There is no health in us.

[Alien]

...

I think we all know what you are claiming, Alan!

So why did you misquote me earlier then?

I didn't say I was quoting you, Alan, I was describing your position as I understood it back in the old BBC forum days, and you have repeated it today. 

I knew then what you were claiming, just as I do now. Your position hasn't changed and nor has mine.

So why did you incorrectly describe my position from the old BBC forum days and my position today?

[jjohnjil]

...

I think we all know what you are claiming, Alan!

So why did you misquote me earlier then?

I didn't say I was quoting you, Alan, I was describing your position as I understood it back in the old BBC forum days, and you have repeated it today. 

I knew then what you were claiming, just as I do now. Your position hasn't changed and nor has mine.

So why did you incorrectly describe my position from the old BBC forum days and my position today?

I didn't.

[Alien]

...

I think we all know what you are claiming, Alan!

So why did you misquote me earlier then?

I didn't say I was quoting you, Alan, I was describing your position as I understood it back in the old BBC forum days, and you have repeated it today. 

I knew then what you were claiming, just as I do now. Your position hasn't changed and nor has mine.

So why did you incorrectly describe my position from the old BBC forum days and my position today?

I didn't.

Yes you did. You wrote, "- ever since he told me that the only reasonable explanation for an empty tomb was that the occupant had been resurrected!" That is a misrepresentation of my position and I have explained again what my position is.

What is going on here, please? Do you really not understand the difference between what you wrote there and my position? My position is:

"The best explanation for the empty tomb where Jesus' dead body had been laid and for the dozen or so times that people (individuals and groups) believed they had seen and sometimes eaten with him and for the start of the Christian church is that Jesus had been raised from the dead."

[Leonard James]

"The best explanation for the empty tomb where Jesus' dead body had been laid and for the dozen or so times that people (individuals and groups) believed they had seen and sometimes eaten with him and for the start of the Christian church is that Jesus had been raised from the dead."

Since we know that people don't come back to life once they are truly dead, that is not "the best explanation".

And since we are well aware of the fact that rumours, gods and false beliefs arise from human sources, THAT is by far "the best explanation".

[jjohnjil]

...

I think we all know what you are claiming, Alan!

So why did you misquote me earlier then?

I didn't say I was quoting you, Alan, I was describing your position as I understood it back in the old BBC forum days, and you have repeated it today. 

I knew then what you were claiming, just as I do now. Your position hasn't changed and nor has mine.

So why did you incorrectly describe my position from the old BBC forum days and my position today?

I didn't.

Yes you did. You wrote, "- ever since he told me that the only reasonable explanation for an empty tomb was that the occupant had been resurrected!" That is a misrepresentation of my position and I have explained again what my position is.

What is going on here, please? Do you really not understand the difference between what you wrote there and my position? My position is:

"The best explanation for the empty tomb where Jesus' dead body had been laid and for the dozen or so times that people (individuals and groups) believed they had seen and sometimes eaten with him and for the start of the Christian church is that Jesus had been raised from the dead."

I am quite aware of your position, Alien, you believe the above because it was written in your book, but you wouldn't believe the exact same circumstances if it had been written in any other book,  I have understood this for many years now and have never said anything different!

Now I suppose we will have the usual "What book?" "When have I said that?" and all the usual twists and turns and squirms we get in every thread you post on.  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

[Leonard James]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

[BeRational]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

True to a point, but he fails to grasp some simple points (or claims to) and is clearly biased to believe the book.

His ability to reason is severely impaired when he just quotes stuff from the bible as fact. You know the old schtick it is likely that Jesus rose from the dead cos people wrote that they ate with him.

I mean, really!

[jjohnjil]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

Maybe. 

He is an intelligent guy, Len, and it just irks me that he denies the bleeding obvious.

[BashfulAnthony]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

And who the heck are you to decide who is a Christian, and who isn't?  You know nothing of what people are like off this forum:  your comment is a mixture of arrogance and ignorance!

