""Ironically you seem to be basing your opinions on hearsay ""
Posted by boxgum, Tuesday, 21 December 2010 8:09:32 AM

Oh, the irony of that statement, boxgum.

""please offer your explanation of [the catholic Church's] primacy even today in human affairs of the sacred and the world.

<=> I don't think it has primacy. The explanation is tradition and an inquisition or three via centuries of theocratic rule.

""It is a fact in life that nothing can stand on a lie"" <=> so true, and even more for a pack of them.

""We Christians walk through history with the confidence in a God of Promise and command; There is a binding effect for good in all religions;"" <=> The best answer is 'No entity of power has survived across the ages. They leave a fine history of good and evil, and some a legacy for future human civilisations.'

As far as burying "the once confident Secularisation Theory", you'd better hope secularisation persists when Islam becomes the worlds dominant religion, and atheism is the dominant belief system.

Seasons greetings and Happy New Year! May the peace the Bible narratives engender be with you.

Pericles yes I agree hehe pretty funny my head would explode with all the contradictions. In fact just reading certain things that have been written makes me wonder how are some people able to stop the ooze from their brains escaping.

Is is psydo intellectual or is it just a plain case of denial, confabulation and a touch of mental confusion

Touché, Pericles. Touché.

AndrewFinden,

No, the accounts are not unreliable because they contain supernatural claims. They are unreliable because they’re hearsay accounts written decades after the fact. That some of them contain supernatural claims only makes those particular claims impossible to verify and my mentioning of this was just a side-note to my point, not the reasoning behind it. That would be a bit of a non sequitur and I don’t do fallacies, sorry.

<<You say that historians like N.T. Wright have confirmation bias...>>

Actually, that was McReal, but I agree with him.

It may be an ad hominem, but not in the fallacious sense because it bares relevance to the situation due to a strong bias. But not just any bias...

<<...the argument cuts both ways. Indeed, everyone has bias, half the battle in overcoming it is recognising that we all do so.>>

A bias with a deep and almost entirely emotional basis. And as most of us know, emotions can skew our critical thinking and prove themselves time and time again to be the cause of bad decisions and conclusions.

So it doesn’t quite cut both ways and to pass the two biases off as equal opposites is misleading. Nobody is emotionally invested in their disbelief in gods; nobody has a reason to cling to disbelief if they’re shown to be wrong.

But anyway, I don’t care what this or that scholar thinks; I don’t care what this or that historian thinks; I don’t even care if they’re a secular scholar/historian.

What these scholars and historians say, or who they interpret the scant documents to be referring to is a side issue to my point that we have no contemporary accounts of Jesus; not a single event from his life that can be accurately dated or evidenced; we have no writings from him; nor do we have any carpentry works. All we have are hearsay accounts, written decades after the fact.

Look, I don’t necessarily believe that Jesus was a completely fictional character; I just don’t think there is sufficient evidence to believe he existed.

That’s it.

Whoa there, boxgum.

>>There is a binding effect for good in all religions; it is God's way across all civilisations<<

This totally ignores the long, long list of religion-based strife that has occurred, regularly, for at least the last couple of thousand years.

Tell the Prods and Micks of Ireland about "religion's binding effect".

Or eleventh/twelfth/thirteenth century Crusaders and Saracens.

Or the sub-continent's Hindus and Muslims in 1947 - they didn't find a lot that was "binding" in their religions.

Nor for that matter did Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.

But perhaps you had something different in mind, when you wrote about "religion's binding effect for good?"

>>The Catholic Church, with all of its faults and divisions across time, has been, and is ongoing, at the apex in the promotion of human development in all of the integrated dimensions of the human person.<<

At the apex, boxgum?

You have to turn a blind eye to a helluva lot of "faults and divisions" to come to that conclusion. Its record of human development has - forgive me for pointing this out - been most notable not for its ability to lead the way, but for its belated, glacial acceptance of the realities of our existence. Ask Galileo.

But perhaps you had a particular definition of your own in mind, of what consists of an "apex in the promotion of human development"?

'this is about God drowning the whole earth and Jesus approves of the genocide.'

at least Noah was smart enough to repent and take the free gift of life. The others were left with no excuses after mocking for 100 years. No different from when Christ comes again.

Good news runner!

It's on next year when He returns on 21 May 2011.

It's official, I promise you.

And even better!

God is going to blow the world up on 21 October 2011.

Isn't that Good News runner?

Just what you and Al Gore have been praying for for so long.

I'm really excited about this, and look forward to Him slaying all of us but for the chosen people.

But, will that be 'the Jews' or the Hillsong crew.

Anyway, there's only room for about 100k saved people, so that leaves over 5 billion down here.

What do you think about that runner?

Ecstatic, or just mildly happy?