Jeanniebean already answered the question. It's totally irrelevant that any prophecies might have been written prior to Jesus. The authors that wrote the story of Jesus could have easily twisted it and fabricated it to appear to have fulfilled these prophecies when in fact, it simply didn't happen the way they claim.

That's precisely what I believe happened. So the idea that prophecies existed, doesn't impress me in the slightest. Besides, I've gone over that stuff years ago. What I found then was that these so-called "prophecies" are extremely vauge and don't really predict anything that Jesus actually did. On the contrary, they predict things that we can't verify. Like the virgin birth, and resurrection. Also things like the idea that there someone would betray Jesus.

So the authors of the New Testament claim that Judas betrayed Jesus. Big deal. Why should we believe that? Maybe no one betrayed him. Maybe he was just crucified because of his own actions.

These are the kinds of things that you'd need to put your FAITH in, in order to believe the story. You also need to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that he rose from the dead, etc. etc. etc.

I don't believe any of that baloney. How could the authors of the Bible know that Jesus was born of a virgin? They couldn't know that. Therefore if they claim to know it then they are clearly liars right there!

How do you change a book that has already been written,published,and memorized by millions of people,and based a entire religion off of it before the twelve disciples were ever born?You really think after Jesus died all the Jews just disappeared and the 12 disciples could just write what ever they wanted?The Jews lived on and millions of them did not convert to Christianity and to this day millions or Jews do not believe in Jesus or the New testament.The fact that the Jewish religion is the same as it was thousands of years ago is evidence that nothing was re-written,lost,or changed by the writings of the New testament.Their beliefs are the same despite what Jesus said and did.

No matter what you believe you can't deny the fact that there was a Old testament written prior to Jesus.Even if there is no physical evidence of the Old testament you still have the validation of the religion itself by hundreds if not thousands of non biblical documents describing the Jewish religion.If you do not believe the Old testament was real then you have to exclude the existence of the Jews who believed and based their religion off of it.I think the physical and historical evidence is overwhelming both regarding the existence of the Jewish religion and also the Old testament no matter how many thousands of Historians and Scholars you ask religious or not.You could also totally wipe out the Old testament and the Jewish religion as physical and historical proof but then you would also have to wipe out what Jesus said also.Because what Jesus was saying was from the Old testament.

Why you think the prophecies are irrelevant is baffling to me.I think it is extraordinary.Certainly as a Atheist if they hadn't come true you wouldn't waste any time digging up the prophecies and using them for your argument but since they did come true of course they have to be dismissed.It's hard to argue no matter what you believe that the odds of a bunch of different people writing a book at different times hundreds of years before you were born and having what they written come true is astronomical.It is impossible today to write a book and tell of a certain person being born hundreds of years from now and describing how he will live and die using hundreds of prophecies that all will come true.

Even if you didn't believe in anything Christian related you still have the Islam faith who described Jesus in their book as a real person.That is a whole lot of people on both sides you are saying made stuff up.

1. you missed the point completely. A total breakdown in communication.

2. Many scriptures existed before Rome put them all together in one book. They were not called "the old testament.""

3. The twelve disciples did not write the new testament. You really need to do some studying.

4. There were no such word as "Jew" back then. Those People were "Hebrews."

'The old testament has a prophecy of the coming of Jesus. Little note i thought i'd put for the following information of when the old testament was written. Is it coincidence that this was wrote thousands of years before the coming of Christ and it just so happened? '

Really?

OT appears to be a history. (part of which was 'assumed' by Abraham after the actually history was lost)

You could probably find someone in each generation that would 'fit' loosely enough within the 'prophesy' as to make it possible to convince large numbers of people that they were the 'one'.

the old testament has a prophecy of the coming of who... Please indicate where it states that JESUS is would be comming. (Please Jesus is way differnt in meaning than any 'name' mentioned in the Torah (actual old testement)

No we all came from Amebas.........and one moelcular cell being to form humanity.......LOL JK go on......please no do not hang me

Acknowledge what? You refuse to cite your sources, and you only have 3 or 4 views on the subject which you spew forth in just about every religious thread whether or not it has any relevance to the topic. Do you really think that we didn't read what you wrote the first 300 times???

