Merged Topic - Historical Reliability of the Gospels

[Mike Cl]

I have no problem with differences of opinion. And if all you want to visit your "home"  are yes men, then you are going to have one boring website. I like debate, not personal ridicule, slander and unwarranted explicatives.

That, my friend, is a bald faced lie.  You do not debate--that requires one to answer questions that you are asked--you don't do that.  You preach.  And not very well.

[aitm]

I never said dinosaurs never existed, and any Creationists will say that there are enough universal dragon tales around to indicate that man had at least saw  dinosaurs if not had run ins with them.

Holy crap..this kid is a full blown retard.

[Mike Cl]

Holy crap..this kid is a full blown retard.

Ahhhh, come on, aitm, you are giving retards a bad name.

[stromboli]

[trdsf]

Coincidence is simply a copout word that means essentially, I have no other explanation.

So is 'god'.  That's the sound you make when you don't want to have to even bother trying to explain, more accurately.  Not only a cop-out, but lazy.

I think it would be far better for atheists to explain how they account for specific events in their lives that have no "logical" explanation.

Very, very simple.

Statistics, and the fact that our brains have evolved to be such good pattern matchers, we even try to identify patterns when they don't exist.

It was exceedingly useful for our ancestors that they could take an unexpected rustle and a faint glimpse of orange and go "YEOW!  TIGER!" and get to safety without having to process that information in a more explicit manner.  And the ones that couldn't do that aren't your ancestors.  Over evolutionary time, that means we became more and more finely honed pattern matchers.

So, we went down the path of making false positives.  The caveman who erred on the side of "Yeow!  Tiger!" and got to safety when there was no need to is your thousand-times-great-grandfather, while the caveman who erred on the side of "Oh, that's just the wind" is fossilized saber-toothed tiger shit.

As our intellectual capacities developed, this instinctive pattern matching did not go away, and because it is instinctive, it is an exceptionally powerful force inside us.  We expect patterns to exist, and now when we think we've spotted one and it's not an imminent risk like a tiger in the grass, we have the intellectual capacity to try to figure out what it "really" was... but what does it mean to try to rationalize a non-existent tiger?

And this feeds directly into the statistics side.

We are horrible seat-of-the-pants statisticians.  This is why people play the lottery.  More importantly, this is why seemingly random and "coincidental" events get mistaken for deliberate and meaningful events.

You remember the remarkable things that happen to you.  But you do not remember the almost-infinitely-many more remarkable thinks that don't happen to you.  And of course the media will sometimes make great play out of really weird events, like twins who haven't seen each other in 30 years happening to move next door to each other, or chance patterns in toast that may or may not resemble Marlene Dietrich or some such.

At this point, strange coincidences no longer become strange because not only are there billions of potential reporters of strange events, the number of potential strange events is orders of magnitude higher.  Someone somewhere bumps into someone else who looks almost exactly like them and takes a selfie and zoom -- another "unexplained", "strange" coincidence.

But it's not unexplained, and strange is not quantitative.  The statistics of large numbers of individuals who subconsciously look for patterns whether or not they're there means that these events get noticed, and reported, and the non-strange non-coincidences don't.  That's not a pattern, that's a self-selected set of events: strange coincidences get reported to others and non-strange non-coincidences don't.

So it doesn't matter if John reports seeing a pattern in his toast that resembles Marlene Dietrich, or some such.  If it didn't happen to him, there are billions of others it could have happened to.  And if it wasn't Marlene Dietrich, it might have resembled Rasputin or Bruce Lee ... or the popularly-conceived (and ethnographically incorrect) image of Jeshua bar-Joseph.

As it is, I do look for patterns in my toast, simply because I know I am a supreme pattern matching machine, honed over millions of years of biological evolution, and because I know heat flow is a stochastic process that by pure chance can generate interesting features.  So far the only pattern I can identify is that the heat flow is uneven, because I can't get a properly brown piece of toast out of my toaster.  In fact, I always carry a camera because you never know what chance things you might see in the clouds, like sharks and numbers and counter-top blenders.

