>>>/rel/

I'll do another one

"Muh criterion of embarassment"

1) Embarassing elements surely haven't deterred non-eyewitnesses for converting any more than they deter people today from converting.

2) People use these embarassing passages as proof that the story must be true. Why assume that the person who invented the story didn't place them there for that reason?

3) Some of them serve an obvious purpose: Peter's denial of Jesus reassures people before the possibility of faltering. Thomas' doubt is meant as a self-insert device (even the doubters ended up believing) and an obvious prelude to the gaslight-tier "response" to the obvious counter argument: "ok well Thomas was given some proof, but it's actually better to believe without proof". And so on and so forth.

4) Texts that the yahwist admits are fabricated contain obviously embarassing passages (Infancy Gospel of Thomas is one). Yet they are made up. Whether all embarassing passages are devices, or simply boil down to the author not being very smart, everyone can have their opinion I guess.

>>18677871
>>"People don't die for a lie"
do retards actually believe this?

>>18677871
>flying wizard battle
kek

>>18677888
Yes, it's one of the most common Christian apologetic talking points
>>18677887
Also, we need to remember that the authors likely didn't consider those details embarrassing given that Christianity already teaches that "the last will be first"

>>18677871
Enjoy hell!

"B-but Yehoshua fulfills the prophecies"

Yes, it is in fact fairly easy to embellish the life of an unremarkable character that no one remembers by inserting tales of him fulfilling ancient jewish prophecies. Or it should be easy enough. Of course, the gospel writers fail even that, as several examples illustrate.

1) The two donkeys: a prophecy in hebrew seems to say that the messiah will arrive on a donkey. It uses a common poetic device, and says "On a donkey - on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (implying the connector, 'that is to say", so to speak). The greek version of that text makes it sound as though the messiah will come riding on two donkeys: Lo and behold, Jesus does that very same thing, even that's obviously not what the prophecy says. Conclusion: the author wanted to include that bit and misread the old testament.

2) The virgin birth: though it is completely absent from Mark, a later gospel writer wanted to include this one. Here the old testament says "born of a young woman". The greek uses "parthenos" which usually implies virginity. Lo and behold: Jesus is born of a virgin.

3) Birth at Bethlehem: the author is apparently uncertain of how to fulfill the prophecy of the messiah being born at Bethlehem, and Mark mentioning Jesus "came from nazareth". Two authors invent two different stories, with Luke's being the more damning one. (there was no such census)

And so on and so forth.

So the topic of prophecies is also a fun one. Other stuff relating to it:

Mark has Jesus predict the destruction of the temple (yet another trauma to any jew) as a way of implying that everything is going according to plan, that Jesus predicted this, and so on. The very simple explanation, of course, is that it was written after the fact.

Matthew completely makes up a prophecy of his own, "he shall be called a nazarene" and has it fulfilled - it is absent from the Old Testament and he is probably trying to connect "nazareth" to the word for "branch" or messiah

>>18677917
> unremarkable character that no one remembers
The level of cope is astonishing

>>18677900
Yeah, the "it's embarassing for your messiah to be crucified" schtick is complete garbage. Being rejected by your people, suffering, etc. was already well connected to prophet and even messiah status. Even outside of judaism: it is a complete myth that the gentiles unanimously thought that all heroes were "strong" and "won". This type of thing is completely all over the mediterranean, and in judaism specifically.

As an aside, you also sometimes hear that "jews all expected a military leader, jesus completely subverted the expectation, no one could have made that up". It would be a shit argument anyway, but as it happens it is completely false, and this imagery was well entrenched, to the point that we can speculate today that this was maybe not even a majority expectation.

>>18677924
>>18677917
>" It uses a common poetic device, and says "On a donkey - on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (implying the connector, 'that is to say", so to speak). "
Case in point, btw, the donkey is precisely a symbol of humility. It is rather obvious that the jews didn't uniformly expect an outwardly glorious kinglike figure lmao. But really, that is all over the place.

This tension (between the obvious fact that the jews were not given any temporal power by god, and their belief that they had to have been given something in some sense) is pretty much the core of the old testament, and arguably of the new testament as well. It's just a story of sour grapes and denial before the obvious fact that there was no covenant and no "god" that favored the jews. The notorious motif of election of the underdog is what kept them going. It's there from the absolute start, when they have to explain that Yahweh picked them last, because they are aware that Yahweh is of course the storm-god of the Kenites, which they even include in Exodus.

By the first century BCE, messianism had already shifted in part (for educated jews, at least) to a messiah-logos syncretism, with a true adam/supreme angel/Logos figure representing the already-and-eternally-saved jewish people. It didn't actually even matter to people like Philo whether the messiah was "gonna come" or not, all these things were already realized. The ultimate cope.

>>18677952
Thanks for your informative posts anon. You seem well read!

>>18677921
Messiah claimants were a dime a dozen around 30CE, due to calculations from Daniel (a notorious and blatant forgery, and itself a cope), making Jesus, in fact, unremarkable in that respect. Jesus was pretty much the most common name at the time, making him yet again unremarkable. Josephus (your favourite historian) cites several Jesuses even among other rebels and prophets of the same time period. All this indicates that Jesus of Nazareth, if he existed, was one of many rebels/prophets named Jesus who were unceremoniously executed by the romans (not by the jews as John claims of course), and thrown into a pit, and that he wasn't a very important character as the only non-propagandistic source we have is Josephus (granting for a moment it's not *all* interpolation) who mentions a Jesus of Nazareth in passing, and who may have christians as his source. The gospels were written hundreds of miles away from Jerusalem, after its annihilation by the Romans. Functionally, we are in fact talking about an unremarkable character that no-one, and certainly not the intended audiences, remembered, and it would be astonishingly easy to make up small details, and everything you made up would be unverifiable.

Of course it's something of a hyperbole: when you die, I could say that nobody would remember you, though perhaps a small circle of people will. It would be more uncommon to die and have *nobody* remember you.

You didn't reply to the actual posts, because you know you can't.

>>18677888
Absolutely, it's right up there with Lewis' "trilemma" as the apologists' silver bullets. (Lewis' trilemma is also garbage, and the fact that a seemingly sane and honest man like Lewis proposed it is sort of poetic in a way, as it shows that you don't have to be a textbook "lunatic" to be completely incoherent on some particular topic, or a mustache twirling villain to be somewhat dishonest)

>>18678008
Lewis’ argument that “hell is locked from the inside” is also shit. People who reject Christianity only do so because they don't see enough evidence for it being true, they don’t believe it deep down and deny it out of pride. If given undeniable proof for it, then they'd accept it.

Also "being locked from the inside" implies it's possible to change your mind about God and get out at any time which of course is a stance that Christians reject. If you want to leave but are forbidden from doing so because of God's decree, then the door of hell is effectively locked from the outside.

>>18677983
cope

>>18678054
>People who reject Christianity only do so because they don't see enough evidence for it being true, they don’t believe it deep down and deny it out of pride. If given undeniable proof for it, then they'd accept it.
Theism is a gauge choice. The same complete history of events can be described in different metaphysical languages without changing the events themselves.

One may describe the causal unfolding entirely in terms of nature, matter, institutions, psychology, contingency, and human action. Or one may describe that identical unfolding as a single divine act appearing through those very causes. Nothing observable needs to be added, removed, or rearranged.

That is the analogy to gauge freedom in physics: changing the description does not change the trajectory.

So logic cannot rule theism out merely by giving a complete natural or historical explanation. “We can explain what happened without mentioning God” establishes only that God is unnecessary as an additional cause alongside the others. It does not establish that the whole causal actuality cannot itself be understood theistically.

Hence “there is no evidence” often really means:

“Nothing inside the field forces me to change gauges.”

That is substantially more modest than:

“The field contains no evidence naturally readable as divine dependence.”

>>18678054
>If you want to leave
I think you clean missed Lewis’ point of hell being locked from the inside as opposed to the outside.

>>18678054
It's even worse than that, as yahwists co-opted the idea of God as the Good (which is the only way they can avoid things like divine command theory or the other horn of euthypro's dilemma, see pretty much all scholastic and neoscholastic answers to that).

