Will you answer me how the record of Lot was written, even though Lot was drunk and women didn't write anything in the Bible?
... Lot wasn't drunk until the end of the chapter, the very end. I'm not sure what the problem here is.
Oh wow, he didn't use incantations. VARIOUS OTHER TECHNIQUES. I don't care if he just flicked his hands and it happened, that is still magic.
No, because it wasn't a technique. Look, you can say I'm splitting hairs here, but I'm going to stick by the actual meanings of words. It wasn't magic, and no amount of changing the meanings of words and terminology is going to change that. If you don't believe in miracles that's on you, but I'm really not interested in continuing to challenge your incessant desire to write off that which you disagree with using false and dismissive descriptions.
Oh geez, oral tradition. Have you ever seen the problem with that? When people do that, they tend to add their own part of the story. I don't care what reason they had to make Jesus the lord instead of just a good man, but a lie is a lie. A Christian on Youtube even told me that people wrote down what happened after hearing it orally, and thus comes almost all religious books.
Oral tradition is an easy choice for you to have picked out of the three I listed, but it's not going to get you anywhere. Oral tradition is not concrete, no. It is however a part of a collection of evidences in the story's favor. And Jesus wasn't "made" into the Lord. He professed it Himself, which is why He was killed by the Romans. So given the evidence of Christ, you either have to accept that He was who He said He was, that He was sincere but insane, or that He was the most notorious liar in history and the biggest con artist to have lived. Knowing Christ in my heart, having read the Word, having studied the man and His history, having looked at the evidence, and having taken into account His legacy and how He changed the world, I accept the divinity of Christ and accept Him as my Lord and savior. So it's on you- Lord, lunatic, or liar.
Yeah sure. A Jew calling Jesus 'the Christ'? Seriously, maybe you'll make more sense when the pope announces that Allah is the true god.
The term Christian was already around by that era, and he was not one. And the Pope analogy doesn't really work. Maybe if the Pope was talking about Mohammad and said PBUH to show respect then you'd be more in line with things.
Wow, he references him. He still didn't even mention any account of the three kings, the bloodbath, or anything after that.
...And? Again, you're really overreaching. Your expectations for written historical evidence from 2000 years ago are staggeringly high in comparison to any other historical figure of the time, just because you don't want to believe in his divinity.
Well, it is much easier to believe when they are in their own time line. You already know the flaws of oral tradition, so I won't tell you why.
Ok, you're not even making a point now. You're dodging mine, though. Sources less than 200 years old are reliable by dang near all legitimate and scholarly standards regarding that time period and well-known historical figures. Again though, way to latch onto the oral tradition point and leave out the other two I gave.
Oh wow, using a book of your religion to prove your religion. Just absolutely genius.
And yet you're not denying the existence of the Apostles, are you? The part of the Bible I specifically referenced regarding accounts of Jesus were the Gospels. Again, we know the Apostles weren't made up by my silly little magic book of lies, and the written records of those men serve well enough as evidence.
Um, YES. It's much better when you use outside sources to prove inside sources. I wouldn't use The Origin Of Species to prove evolution, I would use third grade biology.
Origin of Species is a science or even nature book, not history. You more than likely would use Darwin's works as evidence, not some crummy text book from a school that simplifies the original source material. In contrast, I'm going to the source material and you're using a bad copy. Even still, I already have given non-Christian and extra-biblical sources alongside biblical ones.
Like I said before, they put real events in with their own fairy tales. Flood much?
That's kind of strange then, isn't it? Why make up a bunch of nonsense and merge it with real history? The Hellenists didn't have to rely on real history in their records and religions. It's the Abrahamic religions that rely very much on history. In fact, the history is their religion. Again, the Bible is the narrative of the Lord's people, their genealogy, their wars, their territorial expansions, their enslavement and defeats, their liberation and success, their changes in leadership, their moral codes and sanitary preparations, their kings, and so on. The Bible is the last thing I'd come up with if I wanted to impress people with a story of magic and wizards.
