The absurdity of Christianity

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Did they do this before or after he's supposed to have died?

The problem is that the resurrection DID happen. I’m not attempting to explain the rapid rise of a religion as something I can’t understand. What I’m saying is that people generally do not put their lives on the line for something they believe might be false. It would be easier to risk one’s own life over something he knew to be true. Those who knew Jesus and saw Him resurrected did not consider life on earth to be worth more than spreading the gospel.

The martyr effect is exactly what I was talking about earlier. Jewish religious leaders had to contend with the fact that making martyrs of Christians drew more people into their cause, hence why they eventually abandoned that practice. The way I see it, the way Jesus describes His disciples as “evil” and “selfish,” likely a parody of the priest caste, common people did not view their lives as having any value under that religion as it existed at the time. Christianity, by contrast, expresses the value God gives all human individuals. If a someone’s life is forfeit anyway, what difference does it make if you convert to a religion that offers a personal relationship with God?

James Connolly was a violent collectivist who had the sympathy of other violent, Irish collectivists who wanted to exploit British involvement in the war as a means to establish a collectivist state in Ireland just as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. That’s just playing the victim card, no more, no less. Had all of Ireland united in support of an independent republic and practiced the non-aggression principle, they might have achieved their goals at that time.

Kent State was the result of violent escalation by collectivist protesters against a peacekeeping force. I don’t support the cause they were protesting against—America had no business interfering in Vietnam and Cambodia. But you cannot achieve peaceful ends through violent means.

May 4 and the Easter Uprising are two examples of solidarity of violent grievance groups as they take on government authority.

Both. While he was alive he attracted his followers (the 12 disciples) from the Jewish sect of the Essenes. He became a magnet from this sect. All the evidence suggest that While Jesus was alive he thought he was only fulfilling Jewish prophecy.

This explains two things i) why the pharisees hated him and called him a blasphemer because he and the Essenes were usurping the existing Jewish power structure, it also explains why Jesus attacked the pharisees and ii) it explains why the Romans crucified him. His temporary ascendancy around 33BC made him a dangerous subversive figure for the Romans.

His subsequent death actually worked for the Essenes who made him a martyr and started the uprising against Rome which culminated in the destruction of the messianic sect stronghold of Masada 35 years later in 70BC. The remnants of the Essenes made no headway with Jews so they started preaching to anyone who would listen including the Romans and other gentiles. At this pointy the movement became messianic and formed around the central figure of the martyr Jesus, For example the need for jewish practice of circumcision was retained among the earliest converts in the middle east but as christianity spread into Roman provinces in Europe (Greece) that requirement became discarded. At this point Jesus's message was changed between 100AD - 300AD and by the time of the Niocene creed established in 381 AD the catholic church completely re-wrote Jesus as the saviour of all mankind.

The culmination of the writing of the catholic bible is a mixture of old testament stories from Jewish religious mythology and fiction written about Jesus in the new testament. Exactly the same with islam, a mix of Jewish myth and fictional accounts of Mohammed written after his death (remember both Jesus and Mohammed were illiterate and taught via oral transmission),

Both Jesus and mohammed were real historic characters but the stories written after their deaths are fairy tales.

One thing that never made sense to me is how figures like Judas, Pilate, and the Romans and Pharisees are viewed by Christians. These people are generally viewed in contempt and are considered damned for their roles in the execution of Jesus (though some Christian sects consider Pilate a saint). The problem is that they were integral to the death of Jesus, and thus to God's supposed plan for salvation.

For instance, Judas had to betray Jesus for God's plan to work. This places him in a literal 'damned if he does, damned if he doesn't' no-win scenario. If he betrays Jesus he will be damned. But if he doesn't, Jesus will not die and thus salvation will not be possible.

Shouldn't Judas, Pilate, and the Roman soldiers who executed Jesus be celebrated as Christian heroes for their integral role in making salvation through the death of Christ possible?

I know that Rho or someone is going to say something to the effect of "God knew that Judas would betray Jesus regardless and used that to his advantage". But if God knew that, why did he still create Judas? This means that God created certain people knowing that he would condemn them to Hell for serving a purpose he himself intended for them to serve.

Even Satan himself is integral to Christian salvation. According to the Gospel, it was Satan who entered Judas and tempted him to betray Jesus. Think about that. If Satan's goal is to stop salvation, shouldn't he have prevented the crucifixion?

