Hugh Hefner is now in hell

[Charles]

If I end up going to hell I will own the place in no time at which point you definitely won't want to be looking me up.

And somehow some seem to think that spending eternity with people with this attitude is paradise....

[seer]

And somehow some seem to think that spending eternity with people with this attitude is paradise....

Me, me I do!

[Zymologist]

And somehow some seem to think that spending eternity with people with this attitude is paradise....

I can't speak for any of the other Christians around here, but Darth Executor isn't what's going to make heaven paradise.

[seer]

I can't speak for any of the other Christians around here, but Darth Executor isn't what's going to make heaven paradise.

Darth thinks he will! Actually heaven won't be heaven until he shows up!

[Mountain Man]

I can't speak for any of the other Christians around here, but Darth Executor isn't what's going to make heaven paradise.

None of us in our present state would make heaven paradise.

[Roy]

When you said, "One last straw-man to burn," I can only assume you were referring to the strawman that was to follow,

Feel free to assume anything obviously dumb that you wish.

My conclusion that "Until you have hard evidence to that end, we have to conclude that the premise is true," is referring back to the previous argument that everything we know based on science and personal experience supports the premise "Everything that begins to exist has a cause"; therefore, the burden is on you to refute it. Just a single, verifiable example of something that began to exist without a cause will suffice. So, until you have hard evidence to that end, we have to conclude based on the facts on hand that the premise "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" is true.

You can conclude that if you like, but your conclusions are frequently wrong so that means nothing; and the burden is not on me to refute it, since it's your premise.

OK, so on to your weak attempt to disprove Holding's "The Impossible Faith"... that sure is another nice laundry list you've vomited up. Now go ahead and prove that any of them are a viable refutation of the facts. For instance, suggesting that a clever writer could have invented an embarrassing detail to make his story seem more plausible doesn't explain why anybody would accept the story as true without other vindicating evidence to overcome the social stigma against it. To put it another way, your attempt at a rebuttal effectively amounts to "Nuh-uh!" In the meantime, I'll stick with the conclusions that are supported by actual evidence.

I never said they were viable refutations of (supposed) facts - not least because there's no evidence that much of them are facts - only that they are unwarranted assumptions. You haven't addressed any of them beyond your own "Nuh-uh!".

Now for your continued pathetic attempts to refute Craig, you say "There's probably an explanation, but I don't know what it is". Don't look now, but you've effectively conceded the argument. Instead of rebutting the premise, you just shrug your shoulders and act like it's somehow a refutation. Sorry, kiddo, but it doesn't work that way.

If you were competent you'd have understood that was a refutation of your own claim that atheists had no other possible response, and not addressing anything Craig wrote. But you aren't, so you didn't.

When I said, "Note that Craig's argument is not about what caused the universe as we know it to exist but why does the universe exist at all as opposed to not existing," I was preemptively refuting the common objection that the Big Bang caused our universe to exist, or the multiverse caused our universe to exist, which doesn't actually answer the question why the universe exists at all as opposed to not existing.

Bovine faeces. You weren't pre-empting anything else, you explicitly referred to "Craig's argument". Unless you'll admit you completely mangled your sentence to say something very different to your intent?

Regarding my statement that the Bible has passed the historical test with flying colors, the fact is that any time historical facts are definitively confirmed, they always and without fail affirm the Bible.

The historical facts that Quirinius took office in 6AD several years after Herod dies in 4BC are about as definitely confirmed as anything else from that era, and those facts without fail contradict the bible. You were wrong, you continue to be wrong, and your attempt to escape your error by citing a draft of ²/₃ of an unfinished work as a "comprehensive study" was hilarious.

Also, you neglected to confirm whether you read it before citing it. Did you?

[Adrift]

Couple short points I thought might be useful to the conversation,

Let's look at factor #11. If Christianity wanted to succeed, it should never have admitted that women were the first to discover the empty tomb or the first to see the Risen Jesus.
There's so many unwarranted assumptions in there that you could lose count:
1) The only alternative to the resurrection being real is that the gospel writers were deliberately making up stories that they wanted to succeed
2) Men also went to tombs to anoint bodies, so not having the women there first wouldn't be incongruous
3) The subsequent inspection of the risen Jesus and the tomb by men would be ignored
4) The first gospel not mentioning a risen Jesus can be ignored
5) Mark didn't think of deliberately using female witnesses to make it look less like something invented
6) The gospel accounts are accurate
etc

This isn't actually Holding's premise, in case you assumed it was. It may not sound like much to you, but to historians this is incredibly powerful evidence for the empty tomb. Even very critical scholars find the inclusion of the women at the tomb inexplicable unless it was historical, so, for instance, based on his extensive knowledge of classical writings (especially 2nd temple period), the Jewish historian, Geza Vermes, found the mention of the women at the tomb incredibly strong evidence for the missing body, so much so that he wrote in his classic Jesus the Jew, "When every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer, and the critical agnostic alike--and even perhaps of the disciples themselves--are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb." Vermes, of course, did not believe that the resurrection itself explained the empty tomb (he was Jewish afterall), but he absolutely did believe that it had to be empty, and mostly thanks to this bit of evidence. Now the strength of this evidence for the empty tomb has met with some challenge recently by a few critical scholars, but for the most part, it's considered a very strong point in favor for the empty tomb narrative.

Craig . . . using an unwarranted and unsupported multi-step extrapolation from outside-the-universe->non-physical->sentient->Yahweh.

Just so you're aware, the webpage that MM linked is just a summary of these arguments. Craig does actually develop the idea in greater detail that the Judeo/Christian conception of God fits the general ontology of the uncaused cause in some of his other works. Unfortunately I don't remember precisely where he does that. It's been awhile since I read/heard it. If I run across it again, I'll make sure to drop a mention of it.

