Is it ethical for Jesus to marry at a Chick-Fil-A?

[Grek]

@Redshirt:
The Bible is not a primary source about the life of Jesus. A primary source would be if Jesus wrote an auto-biography or if someone were to conduct some interviews with Jesus. The Bible is anthology of letters, books, poems and other works attributed to people who were thought to have known Jesus. The four main Gospels were written 70+ years after Jesus died, making it extremely unlikely that they were written by anyone who had personally met with the historical Jesus.

@DSM:
Totally. Descriptive moral relativism is objectively true and a prerequisite to functioning in modern society. Its one and only claim is that people disagree about questions of morality. It doesn't make a judgement about whether this is a good or bad thing, it just describes a thing that factually does happen. Moral subjectivity (as I described it, at least) is descriptive moral relativism + opposition to divine command theory: People disagree about morality and there's no magic tablet which has the real ultimate moral answers on it.

[Redshirt]

@Grek

No, the Bible is a primary source. The evidence for the existence of Christ is that everyone who wrote anything about him in the years after his death treated him as a historical figure whose death was within living memory. The Bible is absolutely primary source evidence for that claim.

The four main Gospels were written from 70 CE, not 70+ years later. 70 CE is roughly 40 years after he died, well within range for eyewitnesses to still be alive. Since we don't know exactly when the Q source was written, or if it was even written at all, the documentation Luke and Matthew are working from could be even earlier.

[Prak]

Redshirt, if I slipped Terry Pratchett some amount of money and told him how funny it would be, and reached out to every person who wrote Discworld fanfic, I could probably get every person who wrote anything about Samuel Vimes to say that he was a historical person.

This would not make it so.

Tons of people wrote about vampires and considered them to be totally real. This does not change the fact that we have very little reason to worry about a corpse creeping into our windows at night and drinking our blood.

As much as I kind of wish it were otherwise, reality is not consensual. A consensus that a fictional person was real does not equal that person actually being real.

[Grek]

@Redshirt: I already accounted for that. Mathew was written around 100 CE and Jesus died around 30 CE. That's a 70 year difference.

[Redshirt]

Oh for fucks sake. The fact that everyone in that time period believed Jesus was a historical figure doesn't make him real, it means he was *probably* real and the burden of proof is on someone who claims otherwise.

EDIT:

@Redshirt: I already accounted for that. Mathew was written around 100 CE and Jesus died around 30 CE. That's a 70 year difference.

The earliest Gospel is Mark, which, along with the Q source, is probably what Matthew was based on. Mark was written around 70 CE.

[Prak]

Ok, then let me ask a different question:

does it matter if there was some schmo named Jesus in the time period the Christ supposedly lived? Just because someone writes about Bob the Demigod of 2014 a hundred years from now, and there is a cult leader named Bob, doesn't mean that Cult Leader Bob is actually a demigod.

[talozin]

"Primary source" is a thing that has a specific meaning in the context of historical research. Because there is a primary source for something doesn't mean that whatever that source describes is necessarily factual -- it just means there's a primary source for it.

For instance: De Bello Gallico is a primary source for the Gallic Wars. It was written by a highly interested party, so you have to take that into account when evaluating its claims. But there are quite a lot of events described there for which there are no other primary sources, so either we throw up our hands and say "we have no idea what actually happened at the Siege of Avaricum" or we evaluate the account we do have as critically as possible and try to figure out what probably did happen, what's possible, and what's unlikely.

Anyone who says "there is definite proof that Jesus really existed" is either talking out his ass or about to be extremely famous for finding that proof. On the basis of the historical record it is certainly possible that someone who is recognizable as "Jesus" lived in approximately the era ascribed to him, and it is probably more likely than not that there was a guy named Jesus who had some level of involvement with the creation of Christianity. If you want to postulate that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John made Jesus and his adventures up over a few beers down at the pub and just happened to have a gift for writing good prose, that is also possible (and Umberto Eco is ahead of you, so you should check out Foucault's Pendulum) but there is if anything less evidence for it than there is for the existence of the actual guy.

