Christina Pierce1 day ago
Then you are either one of the more idiotic of Holding's followers, or you have been sorely misinformed about your own reality, to say nothing of common sense. Allow me to enlighten you with facts you'll never get from those who are paid to be Jesus' cheerleaders.
Suppose a stranger on a bus tells you he walked into a store yesterday. Suppose he shows you a picture of him walking into a store you've been to many times, and therein he looks just like he does on the bus. How much effort would you put into authenticating this picture and the claims made about it (i.e., see the originals and negatives, inspect the camera, go to the location and compare reality with the picture, interview cameraman, interview witnesses, etc, etc)? NONE.
Suppose you find out the stranger is free on bail pending a charge of auto-theft, and plans to use this picture to "prove" that he wasn't 250 miles away stealing a car in another city at the time the car was stolen? How much effort would you wish the prosecutor to put into authenticating this picture and the claims made about it (i.e., see the originals and negatives, inspect the camera, go to the location and compare reality with the picture, interview cameraman, interview witnesses, etc, etc)? MORE.
Suppose another stranger on the bus tells you they can levitate without using any physical means to do so, whenever nobody is looking. They then try to substantiate this by showing you a picture they took of themselves in mid-air above the floor in their house. How much effort would you need to put into authenticating this picture and the claims made about it (i.e., see the originals and negatives, inspect the camera, go to the location and compare reality with the picture, interview cameraman, interview witnesses, etc, etc) before you became open to the possibility of accepting the claim as true? LOTS.
"Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" or "ECREE", is not only common sense, it is the normal way YOU think. The fact that you believe normal claims upon normal evidence that you encounter on a daily basis, doesn't mean you always believe what you see. The truth is that the more somebody else's claim sounds improbable to you, the more rigid tests of authentication you'll require the evidence to pass before you'll be open to accepting the claim as true.
If the evidence is being used to support an ordinary claim not involving, miracle, crime or alibi, most of us, including Christians, see no reason to be suspicious.
But the more extraordinary the claim, the more effort most people, including Christians, will will put into authenticating the allegedly supporting "evidence" before they believe the claim to be true. We are perfectly well aware that pictures can be modified, testimony can be falsified, eyewitnesses can be mistaken in their conclusions about what they were looking at, etc.
I wouldn't give two shits about gospel authorship if all these books did was tell about a non-miraculous Jesus. I'd just refer to "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John" in common parlance without raising an issue, because it wouldn't matter either way.
But because the gospels tell about a Jesus who did things that are "extraordinary", then no, I will not be as uncritically accepting that apostle Matthew really is the author of the gospel now bearing his name.
How would my increase in skepticism be qualitatively different than in the case of you and the stranger who uses a picture to prove he can float? You have bigger problems with claims the more they assert that which you deem improbable...and so do I. What?
This more skeptical attitude is perfectly consistent with the common sense way that EVERYBODY reacts. The more the claim departs from typical experience (Jesus rising from the dead), the more everybody demands a stricter criteria of authentication.
The reason isn't hard to figure out: there are thousands of false miracle claims in the world, wherein liars have set forth pictures and testimony to support false claims. So it only makes sense, in the name of ultimate truth, for the degree of authentication rigidity to increase proportionally with the degree to which we think a claim is improbable.
If you were told that ECREE is a mere subterfuge and only means "miraculous claims require miraculous evidence", a concoction by skeptics in the effort to make sure they can always get away from real miracles, you've been duped. ECREE is obeyed and observed by everybody who is not crazy.
Can you imagine what would happen to America's justice system, if lawyers and judges suddenly denied ECREE and simply believed all claims where presented with possibly valid evidence?
Indeed, have you ever been suspicious somebody was lying while lacking direct proof they were lying? Yes. Does that mean you were irrationally skeptical? No, because many times our hunches about another's dishonesty prove accurate. It means you are a skeptic.
I suggest you stop getting your knowledge from a Christian "teacher" whose long history of intentional slander forces you to disassociate yourself from him anyway (1st Cor. 5:11-13), give up the dogmatic snarky attitude as if you could actually survive a debate with a philosophically informed atheist, and recognize that it is your own choice to remain hidden safely behind your anonymity, which testifies most strongly that a person with your brain power has no moral right to be dogmatic about this stuff. you don't know enough about it to even recognize when you are wrong.
You can be dogmatic about sandwiches, puppies, the existence of cars, and clean air. But you need to grow the fuck up and recognize how ill-equipped you are to handle epistemology...and to accordingly back off the snarky attitude. Us atheists are anything but wrong when we give the middle finger to the bible and insist our authentication criteria remain reasonable despite your inability to fulfill them.
See my prior defense of ECREE, and my rebuttal to Nick Peters on the subject here.
