Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
You can play games and write dozens of paragraphs of mental gymnastics and equivocation, but, at the end of the day, religious texts are fiction. They’re wholly-invented myths and legends, and that they may, sometimes, include references (no matter how inaccurate and/or embellished) to verified historical events, that does not - in any way - go to validate the myths, legends, nor even the (at beast) quasi-historical references which may be contained in the myth books and scrolls/tablets of multitudinous religions.
If you have a specific event or historical figure you wish to make claims as real - as told/described in some religious text and with specific relevance to such (“Persian Emperor Xerxes existed!” will not suffice. Prove, for example, Jesus was a real, magical person, son of God (whom you also must prove exists) who exists without citing the Bible or any other religious text, and we’ll have a conversation) - then please provide corroborating evidence from a reliable source.
Also, ya know, I wanna see all the proof, teh science/physics, etc on how you proved both God and Jesus are both real and Jesus died and resurrected 3 days later. The water and wine business, healing of the sick, the fiches and loaves….
Prove it. With evidence.
But I don’t believe that Jesus resurrected or turned water to wine or healed the sick or fed people magic food? Why would I try to prove something I’m pretty certain didn’t happen? I’m confused about what we’re arguing about at this point.
Or have you spent this whole time thinking that I’m a Christian? Like even though the parts where I was saying “yeah, obviously that supernatural stuff is bullshit”?
I’m a lifelong Agnostic who if pressed would argue that we’re in a simulation. I just think studying the Bible academically is really fun and spent years contributing to /r/AcademicBiblical discussing the topic with PhDs in the subject.
You’re going to have to look elsewhere if you want someone proving the Christian mythos to you.
You were arguing that religious myth books were accounts of historical fact, so go on and prove it.
All of your blathering is meaningless without links to evidence from reliable, established sources.
Fixed your strawman for you.
You mean like the four links I already provided indicating that there were traces of historical fact in the Bible?
If you just want to argue around a strawman binaryism if your own projected claim that the Bible is inerrant, have fun, but I’ve got better things to do.
Fwiw, I appreciate what you tried to do. I enjoy reading about the facts that people manage to separate from the fiction. Religion shouldn’t be a thing, but even if all people stopped believing in it, the texts shouldn’t be destroyed like some people would want. I find that silly… hating something so much… it’s energy better spent elsewhere
Honestly if people stopped believing in it the academic study would shrink but improve so much.
A lot of the field is kind of crap and deserving of skepticism, with too little effort to correct for anchoring and survivorship biases.
But yes, sometimes I can find that discussing the academic study of the Bible is as obtuse with some atheists as with evangelicals.
I don’t take it personally though. It’s not a dead religion and a lot of people have trauma relationships with the subject because of things the live remnants of the traditions do. I was fortunate enough not to be born into it and to have spent most of my childhood not even knowing who the heck ‘Jesus’ was supposed to be. It was a huge advantage personally and a huge advantage in seeing past the bullshit when I got around to reading the material.
Not everyone was so fortunate, so I generally have empathy for those who take that more close minded approach even if I do my best to provide the objective information relevant to the conversation.
Appreciate your comment though!
No. Just like when an episode of Star Trek mentions WWII, it doesn’t magically make Star Trek real, lmao