The Gaming Den

Quoting RationalWiki:

There is more evidence for Jesus than for (insert famous ancient person here)
When discussing the evidence for Jesus' existence, a common claim made by apologists is that there is "more evidence for Jesus than 'X'". This is often because ancient records really are sparse for the existence of some ancient kings, Pharaohs of Egypt, or other historical figures. However, what evidence we do have is higher quality than what exists for Jesus. This does not mean it is necessarily worthless, but it means it is worth questioning. Court records, birth records, even lists of property owners or tax records do not have this doubt attached. Finding a document that said "Jesus, known as the Christ, was crucified today, in the Court of..." would be this kind of evidence.
One common claim is that there are "over 5000 distinct pieces of evidence for Jesus". This number comes from counting each individual handwritten document (from full codices down to mere scraps) with New Testament text on it, including multiple copies of the same texts. The actual number is 5500 ancient fragments (dating from before the printing press) of any writings from the New Testament. It should be noted that just 6.29% of these 5000 distinct pieces of evidence have been dated before the 9th century and only 48 supposedly predate our oldest intact Bibles
While it is is impossible to cover all the ancient figures and events Jesus has been compared to there are a few popular ones that show just how shaky the position really is.
Sun Tzu (Sun Wu) (544–496 BC?): his very existence is debated in scholarly circles despite reference in the Records of the Grand Historian and Spring and Autumn Annals which used earlier official records that haven't survived.
Confucius (Kong Qiu) (551–479 BCE): the Records of the Grand Historian used archives and imperial records as source material (which themselves have not survivef). Its author Sima Qian noted the problems with incomplete, fragmentary, and contradictory sources stating in the 18 volume of the 180 volume work "I have set down only what is certain, and in doubtful cases left a blank." Moreover, Kong Qiu was the governor of a town in Lu and ultimately held the positions of Minister of Public Works and then Minister of Crime for the whole Lu state not exactly minor potions one could create a fictitious person to fill.
Leukippos (shadowy nearly legendary figure of early 5th century BCE): very existence doubted by Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE).
Socrates (c469 – 399 BCE): written about by contemporaries Plato, Xenophon (430 – 354 BCE), and Aristophanes (c446 – 386 BCE).
Hippocrates (c460 – c370 BCE): written about by contemporary Plato.
Plato (428 – 347 BCE): written about by contemporaries Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), Xenophon, and Aristophanes.
Alexander the Great (July 20, 356 – June 11, 323 BCE): official historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, generals Ptolemy, Nearchus, and Aristobulus and helmsman Onesicritus where all contemporaries who wrote about Alexander. While their works were eventually lost, later works that used them as source material were not. Then you have mosaics and coins also contemporaneous with Alexander.
Hannibal (247 – 182 BCE): Written about by Silenus, a paid Greek historian who Hannibal brought with him on his journeys to write an account of what took place, and Sosylus of Lacedaemon who wrote seven volumes on the war itself. Never mind the contemporary Carthaginian coins and engraved bronze tablets.
Julius Caesar (July 100 – 15 March 44 BCE): Not only do we have the writing of contemporaries Cato the Younger and Cicero but Julius Caesar' own writings as well (Commentarii de Bello Gallico aka The Gallic Wars and Commentarii de Bello Civili aka The Civil War). Then you have the contemporary coins, statues and monuments.
Apollonius of Tyana (c15 CE - c100 CE): Often refereed to as the "Pagan Christ", fragments of Apollonius' own writings are part of the Harvard University Press edition of The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (1912) ISBN-13: 978-0674990180 as documented in Carrier's Kook article.
Boadicea (d. 60 CE): Tacitus himself would have been a 5-year old boy when she poisoned herself c. 60 CE making him contemporary to her. Furthermore, his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola served under Gaius Suetonius Paulinus during the revolt. So Tacitus was not only an actual contemporary, but he had access to Gaius Suetonius Paulinus' records and an actual eyewitness.
Muhammad (570 – c. June 8, 632 CE): Unlike the New Testament, the Quran was written during Muhammad's lifetime and there are some that say it was compiled shortly before his death. Moreover there are non-Muslim references by people who would have been contemporary to Muhammad.

