Comment Thread for The Resurrection of Jesus - Apologiaphoenix vs Gary

[Mikeenders]

I'm not going to continue debating someone who believes in the reality of exorcisms. Your extreme views in the supernatural is truly frightening.

Which being interpreted means " I got exposed not knowing medicine and they seem have answers to my claims so i better run along now"

[Gary]

WOW Two lines of original thought? Don't give yourself a brain cramp


P.S. get your blood pressure medicine handy by the weekend when your latest junk will be thoroughly debunked as I have done for all others before it.

Sorry, but the fact that you believe that invisible goblins can "possess" people disqualifies you as someone any educated person should listen to. I am no longer interested in listening to your bloviating.

[Mikeenders]

Sorry, but the fact that you believe that invisible goblins can "possess" people disqualifies you as someone any educated person should listen to. I am no longer interested in listening to your bloviating.

Unfortunately for you no one cares whether you are reading when you are debunked. Sorry. Next time get an education. Many theists do believe in both angels and Demons

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-nea...eve-in-angels/

and your incredulity on either isn't evidence against anything

at least I am not the one claiming to practice medicine that is totally incompetent on it.

[Gary]

More stupidity from the Christian holy book:

Insects have four legshttp://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.p...have_four_legs

So there are still some Christians out there who believe that seizure disorders are caused by demons??

Well, if you do, here is a fellow Christian, who obviously has an advanced degree in medicine, who will explain how demons cause seizures:

It is amazing to me how conservative Christians have revised the interpretation of many concepts in the Bible just in my lifetime. Growing up evangelical in the 1970's, I never dreamed that I would hear an evangelical or other conservative Christian pastor endorse the idea that the Creation may not have occurred in six literal twenty-four hour days, or that some aspects of evolution may be true, or that the Flood of Noah's day was only a regional flood of the Euphrates River valley, not the entire world.

Unimaginable!

If any evangelical pastor had preached these "heresies" in the 70's he would have been run out of his church and denomination. But now these "heresies" are considered acceptable views in mainstream conservative Christianity.

So what is up with the Bible? Why is it that orthodox/conservative Christians must repeatedly update their interpretation of God's "holy, inspired, inerrant, unchanging" Word?? Did God allow the Bible to be written so poorly, so confusingly, that mankind has needed scientists, not theologians, to understand what God really meant to say?

Here are some examples of Hebrew/Christian beliefs based on the literal reading of the Bible that have been revised due to scientific and medical discoveries:

1. Flat earth.
2. The flat earth rests on pillars.
3. The earth has four corners.
4. There is a canopy above the earth called a firmament to which God hung the sun, moon, stars, and planets.
5. The sun revolves around the earth.
6. There are "fountains of the deep" under the earth.
7. There is a layer of water above the firmament.
8. The universe was created in six, literal, twenty-four hour days.
9. All animals and planets were created during those six twenty-four hour days.
10. The universe is 6,000 - 10,000 years old.
11. The entire world was covered by water, even Mt. Everest, during the Great Flood.
12. Noah was able to accommodate 10 million species of animals in his boat.
13. Kangaroos got off of Noah's boat on top of Mt. Ararat (modern day Turkey) after the Flood waters receded, traveled (and swam) thousands of miles to Australia...without leaving one kangaroo skeleton on the continent of Asia.
14. Seizures are caused by demon possession.

Once science and medicine proves the literal reading of the Bible on these issues false, Christians then revise their interpretation of the passage or passages in question and decide (arbitrarily) that the passage in question is speaking "metaphorically" and that previous generations of believers were simply mistaken.

What? Says who?

I am currently in a discussion with a Christian regarding the Ascension story. When I point out to him that if Jesus ascended to heaven at a speed slow enough that his disciples could watch him ascend, Jesus hasn't even made it to the next nearest galaxy, let alone the far reaches of outer space and ultimately heaven.

"You are reading this passage literally and being silly. It is obvious that the author of the passage was speaking metaphorically," says the Christian.

When I ask the same Christian if he believes that the Resurrection account should be read metaphorically his reply is, "Of course not. This account should be understood literally. The Resurrection of Jesus was a real historical event."

???

Dear conservative Christians: Please open your eyes. Instead of repeatedly revising and updating your interpretation of your God's "unchanging" Word, why not just accept the obvious: The Bible is an ancient book full of scientific, medical, historical, and archeological inaccuracies, written by scientifically ignorant, superstitious, ancient peoples. People do not "ascend" into the sky and decomposing dead men do not walk out of their graves to enjoy a broiled fish lunch with their fishing buddies.

