Well there are "high quality eyewitness accounts" for many events. Also, I don't deny that on the whole the story of Jesus took place. You always seem to assume that it's all or nothing. Proving that Jesus existed (hard enough) and that some of the events took place in locations that can be traced back doesn't prove that every single fact is true.

As a historian you have to criticise your sources. As I already said, there is always facts, omitted facts and interpretation of facts. And lies, too. And even eyewitness account are highly unreliable as every investigator can tell you.

Another example: Good historical novels also include a huge amount of historical facts like places, people and events. In reading them you can ideally learn a lot about history. But they are still fiction, and as a reader, you have to be aware of that.

Well he is a glowing Evangelical Christian apologist and Professor in Theology. He is not a historian. He is also a "sworn defender" of the resurrection. I'm sorry to say that, this is as biased as it can get. I would be very surprised if the outcome wouldn't "prove" his views.

However, if you say we have to claim that Jesus was raised as long as naturalistic explanations are only remotely possible, then you’re no longer doing serious history. “Careful” means an investigation that proceeds under strict controls, not stubborn assertion of something that can’t be proven beyond all doubt.

Prof. Adolf Grünbaum. I'm keen to pick up some of his own writings now.

I see. No eternal life in heaven or hell then.

This is getting interesting. The internet has it's uses, I suppose.. :-)

This is a pretty arrogant statement. And a perfect example why I often consider it arduous to talk to religious people.

@IAmSinistar: Thanks for sharing your experience.

As I said before, I won't go public with my experiences. I don't want to be found by google this way and also, while I can keep most people involved anonymous, there are people like my wife that I don't want to expose that way for the whole world to see. My nickname here is the one I've been using for ages, so it's probably easy to track me down.

I offered to Soyeong to PM me if he wanted to know "what happened to me", and I extending this offer to anyone interested.

Due to Soyeong's request I'm currently writing down a retrospection of the defining "mystical" events of my life and what I made of them. And although I'm trying to keep it short I'm already on page 10 (A4, Arial, 11pt.). I guess I'll have to write about 8 more pages to cover the important bits. This will take another few days, since there's other stuff (work, family) to do. So please bear with me.
I didn't want to write that much in the first place but as I wrote, more and more memories came back. I kept adding in more detail and more of my conclusions. Also I noticed telling the story having a considerable therapeutic and wholesome effect on me.

If anyone else of you want to read it, you'd have to provide me with an email address like Soyeong did. The thing grew to big to send it any other way. The terms are that you may not publish it, and if you feel the need to show it around, please leave my name out of it.

I'm glad to do it, and hopefully the context of my statements ameliorates some of the "this will be used against me later" potentiality of what I share. I offer up my experiences strictly as raw data, not as links in a chain of conclusion.

For example, the experience I provided has many of the hallmarks of a precognitive or clairvoyant experience. But I am not saying "Oo, I had this experience, psychic powers are totally FOR REALZ!!!". Rather I am offering it as an unusual but actual experience, and one which I don't have an explanation for.

I have had numerous odd occurrences in my life, from Fortean events (I was once in a rain of frogs) to eerily meaningful coincidental events to things that do indeed smack of the paranormal or metaphysical. But I also understand these are my experiences, and as such pertain most significantly to myself and may have little to no import in another's life.

I believe that is one way in which I differ greatly from most religious people. My experience of the world informs my philosophy, whereas they believe that their experience of the world should inform everyone's philosophy. To me, each life is constructed of so many disparate and subtle events that no thesis can be the central axis of them all.

That is very noble. I had to include some of my former conclusion making in my "treatise" to explain the steps I undertook to make more sense of it all.

I'm genuinely interested. How do you cope with it? I've grown very seclusive in terms of telling people about it. I have experienced mostly negative feedback/feelings even from people I considered close when I opened up.

The answer is complex, as you might expect, and consists of multiple parts.

Foremost is just developing an instinct over time as to what is broadly shareable, and what is better confined to sharing only with people you know are receptive to the content. Confessing something like "I've had visions of the future" to a general crowd tends to result in discomfort, even if some of that discomfort is just generated by everyone trying to gauge how everyone else is reacting to that. Something that is more offbeat and fun, like the "rain of frogs", tends to find better general receptivity.

Corollary to the above is how you present the revelation. Unless you are in situation where you all are hashing over deep topics, it is best to introduce the experience in a light way. Again, going back to the "rain of frogs", one can reveal this along the lines of a "some crazy-weird shit I've experienced" tale, rather than a "the world is far stranger than you squares realise" kind of confrontation.

