Christianity is a Fact because This Guy Says So

He’s right on some of those facts, though.

Jesus Christ most likely did walk on the earth. I can be an atheist and totally cool with that. I just know that he was some dude that made some reasonable philosphical points, not the virgin-birthed son of an invisible man in the sky.

It’s also a fact that those who choose to deny God’s existence cannot enter heaven. He just glosses over the fact that we can’t enter heaven because it doesn’t exist. Good Christians, Muslims, cactuses, dinosaurs, and the French also cannot enter heaven, what with it not being real and all. Might as well point out that good Christians cannot simply walk into Mordor, because that’s also pretend.

Well, I’m convinced. Guess I’ll go become a Christian now.

Really?  Facts?  And just what has that fellow been inhaling (aka smoking?)   

A fact is a fact and that’s a fact!

Comment-bait letters drive up hits and thus advertising revenue, and newspapers REALLY need that right now.

One of my local papers has a neocon twit for a columnist who gave it away by accident. He says stupid shit on purpose so people will keep logging in to tear him apart, driving up hits.

Am I the only one who feels like the Auburn Citizen is taking advantage of the village idiot just to grab some eyeballs. “Come one, come all, see the freak show, ignorance so enormous it defies science!”

I feel a little bit bad for him.

I could be a super model if I wanted to, but I just don’t need the money.  And that’s a FACT. 

Tide move in tide move out that’s fact, so god exist. Lol

I’m pretty sure he’s using FACT as an acronym: Fallacious Assertion Contradicting Truthyness

 should be continuation of my post above to Lauren:   Meant to say “doesn’t mean the author of the above “factual article” doesn’t indulge in a bit of smoke.

How YOU doin’?

I just read that in Joey Tribbiani’s voice… it’s impossible not to. 😉

On the other hand… I consulted Google and found a lot more letters from this same guy over the past several years, and many of them are rants directed at Republicans and the obscenity of what American capitalism has turned into. So while he may be, ahem, misguided in his religious beliefs, he also seems sincere in his condemnation of the huge inequity in the distribution of wealth in this country.

I’m not only wondering why the Auburn Citizen published this, I’m kind of wondering why Hemant did.  So there are crazy people in the world, writing letters to the editor.  Um, neat?  Ha ha?  This cuckoo doesn’t need anyone’s further attention, least of all ours.

No, it’s not impossible… I was using the “Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker” voice.

I’ve worked at half a dozen papers in the last 15 years, and I can tell you (for a FACT, hee hee!) that it’s not necessarily journalistic negligence or deliberate comment-baiting on the newspaper’s part to print letters like this.

These are just the letters we get.

Oh, some high-toned papers and those with enormous circulations can pick and choose insightful and informative letters from a thoughtful readership. But most small- to mid-size papers just don’t get many letters to the editor, and those that do come in are divided between people furious (and thus usually irrational) on one particular issue, and a well-known set of diligent local cranks. Useful and intelligent letters are few and far between. We journalists regularly roll our eyes at them, when we bother to read them at all.

Nor would it even be necessary to troll for responses with deliberately provoking letters; your average story on the local sewer works will suffice quite well. If you spend any time in the online comments section of your local paper, you’ll soon see that almost all of the comments come from just a few dozen people who apparently have nothing better to do than gripe, because there is absolutely no pleasing them. These are, obviously, a tiny minority of our readers – just today, as it happens, I estimated roughly that commenters at my own paper represent perhaps one in 3,000 of its readers; and they’re not at all representative, as results from the last several local elections have shown.

Represent! I used to live just outside the ‘city’ (I guess it qualifies) and was actually a journalism Explorer – an extension of the Boy Scouts – in The Citizen’s building. This was back when typesetting was done on a computer, but pasteup was still done by hand using waxers 😉

Come to think of it, I also attended one of Auburn’s baptist churches for a while, at the invitation/insistence of a born-again friend, which as it turned out became my first step towards atheism. They played pretty fast and loose with the ‘facts’ themselves, so perhaps Mr Lynch is a disciple.

 Dude, I dunno if it’s possible to GET that high…

I’ve tried, and I usually pass out somewhere between, “Oh, man, I’m starving” and “Whoa, look at my paws!”