1. Man's "fall from grace" is the reason for death and imperfection on the Earth? SHOW ME WHERE IT SAYS THAT...
2. Jesus said "ye are gods"? Adding a capital G to god just shows me how flimsy your argument is. That you have to lie and mis-quote text you refer to as hearsay is comical.
3. That God commanded the "murder" of heathens and Pagans? Are you trying to tell me that Pagans did NOT perform human sacrifices?
4. You claim the biblical stories CANNOT be true because you don't accept them??? Get real, you are NOT the center of the universe. The world continues on no matter how much you claim to be a "god" and protest the actions of humans. You claim God is an egotistical god-head? Try looking in the mirror...


It's time to gather some new material, this act is getting old and tiresome.

Keep speaking of your moon-godess (who is married to a god who demands blood sacrifices) like she has more morality than my God.
When was your Book of Shadows written? A hundred years ago? 50?

I don't know, it all sounds too much like the arrogant oppinions of a man.

Why would Romans create a new religion and then persecute those of that religion for a few hundred years? Romans were primarily Pagans, not christians. They persecuted Christians and anyone else they did not like. What do you think went on at the Coliseum? There is historical proof of that and the demented rituals and "events" they perpetrated.

Just because you can't comprehend the significance of these things doesn't mean they are 'flimsy'.

You keep asking me to show your where things are said in the Bible, but when I do you give truly trival arguments like above in #2, by saying, "Oh that's a lowercase g and not a captial G". That's utter nonsense. Jesus was being accused of blaspheme in these verses any idiot can see that his reply demands that he was suggesting that he is not claiming to be "god" anymore than he acknowledges that all men are "gods". So the context of the situation demands that Jesus was implying a pantheistic view of life. Any attempt to try twist that into anything else is utterly foolish.

Jesus clearly believed in the pantheistic view of life, thus this clearly shows that he was a Buddhist, and not the Son of Yahweh. There would be absolutely no reason for the Son of Yahweh to tell other people that they also are gods if that's not the case.

So your trivial arguments about lowercase or uppercase g's are utterly absurd. Just look at the CONTEXT of the conversation. Jesus was being accused of Blaspheme! He wasn't being accused of being a mortal judge.

So your argument is utterly meaningless.

I'm sure you would find simply trivial objections if I were to pull specific verses out to show where the Bible demands that mans fall from grace brough imperfections and death into the world. So there's no point in doing that. Besides it's not even necessary.

Everybody knows that in Genesis after God created the earth and before he created man he looked about his creation and saw that it was "GOOD". Well, clearly he couldn't have been looking at animals eating each other and killing each other's babies and see that as being "GOOD".

Therefore, the Bible establishes the perfection of the world before mankind was created. Yet, we know now that this is false.



OLD?

I'm only 60 years old myself. So even if I had been posting from the day I was born the best I could have done is share these views for 60 years.

The story that you're supporting is thousands of years old. Talk about something that's getting OLD!

I've heard all this negative crap about a God who thinks like Hebrews all my life. It preaches, bigotry, religious intolerance, and scientific ignorance, all in the name of Jesus claiming that he is "The Christ", the son of a blood-thirsty male-chauvinistic egotisical Godhead who favors the Hebews as his choosen people.

Talk about a story that's getting OLD.

We really need to move forward from these ancient blood-thirsty heathen-hating religions and move into an era of actual LOVE instead.

I'm all for starting a new religion with Love. In fact, I already have. I honor our creator with LOVE, not with hatred.

But then what happens? The Christians come by and start calling me names, like heathen and sinner, for not joining their bigotry bandwagon that promotes ignorance of science, and supports religious intolerance and possible real wars with non-Christian countries!

Yes, this religion is indeed getting OLD. I'm sick of it. This is why I try to reveal just how absurd it truly is. It's a hateful, bigoted, and religiously intolerent religion, that even supports scientific ignorance and has an agenda to replace science in the classroom with its own mythological teachings of a bigoted hateful God.

Oh Christians love to claim they were persecuted. But the end reslut of Christianity was in the hand of the Romans I.E. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. They couldn't beat them down, so they smothered them and took their religion and twisted it to their own advantage.

The real Christians did not worship Jesus as a God, or as the son of God. Those Christians were all slaughtered. The remaining Christians all fell in line with the Roman's remake of their savior as a God in the flesh and joined the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

Today the Pope still claims to be the number one religious leader of the entire world and there are priests and high ranking catholic clergy working in every country of the world. I believe most of them are just spies.

