quote:

Originally posted by John BE:
Hi,Asarualim ..

1. We can go into this in detail if you want, though it will take time and space! But there is more than one contemporary allusion to Christ and Christians - though I suppose the one about the riot in Rome ab instigatione Chresto is always going to be a bit ambiguous - and the scholarly attempt in the 19th century to argue that Christ did not exist is generally accounted a failure. I've never heard of a demonstration that any particular text is a forgery. If you say that it's "by a Catholic priest", I guess the suggestion is that it's relatively recent, as "Catholic priests", at least in the way in which the phrase is generally used in these days, is a term that would be pretty meaningless in the first thousand years of Christianity? Jewish controversialists in the first couple of hundred years of the Church argued that the resurrection was a spoof, though they never produced evidence of a grave or bones, but none of their writings that have survived ever suggested that his actual existence was a fable.

I'll try and dig out the reference to the (alleged) forged documents. Like TheCarpenter though, I'd be interested in any links you have to other accounts. Whenever I've discussed this in the past I've not once had anything concrete offered as evidence for jesus actually existing. Personally, I think there probably was a man called jesus who was a preacher (there was a lot of it around in them days) and had a decent following, but I think he was just that, a man, and all the supernatural adorments were simply attributed to him over the years to compete with existing pagan roman gods. afterall, they were an mpressive bunch those roman gods - jesus in comparison must have seemed nothing special so to embellish the odd tale here, exaggerate the odd tale there, re-interpret the odd act to make it seem more than it is must have been tempting and probably necessary to get christianity off the ground in Rome. The whole wine into water for example - a believable interpretation is that Jesus was on a recruiting mission at the wedding and managed to convert people from their current religion (water) into his faith (wine). The use of analogy then gets interpreted literally (an error many christians are still guilty of today) and hey presto - you've got a miracle.

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2. It is central to Christianity that Jesus will return. It's also manifestly true that Paul expected that to happen imminently - in his earliest letter he has a lot to say about it, in quite elaborate terms, and his argument that it's better to stay single is based, not on some addiction to celibacy, but on the contention that, if Christ is returning soon, it's best to keep your life uncomplicated, and to focus on the imminent End. As Paul was a convert in the first generation of the Church, it's reasonable to suppose that this aniticipation of an imminent second coming was a part of the expectation of the Christians that he first met.

Yes, that sounds reasonable enough. I believe marketeers call this a Unique Selling Point. I think Paul took quite a few liberties with the "facts" around jesus in a bid to get converts. In looking at the mythology around the man it becomes evident that there are very few other Unique Selling Points about jesus, as most of the details of his life were merely recycled from older religions - born of a virgin, crucified and came back to life, etc.

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And, of course, it didn't happen. Paul doesn't allude to it directly in any of his later letters, but they make an obvious shift towards looking at the problems which faced the Church from day to day, rather than focusing on sober - or breathless! - anticipation of the End. That expectation was therefore wrong, and you make a valid point. However it didn't put the first Christains off, and it's not put others off since. Trouble is, Christianity has something in common with the lager advertised on the box about 15 or 20 years ago, when the bloke's mates ask him what's so good abvout it, and he just takes a sip and says: "Oooh, you gotta try it" ... But to others, that might add up to no more than a sense that some folk will swallow anything!

I think Paul was a good politician, and would have been good in marketing if he was around today. He certainly seemed to have a way of spinning things.

I have to shoot for now but I'll reply to the rest of your post later. Cheers.

quote:

Originally posted by Asarualim:
[I think Paul was a good politician, and would have been good in marketing if he was around today. He certainly seemed to have a way of spinning things.

.

And yet he suffered terribly, didn't he?
Why would a wealthy and powerul man give up everything, spend time in the slammer, live daily with the threat of persecution or death, and for what?

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Originally posted by Mr Woolf:

quote:

Originally posted by Asarualim:
[I think Paul was a good politician, and would have been good in marketing if he was around today. He certainly seemed to have a way of spinning things.

.

And yet he suffered terribly, didn't he?
Why would a wealthy and powerul man give up everything, spend time in the slammer, live daily with the threat of persecution or death, and for what?

Mental illness? Syrian War Syndrome? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Didn't he have some sort of episode on the road to Damascus?

Delusions of grandeur?

quote:

Originally posted by TheCarpenter:

quote:

Originally posted by John BE:
1. You must be almost alone if you think that the hostorical Jesus didn't exist. Contemporary pagan writers in the Roman Empire even mention him, and his followers, in passing.

