Shila

--> @Shila

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.

the power of acting without the constraint of [CAUSALITY] necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion [FREE FROM ALL INFLUENCE].

The ultra rich run the government. They don't have to pay taxes, they help collect them.

--> @Shila

Yep, we have reached an agreement.

Oh look, a protege of Bill Cosby…

https://people.com/crime/superfly-actor-kaalan-walker-sentenced-to-50-years-to-life-in-prison/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab

--> @K_Michael

my point stands.

You mean your question? Well in that case I guess it’s because I agree with it and I’m not satisfied with just feelings alone, I want them validated and God does that.

--> @Shila

This probably deserves its own thread called Who Wrote the Gospels? or Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts? But, anyway:

• We don't have any original manuscripts of the Gospels, obviously. The earliest manuscripts we have, the ones dating from before 200 CE, are fragments -- they don't start at the beginning and they don't contain an end, so we can't tell if they had titles. The complete manuscripts we have date from a later period that is not of much use in determining if the Gospels originally had titles. So the fact that all our (complete) manuscripts have titles does not really tell us much.
  
• Even in these later manuscripts, the way the Gospel titles are phrased changes from manuscript to manuscript -- i.e., "The Gospel According to Saint Mark" vs "The Holy Gospel According to Mark" and so on. More suspicious, where the titles are located changes from manuscript to manuscript -- some titles are at the beginning of the book, some are at the end. This indicates that the titles are scribal ornamentation and were not in the original manuscripts, or else we would expect the titles to always be in the same place and always worded the same way (if they were copied faithfully).
  
• Note how Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, quotes from the Gospels at length but refers to them collectively and anonymously, indicating he wrote before they had been widely attributed to specific men. This is a key piece of data pointing to the original anonymity of the Gospels. Scholars believe they began to be attributed to their now-traditional authors in the second century (and remember, our complete, titled manuscripts date to after that).
  
• For me one of the biggest indicators is just that all of the Gospels are written anonymously in the third person, none of them in the first person, as you would expect of men telling firsthand accounts -- and Matthew, who was supposed to be a disciple of Jesus, feels the need to copy vast swaths of his material from Mark, who never met Jesus. Apostles should feel no need to copy from anyone.
  

I'm a little disappointed that you didn't mention Papias, but I supposed that would bore people even more than our current debate.

Okay, let me take a stab at it.

Judaism: Sticking to one's own ethnicity and being loyal to it, ensuring the Jewish people excel.

Hinduism: This was a colonised amalgamation of Shaivism, Vaishnavism and pagan outliers, the underlying message is to celebrate the chaos and journey that we are on and do good if you can.

Daoism/Taoism: Aim for balance, be the one to flow as life naturally leads, leaving drops of good when expedient and not the one to constantly force too much benevolence or too much malice.

Christianity: Embrace all people and give, use guilt and the approval of others as the mechanics of the moral compass.

Islam: Discipline, fear and undying loyalty to Allah and fellow Muslims but unlike Judaism, aim to spread it far and wide to other ethnicities, do not stay insular.

Most Japanese-originating Religions, especially Shinto: Actions define us, not words or emotions.

Buddhism: Discipline and minimalism above all else, shut up and give to your community or end up reborn instead of in Nirvana.

Sikhism: Be natural and respectful of nature to the extreme, be hairy as you can get away with, ready to slay the beasts that may seek to impose against nature.

Wicca and most neopagan religions: Today the sun is out, let us dance, today the moon is out, that is okay we will sacrifice a goat and have an orgy, preferably a lesbian one.

Thanks for reading.

--> @Shila

These scrolls contained, among other writings, every book in the Old Testament (except Esther). 

• And multiple copies of most books but as I said, just crumbled fragments of the majority of these.
  

Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the earliest copy of the complete Old Testament was from A.D. 900. 

• Since nothing like a complete Old Testament was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls it is still true that "the earliest copy of the complete Old Testament [is] from A.D. 900."
  

