Atheism/Existence of God Debates (Part 2)

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 02:07PM

TheLurker wrote: »

That is true as well. It is the problem when the only history of these events comes from the church itself, after 2000 years of purging heretical alternatives.

Again imagine if the only things we knew about Scientology came from www.scientology.org and some people thought that was a reasonable history of the cult?

*shudder*

That's pretty much how history works. Most of what we know about the Romans, for example, comes from what the Romans themselves wrote. We don't discount it as irrelevant for that reason, or say that we can only learn about the Romans from sources written by independent 'local authorities'.

But I think you're barking up the wrong tree in your ideas about how the Early Church operated or its imagined effectiveness in 'purging heretical alternatives.'

For the first three centuries of its existence there was no centralised hierarchy controlling the Church - that kind of notion belongs in Dan Brown's fevered imagination . You had churches in different places working out, in a very grassroots and organic fashion, which sources they felt were trustworthy and which did not accurately reflect the testimony of the apostles and other eyewitnesses.

Even after the bastardisation of Christianity under Constantine and other Roman Emperors, you still had Christian churches operating in a pretty independent way in areas where Rome (imperial or ecclesiastical) had no power. That's why, for example, the texts from the Eastern Syriac church are so important.

As for the supposedly 'purged' heretical texts - you can still read plenty of them online.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 02:11PM

silverharp wrote: »

What is also amusing is that the ott lore was discarded by the church , but it shows that the faithull were writing down any amount of fanciful accounts due to the distance in time. In the acts of Philip for instance he cursed his enemies causing 7000 people to be swallowed up in an abyss, Jesus then rebukes him and tortures him for 40 days before he gets into heaven.
It shows that the faithfully were prone to making up stuff or filling in gaps where little was actually known

Well, given that the Acts of Philip was written between 250 and 300 years after the New Testament, it shows that there were splinter groups that wanted to write their own Scriptures. No surprises there. We get the same thing happening more recently with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons or Moonies.

Anyone who thinks that has anything relevant to say about the writing of the New Testament centuries earlier would, quite obviously, be off in la-la land.

galljga1 · 11-03-2015 02:16PM

Michael OBrien wrote: »

99% of all 1st century texts? There are no originals from that time period.
What you have is some surviving copies of copies of copies.
Information was not ONLY verbally communicated. Copies of texts were sent all over the Roman empire and elsewhere. There is a long history of claims of heresy that attest to this in church histories. The final orthodox church destroyed heretical material or simply never bothered preserving it. In many cases the only evidence for the vastly different sects of Christianity is the references to them when the orthodox group condemned them, which often involved outright lies or exaggerations (as we see apologetics do today in regard to their opponents).

"Think about how information verbally communicated gets changed through forgetfulness, embellishment." Since it was decades before anything is even allegedly written down, this is likely to be the case. Early christians did not agree on anything, including how many gods there were and whether jesus was god, man, demi-god or spirit.

The copies written afterwards had plenty of errors, mostly due to the writers either not understanding the stories in the way modern christians think they do, or for political and theological reasons, or due to innocent attempts to 'correct' earlier mistakes in their view.
As time went on and these copies of copies of copies were gathered and those that were chosen to be preserved were selected, a certain homogeneity is naturally going to occur.

"Think about the scarcity of ink and papyrus. Think about how few people could even read or write." The messages don't have to be mass produced for everyone to still be copied many many times for different early 'churches'. All it takes is one or two people in a town to preach to the rest based on their limited understanding of things they never witnessed.

"Try to visualise a time where people barely travelled outside the village where they lived." This is incorrect. The common peasant may not have travelled much, but merchants, diplomats and priests did, let alone armies, messengers, envoys and so forth. Christianity grew as big as it did because it was adopted by the Roman Empire in the 4th Century. Roman and Greece had plenty of literate people, many travelled quite a bit if they had to and there was communication throughout the empire. While it might take weeks or months to get to more remote areas, people did so, and did not think it strange because they had no other option.

