What is Philosophy?
Is it “unintelligible answers to insoluble problems”? (Henry Adams)
Is a philosopher “a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there”? (Lord Bowen)
Is philosophy “a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing”? (Ambrose Bierce)
In a recent post a comment was made about how nice it was to have three trained philosophers engaged in making comments.
But is anyone else even paying attention? Does what these trained philosophers say even matter?
Isn’t it true that:
“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.” (William James)
“one cannot conceive of anything so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.” (Rene Descartes)
“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” (Bertrand Russell)
Philosopher: “someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about but makes it sound like it’s your fault.”
Can any of our trained philosophers even offer a defense of philosophy beyond “it pays the bills”?
More specifically, what is the value of philosophy for an atheist?
[Changed Ambrose Pierce to Ambrose Bierce. HT: keiths]
Redating the New Testament
See also:
Before Jerusalem Fell
Regardless of the dating of the Gospels, there’s still Paul’s letters to deal with.
Or do you all deny the historical existence of Paul as well? Lairs4Paul anyone?
Yeah, petrushka, it must be true because people believe it! What more proof could anyone ask for than that!!
Mung,
You are on a roll. literally reams of scholarly takes on the events surrounding the life of Jesus.
Of course nothing you post will be considered evidence. And the atheists with their hands over their eyes and fingers in their ears will tell each other that they are the ones who are rational and that folks like you and I believe things with out or in spite of the evidence.
They will probably continue say that no Christian ever had “any” objective empirical evidence that Jesus even existed
Bizarro world indeed 😉
peace
I have to say I find the non-straw version more bizarre than what I previously imagined. It just gets weirder.
I guess I have a minute so I’ll give you another poke
The first mention of the winged horse was the Hadith
Did you know that the Hadith was written more than 200 years after the life of Mohammad and he specifically asked that this sort of thing not be written?
Did you know that the Qur’an itself asks us Christians to judge it’s contents by the Gospel that we Christians possess? By that standard the Qur’an is a false book and therefore Mohammad is a false Prophet.
We Christians are told repeatedly by Jesus and his Apostles not to listen to false Prophets? That is the reason I do not accept the accounts of Mohammad’s night ride on a winged horse.
moving on
Peace
— C.S. Lewis, the idiots’ favorite idiot.
He was notoriously kind and generous with his time and money to the point of impoverishing himself (and therefore, a True Christian ™ unlike the ones we see nowadays) but he failed dismally to persuade his closest family and friends with his arguments towards christianity.
Do tell us why we should take C.S. Lewis the author of sickly children’s books as an expert on whether this “myth” actually “happened”.
Do tell us why we should believe him instead of, say, Stephen Hawking who with more intelligence explains that heaven is a fairytale for those afraid of the dark.
Christians 0 Atheists 1.
Try again.
FWIW, fifth, the other.guys aren’t that thrilled with your stories either. Maybe you could settle who the infidels really are with another crusade!
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
And I for sure can’t get away with quoting any of these authors. That would be appeal to authority!
Or here’s another one of my favorites: That was written by a Christian, so we can safely ignore it!
One might wonder why there is such a dearth of atheist research in support of the claim that Jesus never existed. I guess if you’re an atheist you can just assume that’s the case. You know, what with atheists being entitled to their own facts and all.
If Paul had remained content to be the Jewish man known as Saul of Tarsus the entire planet would have been better off.
To be honest, about half the letters attributed to Paul in the NT were actually composed by him, so he can’t be blamed for the whole foul mess of early christianity.
It would have been better if he had not survived the fit he had on the road to Damascus.
There’s an enormous body of research devoted to the historiography of Jesus. One can’t prove he never existed, but it’s pretty well demonstrated that there’s no good evidence he did. It doesn’t help that so many documents relating to competing religions were destroyed.
Pretty well demonstrated where?
quote:
These views [that Jesus did not exist] are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.
end quote: Bart D Ehrman
And you all are supposed to be the rational ones LOL
peace
So you believe Paul actually existed and you believe that he was who he claimed to be and you believe he had the experience he claimed to have.