This in turn leads to two other things that help me share my experiences. One is that I try not to overpersonalise reactions to my revelations. I understand that everyone apprehends the world through their own parameters, and they are free to accept or disregard what I share without injury. Obviously I react worse to active abnegation, but don't we all?

The other thing is that I don't have an overarching agenda with regards to what I share. I'm not trying to convince someone of the paranormal or the occult or anything else, but simply sharing my experience. So I am not invested in how it is received in the same way that, say, a religious person might be when someone refutes their statements.

Ultimately I am most interested in sharing and seeing what discussion the revelation engenders. I find this attitude serves me well across the gamut, even with accepted truths and opinions, because dialogue is one of best ways we affect a change in others and in ourselves.

Faith, like trust, does not exist on its own, but is always in someone or something. If you have faith that a safety harness will keep you secure, it makes no sense to say that it was your faith that made you secure and not the object of your faith.

I completely agree. People can inaccurately perceive events, so it doesn't mean the events happened, but I think there is nevertheless still good reason to treat them as eyewitness accounts and work from there.
You’re going to have to be more specific. Archeology strongly confirms many of the things in the OT, such as this list of 50 people.
If a teacher assigned their students to write a paper on the death penalty, you would expect that there will some superficial things in common, such as arguments about deterrence or rehabilitation, because those things are integral to that discussion. If two papers had secondary details that were identical or very close, then you could suspect copying.

In a similar way, most of the details they have in common are superficial because they are integral to what we would expect from a flood narrative. If they were to survive the flood, then a small group would need a way to escape it, so a boat makes sense. They would need time to build it before hand, so there would need to be advanced warning. The flood would kill the livestock, so they would need to be brought on board.

On the other hand, most of the details that are not integral to the story are different, such as with the gods fighting and plotting against each other, the reason for the flood being that humans were so noisy that the gods couldn’t sleep, the top-heavy cube, the time it took to build it, and the length of the flood. Gilgamesh is much more elaborate and extravagant, so Moses’ account is more historically reliable.
I don’t claim Moses’ account is unique, but that, as similar accounts in many different cultures would suggest, the accounts are parallel and have a common source. Both the authors of Gilgamesh and the OT are reporting a past event that neither of them witnessed.
Luke 1:1-4 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us,2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

The themes are different because they aren’t even the same genre. Luke was a first rate historian and you’re not going to find an introduction like the above in front of any other stories about other gods. Jesus was presented an actual person who interacted with actual people in history. We have the bones Joseph Caiaphas, who is reported in all four gospels as the high priest when Jesus was arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin. Archaeology independently confirms many details in the Gospels and 84 things in the last 16 chapters of Acts.

Who was Adonis? What timeframe did he exist? Which historical figures did he interact with? What was the purpose of his life? What did he accomplish? What was the purpose of his death and resurrection? What was the concept of death and resurrection? I say the themes are completely different not because I think one is true (/eyeroll), but because the answers to these questions are completely different.

John was the only Gospel to mention the subject, so wherever you heard it from would have to be from outside the Bible.

Again, I don’t see where it talks about them not bringing enough spices.

"Let not the witness of women be accepted because of the lightheadedness and insolence of their kind" - Josephus, Antiquities 4.219

Of course I disagree with Josephus, but the fact of the matter was that women generally weren’t seen as very credible witnesses at that time. If they were making up the account, then they could have easily had one of the disciples discover the empty tomb, such as Peter. People generally like to portray themselves in a positive light, and tend to omit embarrassing details, so when they admit to one, it’s usually because they couldn’t get around the fact that everyone knew what happened. For this reason, historians give much more historical weight to things that meet the criterion of embarrassment.

Matthew 28:17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.

At the climax of Matthew’s Gospel, a few verses before the end, he reports that some doubted. If you’re trying to give credibility to a new religion that you’re starting, why in the world would you report at the end that some doubted? All four Gospels report instances where people doubted, so the reasonable conclusion that they included these embarrassing details is because that’s what actually happened.

Historians also give weight to things that hostile sources admit. For instance, the Talmud reports that Jesus practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. It notably doesn’t deny that Jesus existed or that he performed wonders.

“Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection. The afterlife involved getting out of the body into some spiritual realm or realm of the mind, but to come back physically is rather disgusting.” – N. T. Wright

It’s not that I’ve disregarded all the parallels to dying-rising gods, but that you have neglected to show any. Simply claiming there are parallels isn’t convincing. Sure, dying for a greater purpose can have a significant meaning, but that’s still really vague about what that meaning is. What was the meaning of Adonis' death and what did that have to do with the meaning of Jesus’ death?

If a group has a cause that someone already believes in, then they might be willing to join in spite of the persecution, but persecution itself is not a motivating factor to join that group.

Most historians date Jesus’ death to either 30 or 33 CE, so you still need to explain how Christianity survived its first 17-20 years.

The conspiracy was that there was this underground crypt that was always secret and only the high priests have access. How did the Egyptians light the inside of their tombs? It creates false dilemmas like there not being soot on the ceiling, when there is black soot in almost every Egyptian temple and tomb. It claims that there wasn’t enough oxygen to light his lighter when there was enough oxygen to breathe. Furthermore, the “light bulb” can be explained by standard Egyptian symbology.

I readily agreed that Egyptians did brain surgery and that there was an ancient steam engine because there is good evidence for them, but I rejected that Egyptians had light bulbs because there isn’t good evidence for them. I have no idea why you think I disregarded it simply because it doesn’t fit into my views or what that even has to do with my other views. I agree that is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of ancients. Each epoch tends to tell a story that places them above the epoch of the past, such as the “enlightenment”. My dad went to Machu Picchu about a decade ago and it really is mind boggling how they were able to do stonework that would be a challenge for us to copy even today. Still, I’m not quite sure why you’re bringing these things up.

It’s always possible to misinterpret something, so all that we have learned from science has a possibility of being wrong, but I don’t think that means we don’t have any scientific knowledge. Knowledge is what we have good reason to think is true, even if it happens to actually be false. Belief is being confident in our knowledge, even if that confidence happens to be misplaced. As often as we are wrong about things, or hold things to be true that are mutually exclusive, it is doubtful that any of us hold a set of entirely true beliefs. Learning is the process of reinforcing those beliefs we think are true, weeding out those beliefs that we wrongly thought were true, and taking in new true and false beliefs.

I think we have knowledge that everything that begins to exist has a cause and knowledge that the universe began to exist, so we have knowledge that the universe has a cause. Whatever other properties this cause has, a being that caused the universe at least aligns with our idea of what God would be if God existed. So I think the Kalam cosmological argument and Aquinas’ Five Ways can give us knowledge that God exists even if that knowledge happens to wrong. I also think we have sufficient evidence for the resurrection that we can have knowledge that the Christian God exists and is the identity of that being.

I don’t think the evidence for all religions are equally strong. For instance, the truth of a religion that makes many historical claims is dependant on the veracity of those claims, so it is weight differently than a religion that makes no claims that can be historically verified.

If a religion is true and it is important to pick the right one, then picking no side means you picked the wrong side.
Could God have motivation for wanting people to seek Him? Could undefyable proof of His existence affect how we come to trust and obey God and cause more people not to form the type of relationship with Him that He wants?

Got to get to work so just quickly replying to these 2 points:
No, I mean I really don't understand what you mean by 'making dead alive' - where does that phrase come from? Who said it? and why is it relevant to this conversation?

No - you said "every other religion" - so while some may be made up over coffee by sci-fi writers, others, like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, the Egyptian pantheon, etc, grew out of other areas over a long time or are the result of what I said "drew the wrong conclusions based on their observations and the need to satisfy their spirituality.".

Durnit, another post went into nothingness - ironically, this post was about the nature of 'nothing' LOL

maybe I'll try again later - for now continuing with the other:
My point - people, even if they don't go to school, learn to understand their own language and the way it is used. To a people whose culture and language involved the use of metaphors, those metaphors wouldn't be tricky things to figure out. They'd just be a phrase with a meaning. Equally, saying '40 days and nights' might be taken by us to mean just that, but to the people of the time it meant 'a long time'

Depends on whether our souls are eternal or just infinite in the future, I guess. Probably the latter due to God's grace of granting it to us.
Eternity in Hell is not a given though - there's a period of punishment in hell before the final day of judgement, when those unworthy will be cast, along with hell itself, into the lake of fire (which I believe means 'oblivion')

Oh I see - that's not the same thing. Making the dead come to life is a change in state, not a self-contradictory state. A circle can become a square by moving and shaping its sides. It won't ever be simultaneously a square and a circle. Same for something from nothing (and as I was trying to say before it ate my post - God created the universe from His power, so not strictly from 'nothing') I see, and I know the atheist view. You can't decide something is an elaborate hoax just by not liking it or not believing it. My point, as for many others, is that some things can be obviously dismissed by looking at their more obvious failings. Christianity doesn't have those. Some things bear greater investigation.
I can't dismiss Buddhism out of hand (that doesn't mean I must believe it - faith is a separate issue).
I haven't looked into Mormonism enough, only heard 2nd hand that it contains more historical inaccuracies than can be accounted for. Still, I'm sure they have their explanations for that.
Comparing Christianity to Scientology is like comparing Science to Harry Potter. The one was admitted by one of its creators to have been made up. The other not.

