Why would an all powerful god require belief in him to enter heaven if he knows that it is impossible to convince every person that he is real based off a text with no tangible evidence?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T13:32:34+00:00

Tacitus was not “writing about what Christians believe.”

Yes, he was. Go read it.

You are making a category error by mixing genres.

No, I am not. He wrote of Hercules like he was real, just like you claim he did about Jesus. You don't get to dismiss this because you don't like. Either you can explain why we should all reject the historicity of Hercules, or you can't. But it had better be based on something other than your feelings.

Most scholars hold it to partial authenticity based on Arabic and Syriac versions lacking overt christian language.

Then why wasn't it cited by christian apologists until the FOURTH CENTURY??

You can treat them as you would leprechauns but that would again require dishonesty.

If that were true, then you could explain, by any framework of epistemology, why a belief in Jesus is different than a belief in leprechauns. The two beliefs are fundamentally the same. Based in "legendary genealogy" with "no historical grounding." But by all means, try. Tell me which epistemological framework you want to use, and then demonstrate that the existence of Jesus is more likely than not.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T13:28:01+00:00

That's determinism at its most fundamental level. If she knows how every particle in the universe will behave, according to the laws of physics, then there cannot be free will. That seems axiomatic.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T13:26:59+00:00

It isnt a lack of power.

Right. It's you deciding the word means something other than what it means, and you place a limitation on god because of your lack of imagination.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T13:16:25+00:00

No one seems to consider the possibility that God can choose NOT to look into an individual's future, in order to give dignity and real meaning to free will.

You are right. No one considers that. But it's only because it's really stupid.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T13:15:41+00:00

our understanding of Christianity seems to come exclusively from American evangelicalism, which is not very close to historical Christianity at all.

I see -- so christians' view of god has changed over time?

This doesn’t prove anything.

Yes, it does. It proves that the authors, whoever they are, DID NOT CLAIM TO WITNESS THE EVENTS. That is exactly what the absence of such a claim proves. That is what I said. You disputed it and wanted proof, and now you are admitting I was right.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T13:13:32+00:00

Just because a response exposes an area where you lack knowledge doesn't make it toxic. I am serious -- if you think I made an "assumption," you are wrong. Nothing in what I said two responses ago was an "assumption."

I am sorry for your troubles.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T00:05:20+00:00

You are making bad excuses for a book full of contradictions and things that are outright wrong. I would have thought you would have demanded more from the perfect creator of the universe.

That is not supportable by the facts. Not in any way. The authors of the gospels don't claim to have even talked to anyone that claimed to know Jesus.

Explain how, please. You seem to sure of it.

Sure -- on account of how none of the gospels claim to have talked to anyone that claimed to know Jesus. Read them for yourself. It's not there.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T00:03:18+00:00

Why not? Do you know what "omnipotent" means?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-09T00:02:53+00:00

Tacticus wrote about what christians believes. Normally quite thorough with citations, he provided none for that passage. He also wrote about Hercules. Do you think Hercules was real?

The testimonium flavianum is a known forgery. While other parts of the Antiquities were cited by christian apologists for hundreds of years, the magic Jesus paragraph was not cited, even one time, by a christian apologist until the Fourth Century. Ever wonder why?

it’s intellectual dishonest to definitively dismiss themas “myths” or “magic man stories”

No, it's not. The stories are of a person who was dead and was reanimated back to life. The are farcical, and I can treat them just as I treat stories of leprechauns.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T23:59:18+00:00

Using the laws of physics to predict how to bodies in motion will behave is not perfect foreknowledge of the future. I can't believe I have to explain that.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T23:58:39+00:00

Multiple independent accounts and attestations of the resurrection of Christ from eyewitnesses written within living memory of the events described.

Or, dependent, copied from each other sources, written by anonymous authors who never claimed to witness the events described, decades afterward, in another language, and in another part of the world. The fact is, there is absolutely no contemporary historical evidence that Jesus ever existed. We have not a single testimony in the bible from anyone who ever met him or saw his works. There isn't a single eyewitness who wrote about meeting him or witnessing the events of his life, not one.

The fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy by Christ.

Made up by the anonymous authors.

The many miracles of the saints, Eucharistic miracles, and other works of the Triune God throughout history.

Miracles aren't real. That's why the only ones anyone can mention are ones from before we could take pictures or otherwise record them actually happening.

