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"Trying to follow Christ's teachings made me a better person. I sense a presence (warm fuzzy to you) that I did not have before. That presence has been both comforting and inspiring. I'm typically very narcissitic and self-centered. In other words I'd kick your butt if you crossed me. All of that changed when I met JC. " Its funny you say you were self centred before you got JC in your life. Yet your argument in this passage is about the effect JC has had on you. You didnt address the news story I mentioned in Ethiopia, not the suicides of gay people, nor the effects of seculrisation on Scandinavian soceities (societies which used to very religious but no longer are). None of these issues were addressed, the only thing you addressed was the effect JC had on you and your life, how it feels for you. Then you tell us its made you less self centred. Forgive me if I dont accept that.

"So what you are saying is I should reject the belief system that has turned my life around and given iut purpose and made me a better person" Are you suggesting that one cant be a good person without your belief system? I have to tell you it can be done and plenty of people do it all the time. What we have seen is that giving up religion does not make people or society bad. The evidence of this is that if we compare similar cultural societies and economic systems but with one big difference , extent of religious observation, most secular societies in the world, Europe and particularly Scandinavia do not have higher crime rates, lower human rights, standard of livings etc etc. The countries in the Western world with the highest percentage of non believers is in order: 1,Sweden 2 Denmark 3 Norway 4 Japan 5 The Czech Republic. If there was any relationship betwen being a good person/having a good soceity and having faith we would see these societies failing compared to those in the West with very low non believer rates eg Coratia, USA and Portugal. But we dont see that. You can be a good person without your belief system, many soceities are doing it now and they all doing very well. But even if they werent that wouldnt make your belief system true.

"I wasn't using a translation or a "Version," but the original thing. " Wow! you have an original copy of the Torah?Its my understanding that the oldest complete manuscript is the Leningrad Codex it dates back to 1008AD. So are you suggesting the Torah was written in 1008ad? Or do you have older originals? The fact is your Torah is most likely a copy of a copy of a copy etc. You dont know what the original said. It is not unlikely they were copied from oral traidtions givung us a furthher source of innacuracy. Most biblical shcolars believe the Genesis story even has more than one author.

"Here is a more poignant question. Why would I want to change my religous experience?" Well there are two answers to that one I can think of straight away. 1) I guess it depends about whether you care or not about truth. If you do,you will want to know if there is objective verification of your subjective experience. You will also want to know whether its possiblle that your subjective experience could be caused by factors other than your current interpretation. But what I would add is that if you are interested in truth you might note there is no objective evidence for god as you yourself have admitted. Moreover there is evidence that your subjective religious experience can be caused by natural occurences, temporal lobe epliepsy is certainly one example. Heres a hypothesis: certain brain activites cause convincing religious experience, it is then interpreted by the person in terms of their cultural surroundings. If they live in a Chrsitian culture they might interpret it as Christ, if they watch too many Sf movies they might interpret it as aliens, if they live under thhe influence of a demoniant messianic figure (someone like David Koresh perhaps)they interpret it as the presence of that figure. Now if you care about truth you may wish to consider sucha hypothesis, if you dont you wont. 2) The second answer I think is more important. You dont exist in a vacuum, but you are part of society. if an entire society belives in something false that can have detrimental effects on society. For example it took a long time for the germ thoery of disease to be discovered partly becuase it was widely held the disease was a punishment from god. Another example: many homo sexuals commit suicide because they live in a society that is intolerant, again at least in part, because of widespread Chrsistian beliefs that homo sexuality is wrong. The beliefs of society have effects, so its important to know if our beliefs are true and not just comforting. I will give you an example just from yesterdays news: http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1258762,00.html If you cant be asked to read it the summary is "Thousands of Aids and Hiv patients are risking their lives by refusing medication in favour of holy water". Now if those people die as a result you may say well this has nothing to do with me, Im over in USA nowehere near Ethiopia. But the theistic idea is a global idea and the more widespread it is the more stories like these will happen and this is far from the worst of them. We can all do our part by abandoning ancient superstition and basing our beliefs on evidence. This will lead to mroe people relying on evidence based medicine and a whole host of other rational outcomes like homo sexuals not wanting to kill themselves, no more stoning people to death for trivial "crimes" and who knows maybe if eveyone had a rational world view we wouldnt have suicide bombers killing thousands of people. Bottom line is widespread beliefs have widespread effects and your beliefs are included in that.

