On 10-1-2012 11:59, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 10/01/2012 11:10, Invisible a écrit :
>> I didn't say Jesus was real. I said he might be real. Some limited
>> evidence suggests he was real.
>>
>> ...or the entire thing might be a forgery from start to finish.
>> Interesting that there's only one version of that forgery, but it's not
>> completely implausible. I doubt we'll ever know one way or the other.
>
>
>  From the Roman documentation, at least the crucifixion did happened.
> It was a seditious Jewish man named Jesus, sold to the Roman ( "give to
> Caesar what belong to Caesar" is about paying or not the tax to the
> invader: as the coins are the coins of the invading country, he states
> that the tax should be paid.), opposing local Jewish powers and local
> business (expulsion of the merchants from the Temple...)
>
>  From where did he came, nothing is sure. Only the last 3 years of his
> life were dedicated to propaganda and sedition. It is also well-known
> that he frequented a whore (Marie Madeleine)... put that on the prudish
> and puritan Church. Coherency and consistency never make it inside dogma.
>
i think the consensus nowadays is that mary magdalene was not a whore. 
there was a tradition in the church to call her that, but that started 
only several centuries later.

-- 
tip: do not run in an unknown place when it is too dark to see the 
floor, unless you prefer to not use uppercase.

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On Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:08:12 -0500, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> > Is there any evidence, beyond the circumstantial, that these things
>> > were stolen?
> 
>> You mean beyond similarities between Christianity and religions that
>> pre-
>> date Christianity?
> 
>   Even if Christianity was completely original and didn't use anything
>   at
> all from other religions, that wouldn't really change the question of
> its veracity, would it?

No, it wouldn't - but I don't think that was the point of John's question.

But yes, even if it was entirely unique, that wouldn't mean it was "true" 
any moreso than the FSM is true.

>   Also, even if Christianity had many similarities to other religions,
>   it
> would be easy to explain from a Christian point of view: Satan likes to
> copy God's work in order to distort it and confuse people, and draw
> people away from the one true religion. There always is an explanation
> for everything.

Well, not an "explanation", but a rationalization that cannot be tested, 
that's for certain.  I prefer to reserve the word "explanation" for 
things that can be actually verified in the physical world.  There's no 
physical evidence for God, Satan, guardian angels (or guardian angles - 
as I've seen it written a few times <g>), nor any other supernatural 
force or being.

Jim

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On 1/10/2012 7:39 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> All of that aside, here's an interesting observation: There's no
>>> evidence that God exists. There's no evidence that Adam or Eve existed.
>>
>> But we are playing "What if" game! Just assume that whatever fantasy is
>> true, then tell...
>
> What if I'm right about everything. Given that this is true, do you can
> concede that I am right about everything?
>
>>> In fact, a lot of people regard the entire Bible as something that
>>> should be in the "fiction" section. But think about this for a moment:
>>> the Bible *itself* most definitely *does* exist. It's a real book, and
>>> it has existed for a very long time.
>>
>> can you define long time ?
>> The bible (which Bible ?) has been made as an assembly of various texts
>> from various sources, along various translation paths, which were highly
>> disputed at the beginning of the church
>
>> Whatever is called the "New Testament" is just the final result of that
>> evolution. About the "Old testament"... it should be, as of Jewish
>> sources, in Hebraic texts (Torah ?).
>
> The more I look at this, the more complicated it becomes.
>
> Short version: The original text of the Bible has long, *long* since
> been lost to history. All that remains now is a trillion different
> versions, translations, editions, revisions, edits and alterations of
> it. If you stare hard enough, you can kinda sorta figure out how one
> version is related to some other version. We will probably never know
> what the originals said, when they were written, who wrote them, or even
> what language. (It seems even the "original" Hebrew was based on earlier
> documents.)
>
> All of which makes it utterly laughable when people say that "the" Bible
> is inerrant. Uh, yeah, which one exactly? (Ah, but wait - isn't that why
> we have a dozen conflicting religions based on the same bundle of texts?)
>
> Regardless, this is an *old* document.
Yes and no.. The "old" part goes so far back that parts of it probably 
existed "before" Judaism did. The NT... as near as any documentation 
suggests, and we have nothing, despite a lot of looking, that goes back 
very far, is around 40-50AD. Which is really sort of odd, given that 
there *should* be some evidence of its contents say.. at least 10 years 
*prior* to 1AD, at minimum. A 40-50 year gap, in a culture that 
preserved even the names of people that collected dung from their roads, 
is... kind of, 'wtf?'.

