Quote Originally Posted by sport_122
Your example is not the same as what i said. In your address you have the evidence to show that you will NOT win. the faith that you are discussing is called blind faith. I do not believe that belief in a transcendent God is built off of Blind faith.



I commented on this in my last post.

Also, 2000 years have not separated the texts. as I have said before we have many of the originals still. maybe 50-300 years ish.

Also, the documents that are written in the bible are presented for a reason. they looked to include people who gave first hand accounts, and at the time of text selection one of the biggest discussion were the validity of the texts. By the time they selected texts they decided to include only those texts which were being used and verified by numerous churches of the time. so lets say you had a church in France, I had one in Germany, and maniacc had one in the U.K. When we came together we would find that as individual churches we had already accepted some of the same books. That is the simple version, but there is a lot more that goes on this topic as well. This stuff is not what people make of it on the surface. it wasn't flip a coin book selection and the only time something was omitted was when King James made his version and started the Anglican church (in this case it was control). Other than that we have always had access to original documents. And the books that are included are included to their fullness. But again, there is LOTS of history that goes with this. I don't think it was about, I think it was about unification.



Remember that there was no Church at that moment. The church wasn't established until he rose. At that time Jesus had worked enough miracles for the few who believed in him to be satisfied. Its the resurrection that commissioned them to go out. Without the resurrection and the witnesses to Christ (he claimed openly and was seen openly) there would be no church. these people would have disappeared much like our modern day cult followers.

But do you think that these men would have died for something they new was fake? I mean, if you had hoaxed a "resurrection" would you have died for it, when they were given all sorts of opportunity to dismiss their claims? That tells me that something very real was going on for them and that very real thing was not sparked by Christs life or death, but it was sparked by his resurrection. Even at his death we see that Christ was alone. Peter had denied him and his followers were scattered.
Sorry Sport, you speak as if anyone here has any indication of what you're really talking about biblically.

They demand proof of existence but dismiss things that are written by men. They demand proof of birth, death, and resurrection but dismiss written testimonies of witnesses and deny the accounts of Acts of the latter visitations of Jesus to Peter and the early church.

The proof that they seek is that in which cannot be proven by anything tangible in their eyes (besides the Bible... but that's been dismissed). The only other proof is that of their own personal faith... but of course, that can't be proven from one person to another... afterall... its "personal" + "faith"

My assumption of most people here is that they've not done a true in-depth study of the Bible and it's information but rather a general or broad overview of the origins of Christianity and perhaps other religions. So to actually use the Bible as a reference is null and void to many here, being that its just a "story book full of contradictions" to them. (not calling anyone dumb or unintelligent by any means, quite the contrary) but the things we accept as truths are relevant from one person to another. (ie: what's true for me may not be true for you... so on and so forth)