But more importantly: so what? Whether or not there was a recognizable historical Jesus, the movement that he supposedly created exists, and has had and continues to have a lot of impact on world history since then. If you could somehow conclusively demonstrate that there was no such historical person as Jesus (and good fucking luck, because that level of documentation of the period of history in question would make Classics professors weep with joy), how much would it really change?

[Redshirt]

No, it doesn't. Very good.

Edit: for clarity's sake, that was directed at Prak.

[PhoneLobster]

No, the Bible is a primary source. The evidence for the existence of Christ is that everyone who wrote anything about him in the years after his death treated him as a historical figure whose death was within living memory. The Bible is absolutely primary source evidence for that claim.

This is the bit where you are either a raging moron or some sort of covert crazy religionist.

Because the whole POINT of the "Jesus doesn't appear to have actually existed" thing is that people IN that time period do NOT appear to think he was a historical figure. There ARE no contemporary sources.

You keep on going on about a bunch of fairly obvious frauds and fairy stories from at best nearly a century after which would, charitably, be called brand liberated John The Baptist slash fic, and calling them primary sources.

The problem seems to be you are too fucking dumb or stubborn to even understand what a primary source fucking is.

Hint. You don't get to take what is at best a highly questionable secondary source and just CALL it a primary source by using your moronic little "Anything we know people ever believed about the past is a primary source about the past itself!!!!" switcharoo.

If we did that then ANYTHING fucking goes and I totally have "Primary Sources" of equal "quality" to yours similarly proving that the entire world is actual a figment in the dream of a huge fucking rainbow serpent.

[Redshirt]

Hint. You don't get to take what is at best a highly questionable secondary source and just CALL it a primary source by using your moronic little "Anything we know people ever believed about the past is a primary source about the past itself!!!!" switcharoo.

Ok, let's do this step by step.

If several different sources claim someone lived several decades previous and here are his sayings, that is a primary source documenting the beliefs of the people of that time and place.

If those people generally believed that said person existed, it is more likely than not that he did in fact exist, especially considering how incredibly spotty the historical record is for that time and place.

At that point, the burden of proof is on someone trying to argue his nonexistence.

Saying "Jesus doesn't appear to have actually existed" is categorically false; he does appear to have existed because a whole bunch of people said he did soon after he died. The fact that they believed obviously untrue things about him is extremely weak evidence for his nonexistence.

If we did that then ANYTHING fucking goes and I totally have "Primary Sources" of equal "quality" to yours similarly proving that the entire world is actual a figment in the dream of a huge fucking rainbow serpent.

Horseshit. If Jesus existed he's long dead religious preacher whose remains have rotted away completely. The only information we have on him is historical. The world is right in fucking front of you, you do not need historical documents to establish what it is.

[Strung Nether]

several different sources

Are there actually any sources that aren't the bible that talk about jesus as actually existing? I though that basically everything the bible says happened has no record besides the bible itself. great floods, slaves in egypt, etc.

[Redshirt]

Josephus Flavius and Tacitus both refer to Jesus. Josephus was writing at around the same time some of the Gospel writers were.

As a historical object rather than a religious text, the Bible is not one source. There are multiple stories from different authors, spanning spanning around 1500 years. In that case, Paul, the author of Mark, the author of Luke, and the author(s) of the hypothetical Q source that Matthew and Luke are primarily based on all count as different sources.

[Strung Nether]

things

I'm not familiar with Josephus and Tacitus, so I will google them, but while I am: I am fairly certain that the "the bible says that different people totally saw this shit and therefore they are independent accounts" doesn't float. If those were from different sources, and existed independently throughout history and were ever talked about in separate instead as part of the bible maybe, but currently, as I understand, the bible is just one source that claims to be multiple sources. You can't have a source that collaborates with itself and call it two different sources.

