Proof that for every two Jewish people there are at least three opinions
I only see a bunch of ornamented books?
Its called the Mishnah, its a bunch of long dead old people arguing over things of mostly very little significance (even for religious people)
One of my favorite Jewish rabbi argument stories was them telling off God for interfering in a legal debate. A rabbi asks God for a miracle to prove his argument, and when he does, the rabbis say “no, that’s not fair. We have to base our understandings on the rules that you gave us, and divine intervention is not a way to settle an argument.”
Judaism is extremely confused, it promotes logic and reasoning but only based on its own logic and reasoning system (that doesn’t follow science or scientific reasoning). So it makes perfect sense, why let god get in the way of a multi-hour long debate over the logic of laws that were made up?
Didn’t islam have to have special religious scholars for figuring out tiny things? I feel like I remember them having to be called in to issue a special ruling through the Quran that a religious building could be entered temporarily by the police to end a siege between them and some other group. Probably mis-remembering, but I feel like that was it.
Didn’t islam have to have special religious scholars for figuring out tiny things?
At least in theory, Islam is traditionally adhered to as an all-encompassing lifestyle. As such, it’s unsurprising to find rulings on the minutia of affairs.
FWIW, deriving new religious verdicts and/or refining the old is a continuous effort as new issues/situations arise.
I feel like I remember them having to be called in to issue a special ruling through the Quran that a religious building could be entered temporarily by the police to end a siege between them and some other group.
Perhaps you are referring to issuing a so-called ‘fatwa’, which is basically understood as a religious ruling derived by an Islamic jurist on a (pressing) matter.
Ah yeah, I meant a Fatwa. Thanks.
Islamic jurisprudence has like several entirely different schools. There are systems for grading which Hadith to take seriously, based on how close the transmitter was to Mo, and which ones you accept inform your interpretation. (Don’t forget shia versus sunni as a large split - other smaller categories and sub categories as well.)
Iirc, there’s a lot of debate on whether actions are permissible versus mandatory, or forbidden versus discouraged. There are four Arabic words that go with those categories that I can’t be assed to look up rn.
There’s also the amazing part where it intersects with Islamic banking, which tries to come up with ways that you can make money without charging interest.
Islamic jurisprudence is complicated af - when I took my grad class on religion, I read lots of those arguments because my professor’s area of focus was medieval Islam.
I’m Buddhist, and it’s always struck me as odd that so many religious people require their text to be literally true.
If it were to be definitively proven that the person called Jesus Christ never existed as a historical person on earth, the various Christian churches and organizations would stop at nothing to attempt to discredit this. They would be furious.
On the other hand, if it were definitively proven that Siddartha Gautama, the person who will be called the Buddha, never existed as a historical person on earth, most Buddhists would find it interesting, probably even humorous, and would go on happily practicing Buddhism.
Good God, tune the self-righteousness down a notch… I can barely see the screen through the smog of smug oozing from your post.
Good
GodBuddha(that’s definitely your thing, there’s no such smug oozing from anywhere)
You may be bathing in it to the point you don’t notice it anymore.
damn ! nobody’s coming out unscathed
Good one.
you wanna keep talking ?
Did that sound good in your head?
Self-righteous, you say? Oozing of smuuuuggg, you say? You’re smelling your own upper lip.
I went to Catholic school (in Canada) and was taught (by priests and nuns) that Christianity probably started as a mushroom cult, Jesus probably didn’t exist but was a composite of various wandering prophets/lunatics wandering around about that time (apparently it’s been a popular way for idle young men to pick up chicks for centuries), etc… The bible was taught as a (very flawed) historical document and not the literal “word of god” as it was decades before. Even services were performed as comforting archaic rituals rather than stodgy religious services. This was consistent across schools, and even the one that was the seat of a cardinal was no different.
The Catholic religion gets a lot of flack (and deservedly so!), but at least they recognize it’s basically just ritualistic bullshit (in Canada at least). Looking back, I think they are just happy to have people in their weird shroomless mushroom cult.
Christianity’s power rest on Jesus nature as God and human at the same time. Without that the theology would have to be very very different.
