... what exactly?
No, seriously. This is basically what a fundie christian on twitter has just used as some kind of sterling rebuttal to the fact that there's no good evidence for the indistinguishable-from-fiction little-j jesus*
It's not entirely uncommon for this kind of response, which is essentially a variant of Tu Quoque, to come mewling from the keyboards of believers, especially the ones lightly marinated in a thin stew of post-modernist nonsense. All that @FXMikey has really done is make a weak attempt to turn back the burden of proof and the problem of a lack of evidence onto the questioner. And he's done it by choosing a massively bad example.
Had he asked me to prove the existence of, say, Plato, then perhaps we'd be on more equivalent grounds. We have very little strong evidence for an actual person named Plato. We have the writings. We have some outlandish claims, we have references from other people post-facto, but there's startlingly little actual evidence.
Of course, my response there would have been that it matters little whether Plato was a real person, or a pseudonym for someone else, or a group of people or a mere character used by later philosophers to outline ideas from a particular period. It's christians that need a real jesus, not philosophers a real Plato.
Of course we have plenty of evidence for the two world wars. We have first-hand accounts, many from people still alive, though that number is shrinking fast. We have lots of autograph manuscript. We have government records. We have film and audio archives. We have newspapers, actual physical newspapers from the period. We have physical artifacts ranging from shell casings to uniforms, to trenches and gun emplacements to tanks to human remains, all confirming that the 20th century was host to two massive global conflicts. To catalogue the evidence from one small geographical region alone would take more time than any one person could provide. My family has records from my grandfather's wartime service in the RAF.
And @FXMikey has a bible.
A story for which we have no autograph manuscripts, for which we have no independent verification, and which contains claims which are demonstrably untrue. There is more evidence for the existence of Sherlock Holmes, as I've said on many occasions.
Point and laugh, everyone. Point and laugh.
I'm conflicted. I mean, if this is the level of intellect that modern christianity is fostering, then we should see the religion wither and die in a generation or two - which I think would be good for the world. But while it's withering and dying, I'll be bored having to deal with this kind of half-assed tosh.
And I really hate being bored.
* never mind the indistinguishable-from-fantasy big-J Jesus, which needs far better evidence than a mere book.
posted @ Saturday, July 30, 2011 9:19 PM