Atheism
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Connect with Atheists
- Matrix: #atheism:envs.net
Help and Support Links
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
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Streaming Media
This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.
- Atheist Debates - Matt Dillahunty
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Orgs, Blogs, Zines
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Mainstream
Bibliography
Start here...
...proceed here.
- God is Not Great (Hitchens)
- The God Delusion (Dawkins)
- The End of Faith (Harris)
- Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell)
- Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris)
Proselytize Religion
From Reddit
As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.
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I describe it like this... the earliest presumed mention of Jesus is in the work of Josephus around 93 AD.
Now, there is evidence that this mention is, itself, a 3rd century "insertion" by the Christian transcriber Eusebius, but aside from that, let's take 93 AD as "gospel" ;)
So from the time of Jesus, to 93 AD, there is not one, single, contemporary reference. If you take the dating of his death sometime around 33 AD as accurate, that means, even following his death, nobody mentioned him for SIXTY YEARS.
If you are to believe that story, you have to believe nobody was talking about a guy who did miracles. Or leave that aside as a later invention, nobody was talking about The Sermon on the Mount, which was likely his biggest claim to fame in his lifetime.
The comparison I like to use is Elvis. We know Elvis existed because we have the photographs, recordings, contemporary evidence, and so on.
Now, imagine NONE of that exists. Not only that, Elvis died in 1977. We would be, right now, 13 years away from the first written record of Elvis. (1977 + 60 = 2037).
Unlikely doesn't BEGIN to cover it.
More on how Josephus may have been "modified" around the 3rd century to meet Christian ideas:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437
https://vridar.org/2015/01/16/fresh-evidence-the-jesus-passage-in-josephus-a-forgery/
This is an obvious example of the presentism fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)
Photographs and recordings did not exist in the 1st century. Not even the printing press. And most people were illiterate at the time. So it is far more likely that nothing would be written versus anything being written during that timeframe.
We have loads of written records of far less impressive things from the period, this argument holds no water.
We do not. Almost no written records from that time period has survived. Everything that we "know" comes from a copy of a copy, often made many centuries after the event.
Nash papyrus
Gabriels Revelation
Polybius history
Tacitus' history
There are also countless surviving frescoes, statues, carvings and monuments from the period that had every chance to record, you know, miracles.
Those are a handful of fragmentary texts. That actual proves my point.
You are conflating the biblical version of Jesus and the historical version of him. The mythicist position has always been that neither existed, but the historical view has always been that the latter (and only the latter) existed.
I would disagree.
You would need positive evidence for your claim, saying the biblical Jesus doesn't exist in neither important nor mundane records does not prove anything.
And claiming that because the miracles aren't mentioned in any records is evidence of a historical Jesus is also false.
What is commonly meant by the claim that a historical Jesus could exist, is that it would be entirely banale for a mundane historical Jesus to exist. Meaning we can't disprove him, and so current best practice to assume he did, just like all the other Jeushas, Marks, and Petruses we never hear about.
That is however not proof a historical Jesus did exist, it is just the working assumption when we can't possibly tell.
And the post here puts doubt on that assumption, as there has been proof that stories where attributed to the Jesus character, and he might only be as real as Superman or Kilroy.
Those are generic Mythicist arguments. You lose credibility by even using such lazy and unoriginal ones. The fundamental problem is that it makes it impossible to demonstration that virtually anyone in history has ever existed because the burden of proof is set so high.
My credibility isn't on the table, You made the claim, the burden to back it up on you. Thus far you've offered assertions, question begging and ad hominem attacks, do you have any actual evidence for your position?
This is not a new debate. It is been around for decades, and historical scholars have pretty much dismissed the mythicist position ages ago. The fact is that there is textual evidence of a historical Jesus, enough for historical scholars to conclude that there was one. In response, mythicists have resorted to dismissing all such evidence as being insufficient. Everything is a fake or forgery according to them.
The result is an argument that can be used against any person from history, until you can dismiss virtually all of history as being not real. That's the problem with your argument. It has very little credibility because of that history.
Just like how historical spider-man existed, but the comic version didn't, right?
Don't do religion, kids.
You’re just another brain dead mythicist. Might as well claim all historical figures are comic book characters.