Actually, the terminology "Real Christians" is a bit misleading.

I think what you mean is that the original "Followers of Jesus" were not "Christians" at all. On the contrary, they did not view Jesus as "The Christ" nor even see him as claiming to be "The Christ". On the contrary, they saw Jesus as a man who rejected the very religion that supposedly predicted the coming of a "Christ".

So the real followers of Jesus were actually seen as a real threat against the Church, and the standardized religion of the day. The very religion that Jesus called Hypocritical, even according to the writers of the Gospels themselves.

I've been thinking about this for many years. Let's take a look at what these so-called gospels actually are, and what they most likely aren't.

First off, they most likely aren't the single unadulterated writings of any individual men. What they most likely represent is a collection of rumors that were weeded through and altered by various scripes and Pharisees who wanted to take the rumors of Jesus and write them up to represent the story they would like to tell, (i.e. that Jesus was indeed "The Christ", thus supporting their original religion of Yahweh, and the authority bestowed upon them as being Priests and Rabbis.

However, the word of Jesus (the rumors of what Jesus had actally stood for) were spreading like wildfire. And those rumors were quite simple. Jesus exposed the evilness of the ancient religion and replaced it with commonsense, intelligence and love.

But the scribes and Pharisees couldn't just stand by and allow that to happen. So like the grinch that stole Christmas, these religious hypocrites (as Jesus clearly pointed out), stole Jesus. It wasn't even for them that he had been physically nailed to a pole, they had to metaphorically nail him to their previous religious doctrine by claiming that he was "The Christ". A claim that holds no merit at all really.

This is why the gospels are so filled with self-conflict and contradiction. The Gospels have Jesus saying that he has no come to change the laws, not one jot nor one tittle, yet these very same Gospels have Jesus doing preciely that! Changing the the laws!

The reason the gospels turned out this way is because the original stories (which most followers of Jesus accepted) were the stories of what Jesus actually stood for, but in order to twist them to make them look like Jesus might have been "The Christ" lots of lies needed to be meticulously inserted. And that's why the gospels are so non-sensical and conflicting with the actual words and teachings that they attribut to the man named Jesus.

One you understand what actually happened, everything suddenly makes perfect sense.

Also, to verify that this is necessarily what had to have occurred just ask yourself a very simple question. Did these gospels come into being in a way that makes sense for an all-wise divine being? Or have they been created by men who have a clear agenda?

Once you ask this question the answer should be obvious. Any genuinely divine all-wise God who is going to bother to send someone onto the Earth in physical form to convey a message is going to have that person write out the message himself so there is no question of who the message came from.

Yet, is that what actually happened? No, of course not. All historians and theologeans agree that the gospels are all hearsay, and that they were all written long after Jesus had died. Nary a single word of the Bible is actually attributed to Jesus himself outside of a "hearsay" context.

Any genuinely supreme all-wise deity would know better than to do something so ambiguous and suspicious-looking. No all-wise deity would expect anyone to believe hearsay stories. At least that's my conclusion. As a mere mortal man I certainly wouldn't expect people to buy into hearsay stories, especially given the circumstances of this particular event.

And if I wouldn't expect people to buy into hearsay, then why should I believe that an all-wise divine being would expect people to buy into hearsay?

Nope, the gospels have deceit written all over them. There is nothing about them that even remotely indicates that they could be from a divine source.

Moreover, just look what these sciptures were actually used to support shortly after they had been written! They were used to support the descruction of pagan temples, and the descruction of the library/college at Alexandia. They even murdered Hypatia in the name of these scriptures and she was one of the greatest teachers at the library of Alexandria (it was actually a university of higher learning)

The people who were in charge of these scriptures and trying to push them onto the masses were doing so in very violent, ignorant, and hateful ways. Trying to sell their version of who Jesus was, in a desperate attempt to regain political power.

And I'm expected to believe these thug's version of who Jesus was?

I think not.

That's funny as hell. I suppose you don't remember when I explained to you how your quote of "ye are gods" was taken out of context and you objected???? Now you want me to look at the conversation "in context".


What next? Will you claim the moon godess is God too because of the mention of other gods? Are the "false gods" God because they were refered to as "gods".

