As an atheist, do you still “acknowledge” Jesus Christ?

The Bible, read carefully, is a source of evidence--not because it's necessarily inspired, but because its claims can be subjected to critical examination, in the context of what we know about the times in which it seems to have been written. The New Testament is a compilation of serveral sources written at different times by different people--all Christians but with somewhat different takes on the figure they agreed existed. Your problem with it seems to be that it can't be trusted, since they're biased.propaganda, which it is. I agree, and that should be kept in mind when using them with caution. But they still can provide important clues about whether or not Jesus (and Paul) existed. As David Nicely nicely puts it, if bias were the decisive factor in rejecting sources, "we would know little-to-nothing about the past, because no one is truly unbiased." Why would anyone make up a crucified criminal messiah when it would make their story, as you say, a "hard sell" and they could have easily made versions that wouldn't be? To me, the simplest explanation is that there really was a crucified guy they had been following, and when He was crucified, they had to come up with an explanation. And why on earth would anyone make up Paul--such a complex figure who claimed originally to have originally persecuted Christians?

Where I suspect we really disagree in our outlook toward methodology is that you're holding out for something approaching proof, and I'm willing to use the same standard I apply to everything else I believe: Judgment, based on available evidence, experience, intuition and consideration of alternative possibilities. I don't think the standards of hard science get us very far in making many of the important decisions in life: choice of jobs, spouses, investments, voting, policy preferences, etc. Especially in such areas as ancient history, where the rigorous standards of even the social sciences are often of limited use, I follow the lead of most people in the field who do the best they can on the basis of the available evidence. As I've said, the existence of Jesus isn't particularly important to me, but in a field of competing views, I think going by the most likely inferences helps with clarity of thought.

That would seem to limit your role as a critic.

Please understand that I'm not claiming there is proof Jesus existed, regardless of what any of these writers might think. I brought them up to show what respected scholars who have spent large chunks of their lives studying the subject have concluded.I wouldn't know what an "indisputable fact" is. I can't think of one. I'll go out on a limb and say There's no such thing as an indisputable fact. Nothing is certain, not even that--except possibly my own existence. (yours, I'm not sure of, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). The Big Bang Theory? Evolution? Global Warming from human sources? The importance of vaccinations for combating Covid? There is solid scientific consensuses among mainstream scientists behind them, but there are scientists on the fringe who dispute them. There is a consensus on Jesus among mainstream scholars, but of course a small contingent of Jesus Mythicists who dispute it. Of course the scholars I quoted are giving their opinions, based on their knowledge and research. Their comments should be taken in the context of their assessment of the other side: the Jesus mythicists. These would include Earl Doherty, Bachelor's in history, who thinks that Jesus of the Bible was crucified by demons in another world; Robert Price, who seems to think Paul thought of Jesus as a purely ethereal being, although there is clear evidence to the contrary in his letters; James Allegro, who thinks Jesus was a mushroom (more accurately, one used by his followers); David Fitzgerald, a personable fellow with a bachelor's degree from Cal State, who relies heavily on the argument that famous people he thinks should have mentioned Jesus didn't; (how many famous people in the U.S. keep up on what cult leaders in the flyover states are doing?): and Dr. Richard Carrier, who has the most impressive scholarly credentials of the bunch, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a refereed book, but whose reliance on misuse of Bayesian statistics and comparison of the Jesus presented in the gospels, miracles and all, with the Rank-Raglan hero-type model of heroes real and legendary. As I've said, it's a judgment call..
..okay what is it? Anything in the archeological record, any primary documents or non religious secondary documents? [/QUOTE]

