Click to expand...

Except they didn't. The huddled in a room together for fear of the Jews, waiting for something to happen to justify their beliefs. Some appearances did happen, but still they doubted. When nothing happened for a while, the went back to their homeland and went fishing. That night, they didn't catch anything until someone they didn't recognize told them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat. They nearly tore their nets and sank their boats. Only after 2 months did they receive their justification, and after that, they preached fearlessly, in the face of possible death at the hands of the Romans and the Jews. In fact, the religion was not allowed for 300 years, and yet it grew.

I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist (that belongs in the conspiracy theory department), but I think his miraculous claims fall in line with other historical exaggerations of gurus by their disciples.

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Jesus didn't claim any miracles. Others wrote about them. Oh, some try to say that Jesus didn't really feed 5000 people with 5 loaves and two fish...

The alternative is that these miracle workers throughout history really did somehow perform these miracles. Perhaps their disciples aren't lying or exaggerating anything. But, what the disciples do is imprint their cultural and spiritual biases onto their leader. So, for example, a South Indian Hindu miracle worker will be considered a reincarnation of Shiva while a Mediterranean Jewish miracle worker will be considered the Messiah Son of God.

Click to expand...

Except that we don't see Jesus coming back in some other's body. And he won't have to claim that he's God returning. We'll know for sure.

leftrightleftrightleft said:

Supposedly, if you seek, you will find. I have been poking at Christianity for many years and I have read a whole list of books from both sides. I have read the New Testament in full and all 4 Gospels multiple times. I have read Mere Christianity, Case For Christ, A Skeptics Guide To Faith amongst others. I have also read other critical books such as The God Delusion, The Rise of Christianity, and The Evolution of God. I have been open to Christianity and have no hostility towards spirituality. I have attended church semi-regularly. But, the more I learn, the more the following seems clear:

1) The Bible is not historically or literally accurate. There are parts that are likely based off true events and true people, but I would say the majority is either exaggeration, allegory, myth or poetry.

2) Jesus is not the literal "Son of God". I do not know what this means outside of some sort of metaphorical context.

3) Church sermons do not depend on the historical truth of the Bible. Many sermons that I have heard are simply literary analysis of a passage which is independent of the historicity of the passage. For example, just this past Sunday, the pastor at my church preached on Mark 5:21-43 in which Jesus heals a bleeding woman and restores a dead girl to life. He used this passage to talk about spiritual healing in our lives and even mentioned how the writer of Mark set up this story in such a way to contrast Jairus and the bleeding woman. The way he spoke made me realize that the historicity of the passage was irrelevant. You could provide the same literary analysis and spiritual application by reading any myth.

4) Christianity is a 2000-year old evolving misunderstanding; a group of conflicting opinions on God, Jesus, spirituality, and paganism. It was warped so thoroughly by the Roman empire, that it is difficult to try to reconstruct what the "original" Christianity looked like. We look at Jesus, Paul and the Bible through a 2000-year lens of history with all the associated theological and historical baggage.

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What is your thinking, outside of Christianity, about God and His relationship to humanity?

leftrightleftrightleft said:

Supposedly, if you seek, you will find. I have been poking at Christianity for many years and I have read a whole list of books from both sides. I have read the New Testament in full and all 4 Gospels multiple times. I have read Mere Christianity, Case For Christ, A Skeptics Guide To Faith amongst others. I have also read other critical books such as The God Delusion, The Rise of Christianity, and The Evolution of God.

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I don't mean to be harsh but you have hardly scratched the surface in your reading. Back when I had read as little as you have I still had a ways to go before actually making a solid commitment to faith. Mere Christianity is good, for example, but there are so many more things to read to have a good education in the Christian faith. The following is not really 'ultimate' but it is a good list. http://www.catholic.com/blog/trent-horn/the-ultimate-apologist’s-reading-list

But then this faith is not about how much you know, even if you do finally read it all and get it and have an intellectual faith. It is about Jesus, one who has offered salvation and asks you to place him as Lord of your life. Theology is a discipline best done on one's knees, first begging the Holy Spirit for enlightenment. I would offer that you have much more to read. Some books from the list I linked to might help. The reading never ends.

Mat 19:14
Jesus, however, said, “Let the little children come to me, and stop keeping them away, because the kingdom from heaven belongs to people like these.”

I would say that your problem is that "people only find what they are looking for".
Your comments show a bias and a thorough lack of understanding.

Perhaps if you tried looking at the facts with an open mind and not get hung up on your own misconceptions.

Widlast said:

I would say that your problem is that "people only find what they are looking for".
Your comments show a bias and a thorough lack of understanding.

Perhaps if you tried looking at the facts with an open mind and not get hung up on your own misconceptions.

