Christian subversion and missionary activities -2

[acharya]

Allow me to go straight to the point and just make a few quick, direct comments.
1. In lawyer’s terms, proof is fact that can be allowed as evidence in a court of law or admitted as the result of scientific experimentation for example.
2. Whomever may have mentioned Jesus in historical documents did so in a context which would not constitute proof of any kind because probably based on hearsay and because too indirect. There is no mention worthy of attention about resurrection.
3. We know more and have more direct proof about certain slaves of the time of Jesus than we do about him. How can any respectable historian be considered seriously when he writes about a man who died 60 to 100 years before their time?
4. Even texts written close to a hundred years after Jesus’ death and obviously biased by their origin, contradict each other; Matthew and Luke can’t agree on where Jesus was born; was it Nazareth or Bethlehem for example?
5. Yes the New Testament mentions historical places and historical persons such as Pilate and Herod, but that is not a proof of anything except that those who wrote it had learned about them. It’s like Homer, the legendary writer of the Illiade who mentions at least one historical place, Troy. Does this mean that the Cyclops he speaks of and the Greek Gods are real as well?
6. Even if we were to find Jesus’ birth certificate tomorrow, it still wouldn’t prove that what the New Testament (made of a hodge-podge of texts hand-picked by the early Church), nor the Old Testament is a repository of a truth or the truth in a literal sense.
7. It is easy to demonstrate that the Bible as a whole is not reliable as a literal truth. I have picked on Christianity because of the original subject, but this can be said of all scriptural religions.
8. Too many people confuse belief and religion. Religion is an institution with creeds and dogmas and dictates. Belief is an intuition of sorts, a hope to understand the world without necessarily proclaiming a truth and dictating a set behavior. Shamanism is an institution as soon as people grant one man (or woman) the exclusive power to access God, but it has at least one respectable element; it leaves God as a mystery, which he is essentially, to be discovered through a personal quest.