Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four…

And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.

Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.

But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.

That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.

So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.

the burden of proof lies with the one who speaks, not the one who denies) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for its position.

Flying Squid said it is impossible what is described in the bible. So he or you if you take his side are the one burdened with proof. In fact the bible provides a very straightforward reasoning. Jesus was granted the power to do wonders by God so people would recognize him as a messenger of God and listen to him spreading the message of God.

You can say you dont believe in that. But it is not a proof of it not having happened. Especially as a lot of people who lived at the time said otherwise.

Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.

It is simply unscientifc to claim to have “facts” against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.

Which is why is said scientific arguments need to be separated from theological arguments.

Saying you believe there is no god is a theological argument based on a believe. It is not scientific.

Saying there is not observable physical proof or disproof of a divine power, which is agnostic, is in compliance with science.

Why do you accuse me of something i never said?

A message being powerful is not in contradiction to it taking time to establish. If you look at the timeline you will see that it grew exponentially. and that the critical point was in the fourth century, after which it became the dominant religion in many parts of the empire.

That is how exponential growth works.

Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.

Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.

I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to “believe in science” violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he’ll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

Jesus as literal son of god was only established some 400 years later. And when later the records of the gospel got translated through multiple languages it seems very plausible to me, that under the assumption that Jesus should be the literal son of god, this sentence is supposed to be worded to confirm that. It is as easy as forgetting a half sentence like “HE said” or turn a third person into a first person form. Or to loose the context that he was announced already before Ibrahim etc.

You make good points. May i introduce you to Islam?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_in_Islam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran

The final prophet Mohammed s.a.s. whose life and effect are well documented as well as the direct word of Allah s.w.t., preserved as original in the Arabic language of revelation in the Quran. You should not though that according to Islam Jesus was merely a human messenger as Allah neither was born nor gives birth. In the same wake Allah is one and not three. But these concepts were added by the church to the Christian theology four hundred years after the life of Jesus.

Can you elaborate what you mean by that?

That god couldn’t change the rules he himself created according to the scriptures? That seems pretty consistent to me.

I think this is a terminological confusion. The original Gospel as in the life and teaching of Jesus, that got lost as it wasn’t documented in his lifetime.

The four gospels that made the choice are as you said collections written later. And there were many more Gospels that the early church decided not to put into the bible. On top of that there is the issue how those gospels got translated multiple times and each translation inadvertently adds a layer of interpretation.

So do you believe the people 2000 years ago knew nothing about the laws of nature or did they? Did they understand that walking on water was something regularly possible or not? Did they understand raising the dead was something not normally possible?

Because that is your claim. And i strongly disagree because we have plenty of evidence that people understood the laws of nature quite well, even if they couldn’t verbalize them in math yet. We have many ancient buildings and technologies that only work with a profound understanding of how physical matter behaves under normal circumstances.

EDIT: By the way i do not believe the bible to be an accurate description of Jesus, as there is an accurate description in the Quran. Still i don’t claim to have proof that Jews, Christians or Hindus are wrong, because i have different theological believes. I acknowledge that my believes are that. And Atheists should realize that they also have theological believes, which is fundamentally different from knowledge about natural sciences.

was written by people with no knowledge of physics

So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders? Do you think they did not understand that walking on water, giving life to the death, curing diseases on the spot and other things ascribed to Jesus as wonders were defying the conventional laws of nature?

The burden of proof is on the claimant.

Exactly. You claim to know that Jesus as described in the bible is an impossibility. So you have to proof that. All i want you to acknowledge, is that you are making an assumption, not providing proven knowledge.

And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.

Ever heard of modern Physics? Relativity theory? Relativistic effects? All of these are the results of observations in defiance of classical Newtonian physics. There is an ongoing revolution in physics since a hundred years because we keep observing things inconsistent with our prior assumptions about the laws of physics.

You know the Chineese? They talk about this ChatPT 7. But we Americans. My uncle, very smart man. Smartest in every room except on Thanks Giving. I always had Thanks Giving and my Turkey, everyone loved my Turkey. He said we will soon have Chat 8 and the Chineese they know nothing like it.

And the roman empire was not able to do that already? From my understanding mythologically/spiritually the Roman empire was perfectly settled with what it had before in terms of political power. Incidentally the roman empire declined and fell apart in the centuries after accepting Christianity.

And before the Roman empire there were the Egyptians. They seemed to fare much better in terms of power with their idol worship than later when they embraced Abrahamic religions, yet they did.

Again you are making an assumption as the base of your logical construct.

That assumption is that the “laws of physics” are absolute in the sense that you know them. This is already problematic from a scientific point of view because our understanding of what the “laws of physics” are were and are under a constant change.

The scriptures are based on the axiom that god created everything including the laws of physics so when he chooses to, these laws can be defied. You can disagree with that axiom, but that does not mean that the logic is inconsistent.

So if you want to be honest your argument is “I don’t believe the scriptures, so i don’t believe in Jesus” which is perfectly valid, but very different from “I know Jesus is impossible and i can prove it.”

Maybe to make an example in science to wrap it all together. Before the invention of microscopes some doctors theorized about bacteria and viruses as the source of diseases. They often got ridiculed as “some invisible animals making us sick? Yeah you drank too much wine again” . Then the telescope came about and it could be seen what used to be unseeable for humans. Nowadays if you would claim there to be no bacteria you’d be rightfully ridiculed. But we also saw in human history that knowledge got lost and things that were established knowledge became bold theories subject to ridicule again.

So being honest to science and human knowledge the valid position is “I don’t believe in Jesus like described in the bible, as it is inconsistent with what i can observe today, but i have no proof in either direction.”

But this position is not more or less valid than “I do believe in Jesus like described in the bible.” Or “I do believe in Jesus but not like described in the bible.”

Important notion that Jesus never claimed to be the son of god and that entire line of thinking was established some four hundred years after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

So we have to differentiate between what is the actual Gospel and life of Jesus and what the more creative parts of the churches invented on top of it over time.

Then why is it that the message was so powerful that the Roman empire abolished its idol worship and chose Christianity? Especially as Jesus a.s. was supposed to be a rebel against the empire?

Do you think people 2000 years ago were all stupid?

His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws.

Which is perfectly sensible given that he was given the power to perform wonders by god to establish that he is indeed a messenger of god. The entire point of wonders is them defying the otherwise imposed limits of the physical world. Because the only one who can grant this power is the source of the physical limits themselves and that is god.

This is logically consistent under the axiom that god exists. Which is what the scriptures are all about.

You can set the axiom that god does not exist. But as there is no proof of that, it is equally axiomatic. So given that your logic works on an unproven assumption you should not use it to criticize a different logic based on another assumption.

Irrespective of whether people believe the prophets to be prophets the level of “proof of existence” they demand is often way beyond what is accepted for other historical people.

And frankly it is quite childish. There is rational criticisms of what happened between the life of Jesus a.s. and what is printed in modern bibles. There is a lot of rational criticism for various christian institutions like the catholic church or other churches.

And i think it is unsurprising when looking at groups like atheist memes. It mostly seems to be a self help group for people who struggled under bad christian parents, rather than a theological conviction. And i don’t think that mocking Christianity is the healthy approach to reconcile with that childhood trauma.

1…

And Israel and the EU help Azerbaijan to continue ethnic cleansing of Armenians, in particular Israel by sending drones in exchange for Azerbaijani oil

2…

The Kurdish identity was deliberately squashed by the Western imperialists France and UK when they drew the borders after the fall of the Ottoman empire

3…

Turkey went into Cyprus when a western aided fascist Greek military junta government tried to take over Cyprus and make it part of Greece with ethnic cleansing against the Turks in Cyprus. Calling it an illegal occupation is again a western imperialist narrative ignoring the complicity in attempted ethnic cleansing or worse genocide by the Greek fascist military junta government of the time. In fact Turkey stepping in was pivotal to the fascist military junta falling apart and Greece returning to Democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus

So already in your first three points you are showing either a lack of understanding, or deliberately downplaying the effects of western imperialist rule and its continuation into today. Armenians are allies of Palestine as they understand that they are victim of the same forces. In particular the Israel-Azerbaijan axis shows that it is not about religion, but about classic imperialist motives of ressources, power and money.