Ten oz

It relates to this thread in that for Jesus to have existed he would've had to have been very different than ALL accounts of him. So much so that it become pointless from a theological stand point whether or not he (Jesus) in fact had ever been real. Only the apostles speak of Jesus' life and there stories a clearly works of fiction. Theologically if Jesus had never performed miracles, been resurrected, and wasn't a form or messenger of god than his existence becomes a formality of little importance.

The sarcasm in my post was the idea that it even matters. I am an atheist. I do not believe that had there been a Jesus he was the son of god or resurrected. The idea that a God would play pretend dead as a means of proving itself seems off.

I do not neccessarily disagree with any of that. However my point is simply that natural selection does not favor success in terms of bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, etc. It favors repuduction and often throughout history natural events have chosen which species reproduce. Opportunities for reproduction are not always equal.

My post was meant to be more sarcastic than theological.

Why the resurrection? If Jesus was God in human form resurrection shouldn't have been so difficult. I thought suffering and then dying was the miraculous aspect of his life? That someone so power who could've prevented any pain from following onto himself allowed it for the sake of example? Either way I think the existence of Jesus in religious terms is a contradiction to faith. It is widely argued that faith is about belief in that which is unseen and unknowable. If that were true why would God needed to have made himself known through miracles and resurrection to obtain the faith of his apostles? Surely he could've just inspired their hearts and souls spiritually through faith and steered them toward writing scripture.

This is a good post but I think for some people who are not clear on the process it could be confusing. Things that are good at copying themselves will produce more copies assuming they have an opportunity to do so. Evolution has not favored the successful anymore than it has the lucky. Doesn't matter how good a species is at reproducing if a meteorite blows up it's habitat or a volcano eruption destroys its food source. Many highly adapted seemingly successful species have gone extinct. In some cases mutations allows certian species to survive while in others cases it was the eradication of competitors through random processes. Natural selection does not necessarily favor "good". It simply rewards whatever is actively alive.

I care because I view the assumption of a historical Jesus an example of how problematic the study history is. Too often conclusive narratives are written as a matter of clutural history, religious believe, or to promote superiorty amongst certian groups. For some reason simply saying something is unknown seems offense or otherwise off putting to people. This goes for all sorts of historical things. I made a comment at work the other day that is it not fully known how the great pyramids were constructed. Within minutes co-workers were accussing me of believing that aliens built the pyramids. As if not knowing was equal to belief in any and all conspiracies. Rather my co-workers insisted that slaves had simply pulled the giant stones into position and that was that. They seemed to find comfort in their mutual certainty. I guess looking to the past with uncertainty threatens the linear world many people believe they exist in. It is easy to just look at constitutions, commandments, and etc with a mind that they are somehow perfect. Order has already been realized and it is merely a formality now that we continue it. Jesus have already died for our sins, the founding fathers of our countries have already set up a perfect system, and we already know everything we need too. It is better to celebrate a history full of heros than acknowledge how ambigious our world can be and how little we understand about how we've gotten from point A to point B.

Philosophical religious discussions are always on the terms of the religion being discussed. There is no real reason to believe in any God other than for the fact that people already do. So by entertaining questions about any God's motives we are pretending for argument sake that the said God even has motives or is otherwise real. Why does God punish the innocent? God doesn't. Humans are the ones who murder, rape, enslave, lie, cheat, and steal from one another. That is a provable fact. Why does God allow it? Well, I have never seen any evidence that God has control over the situation one way or the other. Assuming God had control of the situation would we humans be able to understand its motives? Is my pet Cat a slave. I keep it captive in my home, control what it eats, had surgery performed on it to prevent it from ever reproducing, and etc. Is my Cat a pampered pet or is it living a life of torment? Not all living things view the world the same way. I can not project human feelings on to my Cat any more than I can God. And my Cat is a real observable thing.

Living longer and evolution aside I find that posters on forums who use their real names tend to be more polite. Anonymity allows people say anything without being accountable. Posters are far less likely to be vulgar, racist, classist, and etc if they know friends, family and co-workers might see it. There are forums online where I use my real name. Unfortunately this isn't one of them. I work in an environment where my more progressive political beliefs and Athiesm would create problems between me and my peers.

