I am Lutheran....My grandmother was Catholic.   There is no love lost between these two faiths.....But I was still a pall bearer at her funeral and stood quiet and showed respect during the service.

Well, they ARE invalid. The best he can do is report what others have said.  Not that that isn't reasonable in many cases, but let's be clear.  The earliest Gospels  were probably comitted to paper many decades after Jesus died (assuming the story is accurate).  The word for word, blow by blow descriptions seem are unlikely to be accurate.  It's more likely there is a great deal of oral tradition tied up in it.  OPf course, religious folks can satisfy themselves by saying God ensured they recalled correctly.  I find that less than convincing, but there ya go.

Multiple secular Greek, Roman, and Jewish historians attest to his existence.  Several first and second sorce autobiographies chronical his life,  yet the existence of Jesus the man is denied.  

Never mind that circumstances surrounding his life where inconvenient to the local religious leaders and the regional Roman rulers.  This all  happened 1500 years before the invention of the printing press, and literacy was rare.  Jerusalem, the city where one might expect to find the greatest amount of written evidence, was razed to ground in 70 AD, and  Rome spent 400 years sporadically exterminating those who espoused a Christian philosophy.  Still, people claim a convict, crucified between common criminals,  should be better documented if they are to accept that he ever lived.

The Jesus myth folks must be at least as obtuse as the fundies; who claim that most obscure transitional forms of every organ, of every organism, must be set in stone for evolution to be scientifically viable.

Thank you for the excellent point about literacy. In them olden days not many could read and most were stupid enough to believe fairy tales.  Now, almost all can read and about the fairy tales, well, just look around.

Just s a personal bit of experience, in my BC days I didn't have much use for God.  I was getting along quite well without Him (I thought), and was having fun doing whatever I wanted to do.

I was NOT looking for Him.  I was not interested in Him.

He found me.  He called me.

I realize that's a very hard thing for someone who hasn't experienced it to understand.

The bottom line is that I did not set out to become what I am today.

Cite?



 

That is pretty much how it happened to me.

How can you believe in nothing?? If there is nothing to believe in your case, so how can you believe it????

Makes as much sense as the leftists... increase tax cuts to those that don't pay taxes!!!

i don't have the cite handy, but he's not wrong––the original 'out of africa' hypothesis has been shown to be deficient in the face of the evidence.  use google scholar and look for relevant papers by gill-king.



that said, i don't think this entails what palm thinks it does (though i could be misreading his brief and nebulous comment).



 

And yet Gibbon's work is considered the seminal treatise of Roman history.  The point being, scholarly works can and are done all of the time hundreds if not thousands of years after the events discussed and are not dismissed because the scholar was not actually present at the events in question.

I'm glad someone called it.

Real atheists aren't in the business of mocking, they're in the business of not giving a shit either way.

What I imagine would be most hard for Christians upon seeing this (and no doubt some of you are rightfully upset) is that you have to forgive them.

It's not optional.  It's commanded that we forgive.  

Agree. I'm not religious. I don't give religious people shit. I see no need to.

If I had to guess, I'd say most Christians would probably just say to themselves, "Meh, consider the source" and then just ignore the stupid thing.





 

This

If you had taken the time to read the Wikipedia article, you would have read this:

"The evidence for the existence of Jesus all comes from after his lifetime.[10] The material which refers to Jesus includes the books of the New Testament, statements from the early Church Fathers, hypothetical sources which many biblical scholars argue lie behind the New Testament (the so called Q source), brief references in histories produced decades or centuries later by pagan and Jewish sources[11] such as Josephus, gnostic and other apocryphal documents, and early Christian creeds.[12]"

Show me where that says anything about objective, verifiable historical documents related to Jesus' existence - it simply states that the evidence all comes from after his lifetime, by way of the New Testament, statements from Church Fathers (hardly objective since they were trying to push their new religion), and "hypothetical" sources.

Now, show me Roman documents, histories, eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life and death, and I will start to believe it.

Typical.





 

Sadly, brilliantrocket is no longer with us.



All that hate's gonna burn you up boy.

I just don't get the almost... reflexive... need some have to fire a shot across the bow of believers.

What about the people who put just the fishes on their car?  Do they have a reflexive need to fire a shot across the bow of those who don't agree with them?

I don't see why anyone who truly has faith in God would be at all disturbed by this, yet the amount of screeching butthurt over someone else expressing an opinion they don't agree with is something to behold.

Ah well, I got a good giggle out of this story

How is a proclamation of belief firing a shot over anyone's bow? Not sure how that works.

I hate proselytising.

For any dogmatic belief system.

I proselytise Rum bewbies and Jesus

In Real Life Trolling - IRLTrolling, the best kind.



It amuses me because the same people crying probably thought it was hilarious when that nutjob was going to burn the koran to "show them a thing or two".

I can get along with that. Especially the bewbies!  Bewbies for Jesus!  AIRBORNE!

He created some wonderous things didn't he


and I'm fuckin serious man

To paraphrase Ben Franklin: Bewbies are proof that God exists and that he loves us..

Ahh, I see... when you do it or agree with it, it's valuable free speech; but if anyone else does it or you don't approve, it's a childish outburst.

Gotcha

It's interesting how important this is to you.  I'm not sure why you want to give so much power over your life to someone who puts a little sticker on their car.  It isn't healthy.

You dit'n hear my papaw (A Baptist) talk about them GD "camilites" (Campbellites).  Perhaps this secular government's rule of law kept him in check?  

Stolen from Wikipedia

So to have belliefs (in anything apparently) you have to believe in a god ? Is that how you see it ?

An infinite, omnipresent, omniscient, nonlinear sentient intelligence exists in a empty void and wants to be loved. The intelligence that creates the universe and then populates a extremely small speck in this universe with creatures of it's liking and image. The being does so, having knowledge of good and evil. Yet it chooses being loved over the suffering that it may create by making living creatures in it's own image that can choose not to love the intelligence and will be punished for not doing so by means of eternal pain and suffering.
This intelligence that  is perfect and incapable of making mistakes and exists beyond the 4th dimension and is not constrained by the dimension of duration(time). Therefore the intelligence has seen the past present and future, and has, is, and always will exist. The creatures that the intelligence creates have no knowledge of good and evil and only know to love the intelligence. The creatures are then given knowledge of good and evil by another being created by the intelligence. This angers the intelligence, the creatures that once loved him could now choose not to do so and end up in eternal torment, which being non-linear the intelligence foresaw. The intelligence then creates a, corporeal, linear, mortal being from it's own consciousness to save them from the everlasting damnation that it will inflict upon them.

That god ?

I have to believe all that in order to be able to have "beliefs" ??