61 – c. 113 Not a contemporary of Jesus. Jesus had been dead, if he ever existed, for 22 years by the time Pleny was born. Chronological order for the documentation begins with Pliny writing around 111 AD , then Tacitus writing in the Annals around 115/116 AD and then Suetonius writing in the Lives of the Twelve Caesars around 122 AD.
Pleny the Younger wrote 76 years after the death of your supposed Jesus friend. NOT A CONTEMPORARY OF JESUS. The letter is the first pagan account to refer to Christianity, providing key information on early Christian beliefs and practices and how these were viewed and dealt with by the Romans.[ It is a report about Christian behavior and beliefs. It is not a report about the existence of Jesus.
Stoning and uncertain. It is another claim, not evidence. What evidence do you have backing up the story of the stoning of Jesus?
SERIOUSLY? You want to assert that this is the same guy as the Christian Jesus?
" Sanhedrin 43a[77] relates the trial and execution of a sorcerer named Jesus (Yeshu in Hebrew) and his five disciples. The sorcerer is stoned and hanged on the Eve of Passover.[78]
Sanhedrin 43a tells of a Jesus (“Yeshu”) "offended his teacher by paying too much attention to the inn-keeper’s wife. Jesus wished to be forgiven, but this rabbi was too slow to forgive him, and Jesus in despair went away and put up a brick idol and worshipped it.
The identification of Jesus with any number of individuals named Yeshu has numerous problems, as most of the individuals are said to have lived in time periods far detached from that of Jesus; Yeshu the sorcerer is noted for being executed by the Hasmonean government which lost legal authority in 63 BC, Yeshu the student is described being among the Pharisees who returned to Israel from Egypt in 74 BC. Yeshu ben Pandera/ben Stada stepfather is noted as speaking with Rabbi Akiva, shortly before the rabbi’s execution, an event which occurred in c. 134 AD. These events would place the lifetime of any Yeshu decades before or after the birth and death of Jesus. NOT CONTEMPORARY. IF JESUS EXISTED, NO ONE IN HISTORY EVERY NOTICED HIM OR ANY OF HIS MIRACLES.
Nonsense. This entry has been acknowledged as a pure forgery since the 11th century. If you want to pretend your sources are valid please do some proper research.
Oh please. Once again Pliny was wriitng for advice on how to treat troublesome sects in the early SECOND CENTURY. (about 112CE) Nobody argues that christians existed. They are not EVIDENCE that your Jesus figure did. " As the Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus now in modern Turkey) Pliny wrote to Emperor Trajan around 112 CE and asked for counsel on dealing with Christians. In the letter Epistulae X.96, Pliny detailed an account of how he conducted trials of suspected Christians who appeared before him as a result of anonymous accusations and asked for the Emperor’s guidance on how they should be treated Pliny had never performed a legal investigation of Christians and thus consulted Trajan in order to be on solid ground regarding his actions. Pliny saved his letters and Trajan’s replies and these are the earliest surviving Roman documents to refer to early Christians"
Babylonian Talmund: A 3rd - 5th Century CE compilation of Oral and fragmented Jewish lore and law.
Oh FFS are you that deluded? Sorry ignorant? " Tradition ascribes the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud in its present form to two Babylonian sages, Rav Ashi and Ravina II Rav Ashi was president of the Sura Academy from 375 to 427CE. The work begun by Rav Ashi was completed by Ravina, who is traditionally regarded as the final Amoraic expounder. Accordingly, traditionalists argue that Ravina’s death in 475 CE is the latest possible date for the completion of the redaction of the Talmud. However, even on the most traditional view, a few passages are regarded as the work of a group of rabbis who edited the Talmud after the end of the Amoraic period, known as the “Savoraim” or “Rabbanan Savora’e” (meaning “reasoners” or “considerers”)." Courtesy Wiki
Really? The gospels authors are a matter of tradition, not fact. The earliest “Mark” could not have been written (by an anonymous Greek copyist/author) before 70CE. The other synoptics copy most of Mark (which incidentally has been extensively altered and extended over the centuries). “John” we know was written by up to 4 authors over an extended period dating from about 90CE onwards.
Of course it does most of it was interpolated altered, translated, retranslated and bowdlerised for the last two thousand years by clerics with the main game in mind.