I agree with what you are saying and would add that families that did escape to Detroit, Oakland, New York, etc then had to contend with white flight and political gerrymandering of districts which basically recreated the segregation they had fled.

"The homeownership rate, as well as its variations over time, has varied significantly by race.[8] While homeowners constitute the majority of white, Asian and Native American households, the homeownership rate for African Americans and those identifying as Hispanic or Latino has typically fallen short of the fifty percent threshold. Whites have had the highest homeownership rate, followed by Asians and Native Americans." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_States Home ownership percentage for whites in 74% where as it is 46% for blacks. Laws may prevent racism in the buying and selling of homes but a person still needs the economics means to purchase a home. Blacks have the lowest average income in the country. As I mentioned before the segregation is economically based. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income

First, as a disclaimer of sorts, I do not believe all blacks or all whites choose anything universally. To say blacks in Ferguson choose to segregate or vice versa lumps everyone together under an assumed position. I don't think that is an accurate way of viewing the situation. There was once a time in the United States were almost 100% of the Black community lived in the South. Today it is down to 55%. Families are migrating. So if blacks are not choosing to segregate themselves universally than how is that so many still are? I believe the answer to that question is economic more so than racial. Legal segregation in the united States just ended a generation ago. Beyond its impact on where people lived it also impacted employment and wealth attainment. A whole race of people were prevented upward mobility. Once the laws were changed many whites simply moved rather than live in integrated communities. It takes money to move and coming out of the 60's few in the Black community had wealth. I am sure you've heard of "White Flight". Plush Suburbs were built, real-estate sky rocketed in white communities, and a lot of ethnic people were left living in the parts of town they could still afford. In Ferguson the average annual per capita income is $5,000 less than for the state of Missouri and $8,000 less than the average for the United States as a whole. So moving to some other community is a lot easier said than done. Source of income data - http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/29000.html

Lakers finally got a win last night. 1-5 on the season but it is a long season. Hopefully last night starts a new trend.

@ overtone, I am not entirely sure what you are implying? It appears the leaded gasoline comment in relationship to impulse control implies that youth in Ferguson may be more prone to violence. Then you also bring racial segregation into the conversation implying unfair mistreatment of the community. I think these are rather conflicting ideas to some extent. As many of those who engage in bias treatment based on race/economics would surely use poor impulse control and propensity towards violence in those communities as a justification for any negative treatment.

, I can see that. It is odd though that a politician can campiagn of a platform of hating other politicians, being against the existence of the job for which they are running, and then actually win.

Good explanation of ionization by Nicholas Kang. Batteries are electrochemical and not simple as electrons diffusing between high and low potentials. I suggest you read up a bit on thermocouples and understand how they differ from batteries.

Voting is very important and a lot of people simply do not take it serious enough. There are 3 areas of voting that drive me nuts: First is that candidates are able to run proudly on how average they are. They say they grow up local, never went to a fancy college, attend church twice a week, are just like you and for some reason that appeals to people. I personal do not want a government of average folks. I want my Congressman to be educated in law and finance than I am. I want smart people running things. Second thing is candidates get away with being anti government. They say less government, too much red tap, let the private market handle things, shut down this and that agency, and it appeals to people. It makes no sense. Would anyone want to hire a Doctor that hated biology? To serve in government I think you should at least believe in it. Lastly is gerrymandering. There should be a software program that divides states up into geometric shapes base of population. We (US of A) must stop allowing the two major parties to choose their own voters. It is crazy that we allow districts that clear circle around and snake through communities to to avoid certian populations. It make a farce of the process.

@ Eise, Mark is the oldest Gospel. Who wrote it? I suppose that is a rhetorical question since no ones knows and you have already said that the author isn't relevant. When you say historians can find history in the NT I assume you mean Theologians? They are the ones, "historians" , looking for history in the bible.

