On a serious note, I would in all sincerity appreciate anyone who can shoot holes in this argument to speak up. I would much prefer being corrected on something than to continue to present a flawed argument. If the Gospels were reliable accounts of the life of Christ, what is the basis of the assertion?
Nickolas
JoinedPosts by Nickolas
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53
I think I figured out why Jesus ended up being such an important figure in history!
by sabastious inmary had to make up a story for why she was pregnent after cheating on joseph and it ended up seriously getting out of hand.. -sab.
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53
I think I figured out why Jesus ended up being such an important figure in history!
by sabastious inmary had to make up a story for why she was pregnent after cheating on joseph and it ended up seriously getting out of hand.. -sab.
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Nickolas
How do we know that the writings, you refer to, never existed?
If writings did exist they were not apparently inspired by God, else they would have been retained. Otherwise those who wrote the New Testament were inspired by old writings and not by God, or maybe the writers of the New Testament were subject to that "New Light" phenomenon, too, and they threw out all the old written records? No, just doesn't make sense.
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I think I figured out why Jesus ended up being such an important figure in history!
by sabastious inmary had to make up a story for why she was pregnent after cheating on joseph and it ended up seriously getting out of hand.. -sab.
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Nickolas
Tammy's right, though. I was not making myself clear. I do that sometimes. Saul of Tarsus aka Paul died in AD 67, according to the most reliable evidence. The things Paul writes about Jesus of Nazareth in 80,000 recorded words mentions nothing about His life and no-one during that period and years beyond wrote a single word about it either. It's as if they didn't know any of it. Where did all that absolutely critical information come from? The virgin birth, all those the miracles, the sermon on the mount and all the other stuff that happened from the immaculate conception up until the time Jesus of Nazareth was executed? Huge crowds of people witnessed first hand all the wonderous stuff Jesus was doing but nobody wrote any of it down. Did everybody just forget to? If the information was carried forward word of mouth for 40+ years then it is at best unreliable and still begs the question why wouldn't it have been recorded in writing, anyway, why word of mouth? If the supposition is that there were very few literate people around at that time, that explanation would defy the benefit of Paul having sent out all those epistles for people to read. No word about the life of the early Christians' spiritual leader was recorded for 40+ years after His death - putting the account of Jesus as a child in the Temple more than 60+ years afterward, and that is just too odd to be denied.
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53
I think I figured out why Jesus ended up being such an important figure in history!
by sabastious inmary had to make up a story for why she was pregnent after cheating on joseph and it ended up seriously getting out of hand.. -sab.
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Nickolas
Who forgot? Saul of Tarsus was persecuting those people who followed Christ at the time of his vision. Kind of implies the opposite of forgot.
Tammy
You are absolutely right, Tammy. The forgetting part was the time between Paul's death and the writing of the gospels. I got ahead of the story. Thanks.
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I think I figured out why Jesus ended up being such an important figure in history!
by sabastious inmary had to make up a story for why she was pregnent after cheating on joseph and it ended up seriously getting out of hand.. -sab.
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Nickolas
Jesus of Nazareth allegedly died around 29 AD, accompanied by a whole lot of fireworks and miracles the likes the world has never seen. And then everyone forgot, for 40+ years. Then Saul of Tarsus came along and told a story about a vision he had had about a man who was crucified, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Noteworthy is that he said nothing else about Jesus. In letters he wrote something like 80,000 words about the early Christian movement but said nothing about Mary, the virgin birth, Joseph, Bethlehem, Harrod, John the Baptist, none of Christ's miracles, never quotes anything Jesus is supposed to have said, never says anything at all of Jesus' ministry, never talks about the entrance into Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, the Jewish mob and trials, nothing at all about the story of Jesus' life or even that he ever walked the earth at all. The first accounting of the life of Jesus came from Mark, who in his story tells of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, so all the gospels were written later than that, probably much later. Considered in context, Jesus is not an important figure in history, because he never existed.
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If Jehovah God Chose Russell & The Bible Students Why Did He Give Them So Much Inaccurate Information?
by minimus inhmmm.
either jehovah god (the perfect god) didn't give that information.
it never was the "truth" in the first place..
