What is your opinion of Christianity? (user search)
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  What is your opinion of Christianity? (search mode)
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Author Topic: What is your opinion of Christianity?  (Read 8546 times)
Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom
theflyingmongoose
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« on: July 08, 2021, 11:16:18 PM »

What are you basing this opinion on? Is there any evidence?

There is plenty of evidence - for starters, look into the resurrection.
So... no evidence...

There is no direct physical evidence for the resurrection, but the same can be said of the vast majority of historical persons and events of the ancient world. The amount of historical evidence for the resurrection is actually quite high, with far more contemporaneous, preserved primary and secondary sources than for any other similar ancient event.

The vast majority of historical and textual scholars of the New Testament, Christian or otherwise, agree on the following points:

1) Jesus lived in Judea at the beginning of the first century, died at the hands of the Romans, and was buried in a tomb.
2) The tomb was subsequently found empty.
3) Many people claimed to have seen Jesus alive after this.
4) An account of the above three facts was consistently established no later than AD 50 when written in the Pauline epistles, almost certainly taken from an earlier oral tradition he heard when serving the Roman Empire to combat the nascent Christian sect. Paul personally met many people who claimed Jesus appeared to them post-death.
5) Despite losing their leader, becoming fugitives and outcasts, and having personally denied Jesus, the twelve disciples (and Paul) would evangelize from India to the furthest reaches to the Roman Empire in their lifetimes, and, to a man, choose martyrdom over recanting their claim of seeing a resurrected Jesus.

You can conceive of a few ways to explain some of these points, and perhaps all of them, without acknowledging the historicity of the resurrection, but doing so requires fairly contorted theorizing. For example, perhaps Jesus's body was stolen and an impostor appeared in his stead-- an impostor who was able to convince the disciples (who had spent years with Jesus) that he was who he claimed to be, who could show the scars of the crucifixion, and who would choose to do so knowing full well it would make him a massive enemy of the state for little reward.

Or perhaps Jesus faked his death and, despite massive blood loss and gaping wounds and zero medical care, rolled away (perhaps with help) a massive stone to escape some days later before recovering and appearing to the disciples and eventually abandoning everyone he knew and dying without any known burial location (why would the disciples carry on to their deaths claiming otherwise if they knew he simply lived on?).

Or perhaps it was some mass delusion or hallucination, occurring to over 500 people on numerous occasions, some of whom such as James were diehard skeptics. Or some mass lie was crafted, wherein hundreds of people chose to commit themselves to a non-provable, non-beneficial condition which made them enemies of the state and for which none ever recanted, even at execution. Or perhaps Paul made it all up much later, convinced hundreds to give up everything they had to spread a lie, forged the Gospels which all use differing writing styles and date to different decades, and did so all to lose his comfy position as a high-ranking Roman citizen, become ostracized, imprisoned, and executed, all without ever recanting.

Consider the denouement of Jesus's passion: the disciples see their leader killed, flee from Jerusalem having denied knowing Jesus, and hide as wanted criminals. Their Messiah was supposed to conquer Israel's enemies and rule as David did, not die as the lowest criminal. His death, according to Jewish law, showing the disciples that the Pharisees were correct and that Jesus had been a heretic all along, a man cursed by God. By Jewish belief, the only possible resurrection was that which would occur at the end of time; there was no pining for a resurrecting Messiah. They gave up everything they ever had for nothing.

Suppose they locked themselves in the upper room and decided to concoct a story that Jesus had risen. What would they gain? Who would believe them, fugitive heretics, and do so without might or evidence, especially when the Jewish people did not believe God acted in such a way as they would claim? It would've been a catastrophic plan.

Why not quietly slink back to their hometowns and hope to pick up where they left off? Or take on new identities and start over?

But instead, something happened. Something which convinced them to proclaim something no one wanted to hear, about a man no one wanted to know anymore, with great fervor, and at great personal danger to themselves. This something convinced the skeptics around them. Somehow it worked. It worked so well that it conquered the Roman Empire. It became the largest religion in the world, enduring for millennia with the same, unchanging message.

Is that evidence of the resurrection? I don't know. But the most parsimonious answer I've seen so far to the above evidence is that it happened.

As we all know, second-hand information from 2,000 years ago is always accurate, bigly.
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