That’s a great start! And something you have in common with at least some Christians here (myself included.)
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Amen, Gary!
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Again, because my creator (whoever or whatever they may be) gave me a brain.
Living organisms which can experience pain have existed for 550 million years. Most of those creatures lived in a “dog eat dog” world. They suffered horrifically. My brain tells me that no pain is better. So a creator who created the universe as stated in Genesis 1 and 2 seems more what a “good” creator would do (minus sticking a tree of temptation smack dab in the middle of the playground), If you believe that 550 million years of suffering is somehow better than making a universe where there is no suffering, you and I will never agree on anything.
That’s not really an answer. “Because I have a brain” is an “answer without an explanation.”
It seems you are hinting that your problem is less scope and scale than it is…something else? The problem of suffering?
That leaves you in a quandary. Why is suffering “bad” or “undesirable”? Like…I understand why you might not want to suffer. But why should you care about the suffering of other organisms? It’s almost like you are appealing to a kind of morality, but if a kind of transcendent source of morality doesn’t exist (e.g., “God”?), then the issue of suffering is kind of irrelevant.
Yes, you are correct. Most messianic movements die with the death of the purported messiah. But not all. And Jesus is not the only messiah pretender who still has a following after his death:
A segment of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement believes that their seventh Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is the Jewish Messiah. This belief, known as Chabad messianism, is held by some members of the Chabad Hasidic community, though it is not the official stance of the entire movement, according to a consensus on Mi Yodeya. Followers who hold this view often believe the Rebbe is either still alive or will be resurrected to complete the redemption.
Gary: The followers of Rabbi Scheerson believe it is he who will be resurrected; the mantel of messiah has not been passed to his brother.
A parallel can be made with Christianity and Mormonism. Never in the 1800 years of Christianity had thousands of Christians suddenly believed that God has sent a third testament (the Mormon Scriptures). Just because this had never occurred before in the history of Christianity, does that increase the odds this new testament is true? No.
Tricky. You’re comparing 19th-century Judaism to 1st-century proto-Judaism, which is so much not the same thing that it’s not the same thing, especially when it comes to messianic expectation.
And the issue isn’t “people ‘suddenly’ believing something” than it is the conditions under which they do so…and specifically, in this case, not just “something,” but the physical resurrection of a human being, which we all know doesn’t happen.
Here is a list of evidences used by Christians for the resurrection of Jesus:
- The empty tomb.
- Alleged eyewitness accounts of multiple post-mortem appearances.
- The changed demeanor of the apostles.
- The rapid spread of Christianity.
- “No one dies for a lie”.
- Multiple (alleged) fulfilled prophesies.
- The conversion of two non-believers (Paul and James) due to alleged post-mortem appearances.
- Jesus’ reputation as a miracle worker and healer confirmed by Josephus.
- Why would any Jew convert to a belief system which taught a dead-then-resurrected Messiah, something no Jew had ever imagined?
- Why would any Jew believe that one person’s post-mortem sighting was the “first fruits” of the general resurrection of the righteous dead?
Skeptics can provide reasonable, natural explanations for each of these points. Why do Christians dismiss these natural explanations for a supernatural one? How is that any different from the OP in which some people jump to the supernatural conclusion that the local bank was robbed by non-humans, instead of looking at all the possible natural explanations?
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Thousands of people have claimed to see dead people. Why should we believe the alleged Jesus post-mortem sightings and not all the others?
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And yet none of those arguments is as compelling as the historical argument. There is every reason to believe that this movement would have failed. And yet it didn’t. Not only did it not fail, but the distinct ways in which it preserved and redefined its Jewish roots (specifically around resurrection) is compelling. It’s probably too much of an investment to ask for a real skeptic, but N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God presents this case in a comprehensive and compelling way.
From the point of view of strict historical criteria.
And yes, Wright addresses the issue of “people seeing dead people.”
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Are you claiming that the Resurrection of the Son of God is just an “odd, unexplainable event” in everyday life?
Yep – entirely fallacious.
Yet a good number of former atheists and agnostics in the informal intelligent when I was at university concluded that evolution is a brilliant, elegant, creative method for producing and sustaining an abundance of beauty – and therefore ended up as Christians.
Do you mean as “in Genesis 1 and2 but forced into a new meaning by demanding that it be read through the lens of a MSWV”? Because nothing in Genesis 1 and 2 is contrary to evolution or the Big Bang or any other science.
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I read his book. All 800+ pages. Wright’s main argument is this: no Jew or pagan would ever invent the concept of one person’s resurrection. Pagans found the concept disgusting. Jews believed in bodily resurrection but only as a group event, not an individual event.
But this is false. It reflects a modern Gentile Christian view of Jesus’ (alleged) resurrection, not the view of early Jewish Christians. Early Jewish Christians did not view Jesus’ resurrection as an isolated event as Christians do today. Early Jewish Christians viewed Jesus’ resurrection as the “first fruits” of the general resurrection of the righteous dead. Early Jewish Christians believed that the general resurrection of the dead had begun with Jesus rising first; the remainder of the righteous dead were going to rise any day now. That is why the Jewish believers in Jerusalem were selling their personal property and moving into a commune to fast and pray. The New Kingdom was imminent; they expected it to occur within days or weeks, not years or centuries.
This early Jewish Christian resurrection concept was well within second Temple Jewish resurrection theology. Early Jewish Christians were not claiming that Jesus was resurrected individually in isolation as modern Gentile Christians claim. No, they were simply claiming that Jesus was the first to rise, the rest of the dead were rising shortly.
Important point: If the earliest Christian view of “resurrection” was so outrageous to Jews, they would not have let James and the Twelve worship in the Temple for the next 20-30 years as they did.
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Everything is if you’re a wooden literalist.
And even at it’s most metaphoric, it still superfluously nominates Elohim-YHWH (known to us German dialect speakers as God; the invoked) as the ground of eternal, infinite being.