Religion without God

No, he really doesn't.
And the movie is even more retarded.

His reasoning is quite sound. Especially refuting the idea that the large numbers of people seeing Jesus after his death was "mass hysteria" or "mass delusion".

Also refuting the idea of the "swoon theory". The idea that Jesus simply fainted on the cross and later revived in the tomb. It was pointed out that the Romans who carried out crucifixions were professional killers who might be killed themselves if they failed to properly carry out an execution

None of whom seemingly kept a diary....

Got a better theory for ya.
Whole frigging thing didn't happen.

I don't need to make up a theory that Superman fainted when Doomsday punched him, because Superman ain't real.

Do expand upon the point made with the reference. This is a discussion with you, not with that person. If you find some of their points meaningful and worthwhile, say them and cite the source. Just pointing to some long thing that may have multiple ideas about unrelated areas is vague and I am not pulling arguments out of that for you. You need to make the argument and I will discuss it with you.

I have seen a number of documentaries and read a bunch on the evidence for christ, but in all cases the accounts are dubious and lacking physical evidence. I understand having faith in god, but jesus would have been able to leave documented physical evidence of his existence. Not something written centuries later about stories that were heard from people. It was not necessarily uncommon for that sort of thing to be left behind by a person of such influence. It just seems really convenient that the people writing the gospels are often speaking of times in the past that were well beyond their lives and stories of people long dead they never met.

That corresponds to the way certain parables and religious stories were written back in the day. They told stories of a famous person who did things no one else could and really the stories were meant to convey meaning and wisdom. However, when there needed to be academic recording there was that presence in those times which jesus could have employed and it would not have been a miracle. Muhammed was a person with a historical record. He dictated the koran according to the story. We can read about muhammed and his bloodline because he recorded things. His people made sure they were preserved. There are records. At 30 years old with supp[osed disciples around jesus would have been able to do that. Jesus would have been able to write his own gospels. Why do we need Paul or Mathew? Why are roman record almost non existent of this execution? The romans documented a ton of stuff and yet they didn't have many records of such an important event? What about the jews? They love to write stuff down, so why don't they have records of this?

We have stuff inspired by jesus, but we have little actual record of him and evidence of him. Before you go saying that is evidence we have similar stuff inspired by superman, harry potter, star trek, and other entertainment. I own technical manuals of ships and technology that does not exist. I can show you what a tricorder looks like despite they wont exist for another few centuries. I can show you what aragorn's sword looked like, or the highlander's. It does not mean they ever existed. Yet we are supposed to believe jesus existed on far less.

I am cool with parable and discussing the religious philosophies of christianity, but that is not proof as much as it is rational argumentation.

People in this thread (and before) keep repeating something that is quite false.

The things written about Christ were NOT written "centuries after" he lived and died. Many early writings were made within decades of his life by people who would've been direct witnesses to what happened. This is not "writing down oral legends" centuries later.

The earliest estimates of the writings are AD 50. That is not fifty years of today's life. that is at least a lifetime of a human and it would also be at least two generations after his death that the writings occur. So no one who wrote of jesus saw jesus. If we were to add his thirty years of life to that they would have been 80 years old to have been an infant when jesus was an infant to be his peer when he was wandering about. So let us say they were ten to twenty years old and saw jesus and never bothered to write about it until they were ninety or a hundred years old. Have you ever met anyone who is that old? In our day when people make it that far they are not reliable about things that happened in their youth.

So the best case you can give is some ninety year old person told stories about what he saw when he was ten. He never published it earlier in life, and I do not think that even corresponds to the ages the authors were when they wrote it. So none of them ever met christ. We have records of who donald trump is and he makes shit up that people believe which is not true. You want to tell me that way back then a bunch of guys could not have fabricated this story about a guy they never met? They would have not been born when he was executed on the cross. Because when they wrote these things they were younger than fifty. They would have had to have been at least fifty just for jesus to have held them as babies.

Do we need to go further?

Look, I am fine with characters used for the sake of parable and legend. I am even ok with believing in those characters even though they may not have existed on earth. But I am not saying they are historically accurate. they have meaning to our spirituality and our beliefs. They effect our consciousness with their ideas and the actions we take regarding them. Jesus was not up on a cross in rome being executed. Jesus probably wasn't even a person. He was a creation of a group of people to make a religion, and those people would have seen the same thing done in other religions of the time.

Please elaborate on this. Jesus was crucified in approximately 33-35 AD. It would be like me writing about the founding of Wordforge today. Further, I would suggest that the Apostles were significantly younger than they are portrayed in popular media. I would peg Peter as the oldest and in his very early 20's during Jesus' earthly ministry.