I would have to agree with you Michael particularly on the Roman adoption of Christianity. Jesus was not the founder of the church, Constantine the Great was or rather his mother Helena. A great woman she was too. She was even able to define the Via Dolorosa 300 years after the events happened even though she was not there or maybe she lived contemporaneously with Jesus. Given that recent definitions cover a century, I dont see why I cannot stretch it to 3 centuries.

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 02:17PM

galljga1 wrote: »

I would have to agree with you Michael particularly on the Roman adoption of Christianity. Jesus was not the founder of the church, Constantine the Great was or rather his mother Helena. A great woman she was too. She was even able to define the Via Dolorosa 300 years after the events happened even though she was not there or maybe she lived contemporaneously with Jesus. Given that recent definitions cover a century, I dont see why I cannot stretch it to 3 centuries.

Am I reading that right? A woman who was mother to a Roman emperor, THREE HUNDRED YEARS after Jesus...you think it's possible she lived at the same time as Jesus?

silverharp · 11-03-2015 02:21PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Well, given that the Acts of Philip was written between 250 and 300 years after the New Testament, it shows that there were splinter groups that wanted to write their own Scriptures. No surprises there. We get the same thing happening more recently with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons or Moonies.

Anyone who thinks that has anything relevant to say about the writing of the New Testament centuries earlier would, quite obviously, be off in la-la land.

It shows how the human "religious" mind works. The gospels were written by people who never met Jesus. And I'd refer to my earlier point that it doesn't hang together that any of the miracles written about actually happened as they had so little effect on the local people at the time

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 02:23PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Well, given that the Acts of Philip was written between 250 and 300 years after the New Testament, it shows that there were splinter groups that wanted to write their own Scriptures. No surprises there. We get the same thing happening more recently with Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons or Moonies.

Anyone who thinks that has anything relevant to say about the writing of the New Testament centuries earlier would, quite obviously, be off in la-la land.

The copy of the Acts of Philips that was found in the 1970's is 14th century, but it's language indicates it's a copy of a 4th century work. It contains fantastical accounts of what Philip did and what happened to him.
Compare that with Luke, where the earliest copies we have date from the 3rd century and also detail fantastical accounts...and yet you believe one and not the other.

galljga1 · 11-03-2015 02:24PM

orubiru wrote: »

My knowledge here is a bit sketchy but The Iliad and The Odyssey both pre date The New Testament by some number of years.

Osiris has a very similar "back story" to Jesus and also pre-dates the New Testament by some considerable number of years.

Gilgamesh pre-dates Jesus by a couple of thousand years.

The most probable explanation would be that a group of people got together and invented this mythology to surround the historical Jesus.

If you are implying that accounts of Jesus miracles and resurrection were written in separate parts of the world at the same time, and also while Jesus was still alive, then I am going to have to ask for links or references..

Virgin births, I love them. It was to be my excuse if I got in trouble in my younger years. Yes, christianity was not the first or last religion or power group to involve a virgin birth in its back story.

Came across a great post on another website which is in answer to an article explaining that there are many other virgin births besides jesus:

"this is total baabash and may God have mercy on the one who brought this topic
all those other claims you have are all heresies and the only and one virgin birth in the whole world is that of our LORD JESUS CHRIST
any other virgin birth is religious dogmas used to put people in bondage"

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 02:27PM

galljga1 wrote: »

Virgin births, I love them. It was to be my excuse if I got in trouble in my younger years. Yes, christianity was not the first or last religion or power group to involve a virgin birth in its back story.

Came across a great post on another website which is in answer to an article explaining that there are many other virgin births besides jesus:

"this is total baabash and may God have mercy on the one who brought this topic
all those other claims you have are all heresies and the only and one virgin birth in the whole world is that of our LORD JESUS CHRIST
any other virgin birth is religious dogmas used to put people in bondage"

Speaking of the virgin birth hinault...you've made the point of the difficulty of travel in that era somehow precluding the spread of teachings of a certain messiah.
Yet, even within your own religion, it contradicts you there. Wasn't Jesus born of a virgin mother, who had to travel while pregnant? If a heavily pregnant woman can travel a fair distance, why not teachers and scholars and merchants?

galljga1 · 11-03-2015 02:28PM

RikuoAmero wrote: »

Am I reading that right? A woman who was mother to a Roman emperor, THREE HUNDRED YEARS after Jesus...you think it's possible she lived at the same time as Jesus?