. Well, writers like Pliny the Younger ,Tacitus, Suetonius, and of course Josephus--all of whom lived within a century of the period in which Jesus is said to have been alive. They aren't contemporaneous, but closer than we have for many figures of antiquity. I don't put much stock in them, because they may be relying on Christians for their information-although Tacitus has a negative view of Christians.. And Christians like Papias, Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome, who were writing about Jesus before there was a New Testament. And Jewish and pagan writers near the time like the Babylonian Talmud and Celsus, who attack Jesus and question his paternity, but never claim he didn't exist. As for archaeology, we wouldn't expect a whole lot, and there isn't (assuming the alleged family ossuary discovered in 2015 isn't authentic). But there is some worth noting. One reason Price and other mythicists gave for dismissing Jesus's existence was that Nazareth that he was said to hail from didn't exist at the time. But archaeoloists Ken Dark and Yardena Alexander uncovered what is thought to be remains of Narzaeth. Other archaeology confirms that places like Capernaum at the time Jesus was supposed to have hung out there , albeit that his little or no bearing on whether or not He was. But at least the gospels are consistent with what we know about Galilee at the time. Thy weren't set in Never Never Land, as is the case for most ancient religious myths.

"irrefutable evidence". Heavens , no. I hope I've made it clear by now that all we have to go on is substantial evidence that convinces most (not all) reasonable scholars who have looked at it in comparison with evidence for the alternative. An Encylclopedia Britannica article on Egypt notes :"In addition to favouring large monuments and the elite, the archaeological record has other important biases. The formal cults of major deities and the realm of the dead are far better known than everyday religious activities, particularly those occurring in towns and villages, very few of which have been excavated. The absence of material deriving from the religious practice of most people in itself constitutes evidence suggesting both the inequality of society and the possibility, confirmed by other strands of evidence, that many people’s religious life did not focus on official cult places and major temples." Same goes for the Roman world. Julius Caesar was a Roman general who almost became a ruler of Rome and was later deified by the Roman Senate. Trajan was an emperor. Da Vinci had the advantage of living over fourteen centuries after Jesus when literacy was much more widespread. We can decide to limit our view of the ancient world to such figures, or see what sense we can make of others on the basis of the limited evidence available, which would surely give us a distorted view of the past. Plausible explanations of something as important as the rise of the world's largest religion would be avoided cuz there just isn't enough hard "irrefutable " evidence.

I've enjoyed our discussions, whether or not you exist. It helps to clarify my thoughts, even though both of us seem to agree it doesn't matter much in deciding whether or not the supernatural god man, as opposed to the crucified Galilean, existed, which would be the really important thing. but I think I'm going to have to call it off for awhile. I have a life and a wife and I think if we kept this up for the rest of our lives we'd still never agree.

 

Gravity is the word we use to account for a particular set of careful observations about the operation of the natural world. And the theory is empirically refutable. If we jump off the top of the Empire State Building, we'll probably make a big splash on Broadway. If no splash occurs, back to the drawing board! But really, many of the phenomena people used to think of as supernatural have been given scientific explanations.

By "any scientific theory", do you mean any consisting of empirically refutable propositions? So where would quasi-scientific metaphysical theories like M-theory with its multiple universes fit in? As secular humanist Bruce Mazet remarks, in Skeptic Magazine remarks. "there is no evidence whatsoever that this infinate number of hypothetical universes exist, and according to the the cosmologists who postulate the existence of hypothetical universes, there is no means to obtain any such evidence." The principle function of M-Theory seems to be to provide an explanation for the integrated complexity of the universe that does not involve an invisible intelligent designer. Scientists have learned that they can make more progress if they don't assume that phenomena are the result of teleological agency: deities, "ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night." "Supernatural" tends to be the term we use for such mysterious teleological entities that are as yet unexplained and for powers ike theirs that seem to exceed human capabilities . When we say someone has supernatural powers, we mean he/she has powers far beyond those of ordinary humans.and beyond explanation by existing scientific theories. Multiple universes are also beyond explanation by existing scientific theories. thy;r just not teleological--i.e., purposeful. Maybe someday we'll figure it out, but meanwhile I'd classify it as the first cousin of supernatural--metaphysical.

I prefer to bet on a mysterious teleological entity instead of M-theory, because that hypothesis is simpler than the complexities of multiple universes, and so, as physicists Paul Davies and Robert Spitzer argue, more in keeping with Occam's razor. Also, because it enables me to connect it to a system of meaning and morals that I've chosen to live my life by. All speculative.

I

 

"I am an atheist. I don't believe in about 2,700 gods. Christians don't believe in 2,699 gods, so their nearly as atheistic as me."
Ricky Gervais

 

[...

