People aren't giving up their lives for this belief, as the first century Christians did.

Any valid historical explanation of the sudden rise of Christianity needs to explain certain historical facts:

1. Jesus' burial in a tomb
2. The discovery of the empty tomb
3. Postmortem appearances of the risen Jesus by the disciples, groups of other people and non-believers 4. The origin of the first Christians belief that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Most historians (not just Christians) agree with the four facts above.

The only point of contention is the best explanation of those facts.

I'm only speaking about the historicity of the four facts above.

That level of sophistication in the analysis of claims explains just about everything, from spoon bending and vampires to the beliefs of the Heaven's Gate group and the golden plates given to Joseph Smith by God himself.

Why don't you read the short essays I suggested above and perhaps a real miracle will occur in the form of you realizing that the gospels are only a tool of propaganda based on a handful of biased, uncritical , unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses accounts.

Do you really think that the creator of the universe would wait more than 100 thousand years since the arrival of homo sapiens and then give his all-important message to a tiny group that couldn't even write it down clearly so even 2000 years later people would still be arguing the fine points of what, how and why it actually happened, and in many cases killing and dying trying to defend their own interpretation of such message ?

Something is either evidence or it's not.

<People giving up their lives for their religious beliefs as proof that their beliefs may be right?.>

As I said to mort, <Any valid historical explanation of the sudden rise of Christianity needs to explain certain historical facts:

As I told mort,

<I'm only speaking about the historicity of the four facts above.

In case he gets up the nerve and actually engages with me, here is his post:

<thegoodanarchist: < Clemens Scheitz: ...

Now, if someone has seen minutes 6 to 12 of the link I posted earlier, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76Y..., and cares to comment about the usefulness of the Kalam Cosmological Argument to support the existence of the God of classical theism, I would like very much to read about it.>

I watched it. It was good.>

If you've got me on ignore, you can't post here because we can't converse. If you want to converse then you need to go back and forth with me, and you can't do that on ignore.

Er, no, sorry. You <were> on my ignore list, but I saw some interesting comments from <Clemens> and <Mort> and so I took everyone off of my ignore list to read the thread.

Do you actually think I would try to read a thread with at least 2 of the posters' comments omitted? I can only assume you have never tried that yourself, or else you think I am insane.

<In case he gets up the nerve>

Really? You think it is a lack of nerve that keeps people from engaging with you? No. When you are ready for the real reasons, and have a thick enough skin to accept the feedback, I will tell you them.

< and actually engages with me, here is his post:>

So, let's get this straight - you delete my post, then you repost it? This type of behavior is suggestive of a person on a power trip.

But hey, you paid your annual dues so you may as well have your fun.

<If you've got me on ignore, you can't post here because we can't converse. If you want to converse then you need to go back and forth with me, and you can't do that on ignore.>

I hope any conversation we have in the future won't be a tedious restatement of the obvious, the way you did here.

<My forum isn't a bathroom wall for cowards.>

More evidence in support of <Clemens'> assertion that you have a superiority complex (although he didn't mention you by name). To wit, you don't know enough about me to evaluate my bravery or lack thereof, yet you assume that you can do so.

1. Anything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. The universe has a cause for its existence. >

1. is an unverified assumption. Its flaw is similar in nature to the flaw of atheism, surprisingly.

Atheism is basically a belief that God does not exist, however it is a universal negative and therefore unverifiable.

I have never been to Argentina - how do I know that God is not in Argentina?

Anything that begins to exist has a cause? Well, probably. But neither I nor anyone else has investigated everything that exists, and why it does, so how can we know for sure?

Yeah, probably the existence of the Universe is causal, but it has not been established with complete certainty that <everything> that exists has a cause, so we cannot be certain that the Universe has a cause.

So you only care about the bits in the Bible that you are prepared to believe. The bits you are not prepared to believe you discard.