[DSMatticus]

Its a useful tool for rulers to instill the morality they've chosen on a society.

But it's fucking not. It seriously isn't. People teach and learn morality without god all the time despite its inherently subjective nature, because you are actually fucking programmed to learn behaviors from the people around you (regardless of their spiritual context). Even religious institutions at their height rule by force, not a recognized divine mandate. Christians kept the 'law of god' by murdering people who didn't follow it, exactly like modern secular states do except with funny hats. You are just making this shit up because you are being a dumbass.

[Strung Nether]

inherently subjective nature

Intentional or not, I know bait when I see it.

[Strung Nether]

things

After spending a small amount of time on Wikipedia, it appears that the actual historical Jesus "sorta maybe existed" depending on who you ask. For a guy who attracted "hoards of people" he was really not written about very much, and what was written ranges from "probably forged later" to "maybe genuine". Of course there are no sources collaborating things like planet floods or first sons dying or massive slave revolts. Also: holy shit, I knew the bible was a arbitarily constructed book, but I had no idea as to the extend of the possible number of different authors involved.

[name_here]

I've read that portion of Tacitus in translation. It seriously just says that there are guys who call themselves Christians and claim to be followers of a dead guy called Christ. I would not even count it as evidence that Romans of Tacitus's time believed he had really existed.

EDIT: Apparently I misremembered, and it is more precise, but the oldest manuscripts containing or referencing that passage date from the fourth century and may very well have been fabrications because second-century sources make no reference to it.

[Dean]

While there are a lot of good and very in depth research documents done about the historicity of Jesus. I will reference the following one as being the most concise while still saying virtually everything I think is important on the topic.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/scot ... ojfaq.html

There was also a very strong paper by the Atheist Foundation of Australia I recall reading which, while longer as it is a proper research paper, I looked up and will link here if anyone is that interested.

To put facts on the table every single non christian inquiry I have ever been able to find has come to the same conclusion, which is the conclusion I considered the most valid. That it is possible but not likely that a historical character did exist that later stories used as one of many points of inspiration for the mythological character known as Jesus. But the gulf between that and "Jesus was a historical figure" is enormous. Between there being no contemporary record of the character and all later mention being some version of "There's guys who call themselves christeoni and they go on a lot about this guy they call Christ" rather than saying "There was a man named Jesus who did x" or any given first hand accounts or artifacts combined with Christians proven tampering and forgery of lots of the materials they reference combined with huge volumes of known factual errors and impossibilities in the Jesus story itself means that anyone claiming Jesus is historical absolutely came to the evidence pile with that conclusion pre-loaded. Over and over again some Theologian from Bible College with a PHD in Religion will look at the documents and declare that they figured out that there was some jewish revolutionary who handed out food and did only the most plausible things in the story then got killed. But there's literally nothing to support that, the only way you could come to that conclusion is if you believed it already. The character of the revolutionary/homeless feeding/oppression fighting Rabbi named Yeshua is just as much a fiction as the actual magic Jesus. There is no basis for the conclusion they keep coming to and the fact that they KEEP coming to it indicates to me that they probably work less like actual scientists and more like UFOlogists who, it has been noted, see more UFO's that look like ones from popular movies than things that would probably be designed to move through space.

[PhoneLobster]

Ok, let's do this step by step.

With the Rainbow Serpent too!

If several different sources claim someone lived several decades previous and here are his sayings, that is a primary source documenting the beliefs of the people of that time and place.

That's actually definitively a Secondary source. These are actual fucking terms that mean something you dick head.

But fine. There is about 40,000 years worth of continuous evidence in Australia ranging from European records to ancient cave paintings showing that various Aboriginals believed the Rainbow Serpent was real.

If those people generally believed that said person existed, it is more likely than not that he did in fact exist, especially considering how incredibly spotty the historical record is for that time and place.

Well, if spottiness is a justification 40,000 years gets even more spotty so by your argument the chances of the Rainbow Serpent being real are "especially" better!