 

Yeah, obviously crucified victims were a dime a dozen. How many of them attracted a following after his death? Jesus is the only one I know of. (To be sure, we have Kersey Graves' , self-taught 19th century atheist pundit,"sixteen crucified saviors", but anyone who knows anything about ancient myths recognizes that not a single one was crucified. Some died accidental deaths, others died of old age, were simply murdered, or or didn't die at all) .The thing that made crucifixion a particular problem for Jesus' followers is that He was supposed to be the Jewish Messiah who came , not to die for our sins, but to liberate Israel and lead it to greatness. And for Jews, having him die on a tree was a particular problem, in light of the passage in Deuteronomy that a person who is executed that way is "cursed by God". Talk about hard sells! I doubt that the tear jerker aspect of His death would help, since crucifixion was commonplace and Messiah's weren't supposed to die. He'd seem like just another loser with messianic aspirations. So I ask again, why would anyone come up with such a loser as their candidate for Messiah when they could surely have invented someone more glorious?

What on earth does that statement mean? It is well -established that Christianity had a large and growing population centuries before it would have coercive resources to be torturing and killing anyone. From all reports , the early Christians were the victims of such persecutions, and they drew attention for facing martyrdom bravely. Sociologist Rodney Stark has employed social science methods to trace their exponential growth from the early first century through the fourth century. Amazing that so many would willingly become lion food for the sake of a made up messiah.

Your example of the Holocaust concerns an event in the 1940s, when there were professional journalists, investigative reporters, cameras, photographers, and other tools of scientific investigation that were lacking in the first century. Yet we still have Holocaust deniers. You keep using the standards of hard science to judge research on ancient history. For ancient history, the choices are: don't try it at all, or make the best we can with the sources available. How Historians Determine the Historicity of People and Events – davidmiano.net . If our primary concern is to avoid Type One errors (accepting something as true that is false), we'd insist on proof with hard evidence, primary sources, and contemporaneous materials. That unfortunately would usually restrict us to kings, famous people, and official versions of things, which would be a seriously distorted view of the past. (i.e., a Type Two error.) Most scholars in the field of ancient history settle for the best available substantial evidence subjected to rational analysis and "interpretation", which is ultimately a judgment call. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S106279870000329XThe scholars who study ancient figures like Jesus aren't ranting and raving, but are going on the basis of best judgments based on the evidence, submitted to academic peer review. The same can't be said for the Jesus mythicists, who favor polemics on the internet.

 

Really? What you're doing is merging the issue of Jesus' existence, which is the one I thought we were talking about, with the later portrait of Him in the gospels. I think He would be perceived as a loser and not the Jewish Messiah because the Jewish Messiah wasn't supposed to die and He did. And he died in a manner that Deuteronomy says would make Him cursed by God. The illustrious genealogy traced from David came quit a bit later--like about fifty years later![/QUOTE]

Seriously? Are you suggesting that the Christians (who originally were mostly Jews) made Him up just to piss off the Jews.

Once again, the early Christians were persecuted by both Jews and Romans. They didn't have the resources before the fourth century to suppress any sects, nor to be responsible for anybody perishing. Moreover all of those sects of the Christian religion--Ebionites, Nazoreans, Gnostics and Pauline orthodox Christians, had at least one thing in common: they all believed Jesus existed.

No, because it would be totally irrelevant. What are you trying to show here, and how do you think it bears on the existence of Jesus? Earlier I had the idea you were trying to argue that Christians made up their savior and primarily resorted to force to promote the idea. But we have clear records of the belief in Jesus from as early as the 40s, when Christians didn't have numbers nor resources to be coercing anyone. Your laundry list starts in the fourth century and includes gods and goddesses. Everybody knows Christian started persecuting people and other religions back then. What is the logic of bringing it up as a reason for thinking Jesus didn't exist?

Again the relevance of this escapes me. You concede persecutions and then we're talking about mass persecutions.The worst persecution, well-documented, was during the reign if Diocletian, Constantine's immediate predecessor. Constantine may have figured: if we can beat 'em, join 'em..

