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]
This claim is based solely on the authority of only one witness whose honesty and integrity that I have spent quite a bit of time evaluating.
I have found him to be generally an unreliable witness so I doubt this specific claim unless and until collaborating evidence is presented
peace
PS notice how far afield we have drifted,
Remember this all started because I dared to suggest that perhaps folks here had rejected a straw-man instead of the actual Christian God.
But that exactly is what your claim has been in this thread. To wit:
So you pointed out upthread that the God taught in Sunday School lessons, to millions of children, teachings which shape their beliefs for a lifetime, is NOT the same God you believe in. So your claim is specifically that your conception of God is different from that of other Christians.
And then you reiterated that distinction. Although you made another big conceptual mistake in doing so, in assuming that atheists reject only one god and no others.
And then again, later:
Once again, you specified “my God” as distinct from that of every other Christian. You seem to assume that an atheist rejects the possibility of one particular arbitrary God, but not your special personal one.
Patrick did not miss the point that you made. Maybe you need to work harder to understand your own points.
Do you honestly think that adult Christians have the same level of understanding about these things as the children in a Sunday school? Do you honestly think that the beliefs of an adult anything have the same level of development as what they learned as a child?
I fully understand that atheists claim to reject all gods but this entire conversation began when it was demonstrated that atheists here had no problem with the God of the Cosmological Argument or the God of Panentheism/Pantheism, This observation directly contradicts that claim.
That was the point
peace
Are you one of those people who thinks the New Testament was written all at the same time some 500 years after the events?
So? I imagine you flunked history. Or did you just pretend to go along to get a passing grade? How many of us have actually ever talked to a holocaust survivor? Are you a holocaust denier too OMagain?
They don’t care. All the talk here about concern for the facts is just so much BS. I stopped pretending that they don’t get to make up their own facts.
Please present the objective empirical evidence for your claims.
Well you sure fooled me. You have no position on the historicity of Socrates either I take it?
What precisely is the criteria you employ when you do take a position on the historicity of some individual? Perhaps I just haven’t come across your answer yet, but do you also have no position on the historicity of Peter and Paul?
Actually, what was at question was your concept of God, which you have yet to share. Dare we hope?
It’s a little bit late now, isn’t it, to begin to pretend that the question makes no sense? [Given your demands for objective empirical evidence for the existence of Jesus, that is.]
Yes, the question makes sense.
Once again, exactly how many eyewitnesses were there to the Apollo 11 moon landing? Anyone?
Much more precedent for space travel then for creating loaves and fishes. You’re comparing explicable stuff with magic.
fifth,
You’re tripping over yourself.
I mentioned the bizarre story of the undead walking the streets of Jerusalem in the gospel of Matthew, and asked you if you believed it. You responded:
I have no reason not too my conclusion is based mostly on my confidence that Jesus is trustworthy.
That’s a non-sequitur, since the report comes from the book of Matthew, not from Jesus.
Then you asked:
Did you ask yourself the same question about Muhammad’s flight to heaven on a winged horse?
We have two ridiculous stories, each coming from a source of questionable reliability. You reject one and swallow the other hook, line, and sinker. Why? Because no one has offered you “specific evidence” that the undead didn’t walk the streets of Jerusalem.
Where’s your “specific evidence” that Muhammad didn’t fly to heaven on Al-Buraq?
Why the double standard? (No need to answer — it was a rhetorical question.)
You aren’t evaluating the evidence fairly; you’re just looking for excuses to prop up your irrational, pre-existing Jesus beliefs.
Very black and white world you “live” in Mung.
No, that’s not actually the question. That’s not what happened in the beginning of this thread.
Fifthmonarchyman stupidly stated that atheists are not rejecting his god but rather some strawman version of it.
When corrected, xe created the entire “I believe Jesus is Lord” series of bible-banging comments.
