The Atheist Camel Chronicles: Debate Themes & Arguments for the Non-Believer (and those who think they might be) by Dromedary Hump

Author:Dromedary Hump [Hump, Dromedary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2010-10-05T13:00:00+00:00

1) The military expects everyone to be Christian; to be other is to be less.

2) Standing up to the injustice of religious coercion makes you feel more like an American.

3) Christians are hypocrites to whom protecting freedom and rights means their freedom and their rights, not the rights of everyone.

And so it evidently continues forty years later.

53

The Fallacy of Prophecy Fulfillment: Why Can’t Fundamentalists Get It?

29 Jul 2008

Likely all of us have heard Christians declare that there are some three hundred prophesies in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, called by Christians the Old Testament (OT), that were fulfilled by Jesus and documented in the New Testament (NT). This is a foundational element of the Jesus as God and Messiah belief: Jesus fulfilled the old prophesies.

I have always tried to explain to these credulous folks that the NT is simply a sequel to the OT. That is, since the OT prophesies were known by the Jewish authors of the NT, how hard would it be to write a mythical account of the life of one Jesus to match and thus fulfill those early prophesies? I mean, how difficult can that be to understand? At least mull it over and consider its simplicity.

But they dismiss it at face. It’s just too obvious, too simple and too worldly to be a viable explanation. It’s easier, it seems, for them to accept a mystical magical complex supernaturalism for which there is zero evidence and no corroborating/repeatable examples, than to consider the simplest and most logical explanation for prophesy fulfillment. They cannot even understand the concept; it actually confuses them. Remarkable, peculiar and incredibly frustrating.

I just finished reading Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll; ex Catholic priest, biblical scholar, Catholic Church historian, Christ follower. An excellent read, it was on the New York Times Best Seller List. I highly recommend it. He explains the New Testament prophesy fulfillment bugaboo this way: It’s not “history prophesized,” but simply multiple examples of “prophesy historicized.” In other words, exactly what I have been explaining to the faithful sheep all along.

The NT writers took OT prophesy, known by every Jew, and applied it to Jesus 50–70 years after his death, as though it was a historical fact. It was done to imbue him with the mythical Jewish Messiah status. In so doing, the ancient Hebrew Bible would be “proof of“ and “witness to”, Jesus’ Messiahship … a great selling point if the intent was to recruit Jews to your new cult. And indeed, Christianity was originally an exclusively Jewish focused cult.

Carroll goes on to explain that Jesus’ contemporary followers would never have conceived of this messiah status; it would have come as a complete shock to Jesus himself who would have likely considered it blasphemous.

“Prophesy historicized” is the concept I’ve been trying to describe to the sheeple for years. It took a liberal, thinking Catholic scholar to help me name it. Live and learn.

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