Obviously the very notion of "rejection of God" thus understood (necessary in the definition of the mortal sin, for instance), is completely ad-hoc and highly problematic. Nobody "desires" evil. Socrates and Plato proved it, Aristotle set out to disprove it yet famously failed, concluding that "judgment just is what is revealed in action": you do what you believe you ought to do. Even the chinese knew it (see Wang Yangming), pretty much all advanced philosophical cultures knew it: you can no more do something you consider not-good than you can believe something you consider not-true. Is this counterintuitive? Sure. It's also demonstrably true. Even Aquinas nominally accepted it, and it's highly likely this is the reason he didn't accept the "libertarian free will" defense of hell, but was rather evasive and seemed to settle on a sort of double predestinarian framework. He and thomists usually cope by saying you chose "a lesser good" (same problem arises: no one choses a lesser good qua lesser) or a "prudential good" (yet if this prudential good is not already dictated by the good, how can virtue even begin?)

Then comes Cajetan, and he just decrees "your will" can be oriented to good or evil and that after death this becomes permanent. (again, a modern, ad hoc view of the will).

There is no philosophy behind it, it's just vulgar folk psychology meets revenge fantasy, cristallized in theological dogman.

I could go on and on about this, to be honest, but years of experience researching and debating that specific topic have taught me that it's way above the yahwist's paygrade.

Lewis is just repeating a tradition of intellectual laziness and making it sound profound. The idea didn't originate with him.

>>18678079
> what is conscience
Enjoy hell

>>18678089
You have no clue what you are talking about. Why don't you tell me what conscience is, and how it relates to the will?

>>18678105
Conscience is the will’s moral compass. A seven year-old could tell you that.

>>18677871
>God created the rainbow after drowning the earth

Oughtn’t water molecules and the curvature to the earth have the power to create a rainbow through nature’s patterns from the particles and voids there

>>18678069
is hell the equivalent of a cold shower then? where it’s a bit uncomfortable at first but then you get used to it and don’t wanna leave?

>>18678155
Nah

>>18678110
I wouldn't lift my theory of action from seven year olds, but anyway. I'll assume that you are defending the view that it is possible to go against our conscience, that the will is different from conscience, and that the latter is the former's compass. I think I'm doing justice to your stance by saying that conscience is what judges, and will is what does (since it is customary to name "will" whatever enacts).

On the vulgar conception, right choice is a composite where the former faculty judges, the latter enacts the dictates of the former: right choice consists in actually doing what we think we ought to do.

Yet we have supposed that on that model, it is possible to to act according to your conscience or not. We have to ask if those are choices as well.

Anyone, on that model, would obviously consider deciding to follow one's conscience a right choice. But for it to be a right choice at all, remember: it has to stem from the adequation of conscience and will. It is thus not possible to choose whether to listen to one's conscience at all. You would have to listen to your conscience to even rightly decide to listen to your conscience. Hence, either you can't rightly decide to follow your conscience at all (we can explore the consequences of that, but I doubt you want to defend it), or you are always following your conscience, and we have shown what we needed to show.

>>18678237
not that anon, but isn’t the conscience often something that imposes itself upon us? We want to do X, but thoughts enter our minds from without telling us that it is a bad thing to do and instead we should do Y

>>18678237
I think there is a deeper insight hiding inside your regress. I think you are reaching toward non-closure of choice, but expressing it as a logical paradox about conscience.

Your key intuition is good: if the will must first “choose rightly” to obey conscience, what made that choice right? Another prior judgment? Another choice to obey that judgment? You can recurse indefinitely. There is no little sovereign chooser behind the chooser finally saying, from nowhere, “I choose the Good.”

But then you make an unnecessary leap: therefore one must always follow conscience. That does not follow. A person can judge “X is morally right” while desire, fear, habit, appetite, anger, social pressure, etc. condition action toward Y. Conscience and enacted choice need not coincide.

The deeper resolution is not conscience = will. It is that neither conscience nor will closes a se (c.f. aseity).

Conscience arises through perception, moral formation, reasoning, memory, affect, circumstances. Will arises through those plus appetite, competing goods, habits, embodiment, attention, and so forth. The eventual action arises from the whole configuration.

So, if you are looking for the final faculty that independently chooses whether to obey the faculty that judges, you correctly are noticing that no one will find it. It never closes.

But that does not prove conscience and will are identical, or that people always obey conscience. It shows that choice itself is dependently generated. There is no homunculus behind the will making an unconditioned choice about whether to follow conscience. Judgment, desire, deliberation and action arise together through conditions, and the resulting choice is real without being self-originating.

“Nobody chooses evil qua evil” can remain true: someone normally acts under some perceived good—pleasure, revenge, safety, status—even while conscience simultaneously judges the act morally wrong.

Does this help?

>>18678059
You still didn't reply to the actual posts, because again, you know you can't.

>>18678264
Your atheism is a mere gauge choice Anon.

>>18677917
>Birth at Bethlehem
My pet theory here is Jesus wasn't born in Bethlehem, and the idea he was was made up some time after Mark was written, since it isn't mentioned in Mark and Paul never mentions it either. John doesn't mention it either, and given Matthew and Luke's accounts contradict both each other and the historical record I am inclined to think this was made up to make Jesus look like he lined up with Micha 5:2

>>18678255
>But then you make an unnecessary leap: therefore one must always follow conscience. That does not follow.

It follows from the assumptions that following conscience is a possible choice and a good choice. If at any moment in time we were not following our conscience, it would be impossible in that moment to rightly choose to follow it, which means it would always be impossible to rightly choose to follow it.

>A person can judge “X is morally right” while desire, fear, habit, appetite, anger, social pressure, etc. condition action toward Y.

Of course we have to be careful about what we call a moral judgment. Since it is in fact possible to say in inner monologue "this is wrong, yet I'm doing it" (this is the very root of the confusion about akrasia), my position is that this is not a moral judgment at all, here "wrong" is just a word, an attempt at capturing a nonrepresentational meaning in a representational context. It usually means "considered wrong", "conflicting with a code i profess adhesion to", etc. It doesn't mean that someone actually considers the action wrong, otherwise I still maintain they wouldn't do it. This is sort of what allows Aristotle to think he has proven akrasia, yet it's really just moving the goalposts to think this proves that.

As to the second part, to summarize I think that this central faculty, if one supposes it exists, cannot coherently be "defeated" by pleasure, it can only choose it. What I'm saying is that all of these models of voluntary action collapse into one single central faculty, that if an action is said to be voluntary then it is the product of that one central faculty that is at once judging and acting.

But to be clear, I'm only entertaining these categories, I don't think they actually mean anything. I think deliberation is psychological chatter and that all actions outside of the vegetative functions of the body are voluntary.

>>18678286
I think “one central faculty” is where you unnecessarily stop. Why posit a central faculty at all? If what you call judgment and action ultimately collapse into the total operative configuration that produces the act, then inspect that configuration too. It opens into appetite, habit, perception, history, embodiment and circumstance. Nothing closes into a central chooser. You’ve correctly dissolved the little faculty that chooses whether to obey conscience; now dissolve the larger faculty you replaced it with.

>>18678252
That's one of the horns I didn't bother to explore, as weirdly enough no one wants to defend the "happenstance" flipside to the voluntarist conception of the will. Of course I'm being ironic when I say that it's weird: the idea that we choose whether to listen to our conscience or not is obviously penal in nature, used to separate the guilty from the innocent, those who deserve punishment from those who don't, etc. Yes, one could say that what we do just sometimes aligns with conscience. Here an obvious problem is that conscience is still powerless, it doesn't attract the will at all, acts just align with it. Or even that we stumble into the path of virtue for bad reasons, I guess. This creates a host of other problems but as I said I think that's besides the point.

The problem is much broader than that, and has to do with the fact that people labour under the illusion that they have two selves: one which can easily demonstrated to be value, or conscience, or God, and one, that we have hitherto called will, that sometimes controls and sometimes is controlled (yet decides when to control and when to be controlled, apparently).

But yeah, again for the purpose of the argument there is no need to get into that: if it is even *possible* to make a *virtuous* choice to become virtuous, then it logically follows that one is always virtuous in that fundamental sense.

>>18678288
yeah that's what I was saying, I don't think we have a central faculty at all. I would say that we ourselves are all this central faculty is, and that this self is itself not "me", simply the "I" of everything.

My last sentence in the post you're replying to is incomplete, I'm saying these action are voluntary, but that obviously since I don't think there are involuntary actions, that means nothing.

>>18678294
It does seem that human minds are composite and that perhaps the idea of the unified self/agent is a stumbling block here

But I mean as I mentioned, all of this happens because we completely confuse words like good and bad with lists of good and bad things, items in moral codes, memories of aversion or desire, etc.