Good post. I agree with all it. I think another big problem is that in the protection of capitalist interests in the region. Small enclaves of wealth have been allowed to form. Countries like Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain exist are small in both population and land yet heavily influence the region. Despite their wealth they practice indentured servitude and are guilty of nurmerous human rights violations. Young people growing up in Iraq, Pakistan, and etc don't have a whole lot of options. Many end up in near slave conditions working for the wealthy in Oman and Saudi Arabia and the above mentioned wealthy enclaves. It has a radicalizing effect. The west destorying what little infastructure and government these poor regions have in the name of combating terror while trillions of dollars flow through the region in the hands of a very small minority who in turn use it to further abuse people. It is a " the chicken or the egg" debate though. While the west buys much of the oil and runs protection for the small wealthy oil producing states if we (the west) stopped tomorrow China and Russia would move in and do the same. If the Russian attempt to take Afghanistan is any evidence the violence would only be worse. Ultimately the influence of Oman, Saidi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain needs to be boken and that must come internally from the people in the region. It would help if the media and the U.N. did a better job pointing out the human rights violations in those countries and treated it with the same urgency they do rural ethnic violence in the rest of the region.

Ehrman doesn't call the bible important he calls it the most important book in history. It is odd that when I reference Carrier you disregard him as a Jesus myth theorist but then see validity in the work of Ehrman whom by his own words struggles with faith and spent decades searching for answers to life in the bible and still believes the bible to a critical resource. Both Carrier and Ehrman are bibical scholars. Both work outside of mainstream theology.

Excerpts from "How the problem of pain ruined my faith" by Bart Ehrman "For most of my life I was a devout Christian, believing in God, trusting in Christ for salvation, knowing that God was actively involved in this world. During my young adulthood, I was an evangelical, with a firm belief in the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God. During those years I had fairly simple but commonly held views about how there can be so much pain and misery in the world." "In my mid 20s, I left the evangelical fold, but I remained a Christian for some twenty yearsa God-believing, sin-confessing, church-going Christian, who no longer held to the inerrancy of Scripture but who did believe that the Bible contained Gods word, trustworthy as the source for theological reflection. And the more I studied the Christian tradition, first as a graduate student in seminary and then as a young scholar teaching biblical studies at universities, the more sophisticated I became in my theological views and in my understanding of the world and our place in it. Suffering increasingly became a problem for me and my faith. How can one explain all the pain and misery in the world if Godthe creator and redeemer of allis sovereign over it, exercising his will both on the grand scheme and in the daily workings of our lives?" "Eventually, while still a Christian thinker, I came to believe that God himself is deeply concerned with suffering and intimately involved with it. The Christian message, for me, at the time, was that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God to us humans, and that in Jesus we can see how God deals with the world and relates to it. He relates to it, I thought, not by conquering it but by suffering for it. " "About nine or ten years ago I came to realize that I simply no longer believed the Christian message. A large part of my movement away from the faith was driven by my concern for suffering. I simply no longer could hold to the viewwhich I took to be essential to Christian faiththat God was active in the world, that he answered prayer, that he intervened on behalf of his faithful, that he brought salvation in the past and that in the future, eventually in the coming eschaton, he would set to rights all that was wrong, that he would vindicate his name and his people and bring in a good kingdom (either at our deaths or here on earth in a future utopian existence)." "As it turns out, my various wrestlings with the problem have led me, even as an agnostic, back to the Bible, to see how different biblical authors wrestle with this, the greatest of all human questions. The result is my recent book, Gods Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important QuestionWhy We Suffer. My contention is that many of the authors of the Bible are wrestling with just this question: why do people (especially the people of God) suffer? " "My hope in writing the book is certainly not to encourage readers to become agnostic, the path that I took. It is instead to help people think, both about this biggest of all possible questions and about the historically and culturally significant religious responses to it that can be found in the most important book in the history of our civilization." http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/blogalogue/2008/04/why-suffering-is-gods-problem.html @ Eise, Ehrman is a man who spent the great majority of his life a true believer looking for answers about the world from god in the bible. Lost faith when he couldn't find them but still believes the bible to be the most important book in history. He is a theologian. This is what many theologians are. They are not historians in the classical sense. They are people motivated by faith looking for truth in the bible.

