fossilise_apostle wrote:
You only have to look towards modern cults to start seeing similarites towards christianity.
I'm pretty sure that's the definition of a cult; a rip-off of Christianity. Similarities are inevitible. The most effective lies seem to be ones with a shred of truth!
fossilise_apostle wrote:
The great book of the Bible is the great Gospel of Thomas, dated to 50 AD.
You've been talking to your Imam. The Gospel of Thomas is, in most research, a couple hundred years younger. While people find tenuous literary evidence to older orgins, no manuscripts as old as you propose exist.
fossilise_apostle wrote:
But it unfortuntely leaves all the good bits out. Wheres the bit where Jesus gets resurected? where are the miracles? it is this gospel that i believe tells the true story about jesus, before later authors added bits in for a bit of a yarn.
We (I say "we," meaning humanity... and in particular, museums) have fragments for all but 2 of the canonized verses of the NT from before A.D. 100. This means that when they were written, eyewitnesses were still alive. And these eyewitnesses were more than the authors, they were also adherents and yes, enemies. Had the facts not been as they were recorded, it would have been really easy for enemies to disprove the texts, and really hard for adherents to swallow the texts. Historical records (outside the Biblical texts themselves) confirm the public reaction and AFAIK it logically agrees with the recordings in the letters we assembled into the NT.
In fact, as far as what historians consider to be "historical evidence," I'm told there's more for the record of Jesus' life as we Christians understand it than there is for the existence of Abraham Lincoln.
fossilise_apostle wrote:
it's not that hard to rewrite things, or indeed, make them up.
No, what's hard (as I think I've mentioned in another thread) is to fool people into believing what someone's made up. While the masses can be fooled, it generally takes a propaganda machine with the power of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China, which has only half-convinced the population of that great nation that Americans caused the Tiananmen Square massacre. I doubt a couple of insane fishermen two millenia ago versus thousands of eyewitnesses could have outdone the juggernaut of totalitarian government with complete media control and only maybe a dozen surviving witnesses.
fossilise_apostle wrote:
The same program went on to suggest that religion was developed as a survival mechanism. people with religious beliefs live longer. could it be that special parts of the brain evolved to help man survive?
It sure is possible, and I repeat; if you believe religion
not for logical reasons but for
psychological reasons, then the first half of the C.S. Lewis book
Miracles is your next reading assignment. The best I could do would be to plagiarize him here, so I won't waste your patience in an already longish post.
You're also right in that: if evolution is true, then there is a survival benefit to monotheism. So if you want to be "selected for" and not "selected against" in the progression of evolution, Christianity is a means to that end. But I digress; I have never advocated Christianity as a means to an earthly end (it has been used as such by evil dictators at times like the medieval Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, I won't make that mistake!), and I will not do so now.
Fossilised Apostle, if you believe the so-called Gospel of Thomas and its Gnostisism, you do so in defiance of good reseach and reliable evidence. You therefore do it in blind faith. If you merely use it as a tool permitting you to dismiss the synoptic gospels, then you're believing something because it suits your feelings rather than because it's true. Nothing personal, I am simply trying to diagnose your heterodox opinions. Though, to be fair, you didn't say these were you're beliefs... you cited an ABC special as the source. I got two words for people who believe ABC specials: HELD BACK. REPEATING THE THIRD GRADE. LOW STANDARDIZED TEST SCORES.
But this has been a fun question nonetheless.