this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Religious Cringe
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This is the official Lemmy for the r/ReligiousCringe***** subreddit. This is a community about poking fun at the religious fundamentalist's who take their religion a little bit too far. Here you will find religious content that is so outrageous and so cringeworthy that even someone who is mildly religious will cringe.
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All posts must contain religious cringe. All posts must be made from a religious person or must be showcasing some kind of religious bigotry. The only exception to this is rule 2
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Material about religious bigots made by non-bigots is only allowed from Friday-Sunday EST. In an effort to keep this community on the topic of religious cringe and bigotry we have decide to limit stuff like atheist memes to only the weekends.
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Take it one step further: outside of the New Testament, all the "evidence" that Jesus ever existed at all is circumstantial at best and from a handful of religious Jewish and Roman historians with enormous confirmation bias.
Historians who specialize in that time and area are (for obvious reasons) amongst the most frequently religious academics outside of actual theologians, so most of them have enormous confirmation biases as well.
This is known as “mythicism.” The problem is that it basically requires you to believe in a vast conspiracy by historians and/or that nothing from history can be verified via textual sources. The basic argument against it is that it makes any sort of critical analysis of the past nearly impossible.
It's not a conspiracy because no one says they planned to do it. It's just being skeptical. If they want to believe something then they're more likely to think evidence confirms that belief. Also, since that was the default view, they're more likely to accept it. Assuming that they must be right is not the only way we can trust historians. I'd argue the only way to really trust them is to assume they can be wrong and analyze what they say and what they're basing it on.
No one is suggesting that historical scholars are always right. But the weight of evidence is on their side. The other point is that the mythicism position comes from people with very little or zero credibility. Since this topic has been around for decades, you think they would convince at least a few conventional scholars to just their side. This has instead been basically zero. The rational conclusion is that the mythicism side is either wrong or simply doesn’t have enough evidence to be a viable theory.
There is almost no secular evidence for it, and it is only on those who posit he exists to prove it. So yeah, there's very little (zero) evidence that he didn't exist, or at least the accounts from the Bible aren't accurate. There can never be any evidence for that unless we lived in that time. That doesn't mean we need to trust the alternative. I don't believe in any god, and I don't need evidence they aren't real. Equally I don't necessarily believe Jesus was real, because essentially all evidence for that has a motive to prove he was real.
Almost no evidence is not "no evidence." That's pretty much where the mythicism position falls apart, because they have to resort to dismissing what evidence we have to make their position valid. The other point is that if we use the level of standards demanded by mythicists, virtually all people from history can no longer be verified as real. It effectively deletes most of history.