Absolutely not. Just playing with the much abused word 'contemporaneous' which is being used to cover periods of time spanning a century. Or maybe its a miracle, anything can happen. Prove she didn't

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 02:46PM

RikuoAmero wrote: »

The copy of the Acts of Philips that was found in the 1970's is 14th century, but it's language indicates it's a copy of a 4th century work. It contains fantastical accounts of what Philip did and what happened to him.
Compare that with Luke, where the earliest copies we have date from the 3rd century and also detail fantastical accounts...and yet you believe one and not the other.

I think you've jumped the shark at this point. The earliest manuscript we have of the Acts of Philip is 14th Century, but historians agree it was written in the mid to late 4th Century.

The earliest manuscript we have of Luke is 3rd Century, but historians agree it was written in the late 1st Century.

So what I said in my post is absolutely correct. The Acts of Philip was written 250 to 300 years after Luke. The vast majority of historians, Christian or non-Christian, concur with that. And to treat them as if they were somehow the same from a historical perspective is, to be frank, extremely silly.

TheLurker · 11-03-2015 02:49PM

Nick Park wrote: »

That's pretty much how history works. Most of what we know about the Romans, for example, comes from what the Romans themselves wrote. We don't discount it as irrelevant for that reason, or say that we can only learn about the Romans from sources written by independent 'local authorities'.

Of course not. But it is filtered through the knowledge of what it was. For example few historians accept Roman propaganda as fact simply because it was all that we have as an historical record for a particular time period or event.

So it is not a case of "bah this is Roman propaganda, it must be all made up, ignore it" and more a case of "this Roman propaganda is very interesting, I wonder if we can figure out what most likely actually happened"

Which is what secular historians do with the Bible as well (or the Scientology official history books)

Nick Park wrote: »

But I think you're barking up the wrong tree in your ideas about how the Early Church operated or its imagined effectiveness in 'purging heretical alternatives.'

For the first three centuries of its existence there was no centralised hierarchy controlling the Church - that kind of notion belongs in Dan Brown's fevered imagination . You had churches in different places working out, in a very grassroots and organic fashion, which sources they felt were trustworthy and which did not accurately reflect the testimony of the apostles and other eyewitnesses.

Even after the bastardisation of Christianity under Constantine and other Roman Emperors, you still had Christian churches operating in a pretty independent way in areas where Rome (imperial or ecclesiastical) had no power. That's why, for example, the texts from the Eastern Syriac church are so important.

As for the supposedly 'purged' heretical texts - you can still read plenty of them online.

As you said yourself, Christian churches.

Or to put it another way, there is no evidence I've seen that the Christians themselves were keeping anti-Christian documents, documents that contradicted or debunked the core beliefs of the particular church.

You can say various sects were trying to debunk different details of other sects of Christianity, but that is far from what I was talking about.

There is no early Christian version of Operation Clambake being stored and reproduced by the Christians themselves. The best you can hope for is documents from Jewish and Roman sources, which are very thin on the ground.

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 02:51PM

Nick Park wrote: »

I think you've jumped the shark at this point. The earliest manuscript we have of the Acts of Philip is 14th Century, but historians agree it was written in the mid to late 4th Century.

The earliest manuscript we have of Luke is 3rd Century, but historians agree it was written in the late 1st Century.

So what I said in my post is absolutely correct. The Acts of Philip was written 250 to 300 years after Luke. The vast majority of historians, Christian or non-Christian, concur with that. And to treat them as if they were somehow the same from a historical perspective is, to be frank, extremely silly.