As for Tacitus, he is generally regarded as one of the greatest historians of the age. There were only a handful of them. Most historians are glad we have him, although they don't uncritically accept everything he says. The standards of ancient historians were less rigorous than for their modern counterparts. We may doubt the scale of the persecution, but most historians still believe that it took place. Who do you think would corroborate him? As a mater of fact, Suetonius has a similar account Nero 16.2. Charles Mercier is simply citing an article by Brent D. Shaw, a professor of ancient history at Princeton, late last year in Journal of Roman Studies, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution. I think the article has been effectively refuted by Christopher P. Jones who points to a methodological error in Shaw's analysis, He conflates the persecutions with the executions of Peter and Paul around the same time, and "fails to disprove Tacitus’ statement that, after the Great Fire, Nero ‘introduced as alleged defendants and subjected to the most elaborate penalties those hated because of their criminal acts, whom the people called Chrestiani’." https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...nt-shaw/72A73656C0F1372963C197F8945D38D3These can be regarded as ‘facts’." Tacitus hated Christians. Yet he not only mentions Jesus but gives a vivid account of their persecution. Why do you think this would this get him ahead?

Maybe so. We'll never know, and it has no bearing at all on the question.

Certainly not. We have no evidence of Merlin and Prester John, but we have Paul's letters and the epistles of other church fathers, the gospels, all those writings in the Nag Hamadi library, writings by Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, and Tacitus, the Babylonian Talmud, etc. One thing they all agreed on, despite their many differences: Jesus existed.

Jesus mythicists go farther than that. They claim that the evidence supports a case for His non-existence. I would claim that there is no "hard evidence' in the way I think you are using the term.

I thought I've been saying that all along. We have no "proof", just substantial evidence to think it's the likeliest explanation compared with alternatives.

And that may be why Jesus Mythicists argue the case so vigorously. But for Progressive Christians like myself, it doesn't much matter. All I care about is whether what I regard as the core values of Christianity attributed to Jesus are intact: peace, love, understanding and social justice. I call myself a Christian because I think those ideas are most forcefully and eloquently expressed in the Christian gospels. I remember once in church during the recitation of the Apostle's creed whispering to my wife; "I don't believe any of this stuff." She whispered back :"its just words."

 

Yeah, I have witnessed such so-called miraculous stuff which are called siddhis. So it is not a matter of belief but direct knowing.

But I don't consider them miraculous or supernatural because these abilities can be developed by anyone with the proper practices. So it is actually natural abilities that
come with the proper practices.

An aeroplane may seem magical or supernatural to some a few centuries back, but we know that it is just a natural matter of application of engineering knowledge and there is nothing supernatural about it.

Similarly are these so-called psychic abilities which comes with application of certain practices. People consider them supernatural because of the mystery surrounding it. But it is just not-yet-discovered physical laws in action, which will be probably uncovered by scientific research in the future.

Such abilities have been documented in the scriptures. However you can also see the Buddha and Ramakrishna prohibiting their disciples from the display of these abilities due to the detrimental effect on spiritual growth and strengthening of the ego (due to its attention seeking nature).

Buddha had excommunicated one of his disciples for such abuse of psychic abilities disregarding his teachings, while Ramakrishna removed the psychic ability of a disciple as he felt it could be a potential distraction.

Generally, it is the enlightened who are considered to use such powers safely, and at times some saints who are authorized by enlightened sages.

Vivekananda as a skeptical intellectual in his teenage years tending to materialism, was brought to the spiritual path by a display of such powers by Ramakrishna.

Neem Karoli Baba was another such enlightened being of the past century who used to attract a lot of people on account of such display of psychic abilities. Such display is perhaps useful in helping people convince that the material world is not the fundamental reality, a viewpoint reiterated by modern science as well.

It is possible that someone like Jesus existed considering the impact Christianity had on the warlike and materialistic Romans who eventually converted to it after centuries of brutal persecution of christians.

The whole aura of Jesus to a large extent depend on such miracles along with his teachings, and consequently most people perceive him as divine. If it were not for his
miracles, I don't think he would have attracted so much of attention to himself.

