Your complaint that I snipped selectively from your posting and did not quote everything is unreasonable. If I quoted your entire posting and made my response, and then you quoted all of this and made your response, and then I quoted all of this and made my response, etc., soon we would be transmitting documents that no one would bother to wade through. This is why you should subscribe to Errancy. As a subscriber to the list, you can send your postings there, and I can then respond to whatever points I consider deserving of attention. However, your entire message will have been received by everyone on the list.
I don't know how much debating experience you have had, but anyone who has debated very much will tell you that an atheist simply cannot respond to every piddling assertion that an opponent makes. If the debate is timed, there isn't enough time to do this. If it is an untimed debate (as this presumably is), the responses would become too long to be manageable.
In this response, I am going to reply to just one paragraph that you had in your last posting. I am doing this (1) to keep our postings from becoming ridiculously long, and (2) to keep from aggravating my wrist by excessive typing. In your response, please keep your remarks confined to the point we are discussing; then when we have finished it, we can go on to another point.
TILL:
>I'll just put you on the spot. Prove that God's "son laid
>down is [sic] life to pay the 'wages of sin' for [me] before [I] was born."
> It's easy to quote scripture, but it isn't so easy to prove that what those
>scriptures teach is true. So let me see your proof that (1) Jesus was the
>son of God and (2) that his death paid "the wages of sin."
BRIGGS: <<You exclude the personal testimony (which is enough in todays [sic] courts) because you weren't alive to hear it. You exclude the Bible's documentation of those people's testimonies as fallacy. The only proof you allow anyone would be to shuttle you back and [sic] time and witness the events! You care not about the documented Roman slaughter of a man named Jesus, and then the amazing overthrow of a regiment of Roman Guards at his tomb (by fishermen...Fishermen took a trained squad of Roman killers and defeated them! What faith!) Yet you still acknowledge that this is 1995 years after the advent of Christ, you still use money IN GOD WE TRUST, you still attack his follwers [sic] who have survied[sic] despite persecution from most governments and other religions (including the medival [sic] slaughter of true Christians by the Catholic "church") Jesus was only on earth for 33 years, yet his impact has the momentum as if he was here yester day (he was). How much imperical [sic] evidence will you deny??! It goes on and on. It's pointless to attempt debate with you.>>
TILL: This will be the last time that I will [sic] you. I have been doing it only because you did it when I misspelled Midianite. From now on, I will ignore your spelling and grammatical mistakes unless you resume the war.
I exclude the so-called "personal testimony" that you alluded to for four reasons: (1) the bulk of it is not firsthand, eyewitness testimony; it is merely hearsay, and (2) the presumably firsthand testimony of Paul contains no details of Jesus's appearance to him and is highly mystical in nature, (3) the "testimony" is fabulous in nature, and (4) there is no corroborating testimony of any kind.
Here is why reasonable people can put no trust in this so-called "personal testimony": (1) once somebody SAYS that someone SAID something, it ceases to be testimony and becomes hearsay. You said that such testimony would be "enough in today's courts," but you surely know that hearsay testimony is unacceptable in court. Presumably Mary Magdalene saw the risen Jesus, but what firsthand testimony did she leave? Where is it? We could ask the same about the "testimony" of Salome, Joanna, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Peter, James, and the 500 brethren. Where is their firsthand testimony?
Paul and others in the NT said that Jesus appeared to these people, but when did he do it? Where did he do it? Who were the 500 anyway? Can you give the name of even one of these people? You're very mistaken in saying that this is testimony that would be "enough in today's courts."
