My story of the Super-Human, from approx. 33 A.D.

[Oneironaut]

So Christians should stop saying Jesus was "killed for our sins". He committed suicide.

[Faultydesign]

He sacrificed himself. Which means he allowed himself to be killed for us.

If a grenade is thrown into a fox hole and a man jumps on it he commits sucide.

But it is sacrifice for the good of others.

[Oneironaut]

So...what good did his death do for anyone?

[beachguy in thongs]

It was so you can die a good death, I guess. Commit all the sins you wish, Jesus has already died for the Original one so you have nothing to worry about. But sinning to destroy others, whether it's destroying them materialistically or spiritually, is not allowable because it deters the evolution of the human race.

But smoke all the pot you want. That's why Jesus died.

The proceeding was a view of an independent party and not one that can be backed with the views or intentions of beachguy, inc.

[beachguy in thongs]

Where? I haven't read any such eyewitness accounts.

By that logic, Islam is also true for the same reason, as are a plethora of other religions who have all had people willing to die for what was to them "eyewitness testimony" confirming their religion as truth.

I'm not surprised that they would argue that, but what conclusive evidence do they have?

Funny the divine Jesus never abolished such sexism, or even spoke out against it. But that's no surprise really, since Christianity is mostly a mishmash of existing Jewish and Pagan beliefs.

Legal standards? What? How do they prove that a dead man came back to life through legal standards? In any case, I'm betting that they started out believing in the resurrection of Christ and worked backwards to confirm that conclusion. It hardly ever seems to be the other way around with these sorts of things.

So? Our government isnt clamoring to come up with evidence to disprove UFO conspiracy nuts or other fringe groups.

What evidence do we have that Jesus even existed? Really? What's the evidence? The absence of a corpse? Come on.

So what? Belief in a resurrected godman had been commonplace long before the birth of Jesus. Try reading something by someone who doesn't start out with the intention to prove their preexisting beliefs: http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/beginnings.html

Yet another Bible scholar. Find me something by a non-partisan source, please. The simple fact is, there is no evidence at all from any of Jesus' contemporaries that he even existed. Well, scratch that. Jesus was a pretty common name, and there were plenty of Jesuses recorded back then, but not one that fits the description of the "messiah". You'd think somebody who was performing divine miracles on a regular basis would have gotten a mention by some non-partisan source somewhere during his lifetime, no? How is it that with all his divine powers he didn't convert everybody around him, didn't dazzle them into believing in Christianity? How is it that he only died with a handful of followers who then split up into many warring factions? Come to think of it, why didn't he just use his divine powers to fly away from the people crucifying him? That would have convinced everybody there of his divinity, I'm sure, and he could go off preaching his message to the world (yes, even to the Native Americans that were apparently not deserving of Jesus' teachings until centuries later). Instead, the asshole decides to die and on top of that, make all subsequent generations of humanity pay for it! What did I do to deserve that? Sorry, that doesn't sound like a divine superhero to me.

Don't ask me why people die for absolute faith in absolutely ridiculous ideas. Just look at Heaven's Gate or 9/11. Those people's beliefs weren't confirmed by the fact that they were willing to die for them, and neither are the early Christians'.

So why would knowledge of Jesus' divinity be restricted to these few apostles after his death? Why did he abandon the religion (by dying and not using his superpowers to escape it) to just a couple people who couldn't prove anything about anything?

If I were God and I wanted to send my son to preach an urgent message to humanity, I'd have found a more efficient way to do it. Make him fly around the world, immortal, performing David-Blaine-esque miracles everywhere. I wouldn't just send him to some remort corner of Israel with "miracles" only convincing enough to convert a handful of the locals (a tiny fraction of a percent of the Earth's population), to be killed after 3 decades and have his life chronicled a couple centuries later in a work riddled with contradictions and obviously fictional stories. Why didn't Jesus write his own book? Why do we have to hear everything from dubious second hand sources? You'd think a divine being would have left more evidence of himself if he really wanted everybody to believe in him.

Lots of perfectly morally upright but self-deluded individuals have unknowingly spread lies, and many morally corrupt individuals have successfully put on a disguise of morality. Why should it have been any different 2,000 years ago?

Do you think education was about teaching people to perform cover-ups back then? No, they usually studied classic literature and the like. Uneducated people can do cover-ups. Just look at the mafia. But it probably wasn't really a cover-up of deliberate lies anyways. More plausible is that Jesus was a mishmash of fictional and real stories that later got personified and mythologized.

I have no idea what that is.

