Of course, all this applies only as long as you get to be the one to define the terms ...
seriously!?
- Thread starter scifes
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Of course, all this applies only as long as you get to be the one to define the terms ...
Oh, I'm not claiming that there's proof. I just think there are reasons to think there may have been someone important born at that time.
Possibly because what they have heard of Jesus so far, does not encourage them to invite in a person like that.
A serial killer might say the same thing.
When given the opportunity to know Jesus personally why don't more do it?
There were words like "I stand at the door knocking. Open it up and I will come and sup with thee." What do you think that means?
Go to your door and open it right now!
I opened and it was the UPS guy, delivering my telescope. I set it up, conducted a search, and am now able to report that there is no Father in the Sky. I also checked Uranus, just in case Jesus meant, literally, patros en ouranois. (Being literal is such a relative thing, after all.)
"If you worry about your life you will lose it". Sounds a bit like a serial killer doesn't it?
You wait until post 41 to assign responsibility to me for terminology introduced by scifes?
OK. If you insist:
Dumb: "conspicuously unintelligent"
unreasonable: "not governed by reason; irrational; absurd"
The mere utterance, "sup", might invite a reasonable suspicion as to the nature of the charge, and the evidence for it. It might be worth offering a warm meal and free legal consult.
That is, if you don't blindly believe every rumor you read.
No, I was pointing at your sense of your superiority.
But wait: to point in that manner would require a sense of superiority.
There's no evidence Mohammad was a real person. There's very strong evidence he did not exist and that the entire "Arab Conquest" with Khalid at the helm was a complete fabrication. There's good evidence the most devastating pandemic in the history of humanity wiped most cities off the map, leaving them open for peaceful or otherwise settlement by nomads. It's ludicrous half the Byzantine Empire was supposedly being overrun .... and no one in the Capital (who kept fastidious notes) made a note of this.
I think BOTH sides had their reasons for the propaganda. Christians didn't want to admit people freely converted to a blasphemous Christianity and those Christians soon needed a solid foundation myth to secure their religious endowed power as leaders.
If you have the evidence provide it. As it stands there is no contemporary evidence Mohammad existed.
None.
The word Mohammad was used on Syrian Christian coins as a Title for Jesus. That good evidence Mohammad was a word was quite common, so much so it was stamped on coins, and later this word was choose as the name for a fictional protagonist in a new foundation politico-religious myth.
No, dude, not even close. He's the only religious founder from antiquity who is actually attested by contemporary sources. There is literally no doubt he existed.
You're also wrong about Mohammed being used on coins as a title for Jesus. That's simply not true. As usual, you're trying to pass off half-remembered third-hand information as fact.
It's a funny thing: a person can sit back and wax philosophical (literally) but when push comes to shove, and the question boils down to basics (this is English, we apply words to advance a proposition or give proof, therefore this is about reason) *poof*. No answer.
Yep. She's the Houdini of intellectual discourse.
It's not that I've been trying find myself, so to speak, but that very remark brings me to the starting realization that I just might be the anti-Houdini! (I can even sense a disappearing "666" on my forehead.)
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Logical proofs demonstrate the deductive connection between a set of premises and some conclusion. In this religious case, the truth of the premises is going to be contested. And what's more, an argument ad populum isn't a deductively valid argument form.
Having said that, I agree that probably the majority of the empirical evidence backing up our individual beliefs isn't the product of our own personal experience. I'm told that there's this city called 'Paris' that's the capital of some country called 'France'. I've never been to either one. Nevertheless, I'm reasonably confident that others have and I trust their word and believe that Paris is indeed the capital of France.
I'm more inclined to think that philosophical and empirical methods are elaborations on common sense. They arise from our psychology, from how our human cognitive apparatus functions.
I don't entirely dismiss arguments from authority. (The argument from popularity is just an argument from authority applied to groups collectively.) But there's a vital question in there that must be asked -- How is it that the purported authority knows whatever it is that he/she (or in this case they) say they know?
As the claims that the purported authorities are making become less and less likely on their face, and more and more at variance with the rest of our everyday experience, the more pressing that 'how do they know' question becomes. Jesus is supposed to represent an absolutely unique intervention in human history by a god. So the burden of proof with Jesus is going to be a little higher than it is with Paris.
It isn't deductively valid. That's why its a fallacy.
That doesn't mean that it's always wrong for us to trust the judgement of our fellows. I trust those around me regarding Paris and no end of other things. But it's probabilistic. The probability of my friends and neighbors being right about everyday sorts of noncontroversial matters is probably pretty high and I generally trust them. The chances of some large set of them being right about the ultimate secret of the universe is vanishingly small in my estimation and I greet their expressions of faith about those matters with considerable skepticism.
The argument from popularity is not simply an argument from authority on a larger scale. You always consider the source, no matter how large the group, therefore the argument from authority, even when projected to a group level, is an entirely different concept.
A group of five hundred men in white hoods walk down the street saying that Jews caused all of the world's wars isn't going to sway you to their way of thinking. A group of five thousand men without white hoods preaching the same message wouldn't do the trick, either.
I wonder where we would be if everyone simply accepted what the group thought. We'd live on a flat earth in the center of the universe, probably.
A group of five hundred men in white hoods walk down the street saying that Jews caused all of the world's wars isn't going to sway you to their way of thinking. A group of five thousand men without white hoods preaching the same message wouldn't do the trick, either.
I wonder where we would be if everyone simply accepted what the group thought. We'd live on a flat earth in the center of the universe, probably.
I will argue that religious truths (ie. truths about religious topics) are categorically different than ordinary empirical amd philosophical truths. I think that religious truths are not intended to be contested, nor to be tested. This is not to say that they are meant to be blindly accepted or blindly rejected. I think religious truths are essentially a matter of "either you have it, or you don't," ie. religious statements have the nature of being experienced as apriori true or as apriori false.
Indeed, generally, it is not. Nor are religious truths intended to be accepted "because so many people believe them."
And even if you would go to Paris, France, you would still rely on the claims of others to be sure that you indeed arrived there.
The argument can be made that religious truths are the only ones which can eventually be personally realized, while all others are in one way or another dependent on other people or culture at large.
IOW, religious truths pertain to our true self, and as such, are things we merely re-discover, as opposed to learning them anew for the first time.
Sure. I think that religion is not like that.
And conversely - Why do I feel the pull to submit to someone who claims to be an authority?
Submission to some (purported) authority is inevitable.
We live in a tug of war on the one side being pulled by the desire to submit to someone else's authority, and on the other side being pulled by the desire to be our own authority.
The consequent skeptic, in the pursuit of a satisfactory answer this question, would have to attain at least that same level of authority.
Here, I am interested to know
1. what the skeptic thinks is the relationship between him and the purported authority,
2. what the skeptic's intentions in this communication are.
I think that the bottomline of many of these discussions/debates is that people engage in communications in which they would actually rather not engage in - and they are not aware of this. And so topics are brought up that get valued simply because the people involved have brought them up, not because the people involved would actually value those topics.
Just like one can physically walk off a cliff or into quick sand, so one can mentally venture into mental situations that are the equivalent of falling off cliffs, getting pulled into quicksand and such. We'd like to think it's all "just thoughts," and that we can pull ourselves back or out anytime, at will - but real life experience shows that this is often not the case.
Basically, if one engages in discussion or debate on religious topics because one is bored, or wants to escape thinking about some other problems in one's life, or has an old grudge to vent, then one is up for trouble.
In short, I think that a person who is paying attention to their life as it is, in the present moment, would not be troubled about the bold claims that some people make, nor would such a person get into apparently endless exchanges on religious topics.
See the Water Snake Simile.