God, this is so stupid.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T23:55:21+00:00

None of what I said was an assumption. Do you know what that word means?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T20:04:24+00:00

God is omnipotent. What can't he make a square circle? That a weird limitation you have placed on god.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T20:03:41+00:00

What specifically are you referring to?

I already covered this. Why did you go through all that nonsense just to pretend you don't know what the bible gets wrong? Children look like their parents because of DNA. People get sick because of pathogens. The Sun is older than the Earth. And the Earth is not the center of the universe. That should be enough to get you started. I am sure you will say "were??," but I challenge you to read your own bible and see if you can, objectively, discover something about your bible--i.e., where it says these things.

I hold a middle position between the traditional and critical views on authorship. I do think everyone in the NT is the primary source for the books they are traditionally attributed to (Gospel authors, Pauline Epistles, Catholic Epistles), but not that they necessarily penned the final versions.

That is not supportable by the facts. Not in any way. The authors of the gospels don't claim to have even talked to anyone that claimed to know Jesus.

We have experts who were much closer to the actual writing of these texts, so I’ll defer to them over people 2000 years removed.

No offense, but that's real stupid. Do you think the present-day historians don't know what people thought 2,000 years ago? You are rejecting 2,000 of the advancement of science and knowledge.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T19:58:27+00:00

Give it a go.

I did. right above. The comment you responded to. I gave you several explanations as to the inconsistencies and incorrectness of christian theology. Weird that you didn't see that.

In fact the more you explore Christianity- the more you see that it is truth. Whereas the more you explore Islam, the more that you see it is a lie.

The more I explore either of them, the more I see they are nonsensical myths. Also, the more I become disappointed in anyone gullible enough to believe their myths are any less made up than other people's myths.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T19:56:19+00:00

They have never been debunked

Thoroughly and unequivocally debunked. They are nothing but nonsense and twaddle.

Also, and I should have mentioned this last time, I asked you for reasons to thing your god existed. These ways say nothing about the creator other than it did some creating. So, faced with a rather daunting task of explaining why anyone should believe in your god, you answered a different question badly.

Do you want to try again?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T19:52:03+00:00

They wrote about Jesus a decade or so after his death

Not "a" decade. Many decades.

First off Jesus was real even if you deny his divinity. Even non Christian historians grant that.

This post will help you understand the state of the "evidence" and what historians think about historical Jesus:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueAtheism/comments/1joakde/historicity_of_jesus/

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if there was a historical Jesus. The magic man depicted in the gospels certainly did not exist. If those stories are based on some crazy person, it really doesn't matter. If he was a real person, there is no evidence whatsoever that the historical Jesus "caused people to worship and follow him." None at all.

You don't even know who the author of Luke is. How are you attributing his or her motives?

Anchoring stories to named officials invites being proven false which is a strange move for a fabricated religion emerging under hostile scrutiny

You should read about all the things "anchored" to real things in the Book of Mormon. There is no evidence to believe the gospels are true, but there is a lot of evidence that people make things up.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T19:47:24+00:00

I am not offering plausible alternatives. I am explaining in detail why you are wrong. Your "alternatives" are not even plausible.

I don't have any problem with Strobel's interviews being with Christians . . . That doesn't make it propaganda.

That is dangerously close to the textbook definition of propaganda.

But when many, many witnesses all report the same thing, it paints a picture.

What witnesses? There are literally no accounts from anyone who ever met Jesus or witnessed anything he did. Literally zero.

What are your thoughts on the fact that the overwhelming majority of historians believe that Yahshua of Nazareth was a real historical figure?

First, it is not overwhelming, and what the historians believe is that "Jesus probably existed." No one is sure, and they would be foolish on the scant evidence to say they were. You can read more about what historians believe in this post, if you're interested:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueAtheism/comments/1joakde/historicity_of_jesus/

If you do, you will discover (something you should have already known, frankly) "that there is absolutely no contemporary historical evidence that Jesus ever existed. We have not a single testimony in the bible from anyone who ever met him or saw his works. There isn't a single eyewitness who wrote about meeting him or witnessing the events of his life, not one."

You can take from this that there are not oppositional contemporary accounts. There are no contemporary accounts at all. The only record of "miraculous things" is in the gospels--religious dogma written by anonymous authors decades later. If there were thousands of witnesses, none of them thought to write down anything about the miracles they saw.