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Please learn to use the quote/reply button so we know who/what you are replying to....unless of course you are simply making a generic statement.

The more I learn...
THe more I learn...
The more I learn...

But... Spirituality and virtue are not knowledge! If E = mc2 then we can divide and conclude that...

Mass (m) = Energy (E/c2)

And there are three varieties...

Natural E/c2 - All mass is basically cooled plasma
Mental E/c2 - Mentally, A mathematical formula, but this has chemical and spiritual properties as well.
Spiritual E/c2 - E (motivation, warmth, love) / c2 (faith, hope, charity, joy)

To experience the creator is to do so on a spiritual basis. When your heart is warmed than you will know and it will seem true.

But virtue is not mass... Therefore it cannot be purchased
Virtue is not knowledge... Therefore it cannot be taught

Plato's Meno is a dialogue in which Socrates and Meno discuss human virtue: whether or not it can be taught, whether it is shared by all human beings, and whether it is one quality or many. After discussion with Anytus, Socrates and Meno return to the subject of whether Virtue can be taught. "To sum up our enquiry," Socrates concludes, "the result seems to be that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous."

The following is a story of a man who picked up the energy and light on a spiritual scale...

civilwarbuff said:

Please learn to use the quote/reply button so we know who/what you are replying to....unless of course you are simply making a generic statement.

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I did.

While I have not read the entire thread, I suspect what I am about to write has not been expressed heretofore. If I had to identify the one item of evidence that I see as most telling in favour of the truth of the Christian worldview it would be the compelling narrative. To expand: I believe that the very surprising, yet in hindsight completely Biblically appropriate, way that the New Testament “story” picks up and continues the Old Testament story is evidence of the truthfulness of the New Testament story (and, in fact, the whole story). The general idea here is that one can have increasing confidence in the truthfulness of a set of reported events to the degree that those reported events deviate violently from the expectations of the people who reported the events while, at the same time, making sense in light of a sophisticated and compelling re-interpretation of the history that informed those expectations in the first place. I realize that may sound like mumbo-jumbo, but I believe I have captured the essence of what I want to say as clearly as I can.

Let me now proceed from the general to the specifics and hopefully this will clarify things:

1. The Old Testament presents a story, an evolving narrative;
   
   
2. The Jews of Jesus’ time saw themselves as God’s chosen people, destined to rule over the Gentiles who were, surprisingly, to those Jews at least, presently oppressing them in the form of the Roman empire;
   
   
3. In that setting, the Jewish Messiah figure (presented in the Old Testament) was expected to deliver the Jews from Rome, almost certainly by force, and restore Israel to her rightful position atop all Gentile nations;
   
   
4. Jesus comes along, represents Himself as that Messiah (at least as reported in the gospel accounts), and yet, to the dismay of His followers, dies a shameful death on a cross at the hands of Israel’s oppressors, rather than defeating them;
   
   
5. This turn of events is profoundly at odds with the expectations of Jesus’ contemporaries; if His followers were to invent a story about Jesus, it would not include His death on a cross. Nor would it include other elements of the story presented in the gospels (no space to elaborate here).
   
   
6. Paul comes along and presents a detailed analysis of how his fellow Jews had profoundly misunderstood God’s exceedingly complex and subtle plans. He then argues, in great detail, that there is another way of understanding the Old Testament narrative that has led up to Jesus’ time and that what happened to Jesus very neatly ties up all sorts of threads of that re-interpreted Old Testament narrative.
   
   
7. This is compelling: we have a Jewish nation with strong Messianic expectations based on a certain view of their national history presented in the Old Testament. Jesus clearly did not fulfill those expectations. Along comes an unusually sophisticated and knowledgeable Jewish scholar – Paul – who is able to develop a complex, multi-threaded re-interpretation of the Old Testament narrative. And, surprise upon surprise, the Jesus story successfully completes each of those (re-interpreted) narrative threads. My gut feeling: There is too much in this scenario that works out too neatly to conclude the whole thing was “made up”, especially in light of all the different participants who cannot have collaborated together to make up such a coherent story (e.g. Paul could not “rewrite” the Old Testament, nor could he control what got later written in the gospels).
   

A lot more could be said, but that’s it for now.

I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist (that belongs in the conspiracy theory department), but I think his miraculous claims fall in line with other historical exaggerations of gurus by their disciples. - leftrightleftrightleft

What do you make of this ? A tissue of lies ?

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/new...oland-has-hallmarks-of-a-eucharistic-miracle/

I don't think it's emotional.
It's the biggest controversy in the world.
And no matter how many facts point to God, people dismiss it anyway because we're indoctrinated with pseudo-rationality and naturalism.