Which just goes to prove that xe was wrong in the previous (stupid) statement that atheists reject a “strawman” version of christianity’s god. No, we reject the exact specific version of christianity which fifthmonarchyman preaches: we reject categorically any definition of “lord” or “god” such that Jesus could possibly be identified as “lord” or “god”. We absolutely reject the bizarre concept of the Trinity. We do in fact reject the exact basis of all christian belief.
And this is true whether we accept Jesus as a likely “historical” figure, or not. I find it completely reasonable that there was a rabble-rousing conman named Yeshua ben Yosef wandering around Palestine circa 30CE (just as conman Joe Smith did in New York circa 1820). I find it plausible that a couple decades later, folks who had been overwhelmed by Yeshua’s charisma and by their own weaknesses would magnify his words in their retellings until he seemed larger than life, and perhaps even divine. But that doesn’t mean I accept that Yeshua was actually divine, anymore than you accept Old Joe as divine.
Now, if fifthmonarchyman, or you, wish to explicate your special snowflake concept of god without throwing all your fellow christians under the bus for their “Sunday school” belief in god, feel free. Then we’ll see if any of the skeptics agree or disagree with your proposed concepts.
Instead what we get is an endless game of Whack-A-Mole from the christians.
God is the unmoved mover.
OK, but that’s not the god you worship in your churches.
Well of course not, we worship Jesus The Lord.
But that’s stupid, because you have no evidence of Jesus being anything other than a normal human, if he even existed to begin with.
Of course we have evidence he’s special, died and was resurrected. Says so right here in this bible.
Uh, you do realize you can’t use the mere existence of your text as evidence that what is in the text is true?
You atheists are just afraid to admit that Jesus is Lord and that’s why you invent conspiracies about our text being full of lies
Umm, no, dude, calm down. There aren’t any black helicopters flying overhead.
Besides, you already admitted you believe there had to have been an unmoved mover, and you already admitted that’s god. So why do you pretend to be atheists?
Oh, yeah, back to that unmoved mover thing again. Urggh.
If that’s ALL you mean by the term “god” then, yeah, I guess most of us aren’t True Atheists ™ But we’ve been here before: we already know that’s NOT ALL you mean by the term “god”. So howsabout you explicate your whole concept of “god” and we’ll see if we disagree with it or merely with a strawman version of it.
Too complicate for you to understand, and you would just reject it anyways, so what’s the point. Jesus Is Lord Amen.
Believe whatever you like.
Tell ya what, why don’t you atheists go first. Tell me what aspects of god you don’t believe in, and I’ll tell you why that’s only the stupid Sunday School version of god and my god is so so much better and deeper and more complicated than that
No. You started it. You go first. If one of you theists could ever come up with a coherent concept of god …
It appears to me that I live in the kind of world where people will do or say practically anything to avoid even a hint that God might actually exist, including denying that Jesus existed as a real historical person. Bizarroland.
No, I am talking about eyewitnesses. We have Neil Armstrong testifying that he was an eyewitness to Buzz Aldrin walking on he moon and we have Buzz Aldrin testifying that he was an eyewitness to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
Apply just the right amount of “skepticism” now and you can call into question the entire moon landing.
I understand and accept your inability to perceive nuance.
Indeed.
In tens of billions of human lives, currently and in history, those are two completely separate questions. Does/do god(s) exist? Not remotely the same question as: Did a being named Yeshua ben Yusef live and die in Roman-occupied Palestine circa 0-30CE?
Also separate questions: Given a yes answer to the reported/possible existence of Yeshua, was he the product of god raping Mary? Or was he conceived in the usual human way, with his lineage from the House of David coming from his actual human father Yosef (rather than from his “adoptive” father Yosef, which would never fulfill the prophecies)? Was he specially capable of working miracles like walking on water? Or are the putative miracles a bit of window-dressing to make the rest of the story more compelling? Was he miraculously resurrected to sit with himself in heaven? Why is the “empty tomb” considered to be evidence for a miraculous resurrection rather than evidence for the kind of event we already know might happen in the real world? Was he carried away that night to recover from his near-death experience at the home of a friend, or was his really-dead body removed from the tomb to be interred somewhere else, for someone’s personal or political or religious reasons?