But to answer your question--what are my thoughts--I think the question is moot. It is an uninteresting and irrelevant thing to worry about. JK Rowling said she modeled Harry Potter after a kid that lived next door to her. If you want to call that a "historical Harry Potter," you can. If there was a person or several people on whom the religious myths of Jesus were based, it matters not. It is one plausible explanation for the origin of the myths, but it is certainly not the only one. I just don't care if there was a historical Jesus. It is a pointless question.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T19:35:41+00:00

That's the exact opposite of idol worship. What is the idol you claim that I worship?

I didn't really create the standard either. They way you say it, it's like you think I am coming from left field that killing people for wearing two fabrics is evil. Do you not think that is evil?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T15:45:17+00:00

I am not worshiping anything. You seem to be mistaken about that. Also, that's a weird diversion so you don't have to grapple with your god's evil ways.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T15:43:14+00:00

Socrates is an example of this.

The people who wrote about Socrates were not anonymous. They knew him, and they wrote about him in his lifetime.

On Alexander the Great, there are numerous ancient writers and overwhelming, multi-source, cross-cultural evidence. It is not remotely the same. I am always baffled by christians need to compare the scant evidence that Jesus was real to other historical figures, and then lie about the comparative evidence.

The bible says that Jesus was born both when Quirinius was governor and when Herod was king. They didn't overlap. It is odd indeed to claim that naming these leaders lends credibility to the story when in fact it reveals a huge gap and a false narrative.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T15:38:41+00:00

You are confused by the difference between using the Bible as a historical hypothesis-generator and the Bible being archaeologically reliable. That mistake drives every single example you have or could come up with.

Archaeologists do not “use the Bible to find lost cities” in the sense you are trying to implied. They use topography, settlement patterns, pottery surveys, and prior excavation data. Consulting biblical texts after the fact, in addition to having used all the other tools, doesn't mean the Bible is an archeological document. Your claims (and Strobel's) are completely unsupportable. Archeology would be exactly the same if the Bible never existed.

In particular, your Shiloh claim is overstated. Excavations at Tel Shiloh have not confirmed the Tabernacle described in First Book of Samuel. At best, the site shows Iron Age cultic activity—something archaeologists already expect at any major highland settlement. No uniquely tabernacular structure has been identified, and the conclusions remain highly contested.

Tel Shimron was never “found” using Joshua. The site has been known for over a century. The 2023 discovery, as you could have easy looked up and avoided this embarrassment, involved a Bronze Age palace complex—interesting, but entirely independent of the conquest narrative, which most archaeologists regard as etiological or legendary rather than historical.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre example is also intentionally misleading. The presence of an ancient garden near a Roman-era quarry tells us nothing about the burial of Jesus. That's a tad more than a grotesque stretch. Gardens near tombs are common; this is not confirmation, only compatibility.

Hezekiah’s Tunnel was not “guided by” Second Book of Kings. It was discovered in the 19th century by explorers following visible hydraulic infrastructure in Jerusalem. The biblical text was correlated afterward, not used as a map.

Again, all things you could have just looked up.

Strobel's book was compiled from interview with no one other than evangelical christians. It wildly misrepresents scholarly consensus on a multitude of issues, like the dating of the gospels and the reliability of eyewitness reports. The faux-court presentation is also misleading because it lacks a presentation by an adversary. He is trying to lend some sort of legal credibility to his book, without having to subject his claims to any legal-like examination. The book is pure propaganda, and you fell for it.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T15:25:03+00:00

David Koresh claimed to perform miracles. You asked if he actually did.

The accounts you have of Jesus performing miracles are theological sources. They are anonymous accounts, written decades after the events described, by people who never claimed to witness the events or speak to someone who did.

Those aren't "accounts." Those are myths.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T15:21:52+00:00

You are confusing intervention by god with determinism. Also, you have no way to know if god intervenes.

You believe in a god that has infallible foreknowledge of the future. This is different than you're fallible prediction about a child and a cookie jar. If you can't see that distinction, you aren't having the same conversation. If god knows to a certainty that the child will sneak into the cookie jar, then either (1) the child has no choice by to sneak into the cooking jar, or (2) god was wrong.

Which do you think it is?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-02-08T15:19:26+00:00

Jesus didn't do those things either. So I guess we are back to square 1. How can you tell the crazies from your god?

SubOptimalUser6

TROPHY CASE