It’s simple. There’s no evidence anywhere in the world that any human being has been brought back from the dead after being dead for three days. The Bible is a claim, not evidence. Why would anyone believe that Jesus was resurrected? You would have to prove it first to claim there’s no argument against it.
This book might give you some good perspective.
How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061778192/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_rSL8CbN6DVTPZ
by Khufuu 2019-11-17
When I was a Christian, I read a lot of short articles to explain why verses like these exist. Many of the answers are total BS to justify things like owning a person as property, stoning homosexuals to death, etc. They will throw out the old testament laws because "Jesus makes those laws not matter anymore". Oh really? Show me in the bible where he says we should no longer own people, and no longer consider being gay a sin. I used to say to people that God used slavery to make the Jews, God's people, stronger. Or that they had to punish gay people so Jews could reproduce.
That was bullshit given by someone who needs to justify their God's book because they need to believe God is real and moral and the bible doesn't contain errors.
The other type of apologetics I've read are the books that my family has thrown at me since discovering I'm an atheist. The Case for Christ came from my mom (she never read it), Mere Christianity came from my dad (he never read it), and The Reason for God from my uncle, who may have read it.
I think apologetics are all fundamentally flawed in their methods. They start with a conclusion and selectively accept information that supports that conclusion, or otherwise just make things up. With God, all things are possible.
If you want a reliable source, try Bart Ehrman. His book is used as the reference textbook at Yale for New Testament Studies. That class has all of its lectures posted here. I can't recommend them enough. They use only scholarly sources. All the videos are free. I would believe anything they say in those videos because all of the information is backed up with modern science and historical analysis.
by ProblemBesucher 2019-11-17
I just quickly refer you to some sides I randomly googled - Bible Contradictions, BibViz, Bible Inconsistencies there is a lot out there really. The problem is the Bible was written by a couple of different people who didn't know each other and that 50 some years after Jesus death. I have a good book tip for you about this - it's a book by a guy who was a devoted christian himself, so he knows where you are coming from, he even studied it - he learned how the bible came to be and how contradictionary it is - he became an atheist and didn't care about hell anymore: How Jesus Became God.
If I may ask this: Have you ever read the bible from beginning to end?
by sneakyuntiedsneakers 2019-11-17
>I think the evidence firmly points to the person of Jesus having existed and when you couple this with the fact that the apostles did not recant their faith, it makes a promising case that the Resurrection was genuine.
You need to develop a standard for evaluating claims. And the standard needs to be something you can honestly live with.
There are many, many supernatural claims out there. Mohammed, for example: There are Muslims who argue just as effectively for the veracity of Mohammed's miracles as do Christians with respect to Jesus' resurrection. The same goes for many other religions that we still live with today -- and countless more that have died off over the centuries.
If your belief in a supernatural event is satisfied by ancient second-hand accounts of uneducated people who've never been exposed to science, then you need to apply that belief even-handedly, without respect to your upbringing, cultural experiences, and so on. But, of course, if you do that, you'll find yourself believing in contradictory dogma.
There's a better option: Simply put, Jesus existed. He clearly had an impact. He was tried and executed for that impact. Myths about him (including his resurrection) also developed as a result of that impact. Human beings see patterns, conspiracies, miracles, divine intervention, and divine damnation where none exist. It's a constant in the human experience. We see it historically, with, for example, the myths about Jesus. We see it today, with myths about Q-Anon, crisis actors at Sandy Hook, Obama's birth certificates, and so on. There is something about our brains that invents realities that never existed.
The specific details -- the precise, exact manner in which this one specific miracle developed and grew, is a subject of some study (I'll cite one great book below) but we'll never know the exact truth of how this myth got started. However, the absence of absolute certainty as to development of a myth doesn't mean that you have to believe the myth. If you did, you'd be forced to believe in all kinds of contradictory nonsense.
For an empirical look at Jesus' life and the development of the myths around him, check out Bart Erhman's How Jesus Became God. Erhman is a highly-respected biblical scholar and author of a number of textbooks, a few of which I read ages ago when I was a Religious Studies university student.