What do you have in the way of objective empirical evidence for any of this? Why not just claim he was a liar who never existed?
Yes, I think you are being illogical.
You take the word of a single man, and you believe it to be true. Yet you reject the testimony of multitudes. Selective hyper-skepticism.
Strawman. I explicitly excluded attempts to prove jesus did not exist.
What is lacking is good evidence that the miraculous events in the New Testament actually happened. Or good, independent evidence that the stories in the NT are reliable history. Just not there.
If it was, you’d present it.
fifth,
Interesting how “specific evidence” suddenly drops off your list of demands when it becomes inconvenient for your position.
Someone doubts the zombie story in Matthew? Ask them for “specific evidence” that it didn’t happen. But if you doubt that Muhammad piloted a winged horse to heaven? No “specific evidence” needed. Just disregard the story. It doesn’t fit with your religious preconceptions, after all.
It’s a pitiful double standard, and it shows that you are not interested in looking fairly at the evidence — only in propping up your premature conclusions.
And by the way, why do you suppose that the authors of Mark, Luke, and John failed to mention the walking undead? Seems like that remarkable event would have been worth at least a sentence or two, doesn’t it?
LoL! Good one! Do you have a cite? Is that from one of his books or available online?
The oldest Christian document — the oldest surviving manuscript — is the Gospel of Thomast. Gnostic. 200 AD.
What would constitute good independent evidence to you?
1) We have a sworn enemy of the church (Paul) and someone who thought Jesus was insane (James) both being persuaded by the miracles to the point that they abandoned their previous positions and joined the movement that ascribed divinity to Jesus
2) We have Jewish critics of Jesus acknowledging the miracles.
quote:
“On the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practised sorcery and enticed and led Israel astray. [b. Sanh 43a]
and
· And a Master has said, ‘Jesus the Nazarene practised magic and led Israel astray'” [b. Sanh. 107b]
end quote:
Some critics were converted by the evidence of the miracles some acknowledged them but ascribed them to sorcery and magic,
No early critic we know of denied the miracles despite plenty of opportunity to do so
What more could you possibly want?.
Mung, fifthmonarchyman, and other religionists, years ago I and 500 other people eye-witnessed a flock of immaculately conceived, intelligently designed, specially created Pterodactyls flying around a volcanic mountain. One by one the Pterodactyls dove into the volcano and were burnt up and one by one they miraculously resurrected and flew off to the supernatural place called “Pteroven” to sit beside and become one, again, with themselves and their supernatural Pterodactyl Father, the Creator of everything, who goes by the name “We Are I”. We Are I is both a We and an I at the same time. The inerrant “Book of Supernatural Creation and Other Stuff by We Are I” confirms all that and more.
If you don’t believe me, do you have specific evidence to show that what I and the other 500 people eye-witnessed did not happen and that what I say about We Are I, the burnt up and resurrected Pterodactyls, and the Book of Supernatural Creation and Other Stuff by We Are I is not true?
You also claimed, and I quote:
Where has this been demonstrated?
Experts in the field disagree with you. So, not a strawman.
Surely not every christian is deluded or dishonest, but equally surely they have more motivation to spin the facts their way than a skeptic does. Their faith and their fate in heaven or hell depends on finding an “answer” which agrees with their personal religion. And even in Earthly terms, their livelihood certainly depends on sustaining the christian side of the argument, at minimum not conceding that the non-theist makes any valid points. That’s a powerful source of bias!
That doesn’t apply to me or any skeptic/non-theist I know. We don’t get fame, or money, or heaven or hell, as far as we can tell, from arguing what we see to be reality. We get some personal satisfaction out of arguing, or else we wouldn’t do it, but personal satisfaction is nowhere near as strong a motivation for bias as christian faith must be. We have no incentive to lie, to try to fool you, or to fall into bias without noticing the way christians do.
