Raf

You do not accept facts as a common ground from which we can compare notes. You are dismissed. Thank you for playing. If "many days" is a euphemism for "three years," then any generality is a synonym for any specificity. That's not honest. But you COULD see a contradiction and still deny it because you deny facts as a common ground from which we can draw conclusions. It is POINTLESS to debate with someone who puts "facts" in quotes when they are inconvenient for his predetermined conclusion. Send someone whose debate tactics are honest.

Comparing Galatians to Acts, we learn that Paul and "Luke" did not agree with each other at all on what happened after Paul's conversion. Paul insists that he was not taught the gospel by men. This doesn't square with Acts at all. In Acts 9, Paul goes to Jerusalem days after his conversion. Not months. Not years. Days. (You might squeeze weeks into it, but not more than that). And Paul stays with the disciples. Not so, according to Paul. Well, someone's lying! Is it Paul, who would have you believe he learned the gospel straight from Jesus? Or Luke, who at the least implies Paul was a student of the disciples before striking out on his own? Because whoever you believe, the other one is a liar. Unless you want to try to squeeze the three years of Galatians 1:18 into the "many days" of Acts 9:23. But if you can say "many days" = "three years," then you can say any general amount of time means any specific amount of time. Many days might mean weeks, if you're being charitable, but three years? That's just not honest. Are we seriously to believe that Paul did not learn about the life of Jesus from the apostles? What becomes clear when you realize Paul wrote before "Luke" is that Paul sets himself up as equal to the apostles, while the gospels combine with Acts to demonstrate he is a later addition to the Christian message, not an initiator. He is subject to James' council. He doesn't dictate to the 12 that he gets his revelation from God and therefore they should heed him. THEY, through James, tell PAUL what to do, where and when to do it, and how. The writer of Acts puts Paul in his place, very much unlike Paul himself, who, while declaring himself least of the apostles, also makes it quite clear that he has a line of communication to God unmatched by the other apostles. So what does this mean in context of our discussion? Paul would have you believe he did not learn about the death and resurrection of Jesus, or its meaning, from men. He learned it all "from God" and "from scripture." Perhaps this is why Paul doesn't mention the empty tomb. Perhaps this is why he does not know Judas is dead by the time of the resurrection, so Jesus can be seen of The 12. Perhaps this is why Paul doesn't mention the women who saw Jesus first after the resurrection. The "apostles" had not yet invented any of those stories when Paul was writing. The first gospel, Mark, is compiled by a man whose knowledge of Palestinian geography is so laughably bad that even later gospel writers who plagiarized him still found it necessary to fix his blunders. The next gospel, Matthew, copies so much of Mark that it is abundantly clear to any fair-minded person that it could not have been written by an eyewitness. What eyewitness plagiarizes someone who wasn't there? We know Luke lied through his teeth about the Nativity, because the census he references didn't happen until Jesus would have been at least 8 or 9 years old. And Matthew and Luke provide us with Nativity narratives that conflict with each other in irreconcilable fashion -- meaning neither of these men got the account firsthand from witnesses. Secondhand, maybe. Thirdhand, more credibly. Made it up, probably. John, whoever he is, comes along and invents stories that are so compelling that Jesus MUST be the Christ, raising but never answering the obvious question: why on EARTH would the other gospel writers have omitted these stories from their accounts? You mean to tell me that no other gospel writer found it noteworthy that Jesus raised a man from the dead after he had been buried four days? NONE of them? You're straining credibility here! See, that's the thing about making up stories and placing them in verifiable history: the more fantastic the story, the less likely the event or character is to have gone unnoticed by history. Take Daniel, for instance. Here we have a book that blends fiction with actual history. Nebuchadnezzar, for example, actually existed. History records a lot about him. Which means the writer of Daniel, who came along a few hundred years later, needs to be careful about what he makes up. You can't have him lose his mind and eat, sleep and live in the field with cattle, because history has a tendency to record s#!t like that when kings go mad. Ask George III. And you can't make Daniel SO charismatic that he becomes one of only three head administrators of the Persian empire. Because history has a tendency to record those names. And they are recorded. And it wasn't Daniel (or his Biblical alias). When your fiction becomes too grand, it becomes impossible to pass off as history. Like the Exodus. Egyptians did a real good job of recording their history. Losing a couple of million slaves and their families soon after the firstborn of every family, livestock included, die of mysterious causes on the same night... that never happened to Egypt. Jesus is an interesting character, for sure, but it's hard to say his fame spread throughout the land AND, at the same time, argue that one would not have expected him to be noticed by the historians of the day, who recognized and mentioned oodles of claims to the title of Messiah. In Palestine. Missed the real deal, even after a few thousand people converted to his new faith in a single day. This is not credible. When you make huge claims, you need huge evidence to support them. Or at least SOME evidence. Conflicting accounts from people who were not in a position to know and who get verifiable facts wrong don't amount to a hill of beans as evidence, especially for an extraordinary claim like the resurrection.