Murray Lynch: *lights up, inhales*
God: “Hi there.”
Murray: *spliff falls out of mouth* “What the f***??”
God: “Good day to you too.  My name’s God.”
Murray:  “Where did you come from?
God: “I was twiddling my thumbs up in Heaven waiting for you to pick up that joint.  I can’t tell people FACTS unless they’re high.”
Murray: “Facts? Such as…?”
God:  “Well, that I’m all powerful, for one.  Also -”
Murray: “Wow!  That’s amazing!  Um… hang on a sec…”
God:  “What is it?”
Murray: “You just told me that you can’t tell people facts unless they’re high.  That means you’re NOT all powerful.”
God: “I was lying when I said that people have to be high.”
Murray: “Oh… all right.”
God: “Another FACT is… I never lie.”
Murray: “Wait, you just said…”
God: “What I meant was, I always stand.  People who lie down are lazy.”
Murray: “Um… okay.  So, how do you know that all these things are facts?”
God: “Look kid, when you’ve been sitting up on a throne in heaven for 6000 years, you LEARN a few things during that time.”
Murray: “A-ha!  You said before that you always stand.  But just then you said you’ve been…”
God: “That was a lie.”
Murray: *brain breaks*
God: *looking at watch* “Hmmm… it usually doesn’t take that long.  Oh well.  Here Murray, memorise the following FACTS and post a letter to the editor in one of your country’s God-sanctioned newspapers.  One:  Christianity is true.  Two:  Atheists are idiots.  Three: …” *etc*
Murray: “YES MY LORD.”
God: “Good boy.”  *pats on head*  “I’ll see you next time you are high. Bye-bye!”

 Joey Tribbiani never existed, except in the minds of some people who wrote some scripts & stuff;-P

 Oh, you married too?

A good laugh. Laughing is good for you, and a lot of people need some in their lives nowadays. 

There is actually quite a strong argument – and many poor versions of it I might add – that this Jesus lad may very well not have physically existed.  Of course the physical existence of the man is neither here nor there for atheists as existence does not automatically mean he was also the son of god all gussied up with awesome powers.  His non-existence, however, I imagine would be an extremely difficult proposition for Christians to overcome and perhaps a catastrophic blow to all but the most dedicated at that.
I’d recommend that any who are interested in checking out the case for Jesus as myth read Earl Doherty, who has a lot of free stuff online (http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/mainarticles-1.html), and Richard Carrier an historian that specialises in this period (http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier).  Carrier also has a book on this very subject coming out next year called On the Historicity of Jesus Christ, he really knows his stuff so it should be well worth checking out when it arrives.

But I do have two theories that support the “jesus existence claims.” Bear with me though they are quite radical but not without merit since they came to me via an ex-Jesuit priest.

First he posits that christianity was a carefully planed form of propaganda designed to end the occupation of Israel by the Romans.
Simply put christianity is a consolidation of pagan beliefs combined with Judaic traditions.
Apparently many Romans at the time felt that there were just too many gods and rituals to contend with and that belief in a single god would be more simplistic for the busy roman life. So by replacing pagan traditions and by making jesus the central figure of worship, then that would simplify the Roman belief system and thus conversion to Judaism/christianity ends the occupation. (Demigods become saints and so on.)

His other theory is that jesus was a Buddhist monk.
The Jews would of course be threatened by Buddhism and would promote this monks demise by the hands of the Romans.
But seeing how easily many young Jews were caught up into this monks ideals, we then circle back to the first theory.

By placating a new schism within the Judaic religion and promoting the conversion of Romans, the wise Jewish priesthood ends up killing two birds with one stone.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan has a great quote:

everyone is entitled to their opinion, but everyone is NOT entitled to their own facts.

Sums it up quite nicely.

FACT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 *raises eyebrow and focuses attention as a blip appears on his Furrydar*

Rucking fediculous!

True enough.  And it was certainly laughable.

Fact. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Once, I lost my severely. I found it two weeks later. It was stuck between the cushions in the couch and its battery had died.

I especially liked the Auburnpub.com Rules for Commenting.  Especially #3.

(3) Be truthful. Don’t lie about anyone or anything.

Apparently that only applies to comments to articles/letters and not the articles/letters themselves.