Jesus' teachings are impressive enough. You don't have to add on his lordship or sovereignty to find appealing ethics and even deeper spiritual considerations about things like the sacred or secular. And you can claim my choosing or not choosing affects my eternities, but you can't demonstrate eternity itself, you only have recourse to analogy.
I didn't claim to. I think the resurrection leads to a chain of reasoning that makes it reasonable to suppose eternity will happen. That isn't recourse to analogy.
Basically you can't verify or note in any way whether my disbelief in God affects my life for better or worse and the same can be applied to determining whether your belief in God affects your life for better or worse.
Actually there are scientific studies that show that religious people reap health benefits that the non-religious do not. And this would make since anyway since natural selection obviously likes religion.
Well, then perhaps Christian apologists need to stop going with that angle that I am not behaving morally just because I don't happen to believe in God.
Not aware of any reputable ones that do.
Any effects of Christian belief are honestly irrelevant with regards to a betterment of humanity, since ethical considerations are more important than one feeling they have some ultimate purpose they can communicate to others that share that purpose, which reminds me of the Borg.
Honestly, if it's true that eternity will happen, I think we should be much more concerned with truth than what will make humanity better in the short-term (not that I think being concerned about eternity will not lead to a better situation in the short-term, though).
Jesus doing the things he did doesn't have any demonstrable effect one way or another. People misuse his teachings, abuse the authority he gave them and otherwise make a mockery of the genuine wisdom he taught as a person of faith and genuine ethics, regardless of disagreements about where the ethics are derived.
People doing bad things is logically relevant how to the whether or not eternity exists and our need for atonement?
How can you demonstrate or verify that Jesus coming back from the dead has any effect on the world as we know it beyond people changing their ways incidentally because of how the teaching about his death and resurrection affects their own psychological dispositions: e.g. feelings of guilt and need for redemption? I can argue they are found internally and not externally from some outside source like Jesus or God?
The resurrection would be a vindication of Jesus and thus his claims. He made claims about eternity and about the necessity of reconciliation with God. So I think that's pretty good evidence that eternity (new heavens and new earth) will happen, which will obviously change things in the universe. I'm also curious what other effects you think it should have had beside that and people changing their ways. Furthermore people living in the Roman empire of the first century and most people that have ever lived didn't experience feelings of guilt. Cultural anthropology tells us this.
And you are the one failing to give me these sources! You list these quotes from contemporary authors below about how there is more evidence for Jesus than many other historical figures, but these aren't sources for evidence of Jesus. Show me where a primary source talks about Jesus.
LOL. I already told you the NT books are sources. Especially the 4 gospels since they're in the genre of ancient biography. Furthermore, pertaining to the authors I quoted, if a consensus of scholars with expertise in the relevant field holds to a certain position, you cannot readily dismiss the consensus. It requires a lot of work. Nevertheless, the sources they use are listed
here.
I can't find the exact page I found it at, but I have also saw it in a documentary a while ago which lists Jesus' miracles and compares them to miracles of previous gods/messiahs and i think it was like 80% of them had been done before, many of the other gods/messiahs did more than one of his miracles. You're gonna think I'm making this up because I can't find where I got it from, but at the moment, this is the best I can do.
If it was Zeitgeist then you should know that thinking Christians find it to be a load of crap and are utterly unconvinced by its claims. I'm already familiar with the arguments anyway. I'm just waiting to see which ones you think are worthwhile.
One external source would be the tags found on the ancient manuscripts saying Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote them. Furthermore, Mark and Luke had access to the eyewitnesses and used their testimony for their gospels. Also, later writers attribute the gospels to these 4 people. Secondly, internal evidence of the gospels themselves point to these 4 authors. A list of books that list the relevant external source information can be found
here. These books are by scholars in the relevant field.
Are you actually serious? Who cares who said the quote?! It wouldn't make a difference if I came up with the quote off the top of my head, it still makes sense.
Not to me. You proposed a standard. Back that up with methods from historians.
And if you don't believe it, then you are saying supernatural events don't require much evidence at all.
I haven't actually said how much evidence they require.
I don't understand? Surely, you have seen images or videos of the Loch Ness Monster, bigfoot or people bending spoons? It's not that people have disproved these things, it's that it requires AN EXTRAORDINARY AMOUNT OF EVIDENCE TO PROVE!
And I don't find them to be reliable. I do for the resurrection, however.
Wikipedia is not a valid source.
The difference here is that conquering vast amounts of land was not uncommon in ancient times and is a plausible story.
The uncommonality or plausibility do not immediately set the bar much higher. By your criteria, those watching the moon landing in 1969 would be irrational for believing what they were seeing.
Walking on water and turning water into wine doesn't happen every day, century, decade or millenia. This is why more evidence than Alexander the great is needed.
So say 12 and only 12 people saw someone walk on water. Are you telling me that their eyewitness testimony (considering they are known to be reliable) would not be enough evidence? Because if not, then by your criteria it is "rational" to reject their testimony even though it actually did happen.