Ongoing Skeptic Thread

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

What "others" have said this? These assertions are little more than tinfoil-hat inspired conspiracy theories. What are your sources, and where is the evidence?

My sources are just memorys of shows and magazines over the years, please don't pretend you haven't heard them before. In 3 seconds I found an article threw google http://rense.com/general66/hide.htm

Like I said I could care less if he existed or not because I know what he wasn't.

[Cheese]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

I will get to Carrier's response in due course, but it will take more time to address his points properly.

As to the question at hand, I don't know much about Mohammed, but from what I do know, the socio-economic circumstances of Jesus's life were considerably different, which in turn made for a very different sort of life.

I think his "greatness" is speculative and highly debatable. We should bear in mind that there was almost certainly nothing altogether unique or exceptional about Jesus, nor his message. There were many apocalyptic movements, and many purported Jewish messiahs within 100 years of Jesus life, and they all bore fairly similar traits. It should also be noted that there were a not insignificant number of would be miracle workers in Greco-Roman Palestine, so even these claims about Jesus cannot be considered all that unusual or exceptional.

The success of Christianity is in many ways a matter of timeliness and good fortune (or bad, depending upon your own stakes in this discussion). As a Christian, I continue to hold a certain faith commitment regarding the exceptional claims made about Jesus, but as a historian, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that he was anything but a rather pedestrian apocalyptic prophet; one how was in no way out of place or of extraordinary note in his own time or place.

How does one have or hold faith in this topic when as you suggest there are many exceptional claims and he was nothing more than a pedestrian prophet?

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by T@T

My sources are just memorys of shows and magazines over the years, please don't pretend you haven't heard them before. In 3 seconds I found an article threw google http://rense.com/general66/hide.htm

So, nothing other than those of the tinfoil-hat conspiracy variety, and none supported by actual scholars who conduct actual historical research. Thanks.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Cheese

How does one have or hold faith in this topic when as you suggest there are many exceptional claims and he was nothing more than a pedestrian prophet?

"Faith" by its very definition persists in the absence of evidence, or in spite of the evidence at hand. I don't really know how to answer your question without moving far afield of the topic, and venturing into a discussion about the nature and practice of religion. If you don't mind, I would much prefer to keep this exchange about history. I probably should not have said anything in the last post, but I think that I was attempting to underscore for observers that most of the "exceptional claims" of the New Testament are a religious matter, and as a rule do not factor into the conversation regarding history within the texts.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(1) "In other words, it is much more historically plausible that an actual man existed from Nazareth than it is that he was invented by eager followers." -- But not a plausible deified messiah deserving of worship. Thus, the historical Jesus was as hard a sell in Judea as a mythic one would have been. Thus, its being a hard sell cannot argue for Jesus being either historical or mythical.

I disagree, precisely because Carrier glosses the crucial details of Jesus’s execution to make his point, as I will continue to illustrate throughout. Simply put: It is not merely the incredulity of the claim that Jesus died that makes his invention so unlikely, it is the fact that he was crucified that makes it so.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(2) The argument advanced in this response, however, is a slightly different one than previously formulated. This new argument is more familiarly called the Argument from Embarrassment. Basically, the "Why Would They Make That Up" argument. Many scholars have exposed the logical and factual invalidity of it. I document that fact and discuss the AfE extensively and why it doesn't work (especially in defense of a Nazareth origin, but not just that) in my book Proving History (pp. 124-69).

Carrier has in fact been prone to employing this same argument in his defense of the rabbinic texts which he commonly cites to support his own theory about a dying-rising messiah in Jewish literature. Unfortunately for Carrier, but quite germane to my use of this criterion to make the case for at minimum the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, the sources that he applies it to are ALL post-Christian, many by the tune of at least 200 years.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(3) "practically EVERY Jew—whether in Jerusalem, Samaria, or in Alexandria—agreed about several fundamental principles."-- This is debatable. There were at least ten and as many as thirty Jewish sects, which were widely divergent from the so-called "mainstream" sect of the Pharisees (which most directly became the Rabbinical sect post-war), and we know little about most of them, and thus cannot say "what they agreed about." This is a logically invalid argument from silence.