If we remember that good just *is* what all desire then the problem completely vanishes. Unless, again, one wants to overtly make (as 14th century scholasticism did) man its own unmoved mover standing over "good" and "evil" and choosing from them, I guess.

>>18678298
Nice then. Does the cosmic “I” close in the way the little chooser doesn’t, do you think?

>>18678299
Composite is too weak. A swarm could be composite and still be imagined as a sealed generator. You probably are looking for the words “human minds are dependently generated” instead.

>>18678267
Yeah I'm not an atheist though, and in fact the very distinction between theist and atheist is completely artificial. Now whether you want to equate the Principle (Mind, Being, etc.) with an ancient kenite storm-god who incarnated-but-not-quite as a 1st century galilean rabbi and who stepped in to manually make the sun dance at fatima in honor of his virgin waifu, that might be a "gauge choice" for all I know and care.

>>18678309
Nah, that’s just you being a God-believing Jesus denier. Hell is hotter for such types.
> “His master replied, ‘I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant! You knew, did you, that I am a hard man, taking out what I did not put in, and reaping what I did not sow? Why then didn’t you put my money on deposit, so that when I came back, I could have collected it with interest?’
> “Then he said to those standing by, ‘Take his mina away from him and give it to the one who has ten minas.’
> “‘Sir,’ they said, ‘he already has ten!’
> “He replied, ‘I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me.

>>18678307
>Nice then. Does the cosmic “I” close in the way the little chooser doesn’t, do you think?
I'm not sure I'm really looking to "close" anything. The way I see it, there is no problem to solve. I'm certainly not interesting in going up a chain and hoping I'll find some entity there.

>>18678314
interested* lol

>>18678314
Why would enlarging “I” from the person to everything make it any less dependently constituted?

>>18678311
Yeah I really don't care about fiction though? Only interested in refuting bad arguments.

>>18678316
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "dependently constituted". I mean my answer as I understand the words would be that it's not constituted at all.

>>18678299
>It does seem that human minds are composite
Why does it seem that way to you? Human bodies are composites. "Human minds" are not a thing, mind is mind. The world is composite, doesn't make the principle any less simple.

>>18678317
So you believe in the Creator and don’t recognize Him in Christ? And you’re western, not even Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, probably even raised under Christian grandparents? That’s pretty disturbing senpai

>>18678319
I mean: you dissolved the local “I” because no self-standing chooser can be found there. What exempts the cosmic “I” from the same analysis, or what makes “the I of everything” self-established in a way the personal I is not?

>>18678325
Yeah I reread one of your posts and I think I understand your question. Short answer, because this "I" is not a chooser at all. It is simply a name for interdependence, interpenetration, the unity of being, doing, and undergoing. The transformative instant that is the welcoming of the past by the future, something like that. That's just mind.
So to answer that post, I'm saying that there is no difference between coherent determinism and a coherent view of freedom. Circumstances explain other circumstances, this fact is what I call "I" or any of those other names. (I mean I'm not alone here)

>>18678332
such a chooser at all*
It is of course a chooser in the sense in which the law of cause and effect is a chooser.

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56 KB JPG

>>18678332
You passed the Nāgārjuna test.

In fact, I’d stop calling it a cosmic I because that suggests an entity you explicitly deny. Your “I” is basically a poetic name for dependent arising as a whole.

>>18678322
Why is it disturbing ? Yahwism has been running a shell game for thousands of years by trying to make the principle a localised actor with intentions, desires, interventions in the world (all the while thoroughly denying it wasn't doing just that), I thought about it and I saw through the charade. Do you really not understand how little sense it makes to say "being itself wants you to go to mass on sundays" or "the intelligibility of the cosmos specially caused a human body to be able to walk on water"?

It has also greatly hindered the theological/metaphysical development of western cultures. It has hijacked the "oceanic feeling" of many a westerner, forcing europeans into a cumbersome and irrational system of over-beliefs that stunt their intellectual growth as much as it causes them to suffer.

All of that seems quite disturbing to me.

>>18678336
>denying it wasn't
claiming*
time to go to sleep

>>18678336
Calling YHWH a “localized actor” simply misdescribes classical theism. Classical God is not a bounded agent somewhere inside the universe. The claim is precisely that the nonlocal Source can genuinely know, will, and address without becoming another local object among objects. Why must intention, consciousness, address, and personhood become merely local downstream phenomena, while their ultimate Source is denied anything corresponding to them?
> Do you really not understand how little sense it makes to say "being itself wants you to go to mass on sundays"
Look, I’m sorry you were force-raised Catholic, but the Anglican Church doesn’t send you to hell for missing one.

>>18678340
>Calling YHWH a “localized actor” simply misdescribes classical theism. Classical God is not a bounded agent somewhere inside the universe.
I know that's what you think your religion can achieve, yet it can't.
Religion absolutely does require God to be "God of the proofs, plus something" at some point, and that apodeictically make their "god" in fact infinitely less than the God of the proofs.

>Why must intention, consciousness, address, and personhood become merely local downstream phenomena, while their ultimate Source is denied anything corresponding to them?
Simply because he is the source of them "being in" anything (or rather, anything "being" in them) by being himself those terms. It takes a person to have determinate agency. Personhood is not a person. Hence, God cannot do anything in particular. It takes a conscious subject to experience determinate intentions. Consciousness is not a conscious subject.

There is really no way to escape this. If God is said to "do" anything in particular, in any other sense than the sense in which causality or mind or intelligibility or Tao "do" anything, then he is effectively demoted to small g god by definition.

Or I could simply point out the fact that all of this plainly violates simplicity, you know.
>Look, I’m sorry you were force-raised Catholic, but the Anglican Church doesn’t send you to hell for missing one.
I was raised irreligious, many were not that lucky. I did flirt with catholicism as a 20-something contrarian larper.

>>18678352
>It takes a person to have determinate agency. Personhood is not a person. Hence, God cannot do anything in particular. It takes a conscious subject to experience determinate intentions. Consciousness is not a conscious subject.
>There is really no way to escape this. If God is said to "do" anything in particular, in any other sense than the sense in which causality or mind or intelligibility or Tao "do" anything, then he is effectively demoted to small g god by definition.
obliterated that rat lmao

>>18678352
>Religion absolutely does require God to be "God of the proofs, plus something" at some point
There aren’t any “complete proofs” of God. YHWH is the God of revelation. Reason can motivate faith, it can’t replace it fully. It still takes faith to act morally when the immediate situation would reward evil, as an example.
> There is really no way to escape this. If God is said to "do" anything in particular, in any other sense than the sense in which causality or mind or intelligibility or Tao "do" anything, then he is effectively demoted to small g god by definition.
That’s not airtight at all. There is zero reason at all that covenant would diminish the Supreme. Why do you logically think that?
> Hence, God cannot do anything in particular.
This has to be the (no offence) most baffling attempt to limit God ever. He is not sovereign in His own creation to do whatever He wants all the time?

>>18678359
>This has to be the (no offence) most baffling attempt to limit God ever. He is not sovereign in His own creation to do whatever He wants all the time?
Not at all. God's freedom is the fact that he is freedom. As in, the freedom of things, their autonomy, the unity of being and doing. Not an agent that constrains and changes them from without. Of course, you don't believe he is the God of the proofs at all, so you don't think he is Being, you think he is a being, a very powerful one.

But all I'm saying is that the omnipotence of the principle merely means that it wins within strife, for everything obeys it by existing, and everything desires it by moving. It does everything in general, and nothing in particular. The very fact that it can't do anything in particular is what omnipotence means, just as the very fact that it's nowhere in particular and can't be is what omnipresence means. This is only controversial because you are imagining a very powerful extraterrestrial, not God.

>>18678368
without strife*
should have gone to bed when I had the chance

but yeah all in all I think you should read up (or even look within yourself) to understand what cultures mean by Principle. If you think there aren't proofs you're mistaken. They are a priori of course, because no one disbelieves in God, but they are sound. They just make all religions false is all.

>>18678368
> so you don't think he is Being, you think he is a being, a very powerful one
That’s absurd. I believe God is ipsum esse subsistens. Literally everything you posted is wrong.
> The very fact that it can't do anything in particular is what omnipotence means
What a weak form of “omnipotence”.

>>18678372
> They just make all religions false is all.
Roadmap the proof if you can.

>>18677871
>Baha'i or their teacher, or to Joseph Smith
These people were tortured and killed for not denying something they knew was a lie?

>infinitely more likely than a resurrection
If you apriori think resurrection is infinitely unlikely, yes. But that's not an argument. That's just you stating your bias.