Now compare those to Jesus:
1) The only known possible contemporary is Paul (Romans, 1st Corinthians, 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1st Thessalonians and Philemon) who not only writes some 20 years after the events but seems more intent on the Jesus in his own head than any Jesus who actually preached in Galilee. In fact, even though in his own account Paul meets "James, brother of the Lord" we get no details of Jesus' life, not even references to the famous sermons or miracles.

2) The Gospels are anonymous documents written sometime between 70 CE to 140 CE and there are no references to any of them until the early 2nd century.

As you can see from this sampling, the ancient person being compared to Jesus is generally in far better shape in terms of documentation.

You know, the fucking rage, and whining that people direct at Jesus, or rather just religion in general is pretty fucking old.

The deal is this. . . If there's no "higher power" or whatever then Frank is pretty much totally right about moral relativism.
However, people don't like that shit like AT ALL, people want to feel good about shit. Telling them that there's no savior, (and before it really was hercules) or hero, and no Divine hand setting down the law actually makes shit unhappy as fuck for a huge number of people.
God is the best thing man ever invented. Ancient rulers knew that shit that's why we have pyramids, and the such.
Basically though if you offer people the choice between, "God" and "Moral Relativity" overwhelmingly they're going to be like "God". Not because they're right perse, but it makes them feel better about "the vast uncaring universe". Leave it the fuck alone, already.

No way. An anthropomorphized deity or deities -- and more specifically, prayer -- is one of the most evil, fucked up things that humans do that isn't instantly recognized as being fucked up.

Midnight_v wrote:You know, the fucking rage, and whining that people direct at Jesus, or rather just religion in general is pretty fucking old.

The deal is this. . . If there's no "higher power" or whatever then Frank is pretty much totally right about moral relativism.

Nope. The two positions are tangential. For example: divine command theory, which has been hugely popular in religions (especially monotheist ones) for millennia, dispenses with moral standards entirely. If God decides that torturing kittens to death for the lulz is good, then it's 'good'. Effectively, this is embracing one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma (things are good because the gods command them).

Most meta-ethical theories that have universal moral truths don't depend on God(s), partly to avoid that problem. They go with the other Euthyphro horn (the gods command things because they are good), which is only a problem for theists.

Court records, birth records, even lists of property owners or tax records do not have this doubt attached. Finding a document that said "Jesus, known as the Christ, was crucified today, in the Court of..." would be this kind of evidence.

Not a bad evidentiary standard, but one that most of the following examples transparently do not meet.

Moreover, Kong Qiu was the governor of a town in Lu and ultimately held the positions of Minister of Public Works and then Minister of Crime for the whole Lu state not exactly minor potions one could create a fictitious person to fill.

Horseshit. If you can claim a fictitious person was the son of god, you can claim that a fictitious person was a provincial bureaucrat four hundred years ago.

Unlike the New Testament, the Quran was written during Muhammad's lifetime

No, it wasn't. Large parts of it were written down during his lifetime, but a lot of it was transcribed after his death based on the memories of people who knew it by heart. In any event, treating anything in the Quran as a viable primary source, while the Gospels somehow aren't is a blatant double standard.

Socrates (c469 – 399 BCE): written about by contemporaries Plato, Xenophon (430 – 354 BCE), and Aristophanes (c446 – 386 BCE).

All of whom have conflicting accounts of what he said and what he did. Since the obviously untrue things in the Gospels are the number one attack on the historicity of Jesus, (because, you know, if i claim my dad could beat up Superman, the obvious implication is that my dad must not exist) then the accounts of a disciple who mainly used Socrates as a vector for his own philosophy, a dramatist who used Socrates as a fill-in for the entire class of philosophers and rhetoricians, and a historian/mercenary who barely even lived in Athens shouldn't count either, since none of them agrees on what exactly Socrates said.