[BeRational]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

And who the heck are you to decide who is a Christian, and who isn't?  You know nothing of what people are like off this forum:  your comment is a mixture of arrogance and ignorance!

I for one never question who is a christian. If you say you are a christian that's good enough for me.
I have seen other christians question whether other qualify as christians. TW springs to mind.

[BashfulAnthony]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

And who the heck are you to decide who is a Christian, and who isn't?  You know nothing of what people are like off this forum:  your comment is a mixture of arrogance and ignorance!

I for one never question who is a christian. If you say you are a christian that's good enough for me.
I have seen other christians question whether other qualify as christians. TW springs to mind.

Some posters seem to think that anyone who is Christian must behave like a saint or something. This is a debating forum, not a boxing ring, and you take the rough and tumble, and , in my book, it's not at all serious:  fun and games!!   

[BeRational]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

And who the heck are you to decide who is a Christian, and who isn't?  You know nothing of what people are like off this forum:  your comment is a mixture of arrogance and ignorance!

I for one never question who is a christian. If you say you are a christian that's good enough for me.
I have seen other christians question whether other qualify as christians. TW springs to mind.

Some posters seem to think that anyone who is Christian must behave like a saint or something. This is a debating forum, not a boxing ring, and you take the rough and tumble, and , in my book, it's not at all serious:  fun and games!!   

If someone say they are a christian, that is good enough for me.

I do not care, but I have seen other christians care.

[Leonard James]

True to a point, but he fails to grasp some simple points (or claims to) and is clearly biased to believe the book.

His ability to reason is severely impaired when he just quotes stuff from the bible as fact. You know the old schtick it is likely that Jesus rose from the dead cos people wrote that they ate with him.

I mean, really!

I agree, BR, but at least his posting style shows more thought than that of Sass, BA, TW, etc.

[BashfulAnthony]

True to a point, but he fails to grasp some simple points (or claims to) and is clearly biased to believe the book.

His ability to reason is severely impaired when he just quotes stuff from the bible as fact. You know the old schtick it is likely that Jesus rose from the dead cos people wrote that they ate with him.

I mean, really!

I agree, BR, but at least his posting style shows more thought than that of Sass, BA, TW, etc.

"... but at least his posting style shows more thought than that of Sass, BA, TW, Leonard, etc."   

[Leonard James]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

Maybe. 

He is an intelligent guy, Len, and it just irks me that he denies the bleeding obvious.

Quite, but like so many others, his desire for his belief to be true is too strong for logical thinking to override it.

[Alien]

...

I think we all know what you are claiming, Alan!

So why did you misquote me earlier then?

I didn't say I was quoting you, Alan, I was describing your position as I understood it back in the old BBC forum days, and you have repeated it today. 

I knew then what you were claiming, just as I do now. Your position hasn't changed and nor has mine.

So why did you incorrectly describe my position from the old BBC forum days and my position today?

I didn't.

Yes you did. You wrote, "- ever since he told me that the only reasonable explanation for an empty tomb was that the occupant had been resurrected!" That is a misrepresentation of my position and I have explained again what my position is.

What is going on here, please? Do you really not understand the difference between what you wrote there and my position? My position is:

"The best explanation for the empty tomb where Jesus' dead body had been laid and for the dozen or so times that people (individuals and groups) believed they had seen and sometimes eaten with him and for the start of the Christian church is that Jesus had been raised from the dead."

I am quite aware of your position, Alien, you believe the above because it was written in your book, but you wouldn't believe the exact same circumstances if it had been written in any other book,  I have understood this for many years now and have never said anything different!

Now I suppose we will have the usual "What book?" "When have I said that?" and all the usual twists and turns and squirms we get in every thread you post on.  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

I'm more than happy to try to defend the position I hold, but you do not seem to have understood my position and have consistently misrepresented it on this thread. Do you really not understand the difference between what you said I said and what I actually said (and say)? Until you understood my position properly, there is no point in me trying to defend it towards you since you, apparently, don't understand it in the first place (or are being a tad mischievous).

