Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
Subject: Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)


> >How is it "religion"?  Or, why is teaching about Christ "religion", yet
> >teaching that the earth is round, or that Octavian became the first
emperor
> >of Rome is not?
>
> For the last two, you have solid hard evidence that indeed, the Earth is
> round, and indeed, Octavian was the first emperor of Rome. Christ is
> something else. We did learn at school about the historical character
> Jesus, for the little we know about him, and about the historical
> development of Christianity. But anything else (the "story" of Christ as
> given by the New Testament, the miracles, etc...) is the domain of belief,
> without any hard proof to prove it really happened that way, and thus is
> not to be taught at school. And no, the New Testament is no hard proof,
> just like we don't trust blindedly Homer to have given us a good idea of
> what the War of Troy was like, although we know that war did happen.
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, you would consider "facts" to be
things we have "solid, hard evidence" for, and "religion" to be things that
we don't have such evidence for.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine recently (actually, the same one I
actually got to listen to my conlanging stuff once) about this very topic.
Suppose that God Himself comes to you one day and says, "I'm going to do
something that no human could do so that people will believe I exist.  In
one hour, I will come back and make a flock of sheep appear in your yard out
of thin air.".  Beyond being suprised and amazed that He came to visit you
like this (and that His miracle would be to make a bunch of sheep appear),
what would you do to record this so that others would know what happened and
believe?

After some debate, we figured that the best thing to do would be to grab
your videocamera (assuming you have one) and invite over a few friends.
Then, when the hour has come, a whole flock of sheep appears in your yard,
and you catch it on film.

A week later, prove that the incident happened.  If you try to prove it to
people who don't want to believe that such a thing happened, or already
believe it's impossible, what will they say?  Showing them the sheep will
elicit a "you must have borrowed them from some farmer around here".
Showing them the videotape would get a "wow, how'd you do that!", meaning
how did you fake the appearance of the sheep.

Our conclusion was that we have about as much evidence for Jesus doing the
things He's said to have done as we do for Octavian, and considerably more
than we do for Aristotle or Plato.  Yet the existence of Aristotle and the
things he did are taught as fact in schools, while the life of Jesus is
dismissed as mythology.  (Speaking from my own schooling experience here, as
we've mentioned, your schooling may vary.)

Now, I don't want to start a war as to the deity of Jesus, etc.  I'd much
rather that we only use it as an example of the real question I'm getting at
here.  What is it that we can use to separate "religion" from "fact"?  (And
please don't say a pitchfork.)

In response to the assertion that we don't have hard evidence for Jesus'
stuff, I'd say that we have just the kind of evidence one would expect to
find from such events.  Just as we have only the kind of evidence expected
from the eruption of Krakatoa, or of the Aryan invasion of India.

Anyway, let's keep this to an epistemiological level, not a fight between
religions/whatevers.

Reply