This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Snif snif, aah, the fresh smell of trollbane in the air.
@PoG
You seem to say that without God we cannot know anything to be absolutely true
1) What do you know to be absolutely true?
2) How do you know it to be absolutely true?
Is it because you read it in the bible?
Sounds to me like a lot of Bovine Fecal Matter!
I was waiting all night to get beyond (the last) Thunderdome to talk about something completely different. (I apologize, I always wanted to make a Beyond Thunderdome joke here.) So I recently learned about the “thigh gap” phenomenon and the backlash against it, but the backlash has left me a bit confused. I mean at it’s heart it’s against body shaming, but then I read this comment on a blog and was left wondering.
Suddenly the backlash against it turns around and becomes body shaming. Women who have it are compared to a non humanoid robot that resembles a trash can. I don’t know how to react other than just wring my hands and go “Christ what an asshole.” Am I the only person that sees the irony here? I remember thinking a similar thing with the phrase “real women have curves” though that wasn’t as severe (almost as though skinny women aren’t real women.)
Tomas C. @867 Last thread
Most of us have checked out libertarianism. We recognize the many moral, economic and sociological reasons to reject it. A cult based on selfishness and hatred for society is not something we care to join.
@sugarfrosted, #4:
Do you have context?
Alone, that reads to me like someone isn’t pissed about girls being shamed if they don’t have a thigh gap, but pissed about people who hate body shaming and are publicly criticizing thigh-gap pressure.
on the other hand, r2d2’s legs were, in fact, farther apart than c3p0’s legs. But it still seems a strange way to make that point. c3p0, after all, still clearly had a thigh gap.
So instead, it seems to me most likely that the commenter wanted to say, “Do you want to be short and fat or tall and skinny?”
It’s fucked up any way you see it, but it’s just possible that it’s not fucked up in the particular way you interpreted it first.
POG
I am a third generation atheist on both sides of my family. References to the bible produce in me a wincing feeling of visceral pity similar to seeing your grandparents dancing, drunk, on the tabletops, at their fourth grandchild’s twentieth birthday.
I know, with close to absolute certainty, that your religion is a steaming pile of shit. I know in my heart of hearts, my bowel of bowels, my aqueous humour of aqueous humours, that there is no god. Specious ‘are you sure’ arguments will only ever turn me against you.
Now: please, without reference to the bible, prove to me that your god exists.
Tomas C from previous thread:
Do you grasp the difference between concluding that Jesus never existed and not concluding that Jesus existed? Rejecting the claim that the historicity of Jesus is well established is not the same as making the counter-claim that the non-historicity of Jesus is well established.
It’s possible to be agnostic on the matter and given the flimsy evidence, I think it’s also quite reasonable. Even if there was a historical Jesus, it’s beyond dispute that the majority of what we “know” about him is actually myth. There may be a few grains of truth in there, but it’s hard to tell what they might be.
As for methodology, the criterion of embarrassment is an example of a highly problematic method. What’s embarrassing for one group may not be embarrassing for another. You can’t just project current attitudes towards Jesus back into the period when the NT was written.
E.g. stories that make Jesus seem more human; confused, uncertain or lacking in perfect knowledge and goodness; may be embarrassing to present day Christians, but not all Christians accepted the divinity of Jesus back then. As a result, using this criterion to legitimate the historicity of such passages is problematic and it should be used with care.
@al dente, #5:
1. Curse you, I can no longer test the texture of my daughter’s pasta without thinking of your comments.
2. Tomas C really said that? Oy. Yeah, that’s it. We’ve just never been exposed to libertarianism. That’s the only reason we could possibly reject it. I have to go read the last 50 of the previous TD. Sigh.
Tomas C, in real life – anywhere outside your fantasy island – libertarianism means not only that the weakest go to the wall but also that wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a tiny de facto oligarchy, there is no effective protection for the vulnerable and the vast majority suffer (yeah, a bit like Somalia).
I don’t like that, it’s horribly immoral and I wouldn’t want to live (or for anyone to have to live) in that society. Your entirely unevidenced assertion that this society would be less violent and inhumane than any other is not an argument. Actual evidence is required – such as examples of libertarian societies (societies, not a single family or tribe or other tiny handful of individuals) which have succeeded in not being Somalialike. In reality.
Crip Dyke @9
My work here is complete.
@6 It was in response to a video review of Divergent, which mentioned that most women cast in the movie did have a thigh gap. (I didn’t notice it at all to be honest.) I would link it, but I think it might count as a plug and at 55 minutes I think it’s in TL;DW territory.
I did 15-20 years ago. Took all of 15 minutes to determine it is deeply and fatally flawed idiotology, it is morally bankrupt, and consists of nothing but inane slogans.
It isn’t moral, it has no historical data to back it up, it is nothing but a theology. Accept on faith only.
Dear Unholy Fuck I am hungover. Never never drink that drink. Never. My brain. My poor poor brain. I blame all of you. You utter shower of bastards.
You should have worshipped Spiderman like I told you when the Religio-Troll-festation began. Then I wouldn’t have to do it. LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!
It has nothing to do with Leicester winning the rugby yesterday and a remarkable lack of self control on my part. That’s right out.
Louis
I considered myself a libertarian for a few years of my life. (I drifted to that when I left Christianity, prior to that I was a Rush listening Republican.) Soon I did question the ethics and economics behind it. The thing is the economic effect hurt almost everyone. In my case without government intervention more places would be inaccessible to people with disabilities. (FUCK YES Americans with Disabilities Act.)