It’s not the rational person’s fault that christians confuse those two issues.
It’s a fact that fifthmonarchyman is telling the truth for himself when he says “I believe that Jesus is Lord”. I can’t doubt that. What I deny is that his belief — or your belief, Mung — is evidence for the actual existence of god. That’s not me denying the possible existence of god! Separate questions, Mung!
I’m not threatened (and neither is anyone else, as far as I can see) by “admitting” the possibility that Yeshua existed as a real historical person. Since he was either Lunatic, Liar or Legend, why would I care? Plenty of those in history. It’s not at all bizarre to point out that within “Legend” there are two more possibilities: one is the kernel of an actual human having existed and his story being embellished beyond reality by later writers; the other is that is might have been made up out of thin air — which we know for certain has happened in modern times with Joe Smith’s made-up religion, and again with Hubbard’s made-up Scientology.
Pointing that out doesn’t mean that we are doing “practically anything to avoid even a hint that god might actually exist.”
If that’s your conclusion, your conclusion is factually wrong.
You should be raising this issue with fifthmonarchyman. He’s the one who highly values eyewitness testimony. Others give a lower importance to eyewitnesses.
petrushka,
Well, I responded in brief to you and KN yesterday, but the server cut out at that moment and 2 messages lost. Time is short for TAZ these days.
Are you Irish? Do/did you actually (still) sing the words to “Be Thou My Vision” in church or just hum along insensitive with the choir? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKByTfiHOFE
“Thou and Thou only first in my heart”
Yes, we have named eyewitnesses to the moon walks. Buzz Aldrin is still alive and Neil Armstrong lived until 2012. Any time you wanted to be “skeptical” about their eyewitness testimony, you could have arranged to interview them, to review the audio and video they recorded … and if you still didn’t believe them, well, fine. Not as if anyone has (reportedly) threatened you with eternal damnation if you didn’t believe them.
Contrast that with the supposed accounts of “eyewitnesses” in the NT. Not one of the four gospels was written by an actual eyewitness. The authors specifically tell us that they, themselves, were not there to witness the events they write about. (To be nitpicky, John does claim to have been one of Jesus’ inner circle, but we know that cannot have been true unless John lived to be one hundred, since John was written last of the four. Possibly John was a direct descendent of, or a student of, the actual “beloved disciple” which John pretends to be)
If you were able to arrange an interview with Mark circa 70CE when he wrote out his gospel, you wouldn’t be interviewing a possible eyewitness. His account might be second-hand or it might be tenth-hand. It might have been based on fragments written and preserved from during/right after the actual lifetime of Jesus (writings now irrevocably lost). We don’t have to assume it was a four-decades-long game of telephone with all the inaccuracy that would creep into that. But at best, it’s like believing the journalist’s summary version of events, which even if striving for fair and balanced might focus too much on the loudest nearby witnesses, rather than on the persons who had the most impartial overall view. Or maybe like believing the Hollywood blockbuster movie supposedly Based On A True Story!! When we’re interested in the truth, we can’t pretend that it’s actually an eyewitness account.
You know better.
While y’all are answering hotshoe’s questions, I wanted to add the question of what makes the people who claimed to have seen their hero bopping around post-crucifixion particularly ‘reliable’ (to use Fifth’ word). And did any of them check his pulse while he was still on the cross?
I can’t remember–was Peter supposed to have been one of those ‘reliable’ guys? (If so, that’s pretty funny.)
What do we know about the veracity or carefulness of any of these witnesses that goes beyond their own claims and the fact that you view them as being one of the ‘good guys’–i.e. the the fact that you grew up believing that you’re on their team? Why are they more to be trusted than the witnesses to Muhammed’s super deeds? Or to those who saw lotus flowers spring up instantly where the baby Gautama walked?