Why? Because hardly any atheists make a specific claim that “Jesus never existed”. Which is quite rational, because as difficult as it would be to prove that some guy existed in 30CE, it would be literally impossible to prove that they did NOT. What we can do, like any scientific or scholarly historical research, is hypothesize that he existed, and then predict what kind of evidence we would find if that hypothesis were true (eg contemporary mention of Yeshua by Jewish chroniclers of that time; Roman garrison mention of the uprising of the 500 zombies on the afternoon of the cruxifiction). Finding that evidence tends to confirm the hypothesis; not finding that evidence tends to disconfirm, but not prove the converse: that Jesus did not exist.
However, there are respectable secular scholars who make positive arguments from the text itself that the gospels were originally intended to be symbolic of cosmic truth rather than literal/historical narratives of Jesus’ life.
And then there are some like Robert McNamara Price (former Baptist pastor) who point out, quite correctly, the gospels are such a mess that we cannot rationally draw ay particular conclusion from them, that “… unless someone discovers his diary or his skeleton, we’ll never know.”
I particularly like these lines from Price:
pg 15-16
What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography
See also [not an endorsement]:
Jesus Evidences – The historical literary evidence for Jesus
Mung, if there’s good independent evidence for the miraculous events of the NT, pleast list it. That you fail to present it argues that it doesn’t exist.
Do you really want to endure another book spam? We can bury you on this one
check this out to get you started
expect more 😉
peace
Just list the evidence. I do not ever watch youtube videos for arguments. Not for any argument on any subject.
Just make an itemized list of the independent evidence. Stuff that could be presented to a jury. We can disuss later the quality of the evidence. But first let’s see the list.
Really? evidence please
The oldest manuscript of Thomas we have is from about 340 ce. We have a fragment from the gospel of John that is 200 years older than that. And Thomas is not Gnostic is mostly sayings from the canonical Gospels with some other content mixed in that is at most possibly Proto Gnostic.
It is amazing the straws that conspiracy buffs will cling to
peace
There is plenty of evidence for the historical accuracy of the New Testament documents. Time to move the goalposts again.
Google is you friend man I have no interest in spoon feeding you. This stuff is common knowelege if you really want to find it you will.
The video is an overview of recent scholarship dealing with the names of people and places mentioned in the canonical gospels compared to other ancient literature Jewish and gnostic. He compares name frequency found in first century ossuarys
The conclusion is that the gospels more reliably report these details than other writings of the time.
This is all rather scholarly, If you want evidence it’s definitely evidence.
It’s a cumulative argument If it was presented as a bullet point it would loose some of it’s overwhelming impact.
peace
Nope. Not “selective hyperskepticism”.
Just your strawman version of my clear (and repeated) statements that we have no direct evidence or actual eyewitnesses that Yeshua ben Yosef ever existed. If he did exist, he left us nothing of his own, no letters from him, nothing, There is NO “testimony of the multitudes” Only the writing of two or three men who themselves never met him but claimed to have met many other people who believed in Jesus. Did he really meet them? Did they really believe? Or was there a miscommunication (or deliberate lies) in that chain of supposed multitudes? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, which is why we should all be agnostic on the question of his real corporeal existence.
I’m perfectly willing to repeat that Yeshua probably did exist as a charismatic human — it’s my experience with reality that a legend is more likely to grow around a kernel of truth rather than being made up out of thin air. But “out of thin air” remains at least a possibility — as I already pointed out, you know it happened with the false “religion” of Scientology. And we can reject the probability (essentially zero) that Yeshua was god incarnate in a human body — we have heard that story hundreds of times before in other places and it never turned out to be true. Why would we think it was suddenly true in this case?
As for Paul, we have seven of his letters that scholars agree he wrote, that he signed, in which he describes himself as one of the later apostles of Jesus. Of course we don’t have the original papyri but we have copies of copies and accounts in other sources of copies that have since been lost, which is infinitely more physical/historical evidence than what Jesus left us. I don’t believe Paul was an apostle of an actual divine Christ (rather, that he was a deluded follower of a “normal” prophet), but I believe that he believed it — why wouldn’t I take his direct word that he subjectively experienced it?