I always thought AD referred to after death. 50 AD being fifty years after his death. However, if you were to track back to the birth that would still put the works being published at fifty for the earliest estimates. Still possible, but a fifty year old back then is not the spry and lively fifty year old of today. That would be a person at the end of their life and suffering from quite a few things. Needless to say even at forty or thirty the recollection of events of the youth would be scetchy at best and having no roman record makes it even a bit more odd.

That's a common misconception. AD is an abbreviation for "Anno Domini" which is simply Medieval Latin for "In the Year of our Lord." So, the earliest texts we have appear 15-20 years after the events of the day. Lets be mindful that these are merely the earliest texts we have, they likely aren't the originals.

I am willing to concede there was a jesus christ who was executed, and it is probable he was executed for speaking against the state religion and may have even gone around preaching of love. It is not out of the realm of possibility for the romans to have either kept bad records or destroyed them out of embarassment, or to try to wipe the idea out. I find it much more interesting to put him as existing, but I have not seen anything that could not have been conjured up by some guys.

That being said from my standpoint whether the words were made by god or man the ideas can be discussed and wisdom gained from them. I personally do not need god to put his stamp on something for me to know it is true because I can be reasoned with and observe things.

The beauty of the gospel is that it's my job to tell you, but it's not my job to convince or convict you. My job is to tell you that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, that He died on the cross to reconcile believers with a holy and righteous God, that He rose from the dead three days later, and now sits at the right hand of the Father. It's my job to tell you that we're all sinners and we've all fallen short of the glory of God, that the result of that sin is death, but that the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, and that anyone who repents of their sins and confesses with their mouth that God raised Christ from the dead shall be saved.

One of the jobs (ministries) of the Holy Spirit (the oft forgotten and misunderstood third part of the Triune Godhead) is to convince you that what I'm saying is correct and convict you of your sin. Until such time as the Holy Spirit moves on you to convince and convict you, 1 Corinthians 1 tells us that the non-believer will continue to see the gospel as foolish because, as Romans 5 tells us, we were enemies of God and dead in our sins before He saved us.

It's fairly clear that none of the gospel writers were witnesses. They wrote in Greek for a Hellenised audience (Matthew being a partial exception) and betrayed a lack of understanding of quite a few elements of Jewish life.

Okay - please enlighten me as to how you can both believe that Jesus "upheld the Law and Prophets" and that the nasty stuff in the OT isn't applicable. Without that constituting cherry-picking.

It's very clear what Christ said as you just quoted it. The good deeds you perform on Earth are great, but why would you not want to follow Christ, or would you?

Isn't "in context" still down to your interpretation?

I think you already know his answer....

For example?

That last paragraph is golden and perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of religion - and to think there are idiots out there still claiming it's all historical record.

That is another misconception about how human lifespans have changed over the millennia.

People 2,000 years ago, once they survived to adulthood lived just about as long as a person does today. 70-80 years give or take.

The "average lifespan" years ago was low because a staggering number of children died from many ailments that infants and children do not die of today.

Do you realize people like Noah supposedly lived for about a thousand years in the bible? Supposedly the children of eve lived for centuries. If you are not aware flip open genesis and read up. I have.

Dayton thinks Genesis is an episode of Star Trek.

That was thousands of years (at least) before the time of Christ. By the time of Christ everything we know of indicates that human lifespans were pretty much in line with what we would expect today.

Why you would bother going back to the earliest parts of Genesis in a discussion about the life and death of Christ I really do not understand.

It was a rather dumb episode of TNG if you ask me. Though they did launch some photon torpedoes.

Did the torpedoes cause any deaths?

No. Though the visual effects were kind of nice.

IIRC, the only death in the episode was the crewman on the bridge apparently clawed to death by Riker.

Fuck Trek, that's for MC.
Has Dayton proved his God yet?
No?
What's fucking taking him so long?

I want to know if God created Dayton in his image.

Like not knowing that the temple was such a huge structure. Jesus could not have "cleansed" it or anything of the sort of what is described without a very large armed force.
Like getting basic facts wrong about who was in charge where and at what time. Like getting geography wrong. Like getting Jewish customs wrong.

That assumes anyone in the temple resisted Jesus wielding his whip to run the moneychangers out. Also he ran the "moneychangers" out of the Temple. I assume that they were not present in every nook and cranny of the temple.

Your second line is simply generic assertions. Please give specifics.

That isn't my job. As Elwood put it, Christians are only to present the case.

And I do wish you and others were honest about your disbelief in God. You know it has absolutely nothing to do with "evidence" or "historical scholarship" or anything of the sort.

It is all about you and others simply cannot stand the idea of anyone or anything telling you what you can not do.