In the first place, I would not consider Pharisaic Judaism as representative of first-cent. “mainstream” Judaism; more appropriately, Pharisaic Judaism retains a number of elements at the core of every Jewish sect THAT WE KNOW OF, but it should be noted that the reason for misconstruing Pharisaism as a form of consensus is because of the exceptionally high number of (late) Pharisaic sources at our disposal in the Mishna and the Talmudim. In the second place, mine is not an “argument from silence”; it is an argument from the AVAILABLE SOURCES that makes the case for various common features among THOSE SECTS THAT WE KNOW SOME THINGS ABOUT. Everything that we DO know about Judaism from the Second Temple Period—which is clearly not everything that is to be known—militantly contradicts the idea that a suffering-dying-rising messiah figure had any sort of currency prior to the rise of Christianity.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

I document this diversity and the scholarship and sources on it in the anthology by Lowder and Price, The Empty Tomb: Jesus beyond the Grave ("The Heady Days of Jewish Diversity," pp. 107-10, with endnotes). We cannot claim to know what fringe Jewish sects believed when we have no information about what they believed. Moreover, what we do know of the fringe sects is that they diverged in a lot of unexpected ways from what was supposedly mainstream. Thus, the many more sects we don't have information on can have diverged in many more ways still than even we know. I took Ehrman to task for the same fallacy (and he even contradicts himself on it, as I also point out):
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1794#20

Well, bully for Carrier. He has managed to point out what has been painfully obvious to biblical scholars for generations now about the plurality of Second Temple Judaism. Unfortunately, until he can actually provide some sort of EVIDENCE for the existence of a Jewish sect that matches his mythicist theory, all his claims about how many more ways that various unknown Jewish sects supposedly diverged from “mainstream” Judaism is completely vacuous.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(4) This is a good example of what I mean: "All Jews agreed about the characteristic singularity of God: the god of Judaism was the only God for every Jew."-- This is technically false depending on how you define the word "god.” Jews were in fact henotheistic...

Carrier is splitting hairs here. Henotheism is practically indistinguishable from modern conceptions of monotheism to the untrained eye.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

This gets us back to item (1) above. If introducing Jesus as an object of worship was anathema to all Jews, it would be anathema whether Jesus was historical or not...

How can Carrier honestly not see the difference between worshiping a celestial deity in a henotheistic culture and deifying an executed criminal? It is one thing to anticipate a mysteriously disappearing/reappearing messianic cosmic being, it is quite another to claim that the messiah had ALREADY DIED. My entire line of argument here is that Jewish messianic claims that in one way or another hinge on the expectation of a celestial being cannot be reconciled with the Christian affirmation about a crucified HUMAN Jesus.

I will skip #6–7. I think Carrier and I both substantially agree that Christianity was a Jewish sect, and that it conformed plausibly to various elements of Second Temple Judaism.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(8) My argument does not depend on the "possibility" that Christianity was a radical fringe group of Jews, but on the demonstrable fact of it.

Carrier here glosses my argument, which bears repeating, and with emphasis:

Originally Posted by Textcritic

His argument depends on the possibility that there were radical fringe groups of Jews under the veneer of everything we know about Second Temple Judaism, who harboured thoughts and dreams about a dying-rising-saviour god.

Note the important missing piece here: the issue is not the existence of a “radical fringe group”, but the kind of radical fringe group in Palestine with anticipation for a dying-rising-saviour god; most certainly not one who fit the Christian claims of a crucified human Jesus.