You don't accept facts as an agreed upon common ground. You are dismissed.

When I say the atheist was underprepared, what i mean is that he did not adequately challenge the Christian's premises. Luke was not written by Luke, nor was it written by a companion of Paul, nor was it written by someone who interviewed eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Matt never challenges these assertions. That is when and why he loses. Luke 1:1-4 never claims he interviewed eyewitnesses. And it is crucial that we realize how much he plagiarized Mark because he considered Mark a reliable source. Mark was exceedingly unreliable Mark would actually have you believe that Jesus traveled from Texas to Florida but, along the way, stopped in Chicago. If Mark were relying on the testimony of eyewitnesses he would never quote Mark, with or without proper credit. In the debate above, the Christian's point of view is demolished with the credibility of Luke. Matt also fails to mention the degree to which Acts conflicts with Paul's letters in a way that is disqualifying: one of them is lying. More later.

Nice video. I give the win to the Christian. I think the atheist was underprepared.

As atheists don't believe in God (presumably because of lack of evidence), aren’t they likely to also disbelieve other things lacking evidence? “Atheists: do you believe in the soul?" is often answered by snarkily restating atheism’s definition. Why? My answer on Quora: It’s not snarky. Atheists can believe in anything and still be atheists, as long as they don’t believe in gods. P.S. I don’t believe in “souls.” I can’t speak for anyone else. I believe in brains. Expanding here, a GSC exclusive: Atheism is the absence of a belief in God. They can believe in souls. They can believe in ghosts. They can believe in astrology. Apparently there are Buddhis atheists. Don't ask me about them. They can believe in UFO's and reincarnation. They can be totalitarian. They can be capitalist, democratic. They can be ugly. They can be smoking hot. The only thing atheists have in common is, if you were to ask one whether he or she believes in God, the answer would be no. Now, there are things many atheists have in common. But those things are typically disconnected from atheism. Like souls. A soul, in most usage, is an imaginary unit of existence that is not part of a person's body but is independent of it. We wonder, for example, if the soul survives death. There is, however, no reason dependent on atheism to believe the soul is something that actually exists independent of the brain. Plenty of reasons that are NOT dependent on atheism to believe in the soul. Just because I do not believe in souls does not mean all atheists agree with me, or any!

Can someone please offer advice on how ANYONE is supposed to have a reasonable discussion with someone who abandons FACTS as a mutually agreed upon premise?

Now beyond certain. Christopher Lee

not sure about the grammy, but so sure about peter cushing that if I'm wrong it must be Christopher Lee

Peter Cushing?

much obliged

Ya think?

Rob S. is an a$$#ole.

Agreed on Tanya (sigh) Roberts (thank you Cinemax!)

Charlie's Angels

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i would guess you're on the wrong side of the pond. the sorta gave it away for me.

Kind of my point. Like the resurrection, or Elisha and the giant magic invisible army, or Daniel and... everything about Daniel. Recognizing a story as fictional resolves all contradictions without magically coming up with five crosses on the hill or Peter's six denials or Judas witnessing the ascension but then skipping out so the angels can call them Men of Galilee without being liars. No one is obliged to investigate the topic of this thread, but if you are going to investigate it, you have two choices. One is to follow the evidence where it leads, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. The other is to decide your conclusion before you begin and cherry pick the evidence you're going to believe because it conforms to the conclusion you decided to reach before you really investigated anything. You can pray for guidance either way. God's not going to give you a scorpion if you ask for an egg, after all. Is he?

In the Spider-Man movies with Tobey Maguire, Spidey's webs were organic. They came out of his wrists. In the Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland movies, they're machines that Peter Parker made. What about the real Spider-Man? Were his web slingers organic or man-made? There are a couple of approaches to take. We can interview the producers. Go back to the source material. Or we can recognize this is a fictional character and neither answer is "true" in any meaningful sense of the word.

Wait until he finds out Paul didn't write Ephesians and that Daniel never existed.

John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt stayed withthe showfrom start to finish. Suzanne Sommers (sp?) was the first roommate, followed by Jenilee Harrison and Priscilla Barnes.