You can't say who they were, what relationship they had to each other, or what influenced them but you do know there was at least 7 independent authors? Because of language and writing style? Historians studying art and literature arent willing to make such empirical statements about the work of known figures like William Shakespeare but theologians make them about the New Testamant. We know many famous works or art whether it's poetry, sculptures, paintings, and etc may be credited to the wrong people or out right forgeries. Style and language alone is not enough to know beyond error the authors were independent. Inspiration and influence transcends language. In the case of the New Testament to conclusion by christian theologians is that Jesus was the influence and not another figure like Paul. Humans lie, edit material, are easily influenced, get confused, and are often wrong. Empirical evidence is more powerful than hints based of style. There is nothing empirical in the bible. Even if we accept the theological view what do we have. John is viewed by most scholars to be the only eyewitness account to Jesus and we have no idea who wrote John. The rest are widely viewed to be second hand accounts. We dont even know who they are second hand accounts of. So thn we turn to the cross references. Pontius Pilate is believed to have been real, Nazareth, and there is a window (not set date) for when Jesus may have lived. That is it. An anonymous eyewitness who is believed to have lived at an undertimened time during an era in a place we believe was real. Not very compelling. As for the conspiracy theory stuff religion vs history vs science is a very contentious thing. Google New Testament and history and you'll get a hundred pages of Christian websites or Athiest blogs. Very few people work in a non partisan manner and many people simply do not want to get consumed by the argument. A scholar either draws a line in the sand like Ehrman, Carrier, Price, Dawkins, etc and wades into battle or avoids it all together. So what we end up with is Christian theologians as the subject matter experts vs the Athiest Jesus myth theorists. For me I am not say either side is right. I am not convinced there was or was not a Jesus. You on the other hand assume that Christian theologians have it all workout. I, however, don't accept their methods. Theologians like Ehrman are not a secular Theologian. He is Christian. He believe Jesus more than mortal. IMO that means he does not provide unbiased theory. And theory is all they have. Not proof. A grave would be proof. A relic saved by his followers from crucifixion would be proof. Contemporary Roman references would be proof. Contemporary Jewish references would be proof. What you have are guess' and hints. You can hint and I can guess at a number someone has written down between 1 and 100 but until the number is revealed who is to say either of our hints and guess' we're of value. Theologians have convinced themselves but ultimately there is not a current method to check if they are right.

Seems fair. We'll spilt the difference. : )

Actually I listed several Middle Eastern countries and their role in human rights violations as well. I did not blame the woes on the world on the West. I mentioned the West alongside those other countries because the fact that the West has killed more people in the region than vice versa is something that shouldn't be ignore. Foriegners policing region, especially one of a competing religion never works. I don't think there is a region in the world where that would not create extremism. The trillion dollar comment was directed at Saudia Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman. The wealth and resources of the region are consolidated into small powerful enclaves rather than used to provide infastructure or education to the people region. That has a destabilizing effect. Problems in the Middle East will never be resolved if the attitude is that fighting is merely in their nature. Making blanket generalizations about what was happening 2,000 years ago isn't helpful. What is happening today is the issue. If you were a 20's something living in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or etc what issues would be important. You don't think western military force and the opulence of the Oil Barron countries on their minds? I do. I think those issue are more pressing to them than 2,000yr old habits.

If you do not know who the authors of the Gospels are than you don't know if all the gospels aren't just extrapolations inspired by a lone source. You don't know the source of the information being written. You can't call them independent works done by different people over time because they may all have been inspired by a single source. Mark, Mathew, and Luke are not believed to be eye witness accounts. John is the only gospel scholars (theologians) believe was written by someone who was a witness to Jesus. Of course they (theologians) do not know who that someone is. Consequencely John is also believed to be the last gospel written.....hmmmUltimately Paul is the most influential figure in the New Testament and he is not an eyewitness to Jesus as a human man. Paul is a witness to the vision of a resurrected Jesus. Paul is most likely the inspiration for all the gospels and he was not an eye witness to a living human Jesus. @ Willie71, excellent post!!! You make a good point that some historians omit Jesus from discussion out of fear of backlash. Ultimately archeologist and scolars of classical history step aside and allow theologians alone to credit or discredit the bible. To me the method seems sort of like allowing sports teams to write their own rules. The analysis did seem objective.