Was Jesus a real Historically proven Person ?

[Hal.]

I did say , " .......... in a bizarre Godly logical way .......... " , which I intended to mean that using God's logic , God would understand why God made God's Shroud look this age . I am assuming the Shroud has been shown to be very young .

[Marat]

It always seemed odd to me that God would give humans rational minds so that they would have trouble believing in him, given the irrational stories and deceptive demonstrations he confronted them with, and that he would then punish them for their disbelief, which his 'gift' of rationality to them had conditioned them to have!

 

Once we are painted into the corner where the only way we can save God is by resorting to arguments like 'he uses a special sense of logic,' 'the ordinary rules of morality don't apply to him,' 'he manipulates ordinary physics in some bizarre way,' 'his ways are not our ways,' 'he is too mysterious for us ever to understand,' etc., then the whole notion of God trying to communicate himself to us becomes paradoxical and self-defeating, since he must know he can't succeed, so why does he try, and why does he punish us with eternal damnation for not being stupid enough to believe proofs he knows to be inadequate in terms of the mind he has given us?

 

All of these problems arise because a series of historical contingencies which has made a poorly thought-through idea of Bronze Age Nomads into an apparently important moral principle for 21st century thinkers of an advanced, post-industrial era. The great philosopher Immanual Kant left behind a number of disorganized papers at his death, among which have been found the comments, 'Time is like a peppercorn,' and 'What if a bird barked?' These scribblings, which for all we know might have been just private jokes and random phrases selected to try out a new quill pen, are now actually being seriously studied by professional philosophers for their hidden meaning. Shows what can happen when you take contingencies from the past too seriously.

[ydoaPs]

I can prove it is false really easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping

 

This is the process where you take a 3d model and unwrap the mesh onto a 2D surface.

 

This same process occurs when you wrap a 3d object with a 2d surface, such as someone's face wrapped by a shroud.

 

The shroud of Turin shows a face as one would see it when looking at a 3D object (or an image of one such as a painting or photo) and not one one as it would appear mapped to a 2D shroud surface.

 

Thus, this proves it is a fake as the image on the shroud is completely wrong for it to have been created from it being wrapped over someone.

 

A good way to see this is computer image software. I regularly use this to construct images for computer graphics and thus I know the difference between them. You can see the effect here: http://tech-slop.serveit.org/wiki/index.php?title=Multi_Chan_Hax_Head (it is a tool I use for doing exactly what should have occurred on the shroud but as it doesn't it is proof the shroud is a fake).

And it's been carbon dated to be Medieval.....not to mention the fact that Jesus was a middle eastern Jew instead of a European.

[Marat]

To get around the carbon-dating problem, some religious folk argue that the samples were taken only from the borders of the shroud, which were probably repaired in the middle ages after relic enthusiasts had worn the original edges thin from frequent touching.

 

But people should really take a step back from all this factual in-fighting and ask themselves, what could be more profoundly silly than deciding the ultimate meaning of all human experience and the moral order of the universe based on miniscule factoids like whether a particular old shroud has God's face depicted on it, or whether a given Judean carpenter of the first century of the common era rose again and bestrode the earth as a zombie after his death. The latter fact, if true, seems more likely to be a proof for devil-worship than for Christianity.

[Brainteaserfan]

The latter fact, if true, seems more likely to be a proof for devil-worship than for Christianity.

Why?

[Hal.]

Marat , do you know of any way of thinking that describes the devil as being more than one entity ?

 

 

[Marat]

Somewhere in the Bible we are warned that the Devil may sometimes speak to us in the persona of an angel, and we know as well from the Old Testament that the pagan magicians who displayed their miracles in opposition to Moses before the Pharoh were able to achieve stunning feats. Putting these 'Biblical facts' together, we are led to the conclusion that both inner promptings of self-certain belief ('I know Jesus lives because he is in my heart!') and external miracles (raising the dead, turning a staff into a snake) are unreliable evidence as to whether the source of this magic or inspiration is human, divine, or diabolical. So why would God/Christ try to impress us with these devices which his supposed text warns us against accepting as reliable evidence?

 

Raising the dead is often associated with the black arts rather than religion, and the Devil himself promises somewhere in the Bible, just as does Christ, that 'Thou shalt not surely die' (i.e., there will be everlasting life posthumously). But this seems suspicious right away, that both the embodiment of Good and Evil are making the same promise. The Christian Church has for many years forbidden or discouraged all forms of necromancy, so the fact that Christ seeks to prove his own divinity, not by pulling a rabbit out of his hat, but by pulling himself out of the grave ('ta-daah!') seems inconsistent with the anti-necromantic stance of his religion.

 

There are ideas of the Devil existing in various forms which often merge with apparently divine forms. Gnostic theory posits that what we are preconditioned to recognize here in this defective realm with its warped logic as God is in fact the Devil, while the only route for us in our fallen state to the true God is to turn all our deviant thinking inside-out and embrace the irrational.

[Brainteaserfan]

Somewhere in the Bible we are warned that the Devil may sometimes speak to us in the persona of an angel, and we know as well from the Old Testament that the pagan magicians who displayed their miracles in opposition to Moses before the Pharoh were able to achieve stunning feats. Putting these 'Biblical facts' together, we are led to the conclusion that both inner promptings of self-certain belief ('I know Jesus lives because he is in my heart!') and external miracles (raising the dead, turning a staff into a snake) are unreliable evidence as to whether the source of this magic or inspiration is human, divine, or diabolical. So why would God/Christ try to impress us with these devices which his supposed text warns us against accepting as reliable evidence?

 

Raising the dead is often associated with the black arts rather than religion, and the Devil himself promises somewhere in the Bible, just as does Christ, that 'Thou shalt not surely die' (i.e., there will be everlasting life posthumously). But this seems suspicious right away, that both the embodiment of Good and Evil are making the same promise. The Christian Church has for many years forbidden or discouraged all forms of necromancy, so the fact that Christ seeks to prove his own divinity, not by pulling a rabbit out of his hat, but by pulling himself out of the grave ('ta-daah!') seems inconsistent with the anti-necromantic stance of his religion.

 

Interesting. I don't remember having read that. Could we know where those, "somewheres", are?

 

I think that the discouragement of the necromancy is that we are not supposed to work miracles through the Devil's power, but through God's power.

[Edtharan]

I think that the discouragement of the necromancy is that we are not supposed to work miracles through the Devil's power, but through God's power.

I think this is the important point: How is an observer supposed to differentiate this, and how could we, looking back thousands of years by reading what someone we have never met though it was?

[Marat]

The historical who's who problem creates countless puzzles for Christianity's insistence on the centrality of one, single, historical event and our belief in it, even if we have to have an idolatrous belief in a magical historiographic power to reach that belief. For example, what if we believe the entire Christian message in every detail, except that we think that the person who taught those doctrines, recruited those apostles, performed those miracles, and rose again from his tomb to prove he was indeed the son of God was in fact not Christ but was Joe Schmidlap, a Paramus, New Jersey, construction worker who lived from 1896 to 1932? Does that count as adequate belief? What if someone believed in everything Christians assert of the historical Jesus except that he was not endowed with divine wisdom in the things he said? I have seen a Biblical Commentary which explained away the obviously inaccurate, unscientific, or irrational things Christ said and did at times as a 'consequence of the limitations of the incarnation of the divine in human form.' But doesn't this make it idolatry to worship this defective god-man hybrid as we would the infinite intelligence of God?