npub1vx…q8e3w on Nostr: Okay, since I replied in a snarky way to you, my punishment is that I have to reply ...

Okay, since I replied in a snarky way to you, my punishment is that I have to reply once more.
Let’s recap. Toxic said that Christians are essentially weak cowards. My response is that even if that’s true, it doesn’t make us wrong. People that are stupid, cowards etc believe all sorts of true things. (Furthermore this is an obviously false, bigoted claim).

I said that gravity is predictive and so is the Bible, though I didn’t claim gravity and prophecy are as easy to discern.
I don’t use prophecy is an argument because there’s multiple steps involved to determine whether the Old Testament is a reliable document and whether the New Testament has reliable documents. Furthermore, most prophecy is in sections of literature that are highly symbolic and the New Testament has hundreds of breadcrumbs, not a flashing prophecy sign, This is very foreign to us western readers and we are generally too lazy to go back and understand it. I’ll be short for people who don’t want to go read better explanations elsewhere.
By external, I should have been more precise. The Bible is not 1 book, it’s a collection of writings over thousands of years. Many things spoken of in the Old Testament have been validated archaeologically (sometimes after hundreds of years of skepticism) and many things have been verified in the New. Many things have lined up with physical archeology, monetary units, distances, current exchange rates, complex political structures, percentages of popular names at that particular time and region etc. The claims made by the gospel writers are more likely trustworthy than not. (See Simon Greenleaf, who helped found Harvard Law, in his little book Testimony of the Evangelists) Most died for what they claimed.
Now, these people saw and heard Jesus speak. They saw things like him strangely ride into Jerusalem on a colt donkey as was predicted, his bones not get broken during his crucifixion (not normal) or the “Passover lamb” dying at the time of Passover.

I’m not sure exactly what passage you’re referring to (there are several in different contexts, none fitting what you seem to refer to) but Jesus did come back. He did NOT “come back” in a wooden, literalistic sense. The whole Bible has God “coming” in a figurative way to say that his judgement is coming. And in 70 AD the Romans sacked the corrupt Jerusalem violently slaughtering people. When they surrounded, many Christians fled exactly as he predicted and survived. If you’re thinking of John 14:3, I don’t see any clear prediction that can be falsified unless one thinks that he must be literally taking them away. There are several views on what he’s getting at here but this is pre-death.

If I lumped you in with the pompous skeptics that just want to hurl illogical stones, I apologize.