JustJim: And what's most puzzling to me, Mitch, is how you, as an obviously intelligent, deep-thinking person, could claim "thus it only makes sense to me to see this in exactly the same way." They had some ignorance and cultural excuses to see things the ways they did, but you claim it makes sense to you to see things that way because they did? Maybe you didn't mean that?
mitchellmckain: Well obviously I do not share your opinion that believers are ignorant. I feel no inclination to defend my opinions by thinking that those people who disagree with me are ignorant. I have made it quite clear that I think it is a matter of choice but that seems to offend you somehow - strange. On the other hand, you seem to be hunting a little too hard for something to complain about, again.
JustJim: There you go again twisting things around to mean what you want them to, in order to avoid answering the question, and creating yet another strawman - that I have an "opinion of Christians as ignorant". "They" referred to the writers of the Bible and "believers" of the Bible, as clearly stated in the paragraph before the one you quoted, who attributed things to God because they were, in fact, ignorant of other causes and explanations for those things. Their ignorance is forgivable, since they didn't know any better and didn't have access to all the knowledge and information you do. You do have that access, yet you still think it "makes sense" to conclude that they were right to presume God must have had some good reasons for doing the puzzling things he's supposed to have done in the Bible.
mitchellmckain: Avoid your question? Are you serious? What question? Did I mean what I said? Yes I meant what I said. Here let me repeat it. It is the presumption of a believer - a Christian - one who thinks that the Bible is the word of God - that God did things a certain way because there was a need for it. No I do not think that those who think this way are just stupid and ignorant but that this is a natural assumption for a believer. And so yes I apply exactly the same reasoning to the question of why Jesus appeared before the disciples with the wounds of the crucifixion. He had the wounds of the crucifixion because He thought it was needed for the apostles to believe and NOT because the resurrected body must necessarily be in the same physical state as the body at the time of the resurrection or at the time of death. I in fact believe that there is no consideration of physical neccessity at all because the resurrection isn't physical but spiritual as Paul says in 1 Cor 15.
JustJim wrote:Mitch wrote:Well this seems to be just going nowhere but in circles and I will decline repeating myself this time.
I humbly accept your surrender on all four points, agreeing that your examples are unsupportable.
Delude yourself however you please. But I will no longer respond to your baiting. I no longer believe that you have any real interest in what I say, and I have no interests in games of hurling veiled verbal abuses.