So someone writing about miraculous killings of 7,000 men 200-300 years after the events supposedly took place is not reliable in your view. Okay.
But someone writing about a man who can do all sorts of things, up to and including rising from the dead a handful of decades after the events supposedly took place...somehow that's reliable in your view.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 02:51PM

silverharp wrote: »

It shows how the human "religious" mind works. The gospels were written by people who never met Jesus. And I'd refer to my earlier point that it doesn't hang together that any of the miracles written about actually happened as they had so little effect on the local people at the time

It's this kind of nonsensical thinking that makes it look as if you're grasping at straws.

There is no such thing as 'the human religious mind'. Different religious people think and act very differently. Martin Luther King and Osama bin Laden were both religious, but it would take a particularly warped person to insist that they shared a common 'religious mind'.

You might as well speak of a 'political mind' that lumps together Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler.

Such embarrassing nonsense would be laughed out of court in any other area of discussion, but apparently is tolerated in some circles when the desire to put down religion obscures one's capacity to think coherently.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 02:57PM

RikuoAmero wrote: »

So someone writing about miraculous killings of 7,000 men 200-300 years after the events supposedly took place is not reliable in your view. Okay.
But someone writing about a man who can do all sorts of things, up to and including rising from the dead a handful of decades after the events supposedly took place...somehow that's reliable in your view.

Someone writing about anything, without any evidence that they utilised any sources, 300-350 years after the event is to be accorded less weight than someone writing 50-70 years after the event who we know utilised earlier sources.

That's how history works. It works like that with non-religious texts and religious texts too.

galljga1 · 11-03-2015 02:59PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Someone writing about anything, without any evidence that they utilised any sources, 300-350 years after the event is to be accorded less weight than someone writing 50-70 years after the event who we know utilised earlier sources.

That's how history works. It works like that with non-religious texts and religious texts too.

It does not mean it is not nonsense.

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 03:00PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Someone writing about anything, without any evidence that they utilised any sources, 300-350 years after the event is to be accorded less weight than someone writing 50-70 years after the event who we know utilised earlier sources.

That's how history works. It works like that with non-religious texts and religious texts too.

So then...regale us with the sources for Luke please.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 03:02PM

galljga1 wrote: »

It does not mean it is not nonsense.

Nobody said it didn't. That is a matter of faith for you.

But it is undoubtedly nonsense to equate a 1st Century text with a 4th Century text as if they carried the same historical significance when writing about 1st Century events.

TheLurker · 11-03-2015 03:07PM

Nick Park wrote: »

It's this kind of nonsensical thinking that makes it look as if you're grasping at straws.

There is no such thing as 'the human religious mind'. Different religious people think and act very differently. Martin Luther King and Osama bin Laden were both religious, but it would take a particularly warped person to insist that they shared a common 'religious mind'.

You might as well speak of a 'political mind' that lumps together Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler.

Such embarrassing nonsense would be laughed out of court in any other area of discussion, but apparently is tolerated in some circles when the desire to put down religion obscures one's capacity to think coherently.

He is referring to what is known as magical thinking, and yes it is pretty much universal in humans and works very similiarly. Of course what you do based on it can be wildly different, but the conclusions drawn about the supernatural all take on very similar patterns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 03:08PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Nobody said it didn't. That is a matter of faith for you.

But it is undoubtedly nonsense to equate a 1st Century text with a 4th Century text as if they carried the same historical significance when writing about 1st Century events.

Okay, I'll admit it. I made a mistake there. Now, can you come up with logic, data, reasoning or evidence that suggests that we should take Luke seriously as a 1st century document when it talks about events 50-70 years before, events which include things like the census of Quirinius? Events like that which appear NOWHERE else in the historical record?

How about one of Luke's sources, Matthew? That mentions the three wise men visiting King Herod, who then subsequently slaughters all the young boys in Nazareth. Apart from Matthew, this massacre is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the historical record.

TheLurker · 11-03-2015 03:11PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Nobody said it didn't. That is a matter of faith for you.

But it is undoubtedly nonsense to equate a 1st Century text with a 4th Century text as if they carried the same historical significance when writing about 1st Century events.

