Hi Pericles,

A happy Christmas to you.

http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/origins/quotes/universe.html

Pericles, thank you.

Philip Tang,

My comment about the ancient Egyptians was regurgitated as I remember being told in high school. Obviously my memory or what I was told was inaccurate. I stand corrected.

When I said I didn’t care what scholars or historians said, I was trying to get AndrewFindon to look at the evidence from a different angle less dependent on who says what. That I consider myself an authority is merely something you have invented as a smear tactic.

As if that weren't a blatant enough, unchristian attempt at pure nastiness, you do it this close to Christmas as well.

Interesting link there; interesting too that you would post it so soon after I had already explained to AndrewFindon that it is a fallacy (argument from ignorance) to claim that an explanation becomes plausible for lack of a better one (let’s forget for a second that, in your big bang scenario, god isn’t actually a good explanation due the violation of Occam’s razor). Following that logic Zeus throwing lightning bolts down to Earth was a plausible explanation simply because the ancient Greeks didn’t have a better one.

But it’s not the argument from ignorance I’m so worried about; it’s the dishonesty of the out-of-context quoting of people who don’t even share the view that the big bang proves god. Sticking true to Creationist form, your link provides us with several repeatedly clarified misquotes.

Stephen Hawking is one...

“The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Well, yeah it would, wouldn’t it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it.

The operative word there being “seem” too, by the way.

Then there’s the Einstein quotes such as this...

“The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation ... His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

Continued...

...Continued

Which gets bandied around so often that Einstein was later compelled to explain this...

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” (Albert Einstein, 1954)

And to you, Philip Tang.

>>Hi Pericles, A happy Christmas to you.<<

Thanks for the link. I too went through the experience that so many of your quotes illustrate, that of "wow, it's all so awesome, there must be a God or it doesn't make sense."

I was eight at the time.

By the time I reached my teens, I had worked out that this was simply a convenient way to express "hey, it's all too big and complicated for my tiny insignificant brain to understand".

I decided that instead of inventing a supernatural being who glued the whole thing together, I'd remain comfortable with the fact that it all just happened, and I was pretty lucky, statistically speaking, to experience it all first hand.

The only real "mystery" to me is why so many people find the invention bit necessary. Especially when they come up with so many different ways to justify the existence of their own specially chosen image.

But that's just another of life's mysteries, I guess.

Have a great day.

@Pericles
>"To me, the real mystery is that someone who managed to do all those amazing things with lepers, and dead people, and jugs of water, didn't get so much as a tiny by-line in any contemporary documentation."

Not really that surprising.

"Occasionally people ask why there is no record of Jesus in Roman records. The answer is that there are no surviving Roman records but only highly parochial Roman historians who had little interest in the comings and goings of minor cults and were far more concerned about Emperors and Kings. Jesus made a very small splash while he was alive and there was no reason for Roman historians to notice him.
...
Sometimes Jesus Mythologists will produce long lists of writers none of whom have the slightest reason to mention an obscure Jewish miracle worker and somehow think this strengthens their point. In fact, it has all the relevance of picking fifty books off your local library shelf and finding that none of them mention Carl Sagan. Does that mean he did not exist either? Jesus was not even a failed military leader of the kind that Romans might have noticed - especially if he had been defeated by someone famous."
from http://www.bede.org.uk/jesusmyth.htm

Or from Macquarie Uni's Dr Dickson:
"even if we did possess some correspondence between Jerusalem and Rome during this period, should we expect to find a mention of Jesus in them? Perhaps. History does sometimes throw up unpredictably detailed information, as the letter of Dionysius illustrates. But history is rarely obedient to expectations. I suspect that even if we were to find a batch of letters between Pilate and Tiberius for the very year of Jesus’ death (AD 30), historians would not expect to find mention of him. There were thousands of Jewish trouble-makers in this period, and thousands of executions too; the chance of any one of them appearing in such randomly discovered correspondence is very small."
http://www.publicchristianity.com/jesusevidence.html

http://vimeo.com/11976278
http://vimeo.com/10516887

@AJPhilips

Apologies for mis-citing the RT France quote.

Your comparison of Greek Mythology to the Christian movement is spurious comparison. Not only is there no 'one size fits all' explanation in history - you' have to deal with specific events and claims, the emergence of the two are completely dissimilar.

I'm not going to go around in circles with you, if you refuse to see that your ad hominem is fallacious, failing to show actual and specific examples of bias effecting results.

Seeing as being a Christian was for the first few hundred years 'rocking the boat' it seems odd that the 'boat' wouldn't point out non-existence of the rebel's leader. To suggest that scholars just accept the historicity of Jesus because they don't want to 'rock the boat' is a very poor argument.

Seeing as you couldn't find reference to multiple sources:
"If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method#Core_principles

>"Seriously though, your argument here doesn’t become plausible for lack of something better. That’s an argument from ignorance."

Nope - it's called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method#Argument_to_the_best_explanation

>"there isn’t sufficient evidence to believe (to any meaningful degree anyway) that he existed. If this were a court case, then I would have to say ”not guilty”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m saying “Innocent”. "

This is not law, it's ancient history, and I suspect that much ancient history would not pass such criteria - if you're consistent, then great, if not, it's goal-shifting.

>"you made it out to sound like the Jury was in and that anyone who wasn’t satisfied with the evidence was either ignorant of it or a loopy fringe-dweller."

The Jury basically is in - the scholarly consensus accepts the historicity of Jesus, and yeah, those who think there isn't enough evidence are basically dwelling in the fringes of scholarship (though not necessarily loopy). As I said, if you want to reject the consensus view, fine - I just don't think you've made a persuasive case to do so.