Yes I urge all you non-believers to see this with an

All right. I actually checked out "Ressurection" on amazon, reading the first few pages. Swoon theories and twin theories really mean nothing at all unless you can give empirical evidence that Jesus of the bible was real.

Let's say you do that. Let's say you convince me that Jesus of the bible was an actual living person.

Then comes the next problem. You have to give empirical evidence that Jesus of the bible was the son of god.

Now you have to give empirical evidence that god exists.

And that, good sir, you can never ever do.



And what is this tripe about "late on the scene"? Reason and clear thinking is "assorted fables and myths" in your world? Let's talk about some assorted fables and myths then. Let's see what your bible could have looked like had some gospels not been buried for a much longer time than others. I take it you know enough of the bible to know that the gospels and books were cherry-picked and canonized rather late?

"Full dogmatic articulations of the canons were not made until the Council of Trent of 1546 for Roman Catholicism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for British Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox"

- Wikipedia



"Sixty years ago, at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a trove of neglected
"Gospels" was discovered near a very ancient Coptic Christian site. These
scrolls were of the same period and provenance as many of the subsequently
canonical and "authorized" Gospels, and have long gone under
the collective name of "Gnostic." This was the title given them by a certain
Irenaeus, an early church father who placed them under a ban as
heretical.

They include the "Gospels" or narratives of marginal but significant
figures in the accepted "New" Testament, such as "Doubting
Thomas" and Mary Magdalene. They now also include the Gospel of
Judas, known for centuries to have existed but now brought to light and
published by the National Geographic Society in the spring of 2006.

The book is chiefly spiritualist drivel, as one might expect, but it
offers a version of "events" that is fractionally more credible than the
official account. For one thing, it maintains as do its partner texts that
the supposed god of the "Old" Testament is the one to be avoided, a
ghastly emanation from sick minds. (This makes it easy to see why it
was so firmly banned and denounced: orthodox Christianity is nothing
if it is not a vindication and completion of that evil story.)

Judas attends the final Passover meal, as usual, but departs from the
customary script. When Jesus appears to pity his other disciples for
knowing so little about what is at stake, his rogue follower boldly says
that he believes he knows what the difficulty is. "I know who you are
and where you have come from," he tells the leader. "You are from the
immortal realm of Barbelo."

This "Barbelo" is not a god but a heavenly
destination, a motherland beyond the stars. Jesus comes from this
celestial realm, but is not the son of any Mosaic god. Instead, he is an
avatar of Seth, the third and little-known son of Adam. He is the one
who will show the Sethians the way home. Recognizing that Judas
is at least a minor adept of this cult, Jesus takes him to one side and
awards him the special mission of helping him shed his fleshly form
and thus return heavenward. He also promises to show him the stars
that will enable Judas to follow on.

Deranged science fiction though this is, it makes infinitely more
sense than the everlasting curse placed on Judas for doing what somebody
had to do, in this otherwise pedantically arranged chronicle of
a death foretold. It also makes infinitely more sense than blaming the
Jews for all eternity.

For a long time, there was incandescent debate
over which of the "Gospels" should be regarded as divinely inspired,
Some argued for these and some for others, and many a life was horribly
lost on the proposition. Nobody dared say that they were all
man-inscribed long after the supposed drama was over, and the "Revelation"
of Saint John seems to have squeezed into the canon because
of its author's (rather ordinary) name.

But as Jorge Luis Borges put it, had the Alexandrian Gnostics won the day, some later Dante would have drawn us a hypnotically beautiful word-picture of the wonders of "Barbelo." This concept I might choose to call "the Borges shale":
the verve and imagination needed to visualize a cross section of evolutionary
branches and bushes, with the extraordinary but real possibility
that a different stem or line (or tune or poem) had predominated
in the labyrinth. Great ceilings and steeples and hymns, he might have
added, would have consecrated it, and skilled torturers would have
worked for days on those who doubted the truth of Barbelo: beginning
with the fingernails and working their way ingeniously toward
the testicles, the vagina, the eyes, and the viscera. Nonbelief in Barbelo
would, correspondingly, have been an unfailing sign that one had
no morals at all."

- Christopher Hitchens

Your twisting. Do you really think the incarcerated, not the Nationalist Socialists, choose their fate? C'mon!

Can you fly this plane?
Surely you can't be serious.
I am serious, and don't call me Shirley

His view of open mindedness is not against the idea of God just a prejudicial argument for or against anything. The God example is just an obvious example of the argument.