"It is hard to say with 100% accuracy anything happened in the first century. " Agreed and that includes the Gospel stories. Yet most christians seem pretty damm sure. i dont know whether you would include yourself in that or not. "This all boils down to trying to define God/Christianity by the same guidelines that we use to define science. As I said before I think that it is an impossibility to define one who is outside of creation and scientific laws with natural and scientific laws. " Im sorry this is a comlete cop out and i supsect somwhere inside you know it. What you are saying is there is no evidence to back up your claims, but you dont need evidence.All you need is your experience. But religious experience can be simulated by stimulating certain areas of the brain. i would reccomend you read this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrainqa.shtml What is shows is that religious experiences can be very powerful and can be caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. In fact you will see that religious experiences can be induced by magnets over the brains temporal lobe. Now of course that doesnt prove that your experience is a temporal lobe epilepsy but what it does show is that you cant necessarily trust your experience as representing any external reality. This is the same reason why we dont trust alien abudction stories, they are also brought about by temporal lobe epilepsy. That is why alien abductees are so sincere . That is why we need science to verify what we consider to be true about the universe. Without that verification we might as well go back to the dark ages.

"I meant 500 of any one group. Say half of a small town, which included medical doctors, teachers, mayors along with the farmer and the guy living in the double wide. " Well thats a big assumption, who are these 500 witnesses, where is their testimony? Why accept 500 peoples testiomny when you'll deny millions?(or do you accept alien abductions)Is is really dependant on the geographicla distribution of the witnesses?

"The "first" disciples of JC were willing to experience martydom because they saw a risen JC." This is complete specualtion, you have no evidence that anyone died becuase they believed they had seen a risen Christ. "The first disciples of Mohummed were willing to die because they believed in his teachings of monotheism which was contrary to the polytheism of the day. " Again more conjecture and speculation as to their motives, all we know is that Muhamed made certain claims and people believed him, exactly the same as Chrsitianity. You could just as easily say that early Chrsitians followed Jesus because of the golden rule , not because of a belief in the resurection. This would be just more specualtion though. "If 500 of them(alien abductees) including people of the ruling councils all had basically the same abduction story, we would listen. " According to an alien abductee web site: http://www.ufoabduction.com/faq1.htm#q3 "Abduction researchers have been personally contacted by thousands of people who have had experiences that abductees have had before they knew they were involved with the phenomenon. Polls have indicated that there may be hundreds of thousands more. By all measures, the phenomenon seems to be widespread throughout the society. Only a small number of these people have been investigated by researchers. " According to the Roper poll conducted by sociologists in 1991, 4 million Americans claim to have been abudcted by aliens. So beliefs can even be widespread without being correct. Unless you accept these people have been abudcted by aliens? As to the 500 who suposedly saw Christ rise, who are they? How do you know there were 500? This is just more hearsay evdience that really doesnt stand up. You dont have any good evidence there were 500. it may say so in the gospels, but since we dont know who wrote thhe gospels or when they were written that does not count as evidence.

Im glad we agree that belief in the ressurection is based upon faith and not evidence. "However, the disciple must have had some evidence that convinced them something happened" I think what we can agree on is that at some point there were Christians who belived in the resurection story and were willing to die for their belief. But we dont know when this happened and to whom. We dont know even if there were any contemporaies of Christ who actually died for their belief in the resurrectrion. All the martyrs may well have been people who didnt see what happened. "It is hard to attribute their willingness to a "belief" they made up." You assume they consicously made up the lie. But it might not have been like that, perhaps people simply believed their own fantasies, this happenes all the time. Alien abductees are very sincere people and they genuinely believe they were abducted. That doesnt mean they were abducted. Similarly just becuase early Christians believed in the resurection ( and we dont know that any of them were actually there) doesnt mean their belief was correct. Ill ask you again, what is the difference between Christians willing to die for their belief and the followers of Muhammed who were willing to die for him? There is much mroe agreement amongst historians of the accounts of Muhammed and his followers than there is of Christ. alternativley why not believe that Julius Cesar was a god? We know that some people di believe this, yet again just becuase someone belived something does not make it true.

