Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Don Gately]

[Kuros]

[jkelly80]

[thepeel]

Assuming the story to be true, to the extent that it can be true, he was a dude who talked to an imaginary friend. This friend "god" told him he was to be tortured to death and that he had to take it. He didn't bail. He didn't fight back. He listened to the voices in his head and took it like a fool. These are the actions of an idiot. When somebody is trying to kill you, you protect yourself to the extent that you can. To do otherwise is idiotic. Now, if he actually thought he was to die for a higher reason, it is noble. But still idiotic.

[wannago]

[ultra]

James A. Garfield (1831-81) was an attorney, minister, educator, soldier, and the twentieth President of the United States. He experienced a dramatic conversion to Christianity in his youth while working on the Ohio canal and was later licensed as a minister in the Christian Church. He studied at Geauga Seminary in Ohio (1849); graduated from Williams College (1856); became a Professor of Ancient Languages and Literature in Hiram College, Ohio (1856); was President of Hiram College (1857-61); elected a U. S. Senator (1859); admitted to the bar (1860); entered the Union side in the Civil War as Lieutenant-Colonel (1861); won a victory at Middle Creek and gained the rank of Brigadier-General (1862); promoted to Major-General (1863) and then resigned; member of the U. S. House of Representatives (1863-80); elected the twentieth President of the United States (1880). Garfield was shot by an assassin at the Washington railroad station en route for a northern trip (1881) and died 81 days later.

Garfield recounts the results of a revival he just preached in this 1858 letter. This is the text of James Garfield's letter:

Hiram, Feb. 16th 1858

Dear Bro. Wallace

We have just closed our meeting with happy results. There were 34 addition[s]. 31 by immersion. I was sorry I could not be in Newburgh last Sunday, but it seemed to be my duty to stay here. Bro Dave Shu[?] tells me that the Brethren want me to hold a meeting in vacation. I have spoken 19 discourses in our meeting here - and this with all our work in the school has worn me down very much. I would not think of holding a meeting alone. And don't know as I ought to help hold one. I will be in your place sometime next week and talk with you in reference to the matter of your letter. Which would have been answered sooner but for the meeting. I shall hope to visit Bedford also. Love to your family & believe me your brother,

J. A. Garfield

[JMO]

[Kuros]

[JMO]

[ultra]

http://roseandrock.blogspot.com/2005/04/jesus-denial.html

Jesus Denial

Here I wish to give a simple summary of why the theory that Jesus did not exist is both false and pernicious. I have 10 basic reasons.

1) It is a conspiracy theory. It says that a grand fiction has been hoisted on the world by secretive and powerful Christian organizations. It argues that all evidence pointing to invention has been suppressed, and that all evidence pointing to Christ's existence is fabrication -- all of it, from the New Testament to Jewish writings to Greco-Roman annals. It takes all the evidence from Christian, Jewish, and pagan writers and dismisses it by arguing that it all amounts to invention by reactionary power. In that it is not too different from Marxism, which regarded religion as a reactionary, counter-revolutionary opiate. But the theory is not Marxist in origin. It is, quite simply, a conspiracy theory tailored for Western audiences skeptical of religion. Like any conspiracy theory, it relies on evidence that is not there (because it is purportedly suppressed), and denies all the evidence that is there (because it is purportedly fabricated).

2) It leaves all religions open to attacks from those who, like one Christ-mythologist, regard religion as "mental illness." Many of these people are harmless on the surface, but Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong believed the same thing about religion, and destroyed both shrines and lives by the tens of millions.

3) It represents a monumental step backward in our understanding of other religions and the relationships Christianity has had with them. Calling Jesus a myth requires saying where the ideas for the myth came from. Sometimes it is said that the ideas for such a Savior figure came from the Old Testament and from Judaism, but since this makes the historical break between Christianity and Judaism impossible to explain, an alternative and more desperate course is to say that Christ came out of pagan myths. When this is argued, the Roman cults, and occasionally Buddhism and Hinduism, are named as primary influences upon Christianity. These religions are romanticized, or they are made to seem like Christianity, which is a mistake in itself, but is particularly pernicious because the type of Christian religion referred to here is one that is totally destructive and immoral. Those who say that the cross had antecedents in other religions, and in the next paragraph denounce Christianity for being a bloody religion focused from the start on an instrument of torture, do not realize that they are essentially saying the same thing about the pre-Christian religions of the past or the non-Christian religions of today. They don't say so openly, but that is the fullest consequence of their arguments.