There's all kinds of other bad-faith padding in there too. Stuff like "Tacitus was 5 when Boudica died, so he was totally a contemporary." The fact that the writer of Mark wrote his account at a closer remove from his subject than Tacitus did from Boudica, and was almost definitely a contemporary as well doesn't count though, because reasons.

Redshirt, you are being an ass, go read the link or something.

In the mean time. The best way to put it is that the Jesus of the bible did not exist.

Because if the best thing you can bring yourself to conclude in favor of Jesus existing is that you think the bible is somehow, and contrary to the lack of any and all other evidence and a lot of other contradictions, merely sufficient evidence of... someone of some kind existing somehow, somewhere, doing something...

Then it's totally fucking useless. Because if you can't derive any other facts at all about this supposed "Jesus" fellow from the bible, and you cannot, then you have basically nothing worth talking about.

Really. If your contention is that the bible is, supposedly adequate proof of the existence of an otherwise seemingly non-historical figure... what OTHER facts do you think it actually gives us about him? Go on. Fess up. Tell us which of the Jesus bits are totally real according to your awesome Biblical scholarship.

First of all: salvationist religions are so obviously evil that people instantly recognize the salvationist religions of other people as wicked. The whole "murder some innocent people and get 72 virgins to molest after you die" thing is so laughably repugnant that people think that's a parody or an insult against Muslims rather than an actual thing, which it is.

People only join up because of Pascal's Wager, which is essentially a threat to commit infinite atrocities for people who refuse to join and provide immortality and infinite benefits for those who do. Which is a compelling (if absurd) argument for why you should join, but it's still extremely obviously evil. "Join our zombie army or I'll keep you alive so I can torture you in a lake of fire forever once I have conquered this world" is not something the good guys ever say.

There is no goodness or virtue in monotheism. The entire concept is inherently wicked and obviously so. Any part of the monotheist argument, or even the whole thing, once stripped of the "and I'm part of this religion" clause, is instantly rejected by every person's moral intuition as hateful and disgusting.

Quran wrote:No, it wasn't. Large parts of it were written down during his lifetime, but a lot of it was transcribed after his death based on the memories of people who knew it by heart. In any event, treating anything in the Quran as a viable primary source, while the Gospels somehow aren't is a blatant double standard.

This is actually true. The Koran was not written in Mohammed's lifetime, and there is no direct evidence from his life period that he actually existed. Now there is a lot more evidence that he was a real person than there is for Jesus. For one thing, the tribal empire he supposedly built historically did actually happen. Also he supposedly had children and those children are real people who supposedly had children who had children and such all the way to real people who exist today.

Now, we know for certain that the claims of at least some of the Syeds are false, because they genuinely don't all have the same Y chromosome. But of course if even one Syed's presented genealogy is accurate then presumably Hussein and Hassan had a grandfather and that grandfather was by definition a real person that the stories in the Koran are about. He almost certainly didn't do everything in the book and may not have done any of it, but there is by definition a man who is the maternal grandfather of Hussein and Hassan.

For Jesus there's no evidence at all. There is literally no reason to believe that there was ever a person about whom any of those stories were told. All the verifiable events in the book didn't happen and nothing was left behind. No physical objects were made in the story that actually exist, and Jesus's supposed family is nowhere to be found at any point of history. Even of the people who claimed they had talked to Jesus, historical records only exist of people who supposedly talked to him in spirit, people who talked to him in person are probably fictional as well, with their "first hand accounts" written decades after they were supposed to have lived and died.

-Username17

Redshirt wrote:Horseshit. If you can claim a fictitious person was the son of god, you can claim that a fictitious person was a provincial bureaucrat four hundred years ago.

I just want to say this is very silly. Why wouldn't assigning fictitious titles to fictitious people be easier than assigning real titles to fictitious people? If I made up someone and claimed they were a past president of the United States, discrediting me would be trivial. if I made up someone and claimed they had some title no one gave a fuck about until I made that person up and made up that title to give them, discrediting me would be a bit tricker.