>"son of man" (a name for a supreme angel or agent of creation in late second temple judaism, often a synonym for the cosmic embodiment of the jewish people, the messiah, or the logos of greek thought)
That reminds me of this very particular rabbi....

>>18678440
I just actually read OP’s fud, I notice the low quality right off the bat of his research when he thinks Joseph Smith died like an apostle lmao

>>18678440
>These people were tortured and killed for not denying something they knew was a lie
Being martyred for your faith doesn't vindicate it's truth. Otherwise nearly every other faith would be true as well. Do you understand?

>>18678876
We're discussing someone knowing for a fact a statement is false but enduring torture and death to maintain that it's true. That's what "People don't die for a lie" means. I don't think I've ever met anyone unaware that people can be tricked into a false cause, the argument is specifically about Apostles.

>>18678905
You're missing the point. If you believe in something that's not true and you're willing to die for it, that still doesn't mean it's true. Christians try to spin the atheist argument into something easier to refute. They think that it goes like
>the apostles didn't actually believe in the divinity of Christ and their faith (not the typical secular claim btw)
>well nobody would get tortured for something if their belief is insincere, that means their religion is true

>>18678917
>If you believe in something that's not true and you're willing to die for it
Right. Which is why I specifically pointed out to you that we're discussing a scenario here where one's belief isn't just untrue, but it is known by the person to be untrue.

If your sole contribution here is "people can die for a lie", it is accepted with 0 objections. And 0 concessions, too. Because that's simply not the goalpost.

>>18678925
NTA but the apostles don’t “prove the faith” by dying for it, they just prove their own sincerity. That’s enough. Joseph Smith didn't, he went down defending himself with violence.

>>18678933
Yes, nothing really "proves" faith, but as far as evidence goes, dying for something you know you fabricated is extremely unlikely.

>>18678948
>but as far as evidence goes, dying for something you know you fabricated is extremely unlikely.
And almost nobody is making the argument that was the case for the apostles. I'm sure their faith was sincere, but being willing to die for it means literally nothing if you're trying to use that as evidence for the claims your religion makes. The only reason to even bring this up is if you wrongly think that martyrdom lends any believability to a religions truth.

>>18678959
Martyrdom doesn't lend believability. The apostles do. If you don't understand the obvious difference it makes as far as evidence goes, I'm fine to leave it at that. I don't concede and I hope you find someone who can explain it to you specifically.

>someone told me it's true and I'll die for it
>I personally know whether this is true or false and I'll die for it being true
some people really find this to be equal?

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>>18678966
>The apostles do
Because they were martyred while allegedly knowing Christ on a personal level. I'm familiar with the argument. You can admit you've backed yourself into a corner instead of smugly pretending you're above explaining your actual position.

>>18678974
I have explained my position. You insist on conflating the cases I'm talking about with cases I'm not talking about because they both fall under the umbrella of martyrdom. If it were a subtle error, I would probably assume good faith and explain it to you, but you've had every chance and you insist on your conflation fallacy. My hands are clean.

>>18678933
>they just prove their own sincerity
They don't. People absolutely have died for lies they knew to be lies and even if you make the bizarre claim that it has never happened (do you really think, for instance, nobody has ever endured torture and been killed while concealing an information they claimed not to know, or giving false information?), it is clearly outlined in the OP why this is perfectly within the realm of possibility. It is easy to explain.

We can explain why that would happen, we can't explain how someone would rise from the dead.

>>18678982
You won't because you can't. Not because it's beneath you or something. Why you fags come to a discussion board and then act this coy and womanly with discussion is beyond me.

>>18679059
>this is perfectly within the realm of possibility.
Nobody argued it was impossible.
>It is easy to explain.
Quite a deceptive "it". It is easy to explain why it could be possible. It is obviously a tad bit harder to bring up examples, seeing how OP messed up. It is harder still to explain how come a whole group of men went this rare route.

>We can explain why that would happen, we can't explain how someone would rise from the dead.
You've more or less summed up the issue here. No matter how unlikely a scenario might be, it will always rank above the resurrection in your likelihood estimation. You're basically just re-stating a bias.

>>18679066
It's not beneath me. It just proved ineffective. Your fallacy was called out and whenever you feel like reflecting on it, you may.

>>18678440
>These people were tortured and killed for not denying something they knew was a lie?
Yes, Baháʼu'lláh was given multiple opportunities to recant. He was by all accounts a wise and sane man.

>If you apriori think resurrection is infinitely unlikely, yes. But that's not an argument. That's just you stating your bias.
Yeah I do think it's unlikely as it has never been observed or reported outside of unreliable sources, and there is nothing we know of that could explain it. Lying, on the other hand, has happened, as have conspiracies. It's not really that hard. Stop pretending this has to do with some unwarranted skepticism. If I told you I was abducted by aliens, and you didn't believe me, I could use the exact same sort of vacuous "argument" you're using. Yet you would be perfectly rational in assuming I'm lying, because that's more likely than me having been abducted by aliens, and we all know it.
If you're really making that argument in earnest I've got a bridge to sell you.

>>18679083
>Stop pretending this has to do with some unwarranted skepticism.
Stop pretending your conclusions are argument-driven instead of literally built in apriori into your worldview. You would literally have to reinvent your whole ontology to account for Christ defeating death. That is the barrier. Not the fact you've seen people lie lol

>>18679089
Why are you even using the "people don't die for a lie" schtick to prove the resurrection is more likely than it seems, if some things seeming more likely than others is just a bias according to you?

>You would literally have to reinvent your whole ontology to account for Christ defeating death.
I wouldn't. Even if Yeoshuah bar Myriam had risen from the dead, it would still be a natural event as it can be proven that there are no supernatural events. Some quirk of biology. Still don't believe it happened though, as there are still no arguments for it.

I would have to change my whole ontology to make way for a literal divine *intervention* (you know, causality itself becoming a very powerful cause among causes and whatnot) which is why I know these don't happen. Same way I know there are no square circles, and no "revelation" would convince me that there are - not because I would resist "having to change my geometry" to accomodate it, but because it would render the very criterion by which I am to judge said revelation moot.

>>18678966
>The apostles do
Let's grant that for a moment. What is your source of direct eyewitnesses risking their lives or losing it for refusing to deny the resurrection of Jesus? Because of course, as pointed out in the OP, not even the propagandistic works of fiction you rely on mention anything about that, you know. So I'm curious where you get that idea from.

>>18679110
> would have to change my whole ontology to make way for a literal divine *intervention* (you know, causality itself becoming a very powerful cause among causes and whatnot)
You never justified this (why you think particular covenantal acts violate omnipotence/universality/whatever) still waiting >>18678382

I always find it weird that christcucks use magic tricks as proof of christcuckery (they always do, since even the resurrection is a magic trick), yet in their headcanon even bad guys do magic tricks, and the rabbi explicitly warns that the uber bad guy will come and do magic tricks and says not to fall for it

>>18678268
Of course he wasn't. Now whether that makes Jesus historicism more plausible or Mark (the obvious source for the Nazareth) a retard is up to you. But it's obvious that Matthew and Luke are trying to explain away the fact that either Jesus was from Nazareth, or it had been said (by Mark, maybe by others) that he was from Nazareth.

the absolute state of christcucks itt lmao

>>18678440
>>18678905
There’s not much good evidence this even happened to the apostles

>>18679160
I mean I'm sure Mark is a retard but Nazareth is less of a stretch to me than Bethlehem. I'm inclined to believe Jesus not existing at all would create more problems than it would solve, but I'm open to the idea he's a composite of multiple people.

>>18678905
Joseph Smith was making it all up yet he chose to die rather then admit he was wrong

>>18679192
Nobody would die for a lie except for the hundreds of radical Muslim suicide bombers

>>18679194
Also the Manicheans. They were persecuted by both Rome and Persia. Those guys (including Mani, the founder of the faith) martyred a lot.

>>18678382
>That’s absurd. I believe God is ipsum esse subsistens.
You might, for all I care. That's a thomistic formulation, and I take the thomists' interpretation of it. Thomists famously deny that God is the very being of beings, but rather insist he is the "cause" of the being of beings, which in some mytsterious way means he *also* is a being in some eminent way. (see the whole debate with Bonaventure and the 20th century condemnations, or the difference between analogy of attribution at analogy of proportionality)

Now of course the thomistic understanding of the proofs (which most modern neo scholastics are unaware of) make them an unwarranted jump and a god of the gaps argument: we don't know what is the cause of being, why not say it's some cause that possesses being in an eminent way? It becomes apparent that "ipsum esse substistens" is now just a name for "some really important being". All of this is done to avoid precisely what I'm speaking of, and the church has thoroughly tried to silence everyone who agrees with what I'm saying (Eriugena, Eckhart, etc.) because it's a slippery slope.