First of all, many thanks for your answer.

I totally know what you mean. I think I made a few mistakes in this regard in the past.

For a long my "overarching agenda" was to try to understand what the hell is going on. When I was young it was incredibly hard for me to cope with things that I couldn't comprehend rationally. I've always been a very logical, rational person with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and understanding "hat makes the world tick". I read up on astronomy, relativity and quantum physics when I was in my teens. When I encountered... things, that didn't make any sense in this "scientific" view on the world it nearly ripped me apart mentally.
In hindsight I can see that I sometimes/often opened up to the wrong people or maybe in the wrong way. I did this out of desparation. At times I really was afraid I was going insane. I was frantically looking for confirmation that I'm not totally crazy. Maybe it would have been easier if I had been raised in a religious background, so that I could blame it on my god and not question further. I guess I had been raised Christian, I would be among the most firm believers probably, since every "revelation" or strange event would confirm my beliefs further, just like it is probably the case with Tallima.

It has become better over the years. Fortunately I got lucky to find at least a handfull of people that had similar, strange experiences. I'm also very glad that my wife can cope with my "craziness" on a day-to-day basis. I have come to accept what I'm like even if I'm denied to understand the hows and whys. Writing it all down for the first time brings back a lot of memories that I had blocked out in the past years. I can feel it helps me making my peace with them.

I'm also very interested in sharing, although I'd prefer a less public place. My intention is still to get a better understanding of these things and to meet people with interesting stories. I'm not as obsessed with it as I used to be, fortunately. Having a full time job and family shifted the priorities and this is all for the better for my mental health.

I'm somehow getting the impression that I'm blabbering now and I'm not really getting across what I actually want so say. I'll stop here for the time being. :-)

There were enough people that were there and simply told the story?

I've never heard the oxygen argument. From what I read I gathered that the soot present is most of the time of much younger date (i.e. grave robbers). But this could be explained by the Egyptians having closed oil lamps that would not emit a lot of soot. Some suggested they had a system of mirrors to use sunlight for illumination.
Also I find the standard interpretation of the "the light bulb" (djed pillar and lotus flower) a little far fetched - the arrangement of the parts make little sense. But maybe it's a huge condom with the snake as sperm? ;-)

I'm bringing this up to show that regardless what we think we know about history, we sometimes "ain't know shit".
Machu Picchu is a good example. If someone was to believe in the Inca gods, wouldn't place be strong evidence, since "humans couldn't do it"?

I think there's the difference between us. For me learning is the constant questioning of what I think is true.
You believe in God, and you seek confirmation, reinforcing this.

I believe in things that are not compatible with your god, and although I'm constantly questioning them (and have often changed my opinions) I never reached a point where your belief makes sense to me.

Troy has been verified, part of Oddyseus' travels have been verified (even if natural phenomena were transformed to monsters). Places and events of the tales of Herakles have been verified. Is this strong evidence for the Greek Pantheon existing "for real"?

Yes, if. If one is true and if you know which one is the right one. And if you just don't know?

Well I guess I'd have to be a believer first to understand this. What would be the motivation to play hide and seek, when I'm "damned" if I don't play along?

This is like what one from the Society of Witnesses told me: "Good people that never have heard of Jesus, will meet him after death and can them decide to convert. But if you've heard of Him and don't convert, you're damned".
My answer is and was: "Then it would be better never to have heard of Jesus, because this way I had undeniable proof and would be saved. By spreading your word to people that might not find you very trustworthy or likeable and have no reason to believe you, you're actually driving this people into damnation."

Ahh the topic to avoid, for my part..

Just to contribute a little, like several people I quickly read here, my cultural education and personal experience is leading me to believe in God, the Biblical and Christian God.

As for atheists and agnostics, I do not get you, because your experience is yours, I don't have access to it. I'm out, go on.. ^^