I guess they’re paying their weekly subscription so they can get into Paradise. After Life insurance baby 
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I have a lot to say about Greenleaf’s quote.
Thousands and thousands of people claim to have been abducted by aliens (in flying saucers?), yet this doesn’t constitute evidence that we are being visited by aliens.
In Amityville (on the south shore of Long Island in New York), there is a demon-possessed house that has inspired almost 70 movies and several books.
Thousands and thousands of people claim to have had supernatural experiences because of this house . . . yet it’s all bullshit.
The “Amityville Horror” was a cynical scam that was dreamed up over “several bottles of wine” to cash in with a best selling novel, and the scam worked.
Popularity and mass delusion do not equate with truth, as we tend to believe what we want to believe.
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Since when do courtrooms make judgment calls on claims for magic? The assertion is a fallacious appeal to authority, note a courtroom is cited as authority, and on claims for magic which they are not, and no evidence is offered, it’s just assumed to exist.
Why not just present that evidence here, well I think we know why by now, the gospel myths are anonymous second-hand hearsay at best, written decades after the events they purport to describe, and from an epoch of extreme ignorance credulity and superstition.
Couldn’t have put it better myself, and we can actually examine the claims and the people making them in your examples, unlike the anonymous gospel myths
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My response would be that the gospels are not first person accounts, they are reports of first person accounts and that’s hearsay and inadmissible in court. Simon Green doesn’t understand the way courts work. Or he’s lying. Lying for jesus is a pretty common thing!
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That is an excellent point that didn’t occur to me.
The Amityville horror scam shows that if people who are still alive (such as myself) and who live in modern times can be deceived by such a scam, then what of people in ancient times who were barely literate . . . and the event is recounted decades later from second or third hand accounts?
Jesus was sometimes described as a magician, and I think that this point is important.
Illusionists have existed for many thousands of years, and I suspect that many tribal shamans during the Pleistocene were illusionists who claimed magical powers and/or insights.
Magic tricks can be performed with the most mundane objects, as advanced technology is not neccesary to do interesting magic tricks.
I think it’s possible that a historical Jesus may have been a stage illusionist who used his magic tricks to gather a crowd for his preaching, as such a street preacher would have an advantage over most of the other religious crazy people who were common at that time.
Even today, some televangelists (Peter Popov is an example) do staged healings, where they miraculously cure paralytics in their wheelchairs . . . and all for the purpose of parking asses on pews.
I better shut up now before I get carried away.
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On the contrary evidence is foremost on our minds.
This also exposes the nonsensical and fallacious claim about a court of law examining the alleged evidence of the gospel myths, since there would be no one to question who actually saw anything, and of course courts don’t entertain claims about magic.
If I were found with a gun in my hand, and a dead body in front of me, riddled with bullets from that gun, does anyone imagine someone who’d been dead for decades, whose identity we can’t establish, claiming it was a miracle, would convince a court I was innocent?
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There is often a false dichotomy implicit (and occasionally explicit) in Christian messaging. The title of the apologist tome Evidence That Demands a Verdict for example overlooks that not all alleged “evidence” is admissible; the old CS Lewis false trichotomy that Jesus must have been a liar, a lunatic or the son of God ignores that he may not have existed or the tales of him might be embellished. Running through both of those examples is an implied urgency that you must make up your mind before it’s too late – the better to not think very much in the process.
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Indeed, I’ve expended column inches covering the gulf between whatever “historical Jesus” may have existed, and the assertions presented about this individual. Who may not even have been a single individual to begin with, but a composite character drawn from several of the extant apocalyptic preachers that were roaming first century Judea.
If we’re not even dealing with a single well-defined individual, then the whole of Christianity is built on a fake foundation to begin with. An idea that I can be certain mythology fanboys have never even considered to exist.
Indeed, first century Judea is beset with the difficulties of disentangling verifiable fact from mythological fabrication at the best of times. A situation that becomes orders of magnitudes worse, the moment supernaturalist gobbledegook muddies the historiographical waters.
As I have stated repeatedly in those previous column inches, mythology is not written in a vacuum, but the composition thereof involves so much embellishment and outright fabrication, that it simply cannot be trusted at face value. Mythologies ALWAYS need to be subject to rigorous external corroboration, and no, apologetics does not count as such. Apologetics is all too often a branch of myth making in its own right - the search for fabrications in a desperate attempt to prop up the original mythological fabrications, regardless of how absurd the exercise is.
Perhaps the best example of said absurdity, is provided by William Lane Craig’s fatuous response to the time travel question once put to him, where he openly admitted that he would trust mythological fabrication more than the data presented to him unequivocally by observational reality. Why anyone treats Craig seriously after that, provides an insight into the epistemological Cheez Whiz that is the entire mythology fanboy enterprise.
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Personally I think we are dealing with an entirely invented individual. For someone who should have had a profound impact on his generation there is zero attestation.
Besides, to whatever extent a real Jesus (Jesuses) might have started the ball rolling, the fabulist hagiographic formulations of the canonical gospels render he/them moot anyway. For all practical purposes, Jesus is pure myth. You can just about see him being formed and manipulated by the proto-orthodoxy in the pages of the NT.
People like Bart Ehrman who have devoted their lives to these questions paint a picture, not of an orthodoxy unbroken to Jesus himself, but of dozens of competing orthodoxies duking it out over the first 2 to 3 centuries. Many of these did not even agree on who Jesus was, or on basic questions like whether he was even corporeal.
It was only a fortunate alignment of forces that brought political power and influence to what we now think of as orthodox, creedal Christianity. Simplistically, we have Constantine to thank (or blame) for tipping the scales in favor of what we now think of as Christianity.
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This is it in a nutshell, the actual evidence he existed as an historical figure at all, is scant at best, that he existed as depicted is at best second-hand hearsay written decades after the event, and of course the claims for magic speak for themselves.
The really astonishing thing is that people think there is or even can be an historical criteria for supernatural claims, this is just laughable bias. Let alone that any court of law would enter any claims for magic as evidence, or even more hilarious here, anonymous claims written decades after the event, from an epoch of extreme ignorance credulity and superstition.
I always do a double take and wonder if such claims are a wind up?
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Anyone who thinks that YHWH “chose” them in any manner, needs to learn that said entity almost certainly chose them to be its pet monkeys for the shits and giggles.
P. J. O’Rourke summed it up … if the same god that inspired the Sistine Chapel and the works of Michaelangelo inspired the excesses of the American fundie nutjobs, said entity must be a real kidder.
Not even remotely true, no one knows who wrote the canonical gospels, they are (at best second-hand) anonymous hearsay, by definition.
However the problem doesn’t end there, as someone claiming to have witnessed magic would not be entertained in any court of law, so you have set a woefully low standard for the supernatural claims, and then managed to cite the gospel myths, which do not achieve even that low standard.
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