It’s simple. There’s no evidence anywhere in the world that any human being has been brought back from the dead after being dead for three days. The Bible is a claim, not evidence. Why would anyone believe that Jesus was resurrected? You would have to prove it first to claim there’s no argument against it.
This book might give you some good perspective.
How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061778192/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_rSL8CbN6DVTPZ
When I was a Christian, I read a lot of short articles to explain why verses like these exist. Many of the answers are total BS to justify things like owning a person as property, stoning homosexuals to death, etc. They will throw out the old testament laws because "Jesus makes those laws not matter anymore". Oh really? Show me in the bible where he says we should no longer own people, and no longer consider being gay a sin. I used to say to people that God used slavery to make the Jews, God's people, stronger. Or that they had to punish gay people so Jews could reproduce.
That was bullshit given by someone who needs to justify their God's book because they need to believe God is real and moral and the bible doesn't contain errors.
The other type of apologetics I've read are the books that my family has thrown at me since discovering I'm an atheist. The Case for Christ came from my mom (she never read it), Mere Christianity came from my dad (he never read it), and The Reason for God from my uncle, who may have read it.
I think apologetics are all fundamentally flawed in their methods. They start with a conclusion and selectively accept information that supports that conclusion, or otherwise just make things up. With God, all things are possible.
If you want a reliable source, try Bart Ehrman. His book is used as the reference textbook at Yale for New Testament Studies. That class has all of its lectures posted here. I can't recommend them enough. They use only scholarly sources. All the videos are free. I would believe anything they say in those videos because all of the information is backed up with modern science and historical analysis.
I just quickly refer you to some sides I randomly googled - Bible Contradictions, BibViz, Bible Inconsistencies there is a lot out there really. The problem is the Bible was written by a couple of different people who didn't know each other and that 50 some years after Jesus death. I have a good book tip for you about this - it's a book by a guy who was a devoted christian himself, so he knows where you are coming from, he even studied it - he learned how the bible came to be and how contradictionary it is - he became an atheist and didn't care about hell anymore: How Jesus Became God.
If I may ask this: Have you ever read the bible from beginning to end?
>I think the evidence firmly points to the person of Jesus having existed and when you couple this with the fact that the apostles did not recant their faith, it makes a promising case that the Resurrection was genuine.
You need to develop a standard for evaluating claims. And the standard needs to be something you can honestly live with.
There are many, many supernatural claims out there. Mohammed, for example: There are Muslims who argue just as effectively for the veracity of Mohammed's miracles as do Christians with respect to Jesus' resurrection. The same goes for many other religions that we still live with today -- and countless more that have died off over the centuries.
If your belief in a supernatural event is satisfied by ancient second-hand accounts of uneducated people who've never been exposed to science, then you need to apply that belief even-handedly, without respect to your upbringing, cultural experiences, and so on. But, of course, if you do that, you'll find yourself believing in contradictory dogma.
There's a better option: Simply put, Jesus existed. He clearly had an impact. He was tried and executed for that impact. Myths about him (including his resurrection) also developed as a result of that impact. Human beings see patterns, conspiracies, miracles, divine intervention, and divine damnation where none exist. It's a constant in the human experience. We see it historically, with, for example, the myths about Jesus. We see it today, with myths about Q-Anon, crisis actors at Sandy Hook, Obama's birth certificates, and so on. There is something about our brains that invents realities that never existed.
The specific details -- the precise, exact manner in which this one specific miracle developed and grew, is a subject of some study (I'll cite one great book below) but we'll never know the exact truth of how this myth got started. However, the absence of absolute certainty as to development of a myth doesn't mean that you have to believe the myth. If you did, you'd be forced to believe in all kinds of contradictory nonsense.
For an empirical look at Jesus' life and the development of the myths around him, check out Bart Erhman's How Jesus Became God. Erhman is a highly-respected biblical scholar and author of a number of textbooks, a few of which I read ages ago when I was a Religious Studies university student.