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On 1/10/2012 12:34 AM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 10/01/2012 04:36, Patrick Elliott a écrit :
>> and walking on water (or turning it into whine)
>
> I have explanation (or heresy) for that two, both due to bad translation
> (well, enhanced translation), and more:
>
> Laziness : walk on water; he took the road of water (he swam at worst,
> he might have know some spot where the river was not so deep) to get to
> the other side... whereas usual road on earth was longer.
>
Its also not an uncommon magic trick, involving a bit of prior 
preparation, but where, unless someone walked the exact same path, its 
not readily apparent there is a platform there.

> Turning water into whine: Assume you have a barrel of strong whine for
> twelve people, and usage is to never drink pure water (well, dirty water
> really), and the meal is going to have fifty people: dilute the whine
> with water, actually turning water into whine. A lighter lighter whine,
> but still whine.
>
No one seems to have drunk the whine, to make sure, so this also could 
have been a trick, since there *is* a method that can turn water that 
color, and give it a scent like whine. Its hard to say whether anyone 
would have been dumb enough to drink "miracle water", instead of just 
freaking over the effect. Even if they did, there are, as you say, ways 
of faking it.

> Multiplication of bread: well, the word for multiplication might have a
> translation-side for division (indeed), he did not create more bread, he
> split the bread amongst the people. There was X breads (big size) and
> when done, every people (N people, N>>  X) had bread, a part of bread.
> (like milk: 1 bottle of milk can serve many glasses of milk)
>
Or, it could just be made up gibberish, like his supposed birth. Or, the 
whole thing might have been, originally, a sort of scam by the Flavians, 
and one author has suggested, to convince the Jews that Titus was the 
"messiah" that they where waiting for, in their own book, and the stuff 
in the NT where just parodies of those events in his own campaign. One 
of the more interesting arguments the guy made was that "Mary" was 
sometimes used, during the wars, as a sort of semi-derogatory name for 
any Jewish women they ran across, to the blatant contradictions between 
the three versions of the resurrection can be explained as a series of 
linear events, in which all of the parties confuse each other for 
various spirits, phantasm, etc., after the first bunch, who spotted it 
open, actually confused which tomb they where looking at, and ran off 
hysterically claiming he had risen from the dead. This would make Mary's 
conflicting responses between them, and actions, that of "several" 
random women, not one single person, and there conclusions a kind of 
absurd circus, where they each played on the prior confused 
observations, of entirely different groups of people. A key factor, for 
example, being that, in one version, two people enter the tomb, and in 
another one, two seemingly "glowing figures" are seen crouched over the 
place the body was supposed to be, inside the same tomb. If you assume 
that things happened like this:

1. Woman one runs off to tell someone the tomb is empty.
2. Two people got to check, and another women observes them going in, 
and wanders off to tell people about it.
3. A bigger group, with yet another woman in it, who proclaims are 
seeing angels in there, upon spotting the two people, possibly hit jut 
right by early morning light, making the dust on and around them glow.

He claims that one key is that different words, in the original work, 
are used to describe "when" each of these happened too, and they could 
be interpreted to be, "before sun rise", "at sun rise (just as light is 
visible, but the sun isn't)", and, "as the early light".

No idea if this is accurate. But, I have a certain personal love of the 
idea that a large number of some of the bloody most ignorant people in 
the US are basing their whole world view, quite appropriately, on 
someone's satire.

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On 1/10/2012 3:10 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 10/01/2012 03:36 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> On 1/9/2012 8:31 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> The contents of the Bible may or may not be real, but the book itself is
>>> quite real. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia (which is inerrant),
>>> it seems that at least a few of the things in the Bible might actually
>>> be true. In particular, there might actually have been a real person
>>> actually called Jesus, who at least /claimed/ to be a messenger of God.
>>
>> Based on what? The census data that, supposedly, was collected when he
>> was born, but doesn't mention him? The total lack of anything written
>> "during his own life", by anyone at all, that mentions him.
>
> I won't claim to be an expert in such fields. But it appears that a
> couple of non-Christian sources do mention him (though never first-hand
> accounts).
>
And a lot of ones that "are" Christian insist there is more, then 
inexplicably can't show any. The problem is, we are talking about a 
name. Christ was a title added later. No one just pulled "Jesus" out of 
no place. More than one person had that name, so merely finding the name 
gets you no where at all.

The other problem is, there is no exact certainty as to when what ever 
original of those sources was written either. They seem to be copies, 
not originals, so.. again, no evidence "prior" to well after the fact.

