Does God Exist?

science is precisely what blind faith is not. this however, has nothing to do with the existence or none existence of one or more gods or god like beings.

rather more to the point, is that whether there is one god, no god or many, the desire to be feared, is not a characteristic, of anything that can ever, under any circumstance, be trusted.

 

I have done all that, ad nauseum. So have countess others. Look at the world. Look at all the people who are not christian. Why not? If the evidence is so obvious, why aren't people swayed by it?

Listen to the claim you are making:

1) There was a man 2,000 years ago who said he was the son of god (and also god, but that's a different subject) and that he would save us all

2) This man is said to have performed miracles which proved his divinity

3) When this man was murdered, after three days of being a corpse, he arose from the dead and ascended to heaven, really proving his divinity

Now, if there was any kind of proof for these facts, society as we know it simply wouldn't exist. The incongruity of this story with everything we consider to be rational, normal, sane, or within the realms of biology, cosmology, ontology, is total. That is to say, if this all really happened, then everything we know about everything is wrong, and is turned upside down. There should be rioting in the streets, destruction of government and scientific edifices, and a mass movement to become radical christians, because a freaking god came down from heaven and died in order to gain us access to immortality. but you don't see that, even amongst 90% of christians. They go about their day as if everything in the world is as it always was, but this one time, 2000 years ago, that one time everything was upside down and never to be the same again. But here, in 2015, we can just nod solemnly to that event and continue shopping at malls and getting bank loans for mortgages and investing money in stock markets and watching cable news about the wars our countries are in and then switching to reality tv . . .

Does it strike you as odd that the entire epic of Jesus' life has amounted to nothing more than a mere theological movement, which does not even sway half of the world's population?

It's because there simply isn't any evidence that any of this actually happened.

 

That changes the subject nicely. Instead of the implication that the Resurrection of Jesus was just a cookie cutter version of a dime-a-dozen event, we now are asking for proof that it occurred. The only evidence that it did is secondhand anonymous hearsay reported decades after the fact by anonymous authors in the New Testament--a book for believers. (We don't even know who the authors of the Gospels really were, and Paul got his information from a vision). I don't happen to believe in a literal bodily Resurrection, simply because I tend not to believe extraordinary things without strong evidence and I regard the available evidence as very weak. That doesn't mean, of course, that it didn't happen, and people may choose to believe it for their own reasons as a matter of faith. I do accept it metaphorically, and in that sense it is important to realize what it signifies for Christians and that it isn't a revolving door metaphor for the annual changing of seasons.

I think Carrier is correct that early Christianity was a Jewish mystery religion and he recognizes (as your posted list does not) that it was distinctively rooted in the Jewish religious tradition of the Old Testament. He does not tell us though why people aren't worshiping Baal, Melqart, Osiris, Persephone, etc., anymore, and why Christianity is the largest world religion in the twenty-first century. The evolutionary struggle among memes was not always pretty, but I think Christianity had a lot to offer over its rivals from the standpoint of morality. I've opted for a Christian metaphor because I think Jesus' teachings and example of peace, love and understanding with special active concern for society's rejects resonates with me as the truth that could transform the world. None of the deities on your laundry list come close to in message or example to that. Baal? Really? Only Buddha comes close, and fortunately we don't have to choose between them.

 

What I see is a vast amount of missed opportunity to reduce human suffering offered by a substantial wisdom as to how our human experience is engendered, caused by the pernicious egotistical tendency to culturalization. Turning what someone says into a personality cult of the sayer. The cultural norm is bounded by hero worship and taboo. There is no apparent profound change in the course of the world because of the phenomena of attempting to plug new information into closed or bounded systems.

There is a saying that refers to this defeat of real effect:

No one puts new wine in old wine skins or the skin will burst and both the wine and the skin will be ruined.

Adopting the cult of personality, extending the fundamental status quo in manner of conviction and deed, turns the fundamental wisdom into a mash of sour grapes.

New wine is preserved in new skins. What this looks like in the psyche is that we abandon our previous world model and learn of the world anew.

The only meaningful change is fundamental, that is changing the mind in the form of fundamental regard or the way we organize our view of the world.

 

Old wine skin is our cultural operating system for clarification.

 

i doubt that most airplanes are really that unique.

 

Have you ever watched clouds form?

 

But you quoted my post in asking for a corpus delecti.. I never said that there is a body, because I don't believe in a literal, physical Resurrection. BTW, this is the best article I've read by Carrier, maybe because it arrives at most of the same conclusions I did before I read it. As Carrier points out, the first documented account of the Resurrection is by Paul, who gave as evidence his own witness, which he placed on a par with that of Peter, James and 500 others. Paul's witness was to a vision and he spoke of being resurrected in spiritual bodies. In the Gospel accounts, the evidence gets more concrete and physical as we move from the earliest (Mark's empty tomb) to the later accounts decades later--which would suggest to me that people's memories may be playing tricks. As I said, I don't believe in a physical Resurrection, which is not to say it didn't happen. Carrier offers the suggestion that Christians can plausibly opt for Paul's "spiritual body" alternative without necessarily being in error. I'm enough of an empiricist to be skeptical of other people's visions and since I've never had one of my own, i'll pass. I prefer the metaphor of the "mystical Body of Christ", which I can experience directly. Jesus is a living force in me and other believers.

Carrier seems to want to go further and to say that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, which I don't agree with. Yes, it's my opinion (aka, faith or judgment)) that Jesus' example and message offer the keys to God's kingdom on earth. I prefer the word "my judgment", suggesting an informed opinion based on considerable study and reflection. It's my best effort to decide what would be the consequences of holding to a given course of spiritual action--which is the most important consideration when we're doing life instead of doing science. Instead of believing the unbelievable (pregnant virgins, walking dead people, etc.) I find it more meaningful to try to put Jesus' message and example to work in my life. It is Carrier's opinion (or faith or judgment) that there is no God and that we should worship nothing. His own personal example does nothing to inspire me. Despite some good scholarship and impressive academic credentials, he has shown, in my estimation, bad judgment in fundamental areas of his life. He has so far not been able to persuade many of his fellow historians (many of them atheists) that he should be taken seriously as a scholar, because his narcissism and intemperate responses to critics get in the way, and he's bet his career on the unlikely horse of Bayesian statistics as the grail of historical methodology. His own history of dogmatic atheism poses a credibility problem in using that methodology, which depends so heavily on objective assessments. Despite his best efforts, he has yet to secure an academic appointment. He could turn his life around dramatically by a change of attitude (Hell is a bad attitude). I'm willing to take a chance on Jesus. I don't think that's a less rational choice than Carrier's as a guide for living.

 

I lay on my back and look into the sky and I raise a hand and open it towards the sky in my view. The hand looks real but the sky looks like a painting. It does not look real.

 

I love clouds....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tWRAVXeao0

 

Clouds can take your mind off unimportant things for a while.

 

Very nice - I like this version the best though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Xm30heHms

 

Judy's version is better...I just knew the song had clouds in it......lol

Sky out there is just gray today.....no blue....so is that one big cloud?

 

sometimes they can be annoying though in the summer when you are trying to get get sunkissed in the summer though.....

 

They say every cloud has a silver lining.

 

http://youtu.be/CdMs7eqMvNg

 

I'm feeling kinda spacey I got that purple kush up in me and I'm really on cloud 9 wit dem aliens sittin' wiff me.