I can concede that there is a POSSIBILITY of the sort of group Carrier envisions under the qualification that practically anything is possible. However, all the evidence at our disposal argues against the PROBABILITY that Carrier is correct, and he can marshal no actual evidence to support it.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

I direct you back to item (1). I am here being argued against like this: the Christian teachings were too radical for Jesus to be mythical, because such radical teachings would never succeed among Jews; oh, and by the way, there was nothing radical about Christianity and Carrier is just inventing a teapot in space by saying so. What? Besides those two arguments contradicting each other, the first argument is illogical (remember: point (1)).

Wrong. The argument is thus: the Christian teachings DID NOT succeed among most Jews, because they in no way conformed to any recognisable Jewish messianic expectation, and were especially troubling on the point of Jesus’s humanness and his disgrace as an executed criminal; Carrier is just inventing a teapot in space by suggesting that we can’t know everything about every Second Temple Jewish sect, ergo, a dying-rising-saviour god makes the most plausible historical sense in light of the total vacuum of available evidence. Key here is the assertion on my part that my reconstruction of an historical Jesus is highly plausible, whereas Carrier's assertion is extremely implausible given everything that we do know about Second Temple Judaism, and first cent. Greco-Roman Palestine

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(9) A possibiliter fallacy is saying (A) "it's possible that x, therefore probably x." But I am arguing (B) "x makes the evidence more probable than ~x; therefore, probably x." The teapot argument in this reply suggests this is not understood. It would seem I am being mistaken for arguing (A), when in fact I am arguing (B). And indeed I extensively explain in my book Proving History that the only valid way to argue is (B) and I even elaborately explain why we can't use arguments like (A). So it's perverse to have me accused of doing the opposite.

Carrier’s “evidence” that I have seen marshalled in every place is either late or dubious. I will get to few of those sources cited here, but Thom Stark has already provided a withering critique of Carrier’s use of Rabbinic Jewish literature here. Anyone interested in this discussion really should take the time to read Stark’s long and detailed refutation. On this point, I will only note that I defer to Stark, who has a better handle on the rabbinics than I do. Oh, and consequently, he has a MUCH, MUCH better handle on these sources than Carrier, who—as far as I can tell, and unlike both Stark and myself—holds no formal training in Hebrew or Aramaic.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(10) "Unfortunately, outside of the odd mythicist interpretation of the early Christian writings, there is not one shred of documented evidence for such a movement or doctrine." -- This is multiply false. There are not only documents that contain evidence of minimal Doherty mythicism (e.g., the Ascension of Isaiah, 1 Peter, Ignatian anti-Docetism, Irenaeus on the heresies of Jesus being born in heaven, etc.)

These are all either very late first or second century, and that IS important because it ignores the fact that the BEST sources to be found in Paul, in the Gospel of Mark, and in Q are all much more consistent in their affirmation of Jesus’ humanness, and his actual execution. These speak powerfully to his actual existence.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

...but there are documents whose contents make much less sense on any other theory (e.g., Hebrews, 1 Clement). The whole array of evidence I shall present in my next book, so there is no need to debate it now. We should just wait for that.

I wish I could say that I am looking forward to it, but like Carrier’s other self-published books, I will likely miss it because I am unwilling to buy my own copy, and also because I have no doubt that my university library will not concede to purchase a copy themselves. In any case, it would be of immanent help if Carrier would provide bibliographic information for his forthcoming publication, and even of more help still if he published more frequently on these matters in more widely read and recognised academic journals.

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

Certainly, the merits of mythicism do hinge on whether it makes the contents of documents like these more probable than historicity does. So that is actually where the debate lies. But insisting there is nothing to debate is just inserting one's head in the sand.

It doesn’t really though until there is an actual debate that is taking place. While I recognise that these things do in fact change over time, at present Carrier is among an extremely small group of proponents of a theory about the emergence of Christianity that has virtually NO traction in early Christian studies. The reason for this is that the mythicists including Carrier have proven time and again that they do not know how to correctly handle the sources. Upon reviewing his CV, it is important to note that his publications on this topic tend not to appear in any of the more widely read peer-reviewed literature that would actually be noticed by scholars on the historical Jesus. How does Carrier expect anyone to engage with his ideas if he is unwilling to present them in a forum that will actually attract the attention of the experts whom he seeks to refute?