It’s certainly possible that he was lying about everything he experienced, or mistaken, or whatever. But he makes almost no claims that are counter to our mutual understanding of reality. Beyond the fit on the road to Damascus, no miracles, not dialog with the devil, not appearances by angels. So there’s no particular motivation for me to doubt his existence or his word — they’re mundane.
You are inventing contradictions in my viewpoint that don’t exist so that you can claim I’m “being illogical”. No surprise, you’re wrong.
The problem here is that only you know what would meet this alleged challenge. I certainly don’t. It’s entirely too vague. Plus, your logic leaves something to be desired.
it’s from an article plugging his book that argues this point
from here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/did-jesus-exist_b_1349544.html
tee hee.
I can’t quote using my tablet, but Thomas has parts much older than 340. It is the oldest nearly complete document. And it is very light on miracles.
You don’t need to convince me. Just present your best case. An opening argument, an abstract. I just want to know what independent evidence you have for the miracles of the NT.
hah. You’d almost think I had read the article before asking. Made the connection to Obama and holocaust denial as well.
Thank you.
Nope. No surprise at all. We’re in “The Skeptical Zone.” cue music …
petrushka,
You’re going to have a very tough time making your case.
As Ehrman, who is not a Christian, says:
And:
What exactly does your request for “independent” evidence entail?
You want evidence independent of the one who performed the miracles and independent of those who experienced the miracles and independent of those who witnessed the miracles?
I don’t see the evidence.
I’m not aware of anyone claiming to have been a participant and leaving a first person account.
Bart D. Ehrman:
“Perhaps Buzz is lying. Ya think we should torture him to find out? After all, all we have is his word for it.”
No, Mung, “we” have much more than his or anyone else’s word for it. Millions of people (including me) watched the moon landings on TV as they were happening and in replays of the films, and they can be viewed again and again, along with the still photos the astronauts took. “We” also have the moon rocks that were brought back by the astronauts, and if you or anyone else don’t believe that the moon landings took place you can build a space ship, go to the moon, and see if anything from the moon missions was left there. The moon landings can be verified with specific, empirical evidence.
Comparing the alleged existence, actions, events of an alleged god or lord or messiah or whatever you religionists feel like calling it to the moon landings, in the way that you’re doing it, is just one of many desperately ridiculous diversions in your attempts to dodge the fact that there is no evidence for your or any other alleged god or lord or messiah, etc.
ALL you religionists have is appeals to nonsense and alleged authority.
I haven’t characterized anyone’s motives. But it is a fact that the Jesus story parallels that of several dozen religious figures.
There are more eyewitness accounts of alien anal.probes than of the life of Jesus.
petrushka: I don’t see the evidence.
You don’t see the evidence for what? Miracles?
petrushka: I’m not aware of anyone claiming to have been a participant and leaving a first person account.
You’re not aware of anyone claiming to have been a participant in what, a miracle?
You are willing to accept a subjective account? You”re not asking for “objective, empirical evidence”?
You don’t consider what happened to Paul to be miraculous or you dispute that he left a first person account?
Perfect!
I quoted three in this very thread,
Talk about head in the sand
yes mostly sections from the canonical gospels
We have almost an entire Bible from about that time
check it out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus
some quotes from the gospel of Thomas
quote:
30. Jesus said, “Where there are three deities, they are divine. Where there are two or one, I am with that one.”
77. Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.
Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
108. Jesus said, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”
end quote:
How gullible can you possibly be? Come on man this is not secret stuff
peace
Good for you. Call back in 2000 years and let us know how your religion fared.
I’ve had ephanies. Perhaps not as overwhelming as Paul’s , but pretty impressive. I know people whose lives have been screwed up by vonversion experience. I have a daugher with epilepsy and a nephew with schizophrenia.
Brain glitches are not evidence.