So I thought about this in the shower amd it makes sense to me, like praying and stuff never worked for most people I know, so a direkt link to god gotta be unlikely. That made me conclude that religion is probably fake, no matter if there’s a god or not. Also people speaking to the same god being given a different set of rules sounds stupid, so at least most religions must be fake.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      5 months ago

      Obviously… sort of. Fascists hate him for bucking authority, neoliberals too bc how dare He prioritize anything at all over profit - like why take care of the poor when you can (literally) fuck them over, even use them as slaves?

      Though I would think the word that they would take issue with would be the “great” part rather than the “universally agree” - they can all see who He is, bc His actions made that plain leaving no room for doubt (like He could be a loon but… whatever the reasoning, at least He lived authentically according to whatever principles He expoused) - they just don’t agree that those properties are themselves what they want to see put into the world.

      • frog_brawler@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        There’s no evidence that Jesus ever existed at all; so for a lot of people, they’re indifferent.

          • Uruanna@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Notice how it says people agree but doesn’t say there is any evidence.

            The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death, and it’s only people saying “these guys say there was a dude a while back” , second hand comments, no living first hand account.

            • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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              5 months ago

              The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death

              Not really even “letters”. But literally 2 accounts. One we’re attributing doesn’t even mention the correct name at the time. Jesus was often referenced as Yoshua at the time… So why the fuck did the account call him James? And the second account doesn’t mention a name at all.

              Edit: I need to clarify something since my phrasing is self-defeating (on purpose)… “often referenced as Yoshua at the time” as believed by biblical scholars who are almost universally religious. But the point remains. If the information we have now doesn’t line up with what the accounts state (or the bible)… then how much of this shit is just made up bullshit?

              And the 2 accounts are Tacitus (116 AD)

              Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius

              and Josephus Flavius (95 AD)

              Testimonium Flavianum
              About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ.

              And by the way… Josephus’ account is under heavy scrutiny and is general considered unreliable at best… and downright forgery at worst. The wiki articles linked are a good read and well sourced.

              A really damning case in my opinion is:

              that although twelve Christian authors refer to Josephus before Eusebius in AD 324, none mentions the Testimonium.

              So other early authors that were Christian referenced Josephus works, but ignore the one that actually mentions Jesus directly? That seems odd no? Almost like the work was fabricated AFTER 324AD.

            • Eheran@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Scholars agree on stuff there is no evidence for…? What? Did you even read the article?

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              5 months ago

              That’s literally what first-hand evidence is: an account from someone who met someone irl - e.g. John, Peter, Luke, Mark, etc.

              Also in that historical context, the fact that there are letters at all is somewhat astounding, if Jesus were just some rando. At the very least they seemed to think that He was important.

              The letters were not written until later though - b/c why would they be, if you had John + Peter + Luke + Mark all in one room, why would they be writing texts / emails / chats at one another? They still wrote it within their lifetime though, so “a whole generation after his death” is disingenuous - time passed, but those people who met Jesus were still alive, and wrote the letters, thus making them first-hand recordings of fact.

              Not that I’m advocating that you become a Christian over all of this, just wanting to get that part of the story straight:-).

              • Uruanna@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.

                • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                  5 months ago

                  The gospels were dictated to someone who physically wrote the words down…

                  Oh wait, no I see the problem. Yeah at some point early scholars did get the timeline wrong and thought that the gospels were written 60 rather than 30 years after the death of Jesus. But there are TONS of holes in that theory - e.g. why not mention that the Jewish Temple had been torn down, which is like the largest event for them for thousands of years? I thought that this has been more or less universally debunked, but I could not swear to that especially for it to have permeated throughout the entire world.

                  Wikipedia both backs me up on that one point:

                  Most scholars agree that they are the work of unknown Christians[49] and were composed c.65-110 AD.[50]

                  While in the very next sentence also debunking my claim that they are first-hand accounts:

                  The majority of New Testament scholars also agree that the Gospels do not contain eyewitness accounts;[51] but that they present the theologies of their communities rather than the testimony of eyewitnesses.[52][53]

                  So if we use that article as a surrogate for “world-wide consensus”, then it sounds like we both need to read up on our knowledge of this theology:-D. I for one am fascinated - does this mean that those “first-hand accounts” were merely written in the style of a first-hand account, but also including someone in the community who really was there (they would have been about 60 years old at that point?) - at which point, what is the difference, really? - or… maybe the people were older & feeble (in their 70s?), so merely the result of prior conversations with them over the course of a few years?

                  • Uruanna@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

                    I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.

                  • frog_brawler@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    The majority of New Testament scholars people with an inherent pro-christian bias, that have dedicated their professional and academic lives to their religion, also agree that the Gospels do not contain eyewitness accounts;[51] but that they present the theologies of their communities rather than the testimony of eyewitnesses.[52][53]…

              • frog_brawler@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                That’s a new creative way to “tell me you didn’t read the link; without telling me you didn’t read the link.”

                EDIT: Check the sources on these wikipedia articles… Every citation is from an author that has already made up their mind, and is writing for a similar audience. There’s an obvious pro-religion bias within every citation.

          • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Of course, because a prophet named Jesus may have existed. Jesus was a popular name and being a “prophet” was a popular career at that time. There were probably thousands of them running around.

            Now the biblical Jesus? No, there is absolutely zero evidence he existed.

            • Eheran@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That is literally what the article is about and you still try to twist things to make sure this one specific person never existed. But why?