The Gospels Do Not Directly Say That Jesus Died

[Robert]

Stuart wrote: "Saves them from the mind and money trap of Christian brainwashing.

And from the psychological bullying of egotists who just aren't very bright or very honest."

Thanks for YOUR OPINION!

[Robert]

Stuart wrote: "You and I and others who may be following know fine well you leapt on the 500 BCE for the 2 tiny amulets..."

My response: ANOTHER LIE... but what else would one expect from someone with NO REASON to be moral.

[Ned]

Philosophy is the love of wisdom and knowledge. It is not something behind which one "hides," it is the basis for applying logic. One can't reason without it.

Stuart's M.O. is this:

1) Declare all appeals to scripture biased and illegitimate.
2) Declare arguments from science "changing the subject."
3) Declare arguments from philosophy "changing the subject" and "dishonest trickery."
4) Declare confirming archaeology and/or ancient historians untrustworthy.
5) Having thus shut off all possible grounds for reason, declare victory.
6) Only apply the above method in regards to Christianity.

"Differing weights are an abomination to the LORD, And a false scale is not good." - Proverbs 20:23

[Wade]

Amen, Ned. I enjoy civil discourse, but this is a foreign concept for Stuart. His hatred is so obvious, it actually makes me sad.

Stuart - if Christianity was somehow true, would you become a follower of Jesus Christ? I'm not interested in any of your hateful diatribes. This is a simple question. If Jesus was the only way to God, would you follow Him?

[Stuart]

Wade wrote: "Amen, Ned. I enjoy civil discourse, but this is a foreign concept for Stuart. His hatred is so obvious, it actually makes me sad.

Stuart - if Christianity was somehow true, would you become a fol..."

If the fantastical bits of Christianity were indeed somehow true, I would be the first to admit them.

If you can't independently demonstrate that the Jesus character was fathered by the Jewish deity Yahweh, will you admit it ...?

[Stuart]

Robert wrote: "Stuart wrote: "You and I and others who may be following know fine well you leapt on the 500 BCE for the 2 tiny amulets..."

My response: ANOTHER LIE... but what else would one expect from someone ..."

I have looked.

I cannot find where you have posted the date of your missing 1,100 years.

Therefore I cannot copy and paste what you have written.

Because it was never there in the first place.

I think you need to have a quiet moment with Jesus, Robert.

[Stuart]

Ned wrote: "Philosophy is the love of wisdom and knowledge. It is not something behind which one "hides," it is the basis for applying logic. One can't reason without it.

Stuart's M.O. is this:

1) Declare al..."

But it can be misapplied and hidden behind.

You're intelligent enough to recognise mythology and make-believe and propaganda when you see it.

Spend a paragraph on the mud-man and the rib-woman, Ned.

[Robert]

Stuart wrote: "Therefore I cannot copy and paste what you have written. Because it was never there in the first place..."

My response: You WILL NOT post it again... because the very url you posted PROVES you WRONG.

Of course you won't post it... it proves you CANNOT do the math! LOL!

[Stuart]

Robert wrote: "Stuart wrote: "Therefore I cannot copy and paste what you have written. Because it was never there in the first place..."

My response: You WILL NOT post it again... because the very url you posted..."

The very URL I posted gave the amulets a date of c. 500 BCE.

Your missing 1,100 years puts the completion of biblical scripture-writing at about the same time as the Norman invasion of England.

You really are not bright or honest enough to be doing this.

When you've finished that very necessary chat with Jesus, you should take a careful look at how my pal Roddie does things.

[Robert]

Stuart wrote: "The very URL I posted gave the amulets a date of c. 500 BCE...."

Maybe you should RE-POST it then? Quick find a different one that supports your OPINIONS!
_____________________

Stuart wrote: "You really are not bright or honest enough to be doing this...."

As for bright... LOL!!!! Coming from you... this is a compliment!

[Wade]

Bright skeptics actually keep a Christian on their toes. Then you have Stuart, who is more of the Forrest Gump of skeptics. Actually, Forrest Gump was not rude like Stuart, so he's more of a cruel, condescending Forrest Gump who hates God - not a good combo.

Jesus has His mighty hand extended to you, Stuart. Please repent and accept it.

[Ned]

Stuart wrote: "You're intelligent enough to recognise mythology and make-believe and propaganda when you see it.

Spend a paragraph on the mud-man and the rib-woman, Ned.

I can spend much more than a paragraph on the mud-man and rib-woman. You are correct that the story of Adam and Eve has somewhat of a mythological flavor, though the Bible presents the story as bare fact. But my challenge to you is this: tell me a creation story that doesn't have a mythological flavor. You can't do it, because they all do. You find caused-by-agency mud-man and rib-woman implausible. Fine. I find the chance, causeless primordial-ooze man and the spontaneous generation of sexes from that not only implausible, but impossible. Let's face it -- it doesn't matter what the content of the story is -- there is no story that could be told that would make you accept that God did it. Any origins story told will sound fantastic, and that includes secular mythology. The chief difference is that my preferred explanation comports with what we know of reality while yours does not.

