Ben, the current Christian to visit these pages with his claims, has declared that he has evidence that Jesus Christ, the son of his god and the supposed savior of humankind existed.  He has directed me to a series of guest posts on his blog that supposedly contain this evidence (this post will deal with the first two, and yes, it’s very much the same stuff I’ve posted before.  This is for Ben to comment on since he refuses to post my comments on his blog).   He’s also claimed that this evidence is also in “academic libraries”, a recognizable and typical logical fallacy called appeal to authority.  If Ben has actually gone to academic libraries, he’d realize that they are not filled only with verified claims.  An academic library will have those as well as long superseded claims, that have been demonstrated as false by additional research and complete guesses by authors.  Ben may have a background in physics and math, but he does not seem to have a background in research or the writing of academic papers.

Hope against hope, I went out to look at the “evidence” that Ben thinks is so persuasive just in case it was something new. Nope, nothing new at all.  It’s a rehash of William Lane Craig’s nonsense and other apologists.  Their claims are only valid if you have the presupposition that Christianity is true and if you do not consider how your arguments affect your own religion. In other words, I have never seen one person convert because of the supposed evidence these folks offer, deciding that JC really did exist from the evidence and then deciding to worship him.  So if you’ve seen rebuttals to those poorly constructed claims by good ol’ WLC, you’ve seen the rest of the posts on this topic here and don’t need to waste your time.

Ben, you do need to come here and show me how you think this nonsense is actual evidence and rebut my points.  That is, if you really do think it’s that great.  If not, then you should be willing to admit that and not just ignore how it fails in order to keep your willful ignorance intact.

I’ve found, in my decades of dealing with the false claims of Christians, that they often invite guest posters when they want to trot out a claim but not take personal responsibility for it.  They believe that this tactic will give them plausible deniability when it comes to needing to defend the claims made by the guest poster.  They will often turn around and when confronted with the failure of the claims claim that “well, *I* don’t believe that, it was just the “guest poster”. So you can’t expect me to defend what they said.”   Is that what Ben is doing?  That remains to be seen.

Christians like Ben, are correct that if their supposed savior can be shown not to have existed as claimed, then their religion is worthless.  Even Paul acknowledged this in 1 Corinthians 15, and his only answer is since Christians exist, then the religion must be true. Like Paul, modern Christians have a problem in that their claims are not based on reality, but on stories told to them.  Paul relies on hearsay, and hearsay that not all of the “gospels” agree on.  Paul runs into the problem that people that supposedly were around for the claimed events don’t even believe in them.  Modern Christians who live thousands of years after such events have it even harder, and as we’ve seen, have to resort to apologetics again and again.  They sometimes try to claim that they are only trying to claim a historical Jesus, but it is more than clear that they do not believe in some itinerate Jewish man who claimed he was the messiah, did no miracles, and did nothing to be noticed and also believe that this human is savior of the human race.  They believe in a divine being that did miracles, and *that* Jesus, the one that Peter supposedly denied three times, is no where to be found.

First post by Ben’s guest starts with the poster claiming that it is the weight of the evidence that will turn the tide in his favor to show that it is more probable that the resurrection occurred than it didn’t.   This is a remarkable “tell” to show that the evidence itself is not terribly convincing at all, even to Christians.  Even for them, it’s only “probably” true, but for them faith is not enough so they must gin up claims to convince themselves of such things.

Since we know that the claims of the gospels were held suspect by people perhaps only 60 years after the supposed events, this shows that the poster’s claim that the claims of the gospels were “common knowledge” is false.  The poster claims that the gospels are “eyewitness testimony”, which can be shown false by simply reading the gospels.  If it were from a certain person’s perspective, who was watching the events at the tomb, events that are completely different from gospel to gospel?  Why are they so wrong in number of men/angels, who entered the tomb, what was found there, etc?  The claims of “eyewitness testimony” presented as if eyewitness testimony is never questioned is also an indication that the poster has little knowledge about just how inaccurate eyewitness testimony is.  Continue reading “Not Polite Dinner Conversation – Yep, just as I thought, nothing new as “evidence”” →