Reading the new testament would be informative on this front. It is not about philosophy or morals, it is about Jesus Christ as a specific individual one must suck up to.
That’s very interesting to me. I dont know anything about Buddhism, can you explain why Buddists wouldn’t be affected much if they found out their relifious figure never existed? I think for christians it would be devastating because it would mean all the promises the bible makes wouldn’t come true, like a rewarding after life for it’s followers and a punishing afterlife for non-believers. FYI I’m athiest, but I find religion and it’s verious practices to be fascinating.
Because it’s not about the person, it’s about the Dharma, the teachings. Those exist with or without a historical Buddha, and that’s what guides the practice.
Imagine that someone is showing you the moon by pointing at it. You want to look at the moon, not the finger. The Buddha is a finger pointing at the moon.
This is why Christianity is so scummy. The only reason these shit heels “give back” is because they expect to he rewarded for it. Oh no, we can’t just be kind to be kind, we do it because we are promised something on the back end. Same energy and douchebags who record themselves donating to say the homeless. It’s all about what they get out of the transaction. A fucking pat on the back.
Even worse, in its effort to capture even the shittiest people, Christianity has created a loophole where its believers can deliberately be shitty while expecting everything to be ok if they confess and repent before the end. Like a divine “sorry you’re upset with what I did”.
Because it doesn’t change the message at all. And if you follow a religion because you agree with its teachings, does the source really matter??
If you read somewhere you should be kind to others for betterment of the society. You said “that makes sense, I’ll do it from now onwards”, and you later learn it was a fantasy story and wasn’t talking about real life, would you stop being kind? Now replace that with not actively hurting people.
Enlightenment isn’t about some mystical truth and seeing into the unknown. It’s about stripping away the illusions that cloud the way we see this reality. Those stories about the Buddha are ways to illustrate some of those illusions and how others might have come to the realization. It doesn’t matter if they really happened. A lot of them are so constructed that they are probably fake, at least to some degree.
One that really affected me was the 72 problems story (or some number lol, I only remember that it’s not 99, because 99 problems is from that Jay-z song, but ultimately it doesn’t matter how many problems “everyone has”).
For the short version, a man goes to the Buddha because he heard he can help him with his problems. He complains about his farm not doing well, his wife nagging, his kids not respecting him, a whole slew of 72 or so problems, and for each one when he asks if the Buddha can help him with that, the Buddha tells him no. Finally he complains that he didn’t help him with any problem and the Buddha says “everyone has 72 problems, but I can help you with your 73rd problem: the problem that you have problems. Problems are a fact of life, if you get so bent up about having problems, you’re going to have a miserable life because there’s always problems. Accept that the problems exist and you’ll find peace.” And then the guy was enlightened (in that specific aspect of life, since enlightenment isn’t a global state but basically just means “learned a deep lesson”).
I’d get annoyed at needing to deal with things. Still do sometimes; enlightenment isn’t some magical state. But when I notice that that is bugging me, I just remember the 72 problems story and dismiss that 73rd problem from affecting my mood. Which also indirectly helps with the problems themselves, because if you’re pissed about having to deal with stuff, you’ll be less effective at dealing with them (especially if your mood rubs off on others or attracts trolls). It truly feels like understanding that enabled an easy mode on some aspects of life. If the whole story was made up, it doesn’t undo that understanding or eliminate that easy mode.
Whereas I’ve known Christians who can’t understand why atheists don’t just go around murdering people because if they don’t believe in the Bible, what’s even the point of trying to be good?
I like that story a lot, it’s a good reminder that we may not be able to change our circumstances but we can always change our attitude. So would you say Buddhism is more of a system of thought and less of a religion? Kinda like stoicism?
There is a mysticism angle to it with reincarnation and all that, I think something like a belief that you keep coming back until you can achieve true enlightenment or something like that. Imo that stuff is a nice idea but I’m agnostic overall, so my belief in that regard is “who knows?”
But I do really like the Buddhist philosophy and think it has a lot of value because it doesn’t have to lean on the mystical side to work. It makes sense with or without any idea of heaven or nirvana. Enlightenment is worthwhile for its own sake.