"So do you not believe anything the history books tell you about the 1st century as true?" Unlike many religious people I dont have views of such events in such polarised true or false terms. What I have said many times is that we should have levels of confidence based upon levels of evidence. Where we have a lot of evidence we can be quite confident, where we have no evidence we should have no confidence. In the case of Jesus ressurection we have no evidence,Im still waiting for a list of witnesses to this event. So far we dont have a single one. In contrats, if we look at ancient history (I see no reason to restrict things just to the 1st century) we can be very cofident that for example, Julius Cesar was Emperor Of Rome. We have his own writings, we have other Roman writers (particularly Cicero) who were contemporaries of Cesar describing him, we have his image on coins, we have busts, we have statues etc etc. However there are claims that Julius Cesar was a god (the statue in the temple Quirinus has such an inscription) do you believe them? I doubt you do , but never the less people fought and died for Caesar, and at least we have plenty of evidence of his life. Why dont you accept their claims? The important point here is that whether or not this event happened in anceint history or that event, matters a lot less than whether the stories in the bible are accurate. People dont base their lives based upon the teahcings of Julius Caseser, Appolonius of Tyana, etc . They live their lives based upon the story of Jesus and so we should have better evidecen for Jesus ressurection than other historical events, due to 1) its importance and 2) the unusual nature of the claim (raised form the dead, son of god ) . In fact we have no good evidence for the NT stoory at all. All we have is evidence that at some point within a unknown number of decades after the event poeple beliebved the Nt story. Well so what? People believd Cesar was a god, doesnt make him one. "Nothing like the thousands of copies within the first generation or two of the NT. " Well thats a hard claim to verify since we dont know when the first Nt was written. I was interested to read this from the Catholic News Agency : "Vatican City, Jan 24, 2007 / 05:21 pm (CNA).- Pope Benedict XVI expressed his gratitude and profound satisfaction upon receiving a papyrus containing one of the earliest known transcriptions of the New Testament. ...The famous papyrus contains one of the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, which dates back to the beginning of the 3rd century. It includes fragments from the Gospel of Luke (including chapter 11, where the Our Father is found) and the first fourteen chapters of John." But no matter how many copies of the NT we have, since we dont know when it was written or by whom it cant even begin to be considered as any kind of historical document. Blief in the resurection of Jesus is based upon faith, not evidence.

"You refute eye witnesses claims because we don't have their original documents, just copies of their testimony" What eye witness claims? We have no eye witnesses. We need a lot and we dont have even one yet. What copies of their testimonies are you talking about? The gospels? They are written by unknown authors at an unkown date , so they are not even reliable as copies of testimonies. The bottom line is we have no wtinesses to the resurection of Christ at all. What we do have is a religious belief that was fervently believed. But we also have a religious belief the was fervently believed with Islam. Muhamed claimed to have got gods last message to humanity. People at the time believed him, followed him and died for him. Does that make their belief true? "I wonder how many original copies of any 1st century historian do we have." To be honest I don't know. What I do as a critical thinker is examine the evidence of claims presented to me. If i see a claim the is prevalent in our culture but does not have sufficient evidence I will challenge them. Christianity is one of the biggest such claims, when other claims of the 1st century get as big as Christianity i'll examine them. For example, in the 1st century we dont just have Jesus considered to come back form the dead but also Apolnius of Tyana who Philostratus described as being reaised form the dead. When I get people knocking on my door or teaching Appolnius rised form the dead Ill investigate it more throughly, until then I dont see why I need to look. I make no claims as to the holy nature of anything said in the 1st century so its not for me to provide any evidence. Chrsitians do make such claims and so the bruden of evidence is on them. So far we have seen none whatsoever.

"The Flying Spaghetti Monster is from a South Park episode. " So is jesus

What a disgrace, the evidence for the FSm is overwheming, look here both for images of the FSm in our contemporary world and beyond: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=215

hats off to u Steve, you look amzingly young to be a grandparent. Well done mate. "there is nothing like the BS a theology professor can spout." Finally some common ground between us, Ill second that statement. Funnily enough the web site you pasted from defined theology as "the science of god". If that isnt bullshit, I dont know what is.

