Pulling together threads of this conversation, plus some inductive reasoning from Richard Carrier this morning. My post was intended to be a bit more subtle than Carrier. I was envisioning a world where some god-like powers were acting to make life better. Carrier calculates the odds that such a being exists by looking at the world we actually live in. It’s the same conclusion. He does this while commenting on a recent exchange at Skeptic magazine about the possibility of a good god.
Carrier advocates for something called Bayes Theorem, a way to calculate the probability of something being true. You can look in to the details of that, but the basic data he works with is the observed good done by people, trillions of acts. That good is done according to our limited abilities, but if you make excuses for not doing good, that’s considered bad. It’s all a matter of degree of course. A god is defined as something vastly more powerful than us, so any excuse for say, not preventing a murder, should at least be considered evidence for God being bad. But we see evil and injustice every day, what is crippling God from dealing with it? Whatever it is, we have seen people prevent murder or at least try to, on a regular basis. There are trillions more examples, but where is God? The odds then are trillions to one that God even exists.
OK, if you don’t give up on the original Christian pathway that was built on science. You do end up with a sort of good god? Look at history and RA was a good god in the eyes of the people. Now look at Buddha and you have good gods, who are not really gods. They are like Jesus, just a teacher, but they get looked at as sort of an idol and worshiped like a god. But they have no magic.
What is interesting is that you don’t have to rewrite the bible or anything drastic, just change your viewpoints on the subject matter a little bit. You have to ask the question – “how did the Jesus to Jefferson pathway of the original Christianity stay alive, when all known traces of written teachings were destroyed for close to a couple of millenniums. Yet there was still enough passed down knowledge to start the progressive movement and to form the ground work for America.”
The guys you are talking about here are admitting they are playing “this is how the delusion game gets played.” They are arguing the case of “good vs. evil”. Which is what the original pathway is about. They are just doing it in Paul’s pathway which is not based upon science, like the original pathway created by Jesus’ is. This is not rocket science. And it is sad to see grown men spending so much time and energy on a pathway that is becoming more and more obvious not the pathway of Jesus by so many of our top religious scholars today. This debating of self-refuting data you and your experts are wasting time on should become less talked about to the new generations as they will understand the falsehood of the logic that is being used and use the new data that is available today.
OK, if you don’t give up on the original Christian pathway that was built on science. You do end up with a sort of good god?
Are you asking for clarification here? Are you being rhetorical? I can't tell, because I just made the case that you don't end up with a good god at all. Where is your evidence for a good god? That there was some completely unclear philosophy that took 1,500 years to get sorted and still resulted in a democracy that allowed slavery? Not a very good God.
This debating of self-refuting data you and your experts are wasting time on ....
If something is self refuting, you should have no trouble refuting it. You didn't.
The structure of the God Ra. People worshiped at the temple. The temples were the government for the most part. If the people were not happy or well taken care of Ra would knock the legs from under the temple. Ra was the god, but the god was with the people. Ra went up and down the Nile River from temple to temple to make sure the world was in balance and the people were happy.
It looks to me like the Jews, Greeks and Romans were very jealous of the Egyptian system that last the longest of any civilizations and seemed to have worked the best for the people.
The Catholic Church became like the Egyptian temples of government. But also ended up controlling god. So, there was no one to knock the legs out from under the Catholic Church and the people became unhappy and oppressed.
It was Paul’s Christian pathway that allowed slavery and Jesus’ Christian pathway that put an end to slavery. With Jesus’ pathway the knowledge of all men make-up god. And that is your good god.
Again, religion is a subject that needs to be connected to timelines. For example, in Egypt from data that has been found. Some people would work a second job so they could pay to be a slave at the temples. Then in Babylon, there was the inheritance laws for your slaves.
Agreed. And follow that branch of humanism. And then follow the Rules of Laws that were proven to work for mankind and that were improved on a little at a time going all the way back to pre-history. Jesus’ Christianity was really nothing more than how to use wisdom with knowledge for the morals that were needed for the Rules of Law. Then, of course his big changes in the system of judgement. One could make the claim that Jesus was just fine tuning the Hellenistic system and his Christianity was bringing the Jewish system into and under the control the Hellenistic system. The Hellenistic system being a Deist (Atheist) system that would be controlling the faith system of the Jewish god along with other religions and faiths in Judea and Israel. Where the Greeks, Egyptians, Jews and Romans with all their many branches of faith could worship under one religion. Sort of like what the Assyrians from Babylonians did to the Children of Abraham some years earlier that ended up creating the Old Testament and the Jewish religion that was a branch off of the Egyptian system. And adding the beliefs of Babylonians and other faiths that were of size in the Assyrian Empire. So the people under the Assyrian rule could get along when it came to faith and religion.