At that point, the burden of proof is on someone trying to argue his nonexistence.

So by your argument we are under a burden of proof to disprove the Rainbow Serpent exists because we have 40,000 years of fucking what you ignorantly call primary sources... of people holding a believe that amounts to an incredibly questionable secondary source of the Rainbow Serpent's existence.

Saying "Jesus doesn't appear to have actually existed" is categorically false; he does appear to have existed because a whole bunch of people said he did soon after he died. The fact that they believed obviously untrue things about him is extremely weak evidence for his nonexistence.

You have been UNABLE to point to ANY provable evidence of WHO OR WHAT this guy was.

YOUR argument is SO fucking poor that we can replace "Jesus" with "Bender From Futurama" and claim HE was the inspiration for the bible, because you have back peddled so far away from committing to ANY concrete verifiable ANYTHING about your "Seeds of the myths MUST be true because... I SAY SO SHUT UP!" argument that the seed at this point is utterly disconnected from anything at all.

Seriously go and fucking read Lago's linked article from the other page you ignorant fucker. It actually COVERS the angle you are arguing in extensive detail. There is no good reason to just say "well its a strong myth so SOMETHING must have been real!" and even if you DO try and pull a fast one on that it unfortunately does not permit you to actually have ANY fucking idea of WHAT was real if you don't have any fucking verifiable or primary evidence of anything that was actual real.

I know you WANT to have nice fluffy feelings where the bible isn't a hodge podge patch work of insane fairy stories imagined up by a vast number of total charlatan's with absolutely no connection to history or reality. But the fucking historical evidence is pretty clear that is exactly what it is.

Your attempts to pretend otherwise are incredibly lame and astoundingly ignorant of even the way historians even damn well define Primary fucking sources. And also astoundingly ignorant of the generally accepted views on the actual origins of the documents involved by the vast majority of the main stream of actual Biblical fucking scholarship.

Horseshit. If Jesus existed he's long dead religious preacher whose remains have rotted away completely. The only information we have on him is historical. The world is right in fucking front of you, you do not need historical documents to establish what it is.

Yeah but the Rainbow Serpent is super powerful and also very sneaky. It is either deep in the desert or way out in space and we can't just go and see it. As to proving the world ISN'T a figment of it's dream. Well. By your system the burden of proof is on you, and given your... informed... means of arguing historical and philosophical points I don't see you actually winning that one any time before the end of the great dreaming.

[Midnight_v]

Why do people think they are moral
Simple self bias really. Fun fact: If you ask a room of 100 people "How many of you are more attractive than the average person in this room? How many of you are smarter than the average person in this room? How many of you are more moral than the average person in this room?" about 70% will agree to the first 2 and about 90% will agree to the last one. That's impossible. It is impossible that more than half the room is better than half of the room UNLESS everyone is using different standards and in fact they are. People like themselves naturally. They think of themselves as good and things like them as good and they measure to that standard. So people, by and large, think that whatever moral calender they use is better than average even if it is arbitrary because people think most things about themselves is better than average.

How can you call someone immoral?
By finding hypocrisy. I guard against judging people by my own moral standards but I do judge them by their own. If someone says that thievery is wrong and then steals then I feel comfortable saying that they are immoral, because they have failed their own moral compass. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with murder or rape I do feel completely validated in calling the Church evil for preaching peace and condemning murder while they support genocidal regimes like the Nazi's, or create genocidal regimes like the Crusades. I feel completely justified in calling them evil because they preach sexual purity and abstinence while actively harboring child rapists and commit worldwide campaigns of sexual deviancy.

I actually totally agree with all of that, no further questions your honor.

...Drivel...

How to put this... I find you to be too emotionally invested in this to really communicate with. I'm not even sure what you're going on about anymore except that you're directing it at me.
So here's the deal. Why did ancient kings invent godhood?
If as you say they ruled only by force why the charade?
Why do people right now fly themselves into buildings trying to rack up a high enough k/d to get afterlife points?
Give up sex and take themselves out of the genepool, live a life of austerity for the same?
It isn't just the whip... you ignorant fuck.
Its the lie.
...that you'll get infinite feats or some shit after death.
...that you'll get eternally fucked-off if you die a coward, and never see Valhalla.

Not to say that it isn't the WHIP ALSO, but if you're saying that the LIE of "pleasant afterlife" hasn't been instrumental in getting people to do whatever the fuck the leaders since forever....
You are an idiot, or maybe a fucking liar. I'm not really sure.

Places like North Korea actually enforce shit like State before Self by saying "there's no god but we'll remove you from the gene pool". So while they DON'T have the promise of good shit or eternal torture after death, they found by threatening to send You and everyone of your living relatives to Camp 22 that it lessens the "All you can take from me is my life. Fuck you" attitude. Frankly, even with that in place people totally get the fuck out of there whenever they can.
DSM, I'm sorry the priests did whatever it is they did you you. I don't support that.

[Redshirt]

Phonelobster, almost the first thing in Lago's link is this:

Historians focusing on this era generally accept that there was likely an individual named Jesus who lived in Palestine roughly two millennia ago, had a very small following of people studying his views, was killed by the government, and whose life became pivotal to some of the world's largest religions.[2]

Since that has been the entirety of my position, from the beginning, you either have trouble with reading comprehension, or you're projecting the argument you want to have onto the one you're actually having. You use words like "proveable" when you should know full well that if we're working with such a vanishingly small amount of evidence what we're really dealing in are probabilities.

That's the heart of why your comparison with the rainbow serpent is so dishonest. The claim that there was a religious teacher called Jesus in 1st century Palestine is not a remotely similar claim to one that explains reality as a mystical snake's dream. To the extent that we know anything at all, we know that humans are a real thing. We know humans lived in 1st century Palestine. When multiple writers from the 1st and 2nd century say "there was a guy named Jesus 40-70 years ago, he founded a religion, his brother was a leader of it and got executed in my hometown when I was 25" there is no compelling reason to disbelieve them. It is more likely than not that he did in fact exist, did in fact found a religion, and his brother was its leader in Jerusalem 30ish years later. Could he shoot lightning out of his butt? Probably not, considering what we know about where lightning comes from.

Unlike human cult leaders, there are no documented cases of rainbow serpents that can create universes from their dreams. They might exist, but it is unlikely.

[nockermensch]

No deities is actually WORSE, equaling totally relativistic bullshit moralities springing up whenever someone gets a bigger gun

Dear Midnight, you have actually made me sad. I took a day off of posting yesterday because of actual sadness you made me feel in my heart for you.

This thread is a riot, and I just found my new signature quote. Thanks, dean!

[Josh_Kablack]

If Chick Fil-A the company actually discriminated against gay customers or gay employees than I would be perfectly in agreement with you. Because that's actually breaking the law and actively trying to harm homosexuals. In short, active discrimination. But what they do and who they donate to with their profits is their business and their business alone.

And by extension, what I do with the profits of my own endeavors is my business and my business alone, so I can not merely chose to never spend any of my monies there, but to go so far as to take out advertisements that say "Chick Fil-A is evil, pure and simple from the 8th dimension", and your line of reasoning is totally okay with it.

Heck your line of reasoning that what an entity does with their profits is "theirs and theirs alone" taken to its logical extension means that you would be okay with me hiring hit men to whack the deciders of Chick Fil-A, so long as I did it with my own profits and didn't go into hock for it.

If you don't see the problems with that, I can't help you.

[Username17]

Redshirt: Every event that supposedly happened during Jesus's life, and indeed before his life even began is an obvious fabrication. An obvious fabrication which moreover was obviously written decades later by people without passable familiarity with the setting's nominal location or time period.

There was no "massacre of the innocents." The Roman Empire did not put all the first born males in Judea to death at the behest of a local warlord. That is not a thing that happened. There was no "census" to force Jesus' parents to travel to Bethlehem, and even if there was a census it wouldn't have required anyone to travel to their birth towns. The governor mentioned in the census description became so nine years after Herod fucking died. There was no star of Bethlehem, and no three kings came to heap gold and incense on a baby in a manger. Balthazar and Melchior are not "based on real people," they are fucking fiction.

Which is the bottom line on the story of Jesus: all of it is fiction. And all of it is really bad fiction that is written long after the supposed time period and poorly researched. So what possible reason would you have to believe that any of the characters are based on real people? Christians get really pissy when you call them on their bullshit and tell them Jesus was probably fictional - but that's the only "evidence" there has ever been that there was ever an original person the stories were based on. If there was ever any real person, it would almost have to have been several people, since "Jesus of Nazareth" is from the name alone obviously from Nazareth and not from Bethlehem.

Midnight: You're still wrong. Religion is not now and never has been a good way to propagate moral ideas. Abstinence Education has negative impact: teen pregnancy rates seriously go up. Abrahamic religions consume a majority of the world's pork products, and followers of Abrhamic religions invented polyester blends. Theocratic societies collapse in revolution fairly often.

Even on their own terms, religion has failed.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

@NotoriousAMP, you are obviously an idiot who has been deluded by stupid things certain kinds of religious people dishonestly tell themselves. No one cares about any religious origin of marriage. They didn't care about it when they let the government take over, they didn't care about it when they argued black people shouldn't get married to white people, and they don't care about it now.

Every single person alive today in the United States was born when the state governments were 100% responsible for what the definition of marriage is, and who is or is not married. And by the way, for most of the time that marriage has been defined by those states, it wasn't a tax break. It still mostly isn't. Marriage is not a tax break for procreation. Marriage is not a religious institution. It hasn't been either of those things for most people alive today since every single living person was born. We do not live in a world where that is the purpose of marriage. Anyone arguing that marriage is those things is being dishonest to you and possibly themselves to justify their homophobia.

@Midnight

WTF? Stop visiting fucking forums if you get mad when people talk about things. That is literally my only answer. Like, you are mad that people talk about whether or not religions are good or bad or moral or immoral on forum threads? Stop that. Go whine about how D&D forums have threads about fighters versus wizards or something.

@Redshirt

You are super hella wrong about literally everything and it is funny.

1) The fucking gospels read exactly like someone is making up a fictional story about a mythical figure to tell parables and not attempting to even argue for the existence of that figure. The gospels read exactly like someone writing down the story of Hercules to teach other people about how to live their life, and zero percent like someone attempting to chronicle the life of some guy based on what some other people told him. Up to and including three other people writing completely different and contradictory events down knowing what the first guy said, but changing things to tell a different moral, because obviously all four authors think that the moral is the only thing that matters and the events described don't.

Now, if you actually thought there was a real guy who really did stuff, you would care what his last words on the cross actually where. But if you know that guy never existed, you would feel much more free to make up any damn thing.

2) There is somewhere between very little and absolutely no evidence that people around the time of Jesus's supposed death believed he really existed. In fact, there is scant evidence that even people at the time of the gospel writings believed that.

Everything Paul says makes more sense, not less, if you think he is talking about a mythical figure, not a historical one. The part where he thinks he is on equal footing with all the other disciples makes no sense if Jesus was a person he never met but they lived years with, it makes absolute sense if they all are Prophets of Sky Jesus who had visions and so is he. Ect.

What is and isn't an interpolation in Tacitus and Josephus is tremendously controversial. That line you directly quoted from Tacitus is often believed to be an interpolation by real scholars who aren't also priests, and even some of the priest ones. The "standard understanding" of which parts of Josephus are interpolation and which parts are "core" is pretty much completely made up on the thinnest of pretexts. Pretending this evidence is solid is a fucking joke.