I don’t think Buddhism is unique in that regard. All religions have at least nuggets of valuable philosophy. My personal belief is that Buddhism is denser and broader than most when it comes to that, but I’m no religious scholar so it could just be a lack of knowledge of others.
IMO the best belief systems pick and choose values and lessons based on their own merit rather than having to take or leave the whole package. I also believe that anyone can evaluate those values, as long aa they are thoughtful, honest, and willing to challenge any and all aspects of them. Someone can be more wise than another, but anyone can get there eventually.
You seem like a very emotionally intelligent person, and I respect you a lot. Thank you for sharing your beliefs with and worldview me. I think we would agree on more than we would differ.
Thanks for the kind words, it feels good to be seen sometimes. You seem thoughtful yourself and I’m happy you asked that original question in good faith. The world would be a nicer place with more like you.
Buddha mentions following the doctrine while also not discounting new discoveries of future eras
How hard would it actually be to write a sacred book from the ground up, following the same structure? I’m thinking in writing a cryptic book that could easily be interpreted in a lot of ways, but still feel like a real thing, and make another book series that cite it. Like Tolkien did with Elvish, but a book instead of a language.
The only difference between a religion and a cult, is the number of cultists.
Mormons
See Scientology.
Oh, they have a sacred book too? TIL
Dionetics by L. R. Hubbard
Oh, but that’s like shitty science fiction and pseudo science. I was probably referring to something like the book of mormon, the bible and the quram.
Like, start by having a mystical explanation for the world origin (don’t mind using science as a base, but mystically interpreted and with a lot of symbols). Then some kind of strict law or precepts for the followers of the protagonist god or gods. Something that antagonizes with the non-believers. Then some poetic books, with very vague symbolism. Then some collection of prophecies, very subject to interpretation, and even better if the prophecies contradict each other. And that would be book 1, that can be “found” in the present by some modern day prophet. That book would serve as the basis of the “new” revelation and interpretation of the prophecies, adding more symbolism, and prophecies, in part two of the book.
That would be if you want to match 1:1 the bible, maybe I can settle in book 1, and have the fiction books to cite it as is, adding the “second part” in the story. I’m thinking in something like Dune, but with the complementary full sacred book, so you could read the book, see that a priest of sorts cites the book, and then go to the book and see if it’s a verse taken out of context or it’s faithful to the intention of the book, to foreshadow if the priest has his own agenda or not. You could read the book and draw your own conclusion of the meaning of things there. You could share a piece of the universe you are reading about in the book series. Or not do it and just read the book. I see it like an optional companion for a cool book series.
Some books, Dune included, cite pieces of texts in-universe, but you can’t read them, only the cites. I think this could be cool.
I wonder if LLM can write something like that, in the same ancient style if instructed to. If the book series is not profitable, I can always start a cult with the source material, like Mr. Hubbard.
I’m not a believer but their is decent evidence to suggest that Jesus was a real guy.
There’s as much evidence to support a dude named Jesus lived in Nazareth, as there is that a guy named Sam lives in current-day New York.
A few hundred to a few thousand Jesuses likely lived in Nazareth.
Ok, even if there was a guy named Jesus (which, like, there were thousands; that name was super popular at the time), this guy wasn’t god. The meme says the bible is their proof that god exists, not that some guy named Jesus existed.
But a schizophrenic guy named Jesus must have been much rarer.
Not really. There is no contemporary evidence and all tales about him were written decades or centuries after his purported life. And even if there was a preacher named Jesus that got executed by the Romans for sedition, that still doesn’t make any of the supernatural claims any more plausible.
Though nearly all modern scholars hold that the passage, in its present form, cannot be authentic; most nevertheless hold that it contains an authentic nucleus referencing the life of Jesus and his execution by Pilate, which was then subjected to Christian interpolation and alteration.
That’s still a big maybe.
That’s one of the passages. The passage about Jesus being the brother of James is not historically disputed.
I’m willing to concede that original passage likely had the part about him performing miracles and explicitly calling him the Messiah was a later alteration, knowing that Josephus did not convert to Christianity, but the passage was not invented out of whole cloth.