That isn't to say you couldn't write a falsified history about important historical facts that later gets taken as true due to a lack of differing accounts, but that actually would be harder than writing a falsified history about bullshit you were just making up anyway, because literally no one can write source material to contradict things whose entire domain of relevance is your asshole.

DSMatticus wrote:because literally no one can write source material to contradict things whose entire domain of relevance is your asshole.

Metaphorical asshole, I presume, because the literal asshole seems like a perfectly legitimate topic for medical literature.

Because if the best thing you can bring yourself to conclude in favor of Jesus existing is that you think the bible is somehow, and contrary to the lack of any and all other evidence and a lot of other contradictions, merely sufficient evidence of... someone of some kind existing somehow, somewhere, doing something...

Then it's totally fucking useless.

So? Historical figures don't wink out of existence based on their usefulness. The absolute consensus of the people who lived immediately after Jesus' death was that he existed, and was crucified by Pilate. Prior to that point, there is no mention of a Christian religion or movement, but by the time of Tacitus it's a distinguishable religion from Judaism that's large enough to bear mentioning.

Really. If your contention is that the bible is, supposedly adequate proof of the existence of an otherwise seemingly non-historical figure... what OTHER facts do you think it actually gives us about him? Go on. Fess up. Tell us which of the Jesus bits are totally real according to your awesome Biblical scholarship.

The only events in the Biblical narrative that have overwhelming consensus among historians are the baptism by John the Baptist, another millinarian preacher operating at the same time, and the crucifixion. Everything else is highly debatable or definitively false.

None of that matters though, because you have the burden of proof completely backwards. A religious movement clearly took hold around 30-80 CE that rapidly spread throughout the Roman Empire. Contemporary commentators and the literate members of that religion all state it was founded by a specific person who lived in Galilee. Overturning that consensus puts the burden of proof on the people claiming Jesus didn't exist.

Omfg.

See. Its just fucking trendy and edgy and most of all EASY to beat up on the abrahamic kids. Fuck off. Its old hat, you're just being dicks to retarded people at this point trying to take their safety blankets, because it makes you feel superior.
Known fact: Even if aliens came tomorrow and were like "Oh yeah Jesus? We did artificially inseminate a girl in Bethlehem a couple thousand years ago, did that matter" they're still NOT going to listen to you They're going to literally say "The Antichrist, WE KNEW IT!". You're not brilliant because you figured what they're up to, but they're happier with it and will ignore any empirical evidence you provide. So you're just fapping to the sound of your own voice.

However, most of you missed the MAIN point that was being made.
Which is:
If there ISN'T some universal law being handed down or enforced somewhere, then it really is all bullshit. . .
There literally is no good or evil you can only say there's shit you like, and shit you don't like, which is what societies have been saying to some extent or another pretty much forever.
The morality you pick is pretty much an irrelevant and more importantly Arbitrary rules-set that people stick to because humans (outliers aside) have the same general needs.
See no deities doesn't actually = No Morality
No deities is actually WORSE, equaling totally relativistic bullshit moralities springing up whenever someone gets a bigger gun and a

No deities = Made up morality (enforced as best you can) (justified as best you can)

Which is going to almost always lead to in-group, out-group basic human failure, people just keep making up shit to get humans to give a fuck.

I considered giving the standard existentialism 101 pep talk, but the important thing is that you're wrong about everything. The reality is that the idea that there's some universal significance to what happens to the monkeys on this dirtball is not last bastion holding back a torrent of madness and death, that's just demonstrably not true. Life is seriously better by almost any measure in nations with more atheists while the most religious nations on earth are complete shitholes.

Midnight_v wrote: No deities is actually WORSE, equaling totally relativistic bullshit moralities springing up whenever someone gets a bigger gun and a

No deities = Made up morality (enforced as best you can) (justified as best you can)

Which is going to almost always lead to in-group, out-group basic human failure, people just keep making up shit to get humans to give a fuck.

Hey Midnight, you suck at moral philosophy. Go read some moral philosophy.