Carrier depends quite heavily on his interpretation of a text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, 11Q13, or “11QMelchizedek”. Because this is so important to his theory, and because he so badly misunderstands this text, but also, because the Dead Sea Scrolls happen to be my own field of specialisation, I have devoted a lengthy and detailed response that will follow in a separate post.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

(11) "My whole point in citing 11QMelchizedek from the Qumran Scrolls was precisely to illustrate how badly Jesus fit this model, to the point that it strains credulity to imagine how the subject of the Corinthian creed could ever be confused with Daniel’s Son of Man" -- It fits the Christian expectation of Jesus' future return on clouds of heaven exactly. So I don't see why it is being deemed incongruous. Indeed, there is evidence 11Q13 even imagined Melchizedek would die before doing the same. But that is at least debatable. Though I have an article on this in peer review at an academic journal, I have a current summary online here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1440

I have read Carrier’s treatment of 11QMelchizedek, and am underwhelmed.

Extremely. Underwhelmed.

To summarise his unnecessarily wordy discussion, Carrier is basically arguing from the text that I cited from the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) to support his idea that there was a dying-rising cosmic messiah figure in Jewish religion that predates Christianity. He believes that the allusion (or citation?) of Dan 9:25–26 in a text that speaks about the Last Days clearly points to an expectation that the exalted divine being figure I noted in my citation is being compared to the only explicit reference to a “messiah” here in Daniel. The text in Daniel reads:

Originally Posted by Daniel 9:25–26

You must know and understand: From the issuance of the word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the [time of the] anointed leader is seven weeks; and for sixty-two weeks it will be rebuilt, square and moat, but in a time of distress. And after those sixty-two weeks, the anointed one will disappear and vanish. The army of a leader who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary, but its end will come through a flood. Desolation is decreed until the end of war. (JPS)

Carrier basically infers that the anointed leader who “disappears and vanishes” (or who “is cut off an is no more”) is the divine being from the preceding lines who will vanquish the enemies of Israel and pronounce justice on the Day of Atonement in the Last Days. Carrier believes that 11QMelch can only be understood if this god-like figure dies as an atonement for sin, and then rises again to vanquish his enemies.

His reading has prompted me to consult his curriculum vitae, and as I suspected, Carrier does not have any formal training in Hebrew, nor ANY Semitic language for that matter. Furthermore, while he includes Greek papyrology and palaeography among his specialisations, I suspect based on this latest offering that his experience with ancient manuscripts is likely not transferable to the material features and reconstruction of ancient Hebrew parchment.

In short: first, the fact that the messiah who is “cut off and is no more” is missing from the text is indeed extremely problematic. Carrier insists that the readers and interpreters of this passage would have known the overall context of this passage as it stands in Dan 9:25–26, but precisely presumes so without a shred of evidence.

Here is an English translation of how the actual fragmentary remains of these lines appears:

... inasmuch as Scripture sa[ ] beautiful

upon the mountains are the fee[ ] the messeng[ ] who [ ]nounces peace, who brings [ ] news, [ ]ion, who [ ]ys to Zion, ‘Your [ ]vine being [ ]

This scripture’s interpretation: “the mountains” [ ] the prophet[ ] they w[ ] proph[ ] to all I[ ]

And “the messenger” is the anointed of the Spir[ ] of whom Dan[ ] spoke, [ ]

good news, who announ[ ] is the one of whom it is wri[ ]en, [ ]

to comfo[ ] ...

