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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1500 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

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I'm starting to think that if "Christ rose from the dead" is something that historical evidence supports, despite all the other evidence to the contrary of such things being possible, then it is not that I should believe in the return of Christ more, but that I should believe in historical evidence less - including other areas of history.

I think what you end up finding if you adopt this approach is that all of reality becomes, to varying degrees, less comprehensible. It also makes the cherry-picking problem much worse.

People who generally evaluate historical writings as more-or-less accurate +/- the usual human margin of error and bias and then put their finger on the scale when anything supernatural happens are arguably cherry-picking what they want to read, but at least they have a methodology to it and you can agree on a certain level of ground truth (e.g. most non-Christian historians don't deny that Christ or Paul existed, for instance).

Whereas if you just insist that all historical evidence is downright bad, any pretense of methodological criteria can quickly go out the window and people can just cherry-pick what they like. You might think that the end result here is merely being more reserved about making historical claims, but in real life I think it ends up in weird places like believing in Great Tartaria.

I wouldn't insist that all historical evidence is bad. But from what I have read, an average layman does believe popular history more than they should. There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

Sure, I think careful scholars are cognizant of that sort of thing.

Early writings on Christ are interesting because we both have early writings from Christians (who mostly didn't profit much by believing in Christ as per their own writings) and writings from neutral or hostile third parties.

I haven't read as much of the early writings from and on Christians as I would like, but from what I can tell the pro- and anti- Christian writings often read exactly as you would expect, e.g. the Christians are writing about church discipline, doctrine, and defending their beliefs as intellectually legitimate and their opponents are calling them gullible retards from first principles.

I get the impression that the main difference between second century theological debates about Christianity and Reddit today is that a lot of Christian arguments have remained the same (sans the ones aimed at the pagan gods), whereas "Christ was not the Son of God, merely a magician" or "Christ was not the Son of God since God would never come to Earth as a peasant" have fallen out of favor. "Christianity will destroy our way of life because they are opposed to infanticide and licentiousness" still has some traction though.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

I would disagree with this, personally. The historical evidence we have on Sparta was largely written by foreigners in opposing or post-Spartan states, yes, but very often by foreigners who sympathized with Sparta for domestic political or philosophic reasons - as sympathizers of the aristocratic elite, Spartan 'virtuous oligarchy' appealed to them as contrast to Athenian democracy. Xenophon, who wrote The Constitution of the Lacedemonians, even defected to Sparta rather than return to Athens. A more accurate parallel would be somewhere between Tacitus' Germania and the tendency of Enlightenment-influenced writers to idealize Chinese government (I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...).

It being impossible is the whole point! If people could just rise from the dead all the time on their own then it wouldn't be a big deal! Why is the objection to miracles "but that isn't what physics allows?" That's how you know it's a miracle. It's no surprise to the Gospel writers that it's impossible, that it was impossible and happened anyway is what made it paradigm-changing!

One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens.

I think you missed the part where I don't believe that it happened.

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