> To be clear: I didn't say there is /proof/ that he existed, I merely
> said that some evidence suggests that he /might/ have existed.
>
>> And, that doesn't even go into the problem with how nothing claimed
>> about his wasn't basically stolen from other religions, from virgin
>> births, to raising the dead, and walking on water (or turning it into
>> whine).
>
> I have seen absolutely no evidence at all that this person was actually
> God incarnate, or that he actually performed any miracles. I only said
> he might have been a real person, who /claimed/ to be a messenger from God.
>
The problem is, during that time period, as is joked about in the Monty 
Python movie Life of Brian, the Romans where actively messing with 
several cultures at the time, including the Jews, and even among Romans, 
there was a lot of fly by night religions popping up, with their own 
godlings, so there where probably 2-3 such people on every damn street 
corner, during the time that Jesus was supposed to be around. Kind of 
begs for answers to two questions - Which one of the thousands was he 
then? Why, if you assume the crucifixion bit actually happened, would 
they have even bothered much, unless he did way more than all the rest 
of them where doing. Actually, make that three - If he did, why isn't it 
written down in any official documents from the time, at all, instead of 
either being one of thousands of other unnamed, uninteresting 
executions, or otherwise considered of so little consequence that no one 
made note of it?

> I see nothing particularly implausible in a man being born, walking
> around giving speeches and stuff, and then after his death the stories
> being gradually embellished until we end up with the current Bible myth
> about him being the son of God and rising from the dead and performing
> other miracles. Obviously the Bible story is fiction; that doesn't mean
> that it isn't at least loosely based on a real person, or on events that
> really happened. And it seems possible that some of the words he is
> credited as having said might be words that a real person actually
> spoke. (Mind you, the words could have been altered somewhat over the
> years too.)
>
>> Or, the really big one, that nothing at all in the Bible's NT
>> has *ever* been found, in any form, earlier than roughly 50 years
>> "after" he was supposedly crucified. You would think someone, some
>> place, would have made mention of it, kept and old copy, accidentally
>> stuffed a wall with a manuscript that contained mention of "any" of his
>> speeches, describing any of the events, etc.
>
> We're talking about something which [may have] happened two *thousand*
> years ago. It's a miracle we have any documents at all.
>
We know more about Zeus that we do Jesus, precisely because there *are* 
records from that time. This wasn't some back water country, where they 
used leather hides to record things. Its like coming back 2000 years 
from now, and wondering that any part of the contents of the library of 
congress survived. The Library at Alexandria certainly would have been 
helpful, if it hadn't been burned down, but other records did exist, and 
most "official" ones where kept, even by the morons that burned that 
one. Its hardly a miracle. On the contrary, we have a more complete 
collection of documents from the time period than we do from some more 
"recent" periods, ranging from private documents, to just catalogs of 
purchases from some merchants. What we don't have is anything more than 
a few references, to a common name, without the messiah title attached, 
none of which connect to a specific person, or event, or necessarily 
even the right time frame.

Oh, and to give you another example from "earlier". How about we go back 
another 1,000 years or so, and to Egypt. We couldn't even read most of 
it for a long time, now.. We know that the time line, roughly, works 
like this:

1. Egyptians settle there.

2. Some time later the Semitic people show up, and slowly take over 
government, and then they get kicked out, and the Egyptians are back in 
power.

3. Even later the events leading "up to" Exodus happen.

4. Exodus comes and goes with a) no sign of Semitic clothes, pottery, 
writing, the death of huge swaths of a) live stock, b) citizens, c) 
crops, or d) armies, or anyone trying to conquer the now, supposedly 
devastated, Egyptian people.

5. Other things that we "know" the time frame for happen.

6. Ramses takes over.

7. Egypt eventually drifts into history as a unique culture, and a few 
thousand years later some clown makes a movie where Ramses denies Moses 
the right to leave a non-existent slavery, under the Egyptions.

Or, to put it mildly, we have "more" evidence of Semitic people having 
been, in power, in Egypt, and not being there during the time of Moses, 
than we have of Jesus, from an empire with a recorded history, list of 
plays, recorded works, etc., that was the largest in history, until 
modern times.

Could it have, somehow, gotten lost anyway? Yeah. Could the guy have 
been such a nobody that no one, other than the eventual Christians 
cared? Possibly. Could it have all been made up, for another reason, 
then kept, when it proved useful? Of course, every two bit seer and 
prophet during that time was trying the same thing. One of them was 
bound to get luck, especially if they hit one something that those in 
power thought they could use to retain it. It wasn't, after all, 
uncommon for some Romans to go to a dozen, often contradictory, temples, 
at the time, to make donations, on the chance that at least "one" of the 
gods/goddesses actually existed, and would either grant them what they 
wanted, or worse, punish them for picking the wrong temple instead.

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On 1/10/2012 3:59 AM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>  From where did he came, nothing is sure. Only the last 3 years of his
> life were dedicated to propaganda and sedition. It is also well-known
> that he frequented a whore (Marie Madeleine)... put that on the prudish
> and puritan Church. Coherency and consistency never make it inside dogma.
>
Actually, the whore thing is in dispute. As I said in another post, Mary 
was such a common name at the time that it was used as a derogatory 
statement when encountering Jewish women. If you go back to some of the 
earliest translations, its fairly clear that there where in fact at 
least "two" such Marys, one of them a follower, and the other some 
random street whore, who decided to wash his feet. Even the chronology 
makes no sense, if taken into account, with her being, seemingly 
"unknown", wandering in off the street, and becoming so impressed she 
had to wash his feet, **after** earlier parts of the same text, where 
she is already mentioned as traveling with him (this makes no logical 
sense, unless you get a later "edited" version, like the KJV, which 
attempts, badly, to "fix" these little errors).