Those gaps that you see in the brackets are actual missing parts of the parchment. Dead Sea Scrolls scholars are fairly adept at reconstructing the lacunae with relative confidence, but this does help to underscore what is really problematic about this text—like MOST texts from the DSS. In the estimation of Qumran scholars, there is simply not enough left here to claim many specifics about its shape or function. The point being that there is much conjecture involved in identifying the figures mentioned in this text. Moreover, there is an equal amount of conjecture about the specific scriptures that are cited. In the present instance, the entire citation from Daniel is completely missing, although scholars reasonably assume it was either Dan 9:25 or 9:26, which are the only places in which Daniel explicitly mentions the “messiah”. There is not nearly enough room to reconstruct BOTH Dan 9:25–26, and Carrier believes that it doesn’t matter which of these texts was mentioned, given his opinion that the readers would have been intimately familiar with the precise contents of the entire original prophecy, and they would have always read these things contextually, and would have concluded that these verses were conjoined and with reference to the same figure.

In actual fact, the writers of the Qumran scrolls were consistently quite arbitrary in their employment of scripture. Single words were frequently ripped from their immediate context and reapplied into whole new situations that would totally contradict the original sense of the text. The text in 11QMelchizedek frg. 2 is precisely on this point, in which in the lines immediately preceding the fragmentary reference to Daniel, the following interpretation is offered for Isa 52:7:

Originally Posted by 11QMelchizedek

This scripture’s interpretation: “the mountains” [are] the prophet[s,] they w[ho were sent to proclaim God’s truth and to] proph[esy] to all I[srael.] And “the messenger” is the Anointed of the Spir[it,] of whom Dan[iel] spoke...

The author of this text is drawing symbolic meanings from a variety of other texts for the point of identifying what is likely a VARIETY of eschatological figures, but not with ANY discernible concern for the natural sense of his base texts. We actually have no idea about what the author found significant about the text in Daniel beyond the fact that it (seems to) employ the word “messiah”. With little more to go on, it is a massive overstatement to claim that the “death” (literally the “cutting off”) of the “anointed leader” was the significant point here. A more likely proposal is that the author was more interested in the timetable (the period of seventy weeks) relative to the “anointed by the spirit” (whoever that was). But even further to the point, most commentators are in agreement that the anointed leader in Dan 9:25 is NOT the same figure as mentioned in the following verse. Such is the problem with apocalyptic language and imagery: in many instances, it is not straightforward what is meant even from one sentence to the next by the authors.

This then, leads me to my second problem with Carrier’s interpretation: There is absolutely nothing to suggest that all the symbols employed in this highly fragmentary text are applied to the SAME FIGURE. Carrier is guilty of “overloading” this text’s use of the Hebrew word משיח, which is transliterated “messiah”, but literally means “anointed one”. Carrier consistently errs in his treatment by insisting that this word is ALWAYS employed to a single, cosmic figure of supernatural deliverance in the Last Days. This is a novice mistake, especially when applied to the DSS, in which משיח appears to refer to a WIDE RANGE of DIFFERENT figures including the high priest in the Last Days, the eschatological Davidic King of Israel, the Old Testament prophets, and the eschatological “herald” who would announce the arrival of God's Kingdom. My understanding of this passage is that its focus is more on ensuring a distinction between the variety of important figures in the Last Days: Melchizedek is identified more closely with Daniel’s son of man in Dan 7:13–14, but this figure is NOT the same as the “messanger” who announces the Day of Salvation and the arrival of the divine being, who is NOT the same as the “anointed of the spirit” who is most likely a temple priest. This is relatively consistent with what we see elsewhere in the DSS and the expectation of an “anointed” king from the line of David who would rule, an “anointed” priest from the line of Aaron who would officiate in the cosmic temple, an “anointed” prophet who would proclaim the arrival of God’s Kingdom, all in the company of God’s angelic army.

