rudatron posted:

Nope. Also, I hate to point this out genius, but you didn't explain anything early, you asserted. And contrary to what you believe, there is actual disagreement over this claim that the gospels are biographies!

The Kingfish posted:

Luckily, the blog post atheist man doesn't have a degree in any relevant fields so we know that he can be trusted.

SedanChair posted:

No studying the bible wrong makes you no different than a chiropractor. Or a vaccine denier promoting natural cures, whatever. Only people who haven't been to seminary can be trusted to study it.

Who What Now posted:

That's some gooooooood argument from authority right here.

"You HAVE to trust my people because they have degrees and trusting anyone else is forbidden!"

Crowsbeak posted:

Yeah when talking about a subject that requires extensive knowledge I tend to trust those who tell me what I want to hear.

Who What Now posted:

You should maybe not do that.

Disinterested posted:

I'm not sure what I think of the seminary but I am sure emphasizing academic credentials to make arguments on a notorious gay hookup site about Jesus is suspect as hell.

falcon2424 posted:

Jesus being a historical figure seems like it's 100% about where you set the goalposts.

Was there a person who perfectly meets the events described in the gospels? Trivially no. The stories contradict each other. So at least some details will be wrong.

Was there a person who meets any of the details? Sure. Wandering preachers were a thing. And someone wrote the sayings from Q.

From there, it seems like the argument just resolves into wordplay about what "counts".

Crowsbeak posted:

I shouldn't trust those who don't tell me what I want to hear.

Crowsbeak posted:

Hey I am mostly fine with this. (My bias should be obvious why I am not,but this is a perfectly reasonable position). Say compared to the position where seminarians are all people we cannot trust and we cannot trust historians either, along with the Bibile being the same thing as Harry Potter.

falcon2424 posted:

I'm not sure it's opposed to the position that "seminarians are all people we cannot trust."

Ultimately, religious apologists are starting with a phrase ("Jesus was a historical figure") and trying to shift their definitions until the phrase becomes true. You add or subtract meaning from the phrase based on what the facts turn out to be.

That's exactly backwards of how reasoning normally works; where you start with the facts and then see how well various summaries fit them.

Crowsbeak posted:

Well I look at it like this. Yes I may now be a Christian but I spent part of my life as an atheist. Even as an atheist I could not doubt he existed because when I looked at the fact, that faith healing was common at the time, not just in Judea, but all over the eastern Mediterranean. That for someone to claim they were the Messiah was to be declared a blasphemer and killed. That it wasn't unheard of for someone from time to time say they were just that in Judea and then to be killed by the authorities convinced me that it was ridiculous to deny the existence of Jesus.

SedanChair posted:

To get back ot the point of the thread, it sounds like you were not actually an atheist. I mean really, stories of faith healing are what made you believe? You always believed.

Crowsbeak posted:

Well I look at it like this. Yes I may now be a Christian but I spent part of my life as an atheist. Even as an atheist I could not doubt he existed because when I looked at the fact, that faith healing was common at the time, not just in Judea, but all over the eastern Mediterranean. That for someone to claim they were the Messiah was to be declared a blasphemer and killed. That it wasn't unheard of for someone from time to time say they were just that in Judea and then to be killed by the authorities convinced me that it was ridiculous to deny the existence of Jesus.

falcon2424 posted:

Why are you using a singular 'he' here? There'd have been a bunch of people who (1) were around Judea, (2) associated with Messianic prophesy and (3) got killed.

That's an argument for plural historical Jesuses; there'd have been a collective of people who contributed one-or-more facets to the current story.

Modern redaction criticism pretty much gets you there. We can split the synoptic gospels out into their component sources. And then we've got multiple authors who are either contributing their own sayings to the work (and become historical Jesuses themselves) or were quoting a previous person (who would be one of the Jesuses).

The motivated reasoning bit comes in when people want to keep their phrase "Historical Jesus." So, they move the standard for "Being Historical Jesus" around so that one, and exactly one person fits the newly gerrymandered meaning.

