But I don't. I allow the evidence to demonstrate. I recently studied Hinduism without preconceived notions. I was hoping they could provide evidence of a soul or existence after death.
You might not be consciously doing it, but as you seem pretty convinced that Abrahamic religion is all stories and passed down from one tradition to another and what not, it is easy to enforce that belief with your walls of text.
The quickest way to lose a debate is to pretend to know what someone else is thinking.
ALL of the evidence about Abrahamic stories are that they are myths taken from other cultures, as are ALL religions and myths.
ALL historical scholarship DOES ENFORCE that belief because that's ALL THERE IS.
I study theologians or NT scholars and they start out with a fallacy (the stories are true) and continue on with fallacy after fallacy? You know this. If you read a Christian theologian, or a Mormon, JW, 7th Day Adventist, you would agree because they all support the trinity and that Jesus is God and literally resurrected AND only through belief in him can enter heaven.
Same with Hindu theology, and as we have seen, Bahai theology. They all start out with "our stories are the true word of God....."
So that is useless cognitive bias.
Historical scholars and archaeologists just work with evidence.
I am now listening to Dr Mason on 2nd generation Christians and he goes over some of the detailed methodology of how they know which gospel influenced other gospels and it's extremely detailed. He has evidence, facts and supports his arguments with logic you can follow and see for yourself.
All of these experts, over and over, from their lifes work research, support the same conclusions.
There are no scholars in the historicity field who disagree. Theologians who don't study history will disagree without evidence because it conflicts with their beliefs. Exactly like what's happening in this thread.
Why can you not discuss one thing at a time?
What the F%^* are you talking about? I answer each question appropriately? Sometimes I back up a post with a source or two. which is a proper way to debate. Your flip-flopping every time you get backed into a corner is getting obnoxious.
What is the need to flood posts with assertions by cherry-picked scholars?
This is another strawman used several time in these recent posts.
These are not cherry-picked scholars. All scholars in historical fields say scripture is re-worked Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian myths and later Greek, Persian, Roman myths. That's it.
Here is an interview with scholar Ben Stanhope who studies the Egyptian connections to Yahweh and Israels Kings but at 43:45 he is asked about the Mesopotamian connection and he says the OT is "super-Mesopotamian in style and language" regarding the myths in Genesis. These ideas are known by all scholars in the field, no one ever is like "no it's all from Yahweh". That is pretend make-believe fantasy.
43:45
I don't constantly bring Islamic scholars, with their understanding of history, into the debate .. I use my own thoughts on the topic.
First your own thoughts may be clouded by confirmation bias, lack of education, bias towards a religion.
My thoughts may have bias as well. I am interested in evidence. Is the material syncretic? What is the evidence, what can be supported by evidence, what is suggested by basic non-bias rational thinking? When one tries to make counsulting scholarship a bad thing it's cult-like behavior. If we were talking science or health and someone was like "don't listen to all these scholars" go by your feelings, they would be a crank.
BTW, there are no Islamic scholars who do historical-critical scholarship on the Quran. If one said the Quran may have had pre-cursor copies found, test runs, he would face serious issues. It is not allowed in any Islamic nation. Even the Islamic cartoon drawings with political humor in the caption 20 years ago were met with threats.
As I pointed out, Islam has not accepted historical work yet, just like Christians before 1940 would not. The theologians (like Christian theologians, Hindu , Sikh, whomever, start with the assumption their scripture is true and go from there. Well since it says Jesus did miracles.....He must be divine, IT SAYS SO, end of argument.
A priest Raymond Brown was the first to apply real historical methods to scripture and noticed it didn't actually say Jesus was God. He later changed his mind, possibly due to influence or was talked into believeing his interpretations of some passages was wrong. He was just the first. Eventually secular scholars were able to deal only with evidence and not claims.
"Brown was one of the first Catholic scholars in the United States to use the
historical-critical method to study the Bible.
[5]
In 1943, reversing the approach that had existed since
Pope Leo XIII's encyclical
Providentissimus Deus fifty years earlier,
Pope Pius XII's encyclical
Divino afflante Spiritu expressed approval of historical-critical methods.
[6] For Brown, this was a "Magna Carta for biblical progress."
[7] In 1965, at the
Second Vatican Council, the Church moved further in this direction, adopting the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation
Dei verbum, instead of the conservative schema "On the Sources of Revelation" that originally had been submitted. While it stated that Scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,"
[8] Brown points out the ambiguity of this statement, which opened the way for a new interpretation of inerrancy by shifting from a literal interpretation of the text towards a focus on "the extent to which it conforms to the salvific purpose of God." He saw this as the Church "turning the corner" on inerrancy: "the Roman Catholic Church does not change her official stance in a blunt way. Past statements are not rejected but are requoted with praise and then reinterpreted at the same time. ... What was really going on was an attempt gracefully to retain what was salvageable from the past and to move in a new direction at the same time."
[9]
New Testament Christology[edit]
In a detailed 1965 article in the journal
Theological Studies examining whether Jesus was ever called "God" in the New Testament, Brown concluded that "Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God" and "there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition." He argued that "Gradually, in the development of Christian thought God was understood to be a broader term. It was seen that God had revealed so much of Himself in Jesus that God had to be able to include both Father and Son."
[10]
Thirty years later, Brown revisited the issue in an introductory text for the general public, writing that in "three reasonably clear instances in the NT (Hebrews 1:8–9, John 1:1, 20:28) and in five instances that have probability, Jesus is called God," a usage Brown regarded as a natural development of early references to Jesus as "Lord".
[11]
See now this is what I was talking about, they accept Yahweh wanted the gospels that were picked because those were the correct versions he wanted. But with revelations and claims all is fair. If one guy can say an angel told him them priests can say God wanted it this way. Because they just know.
When you don't have standards of evidence everyone gets a pass to claim their stuff is what God wants.
"While it stated that Scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation,"
blah blah......not evidence.
You wouldn't want to know..
Right. Whatever. You either prove something with good evidence or it cannot be proven. Supernatural things have never ben shown to exist so until they are it's all make believe.
I have, and you ignore it with the same old "no evidence of gods"..
Oh, yeah that isn't evidence., Your beliefs in magic isn't evidence of magic.
You outright reject the Bahai prophet. Yet millions believe. You reject Jw, Mormonism, Hinduism. By this standard there is plenty of evidence. People say so. "God" says so.
That isn't evidence, and you know it. You also don't believe it for one second.
So don't now pretend like you get to make the same claims and that is evidence when it's your beliefs. It is not. At this point you may understand what constitutes proper evidence so I don't know why would would make this statement?
We have been here and are going around in circles now.
Gods are in stories. So is Gandolf. So is Sauron. No matter how hard someone believes in Sauron or how many or how much scripture someone writes and says "Sauron dictated this to me", it's not evidence. Not until Sauron shows up and can be investigated under lab settings (maybe Sauron can communicate with every human at once telepathically and answer cosmic mysteries and explain science to scientists and is always correct) or dictates something so incredible, a cure for cancer, a stop to human aging, would it even be considered.
Even then it would have to be determined if the Sauron prophet wasn't just a genius who figured out a cure for cancer and aging and decided to play a joke on humanity. Rational skepticism.
