Quote of the Day: G.W. Foote

"As a man Jesus died because he had not the sense to live. As a God he must have died voluntarily. In either case it is an idle, gratuitous, enervating indulgence in "the luxury of woe" to be always afflicting ourselves with the story of his doom. Great and good men have suffered and died since, and other lessons are needed than that may be learnt at the foot of the Cross." --G.W. Foote (Seasons of Freethought, p. 279)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Conflating Atheism and Agnosticism is a Mistake

Image
In a discussion over at Bud's blog Dead Logic , a reader asked a question I have been hearing more and more recently. It's a good question, so I thought I would do my part to try and answer it. Doesn't admitting to being an agnostic instead of an atheist FEEL like you're being wishy-washy, or not fully committing to your "belief"? ... I understand that it's only honest to say that we CAN'T be sure, but I sure do hate to show weakness (real or perceived) in an argument. Not at all.  Agnosticism deals with knowledge.  Atheism deals with belief.  The Agnostic position cannot assume whether a thing like a God could exist or not given the lack of sheer evidence for such a things existence. Therefore knowing with any given certainty just isn't possible. The agnostic then makes the claim that a definitive answer with regard to "knowing" of God's existence cannot be given either way. Atheism, however, can state with assurance t
Read more

Discussing the Historicity of Jesus with a Christian Agnostic

Image
Steven Jake, the author of the up and coming blog  TheChristian Agnostic , [1]  wrote a rather thorough response to my lengthy comment asking him about the state of the evidence regarding the historical Jesus. I am pleased he took the time to write a thorough response. I only feel that such a thorough response deserves my own more detailed response as my initial comment was merely that—a comment. So without further ado I will address some of Steven Jake’s comments and concerns. Initially Steven Jake (henceforth SJ) posted a quote from New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman claiming that there is an abundance of evidence for a historical Jesus. I merely contested this claim asking for what evidence we have that would be considered historically reliable. As I see it there is none. That doesn’t mean, however, I don’t think there  wasn’t  a historical Jesus, just that we cannot prove if there was or wasn’t and so I remain agnostic as to the historicity of Jesus—not a mythicist
Read more