Could you give me the links (or authors etc), I am aware of a few who wrote about Christians, but not any that relate to Jesus himself. (For the record, I'm more than prepared to accept some proper third party evidence, I'm just yet to see any.)

[/QUOTE]

I think the muslim koran also mentions Jesus, although they have him as a prophet, rather than as the son of god.

quote:

Originally posted by Angelus the Vampire:
I think the muslim koran also mentions Jesus, although they have him as a prophet, rather than as the son of god.

I think you're right, but then the Koran also mentions a Noah-esque flood, so the fact that a myth can spread from one holy book to another doesn't confirm the original event. All it does is suggest that they share a common ancestor.

There's some rather good sections in God is not Great (by C.Hitchens) on how and why religions adopt different bits of earlier beliefs, including both the probable historic reasons for the Koran and the Book of Mormon or LuisGarcia's list of Easter blessings for the Christians to ponder.

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I think you're right, but then the Koran also mentions a Noah-esque flood, so the fact that a myth can spread from one holy book to another doesn't confirm the original event. All it does is suggest that they share a common ancestor.

Why do you say the flood is a myth?

Noah himself may be a myth, but not neccessarily the flood.

quote:

Originally posted by Angelus the Vampire:
Why do you say the flood is a myth?

Noah himself may be a myth, but not neccessarily the flood.

Sigh, where to start... I'll assume we're talking about one massive world wide flood of epic proportions that covered all (or at least the vast majority) of the earth at some point since humans first started communicating in some way, shape or form. (If you want to extend/ challenge that definition, let me know and I'll see what I can do.)

Firstly, if there was a flood like that, where did the water come from? and where did it go to?

Secondly, a flood on that scale would leave massive amounts of evidence, but there isn't any.
e.g. - We would expect to find massive amounts of sedimentation being churned up and re-deposited, but instead of being laid down in it's originally order the densest layers would be at the bottom and the least dense at the top.
- We would expect to find that all the fossils distributed through these layers, either wholly randomly/ all at the bottom/ with the slowest moving or heaviest towards the bottom and the lighter or faster moving animals near the top (delete as applicable).

Since we don't find evidence that fits this massive one off flood, but we find evidence that smaller local floods do occur, that many cultures have many myths about floods. It makes much more sense to assume that the local floods were exaggerated to epic (even biblical) proportions to suit the story telling needs of primitive peoples (who were also scared of thunder & lightning, volcanoes etc) to fit in with the currently popular god myth of the day (& then copied and pasted into later god myths).

OK....

A world wide flood does not need to have happened. But a catastrophic flood could hav engulfed completely the area of the author of the story.

For example, in the Ice Age, huge glaciers covered large tracts of land hundreds of miles wide. Behind the glacier builds up a lake of rain water formed over hundreds/thousands of years.

Obviously as global warming happens, ice melts and cracks form in the glacier. Once the glacier melts past a point of no return the build up of water in the lake breaks through causing a huge flood. I Have on DVD somehwere the story of one such event happening in what is now the USA: the flood rushing over the countryside was over 500foot deep, and travelled for hundreds of miles. Without rewatching it (or finding it first) I can`t remember the well known area of the USA this flood travelled over, but the landscape after the flood waters died down is very impressive.

The experts are monitoring another glacier that is getting into a similar state of collapse in Iceland at the moment.

Noah and the flood as mentioned in the muslim holy book Qoran is not a global flood. It was a local flood to drown only the local nasties who poked fun at God's Prophet.

As you know, God does not like his mates being mocked. So, He sent hurricanes, storm, floods and everything and drowned all the baddies.

Noah's son was also drowned because he sided with the pagans and refused to get on board he divine ship. God said, he is worst than a pig and I will kill him now.

So, there was no world wide flood. Only parts of Turkey, Armenia was flooded. It was only in the area around the black sea.

Muslims do not expect the Bible version and claim it was altered to make it more dramatic.

--

i believe there was a boat found on Mount Arrarat. as a christian i believe that it was a localised flood as that was the world as known in those days

Sorry for the delay in replying to the above - had a long weekend away. Wet, windy and chilly - should have gone to Catalonia, not to Wales!

Where to start?