[Alien]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

Big platonic hug for Leonard.

[Alien]

  As I said to another poster last week, I learnt long ago that debating with you is a complete waste of time and I wonder why I am bothering now!

Possibly because Alien usually indulges in sensible, thought out posts, and doesn't usually insult people or print long passages of the Bible, like some other "Christians".

True to a point, but he fails to grasp some simple points (or claims to) and is clearly biased to believe the book.

His ability to reason is severely impaired when he just quotes stuff from the bible as fact. You know the old schtick it is likely that Jesus rose from the dead cos people wrote that they ate with him.

I mean, really!

That is not quite as bad as jjohnjil's inaccuracy, but it is, shall we say, an incomplete representation of my position.

[Jack Knave]

...
Except it is Alien who applies double standards in the way he treats various things as many keep complaining about to him. This claim of his on me here is a double standard, to deflect from the fact of his lack of an answer, and he tends to resort to these tactics when he feels cornered - if he has an answer let him give it. I have not applied any double standards as my treatment of all history is the same, as he well knows.

Help me here then. Why do you write stuff like, "You also do not have good evidence - you can't follow it up by interviewing the people concerned" about the NT accounts yet ignore that for the rest of history? I genuinely do not understand why you seem to require different levels of evidence in determining whether something happened. Note that to say that the NT accounts are more important is actually irrelevant (if you were going to say that). If you can't assign a high probability of something happening in the NT because you can't interview the people involved, you can't assign a high probability to the Battle of Hastings, the fall of Rome, the Spanish Armada, the Crusades and so. The importance of the event is important if we need to act as a result of those events, but it does not affect the probability of their having happened.

Please explain.

"...about the NT accounts yet ignore that for the rest of history?"

But I don't. Why don't you help me here by keeping to what we have agreed instead of endlessly backtracking as if it was never mentioned.

1)But you do. You say we can't believe something because it happened so long ago and so on, but you accept that other things happened long ago. Why do you accept all those and not the NT accounts?

You base the whole of your intrinsic and fundamental lifestyle and attitude on your faith and the NT documents. Your whole approach to life is fashioned by this milieu. What else in history do you do that for?

I have explained (and you even did a post asking other atheists if they thought the same) that I treat history for my amusement,

2) Nowhere have I spoken of "amusement".

as just some academic curiosity (I can not personally verify its content) and that I do not base anything fundamental in my life and approach on anything in history. How I conduct my life is based on my personal experiences and on the information I have acquired through my years using my intellect, rationality and intuition to assess these and come to some kind of judgement on various matters. These judgement are the best I've got and I know that they are not perfect or complete but that they will have to do. It is true that I consider what some people from history have said but this is always brought into the colouration of my knowledge, intuition and personal experiences, but it has no direct significance for my life. I therefore treat all history the same.

3) I do not expect that you have to frequently ask yourself if the Battle of Hastings, the fall of Rome, the Spanish Armada and the Crusades happened. However, please answer me this simple question. Did they happen or not? Yes or no?

As I do not believe in God or heaven and all that the fact that my judgements and lifestyle may not be up to some idealistic standard does not bother me which is why I can take this take-it-or-leave-it attitude to some claims in history. A similar thing may apply to late political thinking such as ideas of Marx and so on. Everything  is brought under the lens of my own knowledge and experience - what else do I have?

4) That's fine, but it is not a good excuse for avoiding the evidence of Jesus' death and resurrection. As you seem to suggest whether the Battle of Hastings actually took place will not make much difference to your day today. We can be quite blasé about such stuff, but we do accept it happened. It does not affect how we determine whether or not happened. It does affect how we respond to it. Jesus made claims about himself and about your need to respond to him. If we Christians are wrong and physical death is indeed the end then fair enough. However, if we are right and Jesus was who the NT claims he was and is and if he did indeed make those claims, be prepared to answer his questions.

