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Great points. In response:
Hundreds of people claimed to have seen the resurrected Christ and went to their death submitted to torture rather than renounce their belief, including not only Paul but also James, the brother of Christ, who appears to have been a great skeptic of Jesus's claims to divinity during Jesus's life. What religions have similar historical support?
It is my understanding that Joseph Smith's 12 witnesses later recanted their testimony that they had seen the Angel Moroni. That is a clear contrast with the early Christian witnesses.
Islamic martyrs go to their martyrdom believing that their faith is true. But if Christ did not rise from the dead, then James, Paul, the other 11 disciples, and the hundreds of other witnesses suffered martyrdom and torture knowing that their belief was false.
I think there is plenty of reason to believe that early Christians had conviction. However, your response to my claim that other religious people also have extreme conviction is to say Christians have the best convictions, the convictions of Muslims are lesser, and early Mormon leaders have no conviction. . .
And maybe that is an unfair paraphrasing. Please correct me if it is.
Either way, I think my argument hardly hinges on the testimony of 12 people in the LDS. There are 5.5 billion religion, non-Christians on the planet. I am saying there is no shortage of people across these religions who have an honest, sincere belief and act with a similar extreme conviction and would be willing to pay any price or sacrifice anything for their God or their beliefs.
Also, my research shows that only 3 of Smith's followers testified to seeing the Angel. 8 testified to handling the gold plates. And none of the 11 ever changed their story, but some did leave the church because of disagreements with Smith. Is there a link to some information that says otherwise? My LDS knowledge is probably lacking.
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They don't have to be experts. Hundreds of millions of people have reasonably concluded that Jesus's message was authentic without being such experts. Why do you think that such expertise is necessary or required?
Given how intertwined religion and culture are, I think that supporting that claim becomes very muddy. People in the Americas and Europe are born into a predominantly Christian culture, grow up considering themselves Christian, but never dive a fraction as deep into studying the religion as someone like yourself. I think we can look at surveys of Christian knowledge of the Bible over the last couple of decades to support this.
Only ~28% of Christians in the US go to weekly services, 20% of all US Christians claim to have read the Bible, 50% think the golden rule is part of the 10 commandments, etc., etc. I think this is an indication of large population of 'cultural Christians'. And I don't mean that as a judgement.
There is deeper meaning and understanding of Christianity through the study of all the things I listed above, but very few Christians scratch the surface of that. And most of those that do, rely on experts in those subjects above to do the work and then to tell them what they've learned. Again, not a judgement - the magnitude of topics you would have to be an expert in in order to do the work yourself is unrealistic. And given the importance and seriousness of Christian claims, I see this as an issue. If my eternal soul is at stake, then I don't want to simply accept the religion I'm handed. Nor do I want to accept the word of someone else who declares to me what is true and what I should believe. Given the stakes, this is what I think is reasonable.
Christians will point to other ways of coming to know God aside from the academic. Which is fine. But, since I've never had God appear to me and tell me whats what, maybe I'm at a disadvantage. What I do know is that every religion has their spiritual revelations. Revelations, dreams, NDEs . . . all of this happens to Hindus and Muslims, and other people as well. They can't all be accurate. Maybe some are accurate - but there is no reliable and agreed upon method for validation.
Now. . . If God popped down from the clouds once in a while and said hello to everyone, hung around, talked to everyone, and answered some questions, we wouldn't need to be experts in ancient 'everything' in order to validate and support some of these Christian claims. The Truth would be apparent. And before you say that Jesus did pop on down and do all those things. . . . that was 2000 years ago in an era where just about every culture had their own Gods and gods that walked amongst them and performing miracles.
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Well, for an ineffective method it sure seems to have worked out pretty darn well.
Imagine you are the owner of a huge multi-national corporation. Now imagine 75% of your employees don't understand what you want them to be doing and have actually convinced themselves that you want them to do nearly the opposite of what you actually want them to do. And the 25% that are generally marching in the right direction cannot agree on your mission statement or the how of why of what your goals are.
And then imagine that the 75% group doesn't feel that you are communicating with them at all and are actually following an imposter CEO because this is the communication they think they are receiving.
And then imagine that at the end of their career, you take the 25% and give them a reward and then you take the 75% of your employees that missed the message and you burn and torture them for eternity. . . . okay, maybe I diverged from my analogy a bit there.
Pretty darn well? By what standard?