There’s decent evidence Tom Holland is a real guy too
Lies and heresy.
Who is more likely to be real. Robin Hood or Jesus?
Can you name any such evidence?
Check out Dr. Bart Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist?, he goes over all the evidence.
Every week I receive maybe two or three emails asking me whether Jesus existed as a human being. When I started getting these emails, some years ago now, I thought the question was rather peculiar and I did not take it seriously. Of course Jesus existed. Everyone knows he existed. Don’t they?
But the questions kept coming and soon I began to wonder: why are there so many people asking? My wonder only increased when I learned that I myself was being quoted in some circles – misquoted rather – as saying that Jesus never existed. I decided to look into the matter. As it turns out, to my surprise, there is an entire literature devoted to the question of whether or not there ever was a real man, Jesus.
I was surprised because I am trained as a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, and for thirty years I have written extensively on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the early Christian movement, the history of the church’s first three hundred years. Like all New Testament scholars, I have read literally thousands and thousands of books and articles in English and other European languages on Jesus, the New Testament, and early Christianity. But I was almost completely unaware of this body of skeptical literature, except as a slight image on the very periphery of my vision. As are most of my colleagues in this field of scholarship.
Those who do not think Jesus existed are frequently militant in their views and remarkably adept at parrying counter-evidence that to the rest of the civilized world might seem completely compelling and even unanswerable. But these writers have answers, and the smart ones among them need to be taken seriously, if for no other reason than to show why they cannot be right about their major contention. The reality is, whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist. That is what this book will set out to demonstrate.
I hardly need to stress what I have already intimated, that this is the view of virtually every expert on the planet. That in itself is not proof, of course. Expert opinion is, at the end of the day, still opinion. But why would you not want to know what experts have to say?
https://ehrmanblog.org/my-book-did-jesus-exist-an-answer-to-the-mythicists/
Okay, that was a whole lot of someone else’s words to say the same thing you said.
I am not reading a whole book to investigate your assertion:
I asked for evidence.
You seem to have read a book that presents it. So give us the actual evidence that book presents. This should be easy, because you’re using that book as said evidence.
Please give us a bulleted list of pieces of evidence from that book that back up your claim.
e: Or just one. Something concrete, like an archaeological artefact.
Know that if you choose to argue against facts attested by the overwhelming majority consensus of scholars, academics and historians then you are the one making extraordinary claims.
If you want to hear him talking on this I suggest skipping to 14:35 since you’re impatient:
Read through page 55-101 of below:
https://archive.org/details/jesus-apocalyptic-prophet-bart-d.-ehrman/page/55/mode/1up
Most people in our society probably think that Jesus must have had an enormous effect on the people of his day — not just on his immediate followers. He was, after all, the founder of the most significant religion in the history of Western Civilization.
Unfortunately, the commonsensical view is not even close to being right—biblical epics on the wide screen (the source of many people’s knowledge about the Bible!) notwithstanding. If we look at the historical record itself—and, I should emphasize, for historians there is nothing else to look at—it appears that whatever his influence on subsequent generations, Jesus’ impact on society in the first century was practically nil, less like a comet striking the planet than a stone tossed into the ocean. This becomes especially clear when we consider what his own contemporaries had to say about him.
Pagan sources
Pliny the Younger
The first reference to Jesus in any surviving pagan account does not come until the year 112 CE. It appears in a letter written by a governor of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus (northwestern part of modern-day Turkey), a Roman official named Pliny. The letter tells us some interesting things about these followers of Jesus. We learn, for example, that they comprised a range of ages and socioeconomic classes, that they met in the early morning before it was light, that they partook of food together, and—the chief point for our present investigation—that they worshiped “Christ as a god.” The name “Jesus” itself is not given here, but it’s pretty clear whom Pliny had in mind. Unfortunately, he doesn’t give us any information about Jesus—for example, who he was, where he lived, what he said or did, or how he died—only that he was worshiped as divine by his followers.