I will summarise: There is not one contemporary (to his alleged life) reference to a Jesus figure as described in the Gospels. NOT ONE.
This god sure does appear to condone it . It’s clearly offered up in the story in the first place as an example of Lot’s wonderful hospitality to his guest and shows why we shouldn’t adopt the morals of ignorant people from the past. The same people that equate homosexuality with a sin worthy of death thought that offering up your virgin daughters to be gang raped was the right thing to do to spare your precious male guest. Many of the things the bible tells you to do would rightly get you in prison today, such as killing someone for gathering sticks on the sabbath or killing a woman who was raped if it’s thought she didn’t fight back hard enough. I also don’t understand how your all powerful, all knowing god doesn’t even know who is worthy to be saved and must be counseled by a human in these matters.
Argumentum Ad Populum. Which offers up nothing that I asked. You’re making more claims and going off of a shit Watchmaker Analogy with computers. Then you go on to use the Bible in your argument. Something that you were advised not to do.
Then you go on to downplay historical evidence that was proven by hundreds of historians. So comparing Jesus being real to historical figures like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is really absurd. We call that a Reductio Ad Absurdum.
You were asked to demonstrate with objective evidence for the existence of any known deity. Not proselytize your superstitions.
You made a god claim therefore you automatically accepted the Burden of Proof. Please do as you were asked as you have not offered any physical, circumstantial, contemporary, emperical, or objective evidence. This evidence is used in courts.
The Bible is a claim, not evidence. It is a fictional book that fails to back its claims.
I’ll ask again. What objective evidence can you demonstrate for the existence of any deity?
Can you summon this deity? Can heal the sick in Jesus’s name? Can you make the insane sane again? Can you drink snake venom without dying? Move mountains? Can you demonstrate miracles as stated in the scriptures of that fictional book of yours?
Oh that’s right. You cant.
If you are familiar with Hitchens Razor then you know “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Therefore I dismiss every claim and argument you try to convince me with until you can meet your Burden of Proof. The fact that you think arguing your beliefs to an Ad Nauseam will not give you results.
God sucks. His favoured people travelling and making sure they stay with his favourite folks following Jehovah’s “perfect” laws… (vs 12 “No. We won’t go into any city whose people are not Israelites. We will go on to Gibeah.”)
Judges 19: 22 While they were enjoying themselves,(T)some of the wicked men(U) of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, “Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him.(V)”
23 The owner of the house went outside(W) and said to them, “No, my friends, don’t be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don’t do this outrageous thing.(X) 24 Look, here is my virgin daughter,(Y) and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But as for this man, don’t do such an outrageous thing.”
25 But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her(Z) and abused her(AA)throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. 26 At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight.
27 When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. 28 He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home.
29 When he reached home, he took a knife(AB)and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel.(AC) 30 Everyone who saw it was saying to one another, “Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt.(AD) Just imagine! We must do something! So speak up!(AE)”
Ah,.the rancid smell of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy lingers in the air again.
Except that your goat herder mythology contains several explicit exhortations to kill all who do not conform. Exhortations that have been gleefully pursued by mythology fanboys across the best part of two millennia of European history. Your glib attempt at hand-waving away embarrassing facts won’t wash here.
The short answer to this: bollocks.
The longer answer: first of all, we know computers are human artefacts. We have evidence to this effect.
On the other hand, we have zero evidence that a cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology was responsible either for the universe at large, or the biosphere in particular. Instead, we have, courtesy of several million peer reviewed scientific papers from the relevant disciplines, evidence that testable natural processes, involving well-defined entities and interactions, are sufficient to account for vast classes of observable phenomena, including classes thereof that the authors of your goat herder mythology were incapable of even fantasising about.
Oh, and your glib, ignorant peddling of “randomness” merely highlights how excremental your inane apologetic vomitings are. First of all, what scientists actually postulate on the origin of life, is, as I stated above, that testable natural processes were responsible, in this case, chemical reactions, and the reason that scientists postulate this, is that life IS chemistry writ large. Millions of chemical reactions are taking place inside your body right now, and if some of those reactions stop, you die.