The importance of the event is important if we need to act as a result of those events, but it does not affect the probability of their having happened.

And how do you judge the importance of an historical event? And how do you assess what needs to be done with that importance, how to respond to it? Do you not make all your judgements on what you personally know, what your life has given you in your very short time on this planet? And because of this short period your personal knowledge about life is substantially lacking, as it is for all of us, and yet from this deficient well you are suppose to come to up with an all embracing answer on the meaning of life from some tatty manuscripts written 2000 years ago! Pulling a rabbit out of that proverbial hat. You must be one hell of a ubermensch to achieve all that without err.

5) "Some tatty manuscripts written 2000 years ago?" The state of the manuscripts is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether we know what was written and whether it is making a valid claim for our attention and response.

And this comes to my other ace up my sleeve - if this is the best your God can do in conveying Its most superordinate message to mankind, is to leave us very limited creatures, trapped in the confines of time, with this protean historical puzzle then your God is a joke at best and sadistic at worst.

If you find yourself having to give an account of your life to God, you can bring this up with him. It might be helpful to make some notes now.

You do not need to justify yourself to me nor me to you. You and I have come to different conclusions. Time will tell which, if either, of us is correct.

1) I am sceptical about them all, and equally so! Is that clear?

2) You asked in a post, to other atheists either on here or on my thread What's God Made Of?, if they thought the same a I did as not finding history a good guide to life and other things I've said as you can't know what actually happened. That is why history is just for my amusement.

3) Who really cares? I am quiet blasé about it. They have no consequence on my life today. I read history for my amusement only.

Your whole premise is that if one finds something in history that is significant one should act upon it but I'm saying by definition of what history is you can't  apply such a criterion as history is an unreliable source for factual information and only a fool would do this. This is my argument against your position. History is not fact it is speculation and the further you go back the more so - keeping in mind today we have things like film, recording etc. which help us more with recent history, but even so some details elude us.

4) But the thing is history is just speculation. It is too vague, especially 2000 years ago, to make a clear judgement on it or to think it should be responded to as you claim. My claim is that you have made an err in thinking it is good enough to make a life changing response to it.

What are these questions that JC will ask?

5) What I find ironic is that you are finding it hard to understand what I'm saying to you yet I converse in your mother tongue but you claim to have a clear idea what some people wrote 2000 years ago in a foreign discontinued language with copying error and what not. See my point?

Nothing in history can make "a valid claim for our attention and response" because by definition it will be deficient and flawed before it ever reaches us.

St. Augustine wrote a paper called the 'Literal Meaning of Genesis'. What he meant by 'literal' and what we mean today by 'literal' is totally different. The meaning of words change. With the Gen 6 post we have going on this thread you had troubles/task of explaining the meaning of the word for mountain/hill in the link. We all know what these are for we have seen them but still it was not too clear what the Hebrew(?) meant. If you are having to deal with words referring to material things how much greater difficulty will you have with words referring to ideas and concept from history? How much fuzzier will your understanding be in regards to what they are trying to say and express? So how many words are there from the NT documents that you have misconstrued? The fact is you have no way of knowing. See point?

Don't be too hard on the Alien, Jack, Alan has wrapped his whole life around these flimsy ideas being true.  He'll slip and slide and laa laa until you give up.

I learnt long ago to forget trying to have a reasoned exchange with him - ever since he told me that the only reasonable explanation for an empty tomb was that the occupant had been resurrected!

I reckon the trickster Jesus used a doppelganger who was mentally retarded (blokes with beards and long hair all look the same anyway) and when he was before the high priests and pilot he was drugged so he was docile and didn't say much. The rest follows on from there....

