Finally, somebody else argues that Jesus never existed,
yet nobody asks why these hundreds of people ran around the
first-century world dying for the testimony that they knew Him
personally and why thousands and thousands more, including a lot of
martyrs, never thought to question that?

i.e. two premises:
1) We know that the apostles and others were martyred on account of their claims about Jesus.

2) No one is a martyr for a claim they know to be false.
Therefore, we know that the apostles and others were martyrs on account of their claims about Jesus, and they did not know those claims to be false. So they must have thought those claims about Jesus were true.

Bob Seidensticker, who has commented here on SN, has a handy response to that figment of apologist imagination: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2012/08/who-would-die-for-a-lie/ Both premise 1 and premise 2 are false. The conclusion does not follow. Here's a summary of the main ideas; see Bob's post for details.

First, just as we have no reliable evidence on which to base belief in a historical Jesus, likewise we have no reliable evidence on which to base belief in historical apostolic martyrdoms.

Second, Bob's post also goes on to give examples of people who did knowingly die for claims they knew to be false.

BTW, "Jesus never existed" actually covers a lot of quite different scenarios, most of which are distinct from mythicism. I think it's quite plausible that there was a man named Jesus in 1st century Palestine who said and did things similar to some of the things attributed to him. We don't need much evidence at all to make a claim that ordinary plausible -- though it appears we don't have even that much evidence. Miraculous and untestable religious claims, however, would require substantially better evidence, and we have none remotely that strong.

to say that burning heretics was not wrong for the people who did it because they were products of their time is just moral relativism

Which is why I didn't say it.

I don't necessarily see any problem in imputing bad motives (pride, elitism, love of power, wish to control those of lower status) to Church authorities who tried to prevent the translation of the Bible

I don't either. In fact, I fully acknowledge it. That doesn't mean the reason for the rule is itself incorrect. A professor may be denied tenure because of jealousy, vindictiveness, etc. That doesn't invalidate the institution of tenure or the practice of a committee to oversee it. It doesn't even have any bearing on whether he or she ought to be denied tenure.

freedom of thought and freedom of religion are values that were forced on the Church from the outside and which the Church has adopted and endorsed somewhat tentatively

Everyone in the universe endorses these things somewhat tentatively. Otherwise, Ben Stein's stupid Expelled movie would be making a good point. But, as one of you guys have said on this very blog, scientists have the right to decide what is science and what is not. They have a responsibility to deny ID adherents tenured positions at prestigious universities.

The question is not whether humans have the right to abridge others' freedoms. Obviously, we do, or there is no government and no education. The question is, which freedoms do those in power have the responsibility to abridge and to what extent? The arguments of the last 300 years on this topic are not arguments of principle (or, rather, they shouldn't be), but rather arguments of practicality and the ultimate goals of human discourse and society.

I have no problem acknowledging that the church in the middle ages was too heavy-handed in its use of power. (Although, I suspect our conception of the heaviness of that hand is seriously skewed by our post-Enlightenment educational narratives. As an Evangelical Protestant, I grew up learning "facts" about the Catholic Church and about evolutionary biology that turned out to be ... not exactly false, but seriously misunderstood and taken out of context.) The church has repented her use of that kind of worldly power. But that doesn't mean that she has declared her scriptures to be "public" texts, or that she is going to abandon her mission if given the kind of "evidence" that atheists or agnostics usually present her with.

I used scare quotes because I constantly hear atheists and agnostics talk as though the meaning of "sufficient evidence" is obvious. Then you go on their blogs and watch them argue about something like gun control or the health insurance mandate or whether certain drugs should be illegal, and it turns out they have no clue what "sufficient" means. They go around and around and around.

Then some of them claim things like "we have no free will", as thought there weren't "sufficient" evidence for free will. And some of them try facilely to define morality by describing its evolutionary genesis, as though that were "sufficient" to account for it. (And I am not denying the evolutionary genesis of morality.)

So I will not apologize for my use of scare quotes.

"Sufficient to consider a belief rational" is a tautology. Sufficiency presumes rationality. The question is not whether the evidence for a belief is sufficient to be rational. If it's sufficient - for whatever purpose - it is by that fact rational. The question is - as far as I can tell - whether the evidence is sufficient to take a moral stand on a particular judgment, even in the face of social opposition. And social opposition itself involves popular judgment and the generally assumed understanding of what it means to live a good life.

So even the judgment of sufficient evidence cannot appeal to some absolutely objective POV but must rely on the common judgment of society. I recognize you have the mass of Western culture at your back right at the moment, but you will excuse me if I find the assumptions of a society of doped-up, obsessive, capitalist consumers less than rationally compelling. The lives and the thought of people like Francis (both the medieval saint and the modern pope), Mother Teresa, Ignatius of Loyola, Socrates, John Henry Newman, Martin Luther King Jr, Thomas Aquinas, J.R.R. Tolkien (and that of many others, Christian and non-) are far more rationally compelling, especially since they are able to account for Darwin and Feynman (both of whom I admire tremendously), but Darwin and Feynman cannot account for them.

You guys seem to think that all power is inevitably and inherently
exercised for the good of those in power, that such is the purpose of
power per se. That's just not true.

Nevertheless, I think the modern view (which I take to be more nearly correct than the views that preceded it), is, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. . . . There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."