Third, Carrier cites the separate apocalyptic discourse from Daniel 12 in an effort to draw a comparison between the “anointed leader” from Dan 9:25–26 with the Archangel Michael who would “rise” in the Last Days. In the first place, there is no clear indication from the text why we should align Michael, who is called השר הגדול, “(lit.) the great prince” with משיח נגיד, “the anointed leader (or chief)”. I suppose it is a possible equation to presume, but one does so on a total absence of corroborating evidence. Rather, the lexical differences between the terms makes such an equation unlikely: according to Köehler and Baumgartner’s Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, נגיד is properly understood as “officer in the Assyrian army next in rank to שר”. While lexicography can at times create problems with various interpretations, I would humbly suggest that the difference between the terms employed in these different discourses actually diminishes the possibility that they were ever taken with reference to the same figure in the pre-Christian era.

I was re-reading this after I posted last night, and noticed an error here in my argument. Carrier proceeds to claim that the word translated into English as “rising ... in the Septuagint is exactly the same word used of Jesus’ resurrection in Mark 9:31 and 10:34.” This is only partially accurate. According to the “Old Greek” version of the Septuagint, the Greek word here in Dan 12:1 is παρέρχομαι, which means "to pass over or through", and NOT ἀνίστημι, which appears in Mark as Carrier claims. This verb, ἀνίστημι, IS then used in Dan 12:2 to describe the RESURRECTION not of a “messiah”, but of the general population:

“Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake (ἀνίστημι = Heb. יקיצו), some to eternal life, others to reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence.”

By way of the contrast here, it is abundantly clear that the Archangel in Dan 12:1 who “rises up” (most likely in judgement) is not a “resurrected” figure. What Carrier has done here, and what he consistently does throughout a lot of his writings wherever he happens to cite the Septuagint as it turns out, is that he depends on the second-century CE recension made by Theodotion. Why is this problematic? Well, set aside in this particular instance the thorny issue of how late Theodotion is, it is simply not a very good Greek translation. Any Septuagint scholar will affirm that Theodotion did not have a very good grasp of Hebrew, and in many places it appears as though he is actually constructing his translation from a Greek text, and not a Hebrew one! So here, in order to make his case Carrier depends on a late, poor translation of Daniel, and then passes this off rather matter-of-factly. Again, I must seriously doubt Carrier’s familiarity with the sources and the languages on this point. All this to establish the point: Dan 12:1 was NOT clearly applied in a Jewish context to the anointed leader (or leaders?) in Dan 9:25–26, and the Archangel in Dan 12:1 was NOT resurrected from the dead.

So, what we have here is Carrier’s utterly vapid interpretation of a text that he really does not understand, as a means to prop up his feeble theory of a messianic expectation in Second Temple Judaism that never existed. This is an absolutely critical error, since most of Carrier’s arguments from this point forward depends upon 11QMelchizedek as evidence for a Jewish belief in a dying-rising-cosmic messiah figure before the emergence of Christianity. This theory utterly fails, and renders more of the rest of Carrier’s discussion moot.

Carrier noted in his response to me that this is an article that he has submitted and is currently under review. Honestly, I am very curious to know what academic journal possibly agreed to accept his essay, and how on earth this has passed peer-review. I suspect that like many of Carrier's other writings on the subject of Jesus or early Christianity, it is in a peripheral publication of some sort, where it will almost certainly be ignored by biblical scholars who specialise in Jewish messianism, history, and literature. I can guarantee that a reputable, established journal such as the Journal for the Study of Judaism, the Journal of Biblical Literature, or Dead Sea Discoveries would rightly (and thankfully) reject this piece of poor argumentation, massive and unwarranted supposition, and generally poor scholarship out of hand. Really. It is THAT bad.

I will get to these further items in another post, but for now, it is sufficient to conclude that there is no evidence to be drawn from the DSS to support Carrier’s case.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

So, nothing other than those of the tinfoil-hat conspiracy variety, and none supported by actual scholars who conduct actual historical research. Thanks.

OK,save me time trying to research these what these actual "scholars" say about Jesus, do they say he was the son of god,performed miracles,died on the cross and rose from the dead?

