Thank you for sharing.

Contrast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 1988 with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_Act_(Sexual_Orientation)_Regulations 2006 - this turnaround reflects not just the change in government, but a huge corresponding change in national mood.

(sorry no hyperlinks - the comment parser appears to be very very broken)

I wouldn't be so sure. The Nicene Council voted on its contents; it has undergone numerous translations; and those possible avenues of modification only touch upon the inadvertent. There's no telling the mods that have been sneaked in by those with axes to grind. All the more reason to distrust this as a source of anything but insight into a Bronze Age society.

Anyway, everything in this book of theirs should be discarded and ignored. The book has marginal authenticity, unknown authors and has not been updated, ever. If this book is the one and only one true authority, why does it not contain one shred of ture information about the current world? Surely, this book that speaks the truth would have informed all of man-kind about electricity and the Internet? What about heart transplants, the germ/virus disease theory or something as simple as washing your hands after you defecate?

As a third generation atheist, I am proud that I can ignore the rants and ravings of these people about anything and everything of which they know nothing. Religion is another name for ignorance due to brainwashing.

Returning to what Ebonmuse blogged about, Tom Flynn has written OP-ED Who’s Afraid of Faith-Based Charities? He noted that after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Church had been the only game in town for a lot of important stuff.

"In 500 c.e., if Warlord A wanted to send a letter, he had to call in a cleric to write it down: few others were literate. When the letter reached Warlord B, he had to call in another cleric to read it to him." However, the Church lost its more-or-less monopoly on literacy long ago.

Diplomacy? Five centuries ago, the Church helped negotiate the division of South America between Spain and Portugal. But it is now almost entirely secular. Art? The Church used to be the biggest sponsor of it, but that's now mostly secular. Tom Flynn then argues that that's been happening to charity and social services over the last couple hundred years.

I note that the emergence of science from medieval philosophy and theology followed the same pattern, with religion and the churches gradually retreating. The familiar conflicts between science and religion were from various theologians not wanting to retreat; many early scientists used various theological arguments that in retrospect look like "God of the Gaps" arguments.

Likewise, education has also become more and more secular over the centuries. Many medieval universities had been associated with the Church, but their present-day survivors are mostly secular. Edward Babinski has noted an interesting phenomenon related to that in Antony Flew's Conversion; when a university starts getting too secular for the tastes of some of its members, those members go off and found a new university. Which in turn becomes too secular and spawns a new one. The result is what Babinski has noted, that most fundie "Bible colleges" are relatively young.

Technology has grown more secular. Ringing of church bells used to be very popular for warding off lightning, even though it got many bell-ringers killed by (you guessed it) lightning. Theologians were divided on whether lightning was made by a pissed-off God or made by some evil demon that lives in the air, but they agreed on the bell-ringing part. Ben Franklin's lightning rod was only gradually accepted, with some of its defenders trying to argue that it was not heretical, but it very clearly worked.

Medicine has also, with exorcism and faith healing and the like gradually getting replaced by scientific medicine, including psychiatry.

I think that some theologies are confessions of defeat, like fideism. Medieval theologians would claim that the truth of the One True and Holy Catholic Faith was demonstrable, but someone who talks about how God "can't be proved" and how one needs to perform "leaps of Faith" is clearly admitting having a weak case.

And short of a collapse of society comparable to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, religion will retreat even further. Ebonmuse has blogged on community-building and stuff like that, and scientists have attempted to understand why religion happens.

...figuring that maybe if there's more time in between man's creation and the introduction of Jesus, things will go better.

Why does god need to "figure" anything? I mean, shouldn't he know since he's all omniscient and stuff?

I know we aren't supposed to feed the trolls, but...
Arch,

The existence of God is not an attempt to fill gaps but rather a rational conclusion--a necessity given the fact that matter exists and that we are here.

No, it is not a rational conclusion, it is god of the gaps. You have a lack of knowledge about where matter/energy came from (which can neither be created nor destroyed, so what is here could very well have always been which you seem to be ignorant of) so you insert your god as the "answer" without ever considering that your god is not an answer to the question, you have no reason to select that answer over any other one, etc. It IS god of the gaps and it's fallacious. And, you can hide from my words and not address me all you like, it doesn't change the fact that your arguments are lying in tatters.

Oh, and BTW, rejecting your assumption of god due to lack of support for it, is not an assumption in itself.