It is very difficult for us, today, to justify the use of power to keep the Bible from being translated into the vernacular, or to use force to prevent someone reading a Bible translation or anything else. We may judge less harshly those who tried to do such things in the past because we must always judge people in part by what was understood in the era in which they lived. But to say that burning heretics was not wrong for the people who did it because they were products of their time is just moral relativism.

So I don't necessarily see any problem in imputing bad motives (pride, elitism, love of power, wish to control those of lower status) to Church authorities who tried to prevent the translation of the Bible or who prosecuted people for translating or reading it in their own language. "There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it."

It seems to me that freedom of thought and freedom of religion are values that were forced on the Church from the outside and which the Church has adopted and endorsed somewhat tentatively. One can partly understand why an organization that believes it is the sole and infallible possessor of Truth thinks it is doing what is best to impose its views on those who do not agree with it. But of course it is difficult to believe that a Church which teaches that God permits all kinds of horrors in order to allow people free will should take it upon itself to abridge human freedoms for the ends it deems best. If God granted free will, who is the Church to take it away?

The statement that we must "receive Scripture on its terms as the word of God" sounds like something which could easily have come from the mouths of Luther or Calvin.

Argh. This is like watching creationists troll a biologist's Evolution blog. The evolutionists keep trying to make subtle distinctions, and the creationists just keep ignoring them and making the same obtuse assertions based on a preconceived narrative.

(1) I am not denying that the doctrines of the church were abused by those in power. That's a given.

(2) In order to abuse a doctrine, you have to have a doctrine to appeal to. All evil is committed in the name of some good.

(3) The good of ecclesiastical oversight of Biblical interpretation is independent of its value for social control. It always has been and always will be.

You guys seem to think that all power is inevitably and inherently exercised for the good of those in power, that such is the purpose of power per se. That's just not true.

My chief concern in this particular thread is to reply to the
implication of MichaelNewsham that there was something of trickery or a
con about the Catholic Church's position that expressed itself in
violence against those who sought to know a truth that the church was
hiding. The church wasn't hiding anything in the Middle Ages. The
prohibition against translating scriptures without the oversight of the
church had nothing to do with secrecy.

.

Sorry,I'm afraid I'm unable to understand the distinction you are making. The Church blocked the translation of the Bible because the Church wished to control the interpretation thereof. It feared that if people read the words of Holy Scripture for themselves then the power of the Church would be lessened.

That was the power the Church had over believers- it controlled the meaning of the teachings,and it feared that if people began to read the Bile for themselves they would begin to question the authority of the Catholic Church- which is exactly what happened.

But it wasn't about "bad people misinterpreting the rules" - it was about the Catholic Church making rules to monopolise the control of people's religious beliefs. There was no misinterpretation involved- what happened was exactly what the Church wanted to happen- people who questioned the Church's authority to interpret Scripture were put to death.

I'm depressed by your use of scare quotes around the word "sufficient." I'm using a standard bit of English vocabulary in a common, straightforward way.

A little googling gives me the impression that some Muslims believe Muhammad split the moon in half, based on their sacred texts. Do you think that's a rational belief? If not, how did you decide there wasn't sufficient evidence for it to be one?

So get to work on that and get back to me. Some things to think about while working on this puzzle : how extraordinary is the claim (i.e., how far out of the realm of commonplace, verifiable events is it); and how strong is the evidence for this claim (how likely are verifiably true things we know about to have happened if the claim is true, and how unlikely are these things to have happened if the claim is false)?

The claims made about Jesus by Christians are pretty damn extraordinary, and require similarly strong evidence to be reasonably held. There is certainly SOME evidence for these claims, but not enough to consider belief in the claims rational.

The burning of the heretic was because the church had way too much power, and 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

Why is that an irrational belief? Seriously, I want reasons, not just assertion.

Well, Akin says the following:

That’s because the true meaning of the Old Testament is, says St. Paul, “veiled” and the cleverest scholar is powerless to understand what it’s all really about without divine help.

It seems very simple to me. A text is a "public" thing. Its meaning should be available, in principle, to all. That is why we write things down and publish them—to preserve and communicate the ideas. To assert that a given passage from a text has one "public" meaning that is available to all, and one or more additional meanings that can only be understood by supernatural means is to "supernaturalize" the concept of text.

Suppose, in response to your question ("Why is that an irrational belief?') I had said, "April is the cruellest month." You would quite justifiably say, "I don't see how that answers my question." And I would say, "I know you don't see, but it does answer your question. It just requires supernatural help to understand, and obviously you aren't getting the supernatural help."

In the "real world," for rational people, there are no supernatural veils over texts and no supernatural aids to understanding them. I have an "Old Testament" (Tanakh) from the Jewish Publication Society, and in their notes they to texts like the story of Adam and Eve, they sometimes explain the significance Christian theology places on various aspects of the text. As Jews, their is no "veil" over their eyes to understanding the Christian interpretation. They just don't believe it. I also have a copy of The Jewish Annotated New Testament. I see no reason why a Jewish scholar who studies the New Testament can't understand it at least as well as anyone else. After all, Jesus and the Apostles were Jews.

I don't, by the way, accept what Jimmy Akin says as an accurate and nuanced explanation of what the Catholic Church teaches. But I do think he is describing what many Catholics believe, and I do think those are irrational beliefs. I am not using "irrational" in a necessarily pejorative sense. I respect religious belief, have religious beliefs of my own, and see no problem with people having irrational beliefs of certain types. But I nevertheless maintain that it is irrational to believe the Bible is full of hidden meanings that only people with supernatural help can perceive.