The thomist's understanding of God as the cause of "common being" makes the proofs unconclusive, which is probably why you assume that there is no "complete proof of God". The thomistic understanding of the proofs, however, is original to them, and the fact that it does makes them gratuitous and inconclusive is immaterial. A lot could be say about how it surreptitiously sneaks the idea of God as a being right back in, but that's not the topic.

>>18678382
>What a weak form of “omnipotence”.
Not really. People like Plotinus wouldn't have batted an eye at what I'm saying. Nor would most non-retarded non-abrahamic metaphysicians. The principle just is the dynamis panton, causal power itself. Not some entity that possesses an infinite amount of causal power. To have it acting yet always "winning" because it's stronger just makes its "omnipotence" an arbitrary matter of fact, rather than a matter of definition. It declares it de facto rather than correctly recognizing that whatever we call God is whatever is de jure omnipotent.

I'm saying that the very *possibility* of God being thwarted is unintelligible, because he is by definition the principle of movement to things that move. There is no need and no possibility of a second act over against creation (this also violates simplicity, again), or exceptions "woven into the simple act of creation" (which just reintroduces composition at the level of design rather than at the level of action, meaning it's just a last ditch attempt as sweeping everything under the carpet, of putting narrative complexity into the box of simplicity while not realizing that undermines the very box itself).

>>18679256
I don’t care about all that Thomstic bullshit. I’m just letting you know that a node in the graph is not the same as the Generator of said graph, and the latter can be related to covenantally, and therefore your idea that omnipotence precludes this is wrong. You’re not smarter than the entire Judeo-Christian tradition. Don’t rope Eckhart into your bald heresy either, he worshipped God covenantally too and was a sacramental Catholic.

>>18679265
Your “causal principle” relates to me covenantally but doesn’t even talk to you. Cope and seethe.

>>18678382
>Roadmap the proof if you can.
I have outlined several throughout the thread. The proofs of God are all a priori reflexive methods of naming the most ordinary (both in the sense of order-giving and in the sense of common) fact of existence, or causality.

To say that "causality did this" is as trivial to say of anything as it is univocal to say of everything. To say that God *does* anything in particular means precisely that either God is inserting himself somewhere in a causal network to, say, make the sun dance at fatima, effectively requiring him to be an actor, effectively requiring him to have causal power and not just be causal power, making him a "what" and making any "what explains God?" criticism completely valid for instance - OR it means that God is an indefinitely condensed narrative complexity, that is not really the regularity and intelligility of the world, but a collection of exceptions (aka not simple), or maybe the regularity of the world with exceptions (aka composite). (this is what the least catholic philosophers are now trying to do, as they have correctly noted that God "dispensing with secondary causes" is completely question begging)

I don't think this is an exclusive "or", frankly, as I think it rests on an incorrect view from the beginning, it's just two ways of stating the same error.

All of that doesn't matter because if you think there are no "complete proofs of God", then of course what you're calling God is not God. You seem to think God is "intelligibility, plus something else". I'm saying that makes no sense whatsoever.

>>18677871
>going to hell for being a nerd
redditors are so fucking gay

>>18679270
>You’re not smarter than the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.
Depends what you mean by smarter. On that topic I'm obviously right, it's actually weird that only now the cutting edge of theistic philosophy is catching up. (see copes about "cambridge changes", christians flat out abandoning simplicity and classical theism, the panic over the "modal collapse objection": these are all partial and sometimes badly articulated realizations that there is a problem there)
It really is a pretty obvious objection. I mean it's not even one I should have to defend, the burden of proving that the God of the proofs can ever be identified with Yahweh, or that special divine acts are possible should rest entirely upon the ones making those claims, as they're the ones trying to add something to a framework that obviously doesn't justify it.

>Don’t rope Eckhart into your bald heresy either, he worshipped God covenantally too and was a sacramental Catholic.
Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter. I'm saying that he completely forewent the thomistic framework, did admit that God was the "grund", and his teaching were condemned for it. Whether he realized the implications of foregoing the "ens universalis" dodge is completely besides the point.

>I’m just letting you know that a node in the graph is not the same as the Generator of said graph, and the latter can be related to covenantally
That's just a bad metaphor, and question-begging.

>>18679270
>>18678382
>"I believe God is ipsum esse subsistens"
>"I don’t care about all that Thomstic bullshit"
its just painfully obvious you've just seen a couple youtube vids and are scrambling, my dude
maybe you're even asking an ai for all we know

>>18679290
Your “proof” is not a proof, it’s a logical fallacy which begs the “particular agency requires localization or limitation” question. Your assumption that “If God acts particularly, God must become a particular/local actor or acquire internal complexity” is doing all the heavy-lifting, and it remains undemonstrated.

>>18678368
> The very fact that it can't do anything in particular is what omnipotence means, just as the very fact that it's nowhere in particular and can't be is what omnipresence means
You are very confused. Omnipotence means God’s power is not exhausted or bounded by any particular act; it does not mean God cannot perform particular acts. Otherwise omnipotence would entail impotence: the power to do everything would mysteriously remove the power to do anything. Likewise omnipresence means God is not confined to one location, not that God is absent from every location. “Not limited to X” ≠ “incapable of X.”
> all I'm saying is that the omnipotence of the principle merely means that it wins within strife, for everything obeys it by existing, and everything desires it by moving
Everything obeys God by existing, but not covenantally. Your position is transparent: wanting God universal enough to explain everything, but impersonal enough that He can never personally address, choose, command, or claim you. That’s deeply sinful and you should repent.

I may be done here because I can’t handle you projecting and insisting that I worship another node in the graph one more time. Forgive me. You know nothing of God.
> God, the Cause of all, is one. This does not mean one as in one of a pair, nor one like a species [which encompasses many individuals], nor one as in an object that is made up of many elements, nor as a single simple object that is infinitely divisible. Rather, God is a unity unlike any other possible unity. This is referred to in the Torah [Deuteronomy 6:4]: "Hear Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One."

>>18679110
>Why are you even using the "people don't die for a lie" schtick to prove the resurrection is more likely than it seems, if some things seeming more likely than others is just a bias according to you?
this lmao
christcucks are so fucking retarded and dishonest

this whole thread is hilarious I dont think ive ever seen christcucks getting clobbered that bad

>>18679336
Stupidity is often in the eye of the beholder

>>18679337
>t. failed to refute any argument itt

>>18679129
>>18679186
not those anons but still waiting for an answer to that btw :D

>>18679315
>Your assumption that “If God acts particularly, God must become a particular/local actor or acquire internal complexity” is doing all the heavy-lifting, and it remains undemonstrated.
My assumption is that God is creator, not modificator, because by my count that makes two mutually irreducible notions. Since he is the regularity and autonomy of creation, he can't be that "plus something else". I have explained at length what I meant by that, you're not engaging with any of it. And before you give me the "eternal present" stuff: yes, I know, you're gonna say you don't actually believe God reacts to the world and is a changing being in time (you probably do, though), it's just his one simple act that includes all this other stuff, blablabla. Already replied: the act is no longer simple. It is still completely missing the thrust of classical theology.

>Omnipotence means God’s power is not exhausted or bounded by any particular act; it does not mean God cannot perform particular acts. Otherwise omnipotence would entail impotence: the power to do everything would mysteriously remove the power to do anything. Likewise omnipresence means God is not confined to one location, not that God is absent from every location. “Not limited to X” ≠ “incapable of X.”

Yes, I am aware of the pleb conception of omnipotence, I know what I'm saying seems paradoxical. Let's go again, maybe with a different angle you can see it: if God is "capable" of something in particular in the sense that he could do it but doesn't, he's obviously composed. If we want to avoid that, then God is always doing every particular thing that he can do. This entails obvious absurdities. Hence God is not capable of anything in particular. You can come at this from any angle and it gives the same result: religion is a scam that piggybacks off of theology. Always has been, always will be. I know it hurts to see so plainly you've been swindled but just abandon the yahwist cope and live.

