June 5, 2006
June 4, 2006
Not knowing shouldn’t lead to Christian God
As part of this whole process of coming out from underneath Christianity I've had a lot of conversations, mostly online, with many different people. One of the common fall back positions is that we must have been created, leaving our existence to chance just doesn't make sense.
Ok, sure I can go with that. The odds of me sitting here a few billion years after a few amino acids formed the first protein seems pretty far fetched. No more so than a guy being resurrected 2,000 years ago, but that's a topic for another thread.
What I don't understand is why this argument is supposed to lead to the Christian God. All the "must have been a creator" argument says is that there was a creator, not that it was Yahweh. Sure, you can throw the Bible out as proof that the creator god is the Christian God, but I won't accept the Bible as 100% historical fact. Yes there are parts that are historically accurate, but there are parts that are not. Aside from the Bible, what proof that the Christian God is the creator god is there? What proof do we have that it's not Allah, Zeus, Amen-Ra, or any of the other gods that people have worshipped since we evolved the ability of consciousness?
June 2, 2006
The Naked Truth – Tying Jesus to other myths
There really isn't much for me to say as I'm only about 20 minutes into this almost 2 hour video. But it looks like a pretty good look at myths and religion.
If you go to Google Video and select download for iPod it will download an MP4 file that you can watch later, which is what I'm actually watching now. Be aware though that it's a 230meg file.
Bart Ehrman on The Daily Show
I'm reading Lost Christianities right now by Bart Ehrman, and have a couple of his other books on my bookshelf waiting to be read. One of the ones I haven't read yet, and the one I actually intended to order before Amazon.com caught me with "May we also recommend" and I wound up with 3 books, is Misquoting Jesus. In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman discusses how the people that were trusted to copy the New Testament made changes as they copied; some changes were innocent, some were not.
Below is a YouTube video of Bart Ehrman on The Daily Show with John Stewart.
Backwards prophecy
I'm reading Lost Christianities right now and have a couple of Bart Ehrman's other books waiting in line to be read. One of the points that he keeps bringing up is that the people that copied the Bible, and he's referring to the New Testament, made changes; some subtle, some not; some innocent, some not. This got me thinking that maybe the same thing happened with the Old Testament. It seems possible, even likely, that the early Christians could have edited the Old Testament so that the "thousands of prophecies that Jesus fulfilled" were actually in the OT. With the high percentage of illiterate people, which would lead to very few actually having read the books, it seems like a pretty safe play to try and convince people that the so-called prophecies were fulfilled.
Any thoughts?
