Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

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OpEdNews » How We Know That Christianity Is Not True

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-We-Know-That-Christian-by-Ben-Dench-090504-55.html

May 4, 2009

How We Know That Christianity Is Not True

By Ben Dench

Originally posted:

http://bendench.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-we-know-that-christianity-is-not.html

Modern textual criticism has shown that no part of the New Testament was written by anyone who actually knew a pre-crucifixion Jesus1—if Jesus ever existed as a human being at all. We know this because of things like basic errors in geography and local customs that would be impossible for anyone that actually traveled where Jesus did to make. We also know that after a period of oral tradition there were many gospels and they were circulated without names. The names the accepted gospels were eventually given were only second century guesses—and of course we can show now that they guessed wrong.

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/authornt.html
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/jesus.html

That being said, if we place the works of the New Testament in the order that they were written (for our purposes: the works of Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) as opposed to the order in which they were preserved, we can actually see the process of mythologization happening. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong explores this in the fifth and sixth chapters of his book A New Christianity for a New World. As time goes on we see the resurrection transform from synonymous with the crucifixion and ascension and with no specific mention of a physical resurrection (or an empty tomb) to a distinct event and a definite physical resurrection, Jesus’s conception go from normal to divine, the miracles move from nonexistent to possibly merely symbolic (Spong found that the gospels of Mark and Matthew mapped onto the Jewish liturgical calendar and seemed to have been written to correspond to different celebrations during the year) to actual claims of miracles and then to more elaborate and miraculous claims, and Jesus go from a man to a powerful prophet to a godlike being. Spong concludes that:

OpEdNews » How We Know That Christianity Is Not True.

May 5th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized, history, humanism, religion and spirituality | Leave a comment |

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