This is the definition of pearls before swine btw if you couldn’t tell

>>18679315
>Everything obeys God by existing, but not covenantally. Your position is transparent: wanting God universal enough to explain everything, but impersonal enough that He can never personally address, choose, command, or claim you. That’s deeply sinful and you should repent.
You are projecting your own anxieties and deluded categories onto me. Just say you can't argue against what I'm saying lmao. I mean really you should be the one arguing as my position is the default positions of the greeks that christian thinkers have plundered. See if Aristotle or Plotinus leave open the possibility of "intellect" or "the one" doing anything or "bypassing secondary causes" or whatever.

But you're not arguing, you're just repeating neo-scholastic refrains along the lines of "you misunderstand, God is not a node in the graph!". That's precisely the cake I'm saying you can't have and eat too. You're not actually proving you're not doing that, you're just asserting you don't, because Ed Feser and Matt Frad have not prepared you for the weaponization of classical arguments *against* religion.

>>18680111
wdym?

>>18677888
idk but yeah it's a common argument

>>18679315
>saying that the principle of determinacy does not act in a determinate manner is somehow a gratuitous assumption
wew

>>18680122
>Ed Feser and Matt Frad
lmao

>>18678356
>>18678352
samefag

>>18677871
Genuine question:
How would you respond to the first way of Aquinas?

>>18679339
Luckily most of them are strawmen such as "but it IS physically possible to die for a lie, knowingly!"

>>18681436
1) it is not only "physically possible", it is extremely easy to explain why that would happen, and as far as we can tell it is pretty common
2) no part of the new testament describes any "eye witnesses" dying for their belief of the resurrection. none.

the level of dishonesty is staggering.

>>18680128
Christfags pretend they don't have interest in debate when it doesn't shake out their way so they wipe their tears, take their ball, and run home.

>>18681515
>as far as we can tell it is pretty common
Do share the stats.
>no part of the new testament
Good thing I wasn't talking about the New Testamnet.

The level of dishonesty makes me clutch my pearls and piss my pants oh my oh my

>>18681419
OP here, I've already outlined my position in many long posts throughout the thread.

The gist of it is that "the first way of Aquinas" is really just Aquinas' preferred formulation of an old pagan argument. I of course agree with the core intuition of the argument (I agree with the core intuition of all five arguments, really), I'm just saying it has nothing to do with Yahweh. Note that it ends with "and this everyone understands to be God". Here again I am in agreement: the Principle is what everyone understands to be God. It just turns out this God can be demonstrated to be incompatible with the claims abrahamic scriptures make about him. Nowhere does Thomas successfully defend the claim that these two can be identified. It is also obvious that no one at the time would have

Now when I say I agree with the core intuition, I don't mean that I understand the proof as the later Aquinas said it should be understood. I have explained that here >>18679256 :
Thomas' understanding of the proof is not most thomists' of course (because they know nothing apart from pop apologetics and readymade neoscholasticism), so that doesn't matter.

But I mean just look at Aristotle (Thomas' source, maybe that needs to be specified) and see if he would've left the door open to miracles or revealed religion.

On a side note, you can also look at Aristotle's claim that the Principle moves all things "δὲ ὡς ἐρώμενον", "by being loved" and see what that means for most of christian soteriology.

>>18681532
>It is also obvious that no one at the time would have
said what I am saying now*

>>18681532
>Nowhere does Thomas successfully defend the claim that these two can be identified.
He does defend the claim that they CAN be identified since YHWH does claim attributes of the Principle. Though if you're looking for proof that this theoretical induction and his empirical findings MUST be one and the same, you'll be looking for a long time because we have yet to hook God up to a polygraph and besides this there are no tests. Some would say defeating death would be quite the datapoint though.

>>18681532
>On a side note, you can also look at Aristotle's claim that the Principle moves all things "δὲ ὡς ἐρώμενον", "by being loved" and see what that means for most of christian soteriology.
Also it should be said that Aristotle believed there were 47-55 prime movers

>>18681544
You can't possibly be serious.
>"He does defend the claim that they CAN be identified."
Yeah, key word in my post is "successfully". I am aware that Thomas defends the claim that they should be identified, and hence implicitly defends the claim that they can be identified. He has nothing to back that up though.

>"since YHWH does claim attributes of the Principle"
So? Anyone can write a book where their fictional character does a bunch of stuff and also say "by the way, I am Being itself": it is plainly a hijacking of an intuition that exists across all cultures.

>Though if you're looking for proof that this theoretical induction and his empirical findings MUST be one and the same, you'll be looking for a long time because we have yet to hook God up to a polygraph and besides this there are no tests.
Not necessary. We can dismiss talk of miracles and revelation through reasoning, I certainly have done so.

>Some would say defeating death would be quite the datapoint though.
Even then they would be wrong, see the above.

You're not really giving me anything here.

>>18681517
They are only interested in mocking new-atheist arguments from 10, 20 years ago. The minute they get obliterated like they got obliterated itt, they scurry and scatter like rats. Tiresome.

>>18681680
>He has nothing to back that up though.
>fictional character
>we can dismiss talk of ... revelation
Right. So to "back that up", Aquinas would have to convince you to accept revelation, convince you that the God he himself experienced is real, convince you the God he experienced is the one mentioned in the Bible and that the Bible is correct in recording previous statements.
Yeah, that's not really on Aquinas. That's on you desperately trying to find the "missing link" like when a creationist is denying evolution lmao. But yeah maybe you're right... Maybe Aquinas, one of the top Christians who ever lived, saw a totally different deity and had a brief exchange about his Christian writings for no good reason. I mean... Aquinas would have to prove that his experience is truly his and not an implanted memory. Where is the proof, Aquinas? You're not really giving us anything here.

>>18681805
Right? On 4chan, out of all Christian places...

This atheist is well-read philosophically speaking. It's kinda humiliating that christians aren't able to respond to what should be classical objections of their paradigm, even the Thomistic/Aristotilian stuff.
It makes theists, as a whole, look poor.

>>>/x/

>Aristotilian

>>18681881
Why would I know the spelling?

>>18681887
Cuz you're out here yapping about looks while evaluating philosophy that you can't even spell.

>>18681890
Eh, i always misspell. don't matter.
But thanks for the correction.

>>18681717
To back that up, Aquinas and thomists should have something like a rebuttal to the very obvious arguments that demonstrate the God of philosophy cannot be the God of religion, as the latter performs priviledged, special acts that have nowhere to insert themselves in the framework and implicitly collapse the whole edifice. They don't. Aquinas simply asserts that God's omnipotence means he can "bypass secondary causes". He simply invents a "higher order", and say that God "creates the order" of the world, thus relinquishing the God that the proofs establishes (who *is* the order of the world). He plainly and blatantly contradicts himself. He just completely equivocates the terms and surreptitiously reintroduces a God who is a super-cause, not causality itself. Of course, naming a problem with a latin name (potentia ordinata vs. potentia absoluta) is not equivalent to providing a solution, that much goes without saying.

I'm not asking for proof as if I thought that metaphysics could be completed by revelation but that christians have failed to provide the proofs for its specific revelation. I'm asking for a response to the argument that it cannot be so completed at all (which is the default position). And there is none.

>That's on you desperately trying to find the "missing link" like when a creationist is denying evolution lmao.
Nope. It's more along the line of someone claiming to have observed a square circle, and me proving that it's outright impossible. See the above.

>Maybe Aquinas, saw a totally different deity and had a brief exchange about his Christian writings for no good reason.
I have no reason to believe a story that plainly contradicts argument (and was made up decades after the fact for propagandistic reasons, and could be explained by mental illness even if the reported facts were true)

>one of the top Christians who ever lived
What is a top christian?

>>18681825
>This atheist is well-read philosophically speaking.
I'm an atheist is the sense in which Plotinus was an atheist. There are no atheists, really.

> christians aren't able to respond to what should be classical objections of their paradigm
I mean I agree that they should be classical objections. The thing is, though, history hasn't really given them any reason to be (because a nonreligious metaphysics was never allowed to flourish in the west, for obvious historical reasons - closest you get is Spinoza but you know). Before the 20th century, it's almost never really been question that proofs for God went hand in hand with religion, so that when religion was displaced, those who displaced it threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Neoscholastics are not used to being attacked "from above", so to speak. They can only argue against people like Dawkins, Hitchens and the like. They think they have solved the problem by simply saying God isn't a bearded man in the sky, and the debate has never quite reached the point where someone who understands the framework tells them that their Being acts an awful lot like a being, and is thus functionally an ethereal, ghostly bearded man in the sky.

I think it's coming, though.

Not really apologetics but a favourite of mine is the book of revelations. We clearly know now that it's absolutely nothing more than a jewish revenge fantasy against Rome, yet it's included in the canon and everything.

