The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. After all, if the lottery was played by a billion people and yet only one of them won, that would surely be a mere accident, not evidence of cheating.
But there are things we may feel powerfully that can’t be examined in a 100% critical fact-based way.And those are often some of the most important things in life.If I may please, with all due respect and courtesy, kindly speak for yourself.I, speaking for myself, more than welcome that which you call a “tract.” For me it is not a tract, but, an honest and open sharing of thoughts and understandings by one very learned in matters of which I am most interested. Not Tracts. I cannot credibly assert these things if I cannot prove them from real and reliable evidence. In fact, the attempt by the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jews, which Ewen herself highlights, is itself strong evidence of a later date for composition of the gospels. joining in the mocking; and so on. Consider the recent, widespread phenomenon of "alien abductions." No one on the jury would accept this theory, nor should anyone ever believe itBut to go beyond that, to actually convict this engineer of fixing the evidence like this, Now imagine the defendant argued that the fingerprints were placed there by an angel from God. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s
We have every right to demand very good evidence indeed before we accept the Christian claim. That is only an example. Before you dismiss, please consider making a donation. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. The Gospel does not claim to be written by an eyewitness, and certainly not one named Matthew (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 274). In general, the destruction of a religiously important site only enhances its symbolic significance for believers.So it is fair to say that in the decades immediately following 70, the Temple, the Law, and the Levitical system remained prominent concepts in the religion of Diaspora Jews. From my perspective, “5 + 5 = 10” is a definition we give to signify our understanding of our perception of our observations as a group.How would we demonstrate that “5 + 5 = 10” is a fact if no one existed?Makes sense… but I’d say your work to help feed and clothe the needy can still be accurately called “christian” in some historical sense… in other words, you’re counted among the sheep rather than the goats… and that’s a good thing whether there’s an afterlife that accesses other dimensions or not…The call to be just and merciful, to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and treat the stranger as one’s own is found before Christianity in Judaism, not to say it originated there.And Jesus didnt even make up the two greatest commandments either (which are supposed to summarise his teachings. If Jesus appeared to me now and answered some of my questions, I would believe. We have never observed any evidence for any "disembodied being" or any person who was present "everywhere." However, more orthodox thinkers argue that rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell is tantamount to the rejection of the entire Christian revelation. I take life more seriously, push further, try harder, love more deeply, and cherish every moment because they’re fleeting and -poof- gone.This is not a bad life, Dr. Ehrman. Parenthetical references in the opening essay will refer the reader to the chapter number where the relevant points are elaborated and supported. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me.') They are in the truest sense of the term propaganda literature.
There is no reason the skeptic should accept such a burden for the simple reason that skeptics do not have to accept the appearance stories as 100 percent accurate. Needless to say, there is no basis for such an expectation.It is important to remember also that there were a number of early Christian communities, often in conflict and each with its own favored interpretation of Christ's message.