Just a simple yes or no please, some people like to read your 400 word mini novels on this subject..I don't.
If they did they are completely out to lunch.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by T@T

OK,save me time trying to research these what these actual "scholars" say about Jesus, do they say he was the son of god,performed miracles,died on the cross and rose from the dead?

No. Historians are prevented by making such equivocations and are methodologically bound to investigate and synthesise only what they can in accordance with a naturalistic worldview. Biblical scholars are no different in this regard.

Of course, were you not so obtuse, and had you actually taken the time to read any of my thoughts on this topic you would have already known that.

Originally Posted by T@T

Just a simple yes or no please, some people like to read your 400 word mini novels on this subject..I don't.
If they did they are completely out to lunch.

Heaven forbid you might actually learn something from taking the time to read...

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by Cheese

Yep I understand...Just reminding that these are attributed to him same as Jesus has miracles attributed to his life, after all who would follow a God that can't perform miracles!

The sane. I look at so called miracles as just another trip down the garden path. There is a deeper truth or experience to be found.

[Thor]

Totally forgot, Carrier just did the thinking atheist talk show.

[troutman]

Oregon court rules anti-vaccination views are no excuse


http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/04/oreg...are-no-excuse/

[Thor]

Sorry for the lateness but just sent Richard the response now, he was at the american atheists 50th conference and has been rather busy these last few weeks so I'm sure I'm not holding up the discussion by much.

[Cheese]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

No. Historians are prevented by making such equivocations and are methodologically bound to investigate and synthesise only what they can in accordance with a naturalistic worldview. Biblical scholars are no different in this regard.

The fact that you believe in the Christian teachings yourself suggests that you can keep a naturalistic worldview?
I simply find it hard to believe that you can keep your own bias out of your studies when you are paid by a religious institution.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Cheese

The fact that you believe in the Christian teachings yourself suggests that you can keep a naturalistic worldview?
I simply find it hard to believe that you can keep your own bias out of your studies when you are paid by a religious institution.

Maybe that is true, but not all biblical scholars—nor even most, perhaps—are paid by religious institutions. I am employed by a state-funded school. Even a high number of the highest-ranked so-called "religious institutions" like Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Notre Dame, Duke Seminary, Claremont Graduate Union, King's College in Oxford, etc., are strictly regulated by state academic standards. John J. Collins is arguably one of the most highly respected biblical scholars on the planet at present. He is a devout Catholic, held tenure in one of the most prestigious religion departments at the University of Notre Dame, and is currently at Yale. He has written the industry standard textbook on the Hebrew Bible. He is paid by a "religious institution", and yet his work is anything but "religious" in its methodology.

[troutman]

Give Me An “F”! Creationists Fail a Fourth Grade Science Test


http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...lly_wrong.html

[GGG]

If you go to snopes they have the second page of the quiz. Where the answer is if any challanges your belief in the young earth theory to ask them "WERE YOU THERE"?

[Cheese]

^ ha...hilarious

[Street Pharmacist]

Haha. Parents of the child who brought that home are removing him from that school. Remarkable, really. I grew up being told those thing and have relatives who believe it. Good thing I learned critical thinking in school

[Thor]

Been seeing anti GMO stuff more and more lately including of a lot of lies, half truths about Monsanto.

This video by Dusty is excellent, give it a look

[Textcritic]

^
I quite like Cult of Dusty for his commitment to science and logic, but man, does he have to so gratuitously depend upon expletives to make his points? Maybe it's just me; maybe I'm just getting old; but I still can't help but think that those who use vulgarity in their presentations of arguments do so because their position is weak. This has been a common complaint of Richard Carrier's work, and I think in many instances it rings true (look no further than his deplorable treatment of 11QMelchizedek for proof of that).

In the few videos I have seen of Dusty I tend to agree with most of what he argues, but this is deeply in spite of his turrets-inspired presentation. Just make your points without coming across like a ######; I think it helps to make them all the more convincing.