Mystics believe that Gods love us just because.
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Actually, yes, they need to be answered or it makes the miracle more plausible.
That’s begging the question.
How do you know this? Have you studied the history to be certain he really believed this? What evidence points you to a hallucination or an illusion?
Invisible Atheists: The Spread of Disbelief in the Arab World | The New Republic Perhaps there’s something in the theology that keeps people from asking questions or the culture from recognizing non-adherents.
Exactly. So why is there so much agreement in the New Testament? We’re fighting about minutiae today.
If they felt their religious traditions were important, why did they start a religion the Jews hated?
Sure. I’ll watch the video.
I do think there are good answers to them(though I admit I can’t be bothered going over these things in detail as my interest in scripture and early Christian history just isn’t there), but no I don’t agree with your statement.
Miracles must stand or fall on their own merits, they don’t become more or less plausible depending on whether other people bother to offer alternative explanations. That simply doesn’t make sense.
To see why, consider that I could offer some explanation for why some person did some action (why did Niels drink coffee? I say it’s because he liked it), and this explanation’s plausibility would not at all depend on whether other people bothered to spend time offering alternative explanations.
Is it plausible that Niels drank the coffee because he liked it? I think it is. Now suppose someone else says “He could also have done it because he was dared to!”. Sure, that could also be a reason why he did it, but does that increase or decrease the plausibility that he drank coffee because he liked it? Not at all. It doesn’t make it any less or more believable, or conceivable, or likely, that he drank the coffee because he likes coffee, just because someone happens to mention that he might have been dared to do it. It’s still just as plausible that he did it because he likes coffee.
Alternative explanations(miraculous or not) don’t alter the plausibility of previously offered explanations. Only new facts can do that.
But you believe Christianity emerged in a primarily Jewish culture, don’t you? Wasn’t Jesus a jew?
Let’s just say that it is my experience that most religious believers are sincere and that sincere people can be wrong or misled. I don’t see why I should assume Muhammad(or Jesus), or any other historical religious figure, has to have been dishonest, to have inspired a religious following that grew in size and influence even after they died. Sincere people can have life-changing experiences based in misunderstandings, misapprehensions, misperceptions or what have you. Sure, lying and dishonesty can happen, I just don’t feel the need to “go there” to make sense of the existence of the world’s religions unless there’s good evidence it was involved(like there appears to be for cases such as scientology, or possibly Mormonism).
I agree and I’m quite certain that’s true.
I’m sure you can find people who disagree on whether they’re minutiae, but it’s not hard to see that any extent to which current Christian scriptures show some degree of coherency, is at least in part because there was likely a sort of both cultural and scholarly purifying selection of what early circulating scriptures to consider genuine and canonical, and which to consider legendary, exaggerated, heretical or otherwise. The act of starting to write things down to copy and pass on would itself contribute to this. You don’t have to remember things that well to copy a document.
Ask Jesus, not me, I hear he’s the one who did that. I don’t think the Greeks who wrote down the Christian teachings “started” Christianity, I think they were themselves Christians already.
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I watched.
“closed-rank community” at about 16:00 minutes 
- please go do some research.
Please read Acts. Notice Paulogia is completely ignoring it.
Notice:
Find me a skeptic that has attempted to answer these questions. Then we can discuss.
You may also want to actually check if Paulogia isn’t quote-mining - did you watch all the videos in full he references?
If you don’t actually want to know if you’re wrong, that’s fine. It’s helpful to know I’m wasting my time.
Yes, exactly. I’m suggesting there are NOT new facts that alter the plausibility. Did Paulogia add new facts to show that other apostles never witnessed Jesus? Some contradictory testimony? He didn’t.
Yes. You were saying new religions can borrow from other religions in a consistent way because Christianity exists. Yes, Christianity does that.
Show me another religion that does so in a consistent way. You mentioned Islam. I can show you lots of evidence it does so in an inconsistent way. But I’m not bothering because you’re not interested.
Sure, but Christianity claims multiple people who did so, not one.
If this is “likely” then show some evidence they did this early and often to keep the story and theology coherent.
