Atheism's Army Of The Smug

On the contrary, your counterargument is so stupid it's surprising to see it presented seriously. You should have given a moment's thought to your examples; you didn't, because you haven't even considered the original argument. Here's a clue: it's not simply "they died for it, so it's true". For what it is, you could try reading. Or just go on making a fool of yourself; your choice, really.

<Yawn>

Joseph Smith never recanted even when faced with death by an angry mob.

He went to his death shooting and shouting the Masonic distress call,

Regardless, previously he and his followers were chased from place to place, and they even had for all intensive purposes the whole state of Missouri declare war on them. By your logic why would JS and the rest of them go through all that based on lies?

and the crowd never offered the chance to recant anyway.

Same is true of the apostles.

No where does it say they were persecuted for their beliefs, they were more in trouble for their political acts, primarily the refusal to pay homage to the emperor and their tendency to incite the public to rebel against civil authority. Anyone who was arrested and charged with civil disobedience, treason, inciting riot, or other such crimes couldn't avoid punishment simply by recanting. In the other cases, the crowd turned on the apostle and kill him before any chance to recant.

Why did Jim Jones kill himself, when he knew that all he had been preaching was false?

And how do you know he did? More relevantly, if every single follower had known he was preaching falsehood, how do you suppose it would have went?

They most likely wouldn't have killed themselves

What about the early Muslims who volunteered to die in Muhammad's cause (i.e. The Battle of the Trench), according to your logic they wouldn't have if they knew that Muhammad had not been visited by Gabriel

Now explain how they would have known.

Here's a list of some of The Miracles of Prophet Mohammad as his companions witnessed

Now again, according to your logic if Mohammad's followers didn't see him do such things like crack the moon or have flowing water out of his fingers then they wouldn't have fought and died for such lies, so these miracles must have been true!!

No, don't. Just throw up some more non sequiturs.

Sorry but I need more than everyone else's ancient desert wandering goat herders were tricked or delusional but my ancient desert wandering goat herders were correct.

< Yawn >

Perhaps the most cogent thing you've said.

He went to his death shooting and shouting the Masonic distress call,

Regardless, previously he and his followers were chased from place to place, and they even had for all intensive purposes the whole state of Missouri declare war on them.

You mean "all intents and purposes".

By your logic why would JS and the rest of them go through all that based on lies?

Just Smith -- "and the rest" is your lack of comprehension. One bold impostor makes sense. Smith was the only one who ever saw the plates; at least one of the "witnesses" later admitted they saw it with "spiritual" rather than literal eyes and his translation procedure involved reciting letters he saw in a peepstone rather than directly handling the plates in front of his collaborator.

You need everyone who would have had access to the tomb including the Pharisees to be in on it.

Every single claim in that paragraph is wrong.

In Acts 4:17-21 the Sanhedrin dragged them in and threatened them unless they stopped preaching and doing miracles in the name of Jesus. Then in Acts 5:17-18 they were arrested, and in 5:40 they were beaten and again told to stop preaching. In Acts 7 they killed Stephen for describing a vision of Jesus at the right hand of God. In Acts 8 Saul persecutes all the Christian he can get to precisely because of their beliefs.

I assume by "pay homage to the emperor" you mean the pinch of incense. This is badly anachronistic; the mandatory pinch of incense was instituted several centuries later as a specifically anti-Christian measure. Christians did refuse to participate in the then-existing civil rites, but Christianity was at that time considered a sect of Judaism and Jews were exempt.

Finally, the Apostles told people not to rebel against civil authority, most famously in Romans 13.

You are not entitled to your own facts.

They most likely wouldn't have killed themselves

Now run with that thought a little.

Here's a list of some of The Miracles of Prophet Mohammad as his companions witnessed

All citing hadiths. Hadiths are oral history collected well after the original generation died. (And no, the New Testament isn't.)

Not to beat a dead horse (very bad pun... 8^), I found this an interesting account. I received it as a link in an email just today:

(In the spirit of full disclosure, the author's background is believer-athiest-believer)

-snip-

Skeptical Arguments: Some of the Worst and Most Biased Scholarship

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments—arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts—lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if hew knew about it—that the whole picture which has floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made. I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.

I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later ”communities.”

Contempt for Jesus & the Sneer of Secularism

I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.

I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.

The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation.

They approach her in other ways. They don’t even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually no the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don’t spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.

But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I’m not arguing for censorship. But maybe I’m arguing for sensitivity—on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I’m arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all.

-snip-

Link

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.