And your religion is thousands of years older than Christianity, full of immoral conduct (human sacrifice, murder, etc.). Sure Wicca may be relatively new, with a new name to distance itself from the old opinions of what witchcraft and Paganism were, but it's still based on ancient traditions and there have been writtings within your lifetime that speak of human sacrifice and the power of freshly shed blood. Will you deny that fact? Or simply ignore it?
I thought Wiccans were supposed to be tolerant of other religions?
And how about Eastern Mysticism? Does "no conflict" mean anything to you? You openly contradict the teaching of the very religions you try to promote.




I think you need to reevaluate and revise that statement to read "only an idiot" instead of "any idiot".

You refuse to bring facts to the table, you spout some gibberish as if it were the truth and when asked for proof, you respond with "I'm sure you would find simply trivial objections if I were to pull specific verses out to show where the Bible demands that mans fall from grace brough imperfections and death into the world. So there's no point in doing that. Besides it's not even necessary."
Sorry, but that's one of the lamest cop-outs I have ever heard. If you don't have proof, just say so. If you have proof, provide it. I doubt that you will do either.

You voice your opinions as if they were fact when the only fact is that they are your opinions.

So let's hear it, where does the Bible oppose science?
Where does the Bible promote "religious intolerance"?
And what "possible wars" does it promote?

You really need to move forward from those ancient blood-thirsty, Christian-hating religions and move into an era of actual LOVE instead.

Well, considering the way that you interpret the Bible it probably doesn't because of some lowercase or uppercase letter somewhere.

In fact, if we all interpret the Bible as you do then there's no reason to believe anything it has to say. We can just chalk it all up to one huge misinterpretation.

I'll go along with that one.

In the old testament it says something about not tolerating a witch.

Also, instead of trying to convert the people of the promised land they were told by their God that those people were evil and they should be slaughtered.

without mercy.

Men, women and children.

all evil of course.

That doesn't sound like tolerance to me.

God has no tolerance for worshiping false Gods/idols.

So there you have it. The Bible promotes intolerance. That makes your God a tyrant. Why should any human practice tolerance if God does not?

If anyone supports Joshua's slaughtering a nation of people under the claim that they are evil because they worship some other God, then I suppose they don't even support the "convert or die" policy, they just feel they should go in and kill everyone with no mercy at all.

If God is really that much of a tyrant and that intolerant, I say that he is evil and probably and impostor. Maybe he is Satan himself and he just fooled Joshua into thinking that he was the Lord thy God.

Okay so that makes Joshua an idiot zealot who blindly obeys a fake God and slaughters a bunch of people.

People like that are very scary indeed.

The Romans did not 'create' a new religion. They simply 'usurped' the existing new one and melded it into their empire because they needed to (survival of the empire in the face of a growing 'movement' amoung its citizens). Historical reference - Constantine and the Nician Council approx 300 AD.

oh, I am not making a case,, Im just stating an observation
Where my personal belief is concerned, I am the only one that needs convincing,,, I dont try to form the beliefs of others, all I can do is make an influence but people are gonna believe what in their heart works best for them,,,belief is very personal

Exactly...
The changed it to appease(convert) the Pagan populace.

"Those Christians were all slaughtered." How is that NOT persecusion??? To me that post seems contradictory.

Claim??? There is historical proof of the persecution of the Cristians till the 4th century and pagans after that. I do not deny the atrocities humankind has to to one another, why do you when obviously, by your own words, you know different? You wrote the words, do they mean something else?

Pagans claimed to be tolerant of other religions, but religions that were not "respectful" of paganism were banned. Judaeism was tolerated because of an earlier treaty with an emperor.

So what?

Well, that leaves Rome with a primarily pagan religion, one which would "absorb" other peoples beliefs as long as it didn't contradict their own. The Jews at that time were still under treaty but nonetheless expelled from the city(ies). So we end up with a majority of converted Christians that were either pagan or Jewish originaly.

So they're persecuted for over 300 years. What do you think happens when a Christian becomes emperor? He does the same to the pagans...
All of this was done, not because of religious beliefs, but because of political reasons.


So how do I see history then? Pagans persecuting Christians, then Christians(pagans perhaps?) persecuting pagans.
But, I make the distinction that neither religion has persecuted anyone. It's the men who did the persecuting that are to blame, not the religion. Should every American be held responsible for the actions of our president or military?