4) It is un-scientific. Any conspiracy theory, of course, fails to embrace the scientific method, which requires a relaxed, open mind and the willingness to try to overthrow your own theory, so that it can be tested thoroughly. There are many further ways in which this point could be made. You could say quite correctly that the theory of Jesus' non-existence is overly complex; it creates special explanations, circumstances, and standards for everything encountered, thus breaking the rule known as Occam's razor, which states that entities are not to be multiplied unnecessarily and that all things being equal, the simplest theory is the best. You could point out that the theory tries to prove a negative, an extremely difficult thing to do according to the principles of logic, and a goal that requires extraordinary evidence, not merely the "absence" of evidence. You could describe another no-no of scholarship, known as special pleading, which happens when the theory of non-existence says that things do not appear as common sense would dictate because of special reasons, such as suppression of evidence, and forgery. Many good theories, of course, ask you to suspend your common sense. The earth revolves around the sun, as common sense would not tell you. But notice, that is said to be a common mistake made by all people in all historical epochs. What we have with Jesus-denial is the charge that some people knew then, and know now, what most people have not known. That is very different, and it requires historical proofs, none of which are forthcoming. The only thing offered is suspicion without consummation. No experiments are run; nothing falsifiable is said; no science is therefore done.

5) It is ignorant. It comes from people who have degrees in English, German, biology -- anything but graduate degrees in history, antiquity, religion, ancient languages or Biblical studies. When it does quote scholars from those fields, it goes back to 19th century work, and avoids all recent 20th century advances in biblical studies, archaeology, ethnography, etc. It avoids scholars of non-Christian religions, too, and quotes only people who study other things, so that when, for instance, the god Mithra is said to be Christ's precursor, with a virgin birth and the like, no Mithra scholars are consulted, and only non-Mithra scholars are quoted. As such, the theory has remained on the fringes, always just outside mainstream work; before the World Wide Web, it was hard to find without looking for it specifically. I majored in Religion and attended a year of seminary; in later years I read the definitive works on the historical Jesus, and consulted those works even as an atheist; but I had never heard of a fully articulated theory of non-existence, because when you study history and religion, you don't come across the proponents of the theory; they always have training in something else. Yet they push their opinions about one of history's central questions. I am no linguist, but if you asked me to overthrow the mainstream theories about the origin of English, and told me I could not consult any scholars of English except to note where they can be debunked, you can imagine the quality of what you'll get from me.

6) It is arrogant. The only way to test ideas is to come into dialogue with other ideas, chiefly those constructed by people with knowledge of the subject. Often good theories are complex, and require a lot of reading and hard work to sift the evidence. But the theory of non-existence holds mainly that evidence can be judged, not according to its content, but according to who wrote it. Therefore, the Bible can be dismissed; Biblical scholarship can be dismissed. In this the theory betrays its ignorance of Biblical scholarship, which is full of agnostics and even some atheists. It seems entirely unaware of what current scholars, secular and biblical, are saying, but it nevertheless relies heavily on a very dangerous phrase, "Most scholars believe that" (fill in the blank: Jesus was a myth-figure, he said nothing of what's in the Gospels, etc.) A true scholar can get away with summarizing his or her field; but if you're not in the field, forget it. Even so, most people who rely on common sense know that the vast majority of scientific work on the ancient world, its scriptures, languages, archaeology and beliefs, has been done in the 20th century. Biblical scholarship has incorporated all that work and is now typically based upon it. The definitive works on Jesus are not apologetics, and they openly defy religious or church dogma; but skeptics have long since stopped listening, and they operate on the assumption that the only options on the table are Biblical literalism or Biblical atheism. Basically the attitude is, "I do not need to read those who are trained, because they are biased; I do not need any special training myself, and I have no relevant biases." Well, Copernicus dared to believe that everything he'd been taught on a certain subject could be wrong; but he was a master practitioner in that field. Tell that to those who think they are following in Copernicus' footsteps: you will simply be told in reply that you love your subject and therefore cannot be trusted to know it well.