OK. Who were the writers and how did they have access to all the legends and Jewish teachings?
Feel free to answer the questions or respond. But only if you clarify that you’re interested in my response because you’re interested if you’re wrong, am I going to respond.
Yes, he’s not fond of the “for the bible tells me so”-line of argument.
That it is found in a book called “The Bible” doesn’t make it true.
Those are not questions for me to answer, it’s you who take them at face value. It seems to me you should be telling me why anyone should believe in Acts says, and how you know who wrote them and that they are correctly relaying historical events.
It seems to me it’s me wasting mine, since you’re just assuming it’s all true and demanding I try to convince you out of it. But all you have to begin with are stories in an old book and you’re basically just taking it all on faith.
Now you’re changing your demands. Instead of asking for alternative explanations, now you want new facts. Of course, most of the claims regarding early Christian history in the Bible are so far removed from factual as to be hysterical.
Take some random verse, say
Acts 12:7 Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. “Quick, get up!” he said, and the chains fell off Peter’s wrists.
Here an angel supposedly magics Peter out of prison. Who is writing this? How do I know this occurred?
You tell me. It’s in Acts. Okay, and so what? Does that make it automatically true? I now have to explain to you why it says this, rather than you offering any good evidence that should cause us to think it’s true?
No. I said a new religion can emerge steeped in a culture dominated by another. I don’t know what you mean by it emerging “in a consistent way”.
I simply gave an account that explains how some set of religious documents can come to exhibit some degree of internal consistency. But you also admitted people are fighting about how to understand scripture, by trying to minimize disagreements
I have no problem saying Islam has inconsistencies, or that it is inconsistent with Christanity. I am neither a Muslim nor a Christian. My aim is not to declare either of them worse than the other, I merely sought to point out that a new religion can successfully emerge and spread in a culture dominated by another already existing one.
Uhm, so what? Multiple people had life-changing religious experiences? They do that even today, in other religions. Islam has it’s fair share of famous historical heroes, imams, martyrs, and what have you. It’s making people fly into buildings so much do they believe it. And here we are, with people reading things you think are clearly wrong and internally contradictory, and yet people are willing to die for it.
I don’t have to invoke anyting miraculous to explain the spread of your religion. I just have to point to simple human psychology and culture. They’re nuts.
They do this today. If I edit the Bible as I please and send it to you, or you find some Bible in a hotel room that disagrees with one you grew up with or possibly has multiple additional verses or chapters, will you pass it on as accurate? Heck, you even gave me a link that explains how this still is happening today with the Qu’ran.
I don’t know who they were, in fact that’s part of the problem. We don’t know who wrote this stuff down, generally speaking. Do I need a miracle to explain why some early Greek-speaking Christian would know about Jewish tradition? That doesn’t sound to me like it requires divine intervention to occur.
Perhaps a more interesting question is whether you’re willing to consider what reason you have to think any of the things you believe are good reasons for doing so.
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I can answer and raise legitimate objections to all the questions or objections you posited. I’m not going to because you’re not actually interested in my answers because you’re assuming what I believe cannot be true.
I do have good reasons for believing what I believe.
What good reasons do you have for believing what you believe? That was the whole point of this thread.
Coming in a fair bit later, and others have responded in the intervening time. Being in the antipodes has its drawbacks for timely participation.
I’m a science guy, not a comparative theology guy. I was talking about claims to be the One True Way, more than to be the One True God: obviously polytheistic religions like Hinduism don’t claim to have the One True God, since they have thousands.
Of the monotheistic religions, certainly Islam uses “There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his Prophet” as a very regular formulation, as just one example.
As others have demonstrated, the Old Testament is polytheistic, your deflections aside.
Your claim turns on your adherence to one religious tradition relative to all others, but that is not an objective matter…
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You are wrong, but for the sake of our argument, all you are doing is affirming that even if all gods are allowed, none of them save the Hebrew God makes the claim of exclusivity. Remember the third point in my list far above in the thread:
“Third, that if gods exist, only the Hebrew God truly exists, because he declares himself to exist to the exclusion of all other gods. The moment the Hebrew God enters the argument, all other gods are eliminated.”
