Posted by pancho from pool0457.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.217.202) on Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 10:02PM :
I like him a lot. We meet once in a while and talk about things...philosophy, religion, the weather.
He has to be the brightest religious guy I ever met. I know...seems like a contradiction in terms. There's hope he'll reform thou...but till then, he makes some of the most powerful arguements for Christianity I've yet to come across. Not for its doctrines and the amazingly uninteresting promise of living forever and staring into the face of the god who brought more mayhem to this world than any human ever did.
No...I mean about the likelihood that the story of Jesus is true...I mean about him being the son of a god...being divine and all of that. Seems to me if an idea is worthy...you don't need a coupon for a free dinner of loaves and fishes in order to "clinch the deal"...but anyway.
He says to me that Jesus MUST have been resurrected because we know several people were willing to suffer horribly and be killed agonizingly in that belief.
Had they not really seen Jesus rise from the dead...is it likely they would have gone through all of that?
Good point...if you're god-besotted to begin with...or wavering just before falling in.
Now the more intelligent people who push Jesus use "logic" and "reason"...or they try to. This is why the Jesuits had such a bad rep...they could argue ten sides of a point and you wouldn't know which one they believed.
The most common dodge of your brighter religious type is a penchant for deftly shifting back and forth between, "you just have to have faith and believe" and...."let me prove it to you".
When they're on their faith shtick...they end everything by looking up at the ceiling and saying..."well...you can't prove these things..it's a matter of faith."
And when you reply something like..."how could you EVER even begin to believe this stuff...and WHY"? They start in on the rational "proofs". And then when you go along till you catch them at it...and they run out of "logic"...up go their eyes, out comes the "faith"...and they slip away again.
more later...
-- pancho
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