The Bible has never served as a magic book or fairy tale as you wish to portray it. The Bible has continually served as a historical record. Yes there's symbolism, but that's good as without it it'd be even more boring. Even I can say it. The Old Testament is pretty boring. That's because it doesn't focus on wild magic tricks. It's primarily about our ancestors, their diets, their laws, their governments, and that's it. Nobody looking to make a hip new religion would make up with what's in the Bible. I could see you making up a religion about the world being on the back of a turtle, or being held up by Atlas, or any other far-out stuff. But the Bible doesn't make that a central theme. The focus is God and salvation, not explaining away natural disasters as the might of the gods on Mt. Olympus.
There are great miracles in the Bible, but those are only to demonstrate the might of God and not to explain away things man couldn't comprehend back in the ancient world like was the case with the Greeks and Romans. The story of the Bible is a rather boring, unspectacular one when it comes to magic and sorcery. Yeah we've got the flood, the parting of the Red Sea and the plagues, and that's pretty much it for the Old Testament. The New Testament focuses on Christ who performs miracles. There you get healing the sick, cleansing lepers, and feeding people. He is sentenced to death and is resurrected. Yeah, that's some far out stuff there. The Judeo-Christian faith is great because it doesn't rely on nonsense, multiple gods, or improvised explanations of natural events to make believers. It is a faith that relies on the Word of God and has served as a record of history, genealogy, codes of conduct, and God's covenants with man. So when the Bible goes in depth about the military of Israel in the Book of Numbers, it's really not much of a fairy tale and I'm more inclined to believe it than the stories of other religions or what we might call "fairy tales."
I'm more inclined to believe in the story of the Israelites counting the number of adult males in their population in order to build a proper army than I am of the story of the Greek goddess and her Apple of Discord. I know it's popular in this day and age to write off all religion as fairy tales and mind control, rage against the machine and whatnot, but honestly there's no intellectual benefit of misrepresenting the main focus of the Bible and the stories in it as suspension of disbelief-requiring nonsense. Most of the Bible isn't magic or explaining away lightning as the anger of the gods but rather a cumulative mosaic of the history of God's chosen people and His plan.
Then why do very few external sources talk about them? And don't quote Christian 'historians' again, you clearly don't know how much people will lie to support their point.
This was 2,000 years ago, most records were likely destroyed from the Roman invasions and burning down of cities, paper was expensive at that time, and yet we still have more than enough sources for evidence. Few external sources talk about any individuals from that time. And again, you're looking for evidence that could barely be supplied of anyone around then, and yet we do have evidence but you are unwilling to accept it because it's not in line with your anti-theist point of view. So forget the eyewitnesses, forget the respected scholars and historians, forget the men that spent good portions of their lives traveling with and living alongside Him- they're imaginary or untrustworthy liars. Forget all standards of evidence and historical documentation for this one person and only this one person because having the integrity to accept the truth would validate the beliefs of over two billion people that you happen to disagree with.
No, it's just that when I choose to believe some stuff, I will believe the simpler stuff easier.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Oh please. Socrates has only two sources of existence, both of which were students of his.
And yet you don't demand extra-student sources for the existence of Socrates do you? It's no different than relying on testimony of Christ's Apostles for the life and times of Jesus. You're holding a different standard for Christ than every other person of the ancient world just because of the nature of His teachings. Well I don't believe everything Socrates taught, but that doesn't mean I'm going to doubt his being and demand an insane amount of sources that couldn't possibly exist regarding an individual who is historically recognized and documented. I don't believe in Islam but I don't doubt the historical record of Muhammad. I don't doubt Buddha either. Again, it's on you to believe, but you're not going to get anywhere here with your double standard for historical standing of one person from the ancient world. Either apply the same level of scrutiny that you have for Jesus Christ to Socrates and every other ancient historical figure or don't bother in the first place.
No. I'm saying that Christianity solely has come across as true to me.
...What?