At this point I actually want to find some element of the Christian salvation narrative that does make some sense, just because it's such a challenge.

The short answer regarding Judas is the same with predestination as a whole: Just because God already knows what people will freely choose to do doesn’t mean they aren’t free to make other choices. Judas happened to be that guy who betrayed Jesus. If it hadn’t been Judas, it would have been someone else. It also shows Judas never really believed in Jesus, either, else Judas would have figured out that Jesus would forgive him and the disciples would accept him. Everyone betrayed Jesus at some level—hiding from Jewish and Roman authorities, blending in with the crowd, selling Jesus out, denying any knowledge of Jesus, etc. Judas’s actions were understood in retrospect to be motivated by greed and envy.

This reminds of Star Wars where Annikan was the chosen one, Yoda had a vision and saw that even the Sith had a role in turning Annikan to the dark side in order to bring balance to the force.

In the same way Christians believe that those who condemned jesus to death or like Judas contributed to exposing him had a role in a "divine plan" for Christ to die and to rise again from the dead to take his place as the son of god in an everlasting kingdom.

Such tales have resonance in ancient Greece and Egypt. Even the Vikings pagan gods

You tell us that somebody dead came back to life, but where's the hard evidence you'd need to back up such an extraordinary claim? All you seem to have is that some people risked their lives. Some radical muslims become suicide bombers but that doesn't prove their religious beliefs are correct. History is full of people who willingly gave their lives for this and that, but it proves nothing about their reasons being right or wrong.

You assert (without evidence) that James Connolly and the Kent State protestors were violent, but it's irrelevent to the point I made, which was that sometimes killing the perpetrators of a revolutionary movement sparks off an overwhelming backlash, not the just or unjust nature of what the revolutionaries did.

Hey, look everyone! My prophecy was fulfilled! I guess that means you should all follow me now.

Last edited by dorkseid on 25 Jul 2021, 9:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Around Easter people always have the message “He is risen” written on religious posters, church message boards etc..
Someone wrote these words beneath He is risen,
“Quick! Shoot him in the head before he bites someone and it spreads!”

Anything that gets up and moves around after being dead and buried for days is obviously a zombie.
https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Zombie_Jesus

I thought those were ads for Viagra.

I think he's more Lich (@ Wikipedia) than zombie, since zombies are mindless things.

Who exactly says it’s extraordinary? It’s a matter of course for Christian believers. We already have all the evidence we need. It’s the choice whether to perceive it and acknowledge it that separates those with faith from those without. Besides, demands for hard evidence fall into infinite regression. The resurrection of Lazarus was well beyond the proverbial expiration date, so it wasn’t the resurrection itself that was miraculous. It was the particularly brutal way Jesus died, plus that He raised Himself from the dead and had already told His disciples that it would happen that way.

Hard evidence is a matter of infinite regression, so it’s useless to discuss something that everyone perceives but not all acknowledge or accept as evidence. It’s impossible to make any truth claims without backing it up with faith. It’s not a matter of whether anyone has faith, but rather whether someone has faith in the right things.

The two insurrection events are fairly well-enough known and comparatively recent that anyone who cares enough about them can research them to form a reasonable opinion and analysis on their own of what happened and what those events represent historically, culturally, and politically. The Easter Uprising was a futile violation of the non-aggression principle that sparked retaliation from the British. Whether it was excessive is a matter of debate. And…tbh I’ve never even heard of Connolly before. He’s barely even a footnote in the Encyclopedia Brittanica article about the Easter Rising. Elsewhere he is mentioned as one of the leaders and was prominent in Irish collectivist circles. Of course it sparked a martyr effect. How long had the Irish suffered under English mistreatment? The victim mentality of the Irish is not a great mystery, nor is it any great mystery that Irish collectivists would exploit that sentiment to set off the Irish equivalent of Red October. And yes, it most certainly is relevant in that the Irish were portrayed as martyrs, but they were hardly saints. Early Christians, by contrast, weren’t exactly saints either, but they did not violate the non-aggression principle, either, leading to a relatively peaceful cooperation and coexistence with non-Jews. That’s not to say that Christians didn’t suffer persecution at the hands of the Romans as well as Jewish leaders, it’s just that it’s easier to recognize someone as a martyr when he is killed promoting peace rather than initiating violence himself. The martyr effect has more impact when it is supported by reason rather than when the supposed martyr had a hand on instigating violence.