Chrungka posted:

J.A.B.C. posted:

Dinosaurmageddon posted:

» The bible is a cultural and historical touchstone for western civilization and should be treated and analyzed like any other culture's collected myths. The Judeo-Christian-Muslim faith is not emblematic of all religions, however, so just because you reject one ancient set of books, it doesn't somehow disprove the existence of god(s).

Dinosaurmageddon posted:

» Jesus is a real historical figure for mankind (whether you like it or not), and was as divinely human as you or me. The accounts of his life and his death have sparked great social changes throughout history that reach still to this day, so it's a moot point to argue about his existence.

Dinosaurmageddon posted:

» Plus, the second coming of Jesus already occurred anyway in the last century. Love was - and still is - the main takeaway from the human experience, and music has become the medium of the rapture.

The Belgian posted:

I haven't just been going 'no you', I've given an argument. Owlfancier seems to understand it to to some extend and hasn't refuted it but merely called it impractical. You guys haven't even engaged it at all. But have some of Russell's aruments since some of you love cosmic teapots so much.

Jizz Festival posted:

Let's get to the point of this foray into philosophy and show us where you stick god or souls or whatever it is you want to believe in into this stuff.

The Belgian posted:

I've never made any clais on god or souls, I only objected to a wrong view on the brain and the self.

I don't know if I believe in god.

The discussion from one group has been poisoned by materialism. We must first achieve a aufhebung of this materialism before we can engage in a real discourse. Else, the materialists remain blinded by their biases to the real discourse.

Jizz Festival posted:

Lol ok I have no idea why nobody would want to engage with you and your ideas, what a mystery.

The Belgian posted:

Did you read the Russell piece I quoted? Him, at least, you should find understandable? What are your views on the piece?

Jizz Festival posted:

My view is that I don't care until you can tie all the abstract notions you've been floating around to something concrete so I know what you're really arguing for.

Who What Now posted:

What we call the "self" is the continuous process of your brain interpreting external stimuli and reacting via chemicals mixing among electrical impulses. If I cut out your frontal lobe, the processes that use that area of the brain will cease or be severely impeded. If I introduce different chemicals to the brain it will behave differently. This is why brain surgery and antidepressants work.

Jizz Festival posted:

It's nonsense that physically changing the brain alters the working of your mind?

Who What Now posted:

What we call the "self" is the continuous process of your brain interpreting external stimuli and reacting via chemicals mixing among electrical impulses.

The Belgian posted:

It's this statement. It messes up the order of things and falls into a naïve and icorrect materialism.

quote:

In the naïve attitude of world-life, everything is precisely worldly: that is, there is nothing but the constituted object-poles - though they are not understood as that. Psychology, like every objective science, is bound to the realm of what is prescientifically pre-given, i.e., bound to what can be named, asserted, described in common language - in this case, bound to the psychic, as it can be expressed in the language of our linguistic community (construed most broadly, the European community). For the life-world - the "world for us all" - is identical with the world that can be commonly talked about. Every new apperception leads essentially, through apperceptive transference, to a new typification of the surrounding world and in social intercourse to a naming which immediately flows into the common language. Thus the world is always such that it can be empirically, generally (intersubjectively) explicated and, at the same time, linguistically explicated.

