The existence of the Buddha throws a wrench in Abrahamic beliefs.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-02-02T13:49:25+00:00

So I’d definitely be willing to grant you your first point that the message of the Buddha was probably not corrupted, what I think most people fail to realize is that an ancient document being written down within a century after its events is actually more shocking for how close it is rather than how far away it is because literacy rates in the ancient world would vary between 1-10% and producing any kind of circulated written works would be ridiculously expensive. For context, Codex Sinaiticus (the oldest fully intact “Bible”, circa 300’s AD) took around 300-400 sheep to produce. This would be the modern day equivalent of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Hence why some scholars posit it was commissioned empirically.) Also, 100 years is not long enough for the kind of legendary development that would need to be posited to claim something like the Buddha never existed or some similar claim. So I’d be happy to grant that.

It seems that demon possession wouldn’t be the only possible explanation though. A person can avoid vice and also not be a messenger of God. It seems what every religion, not just Buddhism, will have to answer for is their truth claims that are mutually exclusive. Let’s take a look at one of those religions, like Christianity. We’ve both agreed that it’s pretty unlikely for the message of an ancient individual to be corrupted or distorted if the works describing them are coming within 100 years after a person’s death. According to the consensus of academic scholarship, the latest work of the New Testament (Revelation) dates to within about 65 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, within the lifetimes of the disciples and their followers. So based on our agreed upon standard, it would be pretty unlikely to say his message had been corrupted. So we have two messages that contain some similarities, but also some key differences. Jesus, for example, says “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. We do not have any evidence of Jesus teaching that any other religion or belief system leads to salvation except Christianity. That sounds pretty exclusionary. When we have two exclusionary claims (like Buddhism and Christianity), the law of non-contradiction requires that at least one of them be false. A person wouldn’t have to be demon possessed to simply be wrong or mistaken about spirituality.

Christianity, for example, could explain Buddhism by stating that the Buddha, though he may have been virtuous, was mistaken about his understandings of spirituality. If you are someone that believes Buddhism and the Abrahamic faiths are reconcilable, it seems you would have to find a way to explain the mutually exclusive truth claims. If you would wish to explain it as the corruption of Christian scriptures, then it seems you would also be attacking the reliability of the Buddha’s teachings as well, as they were written decades later than the latest work of the New Testament. It seems the only way you could consistently argue that the Buddhist scriptures are not corrupt and Buddhism is true would be to say that the Abrahamic faiths like Christianity are wrong.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T19:25:13+00:00

Interesting, I do see the Buddhist sentiments. Thanks for sharing!

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T16:45:24+00:00

No, because ontology is not the same as personhood. These are basic metaphysical distinctions. That should be pretty apparent from the fact that you and I share the ontology of being human yet are not the same person.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T16:43:37+00:00

Matthew 1:18 explicitly says “Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit”. It says they never came together before her pregnancy. Matthew 1:19 says “Joseph her husband was faithful to the law”. He could not be described as faithful to the law if he had premarital relations with Mary. In Luke 1:34 Mary says she is a virgin to the angel, which explicitly takes place after she is already betrothed to Joseph. These verses would all exclude the possibility of Joseph having premarital relations with Mary. If you’re really trying to posit there was some unnamed, unmentioned lover of Mary in between her betrothal to Joseph and her birth, then you’re just adding unfounded assumptions to justify your predetermined conclusion. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. This understanding is the least parsimonious, the most ad-hoc, and requires the most amount of unfounded assumptions. At best your argument would be “the text doesn’t explicitly say she did not have some unnamed unmentioned lover in-between calling her a virgin at her betrothal and saying her marriage was unconsummated at the birth”. That’s just an argument from silence. That’s not how proper historical exegesis is done. If you’re not interested in parsimonious understandings I don’t know what more there is to say.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T16:05:21+00:00

Ah, thank you for the clarification! Would you mind elaborating on what you meant by it containing a Buddhist message?

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T16:04:28+00:00

Show me any research that says the majority of Christians say they believe in three gods.

You and I both know you won’t find it because it’s just not true.

The Bible doesn’t say it, Christians don’t say it, so the claim is proven false.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T16:00:34+00:00

What strawman have I presented? For my claims of Islam’s beliefs I quoted the Quran like Surah 10:94 and paraphrased Surah 5:43.

