Who are happier -- Christians or Atheists?

Quote: Evenbob

People use god as a crutch. They have no reason
not to misbehave, except god won't like it and
that scares them. Take the crutch away from them
and they aren't grounded anymore, they had no
solid base in their upbringing except god will
'punish' you if you do wrong. Secular morality
doesn't use threats to keep people in line, they know
it comes naturally to humans, no god the punisher
is needed.

Sorry for the onslaught of posts, but I finished a long week and have a little bit of time before the weekend Masses.

Let me ask you if you consider the law a crutch? Why do we need laws to not commit murder for example? Are these laws only written for Christians who need an extra crutch in case the eternal judgement and possible punishment of God was not enough? Or are laws in the secular world the crutch we need to keep people in line? Do you think we could do just fine if we got rid of all laws and punishments, except for Christians of course?

Quote: FrGamble

It is amazing anyone believed that He was truly risen. .

That's because they didn't. It's what the
urban legend morphed into. 'And they
knew he was truly risen', or so the legend
says.

Imagine living in a time when there were
no newspapers, no magazines, no media
at all. No libraries, no books to check out,
no almanacs or encyclopedias. Every bit
of news you got was by unreliable word
of mouth.

I talked before of Candid Camera. They
would tell a story to someone and they
would tell it as accurately as possible
to someone else. The 2nd person would
tell it to a 3rd. By the time it got to the
5th, the story was almost nothing like
the original.

Imagine 2000 years ago. By the time of
the umteenth telling, Jesus was god and
the real details were lost forever.

Another perfect example of an atheist exaggeration. Were the disciples playing a game of telephone? If you didn't understand would you ask for clarification? We're Christians only allowed to say their message once and never repeat it? Could they not correct someone who said the wrong thing? Of course not. They lived in a culture that was very orally based for communication. Messages were taken seriously, repeated continually, corrected if needed, and accurately passed on. Forgive me, but your comparison to a game of telephone is more laughable than Candid Camera ever was.

Quote: FrGamble

Could they not correct someone who said the wrong thing?

Which would be pretty much everyone. Word
of mouth is the absolute worst way to preserve
a story. All you ever end up with is a legend,
which bears little or no resemblance to what
really happened. Couple that with the fact that
nothing was written down for decades, and you
have about a zero percent chance for accuracy.

Native Americans had oral traditions in their
tribes. Stories handed down from generation
to generation. They ended up being all myth
and legend, just like story of Jesus. As I said,
in modern times it's a big problem because
Christians have to keep insisting everything is
a fact, when it's obvious that it's not. It was
easy to fool an ignorant and uneducated public,
but those days are long gone.

Quote: FrGamble

Your premise included the word often.

That's a small difference. Given billions upon billions of unresurrected dead people, saying "people resurrect" and "people resurrect often" are equally false. It's kind of like saying 2+2= 5 and 2+2= ten trillion are equally false.

Quote:

Your premise of "Dead people never resurrect. Ever." is again not only false but beginning with a conclusion.

A conclusion based on the collective observations of tens of billions of deaths, none of which can be proved to have resulted in a resurrection.

The premise "The Sun rises always in the East" is also a conclusion based on observation.

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No, unlike everyone else at the time this band of Israelites with their impossible claim of the Resurrection changed the world.

Constantine by inexplicably embracing Christianity changed the world. But I'll concede they contributed to it.

It still makes not a single claim of theirs true.

Quote:

Why did Jesus stick?

Because his ideas proved popular.

Let me give you an example: a roman emperor, such as Justinian I, could promote himself by building a large, monumental temple and gain in piety and, ironically, humility, by doing so. This, mind you, after brutally suppressing a riot by massacring as many rioters as his thugs could manage. Then he was free to engage in disastrous wars of conquest.

A pre-Christian emperor, such as Nero, would have had to be twice as brutal towards his own people after a massacre like that, which would have left him no time, money or man-power to pursue conquests.

So much easier to build a magnificent church, right? The debt incurred will be the next guy's problem, and he'll also be remembered fondly for providing jobs. Much more civilized to be uncivilized under Christianity.

Hey, you asked.

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Oh so now is where the sheer number of examples leads to proof. Interesting you would go there. Anyway, we are talking about a miracle here, see below.

This is not about popularity but fact. How many people do you suppose would resurrect if it were possible? And still all people die and none have resurrected. The point is not what they think or believe, but what happened to them.

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The resurrection would be a miracle and something that would not only reverse the effects of death but transform our lowly bodies into glorious ones that no longer suffer decay, sickness, age, etc.

And it would also make Julienne fries?

Every religion claims miracles. You dismissed the resurrection of Osiris, a god, out of hand. Do you not believe he was reassembled by his wife years after his murder and resurrected? Why not? Millions of Egyptians believed it for 3,200 years. Why would so many people believe something for so long if it wasn't true? Why would you doubt the power of the goddess Ist, or her devotion and love for her husband?

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This is one of the modern arguments to explain the resurrection, but it is not at all my claim.