Scholars compared this copy with the Dead Sea Scrolls (produced around 1,000 years earlier) and found that the Old Testament had been handed down accurately through the centuries.

• Remarkably accurate over a thousand years, yes.  For example, one of the most perfectly preserved passages is the 166 words of Isiah 53, in which there are only 17 differences over 1000 years.
  

“ … the historical books of the Old Testament are as accurate historical documents as any that we have from antiquity and are in fact more accurate than many of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Greek histories. These Biblical records can be and are used as are other ancient documents in archaeological work.”

• I think everybody believe this to be true even before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.  Let's note that "as accurate historical documents from antiquity as any"  is profoundly low standard of accuracy by modern standards.
  

not only does archaeology confirm that the Bible is historically accurate, but 

• Well, some of the Bible is historically accurate, some of the Bible is pretty obvious bullshit.  The Dead Sea Scrolls do not establish that Jonah lived for three days inside a whale, for example.
  

professional archaeologists actually use the Bible as a guide in their work.

• definitely true
  

The great Jewish archaeologist Nelson Glueck, who is known to be one of the top three archaeologists in history, has stated the following: "No archaeological discovery has ever contradicted a single, properly understood Biblical statement."

• Not surprising since archaeology is only going to uncover the presence of large public buildings but not say, burning bushes or unicorns.  
  
• But the absence of some archeological discoveries can be said to be dispositive- no sign of  global flooding in the last 10,000 years or Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat, for example.
  

--> @Stephen

The consensus among historical scholars is that Jesus of Nazareth did exist as a historical person. I have no trouble believing that.

Me neither.

For me the difficulty lies in what can be confidently known about him. Did he really think he was the son of God, or was that a belief that developed after his death? Was he really betrayed by Judas? What exactly did Jesus teach -- how much of what we know as "Christ's teachings" were really his teachings? To what degree did he actually anticipate his death? And so on.

All fair questions that I would be more that interested to have answered by the devout Christians.  But I won't be holding my breath, Castin

I imagine devout Christians will just point to the Bible's answers to these questions.

--> @Shila

Once you accept Jesus  indeed existed as a historical person.  The specifics of Jesus’s life and teachings are found in the Biblical Jesus. All your questions are answered in the Bible.

“The first question we have to answer is How do we know what we know about Jesus? How is it possible for twenty-first-century people to know with any reasonable certainty what he did and said in the first century? Obviously, none of us was there when Jesus walked the earth. So how do we gain access to him as a historical person?

For many people, the answer to this question is simple: open up your Bible and read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; they tell us what Jesus did and said. Indeed, for almost nineteen centuries, most Christians—and virtually everyone else, for that matter—believed that the Gospels of Matthew and John were written by eyewitnesses and disciples of Jesus and that the Gospels of Mark and Luke were written by companions of the apostles Peter and Paul.”

Sounds like Bart Ehrman. At least, it reminds me of something else I read from him:

"Most people who are not conversant with biblical scholarship probably think that knowing about the historical Jesus is a relatively simple matter. We have four Gospels in the New Testament. To know what Jesus said and did, we should read the Gospels. So what's the problem?" -- Jesus Interrupted, p. 143

Ehrman goes on to explain what, in fact, the problem is:

"The problem is in part that the Gospels are full of discrepancies and were written decades after Jesus' ministry and death by authors who had not themselves witnessed any of the events of Jesus' life. 

... They were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus' death by people who did not know him, did not see anything he did or hear anything that he taught, people who spoke a different language and lived in a different country from him. The accounts they produced are not disinterested; they are narratives produced by Christians who actually believed in Jesus, and therefore were not immune from slanting the stories in light of their biases. They are not completely free of collaboration, since Mark was used as a source for Matthew and Luke. And rather than being fully consistent with one another, they are widely inconsistent, with discrepancies filling their pages, both contradictions in details and divergent large-scale understandings of who Jesus was.