But with the break with naïveté brought about by the transcendental-phenomenological reorientation there occurs a significant transformation, significant for psychology itself. As a phenomenologist I can, of course, at any time go back into the natural attitude, back to the straightforward pursuit of my theoretical or other life-interests; I can, as before, be active as a father, a citizen, an official, as a "good European," etc., that is, as a human being in my human community, in my world. As before - and yet not quite as before. For I can never again achieve the old naïveté; I can only understand it. My transcendental insights and purposes have become merely inactive, but they continue to be my own. More than this: my earlier naïve self-objectification as the empirical human ego of my psychic life has become involved in a new movement. All the new sorts of apperceptions which are exclusively tied to the phenomenological reduction, together with the new sort of language (new even if I use ordinary language, as is unavoidable, though its meanings are also unavoidably transformed) - all this, which before was completely hidden and inexpressible, now flows into the self-objectification, into my psychic life, and becomes apperceived as its newly revealed intentional background of constitutive accomplishments. I know through my phenomenological studies that I, the previously naïve ego, was none other than the transcendental ego in the mode of naïve hiddenness; I know that to me, as the ego again straightforwardly perceived as a human being, there belongs inseparably a reverse side which constitutes and thus really first produces my full concreteness; I know of this whole dimension of transcendental functions, interwoven with one another throughout and extending into the infinite. As was the case previously with the psychic, everything that has newly flowed in is now concretely localised in the world through the living body, which is essentially always constituted along with it. I - the-man, together with the transcendental dimension now ascribed to me, am somewhere in space at some time in the world's time. Thus every new transcendental discovery, by going back into the natural attitude, enriches my psychic life and (apperceptively as a matter of course ) that of every other.

quote:

There our gaze was guided at first by bodies, in their manners of pre-givenness in the life-world, whereas, in the analyses required here, we would have to take our point of departure from the manners in which souls are pre-given in the life-world. An original reflective question is now directed toward what and how souls - first of all human souls - are in the world, the life-world, i.e., how they "animate" physical living bodies, how they are localised in space-time, how each one 'lives" psychically in having "consciousness" of the world in which it lives and is conscious of living; how each one experiences "its" physical body, not merely in general, as a particular physical body, but in a quite peculiar way as "living body," as a system of its "organs" which it moves as an ego (in holding sway over them); how it thus "takes a hand" in its consciously given surrounding world as "I strike," 'I push," "I lift" this and that, etc. The soul "is", of course, "in" the world. But does this mean that it is in the world in the way that the physical body is and that, when men with living bodies and souls are experienced in the world as real, their reality, as well as that of their living bodies and souls, could have the same or even a similar sense to that of the mere physical bodies? Even though the human living body is counted among the physical bodies, it is still "living" - "my physical body," which I "move," in and through which I "hold sway," which I "animate." If one fails to consider these matters - which soon become quite extensive - thoroughly, and actually without prejudice, one has not grasped at all what is of a soul's own essence as such (the word "soul" being understood here not at all metaphysically but rather in the sense of the original givenness of the psychic in the life-world); and thus one has also failed to grasp the genuine ultimate substrate for a science of "souls." Rather than beginning with the latter, psychology began with a concept of soul which was not at all formulated in an original way but which stemmed from Cartesian dualism, a concept furnished by a prior constructive idea of a corporeal nature and of a mathematical natural science. Thus psychology was burdened in advance with the task of being a science parallel to physics and with the conception that the soul - its subject matter - was something real in a sense similar to corporeal nature, the subject matter of natural science. As long as the absurdity of this century-old prejudice is not revealed, there can be no psychology which is the science of the truly psychic, i.e., of what has its meaning originally from the life-world; for it is to such a meaning that psychology, like any objective science, is inevitably bound. It is no wonder, then, that psychology was denied that constant, advancing development displayed by its admired model, natural science, and that no inventive spirit and no methodical art could prevent its repeated involvement in crisis. Thus we have just witnessed a crisis in the psychology which only a few years ago, as an international institute - psychology, was filled with the inspiring certainty that it could finally be placed on a level with natural science. Not that its work has been completely fruitless. Through scientific objectivity many remarkable facts relating to the life of the human soul have been discovered. But did this make it seriously a psychology, a science in which one learned something about the mind's own essence? (I emphasise once again that this refers not to a mystical "metaphysical" essence but to one's own being-in-oneself and for-oneself which, after all, is accessible to the inquiring, reflecting ego through so-called "inner" or "self-perception.")

Jizz Festival posted:

Amazing how you can't explain anything yourself, almost as if you have no actual understanding of what you're arguing for.

The Belgian posted:

Well I don't have the time right now to write such an extensive text myself, but Husserl did it much better than I ever could. So, why wouldn't you rather read what he has to say that my butchered attempt at the same thing?