That's assuming extraordinary claims were made at the time rather than retrospectively. But even if they were made at the time, why should they precipitate vehement denials? Seems to me you are projecting modern skepticism onto on age that was far more superstitious.

<Where's the negative responses to the claims of the resurrection?>

If I didn't already know you are politically conservative, your supreme overconfidence in your ability to assess something about which you know very little, or nothing, would tell me immediately - Republican.>

Ok look, this long post is just an attack on me. It's not on topic. Either get on topic or I'll just delete this stuff and you can put me back on ignore.

There will be order in this forum and I'll just delete your off topic rants.

Your next comment here is about religion or philosophy or it gets tossed in the garbage. If you want to write a four paragraph post telling me what a jerk I am that's fine, but not here.

Here you post your counter arguments or on topic thoughts or you don't post at all. Period.

But feel quite free to disagree with my positions as strongly as you like.

BP and myself were having a perfectly amicable intelligent informative discussion in this forum covering topics such as Joseph of Arimathea, the empty tomb, independent NT sources, the apocryphal Gospel of Peter etc, and then along come atheist bovver boys CM & CS to trash the place!

These radical godless atheists are as ignorant as they are rude!

It's completely impossible trying to explain the Bible or Christianity to them because their minds are completely closed off to anything other than what feeds their own innate prejudices.

Despite my repeated attempts to convey to CM a proper understanding of the Bible, he stubbornly continues to blather on about Adam & Eve as if that is in any way relevant to what BP and myself were talking about.

These radical fundamentalist atheists can't stand to see an intelligent discussion being conducted about Christianity so they jump in with their disingenuous polemic intending only to disrupt the conversation.

Anything that begins to exist has a cause? Well, probably. But neither I nor anyone else has investigated everything that exists, and why it does, so how can we know for sure?>

Tga, you are appealing to old line verificationism. This is about 80 years out of date and modern philosophers don't use this kind of argument anymore. It went out with its twin brother Logical Positivism.

The reason is that verificationism itself is self defeating. Verificationism says that only those statements that can be empirically verified have meaning, but the problem is that this statement can't be empirically verified! It's not a scientific statement itself.

Philosophers of science have moved past verificationism because it raised the bar as to which statements are meaningful too high. It made it so that virtually no statements could be considered meaningful and actually worked to undermine science.

Furthermore, absolute certainty isn't the criterion for knowledge.

For all these reasons verificationism died out almost 75 years ago and gave way to a permutation called the falsification principle, which was championed by Antony Flew (the world's 'most notorious atheist') at the Oxford University Symposium on theology and falsification in 1948 in his famous story about the "undetected gardener". The idea, if you know the story or are familiar with the history of philosophical thought in the mid twentieth century, is that if a statement can't be falsified in theory then the statement is meaningless (close to verificationism), but not false. Flew tried to show this by telling a story about two explorers who found a patch of flowers in a garden in the woods. They began to argue about whether or not there was a gardener, but no matter how hard they looked they couldn't detect him.

But this view failed because the two explorers that were looking for the undetected gardener (God), were in disagreement about the merits of the Gardener hypothesis and this shows that the statement had meaning after all. That's a long story made short.

So to conclude, both verificationism and the falsification principle (what your objection is based on) ran into two problems:

1. It was too restrictive and would wipe out vast tracts of obviously meaningful discourse, including scientific statements.

2. The principle is self refuting.

The inadequacies of these principles led to a total collapse of logical positivism during the second half of the century.

Because it's in the Bible.

How do you know the Bible is true?

The approach that interests me is the historical one. I find the arguments from natural theology to be pretty convincing as a cumulative case, and the historicity of the resurrection is one of those arguments.

I'm not looking at the bible as an inspired text. I'm treating it just as we would treat any historical document or collection of documents, and asking whether or not there is a good historical case for the resurrection, and I think that a good case has been made.

Because it describes the resurrection.>

Exactly. This is the reason the historical approach interests me so much. It doesn't rely on things like biblical inerrancy, which would be a circular argument as your example shows.