Sure, go ahead and allow the idols of wood and stone and the gods they represent into the argument. The rule still stands. The moment the God of the Hebrews enters the room, all other gods are eliminated.
That is a chant of Islamic adherents, not a citation. What does their god claim about himself?
Ooof, I’m out of energy for this. Claim the win by default, because I don’t have the time or patience to go around in circles on it.
There’d be value in you seeking disconfirming evidence for your claims…
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But a 2 second search did throw up this citation:
Allah is the only God and Lord of all – Surah Taha Verse 98, Quran
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If you’re asking me why I don’t believe in your religion(that a God created everything and then later took human form and got himself crucified and resurrected himself, and the many varied nuances of these stories that circulate in Christian culture) it’s because I don’t see any good evidence for the extraordinary claims it makes. I found that I only believed myself because I was raised to, and once I reflected on why I believe any of the things I believe, Christianity just couldn’t stand up to it.
All there is, is stories in old books that appear to me to contradict how the world actually works(I have been given no reason to think that it is possible to turn water into wine, or to walk on water) with no way to verify them. I don’t believe in spirits, or demonic possessions, or witches, as I have never seen any credible evidence for it.
I also don’t think it makes any sense for God to have himself crucified in some sort of symbolic
but temporary sacrifice of his own life, to achieve something that could been accomplished without having himself tortured and killed(particularly given God’s supposed absolute power over everything, He’s God after all). Makes no sense to me. I generally find that I can’t believe in things that don’t make sense to me. The kinds of stories that are offered to me to try to patch it together and make sense of it just seem like vacuous rationalizations which there isn’t any good evidence for either. I also generally find that if I have to invent a story, to make sense of another story that I can find no good evidence for, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain belief.
When it comes to the origin and spread of Christianity, that just seems totally consistent with how religious believers generally behave. They find their religion significant and important(even when it is so obviously absurd, just look at Islam) so they try to spread it to friends and family and are even some times willing to die for it, so that doesn’t point to anything supernatural.
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If I thought Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t necessary–that there were other options–and that it was only symbolic, I would have stopped believing in it long ago too.
But that’s not what the Bible says. God can only do what is in His character. We can discuss if you want. That should probably be a new thread.
Did you ever see yourself as a sinner in need of grace?
Nah we don’t have to flesh that out. I honestly don’t care enough that we disagree on this to continue debating it.
Of course. I’ve felt both unworthy, guilt, and shame many times, and sort of assumed there was a God looking down on me with disapproval, and apologized profusely and sincerely to an empty night-sky.
And what if you felt Him looking down on you in love instead?
That was always a sort of background assumption. You can disapprove the behavior of someone you love.
But that’s not what God does.
He does something much better: 
The gospel declares that we become righteousness through His love and grace.
2 Corinthians 5
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
It’s not what is said about a god but rather what a god says about himself. The god of Islam does not self-declare, whereas the Hebrew God is verbose in his self-declaration. One of many examples is,
“Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, And his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the First and I am the Last; Besides Me there is no God.'” Isaiah 44:6
In the parade of gods, the Hebrew God is found to be the only God remaining.
Self-declaration is the essential point of separation and preeminence:
“Third, that if gods exist, only the Hebrew God truly exists, because he declares himself to exist to the exclusion of all other gods. The moment the Hebrew God enters the argument, all other gods are eliminated.”
Not sure being represented as preeminently braggadacious is as rock solid a proof of existence as you seem to think…
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“braggadacious” is a human term not to be projected onto the argument of gods. What Greek or Roman gods or others may have bragged about, they certainly ‘forgot’ to brag that they existed to the exclusion of all other gods. Same goes for the flying spaghetti monster, leprechauns, the supreme unicorn, and all the others.
Nothing in this argument says that all gods cannot line up and be counted. But what they emphatically must do is SELF DECLARE who they are, what they are, and their preeminence - if they have any, that is.
Once all self-declare, the One remaining after all others are eliminated is the true God in the line-up.
The god-argument has to be established on some kind of rules. Self-declaration is the most apparent and logical.