Furthermore, over 100,000 peer reviewed scientific papers from the prebiotic chemistry literature, document in exquisite detail the experiments demonstrating that the chemical reactions postulated to be implicated in the origin of life all work. Furthermore, that literature is now covering experiments with synthetic protocells, in order to illuminate further the likely pathways that led to life emerging from chemical reactions.
As for your nonsense about “randomness”, it’s obvious that you don’t understand how this term is used in scientific disciplines. Quite simply, a random variable is a variable whose values conform to a probability distribution. The fun part being that such a variable can behave in this manner, while the underlying mechanisms driving that variable are themselves well-defined and deterministic. Indeed, when scientists use the word “random”, they do so as a shorthand for the fact that they know, courtesy of relevant experiments, that several well-defined mechanisms can produce a given result, but that they lack the audit trail of data telling them which of those several mechanisms actually operated in a given instance. As a corollary, they model the result using a probability distribution, and a Markov chain process whose individual pathways have a probability assigned to them, a modelling process that has been extremely successful in several branches of science.
Indeed, every pathway in a Markov chain process is a deterministic process, but when several such paths lead from event A to event B. those different pathways are assigned a probability value, on the basis that [1] any given single transition from A to B can only involve one of those pathways, and [2] multiple transitions from A to B could involve any of the pathways in question. But I don’t expect mythology fanboys to understand elementary concepts such as this.
In short, your blather consists, at bottom, of “I can’t understand how testable natural processes can achieve the end result, therefore Magic Man did it”, a posture that is vacuous and intellectually bankrupt.
Indeed, not only have scientists constructed experiments demonstrating that RNA strands can be synthesised with ease, simply by allowing the constituent simpler molecules to come into contact with a catalyst (and montmorillonite clay, one of the commonest mineral substrates on the planet, happens to be an efficient catalyst for said RNA synthesis), but other experiments have demonstrated that those RNA strands, once they have been synthesised, undergo Darwinian evolution. I have the relevant scientific papers documenting these experiments in my collection.
Furthermore, containerisation of those RNA strands within lipid vesicles is also achieved with ease, courtesy of the fact that many lipid molecules have been demonstrated experimentally to arrange themselves spontaneously into organised structures, such as micelles, bilayer sheets and liposomes, and they require no other impetus to do this, than turbulent agitation of the medium in which they are suspended - in short, shake the bottle. The electrostatic forces between, and uneven charge distribution on, each lipid molecule directs the requisite self-assembly. But since you obviously never learned the basic physics involved, it’s no surprise to observe that you’re incapable of understanding any of this.
Indeed, if you suspend lipids in solution alongside RNA strands, then shake the container, some of those RNA strands end up being encapsulated inside the requisite lipid structures, which then act as selectively permeable membranes allowing some molecules from outside to enter, while screening out others. Again, all understood for decades by chemists. Once said encapsulation has taken place, those lipid structures act as filters keeping out deleteriously competing molecules, while allowing other molecules of metabolic interest to enter the structure.
Far from being “impossible”, all of the above has been demonstrated not only to be possible in laboratory experiments, but has been replicated numerous times by different teams of researchers. “I don’t understand the science” doesn’t invalidate the science, and doesn’t validate a cartoon magic man from a goat herder mythology.
As for cosmology, oh boy you’re in for a serious surprise when you learn what cosmological physicists are postulating in their recent scientific papers. But I’ll leave that for another time.
That’s for sure. I didn’t realize that it was a down right habit for men to offer up women to be raped in place of males in that perfect, holy of holy books. I mean WTF?
Which raises a huge and uncomfortable question in my mind. In those days and under those rules, who were treated better, a man’s wife and daughters or his slaves?
@Cr2187 I hope you understand that the evidence/argument to prove a jesus existed isn’t even circumstantial, and would not stand in a court of law.
At the very best, all that is available is the fact that some characters mentioned in the bible did exist. The Brooklyn Bridge exists in Spider Man comics, thus he exists?
And any account of jesus were written over a generation after his death. Is it really practical to believe that for a generation this telephone story did not get exaggerated, stories added and inflated?
And even if some dude named jesus did exist in that time, raised shit and was crucified by the Romans (which I can accept) that does not prove he performed any miracles or was the son of god.
And the Romans were known for generating a lot of records. I can access what Julius Caesar was thinking as he pondered crossing the Rubicon. Please think this through, that a civilization famous for records has absolutely nothing about this jesus? Just a mention on his movement many years later?
