It’s hard to identify which alternative renditions are the most ridiculous, but I think this is it. I wouldn’t even identify this as a current rendition amongst higher critics. Too implausible even for them. If you can’t figure out how many dead ends for this to work, then ???.
My rendition is that he was likely another cult leader manipulating his followers. Not much different than Jim Jones, David Koresch, Charles Manson, or even the pastor of my church growing up who enjoyed being the center of attention and bilking people for money.
It’s also possible that he wasn’t personally the key manipulator. Maybe it was John, or Peter, or Paul, or maybe it was all 4 of them.
Having said that, determining whether or not someone who claims to be the creator of the universe isn’t a competition among renditions. The onus is on you to prove that he created the universe, not for us to provide evidence for alternatives.
We know crazy people exist.
We know cult leaders exist.
We know cult followers exist.
We know gullible people exist.
We know people are delusional or succumb to cognitive dissonance.
We know that organizations exist that manipulate masses of people.
We know that people are inclined to believe false religions (like all of those others that you don’t believe).
But I ain’t never seen no man turn water into wine and create a universe in 7 days.
Actually, we all know which one is the most ridiculous. Where just waiting for you to come around on it.
We also know that people believe what they want to believe and that first hand account eye witnesses get it wrong as often as not.
My mother witnessed a leg grow longer with a faith healer’s prayer. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
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You mean to tell me that you don’t do valve replacement surgery on dead patients or continue if they die mid-surgery?
Not since the Obamacare death panels kicked in.
I should also add, you don’t determine if something is correct by ranking plausibility. This is a fundamental problem with how religious people think.
For example, your daughter gets really sick. Is it:
Demons?
A curse?
A displeased volcano god?
Well the first made up answer isn’t powerful enough.
It can’t be the second made up answer because we drowned all of the witches.
The 3rd made up answer used to not be powerful enough, but we just made it more powerful in our recent updates, therefore it’s the volcano god and it needs to eat a virgin.
No. The answer is, you don’t know.
And if you’re going to take a guess, it’s a lot more likely that it’s something you’ve seen 1,000 times before than something that you’ve debunked 1,000 times before and defies all actual understandings of the universe (ie Men don’t create universes)
Actually, Barry I would argue that science (the useful tool) does exactly this…
It matches the highest probability theory with the observations.
Recognizes the tenuous fit. And states: “for now, to the best of our knowledge…”
Science (the dogmatic religion) builds technologies, research agenda’s and oppressive political regimes around established theories. Dogma science then goes out and finds observations that match the power structure.
Eventually - there are simply too many contrary observations to be ignored.
A new Scientific paradigm is established. New oppressive political structures are developed to reinforce the theory…
And we hear:
“We used to think that xxx. But now we know yyy.”
It’s incredibly fantical.
Very much like medieval Christianity.
Not surprising, given that Big Science is of direct decent of Christianity.
I disagree.
That may be how hypotheses are determined, or even how discussions of the unknown are brought about in books and on podcasts, but it is not how science determines if something is true.
The gravitational theory and TriFloyd’s “They wouldn’t have lied because they would have feared the consequences,” guess are not remotely close.
Two things are not similar just because you can very broadly describe them in the same way.
Suppose there are ten theories of how some physical process works. Under the most probable theory — which has a 20% chance of being right — the plane will fly. Under the other nine theories the plane will crash. You gonna go with the most probable theory?
It seems like out of body experiencing can be induced by taking one area of the brain off line, which my guess would be is what is happening when someone is close to dying and parts of the brain are hypoxic. The fact that it can be induced when someone isn’t dying suggests to me that it has nothing to do with death and is in fact just like all of our other experiences and is brought about by neurophysiology.
“Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can induce out-of-body experiences (OBEs) by targeting the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Stimulation of the TPJ can disrupt the normal sense of self and body unity, leading to the feeling of being outside one’s body.”
There are also people who claim to have experienced it via meditation.
I guarantee if we look we can find some yogi in India right now who has as many followers as Jesus did in his lifetime who will attest to seeing him perform all kinds of miracles. Hell, we can probably find one who has followers who claims he died and was resurrected.
And you will dismiss that using the same sort of reasoning that people use to dismiss the fantastical claims of the Bible.
Noting the reality of the catholic church’s history of abuse of science and scientists isn’t “church bashing” and it is you, like your church, who can’t reconcile facts to your preferred worldview.
The persecution of Galileo was a perfectly clear demonstration of the catholic church denying scientific findings. When do you assert is the “way earlier” time that they officially acknowledged their twin errors of having theologians determine scientific facts, and of persecuting those with the temerity to follow science?
You don’t count the nearly 400 years it took to overturn the heresy finding? Why not? Even publication of his writings were banned for 200 years, and still not endorsed when permitted to be made available. That evil fuck Ratzinger pointedly declined to admit the mistake, being deliberately ambiguous (and still critical of Galileo) as late as 1990. Where is the acceptance of reality “way earlier” that makes you a proud catholic?
That doesn’t explain how people return from these experiences having acquired knowledge of the physical world they did not have before.
No, it doesn’t.
If there’s verified documented accounts of these incidents happening I’d be interested to read about them.
How many of these anecdotes have you investigated personally?
Which is more likely? This is a real thing, although I would guess exceedingly rare because I would guess it’s a rare person who “dies” and reports this.
Or there are reasonable explanations ranging from people just make it up, to there was enough brain activity to form memories even if they appeared clinically dead, to what they remember didn’t happen when they were “dead”.
I agree with your point.
Which is why they tested those “theories” (I think you meant “ideas.”) Take 10 DaVinci drawings and apply the scientific method to each one. Oh, all 10 of them failed.
Conclusion: we haven’t discovered the Bernoulli Effect yet, so we don’t know how to make things fly.
Nowhere in the scientific process to we just pick the one that makes the most sense and assume it’s true until we get a better one.
I’d also like to add, when religious people say, “makes the most sense,” what they usually mean is, “answers the most questions.”
I’m not saying it’s beyond the realm of possibility, as I don’t profess to know the unknowable, but that it doesn’t fit within the knowable and most if not all anecdotes like these have been or likely can be debunked under scrutiny. The fact that they’re pushed by people who try to use them as evidence for an afterlife which is directly related to their religious beliefs raises the skepticism level even further.
We talked about a somewhat recent sainthood situation involving a “miracle” where a woman recovered from a brain bleed, which I see to varying degrees on a daily basis. You’ll excuse me if I don’t take the RCC at face value that the recovery defied not just medical odds, but physiological possibility. I looked and was unable to find any literature on the case beyond what the press reported the RCC had posited. One would think it would have been published if it were truly unexplainable.
Sure, it’s possible. I just don’t think very likely for a whole host of reasons.
If life after death is real, why do (I would guess an exceedingly rare) number of people who die and “return” report some sort of experience.
Another piece of this is that we don’t know if they even ever had an “experience,” when they were dead.
A memory is not something you experienced in the past. It is something you are experiencing now. So if you say, “this happened to me when I was dead,” what is really happening is that you have that in your brain now, and you think it happened to you in the past.
Now, 99% of the time, that sensation is correct. But that doesn’t make it infallible. In fact, we know the brain to be very fallible.