Avi,avi wrote: I argue, in harmony with Galileo, that the earth rotates about the sun. I am not seeking to "deride the opposite belief". There is only ONE truth, Jiri. Not two. Your idea, that Galileo is entitled to his opinion, and the RCC entitled to their opinion, though, Galileo never imprisoned any church officials, nor bestowed unspeakable horrors upon those who dared to repudiate the Vatican, is false. Do you honestly believe, that when Galileo published his masterpiece, his goal was to "badmouth" the RCC? I believe that he published his epic research to prove his point, not to disprove someone else's.
Jesus is a myth, just like Herakles, the model upon which the gospel writers depended. There is only ONE truth, here, Jiri. Either Jesus existed, and we have no evidence for that, else he did not exist, and we do possess evidence that he did not. Here, as with Herakles, the evidence is overwhelming that the figure described is superhuman, hence, a work of fiction, not historical biography.
this is the type of argument that is unhelpful. Your starting point is manifestly fallacious. That the gospels describe Jesus as superhuman does not any way guarantee that the figure they lionize did not exist. We have a number of examples of pseudo biographies of figures who allegedly possessed supernatural powers who were undoubtedly historical. Carrier cites the example of Saint Genevieve whose posthumous hagiography listed her miraculous cures, (and causing blindness to thieves in reversed cures), calming storms and righting capsized vessels, casting and summoning demons. The greatest of 'bogatyrs', all-purpose rescue heroes of 'Russian' folktales, Ilya of Murom was a character spliced from two related historical figures. The Slovak highlander Robin Hood named Juro Janosik who was said to uproot hundred-year old oak trees with his bare hands and fight off a regiment of soldiers single-handed, was a real-life highwayman who was hanged in 1715 by the Hungarian authorities. The certificate of his execution is still around. So while I agree that the gospel events are fictional, or at any rate, mostly so, there is nothing I am aware of that would logically exclude the possibility that the fantasies reference a historical figure.
FWIW, your Galileo example is ironically proving my point. He had some very powerful admirers in the Church, chief among them cardinal Barberini, the future pope Urban VIII who was to become his jailer. Urban VIII became famous for his reaction to the passing of the man called Grey Eminence, ' if there is God, cardinal Richelieu has much answer for, if there is no God he has done very well.' Believing himself to be invulnerable, Galileo broke the agreement he had with the Church in which he was allowed to discuss Copernicus heliocentric theory as 'a hypothesis' (even though the teaching was placed on the prohibited "index" by the Inquisition). He became inceasingly challenging to the established Church hierarchy, finally creating a pamphlet (Dialogue in the Flux and Reflux of the Tides) in which he ridiculed (through a character called Simplicio or Simpleton, the Ptolemaic cosmology on which the Church relied. The story of Galileo is really very interesting and far from a story of good (science) vs bad (religion). Suffice it to say that Galileo was bluffing with his challenge to the Church ( he was also plainly wrong vis-a-vis Kepler) even though he was vindicated later by Newton's theory of gravity. There is an excellent account of the whole Galileo affair in Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.
Best,
Jiri