You seem to be happily ignoring that genuine historians do not simply judge time to events as a criteria for assessing sources. They also look at who the source is, their motivation and what they have to gain from what they produce.

So it is entirely historically valid that a 4th century text might be considered more reliable than a 1st century text when you assess who wrote it.

Again just look a the official history of Scientology. Historians a thousand years from how would no doubt consider text by a news paper written about Scientology in 2015 far far more likely to be accurate than the official history written by the Church in the early 1990s

These talking points of yours seem to be lifted wholesale from popular Christian apologetics websites so I can't decide if you know this is true or not. But either way what you are saying is a flawed warped version of how historical study works.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 03:12PM

RikuoAmero wrote: »

So then...regale us with the sources for Luke please.

We know one of the sources was Mark's Gospel, which we know was written before 70AD, and therefore at a time when eye-witnesses of the events described were still accessible. That makes it, historically speaking, of much more value than something that was apparently made up three centuries later.

Another source was almost certainly a document of sayings of Jesus that was utilised by both Matthew and Luke. This document, which scholars call Q, was probably earlier than Mark. Scholarly consensus dates it in the 40s or 50s of the First Century.

So that gives us two sources which, for historians, are very early indeed. The author of Luke also claims to have carefully examined other sources and eye-witness accounts.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 03:14PM

TheLurker wrote: »

He is referring to what is known as magical thinking, and yes it is pretty much universal in humans and works very similiarly. Of course what you do based on it can be wildly different, but the conclusions drawn about the supernatural all take on very similar patterns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

Only for those who prefer stereotypes for the sake of biased argumentation. You might as well speak of an 'atheist mindset' and lump you in with Pol Pot.

Come on, you guys can surely engage in reasonable discussion without resorting to such cliched nonsense.

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 03:15PM

Nick Park wrote: »

We know one of the sources was Mark's Gospel, which we know was written before 70AD, and therefore at a time when eye-witnesses of the events described were still accessible. That makes it, historically speaking, of much more value than something that was apparently made up three centuries later.

Another source was almost certainly a document of sayings of Jesus that was utilised by both Matthew and Luke. This document, which scholars call Q, was probably earlier than Mark. Scholarly consensus dates it in the 40s or 50s of the First Century.

So that gives us two sources which, for historians, are very early indeed. The author of Luke also claims to have carefully examined other sources and eye-witness accounts.

Imagine if you will that Luke's author is a history student alive today and he produces this work, calls it the Gospel of Luke, and submits it to his history professor and waits for his grade.
What grade, in your opinion, should the professor give and why?
For the purposes of this hypothetical, the professor only has access to the Gospel of Luke. The professor doesn't himself talk to the eyewitnesses nor does he have access to the Q document.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 03:15PM

RikuoAmero wrote: »

Okay, I'll admit it. I made a mistake there. Now, can you come up with logic, data, reasoning or evidence that suggests that we should take Luke seriously as a 1st century document when it talks about events 50-70 years before, events which include things like the census of Quirinius? Events like that which appear NOWHERE else in the historical record?

How about one of Luke's sources, Matthew? That mentions the three wise men visiting King Herod, who then subsequently slaughters all the young boys in Nazareth. Apart from Matthew, this massacre is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the historical record.

It's up to you what you believe. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm simply pointing the very poor arguments and reasoning that are being advanced here.

TheLurker · 11-03-2015 03:17PM

Nick Park wrote: »

Only for those who prefer stereotypes for the sake of biased argumentation. You might as well speak of an 'atheist mindset' and lump you in with Pol Pot.

Sure, if you want to. I've no problem being lumped in with Pol Pot when talking about cognitive bias, I'm sure him and me shared various ones (as do most humans)

Magical thinking is a very real human phenomena. As such it was no doubt shared by serial killers, murderers and tyrants. This statement is no more controversial than saying that serial killers murderers and tyrants were human and you are also human. If that upsets you I think you need to re-evaluate why.

Nick Park wrote: »

Come on, you guys can surely engage in reasonable discussion without resorting to such cliched nonsense.