The May 4 incident was preceded by violence against police and others. It wasn’t that the protesters were wrong about the war. It was that their use of violence defied reason and became a matter of public safety. The government was working well within its mandate to maintain law, order, and safety. The scale of violence against police was something that had been unprecedented in that generation, something the National Guard was totally unprepared for at Kent State, and the ineffective handling of violent, illegal protests in contrast to effective and often brutal measures in prior decades emboldened a nationwide protest movement.

It’s really when government action CREATES a victim class, either deliberately or accidentally, when the martyr effect has the most impact. The result of the October Revolution was an ongoing state of revolution in which Party leaders played a collectivist game of whack-a-mole with residual capitalist elements, probably more perceived than real. The Soviet Union was basically an empire comprised of victims who might get relief “one day.” It was a nation of martyrs. The Vietnam War already had its martyrs in America: young, male conscripts forced to fight a jungle version of the Somme over a much larger territory. There was no need for anyone to join their ranks, but anti-government protesters were all to eager to attack police and guardsmen. Despite disproportion retaliation from guardsmen at Kent, it’s difficult to say what options those guardsmen really had. Matters such as Irish independence, Vietnam, and war protests are always best handled without the use of violence. If people die as the result of pursuing peace through non-aggression, at least then their deaths count for something meaningful.

And that is exactly the difference with early Christian martyrs. A government cannot break the non-aggression principle without, first, sending the message that the lives of peaceful people are forfeit and, second, the public taking notice. Because Christians were urged to be peaceful people, persecution of Christians didn’t escape public notice. The creation of a Christian victim class by the government moved more people to sympathize with Christians; moreover, it has a destabilizing effect on the government. The adoption of Christianity as Rome’s official religion, as wrongheaded as it was, was largely a consequence of this effect. This in turn played a key role in the dissolution of the Roman state. Had Christians responded in a violent revolt, it would not have survived with a wide following if it even survived at all. Jewish religious leaders at the time of the early church recognized the need to cool active persecution in no small part due to their recognition of this martyr effect driving numbers according to them. Reality is that the church did not even need the martyr effect at all. The religious justification at that time for ending persecution was that if God willed the Christian church to grow, killing everyone associated with the movement would not stop it. It’s unreasonable to assume that the expansion of the church was martyr- or victim-driven.

How is it a defense of a paranormal assertion to say "it's not exceptional to me?"

So you think your beliefs are something that "everyone perceives but not all acknowledge or accept as evidence?" I've looked and looked but I perceive nothing of the kind. My experience tells me that there's no innate voice in a human's head telling them that there is a god. There might be an unnatural voice born of indoctrination that tells some people that, some kind of group-think effect. But to say that irreligion is the product of stubbornly resisting some supposed inner message from the deity, like I say I know that's ridiculous in my case. You simply don't understand what's going on in the mind of a secular person.

You seem to be saying that hard evidence is pointless or inappropriate because it goes into an "infinite regress." Well, it's of course true that we never get absolute proof of anything, and that sometimes there isn't enough reliable data to have any great confidence in the veracity of an assertion. But where would we be if for example medicine wasn't evidence-based? Luckily, much of the time we can find hard evidence by testing things rigorously. We might not absolutely know anything with 100% certainty as a result, but we can often conclude things with enough certainty to make them worth accepting, always with minds open to new information of course. It's called science and technology, and the things it allows us to create work. Whether that's for good or ill depends on what we've created of course.

Sorry to say I don't see the relevence of the rest of what you've written. You seem to be saying that Kent and the Irish rebellion of 1916 were instances of violence by the protestors and rebels concerned, and that they'd have been better off turning the other cheek. But I don't think you know. I've heard plausible arguments in favour of using force against the violent actions of governments. And if there's any truth in this piece (it looks as if it's mostly externally-verifiable), the Dublin thing was effective, violent or not. It's very much in line with the tourist information I heard when I visited Dublin Castle, though of course that alone doesn't prove it's the truth:
https://ireland-calling.com/easter-risi ... -reaction/

Viagra should market it that way for Easter.Instead of Easter eggs in the basket ,it’s little blue pills.
The Easter bunny would also endorse it.

Definitely one of the undead.

Unless Satan was taking orders from God all along. You've probably already seen DarkMatter2525's video about Satan being the fall guy.