As Lord Mistborn pointed out, as practical matter you are wrong. Secularism has produced a simply better society than religions were ever able to. Non-believers get divorced and go to prison less than religious people and complete college and get Nobel prizes more. The claim that religion is the best, or even a half-way decent method of imposing the societal moral zeitgeist on people is a testable claim. It has been tested, and it is false.

But beyond that, your claim that without deities there's nothing but people pulling out their sticks with the biggest stick getting to push everyone around is a priori laughable. Deities are nothing but a claim to have a bigger stick. That's literally all they are. You claim to have a god on your side, which is infinity times bigger than everyone else's stick, and justify your right to push everyone around based on that. That's the deity argument. So you're saying that if we don't let the wookie win on the basis that he claims to have the biggest stick, then the winner will be whoever has the biggest stick. Do you seriously not see the problem with that?

Literally the only way it is possible to have our morals defined by anything other than whoever has the biggest stick is to discount hypothetical divine infinity sticks from the discussion. Otherwise the biggest stick wins by definition!

-Username17

Midnight_v wrote: No deities is actually WORSE, equaling totally relativistic bullshit moralities springing up whenever someone gets a bigger gun

Dear Midnight, you have actually made me sad. I took a day off of posting yesterday because of actual sadness you made me feel in my heart for you.

I will put this super simply. The idea that morality or meaning comes from religion is a lie religion has told you. This is provable easily. My closest friends are Muslim and I don't know what you are so let me use the Muslim religion as a base.

Muslims would tell you that their morality comes from their religion. That the things that make them a good person comes from their Muslim teachings and their faith in Muhammad and Allah. But here is a fact: Muhammad is a factual pedophile who molests a 9 year old girl. Muhammad at almost 70 takes a 6 year old girl and makes her become his wife and everyone else thinks that is very weird. They describe how she, Ayesha, was his favorite and that they were having sex by the time she was 9 and that he took great pleasure in making Ayesha clean the semen off his clothing. If my Muslim friends actually did have their morality come from their religion then they would view the rape and sexual exploitation of a child by a septuagenarian warlord to be good. As Muhammad is the MOST moral person they should actually view it as an ideal, a standard of morally perfect behavior that they should attempt to emulate. In fact they don't. They find the idea of a powerful warlord raping children to be repugnant as any human should.

If a good morality is derived from a religion then it would be impossible to point out the horrid and depraved things in every religion. The fact that people find the truths of their religion disgusting is demonstrative of the fact that morality is something you have FIRST. That you judge religious texts BY it. And that you never needed them to HAVE it.

You're right Midnight the religiously fed do say they need their religion to feel alright but meth heads say the same thing about meth. If you feed a poison to someone for long enough they begin to rely on it. There isn't a higher meaning, you don't have an outside purpose and that's fucking FINE. I spent last month in a Vermont resort with a beautiful woman, fine foods, and a roaring fire and it was no less enjoyable for having no greater meaning. I lay there knowing full well that everything around me would crumble and age until one day me, she, and the mountain would all be gone. Death is coming, the mortality rate is 100% and always has been but the fear of that guaranteed event is no cause for people to waste their life bowing and grovelling. Your death is out of your control but your life isn't.

I want to write so many things but instead I will leave you with the recommendation to read Christopher Hitchen's "God is not Great" because it is a beautiful book by a beautiful human being who's eloquence and intelligence are a source of inspiration to me. And finally 3 quotes by Nietzsche. Words from the man who declared God dead to say why you shouldn't hold to fear of being put in charge of your own existence.

"All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity"
"There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings"
"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering"

You guys are building a huge strawman. Stop raging at me. And for fuck sake don't be sad.

The universe gives fuck all about us.

Mankind doesn't adhere to 1 unified concept of good.

All the things defined as "good" is more societal concepts of "We don't like that shit"

I personally don't give two shits about "gods" or whatever but you guys overdo the "I hate religion" bit.

The idea that MY moral structure is better than YOUR moral structure is what everyone says.