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Nickolas
I was just thinking of that Jack Nicholson scene, cherrios. Not the whole thing, mind you, but the exclamation "You can't handle the truth!". The context was musing over beliefs and belief systems many of the people on this board have expressed. We all perceive reality in different ways - said another way how we perceive reality becomes our reality and to some extent we are completely incapable of conceptualizing someone else's reality. Some, if not many, of the people in here believe as true what their parents taught them to believe, which for the most part was useful because it taught them how to survive. But they know their parents cannot have been infallible, and certainly not the likes of organisations like the Roman Catholic Church and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. They also understand the irony of coincidence - had they been born in Kabul what they'd believe as absolutely true would be what they currently believe as absolutely false - but they struggle to internalize that understanding, if they try at all. If you stick to the hard evidence that is inexorably accumulating with each passing day, discounting the circular arguments of holy books whose authorities are only themselves, the truth of the universe in which we exist is beyond what many people can handle. The almost absolute statistical and theoretical probability that there is no god is incomprehensible and dismissed out of hand.
The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this thread, from my perspective, is a simple one. He didn't, because He doesn't exist. The Bible Students made it all up, and that's the truth.
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If Jehovah God Chose Russell & The Bible Students Why Did He Give Them So Much Inaccurate Information?
by minimus inhmmm.
either jehovah god (the perfect god) didn't give that information.
it never was the "truth" in the first place..
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Nickolas
... but I hear some bitterness toward God there. That's a slippery slope that many on this site find themselves on.
The bitterness to which you refer is tasted once one begins to doubt what he has been told to believe by his parents and others. If it is indeed a slippery slope it is toward emancipation, Dan. Frightening at first, but exhilarating once you hit bottom and see how clear and unencumbered the sky is above you.
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How do we gain the knowledge that leads to everlasting life?
by wannabe inpage #1. .
many today, more notebly, the religious leaders of this world, and their followers, feel that they can do a mere cursory, superficial reading of the bible, and from that, set forth their hard and fast interpretations of the holy writings.
but is it really all that easy, to understand the holy scriptures, to get 'the breadth, length, heigth, and depth,' of everything written; in order to be 'rooted and established on the foundation, to 'grasp mentally,' with all the holy ones?
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Nickolas
You put a great deal of work into that original post, wannabe, so much that I was exhausted after reading only a few sentences. What is it you are trying to achieve? If it is for me to see your point of view, something a little more bite-sized might be more effective. However, if it is to demonstrate that your faith has taken complete hold of you, you have succeeded. Why not start with something simple? For example, how is it you know so conclusively that Jehovah actually exists?
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Nickolas
I will not bow to the tin god of atheism for sure. I prefer a more neutral position...
I subscribed to a neutral perspective, V, for a long, long time, except I labelled it "agnostic". The tin god reference undoubtedly applies to atheists who just stubbornly refuse to believe the possibility of a god solely on the basis of indoctrination, what they have been told to believe. I might visualise the Red Army hoards sweeping into eastern Europe at the close of the second world war as stereotypical examples - ignorant, unwashed and brutal men that they were. But I do not believe the tin god reference applies generally. I think what differentiates someone who has become atheist over a protracted period of reflection from one who just wakes up one morning and decides he doesn't believe in a god anymore is the former has arrived where he is over a sometimes arduous path. In my own case it was a struggle not to become atheist, keeping mind and door open just a crack by trying hard just to accept and believe that there is more to this life than what the evidence indicates. But with the passage of decades and piling on of more and more evidence (the body of which is beginning to expand exponentially) it has become exceedingly difficult to keep the door from closing entirely. But atheism and absolutism need not be mutually complimentary. While I do not believe in the existence of a supreme being I would change my mind in an instant once exposed to conclusive proof that one exists - I use the example of seeing my parents alive again as sufficiently convincing - but it is apparent to me the same may not be true of one who does believe. My experience has been if you ask one who is devoted to a belief in the God of the Bible (or the Qu'ran or the Torah) what it would take for him to change his mind he would be unable to answer you. But I may be stereotyping people, after all.
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Child Abuse Policy question re: credible evidence
by Open mind ini'm familiar with the two witness rule and just read that it still stands in the new elder's book.. .
if a child accuses someone of sexual abuse:.
1. call the branch.
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Nickolas
Is 12 year old Johnny credible? If he has a history of telling stories then one might need to be circumspect. If he has been a model child who has shown no previous history of being mischievious, then one might need to take him seriously. If Johnny was my child I would put him through the wringer and if he prevailed I would move heaven and earth to put his molester behind bars.