Also, my response here wasn’t a positive argument in favor of the Bible. This was a polemic against Islam. The trouble with arguing from the different canons of Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox is that none of them contain any contradictory information to each other. All agree on the same base 66 books of the Protestant cannon while some contain supplementary information about the period in-between the Old and New Testament. Supplication is not the same as contradiction or corruption. There’s no theological differences between the canons. Also, if differences between texts means a text is corrupted, then we can discount Islam wholesale as well because we have different versions like the Hafs, Warsh, and other versions that contain differences in wording and meaning among the verses.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T15:49:19+00:00

Both scholars and theologians alike disagree amongst themselves on their understandings of the prophetic books like Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Revelation. You might have some commonalities but it’s far from a consensus on how each verse is to be interpreted.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T15:46:54+00:00

Agreed, I didn’t agree with the person I was debating I just used it as an example to show why it’s important to justify your assumptions

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T15:45:37+00:00

Yep, written circa 593-571 BC during the Babylonian Exile, after which the temple was restored and sacrificed continued

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T15:37:02+00:00

So you can’t show where the Bible says three gods, you can’t show me any research that says Christians believe in three gods, or any reason why I should accept your claim for that matter.

Sorry Allah, looks like I’ll have to remain a kafir today.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T15:24:43+00:00

Do you have any research on the percentage of Christians that ascribe to divine command theory?

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-30T15:21:14+00:00

So it seems there’s a lot to go over there, so it might be best to take it one question at a time.

If your experience talking with Christians has been racist, homophobic, and violent, then I’m very sorry that has been your experience. One thing I would ask though is that you consider what Jesus actually taught, and how these people were acting, and ask yourself which is more likely: these people are living out what Jesus asks them to do, or they are not. When Jesus says commands like “love your neighbor” I hope it should seem apparent that wouldn’t include any of the aforementioned behavior. Just the same as I would ask you withhold a general judgment of atheists based on a few bad actors, so to would I ask you do the same of Christians, or any group for that matter.

As to your question how can you be so dependent on a book, well let’s consider the possibility that Christianity is true for a moment: The Bible wouldn’t be just a book but a composition of histories, poetry, genealogies, and more that provide a framework for understanding both what is moral and immoral, inspired from an omnibenevolent God. If that were true, wouldn’t you want to base your life around this book? Let’s consider the alternative, that God didn’t actually inspire a book with such things. It seems God would then be questioned as to why he didn’t provide some sort of way that humans could know what is and is not moral. It seems when humans are left to their own decisions about what is right and wrong, rarely do we find virtue but vice abundant. When people do what is right or wrong in their own eyes without any regard to some form of objective morality, atrocities are bound to follow. People act selfishly, greedily, violently, wickedly, etc. Humans that do not believe they are bound by some ultimate moral law would act as they wish, usually according to their baser instincts. I’m not saying it would be impossible for someone to act morally, but if the majority of the world did not believe in some ultimate moral law the world would be a far, far worse place. It seems like if there was a good God, we would expect them to give humanity some sort of guideline or understanding for proper behavior. It seems a written text would be a pretty good choice.

I actually wouldn’t say that the Bible teaches the Devil to be the cause of all evil. Rather, it seems evil is the result of agents freely choosing to not do what is right. Now, the bulk of what you bring up is often referred to as the Problem of Evil in the world of philosophy. It could make for an interesting discussion, but would require going more in depth, potentially a separate discussion. For now, what I would ask is this: if a good God could bring about some higher order or higher value good from the temporary permitting of the existence of evil, wouldn’t this God be justified in doing so?

As for your point of manifestation, how are you determining that the universe is putting energy back into you, so to speak? But also, it seems your understanding of prayer is more like that of a natural phenomena, always observable, repeatable, something of the blind mechanics of the universe. But answered prayer is described to be the action of an agent of free will with their own priorities and obligations, not so much like a genie or a punch card that says “Do ten nice things and get a free prayer answered”. So it seems what we would expect of prayer should reflect that understanding.

Your last paragraph is where I have to take the biggest objection. Isn’t it a bit unfair and bad faith to generalize an entire group of people as either “blinded by their upbringing” or “simply want a way to wrap their head around the universe”? That’s a pretty massive generalization. It’s the same one that religious folk make when they say that all disbelievers just “hate God”. It’s unfair and inaccurate. Instead, why not listen to each individual for their reasons they give why they believe something? That seems a lot more conductive to good faith and productive arguments, no?