1. For "The Carpenter" - neat name for someone discussing Jesus! -, and for Asarulalim, I've scouted round the net to see how much is there about contemporary non-Christian evidences for the existence of Jesus, and found that there was quite a bit - more than I expected. I thought this would be more useful for you than expecting you to take my word for it - you can see a range of different views.

I should say that, when I said to Asarualim that "you must be almost alone if you think that the historical Jesus didn't exist", I meant that, but no more than that. I didn't mean "if you don't believe that Jesus existed, and that he was who the New Testament says he was, or what the Church has believed that he is" - which, it can be argued, aren't necessarily the same things.

Do a net search under "the Historicity of Jesus", and take a look at what's there. The best all-round thing that I found (at least, in my opinion!) was the Wikipedia entry under "the Historicity of Jesus", which covers all the contemporary sources, and does so, I think, in a balanced way. Titus Flavius Josephus (or, if you wanna be Hebrew, Yosef ben Matityahu, though he might have preferred his Roman name!) is the most interesting, if only because some Christian copyist in later times has clearly fiddled with one of his two references to Jesus, in order to give it a Christian flavour; but the general view among experts is that the copyist just added bits to an otherwise quite neutral text. There's some more radical stuff too, denying that Jesus ever existed at all, and, equally, some from committed Christian perpectives which seem to me to seize any evidence, however compromised, to support their case. I suspect both, because they come with too fixed an agenda!

The point is that no ancient document that I've ever heard of suggests that Jesus never existed, but was just the figment of Christian imagination - whether it's the handful of passing mentions by contemporary or subsequent pagan writers, or Jewish and, later, other controversialists attacking Christianity. They said all sorts of other things: that Jesus was a harlot's child, that his followers stole his body and then pretended that he was raised from death - but never, at least as far as I know, that he was not a historical person.

But as for him being Messiah, raised from the dead, Son of God, Incarnate Word begotten of the Father before time began, that, then as now, was a matter of what people did or didn't believe! In any case, most of the classical writers who knew about Jesus probably would have known little about what Christians believed, and might well have cared even less, though Pliny seems to have met some of then his professional capacity! Fairly naturally, Christianity was seen by Jews as a heresy, but, insofar as they knew or thought about it at all, it seems to have been viewed by educated Greco-Romans who'd picked up vague bits of street talk about it as a weird and rather sinister eastern superstition.

2. I saw a bit of that TV documentary too, Carpenter, but got a bit bored with it because Joseph, Mary and Jesus are just Greek forms of Yosef, Miriam and Yeshu'a (Joshua) and weren't unusual Jewish names - so tombs with those names on don't reveal anything particularly either one way or another. Makes a good story, though - like "The da Vinci Code". So I won't be arguing either of your alternatives from that story ... !

3. What you think about the "supernatural adornments" depends on your starting point. If,a priori, your view is that such things are impossible, then nothing will make them credible for you. The trouble with that is that it makes you limit possibilities to what your mind can embrace.

If you had told an educated man or woman in the tenth century that it was physically possible to fly three hundred people from London to Jerusalem in a metal aircraft, they would have looked at your pityingly and carefully explained why such a thing was impossible. I read recently that thunderbolts were a scientifically proven physical impossibility, despite the fact that so many people across centuries have said they've seen one. The trouble with that is that, as a child, I saw one, during a thunderstorm. At that age, I didn't know that such things had been talked about, never mind that they were scientifically impossible! But I saw it - no doubt; and because of the fact that lots of other people, not just me, seem to have seen the things, I've no doubt that, scientifically impossible or not, thunderbolts happen. So with miracles - I ain't ruling them out until I'm in a position to say that I know everything about the nature of creation, and therefore can be certain that they can't happen. But, should an apparent miracle come my way, my default reaction will be scepticism, because, normally, they don't ...

4. The Book of Revelation is a specimen of a style of writing known as apocalyptic (= revealing something hidden - usually dramatically and enigmatically!) literature, which first appeared in later Judaism. The Book of Daniel, in the Old Testament, is in that style. I see there's a section on this in Wikipedia, though - unlike the section on "the Historicity of Jesus" - I thought this one was a bit thin when I looked at it just now.