The "Whore and follower, both" bit was created much later, as a means of 
showing, even as they ignored it themselves, how much "purer" he was 
than the rest of us (and, at least initially, to show how we needed to 
be nice, even to bad people). By the time the puritans came along, it 
was common to confuse them as the same person. The puritans themselves 
are notable for taking the already distorted meaning of, "taking the 
lords name in vein", and making it into cursing and using words that 
involved bodily functions. The original meaning, BTW, was the use of 
imprecatory prayer, to ask god to give them things, or curse others. 
Hardly a surprise that "modern" Christians use prayer for almost bloody 
nothing else. lol

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On 1/10/2012 7:02 AM, Francois Labreque wrote:
>> I also gather that "Jesus" was a fairly common name too. Like, if I sat
>> down today and wrote a book about "John Smith", in 2,000 years' time
>> historians are going to have one *hell* of a time figuring out whether I
>> based it on a real person or not...
>>
>
> I read somewhere (assign a random value of factuality to that statement)
> that Jesus (or Yeshua) may have been a title or nickname, rather than
> his real name.
>
>
Doubt it. While Jewish names generally had meanings, they where not used 
as titles. Given the time period it would be like, as Invisible said, 
titling someone "John", and expecting anyone to not go, "Oh, I know him, 
doesn't he make sandles two streets down that way?" His *title* was 
Christ, or Messiah. Or at least, that is what they tacked on to what 
ever imaginary person, or poor corpse, had the luck of "founding" the 
things. lol

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On 1/10/2012 8:20 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> And a lot of ones that "are" Christian insist there is more, then
> inexplicably can't show any. The problem is, we are talking about a
> name. Christ was a title added later. No one just pulled "Jesus" out of
> no place. More than one person had that name, so merely finding the name
> gets you no where at all.
>
Hmm. Addendum to this. There is some clown that gets shown on one of 
the, "Its History/Discovery, or something, honest!", channels that 
represents the sort of "Christian" archeologists you get. As one of 
those people that had to deal with the nut put it, "He shows up at 
someone's dig some place, with a camera crew, and bugs them, until they 
give some wishy washy, 'maybe' to his questions of whether or not the 
place they are digging up might be Gomorrah, or the Tower of Babble, or 
what ever he is looking for, just to get him to shut up." He then 
proceeds to make a 1 hour show on how they have proven the events of 
David and Goliath, based on those vague, "maybe, now go away!", 
statements. The guy probably doesn't even know what a shovel looks like, 
never mind what they use anything else for.

For these sorts of "history experts" finding "John Smith" would me 
absolute proof of the existence of which ever one they imagined they 
where looking for, even if all they had was *part* of a name '_ohn S'.

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On 1/10/2012 6:52 AM, John VanSickle wrote:
> On 1/9/2012 10:36 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> And, that doesn't even go into the problem with how nothing claimed
>> about his wasn't basically stolen from other religions, from virgin
>> births, to raising the dead, and walking on water (or turning it into
>> wine).
>
> Is there any evidence, beyond the circumstantial, that these things were
> stolen?
>
> Regards,
> John
Yeah, hoping that is an attempt at a joke, otherwise.. Its kind of 
pointless to make your "God" rise from the dead after three days, turn 
things into whine, walk on water, and have virgin births, when half the 
people on the same street where claiming the same thing, if not all at 
the same time, about 20 other new gods. Jesus, if anything, seems to be 
the godly equivalent of the knife, which is also a radio, lock pick, 
satellite dish, blender, and ear wax remover. Get it now, for 4 payments 
of $9.95, before time runs out!

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On 1/10/2012 1:08 PM, Warp wrote:
> Jim Henderson<nos### [at] nospamcom>  wrote:
>>> Is there any evidence, beyond the circumstantial, that these things were
>>> stolen?
>
>> You mean beyond similarities between Christianity and religions that pre-
>> date Christianity?
>
>    Even if Christianity was completely original and didn't use anything at
> all from other religions, that wouldn't really change the question of its
> veracity, would it?
>
>    Also, even if Christianity had many similarities to other religions, it
> would be easy to explain from a Christian point of view: Satan likes to
> copy God's work in order to distort it and confuse people, and draw people
> away from the one true religion. There always is an explanation for
> everything.
>
And, he is even so good at it, he does it *before* the Biblical events 
ever happened! ;)

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