How can sources like this be used to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus? It's not easy, but there are ways."

-->

@Shila

you have thoroughly and completely misread my intention

making a statement of fact is not a complaint

--> @Shila

you have thoroughly and completely misread my intention

--> @Double_R

I've always found the free will conversation pointless. If we have it then it's settled, we can all move on. If we don't have it then not only does that change nothing, but it means that what we're actually talking about is something that no human being has ever experienced so we have no basis to point to it because we have no recognition of what we're even pointing to.

this topic is fundamental

because it is the core of nearly all human suffering

if you deny causality, then free-will doesn't make any sense, because without causality, your actions don't necessarily lead to specific consequences

if you embrace causality, then free-will doesn't make any sense, because with causality, your actions are caused by previous events

and if you mix the two, sometimes causality and sometimes not causality, then you can never be sure which events are caused and which are uncaused

if you decide a specific event is uncaused, then free-will cannot apply, because you cannot cause (with your free-will) an uncaused event

if you decide a specific event is caused, then free-will cannot apply, because you cannot (with your free-will) cause all of the contributing causes that lead to any caused event

sure, people "experience" free-will, but only in the way they "experience" "god's love"

you can "feel" it, but that doesn't mean it is anything more than a mere emotion

-> @Shila

But here you are complaining you don't find a lot of people debating 1 + 1 = 2.

i'm simply mentioning it as an example

this does not even remotely qualify as "complaining"

-> @zedvictor4

Slavery might or not be better for the slave.

If a slave wants to be a slave, then a slave is not a slave because the capacity to which one is a slave is dictated by a slave, which contradicts the concept of being a slave. So when you state, "better," "better" for whom?

--> @Castin

The consensus among historical scholars is that Jesus of Nazareth did exist as a historical person. I have no trouble believing that. For me the difficulty lies in what can be confidently known about him. Did he really think he was the son of God, or was that a belief that developed after his death? Was he really betrayed by Judas? What exactly did Jesus teach -- how much of what we know as "Christ's teachings" were really his teachings? To what degree did he actually anticipate his death? And so on.

--> @Shila

But here you are complaining you don't find a lot of people debating 1 + 1 = 2.

please be slightly more specific

you don't find a lot of people debating 1 + 1 = 2

--> @Shila

Are you implying objecting matters like morality are less debated?

you don't find a lot of people debating 1 + 1 = 2

--> @Lemming @Shila

Soon the "holocaust" will be a forgettable page of human history.

So, to what degree did the "holocaust" change social thinking?

-> @Tarik

Are you asserting that morality could be debated? Because if it could then that would make it objective by nature

People debate subjective topics all the time. I'm sorry if you don't understand how this works.

Well, the history of the world is pretty short if you are going to hold it to that high standard.  The only contemporary writing that confirms the existence of Alexander the Great is a little chunk of clay written in ancient Babylonian- we couldn't even translate it until pretty recently.  I don't think there's any datable manuscript that contemporaneously confirms the existence of  Jesus or Socrates or Buddha or Mohammed, King Solomon,  Homer, Pythagoras, Sun-Tzu, Confucius,  Moses, Hannibal, etc

--> @oromagi

The fact that 4th century Christians were relying heavily on Josephus for a picture of 1st century Jewish life certainly suggests that the 4th century considered Josephus an authentically first century source.

As you say, "Christians rely heavily on Josephus" and particularly the few lines that Josephus affords their god man Jesus and understandably so. Clutching at straws is all they have when it comes to proving the exitance of their all singing all dancing god.  

The saying goes –history is written by the victors. But when we read Josephus, it is clear he writes with some sadness and regret of the defeat of his nation and its people, but this may well be down to the balancing act he was preforming between any loyalty he may felt he owed to Rome and the Jews whom in their eyes was turn coat and traitor. This of course could well serve for a more accurate history; he was a Pharisee general (if he is to be believed).  