Revelation was written when the Church was first beginning to experience persecution. The early Christians thought that Jesus would return very soon, and there are apocalyptic bits in some of the Gospels that suggested that his coming would be preceded by a time of persecution and suffering. The author - a John living in exile on the Aegean island of Patmos (who might be, but probably isn't, the same John who wrote the Gospel) sees the persecution that was then happening as a sign that Jesus would come soon. So he spends the first part of his writing looking, in anticipation of the second coming, at the strengths and weaknesses of the Christians in the churches of western Anatolia that weren't far from Patmos, and which he seems to have known well, urging them, where necessary, to smarten up their discipleship in readiness. The second part of the book dwells on the end of the present age when the Lord will come in glory and in judgement, when he will judge the persecuting idolaters of the Roman Empire and finally bring in his Kingdom of justice and peace, completing what the first coming of Jeus had begun.

It's like a sort of ancient, religious "Star Wars" in words, in which the rightous strive against the Evil Empire, and anticipating their victory against all apparent odds, because the Force (in this case, the power of God) is with them and must triumph in the end. What it doesn't do is make predictions about our age, or any other period other than that of the writer, though at every period there were, as there still are, exuberant Christians who have talked themselves into trying to make it do so.

Despite all their expectation then, it didn't happen, but some Christians still find this biblical version of reading tea-leaves attractive. Which is why some early Christians were dubious about including it in the New Testament, and why, even today, the eastern Church doesn't read the book in public in worship - because it's too easily seen, not as a "Star Wars" style Christian fantasy, but as some mysterious predictor of God's plan for the future. Which Christians, in every century, always think is going to happen just a few years ahead! Most of them in our day and age seem to live in middle America ...

5. Not sure that Paul was in a position to take too many liberties with the satory of Jesus - remember, he was initially the new boy, the convert into an already existing community, and that's not a position of strength. He managed a degree of unpopularity, even when well established, for arguing some of the theological points that he took on. But, yes, you're right otherwise - nothing orginal in the ancient world about dying and rising gods - or mystical rebirth ... But then, maybe all those are "types and shadows", springing out of a widespread innate human sense of these things, of something which is eternally true, and was actually realized by God in Christ. But then, being a Christian who's bought into this stuff, I would say that, wouldn't I?!

6. And, finally ... Louise10, you're right enough in saying that religion's often been used by the powerful as a method of social control - Christianity as much, maybe more, as any other. But I don't think you can see the beginnings of Christianity in those terms, because (a) there wasn't a book - only the Gospel, passed down within each local church by word of mouth. When books were written, they were measured against that verbal tradition, not the tradition against the books; and (b) because Christianity didn't start with powerful people at its head, and only attracted a few of them for the first 300 years or so. The powerful people, whether Jewish or pagan, despised it - though for different reasons!

But I think I may be with you in some of your comments about Islam. You talk about what Muslims think is right and "honourable" in terms of rape and marriage, and then I read Omrow saying that, because God "didn't like his mates being mocked", he "sent hurricanes .. &c .. and drowned all the baddies", and that God decided to kill Noah's son because he was "worse than a pig". I think your God's way nastier than mine, Omrow!

Noah's son was drowned becaused he mocked God and refused to get on board.

But the pig, he had more sense. The pair did get on to the ship.

Mr and Mrs Swine were saved by Noah.

God killed Noah's son and saved the pigs.

Lesson of Noah's story is that if
you mess with God's Prophets, watch how the Divine Warth will destroy you.

----

Santorini, there was a roughly boat shaped feature seen near Mount Ararat in Turkey, the Durupinar site. Amateaur explorer Ron Wyatt claimed it was the remains of the Ark, to go with his numerous other biblical discoveries, but mainstream scientific reasearch has indicated that it is a natural formation and not a boat. I was wondering however how a localised flood could put a boat onto of a mountain range anyway. And wouldn't God know that the world was a bit bigger than Noah knew so why would he talk about it as a worldwide flood from which Noah had to save all the animals etc. ?

John BE, regarding the Historicity of Jesus, I think it's a very interesting subject and would like to raise a few points for discussion regarding what you said. I'm surprised that you say you found quite a bit of contempory non christian references to Jesus. I don't think any of the writtings were actually contemporary were they? Also only one seems to mention Jesus directly, the rest talk about Christians and what they believe to be true. It's also interesting that Jesus was not mentioned at all by Philo Judaeus, a contempory of Jesus (20BC to 50AD), who wrote a great deal about history, philosophy and religion, and wrote about Pilate too. A contempory of Joshepus, Justas of Tiberias was a Jewish writer who lived in Capernaum where Jesus was often said to have stayed. He wrote a history of the Jewish people from Moses to Agrippa II but didn't mention Jesus - although his work does not survive complete. Also much of the writings you mention attacking Jesus were non contempory too, but as you say they didn't deny his existence.

