Jackthelad
Well-known member
- Mar 31, 2010
- 1,067
What has this got to do with anything?!
Got something to say or just want fewer pesky ads? Join us... 😊
[Misc] Christians seem to be really good people
- Thread starter Mustafa II
- Start date
If those are hallucinations, the people were hallucinating about a statue moving, but since they were all in different directions it sounds more like lots of simultaneous self-induced individual hallucinations rather than one group hallucination.
This is the group hallucination the disciples had:
I think you've got to hand it to them for having such a good hallucination.
It's another component of the whole puzzle.
Commonly thought to be fake by people who haven't looked into it very deeply.
It's not thought to be a fake by Barrie Schwortz who was on the STURP, or Peter Schumacher, or Ray Rogers.
Oh, you know that do you?
Forensic scientists who worked on the shroud disagree with you about that.
How ironic. You're the one who is refusing to look at the whole picture.
BadFish
Huge Member
- Oct 19, 2003
- 18,181
Leviticus 24:16
Whoever utters the name of the Lord must be put to death. The whole community must stone him whether alien or native. If he utters the name, he must be put to death.
Been mentioned a bit on here. Are we okay though because we are typing?
Whoever utters the name of the Lord must be put to death. The whole community must stone him whether alien or native. If he utters the name, he must be put to death.
Been mentioned a bit on here. Are we okay though because we are typing?
BadFish
Huge Member
- Oct 19, 2003
- 18,181
Shit sorry this was supposed to be a private message!
- Apr 19, 2018
- 2,128
No, it blatantly doesn't have to be either God exists or a group hallucination. It could equally (and what I think) be a totally made up story by the Apostles / people who wrote the gospels because it suited their aims to entirely fabricate the myth of physical resurrection. Enough people believed it because they wanted to and needed to believe it. That doesn't make it right or true. The fact it also suits in it's entirety a whole load of social, political and religious philosophies of the time only reinforces that belief it's made up. If you wanted to make up a story in that 1st century community to unite disparate factions in a common cause of revolution you'd invent a physical resurrection and pitch your leader as a messiah and you'd work hard to convince people it was real. It's incredibly convenient that's what they did.
All your arguments and tables prove is blindness to counter arguments that might make you question your faith. I'm guessing you're fearful of acknowledging them because you're worried it might (un)convert you. True faith would acknowledge them and believe anyway rather than come up with false equivalence as a way to try and dismiss them. The only other option (see, two can play that game) is that you're trolling.
They couldn't go back to their old lives, they had to "double down" because the Romans were coming for them anyway. It's what the Romans did. That's why Peter denied knowing him so hard for example, why they went into hiding, and why they invented the resurrection story.
As for your table, I've missed why anyone needs to account for the empty tomb or the shroud? That assumes the shroud is authentic (even the current pope agrees with the pope of the 1300s when the shroud first appeared that it's a fake) - I agree with them and many others, I don't need to account for its existence. And the tomb was empty (if it was) because someone took the body to create a resurrection myth. That myth is already accounted for - you've got pages and pages of people explaining why it was created and all the flaws in the story.
So to sum up, the sceptics' position seems to be that the followers of Jesus had a group hallucination, someone stole the body, and the Shroud of Turin is a fake.
My problem with this is that:
1. group hallucinations don't happen. The example someone gave of something in Ireland is not a group hallucination, it's lots of separate individual ones.
2. if the Romans or Jewish leaders stole the body, they could have simply produced it to discredit the resurrection claims of the disciples. If it was the disciples themselves who stole it, how does that fit in with the group hallucination? Can they have a group hallucination and also steal the body?
3. explain why the shroud has 3D information encoded into it, and is a photographic negative and cannot be reproduced today.
If it wasn't empty, the opponents of the gospel could have simply pointed to the body lying there.
Can you account for the fact that it is a photographic negative and has 3D information encoded into it?
Is your faith that it is a fake reliant upon the 1988 radiocarbon dating test?
Do you think the followers of Jesus would go around proclaiming the risen Jesus, and the opponents of the gospel would oppose them and persecute them and accuse them of stealing the body, while it was still lying there the whole time?
My problem with this is that:
1. group hallucinations don't happen. The example someone gave of something in Ireland is not a group hallucination, it's lots of separate individual ones.
2. if the Romans or Jewish leaders stole the body, they could have simply produced it to discredit the resurrection claims of the disciples. If it was the disciples themselves who stole it, how does that fit in with the group hallucination? Can they have a group hallucination and also steal the body?