Suetonius
A few years later, the Roman historian Suetonius made a casual comment that some scholars have taken to be a reference to Jesus. Suetonius wrote a set of biographies on the twelve Roman Caesars who had ruled up to his own time, starting with Julius Caesar. There is a lot of valuable historical information in these books, along with a lot of juicy gossip—a gold mine for historians interested in major events of the early Roman Empire. In his Life of Claudius, emperor from 41 to 54 CE, Suetonius mentions riots that had occurred among the Jews in the city of Rome and says that the riots had been instigated by a person named “Chrestus.” Some historians have maintained that this is a misspelling of the name “Christ.” If so, then Suetonius is indicating that some of Jesus’ followers had created havoc in the capital, a view possibly confirmed in the New Testament (see Acts 18:2).
Tacetus
Tacitus is probably best known for the Annals, a sixteen-volume history of the Roman Empire covering 14-68 CE. Probably the most famous passage in the Annals (book 15) reports the megalomania of the emperor Nero, who had Rome torched in order to implement some of his own architectural designs for the city. When he was suspected for the fire, Nero sought to place the blame elsewhere and found in the Christians a ready scapegoat. He rounded up members of this despised sect (Tacitus himself says that the Christians were widely held in contempt for their “hatred of the human race”) and made a public display of them, having some rolled in pitch and set aflame to light his public gardens, and others wrapped in animal skins to be torn to shreds by savage dogs. Nero was not known for his timid tactics. In any event, in the context of his discussion of Nero’s excesses against the Christians, Tacitus does manage to say something about where they had acquired their (to him) strange beliefs and so provides us with the first bit of historical information to be found about Jesus in a pagan author: “Christus, from whom their [i.e., the Christians’] name is derived, was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius” (Annals 15.44). Tacitus goes on to indicate that the “superstition” that emerged in Jesus’ wake first appeared in Judea before spreading to Rome itself.
Early Jewish Sources
Josephus
I’ll take the references in reverse order, since the second is of less historical interest. It occurs in a story about the Jewish high priest Ananus, who abused his power in the year 62 CE by unlawfully putting to death a man named James, whom Josephus identifies as “the brother of Jesus who is called the messiah” (Ant. 20.9,1). From this reference we can learn that there was indeed a man named Jesus (Josephus actually discusses lots of different people with that name—many of them at far greater length than the Jesus we are concerned about), that he had a brother named James (which we already knew from the New Testament; see Mark 6:3 and Gal. 1:19), and that he was thought by some people to be the Jewish messiah. The information is not much, but at least it’s something. I should point out that Josephus himself does not happen to agree with those who called Jesus the messiah. We don’t know how much he knew about the Christians, but it is clear that he remained a non-Christian Jew until his dying day.
Canonical Christian sources
Matthew, Mark, Luke
Noncanonical Christian sources
Q
One of the most controversial and talked-about sources that scholars have used for studying the life of the historical Jesus is, oddly enough, a document that does not exist. Most scholars are reasonably sure, though, that at one time it did exist, and that it can, at least theoretically, be reconstructed. The document is called “Q.” What else did it contain? It certainly had some of the most familiar sayings of Jesus. It contained, for example, the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-23) and the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2-4); it included the commands to love your enemies, not to judge others, and not to worry about what to eat and wear (Luke 6:27—42; 12:22—32); and it provided a number of familiar parables (e.g., Luke 12:39-48; 14:15-24). The reality, though, is that we don’t have a full picture of what Q contained, since our only access to it is through the agreements of Matthew and Luke in passages not found in Mark. So, while we can say what probably was in it, we’re hard-pressed to say what was not.
Know that if you choose to argue against facts
Er, what? No, please reread what I said.
Can you give me ONE piece of tangible evidence, or can you only write a strawman dissertation?
I don’t care to watch a video or read a book because you can’t plainly state your point.
How about you plainly state your point?
E: not more quotes from books, but contemporaneous records and monuments, archaeological sites, graves of these people – you’ve given me stories. We have a metric shitload of stories and myths. None of that is proof.
That took an incredible amount of time to format and edit everything in only to receive such a rude dismissive response.
I really hope a lurker appreciates how much effort i spent to give you exactly what you asked for, because you’re a genuinely miserable person.