My friend, you have a long way to go to prove a jesus existed, and an even more difficult road to prove he performed miracles and was the son of god.
And please remember, the bible is the claim, not the proof.
Pretty much. Jesus is no more real than Ezio from Assassins Creed. Ezio Firenze is a fictional video game character that they inserted into historical Renaissance Italy dealing with real historical people. Which is historical fiction like the Bible.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath. @C2187 will make excuses in his head on how we’re wrong because of his indoctrination. He’s clearly not going to accept a rational argument on how there isn’t a grain of evidence supporting that his god or Jesus exists because he’s hung up on “the god of gaps” and a fuck ton of Christian propaganda that has got him programmed full of superstitious bullshit. I guarantee if he replies again he’ll go back to the same circular bullshit he’s been using and post more misinformation. I would not be surprised.
I have a question for you, believer: How can you bring yourself to love and worship a self-confessed genocidal murderer who feels entitled to burn alive anyone who does not cower in fear before “him” and obey his every command? This imaginary god of yours is clearly a narcissistic, sadistic, vengeful psychopath who belongs in a padded cell. Right?
This paper in the BMJ has a different take on the Lot+daughters story. Essentially, the authors argue that the story reeks of blame-shifting, or an ancient cover-up story. If the daughters got their father so drunk they could essentially rape him (ancient drug-rape, even), how come they could make his penis stay erect for the duration of the sexual intercourse, and make him ejaculate? This would have to have happened several times, as both the daugthers alllegedly got pregnant this way. The story just does not add up. But it gets very interesting the moment one consider that the story is really about incest and sexual abuse committed by the father to his daughters. And as we know today, it is all to common for rapists and child abusers to accuse the rape victim of “seducing” the rapist, thereby shifting the blame.
Who seduced whom in the biblical incest story of Lot and his daughters? The answer reveals an ancient cover-up ploy that is in use to this day
Incest that involves the sexual abuse of a child by an adult family member is sadly far from rare. Exact figures elude researchers, but studies suggest that the incidence of incestuous child abuse is far too common in Western societies.1–5 “It is incest itself—and not the absence of incest—that has been universal… in most places at most times.”5
Perhaps the first report of father-daughter incest appears in the Bible in the book of Genesis19. The seducer this time, however, is not the father, Lot, whose wife had crystallised into a pillar of salt, but rather the daughters, who conspire to extract their father’s seed. Their unconventional manoeuvre, today it would be labelled “drug rape,” is implicitly and partially excused by the Bible by their desire to fulfil the first divine/evolutionary decree, procreation
[…]
And, one could argue that when Lot’s daughters plotted to “make our father drunk with wine” they probably already had a fair idea of how he behaved whendrunk and could count on the predictable, sexually explosive concoction of Lot mixed with alcohol. Also unlikely is the story of the double instant impregnation, with only one nightly contact for impregnating each daughter. Usually, sexual activity has to be repeated to achieve pregnancy, sometimes over many cycles. So it’s much more likely that these pregnancies were the result of repeated incestuous activity.
[…]
If it was Lot who abused his daughters, why not openly place the responsibility of the incest where it belongs rather than pinning the blame on his daughters? Sadly, the cover up ploy, which the ancient biblical narrators choose, is as familiar as the act of incest itself. Abusive men have been shamelessly mouthing excuses throughout the ages. “It wasn’t my fault; it was she who seduced me, walking around the house like that. Besides, I didn’t do it, I couldn’t have, I was too drunk.” Lot may be a notorious villain and a sordid weakling, but he is still the nephew of the patriarch, who was the progenitor of the nation, and hence the noble name and family honour must be preserved. The way out of this dilemma is to shift the blame on to the women. Seduction, according to the Bible, is in their nature anyway (see under the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden, where Eve is blamed for seducing Adam to commit the original sin).
Every time I start thinking the bible can’t possibly be any more vile some new depravity crops up that I missed. Of course it’s way more likely that the father raped his daughters instead of the other way around. The sheer mechanics make rape more a male thing. Even if men do get raped it’s other men doing the raping. The whole story stinks. An older man so drunk that he doesn’t even recognize his own daughters is a piss poor candidate for a baby making session.