I think we can also try and avoid shaming away valid lines of discussion by throwing out claims of faux offence.

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 03:20PM

Magical thinking indeed, Nick. In trying to establish the historicity of Luke, you've pointed at it's two sources, Matthew and Q. Matthew is another gospel that also contains accounts of fantastical happenings (for which you need extraordinary evidence), and Q...we don't HAVE Q!
Reliable source of knowledge about historical events? Nope, not in my opinion.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 03:21PM

TheLurker wrote: »

You seem to be happily ignoring that genuine historians do not simply judge time to events as a criteria for assessing sources. They also look at who the source is, their motivation and what they have to gain from what they produce.

So it is entirely historically valid that a 4th century text might be considered more reliable than a 1st century text when you assess who wrote it.

Again just look a the official history of Scientology. Historians a thousand years from how would no doubt consider text by a news paper written about Scientology in 2015 far far more likely to be accurate than the official history written by the Church in the early 1990s

These talking points of yours seem to be lifted wholesale from popular Christian apologetics websites so I can't decide if you know this is true or not. But either way what you are saying is a flawed warped version of how historical study works.

I've not lifted anything from any website. I am simply correcting some of the guff in this thread, and I'm drawing on my past studies to do so (postgraduate in theology and biblical studies).

I'm not happily ignoring anything. I am addressing the claim, made by a poster in this thread, that a religious text from the 1st Century which draws on earlier sources should, when it comes to historical value in assessing 1st Century events, be treated the same as something written three centuries later with no evidence of access to earlier sources.

silverharp · 11-03-2015 03:26PM

Nick Park wrote: »

It's this kind of nonsensical thinking that makes it look as if you're grasping at straws.

There is no such thing as 'the human religious mind'. Different religious people think and act very differently. Martin Luther King and Osama bin Laden were both religious, but it would take a particularly warped person to insist that they shared a common 'religious mind'.

You might as well speak of a 'political mind' that lumps together Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler.

Such embarrassing nonsense would be laughed out of court in any other area of discussion, but apparently is tolerated in some circles when the desire to put down religion obscures one's capacity to think coherently.

A lot of bluster there but can you deal with the point that miracles like the feeding of the 5000 couldn't possibly have happened because the Jews didn't follow him en masse therefore its added in by believers who needed to show Jesus having supernatural powers

RikuoAmero · 11-03-2015 03:26PM

postgraduate in theology and biblical studies)

Just throwing this out here, many people with educational backgrounds in bible studies (that I've encountered) seem to be ignorant of at least part of the discipline of historical research. Those with this background whom I've encountered who argue for the historicity of the gospels have never allowed the same level or quality of evidence to convince them of other religions e.g. the documents about Mormonism that were produced very early on in that religion's history don't convince them of the truth of those documents...but the documents that were produced early on in Christianity's history do convince them.

Nick Park · 11-03-2015 03:27PM

RikuoAmero wrote: »

Magical thinking indeed, Nick. In trying to establish the historicity of Luke, you've pointed at it's two sources, Matthew and Q. Matthew is another gospel that also contains accounts of fantastical happenings (for which you need extraordinary evidence), and Q...we don't HAVE Q!
Reliable source of knowledge about historical events? Nope, not in my opinion.

Mark, not Matthew. Btw, real historians don't discount a source just because it might detail events that conflict with their previous ideas.

Neither would any historian automatically treat any source as unquestionably reliable. But they do assess them as evidence.

As for not having Q, that actually doesn't mean much. Historians happily accept the existence of texts that are no longer extant, based on them being cited by other sources.

Heck, a few posts back you were quite happy to accept that the Acts of Philip existed 1000 years before the earliest manuscript in existence. Why? Because it suited you to do so.

Now you speak mockingly of the non-existence of a document where there is a scholarly consensus of its existence. Why? Because it doesn't suit you.

You change your mind with whatever wind you think might help you in an argument. That might seem convincing to you, but I think most people can see what you're up to and how little you really care about history.

Atheism/Existence of God Debates (Part 2)

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