Asking for more and more sources and info in the manner this guy has is often called clown fishing.
I’m not trying to be rude or dismissive, and I promise I’ve read every word you’ve written. I’m a writer; I know how much it takes to write things.
That’s not what this is about. If you need a pat on the back for writing words and using grammar, here you go: nicely done.
Can you give me the actual evidence you’ve been promising, or are we done here?
But is there an evidence that he was a son of god?
No. That’s why it’s religion, because it is based on faith. If there were enough evidence then it would be science, or objective fact.
Yeah, he was a normal guy
“sup, name’s Jesus, you guys into 40k?”
Isn’t Allah and God the same god?
Yes
In arabic allah literally means god
Pretty much, but their believers get very upset if you tell them that
Well the Christians do, in my experience the Muslims are like “yeah, duh”.
They even have the exact same stories in them, I tried educating a Christian on that but they don’t want to know about it.
To be fair, any text is terrible proof.
I’d rather have Spider-Man as a guide for my morals than that genocidal freak they call God.
Spider-Man has canonically killed more people than God
Did Spider-Man ever kill every single person on the planet but one family?
In the multiverse crisis he accidentally destroys several other universes
Are you talking about the MCU Spider-Man? If you want to go there, then every version of Yahweh that exists has definitely killed more people than every version of Spider-Man that exists.
Not to mention Yahweh genocides on purpose rather than by accident.
If you want to go there, then every version of Yahweh that exists
See, this is where the metaphor really breaks down. You’re trying to shoehorn Pop Sci-Fi tropes into a significantly older franchise. There is no “every version of Yahweh”. Like, canonically, there’s exactly three versions. One of them is the wrathful mass murderer. One’s the nice prophet who got strung up for preaching a revolutionary form of compassion. And one of them is a force-ghost that mostly just operates as Bronze Age Babelfish.
Not to mention Yahweh genocides on purpose rather than by accident.
Idk if you’re going to get a harsher sentence for killing thousands of people deliberately than trillions of people through gross negligence.
Either way, even if you narrow it down to the OG Stan Lee Spiderman, I’m sure you can dig around and find the time he blew up a planet of evil aliens or decimated a miniature civilization with a sneeze or unleashed a cyber-plague that obliterated the population of an adjacent timeline, because 70s/80s/90s era Marvel was just full of that crap.
In the end, the Knights and Spider-Man were able to save the day, except that there still remained the issue of a nuclear bomb that was designed to destroy the world. The Knights managed to open up a dimensional rift and Spider-Man threw the bomb through it…
…
The surviving heroes of that world then challenged the Knights, who had to concede that yeah, they kind of WERE responsible for the destruction of that world. The whole thing was never discussed again, but definitely not the finest hour for the good ol’ Webhead.
So, OG Stan Lee Spiderman did a full blown “Noah’s Ark” tier global holocaust. Except he did it in a post-industrial civilization when the population was in the billions rather than hundred-thousands.
The difference is ‘accidently’. God killed all of earth except one family on purpose and continues to kill people to this day. Assuming Gid is real, of course.
So then God murdered more people than Spider-Man.
Right. You do see how that’s worse right?
You could do a lot worse than Peter. “With great power, there must come great responsibility” is an adage to live by.
- Be God
- Create humans
- Wipe out almost all life off earth in a flood because you’re not happy with the result
Yup, that’s what I call responsibility.
Proof of cds
I don’t see how is this comparable
You dont CDs?
But, that’s a CD. The only way it would be comparable is if people worshipped the bible itself. Not sure if I’m following.
CDs nuts!
Do you like tapes and CDs?
8 track deez nuts on yo mouf
Goteem
Walked right into it
He’s saying you can point to a CD to know CDs exist. No one can point to God.
Actually it’s a picture of a cd
God exists in the same way spierman does, in our hearts.
Actually, my Peter Parker location is slightly to the right of my spleen. He says he’s very comfy there 🤷
Cthulhu definitely exists. He calls to me in my dreams.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
At this point, I would welcome the cosmic horror of the Old Ones
I have a book that proves Megatron overcame oppression and led the Decepticons to Freedom!
deleted by creator
ICE?