7) It is extreme. No secular and relevantly credentialed historian holds the theory, for at least one very simple reason: there was too little time. Myths are told about people who lived far away, in another time and place ("a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"); no one living in the local area can contradict the myth, and the imagination can let loose. Christian writings started surfacing only 20 years after Jesus "purportedly" lived, so the question comes up: why didn't anyone contradict the claim that Jesus lived and interacted with famous local figures? Well, they did, according to the theory, but their testimonies were destroyed by the Church; or in a variation, they didn't speak up, because the Romans killed them all off in the war 40 years after Christ's "purported" lifetime. No historian has produced a comparable example of a myth that overcame all historical objections so quickly. But Christ is said to be such a myth. And people -- reasonable, well-educated people (but not well-educated about religion) -- are finding such arguments reasonable in rising numbers, I fear. Why is evolution being disbelieved these days in favor of creationism? Because our schooling in science, our scientific literacy, is abysmal. Why, then, with our commonly abysmal education about religion, do we not exert more skepticism toward the things we hear and say about religious topics?

*) It is radically partisan and self-contradictory. The destruction of Christianity's root beliefs always takes precedence over consistent and fairly applied standards. Logic is always sacrificed to the goal. This one can only be explained at length by diving deeply into the content, so I will leave it for another post. But see John Meier's multi-volume work on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew, which systematically lays out the logical criteria needed for this kind of work.

9) It is denial, and not history. History describes what happened. Denial is concerned to say that such-and-such did not happen. It does not say that things happened in an alternative or under-appreciated way, only that they did not happen. It is not a positive description; it offers no positive alternative -- and by positive I don't mean happy, I mean simply a map of events rather than non-events. The only events described are writings, or acts of forgery, often by no-names ("Christian scribes") working in the dark. Actual events, other than writing, go without much description or investigation for their own sake; they are brought in only for the conspiracy theory. Individuals contributing anything are said to be mythical beings invented by the true agency, the collective cult with its need for survival and power. Individuals are cut out of history entirely, and shorn of their personal names, except occasionally for individuals who did have a certain genuis at forgery: those are the only people named, dated, and described at length. Bodies are taken out of history, and men such as Christ become disembodied ghosts or ideas -- a terribly unhistorical project, even an Orwellian one. Any piece of evidence that the theory does not like goes down the "memory hole." And of course, in this case what is being denied is not merely neutral, but something that is all too often denied: suffering. The rejection, torture, and capital punishment of an innocent individual is pushed out of existence or otherwise shorn of its meaning. To deny history is always to deny pain and suffering.

10) It is bigoted. It is committed to destroying or defaming Christians, of course, and is sometimes especially hostile to Roman Catholicism. But it is necessarily exploitative of other religions, even those it nominally champions. Moreover, it always denies the deep relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and seeks to overturn mainstream biblical scholarship's deep and healing dialogue with Judaism, by making Christianity exclusively a pastiche of non-Jewish religions which the Jewish people, historically, despised -- not least because paganism oppressed them so cruelly. In many ways, the theory represents anything but progressive scholarship shedding light on victims, whether they be Jews or Gentiles; the only oppression it recognizes is that committed by Christianity. Its conclusions are welcomed, disturbingly, by anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic bigots.

[jkelly80]

[jkelly80]

*double post*

[JMO]

Ok I'm going to go through these 1 by 1 Ultra...

1 First of all, who says this? We don't call people Hercules deniers. As regards a conspiracy theory, I don't buy it. There just isn't enough historical evidence to be sure Jesus existed(I could be wrong here..anybody know the historical consensus?). Personally I think it is irrelevant if he existed or not.

2 Bad men believe something=belief is wrong? That's ridiculous.

3 I don't see the point here. Why can't pre-Christian religions be

[bacasper]

[wannago]