"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” -- Richard Dawkins

This is a hoot, and quite an admission. In reality, we find things with the "appearance of design" to require a designer. We have discovered that biology actually requires the use, interpretation, encoding, and decoding of REAL, not metaphorical, language. Language does not arise from nothing. Were the SETI project to intercept even the simplest code, intelligence would be automatically assumed. In our actual experience, matter does not and cannot spontaneously proceed from disorder to order. Yet this is what the materialist expects us to believe. He finds Creator God incredible, but give him an amoebae, now there is a being he can get behind!

There is much more that could be said regarding recent genetic findings that agree with the biblical narrative of human descent. Also the study of language is similarly remarkable in its biblical conformity. Much like Darwinism predicts gradual transitional forms in biology, which we do not find, naturalistic linguists expect to find slowly developing language from fragments, and do not. Language nowhere appears otherwise than suddenly and fully developed, just as the Bible says.

Furthermore, the materialist is confronted with the problem of explaining agency and intelligence once life does "arise." I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

The bottom line is, any being powerful enough to speak the universe into existence is certainly capable of taking the matter (mud) He just created and doing anything He wants with it. I don't find it at all implausible. The Biblical narrative is less fantastic and conforms to reality better than any alternate explanation I've seen. If you find primordial-ooze man more convincing than mud-man, there is nothing I can do about that, but your condescension on the matter is hardly warranted.

[Wade]

Well said, Ned. If you'll notice, Stuart NEVER has anything to say to support his non-theist position. Some of the smarter skeptics at least have some kind of silly window dressing for the fact that they cannot explain the first cause of the universe. But not Stuart. He just prefers to scatter-shot foolishness that allows him to love his sin more than he loves God.

We all must repent to be saved.

[Ned]

"The blueprints for assembling the protein parts for cells and organs in correct timing and order are encoded into our DNA, which is similar to binary computer code, although it is quaternary (having 4 letters instead of 2). The density of the information encoded into DNA staggers the imagination; there is enough information-storing space in a half-teaspoon of DNA to store all of the assembly instructions for every creature ever made, and room left over to include every book ever written! In addition to the incredible information-storing capacity in DNA, there are machines and systems in biology which vastly exceed mankind's creative capacity in terms of their complexity. For example, the blood-clotting mechanism requires a sequence of 20 different proteins (each of which has an average chance of 1 in 8.03 x 10 to the 59th power of forming by random chance!) triggering one another like dominoes falling in order, until a fibrin mesh scaffolding is formed for the clot itself. If you subtract any one single protein (regardless of where in the sequence of 20), this scaffolding fails to form, and no blood clot is possible. Without clotting, any creature with a circulatory system would bleed to death from a tiny wound, similarly to what happens to hemophiliacs."

Williams, Stephen. What Your Atheist Professor Doesn't Know (But Should) (Kindle Locations 1844-1855). RFH. Kindle Edition.

"DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of a number of proteins--members of a family of large molecules that are chemically very different from DNA. Proteins, like DNA, are constructed by linking subunits, amino acids in this case, together to form a long chain. Cells employ twenty of these building blocks in the proteins that they make, affording a variety of products capable of performing many different tasks--proteins are the handymen of the living cell. Their most famous subclass, the enzymes, act as expeditors, speeding up chemical processes that would otherwise take place too slowly to be of use to life.
The above account brings to mind the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the recipe for protein construction. Yet that information cannot be retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins. Which large molecule, then, appeared first in getting life started--proteins (the chicken) or DNA (the egg)?"

Scientific American

Scientists now posit RNA as the solution, however:

"RNA world advocates suggest that if the first self-replicating life was based upon RNA, it would have required a molecule between 200 and 300 nucleotides in length.17 However, there are no known chemical or physical laws that dictate the order of those nucleotides.18 To explain the ordering of nucleotides in the first self-replicating RNA molecule, materialists must rely on sheer chance. But the odds of specifying, say, 250 nucleotides in an RNA molecule by chance is about 1 in 10150 -- below the universal probability boundary, or events which are remotely possible to occur within the history of the universe.19 Shapiro puts the problem this way:

The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. … [The probability] is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.20

Fourth -- and most fundamentally -- the RNA world hypothesis does not explain the origin of the genetic code itself. In order to evolve into the DNA / protein-based life that exists today, the RNA world would need to evolve the ability to convert genetic information into proteins. However, this process of transcription and translation requires a large suite of proteins and molecular machines -- which themselves are encoded by genetic information. This poses a chicken-and-egg problem, where essential enzymes and molecular machines are needed to perform the very task that constructs them."[http://www.discovery.org/a/24041#prob...]

Thus kicking the can down the road merely presents more "which came first" problems while the astounding complexity and improbabilities involved become even more stark. The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that life, much less intelligent life, is an insoluble problem from a naturalistic perspective. The overwhelming difficulties are exactly why many scientists resort to such hypotheses as "a computer simulation run by super-intelligent beings" (Tyson, 50/50 odds?!,) alien seeding, and multiverses. Anything at all to avoid God.