But they’re facing global condemnation. Some world leaders are furiously frowning at them!

They even have to endure CRITICISM. Can you even imagine such punishment?

Mister Falcon

YEH I DO BABE STOP

The prison industrial complex was the status quo long before Biden was even born. Why limit it to him? Blame Nixon and Reagan for both the drug epidemic and the criminalization of drug possession (accounting for something like 40% of the current prison population), and the near collapse of mental health and rehabilitation programs. Blame Clinton for enabling the corporations to grow even richer off of slave labor.

Well it sure ain’t General Bloodbath McGrath

Who exactly, in this thread, made that claim? FORGET the whole Jesus thing. That was never the point, which you latched onto like it owes you money.

OP’s assertion, summarized: the existence of book “X” is not proof that its contents are truthful, because fiction books exist Your response: book “Y” exists that is fiction, but has a character from book X, so the argument is invalid

You are arguing all over this thread against the claim that Jesus didn’t exist, and yet I don’t see that anyone in this thread made that claim.

OP’s claim is that the bible is not proof that god exists, and the quran is not proof that allah exists. That’s it. Your response about Caesar and Lincoln is invalid because the core claims of their factual existence (remember: vs. god/allah, not Jesus!) are not based on a single, curated book of stories with miracles and magic. There is no religious movement claiming that Lincoln chased vampires, nor is that book considered core documentation describing the life of Lincoln. Your argument is irrelevant.

“I had no idea it would do that. It was a gift/I found it at a thrift store/estate sale/in the trash.”

If you take away the intent, and with no obvious signs that your shirt is anything other than clothing, I don’t know that it would be.

Well yeah obviously but I wanted them to say that. Hoping for a confession here.

Ok, I think I understand what the problem is here. You took my original comment

No such body of “evidence” exists for Jesus

and ran with that, and completely ignored the qualifying phrase that followed it

as defined by mainstream Christians

that is, that he was god and did miracles and magic and was born from a virgin impregnated by god.

You are completely focused on my apparent assertion that Jesus never existed, and have totally ignored the entire point of the original post, and my original response to you, to focus on something I never actually asserted. So go re-read my original response, and let’s clear this up.

I am not claiming, and have never claimed that there definitely was never a Jewish Rabbi that was called Jesus who started a whole new religion in the middle east.

I frankly don’t give a shit if he was in fact 1 real person, or a post-hoc fictional man based on multiple people, or just made up whole-cloth. It doesn’t really matter. What matters, especially in the context of this post, is that I am asserting that there was not a man who was a god, or did any miracles or magic, or died and came back to life 2 days later and then went to heaven. That is not based on fact.

Christianity and it’s attendant liturgical documents and period artifacts and accumulated oral history are the proof.

The fact that Christians exist, and the fact that they have written about their beliefs, are proof that their beliefs are true and based on facts? You don’t see a problem with that argument?

Counterpoint: Hindus exist, and have written about their beliefs (for longer than Christians have). Ipso facto, Hinduism is the one true, correct religion and is based on facts.

I’m not addressing Christians at all

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You’re not concerned with evidence if you’re reflexively denying it.

Wait, do you really think that atheists deny that Christians exist? Do you actually think that’s what we’re talking about? That’s a whole new one. Otherwise you’re committing a major strawman fallacy. I don’t even know how to respond to that. It’s utterly batshit.

He wrote a significant part of the script before he died. Personally I think he would have approved.

also a vocal proponent of ideologies that the public overwhelmingly disagree with, and are openly hateful towards anyone who disagrees with them

This is news to me, what’s he been saying?

There’s no separate, unchallenged easily verifiable evidence that contradicts the claim that a Jewish Rabbi lead a mass movement of ecumenical reformists in the 1st century AD.

This is not necessary. For one, the burden of proof is on whomever makes the extraordinary claim, not whomever wishes to contradict or refute it. Second, no one is challenging the idea that there was a movement started sometime around then, somewhere around there. That is not an extraordinary claim - miracles and magic, however, are pretty extraordinary.

We have an abundance of accounts, many of them from the Roman scholars of the era, describing the movement and its members and their beliefs and activities.

No one is suggesting that Christianity doesn’t exist. The claim is that miracles and magic were happening, and OP is challenging that claim.

Then we have a litany of Gospels, of which the nascent church had to scrub down precisely because so many of them were believed heretical a century later.

Why were some of these writings accepted and some weren’t? Could it be because many of the rejected texts were contradictory, and thus - especially if taken with the canonized text - were ultimately unreliable at best, and outright fiction at worst? What was the methodology for determining which of them were true, and which weren’t?

I’m a bit tired of hearing “Nothing exists” when what you’re really saying is “I don’t personal accept any of the testimony because I don’t like the people saying it”.

That is not at all what I’m saying, and I dare you to show me where I did

In this case, I’m not addressing Christians at all - I’m only concerned with the evidence, like OP. If the evidence that someone 2000 years ago was tossing around miracles and magic comes from a single, curated collection of scripts with dubious provenance that were hand-copied multiple times over centuries, translated & transliterated (many times inaccurately), with little additions and likely edits & deletions along the way, you’re going to have to come up with something a little less biased to convince me. That’s the whole point OP is making.

It quite literally caused a national panic, because it was delivered in a believable manner to a gullible audience.

It mostly did not. Ironically, that story is mostly fictitious.

Did the 1938 Radio Broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds’ Cause a Nationwide Panic? | Snopes.com https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/war-of-the-worlds/

This is not an argument in good faith. This is not a level comparison.

Just because a clearly (that is, without serious challenge) fictionalized account exists doesn’t mean we should ignore the mountains of separate, unchallenged, easily verifiable, unbiased evidence that an historical account is beyond likely. No such body of “evidence” exists for Jesus, as defined by mainstream Christians; the same as for God, Yahwey, Allah, or Odin.

Interesting. Didn’t know the etymology was that muddy; always thought the German origin was widely accepted.

PUT…THE TP…DOWN! TP is for SHITTERS.

For bathrooms without a separate bidet (dedicated bidets are very uncommon in North America at least), you can buy an attachment that sits under or replaces the toilet seat that performs the same function, and is referred to as a bidet. They have a separate water source that is split from the toilet’s source.

I highly recommend getting one if you don’t have at least one bidet I your house.

Their music is catchy, and their lyrics are creative and clever. But I remember when I first heard this song and started looking up other songs (ahoy!), and I remember thinking, “Huh, this song is also about fuckin’…and so is this song…”

I realized that 90% of their songs are about fucking. Sure, a lot of music is about that, but these guys aren’t couching it terms of “making love” or poeticizing or romanticizing it. That’s fine for some people, but I found it frankly obnoxious. I feel like can’t listen to them with anyone else around - I have kids, and conservative family (not me obviously) and adult friends that aren’t in junior high. I mean I have no problem playing Warrant, AC/DC, Metallica, or Korn around my kids but something about Bloodhound Gang makes me uncomfortable.

They have a few songs that aren’t explicitly about fucking - Ralph Wiggum is pretty cool.

I’m frankly plussed.