So the text you write is not necessarily you own. What else isnt what it seems, how about your picture, is that really you?

When quoting other people its a good idea to say so, other wise you look like a plagarist.

Its not uncommon for baloney pseudo scientists to try and hide their lack of substance with jargon and gibberish, post modernism a great example. perhaps theology another? A post modernist example: "If one examines substructural nationalism, one is faced with a choice: either reject semioticist socialism or conclude that the raison d’etre of the reader is deconstruction. De Selby suggests that we have to choose between cultural discourse and the precapitalist paradigm of context. In a sense, Sontag’s essay on the dialectic paradigm of context holds that language, somewhat ironically, has objective value, but only if culture is equal to art; if that is not the case, academe is capable of significance"

"Tacitus, the Roman historian, was not an adult when Nero reigned so you are saying he was not a reliable historian for him?" I would say Tacitus would have a lot more access to reliable information on Nero than he would have had on Christ so yet again you are making a false comparison. For Christ, he may have used Christians as his source and so was simply reporting on what they believed. We should also note that Tacitus histoires should definiltye be treated as less reliable than modern histories as we have a lot more resources than were available at the time. Ill ask you again do you seriously think that ancient historians who had a lot less resources than we do, can be considered as reliable as modern one's? What I am saying re Tacitus is that his writings do not in any way back up the main claims of Christianity ie that Jesus was the Messiah and was ressurected from the dead. At best Tacitus shows us that there were Christians at the time he was writing (about 100ad) . But Im not disputing that there were Christians then, Im disputing the divintiy of Christ and his resurection. Im also disputing that there are any contemporary (of Jesus) evidence of the events of the crucial passages of the gospels. I am still waiting for a real eye witness to those events, so far we cant verify a single one, let alone the several it would take to give the story any credibility at all.

"I wasn't debating your definition as much as your assertion all pyschologist do research and study...I have been stating theology should not be under the ruls of science for quite some time. You must have me confused with someone else." I have not asserted that all psychologists do is study , I made no assertions on what psychologists do. I made an assertion on what psychology is. What pyschology is, is a scientific study of mental processes. The reason this definition is important is because you compared theology with psychology to quote you: "While I believe theology is a study that is unique in many ways it is similar to pyschology (maybe this is why I enjoy both) " My point is that theology (at least Christian theology) does not follow the scientific method, whilst psychology does. Rather than getting bogged down in definitions and semantic arguments I think thisis the real point. Sceintific enquiry can give us high (although never 100%) confidence about the nature of the world around us. Theism cannot rival this sort of knowledge. Any conclusion reached by thiests that are not supported by scientific evidence should not be given much weight.

"He (Tacitus) lived in the generation that followed Christ. He would have been an adult around the time "Q" and Luke were written. That's like saying I cannot write about FDR's influence on social democracy of the 60s because FDR died 10 years before I was born." Do you really think you can compare the two situations? We have access to information now that was unheard of then, the internet, video, newspapers, books... lots and lots and lots of sources of information that simply didnt exist then. There were few scribes, most of the population was probably illiterate and stories wouldd have been passed on most predominatley by oral tradition. That makes someone commenting on events decades after in the 1st century a whole lot les reliable than in the 20th century. Eeven if Tacitus is 100% reliable all it proves was there were Chrsitians, it proves nothing about Christ. The main point is there is no historical eye witness account of Christs, all the co called non biblical sources all lived after Christ so they are not eye witnesses and the gospels themsleves are written by unknown authors at an unknown time.

"I do not use wikipedia, it is very unreliable." So instead of addressing the issues wikipedia broght up you simply slag off the whole of wikipedia. That is what we call an ad hominen argument. Im sure Wikedia may have some unreliable entires, but to to automatically reject anyhting in it is quite frankly absurd. In the areas where I have post graduate qualification I find it remarakbly accurate. Of course I would certainly not rely on wikpedia exculsively , that is why youll note I provided two different sources. But in case you didnt like my last two sources I will give you more: This from Oxford Univeristy psychology dept: "Psychology is a science in the sense that it seeks to understand mind behaviour through experimentation, observation and measurement. Insight and intuition can obviously help, but they are not sufficient" This from Cambridge online dictionary "the scientific study of the way the human mind works and how it influences behaviour, or the influence of a particular person's character on their behaviour:" in contrast psycotherapy: "the treatment of mental illness by discussing the problems which caused it with the sufferer, instead of using drugs or operations" So there are some more definitions perhaps form sources you will find more reliable. In contrast you offer up yet again your own personal experience. But I have to point out your masters is not in psychology, its in counselling.They are not the same at all. Im sure being a counseller may have similarities to being a priest. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with sceintific method which real psychology relies upon. Whilst there is a sub set of psychologists who are clinical psychologists, this is not a definition of psychology. Just in case you think things are different in the USA to the UK this is the definition of psychology from the American Psychologist Association: "Psychology is the STUDY of the mind and behavior. The discipline embraces all aspects of the human experience — from the functions of the brain to the actions of nations, from child development to care for the aged. In every conceivable setting from scientific research centers to mental health care services, "the understanding of behavior" is the enterprise of psychologists. " and at Stanford Univerisyt we have: "The psychology major offers excellent training in how to understand human behavior using scientifically rigorous methods. " Now maybe we are getting a little off topic here, but the point is Christian theology cannot try and up its respect by comparing itslef to a legitmate science. Science is our best way of understanding the world around us, reading ancient books pales in comparison.

Are you sure you are not confusing psychology with psycho therapy? Wikipedia definitions: Psychology is an academic or applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Psychotherapy is an interpersonal, relational intervention used by trained psychotherapists to aid clients in problems of living. This usually includes increasing individual sense of well-being and reducing subjective discomforting experience. On a psychotherapy web site http://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/faqs.html "Psychotherapy is the provision by qualified practitioners of a formal and professional relationship within which patients/clients can profitably explore difficult, and often painful, emotions and experiences......Psychologists are scientists and base their diagnoses and treatments on statistical evidence. "

"In the field of psyschology we have psychotheories like Alderian, Jungian, Existential, Person-Centered, Gestalt, behavior" Again these seem to be more pyschotherapies than real psychology. The two are not the same, psychology is a genuine science whose ideas are subject to emperical verification. Pyschotherapy ecompasses many form of counselling to aid people through life, it is not a science but a treatment whose effectiveness is widely debated. Pyschologists do experiments and subject the data to peer review, theology is nothing like this.

Tacitus did not live at the time of Christ.

Who says I accpet his(Photius or Justus) word? I dont, Im just saying theres no mention of jesus in it. Thast a whole different ball game.

When you say historical Jesus you should clarify what you mean. At very best Josephus confirms that a man called Jesus existed, it says nothing about this dvinity or his resurrection. But you are assuming that the Jesus in Josephus is the Jesus of the gospels. All we know from Josephus is that there was a man called James who was killed for breaking Jewishh law and he had a brother called Jesus. Many scholars believe that the phrase Christ was added by later translations so it might not be the same Jesus Christ. Moreover the fact that Jospehus wasnt alive at the time excludes him as primrary source anyway so even if it is the same Jesus it means nothing more than the Jesus STORY existed at the time in some foorm or another, what form we dont know. i find it amazing that you think a forged document (the second passage of Josephus) still backs up anything to do with Jesus. That passage is widely considered a forgery, even by Christian scholars. The evidence from Pliny onwards only supports the proposition that there were Christians that does not mean they back up the claims of Christians, big difference. "Your major objection to the evidence is that these secular historians were not eye-witnesses. Well, not many historians ARE eye-witnesses of the information they report on" Well our confidence in past historical events depends on named eye witness documents,(amongst other things) if we have none then we have no confidence, we cannot distinguish legend from history. Of course I dont trust oral accounts written up decades after the events. Oral accounts change as they get retold, mostly getting more fantastical. Are you suggesting stories never get embellished?That they never change in the telling? "Can you provide the names of any secular historians who lived during the first century in that area?" Its not for me to provide you with your evidence, thats your job. But Ill give you a head start, I can think of two off the top of my head: Philo was a Jewish historian alive at ther time of Christ and says nothing whatsoever about him. read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo Justus of Tiberius was another Jewish historian alive at the time of Christ, his work do not survive but a document from Photius(a Christian writer) does, in the 9th century he remarked "The Jewish historian (Justus)does not make the smallest mention of the apperence of Christ"