I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist, I think he may well have, but I don't think there is much evidence outside the Gospels which can be used to show this or to actually see what really happened. The Gospels show what people believd some time after Jesus but again are not considerd to have been written at the time of Jesus.

quote:

Originally posted by Omrow:
Noah's son was drowned becaused he mocked God and refused to get on board.

But the pig, he had more sense. The pair did get on to the ship.

Mr and Mrs Swine were saved by Noah.

God killed Noah's son and saved the pigs.

Lesson of Noah's story is that if
you mess with God's Prophets, watch how the Divine Warth will destroy you.

----

...and I'm waiting. Pretty harsh if you are a god that can't handle a bit of mockery sent you way. Sounds a little insecure to me, haha.

Fair comment, Mycor. I think Josephus is the only clear contemporary mention of Jesus. The others, though by no means particularly sympathetic (some hostile, some contemptuous) are later, to varying degrees. A mention from Philo would have been illuminating, since, as you say, he's pretty much contemporaneous, but of course there isn't anything from him.

I think we Christians are inclined to overlook the fact that, at the time, the Church was pretty much off the radar in the eastern Med. - there had been, and, at the time, were still, various sects and pious groups in Judaism, not to mention a number of self-proclaimed "messiahs", who would have only been of interest to Jews, and would hardly have been noticed outside Judaism, except, perhaps, by Greeks living in Palestine and in other places, such as Alexandria, where there was extensive Jewish settlement, and who may thus have been aware of what went on in local Judaism. There's quite a bit in the New Testament about the numbers of people that responded to the Christian message, but I suspect that these responses were quite localized, and not that great in terms of the total population - all new groups, quite naturally, are impressed when they make converts, but numbers that seem large to them aren't necessarily that great in terms of the total population.

I hadn't come across Justus before, so did a little digging! As Christianity had such strong local links with "Galilee of the Gentiles", where Tiberias was situated, you'd think he would have been aware of Christ and Christianity, but I see that very little of his writings have survived, and it looks to me as if his main concern was the local politics of the time, and Christianity may not have been enormously relevant to those concerns.

My main point was that, as far as I'm aware, no chronicler and commentator whose writings are extant, either at the time or later, suggested that Jesus din't exist, and I would have thought that, if that had been an issue, there'd be some suggestion of it somewhere. The argument as to who or what he was is, of course, another matter!

As to ancient floods, no one's mentioned that a disastrous flood is mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a heroic poem preserved on clay tablets from the time of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, in the 7th century BC. I believe that scholarly opinion conjectures that this was already a very old story even then, rooted in legends among the people of Sumer, the oldest civilization in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, from back around 5,000 BC.
It looks as if the tradition of a flood severe enough to be remembered across generations goes back a very long way in that part of the world. And, of course, the Jewish tradition is that Abraham, the nacestor of the Hebrews, originated from the city of Ur in Sumer ...

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Originally Posted by John BE (& frantically hacked down by me to try and keep the length under control, if you feel I’ve ended up misquoting you I apologise.)1… I've scouted round the net to see how much is there about contemporary non-Christian evidences for the existence of Jesus, and found that there was quite a bit - more than I expected. …
I should say that, when I said to Asarualim that "you must be almost alone if you think that the historical Jesus didn't exist", I meant that, but no more than that. I didn't mean "if you don't believe that Jesus existed, and that he was who the New Testament says he was, or what the Church has believed that he is" - which, it can be argued, aren't necessarily the same things.

(Actually, that was me, but I won’t take it personally.) Okay, point taken, because it’s obvious the Jesus that Christians seem to believe in couldn’t actually exist in history.

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The best all-round thing that I found … was the Wikipedia entry under "the Historicity of Jesus", which covers all the contemporary sources, and does so, I think, in a balanced way.

I’d agree with you it’s pretty well balanced, though you’re overstating your case when you claim that…

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Titus Flavius Josephus… is the most interesting, if only because some Christian copyist in later times has clearly fiddled with one of his two references to Jesus

… when the page states quite clearly that there are a grand total of two references to Jesus by TFJ. Also, the first is widely considered to have suffered through repeated interpolation and the second is (in full) “James “The brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” “ So, are you going to accept that Jesus wasn’t Mary & Joseph’s only child, or do you want to do another bit of a side step around that one as well?