Stop basing your life on these fables and legends and accept the findings of modern science and medicine as the basis of your reality. Please.

[Bill the Cat]

Moderated By: Bill the Cat

This is not your blog Gary. We do not allow back to back posts unless you are responding to different posters.

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publicly complain or whine, please take it to the Padded Room unless told otherwise.

[Gary]

Moderated By: Bill the Cat

This is not your blog Gary. We do not allow back to back posts unless you are responding to different posters.

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publicly complain or whine, please take it to the Padded Room unless told otherwise.

Yes, I have broken the rules. I deserve to be banned.

Please ban me.

I'm completely serious. Please ban me from TW. This site has become an addiction which I do not need.

[Gary]

A Thought Experiment

Consider a banker, a devout Baptist and complete believer in miracles. During an audit he finds $100,000 missing. All the employees' books balance. Is he going to accept that the $100,000 just miraculously disappeared? Is he going to expect the police and banking regulators to accept it? Not very likely. Even if all attempts to find fraud fail, he's going to assume that somehow, somebody pulled off a theft.

Now let's assume there is a witness. A long-time, highly trusted employee who is a member of the same church as the banker, and whose character is above reproach. He tells the banker he was in the vault and saw the money simply vanish before his eyes. The banker is certainly not going to expect the police to believe this story or blame them because they suspect theft. If all attempts to crack the employee's story or find the money fail, we have a lot of options to consider. Maybe the employee blacked out or hallucinated momentarily, or had a small seizure. Maybe someone hypnotized, drugged, or distracted the employee momentarily and grabbed the money.

Suppose the vault has a video camera that shows the money sitting in plain view one frame and gone the next. Our hapless employee is in the clear. Or is he? Could someone have interrupted the video feed for a second or two and simultaneously have paused the recorder? Could someone have doctored the security tape? Could someone have fed a false signal to the camera system? Or, a la the old Mission Impossible TV series, used trick photography to fool the security system?

I can't imagine anyone in banking, no matter how devoutly religious, not exploring every one of these avenues before concluding a miracle had happened. Even after accepting a miracle as the only logical explanation, I think this banker would always be prepared for the possibility of a natural explanation. The methodology here is pretty close to that of David Hume 250 years ago, who held that no evidence would be sufficiently ironclad to demonstrate a miracle. The banker wouldn't go that far, but he'd explore every other avenue first.

So why do so many people have a problem when science rejects miracles? Why would people expect the police to dismiss claims that money miraculously vanished from a bank and angrily label scientists "skeptics" for drawing the same conclusion about a tumor gone from a cancer patient? Partly it's a prejudice that scientific theories, unlike $100,000 missing from a bank and possible prison terms for the bank employees, are really not of any practical importance, so what's the harm? Actually, scientific theories are a lot more important than $100,000 missing from a bank vault - in literal money terms, let alone the whole issue of truth. At $100 a foot, a 20,000 foot oil well will run $2,000,000. That's one well. It makes a difference whether the fossils that turn up in the cuttings from the well were deposited according to the conventional view of geologic time or as the result of a miraculous flood. It makes a big difference in money and lives whether we conclude someone's recovery in a $100 million clinical trial was due to the drug, the placebo effect, or a miracle.

Science rejects miracles for exactly the same reasons that accountants do when conducting audits, the police do when conducting forensics, and mechanics do when trouble-shooting cars.

The idea that we always seek natural explanations for phenomena is called methodological naturalism. It must be sharply distinguished from philosophical naturalism, which is the a priori assumption that only natural phenomena exist. It is perfectly possible to be a religious believer and still practice methodological naturalism.

Dear Nick: Most atheists/agnostics are methodological naturalists, not philosophical naturalists. We do not pretend to know as fact that miracles are impossible, or that the supernatural does not exist, or that your god does not exist. We simply believe that it is much more rational and reasonable to seek natural explanations for any event first...before jumping to..."a god done it".

[Apologiaphoenix]

I consider you ignorant because you are ignorant (indeed, willfully so). Not all critics are ignorant. I would not consider Boxing Pythagoras, for example, ignorant. Try again, kemosabe. There is no need to invoke satan to explain you.

I personally would think at this point the devil would want Gary to be quiet. He's doing more to embarrass skepticism than any of us are right now.

[tabibito]

..

Tabby,

How can you believe it was Jesus who told you that your friend's dad was going to die when Jesus believes that Epilepsy is caused by demon possession???

Can you prove that the recorded event was in fact epilepsy? You accept the account the the event occurred, but not the fact that the sufferer was healed? Or that the demon manifested when it was evicted? There's no logic in accepting the account as valid in part - either the event happened as described or it didn't happen.