Well of course the early church spread. If it didn't it wouldn't be around today and we'd be talking about the origins of some other church. That doesn't prove that the church's beliefs are true.

The Bible says lots of things. For instance, that the Sun once stopped in the sky for a couple days. That doesn't make it true.

20/20 hindsight vision. I'm not impressed.

What about them?

So? People say Elvis didn't really die, but that doesn't mean he's really alive. Same goes for Jesus.

Is presumed? Presumed by whom? Not by me. It seems much more plausible that the Jesus story was written to fit the prophecies as best as possible, not the other way around. You know, the same way Nostradamus freaks like to fit history into his prophecies, only the early Christians had more leeway since they were dealing with supernatural myths and not objective history.

Second miracle? I haven't ever been shown that any miracles have happened anywhere at any time. If Jesus wanted me to believe in his miracles, he would come and perform some for me. But since he isn't doing that, I can only conclude that he doesn't care about people like me who are simply incapable of making themselves believe in things for which there is no evidence. And if that's the case, well I don't want to be worshipping anyone that inconsiderate anyways.

But we can just throw out all the accounts of having met Mohammed or Vishnu or any of those other Gods of course. They don't count, because they don't agree with us.

I'm sorry, I can't deal with all these individually. I'm too lazy and I still don't see any conclusive evidence that Jesus even existed, much less that he was who Christians claim he was.

Let me get this straight. Here's a man who was sent to Earth 2,000 years ago to preach some message of peace (I guess God didn't care enough to send this message earlier), and yet despite being one with the omnipotent ruler of the universe didn't do anything worthy of mention by any of his non-partisan contemporaries and only managed to convince a tiny portion of the Earth's population that he was the real deal. Then, although he had all these miraculous superpowers, he could not defeat the Roman court system and its executioners. So he sacrificed himself to God (i.e. himself) and now he wants us all to pay for his sacrifice. I'm sorry, I've just never been able to understand how people swallow that.

Holy Cow, I got that somewhere from Wikipedia.

[F L E S H]

Just a side-note, Jesus' name in Hebrew is the same as the Hewbrew word for Joshua... A perfectly common Jewish name. There must have more than one... The reason we use "Jesus" today is because that's the way his name was preserved through Latin texts.

And now for the rant... What the fuck is up with Original sin? We're all suffering because ate the fruit that a snake gave her? Is that why we suffer? Bullshit people. Is that why Jesus came down to Earth and killed himself?

Think back a minute, what reason is there to believe these little fairy tales as opposed to Greek, Roman, Chinese, or Egyptian mythology? None, really, except that people who have been ruling us for the past 2,000 years have been shoving down our throats. It just doesn't make sense that you claim one fairy tale to be true while all the others are false, just because... well... just cause you said so...

[beachguy in thongs]

You're kinda going back to the storybook with that apple-thing.

Let's turn on ESPN Classic and hope it will take us back to the days when there were no lives.

[Oneironaut]

It was so you can die a good death, I guess. Commit all the sins you wish, Jesus has already died for the Original one so you have nothing to worry about. But sinning to destroy others, whether it's destroying them materialistically or spiritually, is not allowable because it deters the evolution of the human race.

You know what I'd like? I'd like to know what the hell "sin" is. What counts as sinning, and what doesn't? Even the best theologians are constantly arguing over it, so how is the layman supposed to figure it out?

And what IS up with this Original Sin? If God sent Jesus to Earth to get rid of Original Sin, does that mean that God made a mistake by instituting it in the first place? And why do so many Christians insist that Original Sin is still here? Why doesn't Jesus tell them that it isn't?

The answer is that Jesus is dead. Long dead. Assuming he existed in the first place, that is.

But smoke all the pot you want. That's why Jesus died.

The proceeding was a view of an independent party and not one that can be backed with the views or intentions of beachguy, inc.

Wow. Modern Christianity is way off the mark then. Jesus should really start telling people the truth when people talk to him. Oh wait, I forgot...

Can we please get over these ancient fairy tales and accept the world for what it really is? The fact is, any just and loving God would not include sin and evil into his creation. People like to say that good could not exist without evil, but if God is all-powerful certainly he could make a world with good but no evil. Therefore, there is no benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being of any sort anywhere in the universe. It just can't be, if we look at the world around us and use a little common sense.

[beachguy in thongs]

I guess, before there was a physical world, the spiritual world committed an error that sent them to our mortal standpoint.

Why weren't there stories like the Garden of Eden fabricated in the New Testament?

My opinion is that Jesus sees the myths of the Old Testament, and if he had been a 20th century scholar, would've believed in evolution.