Why do people still believe in Jesus and Christianity?

saltydancin said:
As with the communism of Christianity suicidal sociopsychopathilogical homicidal human farming socioeconomic machine & it's Christiananality pedophilia interpretation of one nation under God with "serve the Pope or die" from Islam "death to the infidels" dhimmitude servitude law of the land ever since SCOTUS granting standing with fabricated misnomer immaculate conceptions for thieving US Constitutions - old glory - old testament - absentee voting ballots arsonists.
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Is this gibberish or where you actually trying to convey a point?
 
anatta said:
one correction there is only a few were left that openly called themselves Followers.
They were killed if they practiced openly - of course it took Constantine to embrace Christianity to make it a world religion -but there were many followers up until he did so. Which is why Constantine recognized it
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It is actually amazing how rapidly Christianity spread after Jesus' death. He had only about a dozen followers when he was executed, but it seems to have grown exponentially in the first and second century.

I maintain that the secret to it's success is that Christianity is known to have had an appealing and compelling message for women, slaves, and the lower social strata of the Empire. The message of salvation and spiritual equality were nowhere to be found in the Roman pagan religions
 
Cypress said:
Okay, the international scientific community really does not care if you do not think the big bang is a valid scientific theory.
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Science is not a community. It is a set of falsifiable theories. The Big Bang theory is not falsifiable. It is a religion.
Cypress said:
You are going to have to pay me money if you want me to teach you about the discovery, science and reasearch concerning the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan. I had to pay college tuition to acquire knowlege of that nature.
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Get your money back. You learned nothing about science.

No argument presented. Denial of science. Circular argument fallacy (fundamentalism). Argument by repetition.
 
Cypress said:
Literate in the sense of being able to read and write. Jesus was born to peasant parents in a one horse town in a provincial backwater. He undoubtedly spoke Aramaic, but there is basically a zero chance he went to school and learned how to write. The NT explicitly points out that some of his peasant disciples from Galilee were Aramaic speaking illiterates, which would have been the standard, universal expectation for peasants from Gallile.

I think there is a reason the NT was written in Greek by highly literate people of the Hellenistic world. None of the illiterate Aramaic speaking followers of Jesus could write anything down in Aramaic. If they could, we should have had a NT written in Aramaic
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The NT as we have it was written in Greek. The source text for that Greek was Aramaic (as far as anyone has researched). Israel, Rome, Syria, and Greece all had written languages. Not just government knew how to read and write it. True, literacy wasn't at prevalent then as it is today, but it did exist.
 
Cypress said:
You are thinking anachronistically.

His profound historical role did not come to fruition until centuries after his death.

At the time of his life he was an impoverished Jewish teacher of the apocalyptic tradition of Jewish theology.

He was born an illiterate peasant in a one horse town.

He lived his life in a provincial backwater.

His ministry consisted of probably less than 20 people. Peasant men and women all.

50 after his death, Christianity was a tiny, obscure cult of a subsect of Jews.

Almost no Romans had ever heard of Christianity even 100 years after Jesus' death.

It was not until the fourth century AD that Christianity became a a major religion in the Roman Empire, and ultimately became the state religion.
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Christ's historical role was throughout his life. It doesn't matter how many people believed it. History does not use consensus.
 
Cypress said:
Greek and Latin were the languages of the literate classes and the elite. That was a legacy of the Hellenistic world, and the Empire. Anyone who wanted to read Homer, Plato, Virgil would need to read Greek or Latin. Aramaic would have been no help. Learning to write in Aramaic would have been a waste of time for the educated classes of the Empire in the first century. Even educated Jews did not write in Aramaic, they wrote in Hebrew. Almost the entire Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and only a vanishingly small part of it was written in Aramaic.

On the second tangent, Pontius Pilate did not have to check with Rome to execute Jesus. Rome would have been told nothing about Jesus. As provincial governor, Pilate had the authority to execute criminals, traitors, anyone who threatened the Empire's interests. The Jewish historian Josephus suggests that Pilate was notable for his ruthlessness.

If the NT account is even close to being accurate, the second that Jesus confessed or was suspected of claiming to be the king of the Jews, his fate was sealed. Pilate would have immediately had him executed as a traitor and a threat to the Empire.
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Rome, Greece, Syria, and Israel all had written languages.
 
votebiden said:
What is that "ultimate reality?"
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We are hard wired to believe in what we cannot see, this protected us from attack from predators in the dark... There is a reason folks are more afraid when it is dark. It isn't because things change, it is because we don't know what is out there and are hard wired to believe that something is...

This same wiring enters our consciousness as belief in "higher powers" and that there must be a "larger meaning" to the universe.
 
Cypress said:
It is actually amazing how rapidly Christianity spread after Jesus' death. He had only about a dozen followers when he was executed, but it seems to have grown exponentially in the first and second century.
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he had the 12 Apostles, but many followers (Disciples of Christ)

Cypress said:
I maintain that the secret to it's success is that Christianity is known to have had an appealing and compelling message for women, slaves, and the lower social strata of the Empire. The message of salvation and spiritual equality were nowhere to be found in the Roman pagan religions
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yes. agree completely.
Kind of like Buddhists could be anyone on the Path, while the Hindu gave much more preference to Brahmin.
Buddhism was a religion anyone could follow without being subject to caste
 
Dutch Uncle said:
So there is no other life in the Universe except on our planet. There are no alternate planes of existence, no other dimensions, no multiverses. We are all alone in this single universe which is doomed to Heat Death in 200 billion years. Awesome!
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A strictly mechanistic view of reality seems to me to potentially lead to a debilitating skepticism and cynicism.

The premise that there is nothing more to existence than a collection of leptons, fermions, bosons discounts the possibility for a higher truth, for a meaning to life, for any kind of transcendent reality.

I believe it takes a certain humility to allow for the possibility there is more to ultimate reality than the subatomic matter we can detect in particle accelerators.
 
Cypress said:
A strictly mechanistic view of reality seems to me to potentially lead to a debilitating skepticism and cynicism.

The premise that there is nothing more to existence than a collection of leptons, fermions, bosons discounts the possibility for a higher truth, for a meaning to life, for any kind of transcendent reality.

I believe it takes a certain humility to allow for the possibility there is more to ultimate reality than the subatomic matter we can detect in particle accelerators.
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Agreed, but that's the fundamental atheist point of view. Most "atheists" aren't really atheists. They grow out of it.
 
Damocles said:
We are hard wired to believe in what we cannot see, this protected us from attack from predators in the dark... There is a reason folks are more afraid when it is dark. It isn't because things change, it is because we don't know what is out there and are hard wired to believe that something is...

This same wiring enters our consciousness as belief in "higher powers" and that there must be a "larger meaning" to the universe.
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While that is logical it doesn't fit with the fact all other animal species on the planet which also face off predators in the dark. Why are humans the only ones that need a spiritual power to do it?
 
Dutch Uncle said:
While that is logical it doesn't fit with the fact all other animal species on the planet which also face off predators in the dark. Why are humans the only ones that need a spiritual power to do it?
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We are also the only ones that see the fact that we will die in the future. No matter what we will die and we know it.
 
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