gregjohn wrote:
> Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote:
> 
>>> McChurch is roughly the same thing as McDonald's.
> 
> That's cool.
> 
>>> All I found was con artists, liars, made up stories,
>>> testimony from people who changed their stories over time,
>>> to make them more believable, and an endless list of fake
>>> miracles, alternative, and more rational explanations, etc.
>>> Not once did I *ever* find a *reason* to believe in
>>> any of it.
> 
> 
> I don't doubt this for a second. I'm guessing this is the majority of the
> religion that has enough cash to buy TV programs or networks.
> 
> But back then were you really the type who was looking for TV-style miracles?
> I'd bet I would have disagreed with you more back then when you were carrying
> your bible on Sundays.
> 
TV style miracles? What does that even mean? The Biblical miracles are 
ridiculous enough without TV style ones. In fact, most of the TV style 
miracles always have been the sort of BS, "Oh, 5,000 people spent years 
perfecting the hospital bed, IV drips, medications and surgeries used to 
save you, isn't it just a *miracle* that god kept you alive, while so 
many other people died before!" Uh, no, not 20 years ago when this was 
the common response when you asked most people what "miracles" where, 
and even less so today. It cheapens a word that was already cheapened by 
the fact that its original meaning was indistinguishable from "And Zues 
came down in the form of a swan to seduce the maiden." Its like everyone 
decided that clown shoes where really silly, but not because they are 
over sized and hard to walk in, but rather because they where the wrong 
color. Point out that they are just as silly if they are not fire engine 
orange with purple polka dots and watch out, all the "clown shoeist" 
will cry about how unfair you are about their choice in shoes.

>>>  Truth is, everyone starts out an atheist.
> 
> I heard there's some article out this year "proving" that everyone starts out as
> a theist, that you're wired to be one of some sort. (Of course, some make a
> pro-religious philosophical spin and say God of Bible literally wrote on our
> hearts; others make an anti-religious philosophical spin and say religious
> thoughts are exclusively genetic tendencies in our brain chemistry.)  It seems
> that you posited a philosophical spin as scientific fact-- "everyone starts out
> as an atheist."  Of course this one article in the science journals isn't the
> final answer, but it shows your position is weak.
> 
No it doesn't. Belief in "god" isn't the same as believing that there 
might be a scary monster hiding the in the bushes, instead of just the 
wind blowing them. The whole point of being able to "make up" stories 
about what is "making" things happen around you is that, early on, a 
primitive form of this would keep you from getting eaten by something 
that "was" hiding in the bush. The problem is, we now make up stuff that 
thinks, acts, has the power to make things happen, and all the other 
attributes "we have", and imagine that hiding in the bushes instead. You 
need the former, the later is just pointless and misleading. Show me 
someone "born" with a belief in your or any other "specific" god, who 
wouldn't be just as happy believing in multiple gods, or tree spirits, 
or elves, or fairies in the garden, or just growing up and realizing 
that none of them are any more reasonable than imagining that the 
presents show up under the tree due to a jolly fat man in a red suit, 
and we will talk. Otherwise, all this proves is that people make stuff 
up, based on their **own** abilities, which they imagine think like, act 
like, react like, and possibly even "look like" themselves, most of the 
time. It still, even if you wanted to imply that it suggested god, 
requires that you explain "which one", and "how do you know, given that 
any god you can imagine is ***just like you***, only able to leap tall 
buildings in a single bound (oh, sorry, wrong fictional character...)."

>>> old books, which more and more scholars admit
>>> constitute "no" evidence at all,
> 
> Those are the most loopy ones of all.  I saw the PBS show "Christianity before
> Paul," where they interviewed the Jesus Seminar.  They said something like, the
> bible said Jesus' family was poor, but we've found archaeological evidence that
> Bethlehem was a rich thriving town, and it wasn't even in Bethlehem!  I say on
> the contrary, the bible also says that Jesus' family gives the offering allowed
> for a poor family-- but you'd have to know about the OT laws to catch that fact
> when you read it today. And the ruins of a great trading center doesn't make
> for Jesus not being poor.  Now God could have sent a Messiah from the richest
> family on earth-- that's not the point.  It just shows that you can spin the
> stones any way you want.  There's scholarship on both sides.
> 
There is no contemporary evidence, ***from his own time***, that he even 
existed at all. Everything, and I mean everything, about him shows up 
50-100 years later, and all of it either suspiciously matches times, 
places and events also attributed to Titus Flavius' campaigns against 
Jewish people, roughly 50 years or so "after" Jesus was supposed to be 
around, or looks a awful lot like prior mythologies. Mind, so does the 
OT, if you study older religions that it, most of them contradictory not 
in "details", but in which, and how many, gods where involved (instead 
of just assuming it is the oldest). Do you know, for example, that while 
El is used in later cultures to refer to merely "godlike things", the 
word is "originally" more like Zues, and that El had three sons, one of 
them known as Yahweh. I.e., they are not even the "same" gods? Seems 
like a pretty big thing to mess up... And, this is from here:

http://www.biblicalheritage.org/God/el-goi.htm

Its not surprising that there are massive discrepancies in the NT, which 
was pieced together by comity years after the supposed events, using 
source documents that all, so far, can't be traced back farther than 50 
years "after" the events, when even the OT isn't consistent in any way 
either. It smacks of "invented" religion, and its hardly helped by the 
fact that the Flavians where the "first" converts to Christianity, and 
one of their own claimed to be "appointed" as the second ever "Pope" by 
one of the supposed disciples, while the same persons brother had his 
Jewish history chronicler busy trying to make him look like the second 
coming of the same mythical figure. You would think, if the "Pope" at 
all objected to this, you might have found "something" denouncing the 
comparison, denying Titus' divinity, or accusations against Titus' 
father, who was among the first of the Roman emperors to start calling 
themselves "living gods". Seems to be a bit of Egyptian conceit in their 
some place, but it did make Titus the "son of god", which again, if the 
first/second (depend if you believe some disciple did make him one) 
official "Pope" had any objection to... there doesn't seem to be a lot 
of evidence of it.

Until someone finds something, **anything** suggesting that more than a 
fairly common names shows up on Jesus from his own supposed time, you 
might as well be arguing that Freddy Kruger couldn't possibly have been 
able to make the knife claws he uses to kill people in the movies, for 
all it makes any sense to ask about, "Was Jesus really poor?" We know 
more about "other" carpenters from the time period, including where they 
lived, from documents, tools, official records, etc., in the same area, 
than we have for the supposedly most famous carpenter in history. In 
fact, we know as much, of more about virtually every other god, or 
son/daughter of one, from virtually every other religion in the world 
than we do the one you think is the only "real" one.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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