It's the garden of Eden, and Eve has just learned from the serpent that the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is good to eat. Eve goes over to take a fruit from the tree, and out from behind it steps Jesus, robed and bearded. He holds out his hand like a policeman at a crosswalk and yells "STOP!"

"Adam! Adam!" Eve shrieks. Adam wakes up, sees that strange fellow Jesus and thinks Jesus has bad plans for his wife, and goes over and clocks the savior one. Jesus falls down unconscious. While Adam and Eve are staring down at Jesus and scratching their heads, wondering who it is, God roars:

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY BELOVED SON, YOU IDIOTS??!!"

Adam and Eve hide behind some bushes, as in the traditional narrative. But God knows exactly where they are. God is so furious that he wipes their minds and reinvents the story as it's set down in the bible, figuring that maybe if there's more time in between man's creation and the introduction of Jesus, things will go better.

I like your analogy, and it is quite apt. Harris published a book, and I wouldn't read it. Dawkins published a book, and I wouldn't read it. I started to wonder what I was hiding from, and decided to look into them after Lent. During that holy season, however, I would continue to pray and observe the devotions of my church. And then the walls came a-tumbling down until I had nothing left but an earnest desire for God to exist and the sad realization that wishing doesn't make it so.

But you show that it's not a barren desert of unbelief out here in the reality-based world. There are patient and thoughtful people like yourself who've set up oases of peace and reason. Thanks for the drink!

Reading the comments today, I had a thought about this remark by Jeff T.:

I reasoned that if this verse was true, and that the Church could withstand the powers of death being hurled against it, then where was it for 1886 years?

...In my mind, the Catholic Church was the only Church to have withstood the test of ages and the assault of death for nearly 20 centuries.

If you limit your perspective to the various sects of Christianity, then yes, the Catholic church has been around the longest. But I think we can take a slightly wider perspective and ask: where was Christianity until the first few centuries CE?

If you read the New Testament, it's clear that one of the topics Paul discusses a lot is how Jesus was a "divine secret," a mystery that God had hidden from the world for much of its history (Ephesians 3:1-5, Colossians 1:26). Why would he say this? Because he was addressing the obvious point: if Christianity is the way and the truth and the life, why did no one know about it for the thousands of years prior? Since it was based on Judaism, why was Christianity teaching doctrines like the Trinity that no Jew had ever heard of before? (Along similar lines, I asked in "An Almighty Screwup" why God didn't just send Jesus immediately after the Fall if that was his plan all along anyway.)

Every religion, no matter when it begins, has to deal with the problem of why God waited so long to unveil it. The divine secret is a common answer; another is that God sent a new message because the churches of the day had become irredeemably corrupt. To my mind, if you accept such arguments for Christianity in general, there's little reason not to accept them in the case of any particular denomination, however late-arising.

All these excuses, however, are insufficient against the argument that a true religion, taught by a universal god, would be universally known throughout humanity's history. Anything less falls prey to the argument from locality, one of the surest markers of a man-made belief system.

Here are some outside sources, besides the bible, that prove Jesus Existed, you can look into it if you'd like:

Flavius Josephus
the Babylonian Talmud
Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan
the Annals of Tacitus
Mara Bar Serapion
Suetonius’ Life of Claudius and Life of Nero

Josephus's "golden paragraph" has been acknowledged to be a much later addition to his Testimonium Flavianum. There is no mention of Josephus's description of Jesus by any theological writer before the 4th century where it was quoted by Eusebius (of all people!).

The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the 6th century and makes no specific mention of a Jesus character.

Likewise, Pliny the Younger does not mention Jesus in his letter to Trajan, but merely describes a group of Christians who meet to sing a hymn to Christ.

The alleged comment by Tacitus was not quoted until the 5th century (he supposedly wrote about a "Christus" aroung 117 CE) by Sulpicius Severus. How come no one mentioned this comment in almost 300 years?

Bar Serapion's writings do not mention Jesus, but a "Wise King." Why wouldn't he mention Jesus by name?

Seutonius does not mention Jesus, but "one Chrestus," which does not mean "Christ" in Greek, but merely, "the good." And he is referring to a Jewish agitator in Rome, not Judea.

Likewise, The Life of Nero does not mention Jesus.

My whole point is that Christ was prophecized about, and that he started the Catholic Church, quoted by Ebon, in the bible verse, to start this thread.

Just because the Bible says a Messiah will come, and the Bible says the Messiah came, doesn't make it so. And I'll bet if you ask Ebon, the Bible cannot be used as a historical document.

PS-I thought Peter started the Catholic Church