To Non-Christians: What are your thoughts on Jesus and Early Christianity?

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Among other things, I'm a race marshall. If I see a rule infraction, I have to fill out a written report and submit it to race control. If I don't do this within minutes, or if I do it after chatting with other marshals on the corner about it, it's disregarded as unreliable.

Meanwhile, the constitution of the US protects journalists from having to even reveal the names of their non-written, not necessarily even eye-witness sources (thereby ensuring anonymity) so that the identity of those like "Deep Throat" is protected. Also, the cognitive psychology of memory as it pertains to orality is more complicated that largely arbitrary (though not baseless) regulations about the submission policies for reports of rule infractions. Using this standard (or legal standards, for that matter), journalism would be dead-in-the-water. Part of the difference for standards of evidence comes from differing goals. In court, the goal isn't simply to get at the truth using any and all means (hence spousal privilege, protection from unwarranted search and seizure, etc.). Also, the goal is quite specific: a dichotomous choice. Either the party is liable/guilty, or not. The goal is NOT to determine what happened, but whether a particular party or the prosecution has met the (differing) standards of evidence required for civil and criminal cases, respectively.

Compare this to the sort of testimony in religious scriptures: typically written down decades after the fact, and often not even by the original witness.

Or I could compare it to the standards of peer-review, in which case it fails. This would be a waste of time, but then so is comparing judicial standards or regulations governing written report submissions to historical sources and historiography.

Now... should the standard of evidence for the claims of supernatural acts by a god-man be higher or lower than the standard of evidence for a pass under yellow?

Well, personally I'm not ready to claim Caesar, Alexander the Great, and similar god-men are myths just because they don't meet the standards required of race marshals.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

People are often right too......

Sure. So how do we tell the difference?

I judge on a case-by-case basis. I think most charlatans only a achieve a smidgen of short-lived success.


...by their fruits ye shall know them.......One has to consider everything in forming a position on a case-by case basis. Charlatans exist but are not likely to last with no sustaining true spiritual strength in them. I believe there have been many saints and holy men particularly so in the east/India where spiritual knowledge has reached higher levels than in the Abrahamic world.

IOW, any religious claim that's old is necessarily likely to be true?