Reply #150: in the minds of most believers, Yes. [View All]

[incontrovertible]

I have mentioned before that there is fact and there is truth. The stories in the gospels do not contain a great deal of fact.

That is your opinion. As you are not a Christian, your opinion is irrelevant to the lives and understandings of believers. It's when non-believers such as yourself (and Paula Fredriksen) demand that the faith accept your conjectures as superior to the Gospel accounts - to the point of censoring a motion picture which is based on the Gospel accounts - that I have a major problem with your beliefs.

They do contain a great deal of truth. If Christianity has merit, it lies in its understanding of the truth contained in the gospels.

If you say so. To the faithful, Christianity's merit lies in the belief that Christ conquered sin, and thereby death.

Hmmm... I looked quickly yesterday just for the heck of it and found one among the first five citations.

And what did that citation say? Jericho did not exist? There were no walls? They did not fall? Please, tell me - I'm very interested. By all means, provide as many links as you feel inclined to offer - I welcome them, and swear on my faith I will read every one you provide.

Both of those statements are found, albeit in slightly different wording, in the sacred books of many of the religions that have sacred books (as opposed to those with oral traditions).

Please cite some of them for me - I'm interested in this as well. Not that it really matters to me, because just as you do not believe in the truth of Christianity, neither do I believe in Islam, or Hinduism, or Shintoism, or Animism. But regardless, please tell me which other sacred texts command the faithful to love their enemies, to the point of one's own death.

People have died for all sorts of beliefs throughout history. The fact that people are willing to die for them has no correlation whatsoever with the truth or value of the beliefs.

Can you please cite for me any example of a person willingly dying for something that they knew to be a lie? Because in the case of the 12 Disciples, all of whom were martyred, that is exactly what you are claiming that they did. Does it not stretch credulity in your mind that 12 relatively prosperous men, fishermen who owned their own boats and so forth, would abandon their homes, families and lives, wander the entire known world under constant threat, preaching what they knew to be a lie (that Jesus died, and rose from the dead), up until the point where they were seized and tortured to death? Wouldn't a sane person have given that up after a couple of months - or at least after the first two or three of their close friends were crucified, and took a nice two days to die? And if a sane person would have given that up, wouldn't the fact that they did not do so have proven the Disciples insane? And then, aren't we back to the previous question of: What value do the insane ramblings of 2000-years-dead lunatics really have?

Edit: I leave an original misstatement intact. There is no Biblical record of the martyrdom of all 12 disciples - there is only the traditional account that all except for John, author of The Revelation, were martyred. John was exiled to an island. I hold the traditional account superior to any suppositions to the contrary by anti-Christian scholars, however, this is only a point of faith. My original point, that all 12 Disciples abandoned prosperous lives in devotion to Christ, to the point of great peril and even death, remains.

http://www.ccel.org/bible/phillips/CN500APOSTLES%20FATE.htm