[BashfulAnthony]

...
Except it is Alien who applies double standards in the way he treats various things as many keep complaining about to him. This claim of his on me here is a double standard, to deflect from the fact of his lack of an answer, and he tends to resort to these tactics when he feels cornered - if he has an answer let him give it. I have not applied any double standards as my treatment of all history is the same, as he well knows.

Help me here then. Why do you write stuff like, "You also do not have good evidence - you can't follow it up by interviewing the people concerned" about the NT accounts yet ignore that for the rest of history? I genuinely do not understand why you seem to require different levels of evidence in determining whether something happened. Note that to say that the NT accounts are more important is actually irrelevant (if you were going to say that). If you can't assign a high probability of something happening in the NT because you can't interview the people involved, you can't assign a high probability to the Battle of Hastings, the fall of Rome, the Spanish Armada, the Crusades and so. The importance of the event is important if we need to act as a result of those events, but it does not affect the probability of their having happened.

Please explain.

"...about the NT accounts yet ignore that for the rest of history?"

But I don't. Why don't you help me here by keeping to what we have agreed instead of endlessly backtracking as if it was never mentioned.

1)But you do. You say we can't believe something because it happened so long ago and so on, but you accept that other things happened long ago. Why do you accept all those and not the NT accounts?

You base the whole of your intrinsic and fundamental lifestyle and attitude on your faith and the NT documents. Your whole approach to life is fashioned by this milieu. What else in history do you do that for?

I have explained (and you even did a post asking other atheists if they thought the same) that I treat history for my amusement,

2) Nowhere have I spoken of "amusement".

as just some academic curiosity (I can not personally verify its content) and that I do not base anything fundamental in my life and approach on anything in history. How I conduct my life is based on my personal experiences and on the information I have acquired through my years using my intellect, rationality and intuition to assess these and come to some kind of judgement on various matters. These judgement are the best I've got and I know that they are not perfect or complete but that they will have to do. It is true that I consider what some people from history have said but this is always brought into the colouration of my knowledge, intuition and personal experiences, but it has no direct significance for my life. I therefore treat all history the same.

3) I do not expect that you have to frequently ask yourself if the Battle of Hastings, the fall of Rome, the Spanish Armada and the Crusades happened. However, please answer me this simple question. Did they happen or not? Yes or no?

As I do not believe in God or heaven and all that the fact that my judgements and lifestyle may not be up to some idealistic standard does not bother me which is why I can take this take-it-or-leave-it attitude to some claims in history. A similar thing may apply to late political thinking such as ideas of Marx and so on. Everything  is brought under the lens of my own knowledge and experience - what else do I have?

4) That's fine, but it is not a good excuse for avoiding the evidence of Jesus' death and resurrection. As you seem to suggest whether the Battle of Hastings actually took place will not make much difference to your day today. We can be quite blasé about such stuff, but we do accept it happened. It does not affect how we determine whether or not happened. It does affect how we respond to it. Jesus made claims about himself and about your need to respond to him. If we Christians are wrong and physical death is indeed the end then fair enough. However, if we are right and Jesus was who the NT claims he was and is and if he did indeed make those claims, be prepared to answer his questions.

The importance of the event is important if we need to act as a result of those events, but it does not affect the probability of their having happened.

And how do you judge the importance of an historical event? And how do you assess what needs to be done with that importance, how to respond to it? Do you not make all your judgements on what you personally know, what your life has given you in your very short time on this planet? And because of this short period your personal knowledge about life is substantially lacking, as it is for all of us, and yet from this deficient well you are suppose to come to up with an all embracing answer on the meaning of life from some tatty manuscripts written 2000 years ago! Pulling a rabbit out of that proverbial hat. You must be one hell of a ubermensch to achieve all that without err.

5) "Some tatty manuscripts written 2000 years ago?" The state of the manuscripts is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether we know what was written and whether it is making a valid claim for our attention and response.

And this comes to my other ace up my sleeve - if this is the best your God can do in conveying Its most superordinate message to mankind, is to leave us very limited creatures, trapped in the confines of time, with this protean historical puzzle then your God is a joke at best and sadistic at worst.