And this brings us to the final part: assigning meaning.  Strange events don't have to be meaningful, they can just be strange events.  It's perfectly all right to go "Whoa, that was weird!" and get on with the rest of your life.  In your world-view, these should be considered meaningful events and you have pre-decided for yourself what that meaning is so you retro-fit the event to your pre-existing notion.

Of course, I expect you tuned out as soon as I said 'evolution' (assuming you even bothered reading in the first place), but there's your answer.

[widdershins]

That, my friend, is a bald faced lie.  You do not debate--that requires one to answer questions that you are asked--you don't do that.  You preach.  And not very well.

This is exactly right.  "Debate" is the furthest thing from the truth about what LittleNipper does her.  Argue, preach, judge, complain...those would be more accurate words.

[josephpalazzo]

I know this is VERY early - what we're still in March - but I nominate LittleNipper  for the CHEWTOY AWARD of the year 2016.

It will be up to future new members to beat  LittleNipper for this prestigious nomination.

[leo]

I think is time to send little nipper to the troll cage ( purgatory )

[LittleNipper]

That, my friend, is a bald faced lie.  You do not debate--that requires one to answer questions that you are asked--you don't do that.  You preach.  And not very well.

Debate is a two way question and answer cession. It isn't enough that I simply answer your questions, and as many as you can throw ----- while telling me that biblical explanations are not answers but preaching.     

[LittleNipper]

Yourself included, given your willful ignorance of the passages being presented to you.

And which Bible passages are they exactly?

[Mike Cl]

Debate is a two way question and answer cession. It isn't enough that I simply answer your questions, and as many as you can throw ----- while telling me that biblical explanations are not answers but preaching.     

Okay, let's talk.  Which means I ask questions or answer yours and you do the same.  If I ask a question you need to try to answer--and I need to do the same.  How about you pick a section of the Bible that you can show proves or proves a point and I will then respond to your assertion?

[LittleNipper]

Ahhhh, come on, aitm, you are giving retards a bad name.

Actually, you both seem to be giving atheism a black eye all by yourselves.

[LittleNipper]

Okay, let's talk.  Which means I ask questions or answer yours and you do the same.  If I ask a question you need to try to answer--and I need to do the same.  How about you pick a section of the Bible that you can show proves or proves a point and I will then respond to your assertion?

Hokey doe-key.

[widdershins]

Debate is a two way question and answer cession. It isn't enough that I simply answer your questions, and as many as you can throw ----- while telling me that biblical explanations are not answers but preaching.     

AS MANY as we can throw at you?  I seem to remember a post back on page 8 of this thread, followed by another post on page 11 and a third on page 13 where I tried repeatedly to get you to respond.  You have yet to explain to my why neither you nor any other Christian can do the things he stated would accompany "those who believe" in Mark 16:17-18.  More accurately, you have yet to explain exactly how what Jesus is not what he meant, but rather had some secret yet easy to understand meaning other than what he said, while really being what he said, if only I would bother to look up the words in their original hoodoo, or whatever excuse you have for why God can't seem to speak in plain English when he's saying something which clearly proves you wrong.

[trdsf]

Debate is a two way question and answer cession. It isn't enough that I simply answer your questions, and as many as you can throw ----- while telling me that biblical explanations are not answers but preaching.     

That's because biblical "explanations" don't actually explain anything.  You need evidence, not fairy tales.  And you're still not answering any of my questions.  You have no interest in informed debate -- I assume you typed 'cession' in error, but it's appropriate for what you're doing, which is simply stopping engaging, standing in one place, and yelling in complete and blissful and willful ignorance.

You came to us.  We didn't ask you here.  If you genuinely believed that just waltzing in here and telling us 'the bible says so' would convert us all, you're more delusional than most believers.