Frank Trollman wrote:Of course I can. But that's only within my internal framework, and the only thing you can logic out is that it's consistent with my internal framework. There's no objective standard, nor can there be one.

That's pretty much my point. Except well you guys go into a fucking tizzy when people imply that extra-dimensional beings might be the end all be all of morality.

Speaking of which. . . let me ask you a question. Lets say there was actually was such a thing.
Like fuck NOT GODS cause I don't know what that even means really, but like some transcended 4th dimensional beings or whatever. Time is known to them etc.
They exist and they knew the outcomes of things an they were like "HEY: This is good"/"This is bad" and we knew they were totally legit would they have the moral high ground?
I suppose it's kind of a tertiary thought about deities in general.

Redshirt wrote:Contemporary commentators and the literate members of that religion all state it was founded by a specific person who lived in Galilee.

Actally, pretty much all evidence we have that Jesus existed doesn't get made until well after his death. No non-biblical evidence I am aware of describes first-hand accounts, and virtually all of it is of the form "there's a crazy cult which exists and they worship a dude named Christos. These are the things they say happened to Christos." Those texts would look exactly the same whether or not Jesus was real, because they describe Christian claims, not actual historical evidence.

@Midnight, you said stupid things that were wrong. Deal with it. Religion is not and never has been a useful tool for instilling morality in a society (as you claimed); indeed, it is under religion that certain acts all of society feels are heinous were and are able to survive far longer than they have any right to. Religion is a fucking awful foundation for morality.

When you write something down as the word of some omnipotent divine who must be both praised and pleased, you have fortified those words against reason and progress and the inexorable march of mankind towards creating a better life for themselves. People to this day do not believe in evolution because it is inconsistent with the wild stories of cultists thousands of years gone. People clung and cling to the idea that their wives are their property because their religious texts tell them so.

I get that the relative nature of morality is haaard, but arguing that you can't have a stable social framework despite that without the power of religion is provably wrong and batshit insane. Again, you said stupid things and ascribed an importance to the role of religion that it does not deserve. People are angry at you for being stupid and wrong and praising institutions whose very existence is destructive and harmful and virtually always has been.

Religious propaganda and beliefs are no worse than the propaganda and beliefs of Stalinist Russia which was undeniably an atheistic belief structure. We oppose religious belief structures because they are the most common form of clandestine global evil. It's not that religions have a copyright on evil, it's that they have a majority share. If 95% of the world believed in Stalinist propaganda I would fight against that and you'd better believe my Avatar would look a lot different. As it stands the most effective fight you can take up to make the world a better place is against religion. So that's what we do.

As to your question Midnight it's actually quite cool if you think about it. Imagine that there was a being that started the big bang and created the whole universe. It can create matter from nothing, is immortal, and is incredibly knowledgeable. If that guy shows up and says "Eating pork is the most evil thing" then I would still question it! Isn't that fascinating! Even if you agree that something made you and is bigger than you it STILL doesn't give it any moral authority because such a thing can't exist! It has literally exactly the same authority over you that parents do over their children. My Mom made me and growing up she was massively smarter than me. She told me stoves were hot and that snowy days would get cold. She also told me that cleaning my plate was good but I only did the dishes if she threatened to spank me. She made the rules cause she had "a bigger gun". If someone shows up who is bigger and stronger than you and tells you what to do you might do what they tell you to but that doesn't make them intrinsically -right-. It's just someone with a bigger gun telling you what to do.

If on the absurd off chance that the Abrahamic god was real I still wouldn't owe him shit. He doesn't own me because I don't acknowledge ownership, his statements aren't right unless they pass the same logical scrutiny that everyone else's must so basically he's just a really big guy with a really big gun. He could even be an extremely nice guy and if he can't justify why eating pork is evil then I won't agree that he's right. He may be very powerful and very smart but that STILL wouldn't give him anything like the divine right the religious say he has. I don't worship my Mom and I wouldn't worship him.

The funniest thing about the religious is that even if every fact was right their conclusion would still be wrong.

