Next round

Firstly i would like to thank JB for giving me such an easy response to demolish and steven carr and fifi for their intelligent comments on the previous post. Johnny anomonus also aknowledged there was a lot of meat in my post and he is an xian. So here we go, i feel like a big ball on the end of a chain ready to smah into the argument and knock it to bits.

We still have bone remnants of ancient Jews, even Jewish crucifixion victims (e.g., the famed Yohanan), preserved to this day;
But these are rare preserved under special conditions. Pompeii is meant to be the best conditions for perserving archaeology in the world and yet they found not skeletons there. So if the people of pompeii had their body eaten why didnt jebus?

why, precisely, would worms have consumed the body of Jesus, bones and all, within the lifetimes of the disciples?
Who says it happened in the life time of the disciples? Oh sorry the bible does. you realise that only xians take the bible slightly seriously. there is no evidence that jebus body was in the tomb. Now wouldnt the disciples notice and loose their beliefs? No. Mormons believe their book is authentic despite it being proved false. Imagine in 2000 years time someone said "well nobody would have remained a mormon if the book of arbraham had been shown conclusively to be a fake..."what would you say? What about creationism? wouldn't people not believe it if evolution had been shown to be true. Religios people believe whatever they want to believe. If the body of jebus was still in the tomb they would claim it was a fake or only a theory etc etc.
Which of the claimed "eyewitnesses", either among the Three or the Eight, were martyred?
Earl dorothy thinks that there is no evidence that the first xians were martyred
hat is, of course, pure speculation on my part, but given the fairly clear evidence that the story narrated by Smith's purported translation of the plates is utterly ahistorical
youve missed the point. We know mormonism is ahistorical and yet many people believe it. Why do we know it is ahistorical? Because it happened a lot more recently. How do you know that xianity didnt start in the same way mormonism did? maybe if mormonism happened 2000 years ago and xianity a hundred years ago it would be the other way around

And your substantiation for this would be...?
Are you seriously asking for evidence that they didnt have wiis, tvs and the internet in jebus day? your even more ignorant than i thought

First of all, Russell's Teapot was one of the most pitiful epistemological blunders that Russell ever made.
ad homin attack. It is valid, i can sit here and wait for you to give me evidence to my satisfaction

Your arguments also commit the anthropic principle. To ask why people came to belive jebus rose from the dead is a non quetion as we wouldnt be asing it if such a belief hadnt been belived
I question the value of memetics as a contribution to scientific study
your ignorance astounds me. indeed memes explain why people believde in the reserection. Someone caught the jebus rose from the dead meme and it spread like the plague.
Come now, Mike, unlike yourself, I've researched the ancient myths.
Ah - so you admit that the bible is an ancient myth. I win the debate
If you want to set forth any of Price's arguments on behalf of the pagan copycatting thesis, by all means do so, but I warn you that playing that card in a debate with me is rather
Here is a photo of dionysus crucified:

and here he is risen from the dead:


There we go.

you really are going to have tyo try harder JB

Round 2

Well, JB has come up with a response even more stupid than I was expecting here. I cant believe that im wasting my time responding to such stupidity but here we go.

At this juncture, I could rehearse various standards in resurrection apologetics.
All of which have been debunked time and time again

Early testimony to the empty tomb, perhaps.
Easily explained by Richard Dawkins here: "Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose." Now when you think about it Jubus body was not in the tomb because it was eaten by worms.

group of remotely rational individuals will especially not surrender their lives in such a manner without an especially passionate belief in the validity of their cause
So would a group of people believe something as stupid as a guy discovering golden plates in a wood when they had been proven to be a fake by a guy who had fraud metaphorically written all over him. I remember some mormons telling me that there were eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen Joseph smith with the golden plates and died for this belief of theirs. Oh hang on, your not a mormon. Does the fact that xianity started seem any more odd than something as stupid as mormonism?

the origin of the disciples' belief seems inexplicable
Nobody believed that golden plates were hidden in a wood before mormonism so it must be true...it think not. Where id the mormon belief of the golden plates come from? We must also remember that this was a time before TV, nintendo wiis and yhe internet and so people got bored and made up stories of reserected friends for fun.

This all being the case, it remains for Mike to propose a detailed and historically plausible alternative explanation for the rise of early Christianity that encompasses all available data in a satisfactory manner.
No, because of russels teapot you have to show why xianity starting is different to other religions and offer a sensible explantion of how a man eaten by worms came back to life.

"Science" is thus powerless, by its very nature, to provide "an overriding reason to believe the resurrection of Jesus to be genuinely impossible".
You cannot say that the BBC website is not credible and yet that says: Almost all rationalists are atheists or agnostics. There has been a long link between rationalism and scientific method.

Dawkins, with all due respect to the man for... well, whatever his positive contributions to the world might happen to be
He discovered memes, conveted many people to science, has written best selling books, converted douglas adams to reason,is going to be on dr who...the list is endless

The simple reply to this is that the premise is simply false. "Most pagan gods" were not claimed to have experienced anything comparable to a historical resurrection from physical death to living physical existence.
Oh dear - youve been brain washed by your xian friends

provided he does so with something more credible than Zeitgeist
Well what about robert price - he thinks they ripped of the reserection from pagan myths. now robert price is proberly the top scholar on this subject in the world. As indiana jones is to a good action movie, einstein is to science and mr bean is to comedy Robert Price is to biblical scholarship.

I hope that perhaps one day, you might happen to dispense with your irrational objections to Christianity and finally submit to the truth.
You wont convert me to xianity in a million years. I hope that one day you'll see the light and start reading science books instead of the bible.