There’s a scam to steal money from kids in pretty much every grocery store near where I live. We call them claw machines.

The psychic damage from that acronym still hurts after all these years.

I know. I never really believed you were going to think critically about your religion.

Thanks for the discussion.

So have Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Pagans, and witches.

So that’s clearly a bad way to know what’s true.

Either the others didn’t have enough paper to do so, knowledge of it, or didn’t see it as important. Matthew has already written it down anyway.

It sure seems like God could have remedied all of those, as the harmony of the Bible is often mis-cited as another miracle.

Most of my Christian friends including my girlfriend were non believers who converted.

I don’t believe you, because Christians have a habit of embellishing their stories. Every “former non-believer” I’ve ever met were really just non-practicing Christians who had been indoctrinated but fell away then later reaffirmed their faith for social reasons.

I’ve never heard a good rational reason based to believe any of it. You could change that, but I don’t think it’s a challenge that can be fulfilled because people don’t believe in religion for rational reasons, the do it for social reasons.

It’s a big reason why most people stay in the religion they were indoctrinated into: otherwise they’ll lose their social network and become ostracized. It’s why people join a religion: they want that social network.

They had different agendas, as each gospel account was written to a different audience. This is uncontroversial; are you really disputing this?

And they do have story-breaking contradictions. Why is Matthew the only account that mentions dead people rising and roaming the city when Jesus died? That sure seems like an important part of the story to me, and most certainly worthy of the one sentence that it takes to express. If you were reading four different accounts of a mugging and one of them said there were a bunch of zombies around but nobody else mentioned them, wouldn’t you find that a bit unbelievable?

Not if you’ve been indoctrinated to believe it in the first place. But again, why should anyone believe four anonymous contradicting accounts of a cult leader rising from the dead? It’s only compelling if you already believe it.

How many people have you converted from non-believers to Christians? Why do you think it’s so hard to convince people who weren’t brought up in the church?

You missed the whole point.

Yours aren’t compelling either, you’ve just been indoctrinated otherwise.

If someone “raised from the dead” in front of me I’d need stacks and stacks of evidence to validate it, not merely a narrative from two thousand years ago where the author had an agenda to convince people that the laws of nature briefly stopped in a time when everyone believed in magic.

What do you have other than stories written a generation after the purported events by four anonymous authors that contradict in major story-breaking ways?

“Miracles” are only compelling to people who already believe.

They’re utterly unconvincing to anyone not indoctrinated, as proven by the fact that you don’t believe in Hindu, Buddhist, Mormon, or Muslim miracle accounts.

Well, Iron Man was crucified for our sins.

As was James T. Kirk.

It’s amazing how OpenSUSE got my laptop’s valve covers to leak oil.

That’s some cloaca & dagger shit.