@Midnight, you said stupid things that were wrong. Deal with it. Religion is not and never has been a useful tool for instilling morality in a society (as you claimed); indeed, it is under religion that certain acts all of society feels are heinous were and are able to survive far longer than they have any right to. Religion is a fucking awful foundation for morality.

When you write something down as the word of some omnipotent divine who must be both praised and pleased, you have fortified those words against reason and progress and the inexorable march of mankind towards creating a better life for themselves. People to this day do not believe in evolution because it is inconsistent with the wild stories of cultists thousands of years gone. People clung and cling to the idea that their wives are their property because their religious texts tell them so.

You are an illiterate fuck.
I said, Its a useful tool for rulers to instill the morality they've chosen on a society. That's what all the talk about big sticks and pyramids was about. I actually don't give a shit if you personally are angry because: "inexorable march of mankind?" hahaha. I can no longer take you seriously, because of your needless hyperbole. THANK YOU! I lol'd so hard. Fcuking clown mode you engaged.

The funniest thing about the religious is that even if every fact was right their conclusion would still be wrong.

Fair enough however...

If that guy shows up and says "Eating pork is the most evil thing" then I would still question it! Isn't that fascinating!

Not. Particularly. No. Some people would and some wouldn't but it is interesting where you went with it. I specifically didn't say Johova or whatever, because I was talking consequentialism. If that motherfucker was like I can see the future "Eating pork is going to fuck over everbody eventually. Stop it"
...and so on an so forth.
However, I actually understand you way better now. The reason that you guys get so ridiculously ranty is because you think religion is the biggest evil ever or some such, and whatever I guess, *shrug*.

What I don't get is how everyone seems to think they're moral people, when you profess yourselves that there's moral relativity? Its ridiculous.

Actally, pretty much all evidence we have that Jesus existed doesn't get made until well after his death.

This is profoundly irrelevant to the point I actually made. That the Gospel accounts were written after Christ's death is well established; whether that invalidates it as evidence for his existence is a separate question, the answer to which is no. The only extant evidence we have for the existence of Confucius was written four hundred years after he died. The scholarly consensus on both of them is that they were historical figures of some sort.

No non-biblical evidence I am aware of describes first-hand accounts, and virtually all of it is of the form "there's a crazy cult which exists and they worship a dude named Christos. These are the things they say happened to Christos."
Those texts would look exactly the same whether or not Jesus was real, because they describe Christian claims, not actual historical evidence.

First, biblical evidence still counts, because discounting it as a primary source because it's partisan is dumb.

Second, Tacitus and Josephus do not say "these are the claims they make" they just state, flat out that there was a guy named Jesus, who was crucified by Pilate.

For instance here's Tacitus:
"Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus"

The parts of Josephus that weren't interpolated by later Christian copyists tell it similarly. Non-Christian writers just took it at face value that Jesus was a person who existed and got killed and had a bunch of followers deify him.

And of course there's Paul, but his obvious assumption that Jesus was a real person who was killed within living memory doesn't count, because later Christians put his writing in the Bible, giving it Bible cooties.

Finally, even if these are all second-hand accounts, so fucking what? They're second-hand accounts from a tiny Judean cult that was evidently chock full of the guy's family members. Josephus was in his twenties when "James the brother of Jesus" was killed in Jerusalem. Occams Razor points directly at him actually being their cousin but not turning water into wine.

Redshirt wrote:The only events in the Biblical narrative that have overwhelming consensus among historians are the baptism by John the Baptist

So in other words when challenged to produce one single factual thing about Jesus from the bible.

You back the fuck down like a pussy.

You're confusing normative moral relativism with moral subjectivity. The former says that because different people make different moral judgements, all moral judgements should be treated as equally valid. The later says that morality is based on human beings rather than on some external factor. They're not the same at all. Moral relativism is repugnant and moral subjectivity is the only alternative to divine command theory.

So in other words when challenged to produce one single factual thing about Jesus from the bible.

You back the fuck down like a pussy.

