In article <web.475dcb9d922777eb6c8c02a10@news.povray.org>, 
nomail@nomail says...
> > The religious stance of "if we can't explain it, it must be God" isn't
> > valid logic.
> Hmm, right, but I think I read it correctly. I take Patrick's statement t
o mean
> the "not" as:
> you first have to provide evidence that divine intervention was needed to
 make
> that happen, not (that) human action was needed (or whatever). The contex
t
> doesn't seem to be "not human" in the sense of negation of human.
> 
Since the specific context was Christianities historical success, when 
compared to alternatives, its only reasonable to propose that the 
largest contributing factor, if not the supernatural, would presumably 
be humans. I rather doubt squid, parrots or termites would have had a 
huge impact on whether or not it was successful. It was a human 
endeavor, so its reasonable to presume that, according to the criteria 
given, the answers is either A) humans found the religion useful, as 
tool to defuse at least part of Jewish uprising, undermine other 
competing religions, and consolidate power in a single ideology that 
they could presumably have some control over, or B) god sticks his 
fingers into things in a bunch of key situations, so as the *bring 
about* the events (yet does so in such a way that no one can find any 
evidence of it without first *starting* from the stance of believing in 
him).

I find the later *very* improbable, for a number of reasons. 1. The 
intentional parallels of events used by Titus to try to make himself 
look like the second coming. 2. The fact that the OT was *very* clear 
that their savior was *supposed* to be a war lord, come to save them 
from foreigners, and instead talked peace, was conveniently betrayed by 
the people he supposedly came to lead, and all but told his followers 
that they should ignore all offense against them, when the greatest 
offenses where coming from the Romans, who had spent the last 50 years 
trying to crush the Jewish people. 3. The fact that not even "newer" 
documents purporting to prove any of it happened are from earlier than 
50 years after the events, when those Romans that had adopted the 
religion where in power, the war with the Jews had left the Jewish 
people broken (or at least sufficiently pacified) and unable to protest 
anything much, and Rome had nearly total control of everything from 
England to the borders of parts of Asia.

That is of course the problem with your great "gains" that have been 
supposedly made in proving any of it. You still can't provide anything 
**from his own time** that proves any of it actually happened, even 
among people that where scholars by nature, and recorded every birth, 
death, sold cow, odd event witnessed, etc. One would *think* some place 
in the thousands of documents from the time he was supposed to be alive 
would include some mention of someone that did everything *short of* 
selling his cow to the local butcher. There is nothing. We can find 
records, despite being buried and hidden, suggesting there may have been 
"some" truth in the whole Exodus bit, evidence strongly suggesting where 
the Noah story came from, places and archaeological evidence vindicating 
the existence of many thing and places in the OT, even if specific 
events are presumed exaggerated or can be reasonably linked to possible 
earth quakes, volcanos, etc. (there was one such very large volcano at 
that 500 year earlier point that exodus may have actually happened, for 
example). For the entire contents of the NT, we have the word of one 
person that was young enough to have *maybe* been there, but close to a 
half century between, a letter by the same person that **claims** he 
wrote all of it decades earlier, but, I don't know, lost his hat with 
the magic tablets in it or something? No explanation is given in it for 
why no earlier work has ever been found, and since the letter was 
written during the same period as the works it claims where *really* 
written earlier, some *other* evidence is necessary to prove those 
stories "did" come from an earlier point. At best, we can say that some 
people mentioned existed, in a place we know existed, in a society that 
was, if anything, even more obsessed with recording every tiny fart 
someone made than the Jewish people where. And yet, all the records from 
the period can muster is a name, and some statements, made half a 
century after the fact, attesting that all of it happened, but somehow, 
no one bothered to record any of it...

Heck, we have better proof that the walls of Jericho fell (though the 
fact that the evidence in that case implies that they fell and where 
rebuilt about a dozen times in a 200 year period, one of the last times 
do to an earthquake that also destroyed half the other coastal cities in 
the region doesn't help the claim that the story is accurate). But at 
least we can give the odds that someone attacked it then a 50-50 chance, 
and not a, "Umm? Where is the evidence the dude existed in the first 
place?"

But, I don't think there is much point in continuing the argument. Its 
already been made pretty clear that no logical argument, facts or 
evidence that might contradict the views of those defending the validity 
of the supposed history in the Bible is going to sway them from a) 
ignoring the contradictions or b) questioning the existence of the 
invisible phantom supposedly behind it. And, I am by no means any where 
as near as knowledgeable as some of the others that I have seen dissect 
and argue the factual and historical details of this whole thing. And, 
they get at tired as I do trying to present any of it to people that 
flat out refuse to accept the possibility that hundreds of books written 
*specifically* by people that where more interesting in proven their 
religion right, and finding and examining the true historical record, 
might have just "maybe" had a severely biased interpretation of the 
facts. Heck, just look at archeology. There was once a bias that mummies 
where meaningless, compared to everything else around them, and that 
some old bones found on a alter where just, "random refuse places in box 
#43." Today, if someone sold a mummy to burn it in a fire place, they 
would end up in jail, and someone finding the skull of some big dino on 
an alter, would ask, "Why the heck did the people that built this place 
put it there?", not, "Hmm. Its junk. Just shove it in a box."

Its not hard, given that, for a time, the church had absolute control of 
early science and all colleges, and the Victorian ideals, which still 
hold a strong influence in the US today, later proclaimed *some* ideas 
so horrible and unacceptable that one simply didn't *ever* suggest them 
(even if evidence suggested they might be right), to imagine a serious 
bias problem in works describing early church history. Its almost a sign 
of fundamental insanity for someone to suggest that this *hasn't* 
distorted both the interpretation of historical facts that *are* in 
evidence, and to strongly imply why some people would much rather 
imagine ones that have *never* been in evidence, rather than admit that, 
once again, the churches interpretation is the one that is badly out of 
sync of reality.

-- 
void main () {

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

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