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  1. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    You don't know that. All you know is that the first non-Biblical historic evidence comes from the beginning of the 2nd century, which is not itself evidence that the town didn't exist in the 1st century. I don't have any evidence of your existence prior to today. Were you just born? I'm not...
  2. Vishvavajra

    Why Commemorate the Death of Jesus?

    For most, celebrate is not the correct word, so much as commemorate. The death of the founder of the tradition is regarded as worthy of remembrance. That said, some do celebrate his death, as they believe that his death itself was the magic thing that would bring salvation. It's closely tied to...
  3. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    It's true that apologists need to come to the scholarly table, which is open to all. The problem is that many of them would rather keep those definitions fuzzy so that they can wiggle and equivocate their way out of things when backed into a corner. Scholars, by contrast, prefer clear...
  4. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    Also a good point. Every time you see the word city in an ancient context, it's best to think of it as metropolitan area. The walled city itself was not a self-sufficient entity. Ancients just took for granted that it would have little exurbs and satellite villages and sometimes even minor...
  5. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    I don't think that's a defensible reading, even if we were to accept that that statement was authentically Jesus and not something the early church put into his mouth as a kind of doctrinal touchstone. For one thing, "life" is a programmatic term of great import to early Christians and...
  6. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    That's not how sacrifice has ever been used in a religious context. Quite the opposite on all counts. You can visit it today, so it's not as if it's a fictitious place. And there's archaeological finds there going back some 9000 years. The question is whether it existed as a town by that name...
  7. Vishvavajra

    Could God Exist, And Not Exist Too?

    If existence is "a very defined thing," then you shouldn't have any trouble defining it for us in a way that will hold up on analysis. I look forward to it, as that would make you the first in history to succeed at that challenge, and all of us would have the honor of saying we were there when...
  8. Vishvavajra

    Could God Exist, And Not Exist Too?

    Yes, quite right. In fact, one can argue that the bad theology comes from people being too literal-minded and misunderstanding the original message. The Orthodox appreciation for apophatic theology is, I think, an example of Tillich's principles in practice, and it was a thing long before he...
  9. Vishvavajra

    Loving God = Eternal Torture?

    The Gospel of John and Revelation are thought to have been composed, or at least arrived at their final form, around the same time, c. 90 CE. As early as the 4th century there was a tradition that they had been written by the same person, although that's no longer considered likely. As for...
  10. Vishvavajra

    Could God Exist, And Not Exist Too?

    Paul Tillich's thoughts on the subject are relevant here, I believe. He argued that traditional theistic theology, which conceives of God as a being, is hopelessly flawed and a cause of much alienation for modern people. A being—even one much greater and more powerful than us—cannot be the...
  11. Vishvavajra

    Could God Exist, And Not Exist Too?

    The ancient Epicureans insisted that space existed, i.e. that it satisfied all the Parmenidean criteria for existence. It's not a solid thing, but who says only solid material things can be said to exist? Even strict materialists don't go that far. And weight is a relative phenomenon dependent...
  12. Vishvavajra

    Was Satan wrong to demand equal rights in heaven?

    What myth of Satan are we looking at, exactly? Is this from Milton?
  13. Vishvavajra

    If a person is not sincerely have faith in god first, then he can't feel god's presence.

    It's a convoluted form of begging the question. In order to come to know if X is true, you have to already have accepted that X is true. It's what makes presuppositional apologetics so annoying and impossible to engage with. It's also similar to a Catch-22 in its practical application. In any...
  14. Vishvavajra

    Could God Exist, And Not Exist Too?

    The problem there is that, as I mentioned above, existence isn't a mathematically simple variable. It's a subjective designator. There's no way to objectively define existence, so it can't be reduced to simple math or formal logic. It's like saying that something can't be both good and not...
  15. Vishvavajra

    Could God Exist, And Not Exist Too?

    On the contrary, it only violates Aristotelian logic. In Buddhist logic it's perfectly sensible, since the categories themselves are largely arbitrary and negotiable. Therefore something can logically be said to exist in once sense and not in another. If one actually analyzes what "existence"...
  16. Vishvavajra

    It's said Jesus' sacrificed himself to save us...

    The idea that Jesus was a human sacrifice to atone for humanity's sin is a philosophical theory that appeared some 1000 years after Christianity arose. The most common versions that one encounters in Western Christianity (i.e. Catholicism and Protestantism) can all be traced back to a monk named...
  17. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus actually exist as a historical figure?

    That's true. The problem is that he implies that it's not, that this is some kind of minority voice, and that scholarship on the subject is dominated by ideas that have been marginalized for about a century now. There's a subtle dishonesty at work there: by saying a lot of reasonable things...
  18. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus actually exist as a historical figure?

    Paul makes reference to some very basic elements of the Jesus story: his institution of the Eucharist, his crucifixion, and his resurrection (whatever Paul means by that—it's pretty clear that it's not bodily resuscitation, given Paul's contempt for the idea in 1 Corinthians). Afterwards he is...
  19. Vishvavajra

    Did Jesus actually exist as a historical figure?

    Regardless of what one believes about the historical Jesus (or lack thereof), it's undeniable that the version we have in the Gospels is a mythic figure. That fellow you link to says a lot of things that are certainly true. However, many of them are actually mainstream in Biblical scholarship...
  20. Vishvavajra

    Are there any contradictions in the Bible?

    Yep, and it's hard to argue against. Too many little details are similar, right down to the releasing of three birds before sighting land, for it to be a coincidence. And of course, we know that the Mesopotamian Flood literature (of which the Gilgamesh is just one example) is of vastly greater...
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