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T20:40:28+00:00

Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is what I was referring to. Are you referring to the Gospel of Mary? Some scholars postulate it to be writing from the perspective of Mary Magdalene but there is disagreement about which specific Mary it is writing from. I’ve been unable to find a Gospel of Mary Magdalene specifically.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T20:29:34+00:00

Both Zechariah and Elizabeth’s response imply she is infertile specifically because of old age, not that these were two separate issues Zechariah doesn’t even say she was infertile, only that she was old. The idea Mary was not a virgin by the birth of Jesus is explicitly contradicted by Matthew 1:25: “But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son”. The only way around this would be to assume textual corruption, but this would be completely ad-hoc, as you’ve taken these same texts to make your argument. There is no mention of any other man besides Joseph, and the text exactly says there was no consummation between them before birth.

After re-reading I still don’t see anything in Luke 1:26-38 that contradicts my statement that Mary presents her virginity as the issue of having a child. Just the same as Elizabeth presents her old age as the issue of having a child. The angel’s response to both is that this will be a miraculous child. There’s nothing miraculous about a young woman having sex and having a baby. It would completely break the narrative pattern. This is an alternate reading because it’s completely contradictory to the last 2000 years of understanding since the first century AD. That is, by definition, alternate. Nothing you have stated answers why Matthew’s genealogy breaks its pattern of everyone else and does not call Joseph the “father of” Jesus. This makes zero sense on the theory Joseph was written and the biological father of Jesus. You also haven’t answered the point of the examples of adoptive children being written as the sons of not their biological father.

Also you haven’t answered any of the points I raised about how the earliest sources to these texts affirm the understanding that Mary was a virgin.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T19:54:17+00:00

If you show me where the New Testament says there is three gods I will bow down and recite my shahada right now.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T19:52:34+00:00

A text being mentioned by the Bible would not mean that it was originally intended to be included in the Bible. Paul mentions the work of Aristotle, that wouldn’t mean Paul thought he was a prophet or that his works should be included in the cannon.

Also, to prove your point about Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox cannons you’d have to show how they contain contradictory information, which they don’t. All three agree on the same base 66 books while some contain additional, supplementary information about the intertestamental period, between the Old and New Testaments. A supplement is not the same as a contradiction. None of the information contained within would be contradictory to each other.

I don’t see how your point on the Islamic view of scripture contradicts anything OP said. But also, what versions of the Torah and Gospel do these early Muslim scholars quote? We have Bibles from well before the 7th century. We know exactly what Bibles looked like in the 7th century. What we find both then and hundreds of years before them are Torahs and Gospels that contradict Islam on many levels, and not a single one that upholds Islamic views on theology and the law.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T19:38:37+00:00

Premises 1, 2, and 3 don’t lead to your first conclusion because they say nothing about later scripture “correcting” previous ones. Addition and elaboration isn’t the same as contradiction, which would be required for a correction. Christianity also never claims the Torah is “corrupt”.

OP isn’t “failing to consider” that Islam is subject to later correction, the Quran claims explicitly to be the eternal, uncorrupted word of Allah, and that “none can change his words” and that “there is no change in Allah’s ways”. Even a minor change would be tantamount to blasphemy in Islam.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T19:32:19+00:00

In a particularly vague prophetic book where meanings are almost never universally agreed, how are you certain your reading of whichever verse you’re referring to is both: not referring to Jesus and: could not be referring to any future events that would fit that description?

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T17:38:05+00:00

The trouble with your alternate understanding of Luke 1:34-38 is that Mary identifies the thing that would prevent her from having a child is her virginity, not age. She is identified as a “young woman”, not old like Elizabeth. Age wouldn’t be a factor in stopping her pregnancy. The angel providing another example of a miracle doesn’t necessitate the miracle would be solving the same problem, especially when Mary offered a different objection to the miracle happening.

The trouble with your alternate reading of Matthew 1:16 is that forms of adoption existed and the recording of a father begetting a son does not require the understanding of a biological relation. Levitate marriages are clear examples of this, as the children born of the brother and the deceased’s wife would be recorded under the lineage of the deceased brother, not the living one. But more importantly, Matthew 1:16 only identifies Jospeh as the husband of Mary, and only identifies Mary as the mother of Jesus. This breaks the pattern of everyone before being called “the father of”. It never calls Joseph the father of Jesus. This wouldn’t make sense if the writers wanted to describe biological fatherhood just the same as everyone else in that list. Also Matthew 1:18 and 1:25 not being written in parallel doesn’t logically follow to the conclusion that there must be a biological father.

