Autobot032 wrote:Alpha Strike wrote:Bluebullet wrote:I don't believe that. Jesus died and rose from the grave. As experts have said, after Jesus ascended to heaven, many people named their children Jesus and other biblical names. It was a purposly made coincidence that a father was named Judah and he named his son Jesus. As a Chistian, I will continue to believe what I believe and nothing will convince me otherwise.
And that my friends is faith.
I agree with him, and we're entitled to that. Thank you very much.
Believe how you want, let us do the same, that's all I ask, and I'm sure that's all Bluebullet asks as well.
believing what you want is one thing (and i happen to believe the same thing), but a post like bluebullet's conforms to the worst stereotypes about christians. rather that use reason, his argument is "that can't be true because it doesn't conform to my existing beliefs," which is just an all-around stupid argument to make, especially when there are so many existing flaws in the claim:
1)
But CBS News correspondent Mark Philips reports that, although archeologists have long argued over the factual and historic accuracy of Christianity's version of history, in this case, the archeological establishment has lined up to label this claim as bunk.
i'll take the word of the experts over james cameron's any day. i'm not going to list all the evidence they presented, as it's in the original article, but i think the truth is pretty obvious.
2) the tomb was discovered in 1980. don't you think that if there was actually a reasonable chance that it was his tomb there would have been a bigger deal made about it before a washed-up hollywood hack decided to say it was over a quarter of a century later?
3) all cameron really has to back up his allegations are the names, all of which were fairly common back in the day. for the record, jesus' original hebrew name was "yeshua," and even just looking through the bible you can find reference to other individuals with the same name (usually written "jeshua"). especially considering the mountain of archaeological and historical evidence against him, that makes for an extremely flimsy claim.
4) where the hell does it say anything about dna testing? cameron mentions some statisticians (because their calculations on the odds of a mother, father, and son having certain names are
so much more reliable than the findings of trained archaeologists
), but there's nothing anywhere about dna testing. and if there was, as has been said, it would have been a load of crap anyway.
you see? there's plenty of ways to state that cameron's claim is a crock without resorting to mindless rants which conform to every possible definition of the term "blind faith." despite some people's claims to the contrary, it's quite possible to become a christian (or in my case, a messianic jew - essentially the same thing but jewish) without shutting off your brain in the process.