I would say many of Jesus's miracles have been replicated by the masters mentioned by me, and even more so. Hence I do not personally consider it very hard to believe that such a person existed.

I think Jesus designed Christianity as a system to nurture and develop enlightened beings similar to Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism.

But because of Jesus's death at a young age, the tremendous persecution the faith suffered initially, the unscrupulous editting of the Christian scriptures by the romans after they adopted it leaving it largely incoherent, Christianity was not able to fulfil its original promise or objectives.

However there are still Christian enlightened beings like the Christian Carmelite nun Bernadette Roberts who attained enlightenment by practice of Christian religious concepts, and who found Buddhist terminology useful in describing her enlightened state.

I had created a thread about her in the Christianity forum...

Bernadette Roberts on the experience of no-self

 

Could you tell us specifically what exactly these siddhis are like, especially the ones you personallly witnessed? Are you talking about levitation, mind reading , telekinesis, walking through walls, walking on water, etc.?

 

Actually Paul speaks of Him as a real person: a "man" (Rom. 5:15), "made of a woman(Gal. 4:4), with a living brother and associates. Paul acknowledges that there were Christians before him which he used to persecute and some leaders of which he continued to argue with. And regardless of when the gospels were written, there are parts of them (the existence of a crucified Galilean) which are plausible. And parts (the miracle-working god man, which are questionable in light of the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nothing extraordinary about Galileans being crucified by Romans.

 

Maybe so, maybe not. So what?

In terms of body count, I'd say the worst persecutions were conducted by atheist Marxist-Lenininsts: over sixty million and counting.

Again, so what? The components were written mostly in the first century, in addition to the ones that were left out. And they all agreed on one thing: Jesus existed.

Again this is an irrelevant point, except to help explain the intense dislike of Christians that animates Christ mythicism.

Oh, they do more than that. They put forward arguments to bolster the idea that no Jesus existed, although careful reading shows some of them will concede that--well, there might have been some obscure Jewish preacher by that name who was crucified by the Romans.

We keep going over this point, Meagain. I've never been asserting "conclusive proof",just substantial evidence. You have yet to explain by any cogent argument why anyone would make up such a figure as a crucified messiah when it went against the grain of what people expected for the Jewish Messiah and would cause Him to be considered "cursed". I wouldn't rule Merlin out, although I suspect he is more likely to have been a Pict or Celtic Shaman than a British wizard. But I can easily see why someone would have made him up. Sane goes for Bigfoot. Those photos of him convince me he was probably a hoax. Looks like a guy in a gorilla suit Jesus--not so much. But I try to keep an open mind. A determined skeptic could explain away just about anything he puts his mind to. I'm sure You're aware there are folks who dismiss the moon landings as fake, still believe in a Flat Earth, and think 9-11 was staged by the U.S. and the Israelis. Most scholars who have studied the matter (and whom you apparently haven't read), presumably reasonable persons, agree.And why do they do that? Where Jesus is concerned, most of the atheists I hang with have had bad experiences with toxic Christianity and are hungry for anything that will drive a stake through its heart.

You aren't convinced, which is your prerogative. The nice thing about substantial evidence is that reasonable people can agree on it while other reasonable people don't. But I really think we've reached an impasse, and I'm going to bow out before you bring up the Easter Bunny and the Loch Ness monster.

 

Agreed! And those are the more important questions. I tend to take a metaphorical approach toward those.

 

Oh, Meagain. In the immortal words of Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Brokeback Mountainountain, "I just don't know how to quit you." Just when I though we'd said our final goodbyes, you throw out some new statement that cries out for rebuttal. In this case, its: "Marx and Lenin never started a religion, are documented individuals, and their reality does not hinge in any way, major or minor, on how many people may or may not have been persecuted in their name." What's wrong with that statement? So many things.:

• It's non-responsive to the statement it was supposed to be responding to, which was "In terms of body count, I'd say the worst persecutions were conducted by atheist Marxist-Lenininsts: over sixty million and counting", which was, in turn, responding to your statement that :"The worst persecutions in history have been inflicted by only one religion in history." Now if you had said "the worst persecutions in history by a religion.." I'd have let it go.
  