But if we are talking about discarding and dismissing the works of Josephus in its entirety then the same can be said for all ancient works including the bible. 

The consensus among historical scholars is that Jesus of Nazareth did exist as a historical person. I have no trouble believing that. For me the difficulty lies in what can be confidently known about him. Did he really think he was the son of God, or was that a belief that developed after his death? Was he really betrayed by Judas? What exactly did Jesus teach -- how much of what we know as "Christ's teachings" were really his teachings? To what degree did he actually anticipate his death? And so on.

-->

@Shila

My apologies.

#85

To Sidewalker you said: More so, those that stand to gain advantage from perpetuating the myth.

Yep, as I stated Jesus/Joshua/Yeshua is/was a character recorded in historical narratives and we know roughly where he was said to have lived, there's no denying that.

And that's about all one can say for certain.

And yep 1632, that's the point I try to get across. All is made up after the event.

--> @Shila

Here you are admitting you are not particularly interested in pursuing a conversation which has gone down so many rabbits holes. But you make no attempt to address your depravity and gender dysphoria.

As I said rabbit holes. 

You also appear very judgemental despite links and evidence that confirm  your depravity and gender dysphoria.

No judgmental bones in my body.  

Everyone appears to you like they don't have anything better to do. But you are the only one obsessed with your depravity and gender dysphoria.

There are always people wanting to jump in and have a discussion, nevertheless, it is you and Stephen who are being the model litigants. Not. 

Let us help you Reverend so you can continue your mission to help others discover the historical and biblical Jesus,

What size is that paper bag again? 

how do you know "there is a standard"

Based off of subsets of His standard I do know, like what Shila alluded to in post #840

now we can just throw all the haters in prison

The oldest manuscripts of the works of Josephus in their original language of Greek date to the tenth and eleventh centuries. Portions of the works are also quoted in earlier manuscripts by other authors, particularly Eusebius (fourth century). There are also versions in other languages, notably a Latin translation made about the fifth century. These are all codexes, bound books, not scrolls.https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/16970/are-there-any-extant-original-first-century-manuscripts-of-any-of-josephus-work

Given that the oldest record of any alleged work of Josephus is not found until the 4th century and then only in portion - we obviously have no eyewitness accounts that he is a real historical figure.  He's probably a legend someone dreamed up.

Since he apparently is the main source for many ancient legends we can probably dismiss most of his work as made up.

Perhaps it was just one of many people in the 4th century who wanted to use a famous legend's name to give some credibility to their work.  We know many did this sort of thing.

What do you reckon and what evidence would you give to refute the fact that he is just a myth?

--> @Avery

And I differentiate between base instinct and acquired behaviour.

And sexual attraction at base level is a separate issue to physical attraction at a socio-conceptual level

The stag fucks every doe irrespective of looks, and without the need for overthink.

And indiscriminate sex is more relative to the human condition than it is to most other species.

Indiscriminate sex is the outcome of overthink rather than the outcome of base physiology.

That is to say that humans have developed the practice of copulating when it not necessary to do so.

Recreational sex as it were.

--> @Shila

Slavery might or not be better for the slave.

That would depend upon the slave owner.

Do you think that today, slavery is better for the young girl who is forced into prostitution by Eastern European thugs.

Not all slaves were black. 

And not all slaves were/are put to work on sunny sugar plantations by jolly slave owners.

--> @Shila

Showing them love no matter where they are will make prisons less isolating or stigmatizing.

i agree

your sources can still be in doubt

do you think the epic of gilgamesh is true because it is based on a historical king ?

or the legends of king arthur, which are also apparently based on a historical figure ?

--> @Shila

Maybe if you followed the topic in each thread  instead of making it all about your depravity and gender dysphoria you  might get your views across as a Reverend  and not what you are perceived as to the members.