3. explain why the shroud has 3D information encoded into it, and is a photographic negative and cannot be reproduced today.
Can you demonstrate that they wanted and needed to believe it? It led to them being persecuted and in some cases martyred. Is that what they wanted and needed?
I do acknowledge them. There's the theory that the resurrection is true, the theory that there was a group hallucination (Bart Ehrman's theory), the theory that someone conned them all into believing it (that's your preferred one, isn't it?). I'm not in the least bit fearful of acknowledging any theory. I honestly haven't seen any good theories yet that explain why the early followers of Jesus sincerely believed in the truth of the resurrection, but I'm happy to acknowledge any that anyone can suggest.
No, I'm not trolling.
I'm not sure whether or not you're right there. My feeling is that they could have gone back to their old lives, or started new ones. Peter denied Jesus so hard at the time because it was happening right in front of his eyes. After the crucifixion, I think it would be more likely that Peter would have kept his head down, not stood up and started drawing attention to himself again.
The tomb was empty.
If it wasn't empty, the opponents of the gospel could have simply pointed to the body lying there.
That's fine if you are happy and convinced that it is a fake.
Can you account for the fact that it is a photographic negative and has 3D information encoded into it?
Is your faith that it is a fake reliant upon the 1988 radiocarbon dating test?
Do you not think it was?
Do you think the followers of Jesus would go around proclaiming the risen Jesus, and the opponents of the gospel would oppose them and persecute them and accuse them of stealing the body, while it was still lying there the whole time?
Somebody? Who?
Can you summarise niftily for us why it was created?
Baldseagull
Well-known member
Not a part of the puzzle if it is a fake.
It has been dated to about the time of when it first appeared
Ok, it has blood on it, but the science was not conducted well enough to conclude that it was human blood.
No, I have looked at the picture you are painting and see fallacies in your logic, we start with differing assumptions, you that there is a God, me a vanishingly small chance that there is a God, and even less that the Bible tells us anything about him.
If the Shroud is proven beyond all doubt to be a fake, you will not believe it, or if you do, you will still believe in the resurrection.
If it is proven to be 2000 years old, have human blood on it, and be cloth from the correct area, I still will not see that as proof of a resurrection.
Just because I can't tell you how the image came to be on the cloth, doesn't mean it's magic.
I can't tell you how a great many things of antiquity came to be, we don't just say God did it because we can't yet work out how a man did it.
Baldseagull
Well-known member
No, no, no. No one here as put forward a group hallucination theory except you, in reference to a scholar that you otherwise seem to agree with.
You have had numerous alternatives and you choose to ignore them, in preference to your straw man of a mass hallucination.
True, but I'm far from satisfied that it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be a fake.
What I would need in order to be satisfied that it was a fake would be an explanation as to how come it is a photographic negative and how come it has 3D information encoded into the image. This aspect of the shroud is so extraordinary that the inventor of the VP-8 image analyzer (Peter Schumacher) became a Christian because of this. All I ever hear is "the radiocarbon dating test said 1260 to 1390," but this doesn't address either of these points (photographic negative, 3D info), and it's not much good if they radiocarbon dated a medieval repair patch, as Ray Rogers maintains. There's also the question of how the image was formed, and why there is no image under the blood.
When you say "it", do you mean the whole shroud, or a medieval repair patch? Because according to Ray Rogers it was a repair patch that they dated.
Is there any reason to assume that it is not human blood?
Doesn't matter whether there is a god or not. I'm just looking at whether the resurrection happened or not, which is not the same thing. Forget God, just analyse the facts.
Yes I will.
Why shouldn't I? If the shroud is a fake that doesn't necessarily mean that the resurrection didn't happen, but if it is authentic, it does raise questions for you to answer.
What if it is proven to be 2000 years old, have human blood on it, be cloth from the correct area, be a photographic negative (basically the world's first photograph 1800 years before the invention of photography), have 3D information encoded into it, formed in a way that cannot be explained, showing wounds unique as far as we know to the way Jesus was crucified with a crown of thorns and spear wound in his side?
I don't think we're going to get 100% proof.
In life we function without having 100% proof of things. In law, cases are decided based on things being proven beyond a reasonable doubt. I suppose faith bridges that gap.
Baldseagull
Well-known member
It is an interesting item, but there are a number of things from the past that surprise us and we cannot understand how they were created. I am pretty sure that men have known a pinhole in a sheet can produce an image on the wall for a lot longer than we have had cameras, and that light can discolour fabrics with time. It would be surprising if it were 2000 years old, but I suspect that even that long ago men knew this.