(2) Paul gave no details of Jesus's appearance to him. He simply said that it happened. You cannot consider the accounts in the Book of Acts to be firsthand testimony, because they came to us through Luke. If we even consider them, we have to be fair and notice that they are contradictory: (A) one account says that the men with Paul heard the voice that spoke (Acts 9:7); another one says that the men with Paul did not hear the voice (Acts 22:9). [Go ahead and make your quibble about the case of "phono" in Greek and argue that the latter simply means that the men didn't understand the voice. I'm prepared to shoot it so full of holes that it'll sink faster than a ton of lead.] (B) One account says that the men with Paul remained standing while the voice was speaking (Acts 9:7); another account says that they fell to the ground (Acts 26:14). Besides, the problem of contradictions in these hearsay accounts, we must also consider the absurdity of what is being claimed. Paul saw Jesus on this occasion (presumably), but the men with him saw no one. So this puts you in the position of believing the claim that while he was in the company of others, Paul saw Jesus but nobody with Paul saw Jesus. You may consider that reliable "proof," but I don't. If someone who had been in the company of others said today that he had seen Elvis Presley but no one in his company had seen Presley, how much confidence would you have in such testimony?
(3) All of this testimony about miracles, a three-hour period of darkness at noon, an earthquake that resurrected "many saints," the resurrection of Jesus, the teleportation of Jesus from one location to another, the ability to pass through solid doors, etc., etc., etc.--all of this is so extraordinary that no rational person can believe it without better evidence than the kind I have discussed above. During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Josephus reported that a heifer being led to the altar in the temple gave birth to a lamb; he reported that a bright light shined about the altar in the middle of the night and gave the appearance of daylight; he reported that the people in Jerusalem saw armored soldiers and chariots in the clouds surrounding the city (Wars of the Jews, Book 6, Chapter 5, Section3). I doubt if you believe any of this, and you reject it for the same reason I do. It is too fantastic to believe without better proof than the "personal testimony" of a man who lived in highly superstitious times.
(4) There is no evidence from contemporary writers to corroborate any of the fabulous claims that the biased writers of the NT documents made for Jesus. He was presented as a great miracle-worker who was followed by great multitudes from as far away as Syria (Matt. 4:24-25; Mark 3:7-8), yet no contemporary nonbiblical writers even mentioned the man. Some events associated with Jesus would have been so fantastic that others would have taken note of them and left us some record. The darkness "over all the land" that Matthew, Mark, and Luke reported while Jesus was on the cross would be an example of what I mean. If the darkness was over "all the land," then surely it was more than just a darkness over Jerusalem, so why didn't contemporary nonbiblical writers refer to it? Desperate inerrantists try to find a reference to this in the works of a 3rd-century writer named Julius Africanus, who referred to someone who may have been named "Thallus" who made a reference to an eclipse that may have been a reference to this darkness, but this is certainly not convincing evidence. The works of "Thallus" are no longer extant, so we don't know exactly what his statement may have been.
The fact is, Mr. Briggs, that no contemporary nonbiblical writer made a single reference to this man Jesus you believe in so fervently. You can point to vague references by 2nd-century historians, like Tacitus, but these cannot be considered firsthand, eyewitness testimony and are probably no more than references to what Christians of the time were known to believe. You cannot cite a single example of any non-Christian writer contemporary to Jesus who wrote that he actually saw the man or heard one of his sermons or witnessed one of his miracles or saw him after the alleged resurrection. You can cite no references to any Roman records that would verify that the man Jesus was ever crucified. So your proof that is "enough for today's courts" turns out to be no proof at all.
BRIGGS: <<You care not about the documented Roman slaughter of a man named Jesus, and then the amazing overthrow of a regiment of Roman Guards at his tomb (by fishermen...Fishermen took a trained squad of Roman killers and defeated them! What faith!)>>
Would you please clarify this statement? What do you mean by "the documented Roman slaughter of a man named Jesus"? What documentation are you talking about? Do you mean the gospel accounts? No serious biblical scholars considers these the works of eyewitnesses. So I can't comment on this until I understand what you are claiming. And what exactly do you mean by "the amazing overthrow of a regiment of Roman Guards at his tomb (by fisherman...)"? I don't even know of anything in the NT that would support a claim that this had happened. Only Matthew mentions a Roman guard, and according to his record, they were scared away from the tomb by the appearance of an angel. So I need clarification.
In your next response, please confine yourself to rebutting my counterarguments delineated above.
Farrell Till