I never refuted Jesus as being a real person, but I doubt scholars agree Jesus was Crucified
Actually this is one point that most scholars agree as being true.
“No serious historian of any religious or nonreligious stripe doubts that Jesus of Nazareth really lived in the first century and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and Samaria.”
Powerful Reasons Why Scholars Know that Jesus Existed.
Other sources such as Tacitus, Josephus, Lucian and the Babylonian Talmud, which are close to the time of Jesus mention he was put to death and Tacitus mention Pontius Pilot. There is also the fact that Christian and non-Christian writings mention the rising up of Christians soon after Christ's death on the basis of him being crucified and then rising from the dead. Many Christians were persecuted and also crucified. The enemies of Christ and Christians write about this and they were the least who wanted to support Jesus and makeup stories because they wanted him gone.
because there are many Muslim scholars as well and in Islam they are very specific about Jesus being taken by Allah into Heaven when the Jewish leaders began conspiring against him. If there were evidence of him actually being crucified, that would expose Islam as fraud; that would be akin to having proof of Jesus never rising from the dead, which would expose Christianity as fraud.
It is ironic because one of the criticisms of the Bible is that it was written 100s of years after the event. Yet some of the books about the crucifixion of Jesus were written very soon after his death when eyewitnesses were still around. The Koran was written 600 years after the death of Christ. Islam also supports the old testament but instead of also supporting the New Testament writings they change things to add their own version where Mohummad is the great prophet and not Christ so of course, they will minimize Christ's position. Who would be more credible the eyewitnesses to the events and other non-Biblical writings closer to the event or someone coming along 600 years later who had a vested interest in changing things to make a new religion.
But my point was not about if he were an actual person or not, but about the claims of him regularly doing things outside the laws of nature. There are many fictional novels and books written today that include actual events and involve actual people of today, yet they are still books and novels of fiction.
Jesus's miracles are another thing and nothing to do with his morals.
First of all, you need to quit bringing up Sam Harris, because nothing he said had anything to do with Objective Morality, even though the title on the Video suggested otherwise.
If you read his articles you will find it has everything to do with objective morality. But I understand you do not want to look into Mr Harris so here are some other non-religious sources that use similar reasoning.
The thesis of this essay is that morality is not objective in the same way that statements of empirically verifiable facts are objective, yet morality is objective in the ways that matter: moral judgments are not arbitrary; we can have genuine disagreements about moral issues; people can be mistaken in their moral beliefs, and facts about the world are relevant to and inform our moral judgments. In other words, morality is not “subjective” as that term is usually interpreted. Moral judgments are not equivalent to descriptive statements about the world—factual assertions about cars, cats, and cabbages—but neither are they merely expressions of personal preferences.
How Morality Has the Objectivity that Matters—Without God
Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. In the tradition of Plato and G. E. Moore, Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. These principles are a fundamental aspect of reality, just as much as those that govern mathematics or the natural world.
http://www.oupcanada.com/catalog/9780199259755.html
I agree, with God, it comes down to having trust in him and his word, but the same applies to me! The difference between you and I is that you have trust in God and his word; I don’t. I have trust in myself and my word; you don’t. Kinda balances out.
The difference is having trust in a human is risky as humans are fallible and can be influenced, biased and corrupted into thinking something is good when it is bad. That is our weakness. Whereas with Jesus he is the same always and has no sin. His moral teachings are always good and can be depended upon.
Bro! I have read the Bible, and I will put my morals up against that God’s morals any day!
Jesus is the fulfilment of the bible and he is infallible and without sin. Therefore a rock solid and dependable example of how to live a good life. But going back to the weakness of humans it is not us who become good as we cannot but Jesus living in us that enables us to live good moral lives.
The problem with taking your morals from the God of the Bible is that even when he is proven wrong, his fan club will insist that he is right!
There is no fault in Jesus to be proven wrong. He is our only source of how we should act. That was his mission to show us the way.
My ability to know the difference between right and wrong. (I thought I answered that already)
I meant what measure can you use to know it is really good as in absolutely good. Not your version or another humans version of good as this can be many different interpretations of what is good and there is no guarantee that it is absolutely good. Like I mentioned earlier humans can deceive themselves into thinking something is good when it is not so good because of ulterior motives such as overlooking something or compromising things because there is some sort of benefit to be made.
No; there are some issues where everybody will subjectively agree on. No lawgiver needed.
How do they determine that it is actually good. They may agree but what is the basis for their choice being ultimately good. A group of people can be wrong just as much as an individual.
Sam Harris makes the point that there are right and wrong answers when it comes to cultural successes, then he makes the claim that morality is related to that. He makes the point that not all moral principles should be considered equal; he even seems to say it would be good if we could all agree on what is good and bad moral principles, but nowhere does he claim that we do. And nowhere does he claim some moral law giver outside of mankind that knows what is best for us.
SamHarris would never agree that there was a moral lawgiver. As you have said he is only making the point that there are certain moral positions that are better than others that we all can know.
Again; you need to quit bringing up Sam Harris in this conversation because he is not supporting your arguments of Objective Morality.
Fair enough, not my idea of objective moraily but objective morality nevertheless.
From Sam Harris's website
Clearly, we can think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a law-giving God. In The End of Faith, I argued that questions of morality are really questions about happiness and suffering. If there are objectively better and worse ways to live so as to maximize happiness in this world, these would be objective moral truths worth knowing. Whether we will ever be in a position to discover these truths and agree about them cannot be known in advance (and this is the case for all questions of scientific fact).
But if there are psychophysical laws that underwrite human well-being—and why wouldn’t there be?—then these laws are potentially discoverable.
Knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality. In the meantime, everything about human experience suggests that love is better than hate for the purposes of living happily in this world.
This is an objective claim about the human mind, the dynamics of social relations, and the moral order of our world. While we do not have anything like a final, scientific approach to maximizing human happiness, it seems safe to say that raping and killing children will not be one of its primary constituents.
The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos
