How do we know that Christians are Delusional?

gungasnake wrote:

. . . Jesus had told the whole countryside he'd come back; the whole basic idea was to re-convince the world that there IS life after death. . .

So the psalmist had it wrong when he said, regarding one who dies: "In that day his thoughts do perish"? (Psalm 146:4)

Or was Jesus' resurrection just an affirmation of God's power to restore life to those who have died?

Since God forbade consulting with fortune tellers, would you really expect the witch of Endor to conjure up Samuel, or could Samuel's role have been played by one of Satan's co rebels?

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echi wrote:

gungasnake wrote:
Pretty much every one of them went to his death rather than deny what he'd seen.

For that matter all anybody ever had to do to put an immediate stop to Christianity was produce one dead body which was supposedly being guarded by Roman soldiers and they couldn't even do that.
It is completely irrational to conclude that anyone ever witnessed a "living dead" Jesus. It's much more likely that the idea was popularized centuries later by misinformed/misguided followers, like the ones who slaughtered the Christian "heretics" and burned their books.

Allow me to provide you with another little hint. Jesus would have no more use for a dead body than you or I would; aside from everything else, a crucified dead body would not be walking in a Roman province for forty days; figure about half a day before somebody with a Roman uniform on would see him and then he'd get crucified again with much bigger nails and he'd STAY crucified. What the people saw was sufficiently real as to be indistinguishable from them seeing a dead body walking around and talking to them, but that is not what they actually experienced. What they actually experienced was a paranormal event and the sort of thing which Julian Jaynes described only visible as well as audible. In other words, the exact sort of thing which Saul and the witch of Endor saw.

The real dead body? I assume either God or people in God's service disposed of it.

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gungasnake wrote:

... but that is not what they actually experienced. What they actually experienced was a paranormal event and the sort of thing which Julian Jaynes described only visible as well as audible.

What sort of thing did Julian Jaynes describe?

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He was probably smoking pot or taking some cocaine for those paranormal experience.

Some others claim they talk to Jesus all the time; they just can't prove it.

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A meaningful description of Jaynes would take pages... You can do your own google searches on 'Julian Jaynes' and try to figure it out, or I could provide just a tiny flavor of it.

Jaynes was a psych prof at Princeton who wrote a book called Origin of Consciousness which became a sort of an academic sensation in the laste 1970s since it involved a sort of a fusion of ancient lore and exotic areas of neurophysiology in a sort of a study of things sometimes called 'paranormal'.

Jaynes was an amateur philoolgist (student of ancient language and literature) which was Nietzsche's official job title but something which has to be an avocation in our own times. He noticed that backwards from about the time of the Trojan war, people described in literature do not behave as we do wrt decision making, i.e. that at every juncture at which you or I would have to stop and reason out how to proceed, ancients appeared to be being told precisely what to do by inner voice, which were typically described as Gods and goddesses in literature like the Iliad.

Jaynes figured "Hey, I'm living here at a major university which has to have a neuropsych dept..." and went and introduced himself to same, and asked them what if anything in the human brain or nervous system might cause somebody to hear voices when none were present. What they showed him was that there is a right brain analog to the left brain speech center (Wernecke area) which is like the human appendix and is not used, but that there is a bridge crossover between the two areas and that when the right side area is stimulated with electrical probes, more often than not subjects claim to hear voices, as real as ordinary human voices.

Jaynes makes the case that ancients were simply using a part of the human brain which is no longer used and that this was the basis for ancient religious practices including prophets and oracles, as well as familiar spirits as in the case of the "witch of Endor". Jaynes did not believe any of the voices the people were hearing were real, but that is an open question.

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Anybody who has seen the movie "A Beautiful Mind" would acknowledge that some people do see and hear people even if nobody is around.

It's an illness called schizophrenia.

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Interesting post, gunga. So you believe that Jesus's tomb was empty, but you don't necessarily believe in the bodily (physical) resurrection?

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echi wrote:

Interesting post, gunga. So you believe that Jesus's tomb was empty, but you don't necessarily believe in the bodily (physical) resurrection?

If you want resurrection of physical bodies the religion you want is voodoo and not Christianity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqhh6Ebr9nQ

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echi wrote:

Interesting post, gunga. So you believe that Jesus's tomb was empty, but you don't necessarily believe in the bodily (physical) resurrection?

That Jesus did not reappear in the same body he had before death is evident by Thomas' inability to recognize him. But he certainly was not a mere apparition. He even ate a meal with them.

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Jaynes wrote The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. About the only sensation attached to it was in the minds of those who were neither well educated in ancient history and literature, nor in philosophy and psychology. I once commented to a philosophy professor of my acquaintance that Jayne's work was interesting, perhaps, as an excercise in philosophy, but that he was woefully ignorant of ancient history and literature. He responded that that was funny, since he had been impressed with Jayne's knowledge of ancient history, but that his grasp of philosophical concepts was crap.

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Setanta wrote:

Jaynes wrote The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. About the only sensation attached to it was in the minds of those who were neither well educated in ancient history and literature, nor in philosophy and psychology. I once commented to a philosophy professor of my acquaintance that Jayne's work was interesting, perhaps, as an excercise in philosophy, but that he was woefully ignorant of ancient history and literature. He responded that that was funny, since he had been impressed with Jayne's knowledge of ancient history, but that his grasp of philosophical concepts was crap.

Face it: you and your friend are BOTH just about fit to shine shoes for people like Julian Jaynes.

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Jaynes did not submit his manuscript for peer review, and therefore, it was not published or reviewed in professional journals, and relied up sales to the general public--it has only ever been used in university courses if a particular professor was attracted to it. The entire thesis is dodgy at best, and Jayne's references to ancient history and literature are idiosyncratic, and are denied by the vast majority of specialists in those fields.

I'm not surprised that you believe it, though. There is certainly no harm done to the body of academic knowledge that an alarmist conspiracy fanatic such as you believes anything. Whoever commented that this thread was ruined as soon as you showed up hit the nail on the head.

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neologist wrote:

echi wrote:
Interesting post, gunga. So you believe that Jesus's tomb was empty, but you don't necessarily believe in the bodily (physical) resurrection?
That Jesus did not reappear in the same body he had before death is evident by Thomas' inability to recognize him. But he certainly was not a mere apparition. He even ate a meal with them.

The nature of true bicameral things was apparently such that a witness or observer would be utterly unable to detect a difference between such an experience and the actual experience of seeing a subject in the flesh.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=9&chapter=28&version=31

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I'll say it again, there are fifty or a hundred or so such stories in the bible and all have rational explanations.

If you really want miracles and outright violations of mathematical, probabilistic, and physical laws, you need to be talking to the evolutionites; that is their specialty.

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Evolution does not violate mathematical, probabilistic, or physical laws. Those claims have been shown to be lies, dozens of times--and you know it, Gunga. After I watched you trying to use cave paintings by native Americans (who were, presumably, unevolved descendents of Noah) of a shape-shifting water spirit cat whose bones turn to copper after dying as evidence that Young Earth Creationism is true, I know beyond any reasonable doubt that you are not the person that one should seek to have a discussion about mathematical, probabilistic, or physical laws, let alone rational explanations. I'm a generous person, however, so I'll be more than happy to rebut whatever nonsense you want to download from your favorite creationist website to spam this message board with.

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Here's the deal. A man walks up to me with a theory which requires one or two or possibly even three probabilistic miracles in the entire history of the planet, and I'm willing to at least listen. Evolution on the other hand stands everything we know about mathematics and probability theory on their heads and requires endless series of zero-probability events and probabilistic miracles.

The biggest group of evolution deniers in the world are mathematicians and not Christians.

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Are mathematicians delusional then? Evolutionists? what?

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gungasnake wrote:

Here's the deal. A man walks up to me with a theory which requires one or two or possibly even three probabilistic miracles in the entire history of the planet, and I'm willing to at least listen. Evolution on the other hand stands everything we know about mathematics and probability theory on their heads and requires endless series of zero-probability events and probabilistic miracles.

The biggest group of evolution deniers in the world are mathematicians and not Christians.

I wasn't aware that Christianity and Mathematics divided people into such clean-cut categories where you can tell which mathematicians are Christians and which are not, which are Muslims and which are not, etc. You have created a false dichotomy as one can be a Christian Mathematician, Muslim Mathematician, or whatever and still not have any idea of the evidence supporting evolutionary theory, or the mathematics behind it all, simply sweeping it under the rug in favor of the religious opinions they were brought up to hold. You've tried to use the authority of mathematicians in an area where they generally have no authority. You make it sound like a voting process where the majority of voters are correct, and that's silly in itself but even sillier when the majority of voters don't actually have a grasp on what is being voted upon. Your argument boils down to he-said she-said nonsense.

Evolution does not throw probability theory on its head. In fact, it is the probabilities of certain things coming about that make it such a powerful theory. I want you to find some competent computer programmers that know how to write genetic algorithms and I want you to ask them if those genetic algorithms throw probability and mathematics on their head. They'll laugh at your suggestion--just as this competent computer programmer does. If evolutionary theory did turn mathematics and probability theory on their head then we wouldn't use techniques inspired by evolutionary theory to, quite literally, evolve certain things. We use them in artificial intelligence functions/classes to finding the quickest path to a location. We use them in code optimization routines for things like Cascading Style Sheets, actually evolving the code so it becomes more efficient. The things you think go against mathematics and probability theory wouldn't be used in computer programming if they actually behaved like you think they do.

Gunga, it is blatantly obvious that you know nothing about the theory of evolution or how it relates to mathematics and probability theory.

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megamanXplosion wrote:

If evolutionary theory did turn mathematics and probability theory on their head then we wouldn't use techniques inspired by evolutionary theory to, quite literally, evolve certain things. We use them in artificial intelligence functions/classes to finding the quickest path to a location. We use them in code optimization routines for things like Cascading Style Sheets, actually evolving the code so it becomes more efficient.

Good stuff. Thank you Smile

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rosborne979 wrote:

megamanXplosion wrote:
If evolutionary theory did turn mathematics and probability theory on their head then we wouldn't use techniques inspired by evolutionary theory to, quite literally, evolve certain things. We use them in artificial intelligence functions/classes to finding the quickest path to a location. We use them in code optimization routines for things like Cascading Style Sheets, actually evolving the code so it becomes more efficient.

Good stuff. Thank you

It is quite funny to hear mmx describe computer code as 'evolving' when it takes intelligence and guided effort directed toward a goal to produce computer code. Laughing

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How do we know that Christians are Delusional?

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