This is no better than what the Muslims are saying.

Submitted by John Smith (Canada), Sep 27, 2006 at 18:24

500 hundred "witnesses" saw Christ ascend to heaven! Are you for real? This is exactly the sort of uncritical nonsense the Muslims have been swallowing for 1600 years. First of all, there is a ton of very good critical opposition to the very idea that there was even a real person named Jesus. Certainly, even the earliest known Christian writer, Paul, never makes any mention of a Jesus Christ who was a teacher and prophet, who had a ministry during the time of Pontius Pilate.

Similarly, none of the Jewish writers of the time, especially Josephus, make any mention of anyone named Christ, nor do any of the Pagan writers. Also, the Gospel writers were anonymous writers and no New Tetament scholar of any stripe, liberal, conservative, fundamentalist or atheist, believes today that the gospels were written by THE actual Mark, Matthew, Luke or John. In fact they were only later said to be written by these men. In fact, Mark, which is the earliest of the four in the canon was not written earlier than 70 AD and most scholars date it between 70 and 90 AD.

This means that whoever wrote the gospels could not have had firsthand knowledge of this so-called person named Jesus. In fact, most of the books in the NEw Testament are known forgeries, and much of what you read in the gospels and epistles of the NT are actually interpolations made by later Christian scribes. Christian scholars call them interpolations but that's just a fancy word for forgery. I could go on and on like this, but the basic message is that Christianity is just as foolish as Islam and the only reason why there aren't any modern atrocities (though history is littered with them) committed in the name of Christianity is that in the West for the past several centuries the incursions of reason, rationality, and through it, science, have severely hobbled the knees of the Church and have subordinated it to the state.

This hasn't yet happened in most middle eastern countries where there is no separation of church and state but rather you have basic theocracies at work. But to challenge the unreason behind Islam by citing equally foolish and irrational Christian dogma is so seriously ridiculous that it makes me tremble and makes me fear for our futures. The only way to combat radical Islam is by spreading the word of reason and rationality, and not the silly superstitions passed on by ancient writers who still believed that lightning was a message from God and that the Earth was 6000 years old---and flat! We need to move past this religious garbage in order to find a better way to live together. Religion=intolerance.

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