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The point is that no ancient document that I've ever heard of suggests that Jesus never existed, but was just the figment of Christian imagination

That’s your point?! Your only one step away from claiming that because there are no contemporary documents disputing the existence of Puff the Magic Dragon, therefore PtMD must exist.
Try and think this through, no one is disputing the existence of Christians. All anyone has said is there is distinct lack of evidence to back up any of the claims made on Jesus’ behalf (e.g. about any of the ‘miracles’ happening) and when it comes down to it there is also a distinct lack of evidence to support the idea of Jesus as an historical entity either. Remember, evidence of Jesus (or the Jesus) was asked for, not Christians. The vast majority of the authors shown only comment on Christians, with those that comment on Jesus either being suspected forgeries, or some references to ‘Chrestus’ and whether these was a corruption of ‘Christus’ or a common name to give a slave.

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2. I saw a bit of that TV documentary too, Carpenter, but got a bit bored with it because Joseph, Mary and Jesus are just Greek forms of Yosef, Miriam and Yeshu'a (Joshua) and weren't unusual Jewish names –

As memory serves Jesus was the 6th most common name at that time, so looking for the Jesus] seems to be a bit like asking for the preacher called John today (see below).

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3. What you think about the "supernatural adornments" depends on your starting point. If,a priori, your view is that such things are impossible, then nothing will make them credible for you. The trouble with that is that it makes you limit possibilities to what your mind can embrace.

No, my a priori position is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; it’s the absence of credible evidence is compelling (my a posteriori position). If you’d like to state whether you agree this is a fair test or propose an alternative test we can look at that as well.

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. I read recently that thunderbolts were a scientifically proven physical impossibility,

I’d check exactly what you’re reading (or exactly what you mean by a thunderbolt), frankly it sounds like one of those daft pieces of ‘research’ that hasn’t been checked properly (like all those claims that bees can’t fly & kangaroos can’t jump).

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4. The Book of Revelation is a specimen of a style of writing known as apocalyptic (= revealing something hidden - usually dramatically and enigmatically!) literature, which first appeared in later Judaism. …The second part of the book dwells on the end of the present age when the Lord will come in glory and in judgement, …It's like a sort of ancient, religious "Star Wars" ….

Let’s bring two parts of your answer together here, there’s a Jesus figure, that could have been a preacher about 2000years ago in the middle east; could have been a collection of stories about preachers and other ‘miraculous’ happenings of about the same time; or could have been God on Earth in some way shape or form (& if you check wiki on Early Christianity, you’ll find references to Christian sects that thought he was only God/ only a man/ a man who at some point after his birth became God/ or didn’t take any actual physical form and his material form on Earth was an illusion). (Ultimately, I don’t regard two contested pieces of evidence as nearly enough to establish his actual existence, but for whatever reasons you do.)
Then we get to Jesus saying he’s going to come back bringing world peace/ heaven on earth/ justice to roman idolaters etc.

Ever hear of Cargo cults? Basically in WW2, the US forces turned up on small pacific islands, built airstrips and planes would land on the airstrips where the forces would unload their cargo. The native islanders seeing this started to build their own ‘airstrips’ and then sat there waiting for their planes to arrive with their cargo. Beginning to sound familiar?
Also, most of these cults are happily waiting for “John Frumb” to return, again bringing cargo bounty & all manner of bountiful goods. So we could spend our time speculating on whether John Frumb was a US soldier who landed on one (or more) of these islands, or whether he was an imaginary figure (or whether the name John Frumb is a corruption of Tom Thumb), but ultimately we’ll probably never know and in any case what difference do you think it’ll make to whether John will turn up (again)?

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… God decided to kill Noah's son because he was "worse than a pig". I think your God's way nastier than mine, Omrow!

No, Omrow’s God only killed some people in a localised flood, yours killed everyone on the planet apart from Noah & co. Even if you’re going to try and claim this was a smaller flood (i.e. not the flood god promised in Genesis) Omrow’s god only killed one more person (Noah’s son) than your’s did. So I’m not sure that really qualifies him as “way nastier” (or are you now saying that this was just a flood and God had nothing much to do with it at all?)

Eek! I've managed to change the colour at the top of the post to exactly the same as the background (too used to posting on a grey background obviously).

Anyway should read...

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(& frantically hacked down by me to try and keep the length under control, if you feel I’ve ended up misquoting you I apologise.)

(...and it will do if you highlight it, but just in case.)