Why you little!
Who else could command me to torture and eat all those stupid noisy kids
The eternal hunger.
Of course he’s real! Don’t let those filthy unbelievers confuse you! Keep up the good work!
Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother. Cthulhu does not have interest in pesky kids.
It’s all a part of Azathoth’s dream anyway, long may they slumber.
Those kids were just figments, but then so are we.
Spider-Man. Respect the hyphen.
And he’s real. And broke.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/22dd641b-9dec-4118-b3e8-09087b1979c7.mp4
He was always the least ego centric spider-man.
Actually there are many books of Spiderman which means there’s more proof for Spiderman than there is for God.
Middle English: via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin biblia, from Greek (ta) biblia ‘(the) books’, from biblion ‘book’, originally a diminutive of biblos ‘papyrus, scroll’, of Semitic origin.
Little books. Booklets. Since both God and Spiderman have several books, they will have to play this out by arm wrestling or Parcheesi.
Imagine picking up a copy of a copy of a copy of partial recreation of a blog entry about Spiderman existing in the year 4000, and having a long argument over whether Alain Robert, “The Human Spider” ever existed.
Imagine picking up a copy of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in the year 4000 and insisting “This guy couldn’t have been real, either”.
It’s curious, because I rarely see this argument aimed at the Apostles - particularly John and Peter. There’s just this tacit “They’re liars, it never happened” subtext.
No one is brave enough to challenge the entire history of a schism in the Jewish church two millennia ago. Or to consider the apocrypha or the gnostic texts or the plethora of splinter faiths that emerged from this singular moment.
These are things that seemingly happened independent of a non-existent person, without any identifiable precursors.
It’s like spilling a bunch of ink claiming Lincoln wasn’t real without asking who won the presidency in 1860.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection. There is a ton of exaggeration in all mythology texts, and some are just stories to illustrate a point. But of those that did have factual events, they are rarely a true telling.
Maybe some Israelites left Egypt during a particularly shitty time in Egypt. It is so easy to take a story of a smallish group of Israelites escaping slavery during a plague and being chased by some guards who gave up, and repeatedly embellish that story until God both hardened Pharaoh’s heart and punished him for not doing right by His people (which number far more than could possibly have been living in Egypt at that time) by giving a series of plagues, and then wiping Pharaoh and his army out with a magical sea passage that closed on them. It’s such a trope of all human storytelling it’s been a joke for centuries.
Apply that to literally every story, think of the motivations behind those writing it, and you can get an amazing moral teacher becoming God.
But to the point of the meme, from the perspective of people in the future, there may have been a Peter Parker, but there’s no reason to believe there was a Spider-man without more to go on than the comics. Likewise, religious texts.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection. There is a ton of exaggeration in all mythology texts, and some are just stories to illustrate a point. But of those that did have factual events, they are rarely a true telling.
Can you be more specific here? What are factual events? Are you referring to the Bible? Which events specifically?
Because my understanding is that the consensus among historians is that there’s only like one or two references to a “Jesus of Nazarath” outside of the Bible (Josephus being the main one, and even that is super vague).
The honus is on your to prove that he existed, not the other way around.
There are an unfortunate contingent of atheists that think “Jesus existed” = “support for Christianity.” I’ve had this argument on this very website. (Very common on the internet for someone to assume that a non-mythicist must be a Christian - uh, no, that’s following for that CS Lewis “lunatic or lord” false dichotomy.)
It’s clear that there was a real, vagrant preacher that had a following. Q and the Sayings source were likely compiled quickly after his death - it’s likely that many of the words attributed to him were the words of the real man.
At first, I don’t think he was understood as literally divine, just a messenger of god or prophet. There’s a clear escalation across the gospels if you read them in the order they were written - it’s really John that presents Jesus as the logos, and John was written last.
The most likely explanation was that he was an apocalyptic Messiah figure, who was supposed to lead to the overthrowing of the Romans. When he was killed, the cope became that he was resurrected. They negotiated with the text of the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, and constructed the fully human/fully divine figure that eventually became the theological party line.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity,
The big reason for this is that the name Jesus is interpreted and thousands of men came to and from Nazareth.
