I Can't Believe Arguments Like These Used To Sway Me

[AnonymousCoward]

I still follow the Gospel Coalition, which is formed of pastors and churches who ascribe to new Calvinism. Nowadays, I like to read the blog entries and find the faulty logic. In the latest entry, it's not so hard. 

 

http://thegospelcoalition.org/article/answering-alternatives-to-the-resurrection

 

This pastor apparently dug up a blog post from 2009 and essentially answers every alternative to the resurrection with "There's no evidence," while ignoring the fact that there's no evidence for the resurrection either.

 

 

 

Acrobats like these make me that I think it takes more (blind) faith not to believe in the resurrection of Christ than to believe.

 

It was statements like these that kept me in the faith for so long. I always felt I didn't have enough faith that there wasn't a God to move to the other side despite my doubts.

[Aggie]

I remember that dynamic well.  I used to remember thinking how arbitrary the Jesus Seminar seemed for choosing which words it was likely that Jesus said.  I still think that the Jesus Seminar was rather arbitrary (!), but I was just not applying questions and doubts in a uniform way. 

 

Supposedly spoken in Aramaic, translated to Greek, with (at least slightly) differing versions in 4+ different gospels (two of which seem to be dependent on a third and many of which have no doubt been lost), written almost 2,000 years ago in an alien culture, sometimes miscopied by scribes in a multi-hundred year process, full of amazing/miraculous/unverifiable stories and metaphysical assertions, interpreted in radically different ways throughout the centuries... I should be highly confident or even certain about something like this?

 

Reminds me of the commotion lately with that text that claimed Jesus was married.  Although I don't have any confidence in that text, it struck me as so odd that people were very skeptical about a Jewish guy being married (something that happened in that culture with an everyday regularity of course) but were totally unskeptical about him walking on water, changing water into wine, being the One through whom the whole universe was made, etc., etc...