If you find yourself having to give an account of your life to God, you can bring this up with him. It might be helpful to make some notes now.

You do not need to justify yourself to me nor me to you. You and I have come to different conclusions. Time will tell which, if either, of us is correct.

1) I am sceptical about them all, and equally so! Is that clear?

2) You asked in a post, to other atheists either on here or on my thread What's God Made Of?, if they thought the same a I did as not finding history a good guide to life and other things I've said as you can't know what actually happened. That is why history is just for my amusement.

3) Who really cares? I am quiet blasé about it. They have no consequence on my life today. I read history for my amusement only.

Your whole premise is that if one finds something in history that is significant one should act upon it but I'm saying by definition of what history is you can't  apply such a criterion as history is an unreliable source for factual information and only a fool would do this. This is my argument against your position. History is not fact it is speculation and the further you go back the more so - keeping in mind today we have things like film, recording etc. which help us more with recent history, but even so some details elude us.

4) But the thing is history is just speculation. It is too vague, especially 2000 years ago, to make a clear judgement on it or to think it should be responded to as you claim. My claim is that you have made an err in thinking it is good enough to make a life changing response to it.

What are these questions that JC will ask?

5) What I find ironic is that you are finding it hard to understand what I'm saying to you yet I converse in your mother tongue but you claim to have a clear idea what some people wrote 2000 years ago in a foreign discontinued language with copying error and what not. See my point?

Nothing in history can make "a valid claim for our attention and response" because by definition it will be deficient and flawed before it ever reaches us.

St. Augustine wrote a paper called the 'Literal Meaning of Genesis'. What he meant by 'literal' and what we mean today by 'literal' is totally different. The meaning of words change. With the Gen 6 post we have going on this thread you had troubles/task of explaining the meaning of the word for mountain/hill in the link. We all know what these are for we have seen them but still it was not too clear what the Hebrew(?) meant. If you are having to deal with words referring to material things how much greater difficulty will you have with words referring to ideas and concept from history? How much fuzzier will your understanding be in regards to what they are trying to say and express? So how many words are there from the NT documents that you have misconstrued? The fact is you have no way of knowing. See point?

Don't be too hard on the Alien, Jack, Alan has wrapped his whole life around these flimsy ideas being true.  He'll slip and slide and laa laa until you give up.

I learnt long ago to forget trying to have a reasoned exchange with him - ever since he told me that the only reasonable explanation for an empty tomb was that the occupant had been resurrected!

I reckon the trickster Jesus used a doppelganger who was mentally retarded (blokes with beards and long hair all look the same anyway) and when he was before the high priests and pilot he was drugged so he was docile and didn't say much. The rest follows on from there....

Perhaps He used that "pilot" to help Him fly away, to fool everyone!   

[BashfulAnthony]

JK,

I reckon the trickster Jesus used a doppelganger who was mentally retarded (blokes with beards and long hair all look the same anyway) and when he was before the high priests and pilot he was drugged so he was docile and didn't say much. The rest follows on from there....

Maybe Jesus used the "pilot" to fly away and fool everyone?   

[Jack Knave]

OK, got your point. I'll make a note of it.

OK, got your point. I'll make a note of it.

OK, got your point. I'll make a note of it.

OK, got your point. I'll make a note of it.

OK, got your point. I'll make a note of this too.

If only you would!!! The thing is we'll be arguing this point again, I'll be saying you agreed to this and you'll be saying I never, where?, show me the post. Not only are you being disingenuous you are lying to yourself! How do you square that with your Christian faith? How do you look yourself in the eye in the mirror and consider yourself a good honest disciple of your God? What kind of testimony is that to those you want to come to your faith? "Come all ye liars and follow me!"

It is too vague, especially 2000 years ago, to make a clear judgement on it or to think it should be responded to as you claim. My claim is that you have made an err in thinking it is good enough to make a life changing response to it.

