As far as I know, @Mercer is a Christian.
I’m not. But I don’t see any need to falsify the resurrection. I can be skeptical without that. And I am not attempting to persuade anybody else.
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Apology accepted.
No, I was pointing out a major way in which science is not analogous to faith.
It isn’t. OK?
Beliefs are not analogous to scientific hypotheses, yet you just equivocated between them. That’s my whole point!
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hmm…Christianity sort of is…it’s a psychological claim, that you can test with related science.
This is the question @Faizal_Ali was asking: How do so many people claim to have a relationship with a person named Jesus who they don’t see?
And related: Did the apostles hallucinate seeing Jesus? Were they in it for fame, power, money, pride, etc? Why did they do it? Those things you can test based on scientific knowledge of how people operate.
No. Your vocabulary is hopelessly jumbled. Is that a deliberate rhetorical move?
You are not being scientific if you ignore competing hypotheses, as you are obviously doing.
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What competing hypotheses am I ignoring?
The hypothesis that the apostles existed, of course.
And what other hypothesis are you proposing to explain the biblical texts and more that you can back up with evidence? I’m not aware of any reputable historical scholar that does not believe the apostles existed.
In that case, perhaps @Mercer could start with his subjective christian religious experience…
Afterall, that’s the title of the thread… and i am definitely interested in @Mercer take on the subject.
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I don’t know what he’s trying to say then. 
What does “I can be skeptical without that” mean? Does it mean, “I can be a skeptic because I don’t want to evaluate evidence; I’m perfectly fine without deciding whether things are true or false?”
I’m not sure why you were asking the question in the first place about relationships with Jesus, but if the idea is intriguing to you and you’ve read the gospels and you’ve examined the evidence and you still don’t get it, I would be remiss not to tell you the Bible actually says, just go to church, have someone preach foolishness at you for a while, and see if it makes sense.
1 Corinthians 1
For the [g]message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”
20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the [h]disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 22 For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a [i]stumbling block and to the [j]Greeks foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
That was the view of some, but when spoken by the PIs of the actual experiments, I would speculate (since I can’t know for sure) that it was more a political statement than reality. They invested more than ten years and millions of euros, had lab management and indirectly politicians to answer to-- I do not believe they looked at it as a win-win. I certainly would not have.
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I have evaluated the evidence (of the resurrection) for myself. And I do not find it persuasive.
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Hmmm.
Imagine we were guests at the wedding at Cana. We happened to look in the kitchen when Jesus did whatever he did so that pitchers containing water subsequently contained wine. Did we witness a miracle? I can think of an alternative explanation, presuming the event is not entirely fictional.
The hosts couldn’t afford to provide enough wine but Jesus had enough to buy more and sent the servants out to fetch it from the wine merchant. The cover story was to avoid embarrassing the hosts.
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We can stipulate that all the alleged miracles have alternate explanations. If it is not a miracle, upon investigation you’d potentially confirm an alternate explanation. For a true a miracle, if there is such a thing, you’d never confirm an alternate explanation.
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So it is the dictionary’s fault, since you could not possibly have made a mistake. And what was this bountiful evidence we had before the Higgs was discovered?
Such as there is one, the issue for me is what miracles are supposed to add to the force of ideas presented, say, in the Sermon on the Mount. For me, the loaves and fishes is both a distraction and a detraction from the essential idea.
I do not have anything better than the standard explanation, that the New Testament miracles are intended to establish the deity of Christ. He can say to the lame man “your sins are forgiven,” which is the in the purview of God yet can be uttered by any poser, or he can tack on “now get up and walk.”
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That makes me wonder why anyone needs to be lame, crippled, or otherwise needlessly suffering if it can be fixed with a word.
But it’s a bit unfair of me to take this tack as I cannot imagine any circumstance where Christianity, at least any of the versions currently on offer, would begin to make any sense to me.
Exactly. Which is why, as one of our members @Puck_Mendelssohn has pointed out, the methodology of history can never establish that a miracle has taken place in the past. We are unable to perform the required investigation for alternative causes.
Which gets back to the question of how does one verify whether a miracle occurred in the distant past? What is the methodology? Not science. Not history. So what?
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Nothing. Nobody can verify a miracle occurred in the past. Which is why we say we believe, not that we know. Even if you buy all of the arguments (I don’t find them very satisfactory) about how the resurrection “must” have happened (witnesses who were willing to die, etc.) at best they can strengthen your belief.
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