Original Sin?

Quote: Nareed

Have you then reversed your belief that morality can come only from the one true god Ishtar?

Morality obviously comes from God, why do you think it is that according to Jefferson you feel so good while living a virtuous life?

Quote: FrGamble

Morality obviously comes from God,

Which one?

The one who is the all-powerful, necessary and non-contingent, spiritual creator of all things.

Quote: FrGamble

The one who is the all-powerful, necessary and non-contingent, spiritual creator of all things.

Ba'al? Chronos? Marduk? Aten-Ra? Amun?

There are so many one true gods.

Quote: FrGamble

In regards to the NT it does mean that with very few exceptions every verse is attested to in many different manuscripts.

That's like saying you know a wild
rumor is true because you read it
in 10 different tabloids. Surely they
wouldn't print it if it wasn't true.

As a starting point, I'll again point to
the Jesus Seminar. They were one
of the first groups to use forensic
investigation methods on historical
events. Not only did they conclude
that Jesus never said 80% of what's
attributed to him, they also concluded
that he was a faith healer and worked
with people who had psychosomatic
conditions.

He did not walk on water, feed the multitude
with loaves and fishes, change water into
wine or raise Lazarus from the dead. He was
executed as a public nuisance, not for claiming
to be the Son of God. The empty tomb is a
fiction, Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead.
Belief in the resurrection is based on visions that Paul,
Peter and Mary Magdalene supposedly had.

Forensic methods, which are very reliable, show that
Jesus was mostly an urban legend, which makes
perfect sense.

Quote: FrGamble

Morality obviously comes from God,

How do you figure that. You can be
a heathen who's never heard of
god and lead a perfectly virtuous
life. Lets not get into the secular
morality discussion again, where we
produced evidence that secular
people are just as moral, any many
times more so, than religious people.
Being moral has nothing to do with
a religion or a god.

Quote: FrGamble

The NT is the most attested ancient document by leaps and bounds. Surely you are not saying that all documents from the past are just hearsay.

In regards to the NT it does mean that with very few exceptions every verse is attested to in many different manuscripts.

Is this also a strawman or a reductio ad absurdum? I don't think I was saying what you are claiming above. Specifically in countering Evenbob's idea that the texts of the NT were modified or changed through the centuries the attestation we have from very ancient and diverse sources shows that this is not the case.

Why do you continue to deny the evidence that even the 4 gospels were substantively edited after the fact with new content, not just spelling and grammatical errors? Even in modern versions of the bible, some verses of the bible have been moved to a footnote or removed entirely because older texts were found that did not include those verses.

Your straw man is the suggestion that even bob must be saying that all documents from the past are hearsay. If you point to a document from the past that is hear-say, such as people recounting their memories about the Apollo Moon landing, you do not change the validity of the statement one way or the other that the stories in the bible are hear-say. I was pointing out a variety of ways that you can not draw proper logical conclusions from a set of statements. That is not a reducto ad absurdum. It is just a list of assertions, and the conclusions that can not be drawn from them.

examples from http://www.nola.com/religion/index.ssf/2011/03/changes_to_the_bible_through_the_ages_are_being_studied_by_new_orleans_scholars.html

Quote:

For example, the famous tale in John’s Gospel in which Jesus challenges a mob about to stone a woman accused of adultery — “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” — is a variant that copyists began inserting into John at least 300 years after that Gospel first appeared.

In the conclusion to Mark, the description of Jesus appearing to various disciples after his resurrection does not appear in the earliest manuscripts.

And in Luke, the crucified Jesus’ plea that his executioners be forgiven “for they know not what they are doing” likewise does not appear in the earliest versions of his Gospel.

Quote: Dalex64

Why do you continue to deny the evidence that even the 4 gospels were substantively edited after the fact with new content, not just spelling and grammatical errors? Even in modern versions of the bible, some verses of the bible have been moved to a footnote or removed entirely because older texts were found that did not include those verses.

I'm surely not denying that the amount of forensic material and ancient manuscripts for the Bible give it the most scientific and sure basis for trustworthiness over any ancient text. I will deny that the Gospels were substantively edited with new content. The rest of what you described is the history of Biblical studies and hermeneutics and it is wonderful that we continue to grow in our understanding of what was originally written down and what the early Church interpreted and understood about those texts.

Quote: Evenbob

That's like saying you know a wild
rumor is true because you read it
in 10 different tabloids. Surely they
wouldn't print it if it wasn't true.

I find it hilarious that this paragraph describes the Jesus Seminar and you ridicule it and then you extol the Jesus Seminar in the next one. You just want someone to say what you feel and will believe and latch onto anyone who says these things. Look what happened when you read that one book you recently read, it is as if it is the Gospel to you. Why? Because you like what it says. Do some objective research and look around the field of Biblical studies before you become so frustratingly certain that everyone is lying except these sources you like.