OK. We disagree on this point quite fundamentally.

This is not a matter of personal opinion it is a point of logic and rational argument which is independent of ones own viewpoint. You aren't answering me with counter-arguments here because you have non and you know in your heart of hearts your position is flawed and doesn't hold 'water'. The whole basis on which your faith position is based is deficient. The fact is you do not know what happened in the past , no one does, it is sheer speculation, and yet you have taken wholesale an iffy  spiritual disposition from 2000 years ago and applied it to your life as if it had genuine validity when it clearly, logically and rationally, does not and is highly suspect and flawed.

What are these questions that JC will ask?

I would think it would be along the lines of, "Why did you view my life, death for your sins and my resurrection as something just for amusement? Why did you not respond in the way you needed to?

I did respond in the appropriate way as explained above. Would he really need to ask? All he has to do is read these threads. He can read can't he, or is he illiterate?

5) What I find ironic is that you are finding it hard to understand what I'm saying to you yet I converse in your mother tongue but you claim to have a clear idea what some people wrote 2000 years ago in a foreign discontinued language with copying error and what not. See my point?

I see your point, but it is not valid. There is an absolutely huge body of Greek literature from hundreds of years before Christ through his time and right up to the present day. There are plenty of people who understand what ancient Greek texts mean, including in the dialect used in the NT. Greek is not a discontinued language. As for copying errors, let me quote the popular skeptic scholar Bart Ehrman from an appendix in Misquoting Jesus on p252 of the American version:

Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.  The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."

So, remind me why you think we have lost enough of the NT to not know its essential claims, in particular the essential claims of Jesus and why you read such stuff only for amusement.

You've pasted that blokes quotes before. The point I'm making, as I've said above, is not a matter of personal opinion as all people involved in this kind of discussions are just speculating to some degree or other but one of logic and rationale. Regardless of how 'huge' the stuff we have or how well we understand an old language, in the end we just can't be sure 100% and we definitely can't take an idea wholesale from the past and live our fundamental lives and principles by it. That is just insane!

Nothing in history can make "a valid claim for our attention and response" because by definition it will be deficient and flawed before it ever reaches us.

St. Augustine wrote a paper called the 'Literal Meaning of Genesis'. What he meant by 'literal' and what we mean today by 'literal' is totally different. The meaning of words change. With the Gen 6 post we have going on this thread you had troubles/task of explaining the meaning of the word for mountain/hill in the link.

Did I? Please tell me which post I had this trouble on.

There you go playing up again with, "which post?" when you know which post! The link to an old post of yours you gave me on the posts where I questioned your non-global flood idea and so on. There you pointed out that a Hebrew? word could be taken to mean mountain or hill by us 21thC duds. This is totally disingenuous to imply that we can read with 100% accuracy old languages, and know precisely what words mean even those conveying ideas, concepts and beliefs.

We all know what these are for we have seen them but still it was not too clear what the Hebrew(?) meant.

Why the question mark after the word "Hebrew"? Are you saying that you are confident there is a fundamental problem here with the original language even though you are not sure what that original language was?

The language type is not the issue it is the fact that we can't know for sure with any old language, that 100% knowledge of it is not possible. Even talking to the people we know, vis-à-vis, we still can't get a pure 100% translation of their thoughts; what's on their minds, so why do you consider 2000 year old written scripts would somehow be easy for us today? If language was clear writing legal documents could be done by any old idiot. But the fact it's not explains the endless arguments in law courts.

If you are having to deal with words referring to material things how much greater difficulty will you have with words referring to ideas and concept from history? How much fuzzier will your understanding be in regards to what they are trying to say and express? So how many words are there from the NT documents that you have misconstrued? The fact is you have no way of knowing. See point?

I see the point you are making, but it is fundamentally flawed.

An assertion and statement like that is not an argument and explains nothing with regards to the point and argument you seem to imply you have.