• Even then, you say "Marx and Lenin never started a religion". This takes us back to an earlier debate we had once over the meaning of "religion". You're still clinging to an older structuralist usage that the sine qua non of a religion is one or more supernatural beings. That's one definition, which is legitimate. According to Webster', another definition is "a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith." Definitions aren't right or wrong, only more or less useful. Many scholars in the field have abandoned the structural approach for a functionalist one, or a "cluster" approach that makes it easier to explore similarities between Abrahamic religions and the so-called "godless ones" like Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism."
• This is similar to the changes anthropologists made when they went out to some South Sea islands and found societies that had no rulers. legislators or statutes.. Yet you could take a walk on the beach there late at night and not be afraid of being mugged. The older approach would be to say these were lawless societies, but anthropologists following Malinowski concluded they could learn more about how humans are regulated by trading structural definitions for functionalist ones accepting things previously thought of a just customs as the equivalent of our laws. Likewise, they decided that apart from having no deities, the "godless" societies had features that were strikingly similar to our religions, namely codes, creeds, cultus, and community.(Prothero, God Is Not One) It is in this functionalist sense that a number of scholars have concluded that it makes sense to speak of "secular religion", defined as "a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with religion." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_religionEric Voeglin, The Political Religions; Emilo Gentile, Politics as Religion; Roger Griffin, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion. A number of scholars have argued that Marxism-Leninism in particular is a secular religion (e.g., Paul Kurz, Murray Rothbard. Joseph Schumpeter) or a quasi-religion (John E. Smith, Marxism as a Quasi-Religion ) , although the true believers think of it as a science.
  
• Why do this? Because scholars think that secular and godly religions have so much in common. The Marxist-Leninist creed is dialectical materialism, which purports to provide a "scientific" theory of history (and by scientific, I mean something much stronger than the rest of us expect of science.) As Schmpeter puts it: "To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved." Krushchev was so confident in it that he proclaimed to the west in 1956 "We will bury you." Although he now lies mouldering in his grave, and the Soviet Union since dissolved, die hard Marxist still believe that one day it will happen.(Compare the belief of traditional Christians expecting the inevitable return of Jesus over two millenia after his death).Communists also have their code of conduct (strict party discipline: I will go where the Party sends me). Like the Christians of yore, they became notorious for ferreting out deviationists like Trotskyites, Browderits, Titoists, borgeois formalsits, etc.; they have their cultus, the parades down Red Square, pictures of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the Dear Leader evreywhere (the identity depending on the country concerned). And of course they had community. They don't call it "communism" for nothin"; collectivism was the name of the game. In this respect, they resembled early Christians, who actually practiced a purer form of communism.
  
• As for having documented individuals as their founders, no one would dispute that. And I would agree that it has no bearing on how many individuals were persecuted in their name. But I really don't think that Jesus's existence and teachings, factual or not , had any bearing on the persecution done in His name. After all , He was the Prince of Peace who preached peace, love and understanding And Christians didn't start persecuting anyone until about 400 years after He was supposed to have died. Surely, You don't think His existence "hinged" on the persecutions, since Christianity was well-established before Constantine and His existence or non-existence turns mainly on documents dating to the first and second centuries.
  
• Marxist-Leninists did and do persecute on a scale even far exceeding that of the Christians. Rudolf Rummell, the go to source on body counts, coined the term democide to designate such killings at the behest of the State. .He ascribes about 20 million of those to the Soviet Union and 40 million to Communist China. The latter is still at it, with the Falun Gong and the Uyghur Muslims.
  
• It's useful for atheists to realize that if and when they ever get rid of godly religion, they're not necessarily out of the woods. Secular religions have a way of rearing their heads ,in response to widespread human emotional needs for meaning, identity, and relief from existential anxieties. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, nationalism has been rearing its ugly head in Russia, Western Europe and the United Statesl And we're presently facing what strikes me as a virulent hybrid of secular and sacred religion: Christian nationalism. God help us!
  
• Okay, I'm done. Outta here!