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Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.
Okay, I’ll bite the bullet here. There’s plenty of evidence to support that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that he rose from the dead. For the benefit of others here who might read this…
Jesus Christ was (to my knowledge) the only founder of a major world religion who claimed to be the son of God. He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim. Why would someone make such an outrageous lie if it meant their death? Jesus Christ was not merely a good moral teacher, he claimed to be the son of God so those who admire his virtuosity (but not his divinity) will have to answer to why they admire a liar.
Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived. Many of these prophesies, as well as the account of Jesus’ acts, are verifiable by eyewitness accounts (reproduced in thousands of manuscript segments carefully copied and preserved over thousands of years). There is more scripture authenticated and verified from the New Testament than texts of many Ancient Greek philosophers whose authenticity is never questioned as rigorously. The letters of the New Testament have been subjected to lexical analysis and found to be internally consistent by author and authentic. There are no contradictions in the Bible, unlike the contradictions inherent in other belief systems such as transgenderism.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection. His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story. We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion, a mortal wound that the soldiers had believed was conclusive.
I could go into more detail, but belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God, who died and rose again has a lot of rational merit. There is ample evidence to support this belief, but it isn’t proof so ultimately you must choose whether to believe it or not.
I do love an opportunity to relive my atheist debater glory days.
Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."
According to the books written by his followers, yes. In a lot of places you can see how the Gospel authors are working overtime to fit prophecy to reality, like Matthew's story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on both a colt and a donkey, to fit the prophecy of Zechariah. Or the two very different nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. And a lot of the supposed prophecies fulfilled by Jesus aren't even prophecies, like Psalm 22.
Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.
Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun. Actually less so, because there's video evidence of the leprechaun crowd. The resurrection narratives in the gospels contradict with other on a number of points which makes their historicity doubtful at best.
IMO the empty tomb story is probably a later fiction. "Translation fables" in which bodies went missing from tombs were extremely common in the Mediterranean literature of the time. It was a literary shorthand to indicate that a righteous person had been assumed to heaven and been deified. It would be special pleading to assert these other contemporary stories are false but the story in the gospels is true.
I feel like I'm back in 2012 just typing out the words, "you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible," but...it's true. Yes, this is what happened according to a story in the gospel of John, and the reliability of the gospels is the issue in question.
For a lot of these you are misrepresenting @Cirrus's points in order to rebut a weaker and less evidence-based claim than the one he actually made.
Notice you said "as" rather than focusing on the actual "why", because the "why" (which was the claim in question) is a much softer and more difficult point to rebut. There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death. Jesus was betrayed by the Jewish leaders because he claimed to be the son of God, and this is why he was executed. The legal pretext is a separate matter.
I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all--it seems to have been written decades after the actual events, with an eye to maintaining consistency. Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."
I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.
I agree here, the only reason to trust a one-off mention like this is if you have strong prior reason to trust the author's original account, and trust that nothing has been warped/miscopied/mistranslated/deliberately altered from the original account.
That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.
Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.
If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.
I didn’t address this precisely because I didn’t think it was with addressing. Yes there are a lot of contradictions in the Bible, but arguing about them is usually fruitless.
What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.
The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?
The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.
I thought it was clear I was aware of this based on my response. You are vastly overstating scholarly consensus on this. Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel. Given how long ago this happened, our strongest evidence either way is still pretty weak. Even if Matthew did copy Mark though, as I mentioned, it's really not too strange to just imagine Matthew, the apostle, copying Mark's account to maintain consistency about events he may not now remember in quite as much detail decades after the fact.
John appears to be an eyewitness account, Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts, and Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.
Metatron did a video about the arrest of Christ, looking at the 'original' Greek text of the bible. Very interesting look on the matter, and going by the various gospels, it's heavily implied if not out-right stated that Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist/rebel, alongside the other two.
This I would disagree on. My interpretation of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate is very much a case where Pilate is having to deal with politically charged Pharisees hell-bent on seeing Jesus killed due to his teachings. Going by the Gospel, Jesus literally argued his case with Pilate so well that Pilate was begging the Pharisees to allow Pilate to declare Jesus guilty, so much so that he offered them up the choice between Jesus and a man accused of murder.
And we know who they picked.
Right I was already aware of this, that's the legal pretext I was talking about. If you're talking about WHY he was executed, I think it makes the most sense to talk about the proximate cause, i.e. the reason he was executed when others in the same reference class were not. Many others who were about equally anti-Roman were not executed. He was executed, not for insurrectionist beliefs, but for claiming to be the Son of God, which earned him the enmity of the Jewish leaders, who created the legal pretext of insurrection in order to execute him.
Interesting that the other two were also possibly executed as insurrectionists. Honestly not the sort of thing that is very significant to me, so I won't be looking into it too much, but I wish that kind of info was easier to find.
I think I'm missing something here; this sounds like you're agreeing with me. The Pharisees can exert some pressure on the Romans to execute specific people.
Did you miss a word? Pilate wanted to declare Jesus innocent.
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