I Want This Coloring Book

Well IF the first one is a draft of the second one, the artist does a very good job of showing that Jesus is nothing more than a sun god.

Now will someone give me the mahogany crayon, please? I want to do Jesus right. 😆

They’re here

Dorid, it’s fine if you don’t believe that the teacher known as Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t god or born of a virgin or an instigator of miracles. But your graphic goes further. It states that Jesus is imaginary. It’s a characterization of the roots of Christianity that resembles UFO cultist claims more than the truth. If you don’t want to be compared to the people who made up the Roswell flying saucer crash/alien autopsy, then don’t make up facts and don’t play coy when you are called on it. Your response and your page are more cute than valid.

Dorid, that all seems like a weird definition of “imaginary”. If you take every historical figure who has been mythologized, then no one existed! Hence no George Washington! No Augustus Caesar or Alexander the Great (both of whom claimed a Virgin Birth!) Let’s just erase history!

Hey, if I say that you have a red nose just like Rudolph will turn imaginary and go away?

Game, set, and match.

(At the risk of flooding someone else’s blog with an argument unrealated to the post, I’ll offer this last. Joel, I think we should take this to your turf or my turf to continue, just to be polite to the blog owner here.)

There’s a lot of difference between a historical figure who’s been slightly exaggerated and an imaginary story. Does telling an inaccuracy make the person disappear? Obviously not, but there comes a point where you are no longer talking about the same person. There are a lot of fantasies woven about historical individuals. Take Columbus for example. Here’s a guy who’s been credited with finding America… a place that was already populated. The myths surrounding Columbus don’t extinguish his reality, they’re just stupid. Columbus WAS first in the Americas in ONE thing: He was the first white slaver. But we hardly celebrate that on Columbus day. Even though we have all sorts of information about Columbus we still cling to silly, romantic, and imaginary notions about him.

That’s a little different than, say, Jack, from Jack and the Beanstalk. Sure, there have probably been a number of poor widow’s sons in the past, and I’m sure some of them have even been named Jack, but that doesn’t make the story Jack and the Beanstalk true and it doesn’t make the Jack of the story real.

Jesus is a lot like Jack. The name was fairly common, as was being a teacher. A teacher named Jesus that was the source of some of the stories is a possibility. Yet that’s hardly sufficient foundation to believe the whole story, or the reality of Jesus as known by Christianity. There may well have been a young boy named Jack, who had to sell a cow, but again, that doesn’t make the story, and the characters in it, any less imaginary.

Joel argues that I would have to acknowledge that by my definition, no one would have ever existed. I argue that by his definition, nothing is imaginary, and every character from every story is real.

Joel, while you argued my point about Jesus, you didn’t address my other example:

Do you believe in Santa Claus?