It seems ridiculous to me that they knowingly tested a repair patch, for dating, or is your man just guessing that it might have been a repair patch?
I don't know whether it was deliberate or not. I do know that the British Museum wouldn't release the raw data until they were obliged to by an FOI request, which seems a bit weird but maybe there was a reason for that, although cynics might suspect that there was some skulduggery going on. Rogers was involved in the STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project).
Raymond Rogers - Wikipedia
Shroud of Turin[edit]
Rogers was appointed Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) in 1978, applying thermal methods to the study of this relic. In recent years, he further researched material relevant to the dating of the Shroud, publishing his findings in Thermochimica Acta.In 1978, the team of scientists conducted their testing over five days in Turin, Italy.
Until Rogers's death in 2005, he continued to study the Shroud and explain the studies he had undertaken. He participated in ongoing discussions with the Shroud Science Group, a group of about 100 scientists, historians, and archeologists who continue to study the Shroud of Turin.[3]
Criticism of the radiocarbon-14 dating of the Shroud of Turin[edit]
Main article: Radiocarbon-14 dating of the Shroud of TurinRogers's continual study of the Shroud resulted from a 2000 study by Joseph Marino and Sue Benford, based on x-ray analysis of the sample sites, showing a probable seam from a repair attempt running diagonally through the area from which the sample was taken. These researchers conclude that the samples tested by the three labs were more or less contaminated by this repair attempt. They further note that the results of the three labs show an angular skewing corresponding to the diagonal seam: the first sample in Arizona dated to 1238 A.D., the second to 1430 A.D., with the Oxford and Swiss results falling in between. They add that the variance of the C-14 results of the three labs falls outside the bounds of the Pearson's chi-square test, so that some additional explanation should be sought for the discrepancy.[4] The claims by Marino and Benford on the lack of statistical consistency of the results of the 1988 radiocarbon test were in contrast with the conclusions of J.A. Christen, who in 1994 applied robust statistics (Empirical Bayes method) to the radiocarbon data and concluded that the given age for the Shroud was correct, from a statistical point of view.[5]
When Rogers saw the paper by Marino and Benford, his reaction was that they were not scientists,[6] their theory was ridiculous, and that he still had fiber samples he had taken from the Shroud that could disprove their theory. Upon examining the fibers under a microscope, however, he concluded that, as they had hypothesized, a cotton patch had been woven into the linen fibers and then dyed to match the color of the linen. This was possible because linen is strongly resistant to dyes but cotton is not. Rogers claimed that the repair had gone undetected because it was expertly done; there was no record of it; none of the STURP team were textile experts; and the area had not previously been a major focus of any major Shroud researchers' attention, because it was outside the image area.
Rogers claimed that under the microscope he could see the undyed linen fibers, the cotton fibers, and the dye on the cotton fibers. Because he knew he had terminal cancer, he contacted his friend and fellow STURP researcher Barrie Schwortz to record interviews, etc.[7] He also sent some of the fibers to a research lab for independent examination. When they were preparing samples, in one case they accidentally pulled apart the cotton and linen sections of one fiber. Schwortz reexamined false-color x-ray fluorescent photographs of the Shroud taken by STURP and pointed out that the sample for radiocarbon dating was taken from the only section that showed up green, indicating it had different chemical properties from the rest of the Shroud, but no one had previously paid attention to the color difference because the green portion is from a section that does not contain part of the image. In December 2008, the Discovery Channel in the United States presented a documentary titled Unwrapping the Shroud: New Evidence, containing a detailed explanation of the repair and footage of Schwortz and of Rogers discussing their new findings.[8] A few months before his death, Rogers submitted an article describing his findings to a peer-reviewed journal, and it was published less than two months before Raymond Rogers died.[9] The essential conclusion of the article is that the radiocarbon datings were accurate, but because the samples were from cloth that was not part of the original Shroud, they are irrelevant to the age of the image area.
This video is worth a watch. It's quite brief.I don't know whether it was deliberate or not. I do know that the British Museum wouldn't release the raw data until they were obliged to by an FOI request, which seems a bit weird but maybe there was a reason for that, although cynics might suspect that there was some skulduggery going on. Rogers was involved in the STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project).
Raymond Rogers - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Shroud of Turin[edit]
Rogers was appointed Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) in 1978, applying thermal methods to the study of this relic. In recent years, he further researched material relevant to the dating of the Shroud, publishing his findings in Thermochimica Acta.
In 1978, the team of scientists conducted their testing over five days in Turin, Italy.