[Adrift]

The historical facts that Quirinius took office in 6AD several years after Herod dies in 4BC are about as definitely confirmed as anything else from that era, and those facts without fail contradict the bible.

Just a quick point on this, not so much on Quirinius, but on Herod's death date. New scholarship is reexamining a 1 BCE death date rather than the commonly accepted 4 BCE death date. See, for instance, Andrew E. Steinmann's paper When Did Herod the Great Reign?

[Roy]

Couple short points I thought might be useful to the conversation,

Rationality! Yay!

This isn't actually Holding's premise, in case you assumed it was. It may not sound like much to you, but to historians this is incredibly powerful evidence for the empty tomb. Even very critical scholars find the inclusion of the women at the tomb inexplicable unless it was historical, so, for instance, based on his extensive knowledge of classical writings (especially 2nd temple period), the Jewish historian, Geza Vermes, found the mention of the women at the tomb incredibly strong evidence for the missing body,

I have no problem with the women being at the tomb first making it more likely to be historical, or with this increasing the veracity of there being an empty tomb. But it's a long way from there to the resurrection, as you note, and it's also a long way to claiming that the women being described as the discoverers would have deep-sixed Xtianity if the resurrection was not real, which I what I understand Holding's point to be.

Just so you're aware, the webpage that MM linked is just a summary of these arguments. Craig does actually develop the idea in greater detail that the Judeo/Christian conception of God fits the general ontology of the uncaused cause in some of his other works. Unfortunately I don't remember precisely where he does that. It's been awhile since I read/heard it. If I run across it again, I'll make sure to drop a mention of it.

Don't worry, I've seen them. I found his arguments flawed, as they made too much use of special pleading and ignoring aspects of the Judeo/Christain god he couldn't explain.

[Roy]

Just a quick point on this, not so much on Quirinius, but on Herod's death date. New scholarship is reexamining a 1 BCE death date rather than the commonly accepted 4 BCE death date. See, for instance, Andrew E. Steinmann's paper When Did Herod the Great Reign?

Thanks - I didn't know that. It doesn't affect my main point though.

[Mountain Man]

Feel free to assume anything obviously dumb that you wish.You can conclude that if you like, but your conclusions are frequently wrong so that means nothing; and the burden is not on me to refute it, since it's your premise.

I never said they were viable refutations of (supposed) facts - not least because there's no evidence that much of them are facts - only that they are unwarranted assumptions. You haven't addressed any of them beyond your own "Nuh-uh!".

If you were competent you'd have understood that was a refutation of your own claim that atheists had no other possible response, and not addressing anything Craig wrote. But you aren't, so you didn't.

Bovine faeces. You weren't pre-empting anything else, you explicitly referred to "Craig's argument". Unless you'll admit you completely mangled your sentence to say something very different to your intent? The historical facts that Quirinius took office in 6AD several years after Herod dies in 4BC are about as definitely confirmed as anything else from that era, and those facts without fail contradict the bible. You were wrong, you continue to be wrong, and your attempt to escape your error by citing a draft of ²/₃ of an unfinished work as a "comprehensive study" was hilarious.

Also, you neglected to confirm whether you read it before citing it. Did you?

I did support the premise that "Everything that beings to exist has cause", you dullard, not only be quoting Craig's original argument but also explaining it in my own words. If you want to take issue with it then the burden is on you. That's how this whole debate thing works, kiddo.

Adrift did an able job shooting down your attempts to refute "The Impossible Faith". Like most brain-dead skeptics, you're either unable or unwilling to recognize the strength of the argument.

I guess you missed the point that effectively shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Duh... I dunno," isn't really a response in any meaningful sense, and it's certainly not a response that challenges the premise that "If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God."

I say that I was preempting a certain line of argument, and I was. That you refuse to believe me on that point doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Final point, as Adrift points out, continued research shows that the Bible got it right with regards to the census. This pattern is repeated time and time again: some person or other claims that the Bible is historically inaccurate; the matter is debated and studied; eventually new evidence is discovered showing that the Bible does, in fact, contain a true historical record. Did you bother reading the Glenn Miller essay? He covers this stuff in considerable detail. Look, I'm not going to belabor this point, but here's a shorter essay that may be more your speed which notes that:

Source: http://christiananswers.net/q-aiia/census-luke2.html

Luke 2:2 says that the census taken around the time Joseph and Mary went down to Bethlehem was the firsthttp://christiananswers.net/q-aiia/census-luke2.html

© Copyright Original Source

[Darth Executor]

I can't speak for any of the other Christians around here, but Darth Executor isn't what's going to make heaven paradise.

I am but only for the ladies.

[Charles]

I am but only for the ladies.

That sounds like Hugh Hefner to me.

[Tassman]

I am but only for the ladies.

72 virgins, perhaps?

[Roy]

One quick response - I may respond to the rest later.

Final point, as Adrift points out, continued research shows that the Bible got it right with regards to the census.

What Adrift actually pointed out was that Herod may have died in 1BC, not 4BC. This does not show that the bible got it right, since it still leaves no overlap between Herod dying in 1BC and Quirinius taking office in Syria in 6AD.

Did you bother reading the Glenn Miller essay? He covers this stuff in considerable detail.

I read enough of it to know that it's not the "comprehensive study" you claimed it was, but an incomplete draft of which only the first two sections have been written, and that its index lists the relationship of Quirinius with Syria as being covered in the third section which has yet to be posted.

Which leads me back to the question I've ask you twice, and which you twice haven't answered:

Did you read the Miller essay before you cited it as a "comprehensive study"?