No, I didn't back down, I directly challenged the assumptions behind your stupid, useless question. If a primary source claims someone existed, and no other sources from the period discount that claim, then the burden of proof is on someone who claims otherwise two thousand years later.

For instance, if the Bible claims Jesus' mother's name was Mary, we have absolutely no reason to suspect otherwise. So that's a "factual thing" that we can "know" with some certainty.

On the other hand, if the Bible claims Jesus rose from the dead, we can discount that claim because everything we know about biology says otherwise. That of course doesn't invalidate other non-dependent claims though, any more than me claiming my dad is an astronaut makes him imaginary.

Redshirt wrote:Second, Tacitus and Josephus do not say "these are the claims they make" they just state, flat out that there was a guy named Jesus, who was crucified by Pilate.

And there is absolutely no reason to believe that they are drawing those conclusions from some valid historical record as opposed to what some Christians who never met Jesus or anyone who they know met Jesus say happened. And there is some debate about whether or not one of those is in fact falsified by Christian scribes.

Grek wrote:You're confusing normative moral relativism with moral subjectivity. The former says that because different people make different moral judgements, all moral judgements should be treated as equally valid. The later says that morality is based on human beings rather than on some external factor. They're not the same at all. Moral relativism is repugnant and moral subjectivity is the only alternative to divine command theory.

Technically, I'm pretty sure all of those things fall under the umbrella moral relativism with different qualifiers. For example, moral subjectivity as you're describing it is just moral relativism without the normative in front.

The pork thing was just an arbitrary example, it could be anything. If a God says "Pork will fuck everyone over" then he still has to use some moral compass to explain how he is making that judgement. If his moral compass was utilitarian then he would be measuring the future happiness of all the people and comparing it to other alternatives but that would still just be a compass and we call that particular compass utilitarianism. You'd want to ask what his metric was too. If instead of measuring things by the general well being of humanity he was measuring things by the well being of the White Rhino species he might tell us all to kill ourselves. There's no reason to assume human happiness or even life would be his metric. His scale like all others would be arbitrary. So you'd want to know.

Your last question; "How can anyone think they are moral or others are immoral in a universe where morals are arbitrary" is totally valid. Here is the answer in brief.

Why do people think they are moral
Simple self bias really. Fun fact: If you ask a room of 100 people "How many of you are more attractive than the average person in this room? How many of you are smarter than the average person in this room? How many of you are more moral than the average person in this room?" about 70% will agree to the first 2 and about 90% will agree to the last one. That's impossible. It is impossible that more than half the room is better than half of the room UNLESS everyone is using different standards and in fact they are. People like themselves naturally. They think of themselves as good and things like them as good and they measure to that standard. So people, by and large, think that whatever moral calender they use is better than average even if it is arbitrary because people think most things about themselves is better than average.

How can you call someone immoral?
By finding hypocrisy. I guard against judging people by my own moral standards but I do judge them by their own. If someone says that thievery is wrong and then steals then I feel comfortable saying that they are immoral, because they have failed their own moral compass. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with murder or rape I do feel completely validated in calling the Church evil for preaching peace and condemning murder while they support genocidal regimes like the Nazi's, or create genocidal regimes like the Crusades. I feel completely justified in calling them evil because they preach sexual purity and abstinence while actively harboring child rapists and commit worldwide campaigns of sexual deviancy.

And there is absolutely no reason to believe that they are drawing those conclusions from some valid historical record as opposed to what some Christians who never met Jesus or anyone who they know met Jesus say happened. And there is some debate about whether or not one of those is in fact falsified by Christian scribes.

As I pointed out, Josephus lived in the same city as James the Just, who was a family member of Jesus--either a younger brother or a cousin. They were direct contemporaries, and your assumption that he got his information from Christians who never met Jesus or even anyone who met Jesus is just that, an assumption you're projecting onto the historical record.

What was an interpolation by a later Christian scribe, and what was original to Josephus is actually not that controversial anymore. The claim that it was all a forgery still kicks around on atheist apologetics sites, but that's because they're apologetics sites, and generally terrible.