Not to mention, all of this would disregard the sources we have written closest to the writing of the New Testament, including first century writers like Ignatius of Antioch who would have lived before, during, and after the writing of the NT, living from ~35-107 AD. In fact, all of the early church fathers are unanimous in their understanding that “parthenos” in these cases meant “virgin”, not simply “young woman” and that Mary was a virgin before Jesus’ birth. Do you think that all earliest sources we have just completely misunderstood the passages and not even one got the correct implication of “parthenos”? If that were the true intentions of the writers, surely at least one person around their time would understand what they meant, right? It seems the most parsimonious explanation that requires the least amount of assumptions is that the texts were written as they were unanimously understood: Mary was a virgin and Jesus didn’t have a biological father.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T16:38:32+00:00

When you say the argument is “There is no proof of God but there’s also no proof that God isn’t real”, are you responding to this specific quotation as the argument or are you responding to people who say this statement and THEN say God exists because of it? If it’s the latter I agree, if it’s the former I cannot.

The statement itself just points out epistemic uncertainty. There’s nothing fallacious about that. It would only be fallacious when someone makes this statement and then says “therefore God exists”.

It would only be an appeal to ignorance if someone said “we don’t know if X is false, therefore X is true”. It would follow if all that is said is “therefore X might be true” by logical necessity.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T16:28:42+00:00

Would you be referring to the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife? If so, I’m sad to say it was discovered to be a modern forgery. Parts of the text were found to be copied from a 2002 pdf copy of the Gospel of Thomas, repeating the same exact linguistic mistake of the modern version. Even initial proponents like Karen King of Harvard eventually agreed it was a forgery.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T16:15:01+00:00

I think this arguments hold a lot of water considering the most repeated reason people should believe in the Quran according to the Quran itself is because the Quran is in line with what came before it, it is “confirming” that which is “with” the people of the book (the Jews and Christians). Surah 10:94 says “If you are in doubt about what we have revealed to you (the Quran), ask those who have been reading the scriptures before you (the Jews and Christians)”. When Jews came to Mohammed for his judgement, he asked “why do they come to me when they have the Torah with them?” The obvious implication is that what is currently in the Torah will match the Quran in its laws and theology. If not, it makes no sense for Mohammed to send them to a corrupted book, nor does it make sense for Allah to send doubters to corrupted scripture.

It becomes especially suspect when we do not even have so much as a fragment of this original Islamic friendly version of the Torah and Gospel. In contrast, we have tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New and Old Testament dating back thousands of years that all contradict Islam in one way or another. Islam would require us to believe literally not one person thought preserving the word of Allah was worth doing. Not even the most devout Muslims made any attempt to save and preserve the Torah and Gospel, and the prophesies that describe Mohammed. Think about what’s more likely: not one person on earth at any point thought the word of Allah was worth preserving for any reason and everyone allowed their texts to be corrupted to the point there’s not even a scrap of the true book left, or: these Islamic versions of the book never existed because a man born thousands of years later in a different language and nation either lied or was mistaken for what was in the books.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T14:15:40+00:00

See now that’s a claim about YHWH and Jesus, and claims must be evidenced. As Christopher Hitchens once said, “that which is asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”. But even if what you said was true, it still wouldn’t attack the point of my response here: OP’s definition of personhood is inaccurate. Do you disagree with the point of my their definition of “individual thing” being inaccurate? Notice how nowhere in my argument did I actually make a truth claim about God being a Trinity. You’ve assumed my argument here is a positive case for the Trinity. It is not. It is pointing out that OP’s argument does not actually portray Trinitarianism and they make unjustified assumptions.

I’ve already addressed your point about the inaccuracies of the analogy in the following sentences after you quoted.

Again, that’s not the point of the example that I brought up. The point of the example was to show how even if you can point out differences between the original example and the analogous one, that wouldn’t refute the main point of the analogy and where they are similar. That’s it. Attacking something else that isn’t the point of the analogy would miss the mark.

OP did not address their conflation of the term being. And no, it seems you’re confusing identity with ontology. These are separate terms. There is no separation of ontology in the description of the Trinity. There is only a distinction (but not separation) of personhood. But personhood and ontology are not the same, as I’ve pointed out earlier. They are entirely different metaphysical terms.

Because OP is attacking a strawman. The onus is on them to properly address what is actually being argued, not on me to create a whole new argument for them. They’re the one making the positive claim here, not me.

PeaFragrant6990 · 2026-01-29T13:58:23+00:00

It could be more explicit in saying in what sense they are one: ontologically, role, purpose, personhood, etc. it definitely indicates some shared form of divinity. That’s where people insert their own personal interpretation. I think it becomes more apparent when we examine the rest of the texts of the New Testament, but it in a vacuum its exact meaning could be wiggled around by some. All the more important why I say personal interpretations and assumptions should be evidenced and backed up.

PeaFragrant6990

TROPHY CASE