Until Rogers's death in 2005, he continued to study the Shroud and explain the studies he had undertaken. He participated in ongoing discussions with the Shroud Science Group, a group of about 100 scientists, historians, and archeologists who continue to study the Shroud of Turin.[3]
Criticism of the radiocarbon-14 dating of the Shroud of Turin[edit]
Main article: Radiocarbon-14 dating of the Shroud of Turin
Rogers's continual study of the Shroud resulted from a 2000 study by Joseph Marino and Sue Benford, based on x-ray analysis of the sample sites, showing a probable seam from a repair attempt running diagonally through the area from which the sample was taken. These researchers conclude that the samples tested by the three labs were more or less contaminated by this repair attempt. They further note that the results of the three labs show an angular skewing corresponding to the diagonal seam: the first sample in Arizona dated to 1238 A.D., the second to 1430 A.D., with the Oxford and Swiss results falling in between. They add that the variance of the C-14 results of the three labs falls outside the bounds of the Pearson's chi-square test, so that some additional explanation should be sought for the discrepancy.[4] The claims by Marino and Benford on the lack of statistical consistency of the results of the 1988 radiocarbon test were in contrast with the conclusions of J.A. Christen, who in 1994 applied robust statistics (Empirical Bayes method) to the radiocarbon data and concluded that the given age for the Shroud was correct, from a statistical point of view.[5]
When Rogers saw the paper by Marino and Benford, his reaction was that they were not scientists,[6] their theory was ridiculous, and that he still had fiber samples he had taken from the Shroud that could disprove their theory. Upon examining the fibers under a microscope, however, he concluded that, as they had hypothesized, a cotton patch had been woven into the linen fibers and then dyed to match the color of the linen. This was possible because linen is strongly resistant to dyes but cotton is not. Rogers claimed that the repair had gone undetected because it was expertly done; there was no record of it; none of the STURP team were textile experts; and the area had not previously been a major focus of any major Shroud researchers' attention, because it was outside the image area.
Rogers claimed that under the microscope he could see the undyed linen fibers, the cotton fibers, and the dye on the cotton fibers. Because he knew he had terminal cancer, he contacted his friend and fellow STURP researcher Barrie Schwortz to record interviews, etc.[7] He also sent some of the fibers to a research lab for independent examination. When they were preparing samples, in one case they accidentally pulled apart the cotton and linen sections of one fiber. Schwortz reexamined false-color x-ray fluorescent photographs of the Shroud taken by STURP and pointed out that the sample for radiocarbon dating was taken from the only section that showed up green, indicating it had different chemical properties from the rest of the Shroud, but no one had previously paid attention to the color difference because the green portion is from a section that does not contain part of the image. In December 2008, the Discovery Channel in the United States presented a documentary titled Unwrapping the Shroud: New Evidence, containing a detailed explanation of the repair and footage of Schwortz and of Rogers discussing their new findings.[8] A few months before his death, Rogers submitted an article describing his findings to a peer-reviewed journal, and it was published less than two months before Raymond Rogers died.[9] The essential conclusion of the article is that the radiocarbon datings were accurate, but because the samples were from cloth that was not part of the original Shroud, they are irrelevant to the age of the image area.
It features Rogers himself explaining how he came to the conclusion that the bit of cloth they tested was in fact a repair patch.
Crikey! You're asking for a smiting. Pfft! So much for Christians' 'belief'. You've not only let god down, NSC down, but you've let yourself down.
Hang your head in shame.
I see this post aimed at someone else, and it seems quite pot/kettle.
Several people have highlighted the inconsistencies in the bible, the fact that different accounts were written by different people at different periods, by people who never met Jesus, probably not even about Jesus some of the time. It's been shown how the Shroud was not used for Jesus - even the Catholic Church who own the Shroud, don't think it was used for Jesus, but you don't look at any of the information presented and come to the only rational explanation there is.
Instead, you think that perhaps people can't explain why others have written that the disciples thought they saw Jesus, and so you go on about that as if it means anything.
You'd be better off just admitting that you don't care about the facts - you love the idea of Jesus being the son of god, and you're going to stick without despite all the evidence that he clearly wasn't, and that's fine - it's entirely your prerogative to believe, and it obviously brings you some happiness to do so.
Last edited:
So you've got 2 possible options:
1) Christ rose from the dead
2) Some people had a group hallucination
It is farcical that you can write such nonsense without laughing as you type.
Yes, perhaps there are more possibilities.
Feel free to add to the list.
Remember, you're talking about a whole load of people who were sincerely convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. You're talking all Jesus's remaining disciples, plus other friends and followers:
He appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.