And no, it's not about "the world" or "the wordly powers", or if it is it completely cristallizes all of that on Rome. It predicts that the Roman empire will fall with its next emperor, and that the "woman clothed in sun" i.e. Israel (no, not Mary, not the Church: Israel) will prevail.

>>18682281
oh and also a big part of that is repeating an urban myth that Nero had faked his death and would return

>>18681531
Come on now. You have been given numerous examples, and have replied to none of them. I would personally add the chinese practice of ding zui which entails just that by definition (just here you have hundreds, likely thousands of examples). Your little gaslighting trick was dismantled and that's that.

You at least illustrate the fact that people are willing to get humilated on an anonymous forum for a lie.

>>18681531
>Good thing I wasn't talking about the New Testamnet.

Just what are you talking about? Propaganda written 100 years after the fact, that is even less believable and infinitely less widely believed than the drivel in the New Testament? Also, could you tell me which of them includes the following narrative:
>Apostle is threatened with the death penalty
>is offered the opportunity to be spared if he recants his belief in the resurrection
>doesn't
>is killed

>>18682363
>You at least illustrate the fact that people are willing to get humilated on an anonymous forum for a lie.
kek'd

>>18681552
wtf lol

>>18682606
Yes, he didn’t actually believe in a singular prime mover. He was basically trying to calculate the movements of the stars and planets and estimated that there were 47-55 prime movers who caused the movement of the celestial bodies.

>>18682649
>this is the guy who solved philosophy according to e-apologists

>>18682377
About the lives of the apostles. But now that you called it propaganda I feel my arguments falling apart and faith leaving my body wow using a loaded word is so effective what is happening to me...

>>18682686
Ok, so no source then?
It's crazy to think even in the apocryphal texts which again
>were written at least 120 years after the time period they are set in
>are acknowledged as forgery and fiction by the whole of christendom
>serve an obvious interest (as the NT does)
>are undeniably even more ridiculous than the new testament in their content
you still can't find a single instance of what I described. Really makes you think. Is it possible that even your belief that "direct eyewitnesses died refusing to deny the resurrection" (which would prove absolutely nothing, as was irrefutably shown) doesn't even rest on a shred of textual basis?

Do keep digging though

>>18682686
>my arguments
where are your arguments, christcuck? are they in the room with us?

>>18682742
Correct, no sources, I made the lives of the Apostles up. Good chat.

>>18683017
You do know this is part of a longer discussion where I challenged a statistical claim, right? I don't know what's in the room with you, but I suspect it's a bucket.

>>18677882
i would like to have such a board

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>>18677871
If Harry Potter isn't real can you explain how there were hundreds of wizards who affirmed he was the boy who lived? Why would Serious Black sacrifice himself if Harry Potter wasn't that important? We find much archeological evidence for castles existing around england to support this. The only reason you even exist is because the Harry Potter wizards make the world work, the only reason you can even have knowledge at all is because it's grounded in the magic of the wizarding world.
Now... we live in a fallen muggle world now so YOU can't do magic anymore because of past misdeeds other wizards did long ago... I, on the other hand, can do magic, but I can't really show you since it's a personal, spiritual magic and connection I have with the wizarding world you just wouldnt get, but one day Harry Potter will come again and enact infinite justice through one final expelliarmus cast and you will see. Oh, and if you don't believe this, you will be tortured by dementors in an evil magical eternal Triwizard cup Voldemort dimension forever btw (Enjoy hell).

>>18683074
Feeling lonely in your threads?

>>18683076
Enjoy hell.

>>18677871
Goofies man anyone who believes in celebrity worship such as the iconoclast apocalyptic preacher aka Jesus who wandered around until he was gang raped by Roman Jews fuck god not real all gay

>>18683020
>Correct, no sources, I made the lives of the Apostles up. Good chat.
It really shouldn't be that hard. Just show me the passages where a direct eyewitness is executed for refusing to deny the resurrection. I don't understand why you're making this so difficult, obviously you know your sources well.

>>18683074
also kings cross is literally a real place, you can go there and check

>>18683020
>You do know this is part of a longer discussion where I challenged a statistical claim, right?
nah you just grabbed ahold of the phrasing "pretty common" (can mean a number of things btw) to make it seem like you were making a point. you've been given examples, you're just ignoring them. people don't have to sift through millenia of archives to give you "stats", especially not when you've failed to acknowledge the many examples people have given you. it was just a woman tier, vacuous attempt at trying to have the last word.

>>18684052
>pretty common was meant mysteriously
>don't address it
I accept your concession.

>>18683605
I just told them I made the whole Tradition up. What is so difficult to understand? Should I use simpler words?

>>18684084
>capitalizing "tradition" for e-apologist points
lmao
I accept your concession that it's all fiction made up centuries after the fact
jokes aside though, for the sake of honesty you should probably also confess that you really thought there was a textual basis for those stories, looked for it, realized there wasn't, and just flat out gave up. confessing is good for the soul! :D

>>18684103
>you really thought there was a textual basis for those stories, looked for it, realized there wasn't, and just flat out gave up
This exact scenario happens with Christians constantly on this board and just like this guy they then pretend they are above the argument for several posts before running away. It's happened multiple times in this thread.

>>18684103
Yes, 20 centuries. I made it up.

Jokes aside, you over-estimate the amount of effort I put in here. The stories are true and when they were written down and by whom doesn't really matter, this is a consistent position on most texts within the Tradition. I gave up the moment I saw you're dishonest enough to utilize the optics of "but did they write it down right away tho". That kind of interaction is beneath me and is only good for trolling.

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>>18684128
>The stories are true and when they were written down and by whom doesn't really matter

>>18684854
>Anon first discovers oral cultures

Just another cult. You look at scientology and there is zero difference.

>>18684860
So all stories told via oral tradition are 100% historical?

>>18684948
100% every time everywhere by everyone, no exceptions

>>18684957
Based retard

>>18684124
not just on this board, everywhere. I've seen it in telegram chats, in academic debate, hell I've even seen it irl. they will be absolutely relentless when they can recite their e-apologist script, they can go on for hours and days or even weeks, make video essays, twitter threads about how they have all these proofs and arguments and people just aren't willing to engage with them because of muh modern pride or whatever.

the minute they are shown that it rests on nothing they suddenly don't care about philosophical or historical coherence, and they will gladly tell your that they're not protestants/literalists (pretty much the error message the computer gives you when you force it to go off script), and will mumble something about "tradition" or feeling the presence of Christ in the eucharist.

nigga who never heard of the Tradition is giving opinions on apologists lmaoooo

I think everyone here is fully aware of the concept of tradition, yes.

I mean it's still essentially a cope since to argue about anything tradition-related you should be able to at least give historical evidence (otherwise anyone can claim anything as part of the "Tradition", I can even say that the tradition has always said the opposite of what you're saying) or at least examine the consensus.

And in that case the consensus is that the idea that "direct eyewitnesses died for refusing to deny the resurrection" is an idea that was never clearly formulated before modern time. And in fact we probably know where it comes from (a 2nd century method of execution described by Pliny)

>>18685021
NTA but Stephen and James martyrdoms are attested in Acts. 1 Clement attest to Peter and Paul's martyrdom. And obviously Josephus attests to James (Jesus's brother) being stoned.

>>18684084
"Pretty common" means in that context "more common than you would think", "common enough", and is a perfectly valid way of conveying that idea in English. If we see a blood moon (and you say that proves the wrath of Enlil or whatever) and I explain lunar eclipses to you, saying they are pretty common, am I making any specific claims as to frequency? Am I saying they happen everyday or are the norm? .

I mean I know you're grasping at straws here because you know you've lost, but I'm spelling it out for you in case you really think you did something.

>>18677871
even if it were true, it'd be immoral to align with such an Evil god.

As for whether it is true or not? Well, it doesn't answer the question of "Why am I me instead of you?" so it instantly gets filtered.

>>18685054
Yes, you are making an imprecise claim about frequency there and that they are the norm. Whether the frequency is daily or yearly or whatever it does not say. Which is why "show the stats" is a valid request for clarification.

But kudos for taking it on the chin that you didn't know "common" denotes frequency and norm. Those are some of the word's absolutely key meanings.