Jesus' diagnostic skills regarding the health of human beings appears to be poor to pathetic. Your "sense" that your friend should visit his dad was just a lucky hunch. You cannot prove it was anything else, but I can prove that Jesus has a very bad track record of diagnosing disease in human beings. The Christian holy book is littered with medical inaccuracies:

Oh really - a string of "lucky hunches" involving other people led to my friend, a man contemptuous of Christianity, paying attention to what I told him - it wasn't a one off. In my mention of this matter I asked you to consider what would have made my friend pay attention to what I was saying - you clearly give that point no thought whatever.

Anthropological Pseudoscience

You're wasting your time pointing to Genesis. Problems with the book are known and acknowledged.

Peoples of the time did consider the heart to be the seat of the emotions, true enough. Some people of the times thought that the heart was also the seat of thought. Unfortunately for your argument, Esther 6:6 does not say that a man thought with his heart, and the word used is Leb not Labab.

"And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead. Mark 9:26" ... As with your comment about epilepsy, you cherry picked the record. The assumption that every occurrence of "deaf and dumb" must be due to physical causes. And the description you give of the cause is usually congenital, which the Biblical record shows not to be the case on this occasion.

Again, you claim to know that such conditions arise only from medical causes.

Jesus did not attribute all causes of ailment to demons. Jairus daughter, the man born blind, the paralytic lowered through the roof by his friends and a number of other healings were listed as healings, not as exorcisms. It looks like you've been playing in the Jewish sites again with this lot.

The take-home message about these purported exorcisms is that they could not have happened if we are to believe the means by which they occurred unfolded exactly as recorded in the Gospels. Even if the perceptions of the authors served as the basis for the exorcism claims, the text is still incorrect and, therefore, unreliable. Thus, the Bible has once again demonstrated its own hilariously fallacious nature.

Cherry Picking. You're only taking parts of particular records and ignoring other parts of the same records. And ignoring other records that show the claim that Jesus thought every occurrence of illness was due to demons to be false.

[One Bad Pig]

Yes, I have broken the rules. I deserve to be banned.

Please ban me.

I'm completely serious. Please ban me from TW. This site has become an addiction which I do not need.

You see that little red 'x' in the top right corner of your browser? Click on it.

[Apologiaphoenix]

You see that little red 'x' in the top right corner of your browser? Click on it.

One would think a doctor would be someone encouraging self-control.

Yet another characteristic fitting of Gary's ego.

[Christianbookworm]

If Gary is using Windows, he can press ALT+f4 or CTRL+W

[psstein]

I've been away for all of 36 hours, and there's a whole new mess.

Using a site called "Biblical Nonsense" is so balanced and fair, right? Or you could consult scholars and commentaries (e.g. the Anchor Bible Commentary on Genesis, the Jewish Publication Society commentary, etc.). But those would require some sort of actual inquiry.

Also, the "atheists/agnostics aren't philosophical naturalists" has to be a joke. You cannot claim atheism based on methodological naturalism.

[psstein]

Actually - it was somewhat before that date. Paul and Silas were there, and Paul died in AD 58 or thenabouts ... unless of course you want to posit that Paul's ghost was present in Berea sometime around 12 years after his death.

Paul probably died a little bit later (somewhere between 62 and 67, during the first real persecution). Paul has undisputed letters dating from 61, so it would be odd if he were dead then.

[psstein]

Here is the thing about "scholars" telling laypersons that they can't really know what the Bible says unless the speak Greek and Hebrew: Pure horse crap.

If a layperson wants to know the consensus position of scholars and translators regarding the translation of ANY passage in the Christian New Testament, all he or she has to do is get out a minimum of THREE of the most trusted English versions of the Bible, compare the passage in question, and if there is no disagreement (which there will not be a very high percentage of the time), the layperson can be very confidant that the Bible they are reading has translated the passage correctly.

The idea that only Greek speaking scholars can know what the Bible really says is arrogant nonsense. If this concept is true, lay Christians should toss their Bibles in the trash and just rely on "scholars" to spoon feed them the REAL meaning of the Bible. This is nothing more than the arrogance of Churchmen. We fought a Thirty Years War to end that kind of nonsense, giving the Bible to the common man.

I feel like every post gets stupider.

Here's some bold letters: IF YOU CANNOT READ THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGES, YOU ARE READING AN INTERPRETATION. You cannot conduct competent exegesis unless you know the original languages. I do not exegete the NT because I haven't yet learned (enough) Greek. The same is true with the OT. My Hebrew is better than most, but far more competent exegetes should commentate on the text.