Sometimes, they do debate serious questions on Unbelievable? radio show. But they feature clearly insane people like Steven Carr. Note that debates on the Unbelievable radio show start at about 15 minutes into the podcast. The Christian debater and callers are woefully uninformed in this debate, so I would recommend listening to something with William Lane Craig instead.
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Unbelievable? 11 Apr 2009 – “Did Jesus Rise from the dead?” An atheist perspective |
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Steven Carr has a prolific presence on the internet as an atheist blogger and debater. He contends that the early Christians did not believe in Jesus’ resurrection and that the Biblical views of resurrection are contradictory. Canon Michael Cole is a veteran defender of Christian faith and responds to Steven’s criticisms of the resurrection. For Steven Carr see http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/ For Canon Michael Cole see http://www.nationwidechristiantrust.com |
I’m trying to give my audience something different here. I prefer formal academic debates, but maybe I need to post things like this for some of the more crazy atheists who leave me weird comments. I don’t know. Maybe my Christian readers will enjoy hearing an unqualified loon rant and rave like a lunatic at the full moon. Your call.
UPDATE: I am, of course, kidding about Steve Carr and I think he did a good job in his debate, whereas his opponent and the callers were not nearly as prepared. I wanted to see how fast he would descend on my blog, and if you read the comments, you’ll see that I wasn’t mean to him at all. But I wanted to engage him in a discussion and I thought this was the best way to get his attention. I apologize for my sneaky tricks, but they worked!
My response to Carr would be two-fold:
1) That word you keep using. Resurrection. I do not think it means what you think it means.
2) How do you square the empty tomb with your idea of a non-physical resurrection? We have multiple early sources for the empty tomb, and piles of evidence for it from those early sources, not the least of which is the testimony of the women followers of Jesus.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
‘Clearly insane’? It does not take Christians long to resort to personal abuse.
‘He contends that the early Christians did not believe in Jesus’ resurrection….’
Of course, I never said that in the debate. Justin Brierley wrote that.
I claimed that early Christian converts scoffed at the idea of their god choosing to raise corpses.
Anybody who is ‘clearly insane’ can read 1 Corinthians 15 and see references to Christians who clearly did not believe in corpses rising.
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Steven, I’m only teasing you because you totally reinterpret the word resurrection to mean what you want it to mean, not what the people who used that word meant. Does it matter to you what ancient Jews meant by that word “resurrection”?
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Of course. That is why my blog shows how other Jews defended their resurrection beliefs in a totally different way to the way Paul defended his belief that Jesus ‘became a life-giving spirit’.
It matters to me how Paul used the word ‘resurrection’.
Which is why I wiped the floor with Canon Michael Cole on the subject…..
Does it matter to you that Tertullian called the raising of Lazarus a prime example of a resurrection?
Does it matter to you that early Christian converts scoffed at the idea of their god raising corpses?
Does it matter to you that Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5 that the earthly body is destroyed?
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Thanks for keeping your comments short. You do understand that that the Jewish burial practices was to preserve the bones in order to have something to resurrect on the last day? So, how can Jesus be resurrected if his bones are in the tomb? You can use some other word, like exalted, in order to vindicate Jesus. But the word resurrection means that the bones are GONE from the tomb. That’s what Jews meant by resurrection.
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So not one single word of refutation of what I said.
Paul said the earthly body was destroyed. 2 Corinthians 5:1. How can the earthly body be destroyed if it is not restored?
How can the author of 1 Peter say that all flesh was grass, if he believed that not all flesh saw corruption?
Paul described his beliefs prior to his conversion as ‘garbage’.
Paul , of course, trashes the idea that resurrected beings are made from the dust that corpses become :-
‘The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God….’
Compare that writing by a Christian with how a Jew wrote ‘All the bodies crumble into the dust of the earth until nothing remains of the body except a spoonful of earthly matter. In the future life when the Holy One, blessed be He, calls to the earth to return all the bodies deposited with it, that which had become mixed with the dust of the earth, like the yeast which is mixed with dough, improves and increases and it raises up all the body. When the Holy One, blessed be He, calls to the earth to return all the bodies deposited with it, that which has become mixed with the dust of the earth improves and increases and raises up all the body without water.’
Paul deliberately sets about trashing Jewish belief in ‘the dust of the earth’ being made into resurrected beings.
All this is in my debate with Canon Michael Cole, who got walloped….
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Thanks Steven. I guess we’re going to have to leave it there, as I have some other writing to do. We disagree about what the word resurrection means. I think the Jewish meaning is correct.
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