Was George Washington president?

jesus_freak

Muse
jesus_freak
Joined
Jan 20, 2007
Messages
515
Can someone help me with this? every book that I read on the subject was written by man!!! I'm thinking that maybe he did really live, but no way was he a president!! Lets get to the bottom of this, and don't even get me started on Julius Caesar!!!:eek:

Fixed
 
Last edited:
jesus_freak said:
Can someone help me with this? every book that I read on the subject was written by man!!! I'm thinking that maybe he did really live, but no way was he a president!! Lets get to the bottom of this, and don't even get me started on Julius Ceaser!!!:eek:
Click to expand...

There must be a story here. I don't know what it is, but there is definitely a story.
 
jesus_freak said:
OK...how do you know??? Prove it, and don't use any thing that was written by man as your proof, because we all know that is not reliable!
Click to expand...

You are operating on the fallacy that thigns by man are unreliable therefore none of it can be used. This isn't true. becuase men can be unreliable, we typically like to have multiple sources of independent information.

And if you have only 1 source and it's veracity is highly suspect, than of course we must question wether or not the person described in that text is real.


But For good ol george, we have
1.) signed letters and artifacts from him
2.) a grave
3.) treaties to which he has signed and were notarized by others.
4.) portraits which we have accounts of him posing for.
among many other bits of cooberating evidence.

So his existince is well documented.

Now, if in 2000 years, we loose all that evidence except for a story somebody wrote about GW in 1870, then the future people would be fully justified to doubt GW's existence.
 
Yes he was, but I'm a man so what I say is unreliable.

I base this belief on the unreliable account of many independent contemporary primary sources. These too are unreliable. However being as they are primary sources there's no reasons for mistakes made in one to be duplicated in another.

Their universal concurrence on the matter leads me to accept a very high degree of confidence that george Washinton was indeed the first president. However I have strong doubts about the cherry tree story.
 
Last edited:
jesus _freak is is trying to make a point, a weak point, but a point none the less that skeptics say say the Bible was written by men, so it is not reliable.

The thing is; however, that no one I am aware of claims that GW biographies were for or were written by a deity. In addition, no one I am aware of claims that they are the word of a god.

One should be skeptical of that whole cherry tree nonsense regarding GW. That is a false story created to puff the man up a bit.
 
Last edited:
Jesus Freak,

I think you're mischaracterizing skepticism with your clumsy analogy. Just because humans can make mistakes doesn't mean that historians automatically dismiss everything ever written as bogus. (If they did that, there wouldn't be any point to studying history to begin with.) They examine it and decide what's true based upon the best evidence. Trying to make an equivocation between Washington and Jesus is silly because we have mountains of evidence regarding Washington's life. That's not the case with Jesus. The Bible says everything in the Bible is true. Where's the corroborating evidence that keeps this from being a circular argument?
 
Joobz did a great job in his post showing how badly JF is mis-characterizing the skeptics of theism, completely demolishing JF's position.

My prediction is that JF will completely ignore it.

After awhile, don't you get the feeling that all this effort to communicate with people who completely refuse to listen to what you're saying... is a bit futile?
 
joobz said:
But For good ol george, we have
1.) signed letters and artifacts from him
2.) a grave
3.) treaties to which he has signed and were notarized by others.
4.) portraits which we have accounts of him posing for.
among many other bits of cooberating evidence.
Click to expand...


We also have the contemporanious accounts of hundreds (if not thousands) of people who lived during Washington's time and wrote about him and what he was doing. We have newspapers that account for his actions week by week.

This is in contrast to Jesus who has almost nothing writen about him contemporaniously.

It is also in contrast to the early life of Washington. As our sources get poorer, our skepticism about his supposed actions becomes greater. There is no contemporanious account of the cherry tree incident and most serious scholars discount it largely for that reason.
 
I for one am willing to acknowledge that Jesus existed for the sake of argument. Proving that he was God is a whole different pile of wafers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom