? Remember I'm a bit outta date with my scriptures and apostles... What did Paul say?
See
I Corinthians 15:1-8. He says, not only that Jesus appeared to him after Jesus' death, but also that Jesus appeared to others. Some emphasize the fact that Paul mentions over five hundred Christians to whom Christ appeared, and I believe this is important. In my mind, however, the fact that Paul started out hostile to this religious movement (even putting them in jail) lends more weight to Paul's own experience, and I treat his statements about appearances to other people as evidence that Paul's beliefs were held by numerous earlier Christians.
As for Inanna, if you wish to ignore the similarity of descending to the after world and returning that's up to you. The point is, it is a part of a religion prior to Christianity by two centuries or more. Not to mention, how do you get proof of a divine being descending from a heaven into the underworld. There isn't any physical evidence of Jesus doing it why does Inanna have to be held to a higher burden of proof?
Your straw man argument is careless and misleading. I ignored nothing.
You ignored the fact that the Inanna myth featured her dying
after she got to the underworld (where she had already done all sorts of stuff). Aside from some passages in the New Testament with debated meaning, there is nothing indicating that Jesus did anything specific while dead. The point was that He came back, and people saw Him after He came back.
It is not that Jesus went down to the underworld that I attempt to prove. He died. There's plenty of evidence for that--so much that it is beyond doubt in most liberal circles. I've offered evidence that He was seen alive after death.
As an example of what I mean, answer me this: what would it take for you to stop believing in God and start believing in Thor? Can I ever convince you to drop your faith if I tried?
There are a number of things.
(1) Show actual reasons why the bias of the disciples for Jesus would cause them to distort facts to put forth the idea that He'd come back to life if in fact He did no such thing. This motive would have to also explain why they were willing to suffer for their beliefs, since some of them were imprisoned or even killed. (And just in case you're thinkin' it...don't try to use the opulence of centuries-later cathedrals to allege that the disciples had a financial motive.)
(2) Produce the body. Multiple pieces of information support the idea that the tomb was empty. Matthew writes that the Jewish leaders bribed the guard at Jesus' tomb to say "His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept" (Matt. 28:13 NKJV). In verse 15, Matthew goes on to say that this story is widely told in Jewish circles up to the time of Matthew's writing. As Robert E. Van Voorst comments, "The significant historical difficulties of this Matthean passage do not militate against its closing point, that this story was widely current among Jews as anti-resurrection polemic when this Gospel was written. Matthew would be unlikely to report, much less invent, such a vivid, powerful anti-Christian story if it were not in circulation." (Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament [Grand Rapids, Eerdman's, 2000], page 132).
(3) Show some eyewitness evidence, or at least some kind of evidence, for the existence of Thor.
A bit incorrect there. The idea that the universe as we know it started with a "bang" (i.e. an expansion of some sort) is the simplest explanation that corresponds with various extraterrestrial observations (I'm not an astronomer nor am I a theoretical physicist, so don't delve too deep here). However, adding any extra details on top of that "bang" adds numerous questions that must be answered, and "God did it" is no exception (e.g. questions such as: for what reason and how is God the sole exception to the "everything had to come from somewhere" rule?). If you're going to claim that some higher intelligence set something in motion, you're going to have to prove it or concede that we just don't know at this point.
You too are a bit incorrect there. There is no rule that everything must come from something. Though I believe that God made the mass-energy of the universe, I do not assume that this is accepted by others. For the purposes of debate, I work under the assumption that the mass-energy of the universe may have always existed, hence I don't expect any non-theist to explain its origin.
Every
event, however, demands a sufficient cause. The Big Bang was undoubtedly an event. Other proposed causes, such as a quantum vacuum, an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction, or some event in another universe, invoke many more entities than some God, and are no more testable.
There are some posts in the debate about religion, atheism and agnosticism which I think you should look at. Please start with
this one, the ones I link in it, and my responses.
According to dictionary.com, "wrong" means "not in accordance with what is morally right or good: a wrong deed".
Since morals themselves are subjective, I'd say "inherently wrong" is an invalid concept.
And I hold that there exists a conscience which cannot be explained as mere social conditioning, and it indicates to me and countless others, even those who don't believe there is such a thing as a conscience, that destroying the world is objectively wrong no matter the social conditioning. Don't you watch Saturday morning cartoons like Pokémon?
They were all Jesus' disciples. A significant degree of bias there.
I acknowledge that the disciples had a bias for their teacher. However, such a bias does not prove the likelihood of deliberate fabrication.
This article gives a similar example.
Open-mindedness: being open to the possbility that there are other possible explanations for this "Paul's conversion" of which you speak.
You need to show more than possibility. You need to show probability. I've heard the explanations: heatstroke, secret sympathy for Christians, even the idea that Paul never believed Jesus was a real human to begin with (the last of which fails to account for Paul's mention of the Lord's brother James in Galatians 1:19). These all fail to take something into account, and/or use special pleading to avoid giving evidence. The best probability, based on the evidence, is that Paul became convinced that he'd seen Jesus because...he actually did see Jesus.
There is record of "paradoxical deeds", which are stated to be "extraordinary events caused by God". I'm sure you know where I'm going with this, but "apparent paradox, therefore miracles, therefore Yahweh" is not a logical argument.
On top of this, there was no extensive study done on any of these "paradoxical deeds". Thus, we can't be sure if they were actually "paradoxical" or merely the result of sleight-of-hand combined with trickery and a game of historical "Chinese Whispers". I'm not claiming that it IS, but if you're going to claim it isn't you have to prove it.
Inserting the word "apparent" is special pleading. My argument is that these things are an additional witness to supernatural actions of Jesus. Nothing you said countered that.
More importantly, sleight of hand won't cure blindness or raise dead people. The eyewitnesses to these deeds did not all die off before these accounts circulated, since Christians started widely proclaiming these things very shortly after Jesus' death.