Too bad, because that would have a slim chance of being true.

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My guess is J. Anthony Blair

No idea who that is, even after a brief Google search (on Yahoo! Did you know you can Google on Yahoo!?)

Actually I mean Eric Arthur Blair. You may know him by his pen name: George Orwell.

Quote: Nareed

Why did Jesus 'stick'?
Because his ideas proved popular.
.

That's part of it. The early Church was run
by very smart people with an agenda. They
put the NT together with the exact idea
of what they wanted it to say. Everything
else was tossed. It was the start of the modern
era of religious quest for power. No religion
in history wielded as much power and sheer
force as the Catholic Church. They ran
everything, especially the royalty that was
supposedly in charge.

This was not an accident. It had little to do
with the story of Jesus being true or not,
it was their job to make it true and deal
with anybody who opposed them. They're
only opposition were pagans, who were
unorganized and uneducated. Those they
couldn't assimilate into the Church, they
destroyed. This is why Jesus 'stuck', they
forced him on people for a thousand years.

Quote: Evenbob

Word of mouth is the absolute worst way to preserve
a story. All you ever end up with is a legend,
which bears little or no resemblance to what
really happened. Couple that with the fact that
nothing was written down for decades, and you
have about a zero percent chance for accuracy.

This is simply not true. You are thinking again of a simplistic game of telephone. In the real world you can repeat yourself, correct misinterpretations, have multiple people telling the same story so you can notice if something gets lost or misunderstood, you can ask questions, clarify, repeat again. If we played telephone and I was allowed to repeat the phrase to you many times and walk with you to the next person to emphasize the right phrase and correct the mistakes if there was any and then you could do the same thing there is about a zero percent chance that the last person on the line would not receive the accurate phrase.

To use another example, do you know what your grandfather did for a living or any stories from his childhood? If you do chances are they at least began as an oral tradition and are very accurate. Also as you mentioned things were written down within a decade or two of the events, which at that time was quite extraordinary. Considering that the Bible is the best historical document bar none of that time you are pretty much saying that all of ancient history is zero percent accurate and that would be silly. Finally, if I ever invent a time machine I'm going to bring back someone from those ancient times to smack you across the face for continuing to insult them.

Quote: Evenbob

They put the NT together with the exact idea
of what they wanted it to say. Everything
else was tossed. It was the start of the modern
era of religious quest for power.

This was not an accident. It had little to do
with the story of Jesus being true or not,
it was their job to make it true and deal
with anybody who opposed them. They're
only opposition were pagans, who were
unorganized and uneducated. Those they
couldn't assimilate into the Church, they
destroyed. This is why Jesus 'stuck', they
forced him on people for a thousand years.

Will you please stop it. The early Church was the opposite of a quest for power. These humble followers of Jesus, without a scholar among them before Paul, were going against the powerful Roman Empire, Jewish scholars and a pagan polytheistic culture that was the basis of their way of life and economy. They were persecuted by everyone and yet the message and truth of the risen Lord Jesus continued to spread. Not so that any single Christian would be exalted, in fact if you were found to be a Christian you would lose everything. The Catholic Church at its beginning was a poor, humble, and pure group who had nothing but love and hope to offer to people because of Jesus Christ. They had no power, wealth, or control of anything and people joined them by the thousands day by day. Oh how I long for those days again!

Quote: Nareed

That's a small difference. Given billions upon billions of unresurrected dead people, saying "people resurrect" and "people resurrect often" are equally false. It's kind of like saying 2+2= 5 and 2+2= ten trillion are equally false.

Um... did you mean to say that that? 5 and 10 trillion are both false, but not equally so. One is a little closer to right than the other one.

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A conclusion based on the collective observations of tens of billions of deaths, none of which can be proved to have resulted in a resurrection.

The premise "The Sun rises always in the East" is also a conclusion based on observation.

You might not believe in the Resurrection of Jesus but you are happy to resurrect many arguments you considered dead when used against you. So now the collective observations of billions of people is valid. "The Son has risen" is a conclusion based on observation.

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Because his ideas proved popular.

Let me give you an example:...

Hey, you asked.

I'd like to quote Yoda here because I don't follow you.

Quote:

Every religion claims miracles. You dismissed the resurrection of Osiris, a god, out of hand. Do you not believe he was reassembled by his wife years after his murder and resurrected? Why not? Millions of Egyptians believed it for 3,200 years. Why would so many people believe something for so long if it wasn't true? Why would you doubt the power of the goddess Ist, or her devotion and love for her husband?

I doubt it because I live in the 21st century and nobody believes such things anymore. Why don't they? Probably because even then there was no historical proof of it every happening.

Quote: FrGamble

In the real world you can repeat yourself, correct misinterpretations, have multiple people telling the same story so you can notice if something gets lost or misunderstood, .

Too bad real life isn't that efficient. You're
talking about a perfect case scenario, and
when has that ever been the case. The
stories would soon be out of hand and
things added and taken away, and no
amount of word of mouth 'correction'
would make it right.