What is going on here Lausten. You posted parts of your sermon helper.
You posted in your blog, “Rather than try to understand the mind of a 1st century Palestinian who couldn’t have heard of the word “science” since it hadn’t been invented yet, I’ll just make an observation.”
I would have thought you would have been way past that point of understanding a long time ago. The word “science” was understood to be included in the word “knowledge”. Just look at the greatest math scholars of that time were coming out of the universities of knowledge. The greatest libraries and museums were also at those universities. The word Knowledge was the science of the time.
Anyway, I think that you have not been working to a timeline. We will never get past the simple basics if you don’t get the religion broken down into the two pathways that were being used. The simple truth is that the NT was paid for by the government. It was a government program to help control the civilization. It was put together most likely by Athanasius who was the Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt. It was most likely put together in the atheist universities in Egypt by the atheist scholars of the religion of knowledge. Mainly do to the fact that the NT foundation is the religion of Knowledge. Put another way - The religion of science. The NT covers Nicene Christianity and is made of several religion and some of them were pagan religions. I don’t see where Paul had much of anything to do with the making of NT. We are talking the year 367 and Paul had been dead a long time. If the government had picked the Religion of Knowledge over creating the Nicene Christianity. Most people would not even know who Paul was other than a guy hired by Jesus for his political campaign. And it could be argued that the people themselves help create the religion. The church was in many ways responding to the needs of the people.
Was the government wrong in creating the Nicene Christianity? At this point we have to assume that the Religion of Science did not cover the needs of the civilization that the government required. Science may be good at explaining morals and wisdom. But it does not have that one on one relationship that a deity can provide.
The greatest libraries and museums were also at those universities. The word Knowledge was the science of the time.
Show me any of the methods or principles that we now consider science being taught anywhere. Or proof for anything else you said about Athanasius or whomever.
The church was in many ways responding to the needs of the people.
The Christian population in the Roman Empire by 300 C.E. was only 10% of the population. And that was believe caused by Fiscus Ludaicus. An annual tax placed upon the Jewish population. By declaring themselves Christian they did not have to pay the tax.
Point being. After the government forced the atheist universality to organize the Christian religion and a plague hit the area causing massive death. The Christian religion started to grow in size. Another factor may have been the closure of all the other religions.
Although not a clear and well documented process, there is plenty of scholarship on how the Bible was assembled. Where in all of that do you find mention of these “atheist” “Egyptian” “universities”?
The pathway started by Mary and Jesus was picked up by Philo of Alexandria, also known as Philo Judaeus and brought into the religious philosophy for rethinking as a possible pathway to be expanded and used. Which was then picked up by Montesquieu of France, who was known for Spirit of the laws.
Ok, where did this religious philosophy take place? The University of Alexandria. And who was Montesquieu. The father of science. What were the Spirit of the Laws? It was based upon the Laws of Knowledge. A common factor for all of this is that the deity was missing.
Rome got control of Alexandria in the year 30 BC. Alexandria was only second to Rome in size and wealth. Plenty of religious scholars who believe in deities tell you how the bible was written. Today we have the religious scholars who are not believers in deities and their views are different. Imagine that!
Great post on putting the human face and a timeline on the time period we are talking about. The book data is from twenty to thirty years ago. Which means it’s forty to fifty years old. One must wonder if that same data written about today would open up more on the what’s and why’s reasons that these items took place. I think that people are beginning to crack open the door a little bit and let the light in as to what really went on. These types of books put some light on questions that needs to be answered and showed a better and more plausible actions by people of the time. But then in 2002 the James Ossuary stole the show and these books never got the attention they deserved. Kenneth Humphreys did a good job bring the highlights of the books to a web page.
You relate random facts without making any documented connections.
Will be glade to. Could you please post a list of all the destroyed documents by the Church and I will show you which ones on your list will most likely have the documentation you request.
I linked to the site about Theodosius because it contained much of the data I consider relevant to refuting your statements in a concise format. That “same data” has continued to be studied so it’s age is irrelevant. If you have information that it’s changed, then present that, instead of just “wondering” about it. People have been “cracking open the doors” for 100 years now, but you keep talking like it’s you who is somehow ahead of the game. To support yourself, you refer to archaeology that was refuted almost the moment it was presented; a box of bones from who knows where.
Then you lead me back to the site I sent you to, different page, same author. A page that disagrees with you. That’s some kind of weird trolling. Brother James and his Box of Tricks
Could you please post a list of all the destroyed documents by the Church and I will show you which ones on your list will most likely have the documentation you request.
Is that sarcasm? I prefer using documents that actually exist.