Do you really think that your view that your religion is the single special one has nothing at all to do with your upbringing and is based solely on your impartial consideration of all the evidence? Do you think that in full understanding of the fact that every believer of EVERY religion has precisely the same theory about his/her own? Doesn’t that give you any pause whatever?
Yes, we very well know that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and it’s good to keep reminding people of that so they don’t fall into stupid gullibility.
But even granting the possible worth of eyewitness testimony, the gospels don’t have it.
No direct eyewitness testimony survives about Jesus’ supposed life and/or death. At best, christians can claim that some fragments of eyewitness testimony written down at the time survived three or four decades to be transcribed into Mark and Matthew. But none of the gospels was recorded by an actual eyewitness and christians should not lie about that. It makes them look dumb.
Even fifthmonarchyman should be able to see that.
The existence of God does not depend on Jesus being a historical figure, only one version of God does.
But hotshoe, what you’re not getting is that their witnesses, along with the folks who later memorialized the claims, are extra-special. I mean, they’ve given us the one true religion, no?
I mean, that’s kind of a big deal.
I was in the choir, for ten years. I was not a member of the congregation.
Reality calling hotshoe_
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
You said that the God that’s taught in Sunday School classes is a strawman, therefore inaccurate.
And that the God that you believe in is different from the Sunday School God.
It’s a fact that most people don’t follow the same religious path over their lives. Most Christians don’t. There are many, many adult people calling themselves Christian who’s level of religious understanding has not changed much, if at all, since they were in Sunday school. If you deny that, well, then you’re in simple denial. By your standards, these people worship a different God than you do.
Also, even for a Christian, the pathways taken during the development of religious understanding are different for each person. Since you don’t believe in the same God that you were taught about in Sunday School, due to the particular pathway your religious understanding took, it’s a simple observation that people who took different paths will have different understandings, and end up worshipping different Gods. Different than yours, and different from each others.
There’s no way you can start out claiming that all Christians are taught the wrong God in Sunday School, and end up claiming that even most of them have ended up worshiping the right God, much less the same God. If Your God is the right God, then that of most other Christians must be the wrong God.
The Resurrection of the Son of God
The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach
Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity
Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making
Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts
Reality? Well, I think the whole impregnated-by-god thing is a tall tale. Maybe Mary claimed it to prevent Joseph having her stoned for infidelity because he knew he couldn’t be the father. Maybe no one at the time said it, but it was added later by the authors of a couple gospels to make their “hero” look more important. Similar tall tales have been told about the offspring of gods in most cultures throughout history, and the gospel writers would have know that was a proven tactic.
But if it were true that god impregnated Mary as the gospels report, then it was rape simply because Mary could not say no. She was never given the chance to say no in advance — she was informed that it was going to happen (whether she wanted or not). And though it’s reported that Mary went on to say “be it unto me according to thy word”, how could a helpless young woman from a backwater village say No to the Lord? She had no power, and god already had its plan to put into action. Sex without freely-given consent is rape. We don’t have to speculate where god’s penis was to to know that impregnating a woman without consent is rape, even if it didn’t happen to break her hymen.
It would probably not be called illegal so long as god didn’t incarnate to physically enter her, but it certainly was immoral of the Lord god to use an innocent young woman so.
Christians are proud of the most disgusting things.
How much does Amazon pay you for spamming these book titles?
The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
The Death of the Messiah, From Gethsemane to the Grave, Volume 1: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels
The Death of the Messiah, From Gethsemane to the Grave, Volume 2: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels
Not enough.
Evidence for the Historical Jesus: A Compelling Case for His Life and His Claims
Sigh.