Can anyone disprove one of them wasn’t “Jesus of Nazareth”?
Tap
No more than anyone can prove one of them was.
Which story will you remember the most: the boring and mundane, or the fantastical and exciting?
Most stories back then were also passed around by word of mouth, so each retelling will be slightly different (possibly also more exciting than the last). By the time someone decides to write it down it has already been distorted. Probably not much is left of the original story.
Maybe the story of Noah’s ark started out as a real story of a man who managed to save a few of his livestock from a stormy day, and then it somehow got so distorted it became a story about a man surviving a world encompassing extinction level event.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection.
I’ve seen quite a few folks float the full blown “Jesus was invented by the Romans to trick the occupied state of Palestine into accepting Roman rule” theory.
Apply that to literally every story, think of the motivations behind those writing it, and you can get an amazing moral teacher becoming God.
Sure. Siddhartha (the Buddha), Mohammad, even Confucius to come extent.
But like with most of these, the divinity of a figure is decided on well after they’ve been dead and buried. What I’m stuck on in the denialist “You can’t prove Ancient Historical Figure X existed now that I’ve arbitrarily rejected the veracity of all the existing materials.”
But to the point of the meme, from the perspective of people in the future, there may have been a Peter Parker, but there’s no reason to believe there was a Spider-man
The point of the meme is that religious texts are fictional, because fictional texts exist.
The point of the religion is that society should organize itself around certain traditions and taboos, because it will lead to a utopian future of peace and plenty.
There difference between Jesus and Spider-Man isn’t their magical powers, its their activist base of enthusiastic followers.
In Julius Caesar a clock strikes three, and while they had hours (a fraction of the daytime, not a standard unit) they didn’t have mechanical clocks.
But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.
Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute. The miracles and matching Jesus up to fit the prophesies came later. Also Pontius Pilate loved crucifixion and had execution teams on standby where it was considered elsewhere in Rome a dire sentence for the worst of offenders. Pilate was the Roman equivalent of a hanging judge, so it was super-easy for a malcontent in Jerusalem to end up on the cross.
But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.
We know about Julius Caeser in large part due to the highly politicized nature of the office. If he was a “lesser” consul or emperor, less material would be produced and preserved over the subsequent centuries. The materials around minor prophets in far-flung holdings where the biggest literate portions of the population were ideologically opposed to his contemporaries weren’t going to make it to Cato the Elder in a timely fashion.
That takes us to the documents we do have, which are absolutely larded up with embellishment and gossip and mythological rumor. That’s not an unknown problem for exceptionally historical figures. We don’t discount the existence of the Pharaohs of Egypt because their surviving manuscripts describe them as deities. Nor do we dismiss the existence of the city of Troy because our handful of texts insist the city was frequented by Greek gods and goddesses.
Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute.
The significance of the founder of the Christian movement wasn’t that he was one more anti-establishment apocalypse prophet, but that he succeeded in galvanizing an enormous popular movement in a way prior rabbis and rabble-rousers hadn’t.
Blandly comparing Christ to Spiderman only really makes sense if you believe Spiderman has had the same influence on modern American society and culture as a Jewish mystic had on Rome. I mean, maybe 2000 years from now we’ll see it differently. But it seems fairly obvious that’s not the case.
As I understand it, Christianity got lucky. Jesus’ incident led to a movement in a time when it suited the purposes of disregarded demographics, of ambitious warlords and academic philosophers. It was the grain of sand that started a landslide, the planet suitable for intelligent life to evolve.
Jesus (again, according to academic consensus) was the lucky quantum to start a massive cain reaction.
And New York City is real, so that means Spiderman is real (this is literally the logic that some Christians use to defend the Bible)
Also, there are now more Ikea catalogs published than the Bible, making Ikea the superior religion.
Since Ikea a famous for their meatballs, a part of the holy dish and body of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, our Holy Noodle is more real than the Christian god, or any other god.
At least cite Amazing Fantasy #15, heretic.
For some reason I find op citation funnier.