>>18685040
>Stephen and James
Already adressed in the OP
>1 Clement
Does seem to imply that Peter and Paul were killed (more likely for Peter than for Paul). Certainly mentions that they suffered in some way or other, and that they are dead. Mentions nothing about them being killed for refusing to deny the resurrection.

imagine looking into the historicity of magic stories lmao

>>18685086
Hell yeah, OP. The texts need to record precisely the timestamp of their death and their position on each separate dogma up until the end. We cannot be reasonably expected to infer their faith from the fact that their deaths are shared with the believers in the manner that they are. Where are the sketches?

It's a moral question.

If you say that you agree with Christianity's morality and that you agree with the notion of billions of people burning in Hell forever, then you're already aligned with Christianity even if you don't believe it is true.

>>18685066
>Yes, you are making an imprecise claim about frequency there
Yeah, if you want to call it imprecise just cause I don't want to look up exact numbers for a phenomenon everyone knows is common, you can. It's still correct to call it common, though.

>and that they are the norm.
That something is common does not mean it is the norm. Lunar eclipses are common. You can ask anyone, ask an AI for all I care. They are not the norm though. Rolling dice and getting a 6 is common. Rain is common in London but it is not the norm.

>you didn't know "common" denotes [...] norm. Those are some of the word's absolutely key meanings.
Still factually false, see the above.
Common does denote frequency though. (of course, frequency is here merely understood as " the fact of something happening often or a large number or times" as per the cambridge dictionary)

Since you have been proven wrong on even that desperate and dishonest attempt to deny the very meaning of words while hyperfocusing on an irrelevant comment made in passing, would you like to get back to the fact that you have been proven wrong on the rest as well? Or would you rather keep pretending you're ragebaiting because you're above this exchange or whatever? (which I doubt is a good look for a very rational apologist of a very rational faith such as yourself)

>>18685114
This thread is about apologetics. It is about the validity or lack thereof of these arguments.

You can think what you want, though it's odd you're just asserting that a belief is 2000 years old if you can't give any reason that makes you think that other than you saw it on twitter, and if you're ignoring direct evidence explaining when and why it was fabricated.

But yeah, of course you're gonna say "my tradition tells me it's true". The question is whether you can use that argument to convince people outside of that tradition.

We have already demonstrated (with no counter argument offered) that the "people don't die for a lie" part is false, that's besides the point.

The point here is that you can't even show anyone any semblance of a proof that "direct eyewitnesses to the resurrections were put to death for refusing to deny it", and that you can't even show a single *claim* (I would wager, before the XVIth century) that this ever happened. This has been established as well.

Hence, it has been proven that the argument does not work, for two separate reasons. Will you stop using it?

>>18685388
>call it imprecise just cause I don't want to look up exact numbers
It's imprecise because "common" doesn't indicate any precision. That's just how the word works, that's not an attack on you my brother.
>That something is common does not mean it is the norm. Lunar eclipses are common.
And they are the norm. They happen with regular frequency. Maybe you just mistook "norm" to mean mode? As in the most frequent output?

I have no idea what that last bit was about but I would be much more interested to know how common you think babies growing into saints are. Maybe you think saints fall from the sky during Lunar eclipse?

>>18685450
>documented source from the era
>"otherthan you saw it on twitter"
Probably the worst faith post in this entire thread, I rarely do this but I did not read past that point.

>>18685452
>It's imprecise because "common" doesn't indicate any precision.
I'm agreeing with you, yes.

>And they are the norm. They happen with regular frequency.
"Norm" has little to do with the idea of regular frequency, so I don't know why you mentioned that. Lunar eclipses also don't happen with regular frequency.

A norm is a " type of behaviour that is expected and considered to be typical" (again, dictionary). So there are of course several ways of understanding that word, depending on how or to what I restrict the context in which I formulate my expectations (generally, that context is implicit).

Now if I make claims of chronological frequency, and if I only speak of days in London in general, I really have no reason to say that raining is the norm in London. Likewise if I speak of 24h periods in general, I have no reason to say that lunar eclipses involving ours Sun, Moon and Earth are the norm.

Now if I want to understand "norm" the way you are understanding it when you say that "lunar eclipses are the norm [because (?)] they happen with regular frequency" I first have to try to understand what you are saying. Since lunar eclipses do not, in fact, happen with regular frequency, I guess what you were trying to say is that they happen in a predictable manner, in a way that can be explained, or when conditions obtain (which is all but tautological). On that understanding, there being oganesson on earth is also the norm, as it predictably happens when calcium 48 ions are launched at ~10% of the speed of light onto Californium-249. And people dying for a lie is also the norm, as it happens whenever they have a good reason for doing so.

None of that is really helpful though.

>>18685452
> I would be much more interested to know how common you think babies growing into saints are.
It depends what you mean by saints. If you're really into traditions that go back 2000 years and thus understand it as the early christians understood the word "hagios" (i.e. any member of the church, which here I will interpret as any apostolic church), then a quick calculation gives the following estimate: 2.2% of babies born between 1990 and 2020 have "grown into saints" (i.e. were baptized as adolescents or adults).

If you are referring to the process of canonization, I can only give you a very rough estimate: about 1 baby in 10 millions ended up becoming a saint in the eyes of some apostolic church, among people born in the last 2000 years.

That's not telling us much though, "people don't die for a lie" is still a joke of an argument, and I still received no counter argument to my demonstration of that fact.

>Maybe you think saints fall from the sky during Lunar eclipse?
No, I don't think saints "fall from the sky during Lunar eclipse (sic.)". Why would I think that?

>>18685455
These elements have been adressed. 1 Clement states that Peter and Paul are dead at the time of writing. It says that at some point(s) they were persecuted, and it seems to imply that Peter was executed. Now famously, there is massive debate here as to who even killed Peter, if he was indeed killed. Nothing about dying for their belief in the resurrection.

The others have been adressed as well. Acts says that James (brother of John) was killed by Herod with a sword. Nothing more. It also describes Stephen being killed in the context of jew-on-jew mob violence. (this was included in the OP)
James was stoned for "breaking the law". Absolutely no mention of them dying for their belief in the resurrection. (btw nothing of that is surprising regarding the leaders of a seditious jewish sect in 1st century Judea.

Since people have failed to give me any precedent to the idea that "direct eyewitnesses have died for their belief in the resurrection" (I'm not even asking for historically believable proof at that point btw, just proof that this claim was ever made in pre-modern times), I have to conclude that e-apologists themselves do not know where it comes from (incidentally I'm pretty sure I know where it comes from), and that presumably it's just something they've heard on twitter, since that's where e-apologists get their info. (or maybe youtube)

Same goes for the related idea that "christians have believed for 2000 years that the apostles died for their belief in the resurrection". I mean repeating the word "tradition" is good, but generally to show that something is part of a tradition you have to, you know, give some sort of proof that it's part of a tradition?

Otherwise I could just tell you that christian tradition has asserted for 2000 years that Jesus' middle name was Butch or that Peter was allergic to mango. Or that christian tradition has asserted for 2000 years that no apostle died for their belief in the resurrection.

>>18677871
If we accept the narrative that Jesus was buried in a tomb instead of the more common practice of being buried in an unmarked grave, then the likely explanation for why his tomb was found empty is that his followers simply stole the body at night.
Christian apologetics often respond to this saying “hurr durr the guards were bribed to say that”. But only Matthew claims Jesus’ tomb had guards who were bribed to say Jesus’ body was stolen, the other gospels make no mention of any guards and Mark even has Mary Magdalene ask how they will open the tomb when visiting (which shouldn’t be an issue if there were guards who could open it for them). Furthermore, Matthew isn’t clear on whether it’s Roman soldiers or temple guards and both lead to problems:
>The punishment for Roman soldiers sleeping on the job was execution. So even if an entire squadron of guards all fell asleep, they would have never admitted it even if they were offered a bribe.
>Temple guards were disorganized and could have fallen asleep on the job or be overpowered, making it possible for someone to slip past them to steal the body.
If anything, the idea that there were any guards is the counter-narrative to the likely explanation that one of Jesus’ followers simply stole his body at night, not the other way around. Also, Jesus had thousands of followers, so even if none of the main disciples stole the body, another follower easily could have.

christians real silent in this thread for some reason

>>18685833
Gee why would that be? I'm sure you are arguing in good faith and can be convinced by a good argument, no?

>>18685742
o yea absolutely, just show us those "good arguments" (those that have not been refuted itt) and we can discuss em

>>18685970
meant for >>18685847
kek
was gonna say I agree with >>18685742

>>18685742
but why would one of the followers steal the body, and what would they have done with it? is there any similar precedents for grave robbery at that time?

>>18677871
>yahwist
does that mean the same thing as judeo-christian?