Fucking pisses me off when people generalise every religious person as a hate preacher/ idiot etc. Its human nature to hate. If they couldnt disguise it under religion, theyd be something else to fight about. Do you think it was all peace and roses before religion?

Fucking pisses me off when people generalise every religious person as a hate preacher/ idiot etc. Its human nature to hate. If they couldnt disguise it under religion, theyd be something else to fight about. Do you think it was all peace and roses before religion?

Turned water into wine? What kind of switcheroo con was that?

With regard to empathy and intelligence I wouldn't say that correlation means causation.

Morality is a result of empathy, which is a result of intelligence. There is no logical basis that religion of any kind is somehow the foundation of morality.

I think ive had this debate before but the foundations of morality come from religion. Think of many areas where there was rampant canibalism, murder etc before missionaries found them.

As for your second sentence, I completely agree. A lot of the religious 'practises' that I follow are from a cultural, community aspect rather than the religious aspect. In terms of their being some deity, its not something that I give much thought because whether there is or isnt my lifestyle but if there is I strongly reject the notion of a loving, rational deity that gets preached so much.

And I completely lost it at the Jesus/Chuck Norris line

I think ive had this debate before but the foundations of morality come from religion. Think of many areas where there was rampant canibalism, murder etc before missionaries found them.

He did exist, but did not have spiritual powers. Instead, I believe he was a relatively famous man who helped others. 60 years later (or whenever the statements were written), the people who wrote the bible decided to use him as a figurehead for their new religion as he was already famous.

Personally, I have doubts about the validity of creationism and higher being, but value the teachings of Christianity and the work that churches perform.

American New Testament scholar Robert M. Price questions the historicity of Jesus in a series of books, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), Jesus Is Dead (2007), and The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (2012), as well as in contributions to The Historical Jesus: Five Views (2009). Price is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of writers and scholars who study the historicity of Jesus, arguing that the Christian image of Christ is a theological construct into which traces of Jesus of Nazareth have been woven.[302] A former Baptist pastor, Price writes that he was originally an apologist on the historical-Jesus question but became disillusioned with the arguments. As the years went on, he found it increasingly difficult to poke holes in the position that questioned Jesus's existence entirely. Despite this, he still took part in the Eucharist every week for several years, seeing the Christ of faith as all the more important because, he argued, there was probably never any other.[303]

Price believes that Christianity is a historicized synthesis of mainly Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek mythologies.[304] He writes that everyone who espouses the Christ myth theory bases their arguments on three key points:
-There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.
-The epistles, written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus; all that can be taken from the epistles, he argues, is that a Jesus Christ, son of God, came into the world to die as a sacrifice for human sin and was raised by God and enthroned in heaven.
-The Jesus narrative is paralleled in Middle Eastern myths about dying and rising gods; Price names Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and Dumuzi/Tammuz as examples, all of which, he writes, survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and thereby influenced early Christianity. Price alleges that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels.[75] He argues that if critical methodology is applied with ruthless consistency, one is left in complete agnosticism regarding Jesus's historicity.[301]

Price argues that "the varying dates are the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history" citing accounts that have Jesus being crucified under Alexander Jannaeus (83 BCE) or in his 50s by Herod Agrippa I under the rule of Claudius Caesar (41–54 CE).[305][306]
Price points out "(w)hat one Jesus reconstruction leaves aside, the next one takes up and makes its cornerstone. Jesus simply wears too many hats in the Gospels—exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure (...) The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time."[307]

Later on Price states "I am not trying to say that there was a single origin of the Christian savior Jesus Christ, and that origin is pure myth; rather, I am saying that there may indeed have been such a myth, and that if so, it eventually flowed together with other Jesus images, some one of which may have been based on a historical Jesus the Nazorean."[308]

Price acknowledges that he stands against the majority view of scholars, but cautions against attempting to settle the issue by appeal to the majority.[309]

This a thread to share your slightly controversial/offensive opinions, and to invoke discussion about them.

There is also the account by the Roman Senator (name escapes me, but google can help) which is worth considering.

^

I lean on the side of probably not. I don't make any definitive claim that he didn't, just that it's very unlikely and that the evidence doesn't support the claim thathe ddefinitely did.

Matthew, Mark, Luke & John can't even match significant details of his life, and all other non-biblical texts referring to Jesus are by people born well after Jesus' supposed persecution.

The story of Jesus also borrows heavily from other Ancient religions and folklore, such as the virgin birth, healing, death & resurrection.

I don't think there is much doubt Jesus the person existed, now whether he was the Son of God or responsible for all of the miracles described in the bible is up to personal belief/debate.

But did he exist, yes.

Fredsta wrote:
There's a fair bit of support from early historians within the Bible and on the other side of the fence with Roman historians touching on it, I've no doubt the MAN existed, whether or not he was what he claimed to be is the only thing up for dispute imo.