I'm not particularly interested in pursuing a conversation which has gone down so many rabbits holes by those involved - and without any particular parameters in which to make a point.  To me it looks primarily like you and Stephen are measuring each other up. the rest of those involved are along for the ride and obviously don't have anything better to do. 

the point here is

even if the person's existence is verified

that doesn't somehow make all their stories automatically true

even if the jesus stories are based on a real person

that doesn't make any of the "eyewitness accounts" magically true

--> @Shila

How can there be haters if we all love one another. Even the haters will be loved.

ok, are you suggesting we let everyone out of prison ?

or are you suggesting we construct lovely prisons ?

Wow. Talk about putting a new image next to the term "TDS troll" in the dictionary.

the point here is

even if the person's existence is verified

that doesn't somehow make all their stories automatically true

oh, good

now we can just throw all the haters in prison

--> @Double_R

Hitler did not personally order all the cancelling eeach other, in the end the Nazi people, not just staff, began embracing iy due to the influence it yad and they were peer pressured to feel disgust at any talk of free expression and harmony with Jews, LGBTQ and the disabled etc.

One person alone cannot control a whole population, there are ripples and waves of influence. Kim Jong-Un is unironically eorshipped in North Korea and rebels are seen as devilish. The more you cancel your opposition, the more that the average citizen will irrationally assume they have no side to the story worth listening to nor that they have reformed later.

--> @Shila

Fine Art Isn’t About Art. It’s About Evading Taxes.

https://youtu.be/3L1an9JU3Nk

--> @Shila

Everyone needs a chance to say where they stand with the Historical Jesus.

everyone needs a chance to say where they stand on the historical joseph smith

everyone needs a chance to say where they stand on the historical confucius 

everyone needs a chance to say where they stand on the historical prophet muhammad 

everyone needs a chance to say where they stand on the historical abraham

everyone needs a chance to say where they stand on the historical jemima wilkinson

--> @Tarik

so, FUNCTIONALLY each person needs to figure out FOR THEMSELVES what they believe is "right" and what is "wrong" ?

Yes, if what they believe aligns with God.

how do we know what "god" wants ?

--> @Shila

Well, the head is centre of operations.

--> @Tradesecret

 Ethan gets more mentions than the rest of you together - 

  

Yes, 

for all the wrong reasons.  Public Moderation Log (debateart.com)

Nope .  You offered him an invitation.   The brother only mentioned him as part of a related post

 And so it should be. 

Until they are politely asked to leave.

-->

@Shila

#87.

You asked the question.

I responded.

All current and relevant worth was contained within that exchange of data

--> @BrotherD.Thomas @Shila @Stephen

Brother

Oh yes I remember that well. 

You showed me didn't you.  Brother D Thomas - superior in all that he purports.  

And yet for whatever reason, I continue to return. 

One might think that whatever blows you feel you have given me were not sufficient enough to send me running for the hills.  

Of course, and indeed - EVERY TIME I return and respond is sadly for you - EVIDENCE of your failure. 

Wait, what. Did I say your failure? Hmmm - affirmative. that means yes if you didn't know. 

the number one fake on this site is Brother Thomas.  He can't even fake his religiosity. Or his atheism.  

Me on the other hand - just do what I do and all the lies and dogmatic assertions that you make well - as I continue to be quoted so lovingly by your only friend in the world - is like "water of a duck's back". 

Oh that I can disappear and be quoted by all of my friends.  It's amazing really.  Yet, you know what? I don't recall too many people quoting or referring to Stephen or Brother or even Harikrish when they disappear.  There are occasional exceptions to the rule. Even our friend - you know the permanently banned friend - Ethan gets more mentions than the rest of you together - when you are not around.  

Hence - it is clear who are the ones who are missed because of their substance. but hey, you keep on dragging me back here. 

--> @Shila

Have you considered the alternatives to "objectivity" and "freewill" that makes us complacent slaves?

you can't be a slave to any human if your trajectory begins with the origin of all things