• 3 Posts
  • 234 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle









  • Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere

    The cost would thousand of trillions at least, in fact it may cost more money to do something like that than currently exists. We can barely fund NASA.

    Frankly if humanity ever could get together politically to allocate enough resources to do anything like this, Im fairly sure a few greedy billionaires would stick most of those public funds in their pockets, and we’d end up with nothing at the end.

    Im sorry to say Im pretty pessimistic about us as a species getting anywhere. Hell we’re 80 year out from WW2 and still struggling to control fascism.





  • Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion, which suggests that Tacitus was repeating an urban myth whose source was likely the Christians themselves,[3]:344 especially since Tacitus was writing at a time when at least the three synoptic gospels are thought to already have been in circulation.

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tacitus

    According to Bart Ehrman, Josephus’ passage about Jesus was altered by a Christian scribe, including the reference to Jesus as the Messiah

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus

    Scholars have differing opinions on the total or partial authenticity of the reference in the passage to the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate.[15][30] The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic.

    Respected Christian scholar R. T. France, for example, does not believe that the Tacitus passage provides sufficient independent testimony for the existence of Jesus [Franc.EvJ, 23] and agrees with G. A. Wells that the citation is of little value

    A. The first line of the Tacitus passage says Chrestians, not Christians.

    Suetonius says Chrestus was personally starting trouble in Rome during the reign of Claudius.

    Suetonius is writing years after Tacitus yet doesn’t mention that Chrestus died.

    So Chrestus can’t be Jesus because it’s the wrong decade, wrong continent and missing a death.

    B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.

    P.S. Even if the second line was somehow authentic, the information would have come from Christians. This would be the equivalent of deriving Abraham’s biography by talking to Muslims.

    This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.

    In the immortal words of Christopher Hitchens, if this is all you got, you are holding an empty bag.


  • There are lots of people now today who claim to be god, claim to be jesus, claim to have magic powers. so it would appear this is just normal human behavior and has been for a very long time. But the main reason people continue to believe these ancient holy books and all the stories in them is literally because they are protected from inquiry. So Jeff down the street claims to be jesus? We can go test him and try to falsify his claims. But some guy 2000 years ago, ya its not possible to check that one out. And That is why they persist, its by design.