A motivated book written by a christian theologian “to end the classic division between the ‘historical Jesus’ and the ‘Christ of faith’ proposing instead the ‘Jesus of testimony’. ”
Which Bauckham thinks he can do by claiming that the underlying sources of the various gospels were “transmitted in the name of the original eyewitnesses”. Big whoop! Says nothing about whether the “named” witnesses were telling the truth and nothing but the truth to begin with, whether the fragments compiled by Mark, Matthew, and Luke were “transmitted” correctly over four decades of being copied from hand to hand under abysmal 1st century conditions, nor whether we should trust that any pieces which the gospel authors did NOT have access to, or pieces that they chose NOT to include for some reason, would have given us a better overall view of their hero.
The gospels are still NOT eyewitness testimony, even if they were created based on (some) “named” witnesses, any more than a National Enquirer article is eyewitness testimony, even if it quotes (some) actual witnesses in its article.
And we still can’t go back and interview these hypothetical “named” witnesses to Jesus. Unlike Buzz Aldrin, about whom you can satisfy your reasonable skepticism at any time. And unlike the witnesses quoted in any National Enquirer article, with whom a qualified reporter can legitimately do their fact-checking.
Keiths here is some advise. If you want people to take you seriously you are going to have to quit making statements like this so quickly. I have seen you repeatedly say something similar with confidence only to have it refuted in the very next post. It makes you look silly
It’s not just me folks from your side see it as well
Do you even know what an apostle is??
quote:
And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach
(Mar 3:14)
end quote:
The apostles were Jesus chosen means of communicating his message to the world. The word apostle itself means a delegate; specifically an ambassador. The apostles were given the special unique job of being the mouthpiece of Christ.
When an ambassador speaks it is the equivalent of the King who sent him speaking, If you read something written by Mathew it is Jesus talking.
Now a honest debater would realize their error and apologize for his lack of understanding of what the Christian faith teaches and look for another flaw in the argument.
I won’t hold my breath
peace
Contemporaneously with the foundation of Christianity, there were about 60 other religions having the same key features. Divinely initiated pregnancy, death, descent into the underworld, and resurrection.
The story can’t be used as evidence that the story is true.
ALL,
I’m trying something different. In the interest of my blood pressure and cosmic harmony I am ignoring Hotshoe’s comments. If he says anything of value please re-post it so I will see it. Minus the trollish verbiage of course and I’ll be happy to respond
Thank you
This one was extra-special, petrushka. It’s like there were a half-dozen other political partes when the Bolsheviks took over Russia. They weren’t the biggest party either. But they had Lenin.
Those other 60 religions are like the Trudoviki or the Kadets. Gone. Moral: next time get a Lenin or a Paul. (And this is, obviously, a moral that can be extended to rock and roll.)
None of the gospels were written by any of the apostles. That’s fact agreed upon by essentially all secular and christian scholars of biblical history. The gospel of Matthew was written about 70CE, but perhaps as late as 100CE, by someone who had never met Jesus, much less been one of the anointed twelve apostles.
If your pastor is telling you otherwise, your pastor is lying to you.
So it’s just stupid and irrelevant of you to try to lecture us on why the apostles were important. As usual, non-theists know more about religion than the christians do. (Only the Mormons score better, on average, on the quiz about modern and historical religion.)
Perhaps Buzz is lying. Ya think we should torture him to find out? After all, all we have is his word for it.
I’m actually beginning to doubt whether Newton and Einstein actually existed. This “universal acid” stuff is great! I just knew I’d find something worthwhile to guide my life here at TSZ.
You gals should try it more often I think. Perhaps Gregory never existed!
Anyone can be hyper-skeptical about anything if they try. Just look at holocaust denial.
This is actually one of the stronger evidences for the truth of Christianity
Quote:
‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
end quote: CS Lewis
let that sink in
peace
Bless your little heart.
Yep, torture, it’s The Christian Way ™
Funny your mind should jump to that extreme.
Err, not funny, the other thing 🙁