Their concept of “Economic Freedom” doesn’t really work. Giving more power to business results in less for everyone else. When you increase “economic freedom” from my vantage point, it gives more people the freedom to work as a virtual slave or die under a bridge, which is basically why Jewish and Irish immigrant (ie my ancestors) worked in horrible conditions like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, because the other option was starvation and death.
PS. Hey an excuse to link this song. I’ll take it! מײַן רוע פּלאַץ (Mayn rue plats (My quiet place)) this song ended up being associated with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. It was written by the Sweatshop Poets who wrote about conditions in factories at the time)
@15 Arg, I messed up that translation it’s “My Resting Place.” (They’re the same word, sorry)
Louis @14
Of course not. You were celebrating Cody Nance winning his second Built Ford Tough Series professional bullriding event of the year by riding Meat Hook for 89.25 points.
Apologies for the incoming wall of text… got a little carried away in reading through the last thread since it closed.
Fun fact – this is an edited and trimmed version! No, really. I think I have a thinking disease.
@PoG, 682
All this assertion proves is that the bible – the source of the claim – is an unreliable source for truth. My “heart of hearts” knows that I enjoy chocolates, and stargazing on clear nights. It knows that I love my parents, my brother and my niece. It knows that I’m a little bit annoyed at myself for falling short of completing the current special event on Star Trek Online, and that I’m a little thirsty at the moment. It does not know that your god exists, and it knows that it does not know that. That you claim to know my heart of hearts better than my heart of hearts does only shows yourself to be deceived. It is a lie.
Say, tell me… there’s a character in the bible… people call him the father of lies… who is he again, exactly?
And we said you’re wrong. We don’t know. We don’t believe. We don’t suspect. You are wrong. Your perfect and infallible bible lied to you when it claimed this nonsense about us. Your book is lying to you about us. Your preachers are lying to you about us. What else, do you think, they might be lying to you about?
(And, again, the father of lies is who? Why do you worship the devil?)
It’s still a lie, devil worshipper.
@impact, 708
Well you’ve kinda missed the point, but I thought I had to have total knowledge of all things before I could claim to know anything at all? I must have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion? Know how the prince of the Regulan W’E’H’L’A’T’A tribe is wearing his headfronds this season? What my best friend from school’s mum got for mother’s day today? After all, in the 99% of knowledge that I don’t know in the universe, maybe something contradicts the fact that I’m listening to John Lennon’s voice in my ears right now?
That first claim is disputed by most biblical scholar’s that I’ve heard on the subject. Most claim that the books of the new testament were written several decades after the supposed life of Jesus by people other than those named in the titles.
PoG has shown the second to be false – the bible is not divinely inspired. As he has informed us repeatedly, it’s full of lies – lies that we know perfectly well are lies, because they speak to what we know, and we know that we don’t know what it claims we know.
I have a book that says I exist. The same book says that I am a superhero who can fly to the moon in six seconds. It’s true when it says that I exist, therefore it is true when it says I can fly to the moon in six seconds.
Either both your claim and mine follow, or neither does. So, which is it? Am I a superhero, or would the bible being true when it spoke of a god existing only mean that it was true that the god existed?
And why don’t you seem to see the difference between granting a hypothetical to demonstrate a point and accepting that hypothetical as fact?
@PoG, 719
No, we got it first time. You might notice that many people responded to it. It’s no more convincing on a second reading.
@impact, 724
The bible claims that we know that god exists. This is false. Therefore, regardless of whether some details reflect reality (such as referencing real places or historical people), the book itself cannot be taken as an accurate document, nor can its claims be trusted without external verification.
@PoG, 733
Adam and Eve were sinless, and it was their sin that destroyed everything. The sin of the sinless is to blame.
How do the sinless sin?
@PoG, 758
The bible was written by men who lied at least once in their lives (were dirty, rotten, stinky liars!!) who claimed it was the “inspired Word of God.” So what? Lying liars lied to you. That’s what liars do, is it not? You have been deceived into worshipping men. You have elevated long, dead men to godhood. You should hope there is no truth to the bible, because that’s a sin.
Ah, but how do I know this? I could just be saying this to be cruel, to shake your faith… true. I suppose the best way to show that I’m not is to demonstrate that the bible is, in fact, flawed. The bible says we know that your god exists. We do not know that your god exists. The bible is flawed. The bible lied. The people who wrote the bible lied, about us, to you. You have given whatever soul you may have to the hands of men. Not just men who occasionally tell lies, but men who lied for the purpose of controlling you. If there is a satan, they were his agents. Do not listen to them.
@PoG, 785
What do you know about nothing? Is it a possible state? Is it a stable state? Have you ever seen an actual “nothing”? I don’t mean an empty room with nothing in it, I mean actual nothing, the utter absence of anything at all. What happens in such a state?
@PoG, 806
Seriously, you’ve complained that people didn’t read your summary, when many plainly responded to it, when you clearly didn’t read my response to you from yesterday?
“You believe that the Law of Gravity is absolute. It is present in all the world. It has always existed and will always exist.”
If you had read my comments which specifically dealt with things I know, you would know that this is a false claim. Gravity is not absolute – it behaves wildly differently within a mere few hundred miles and at different speeds. Around extreme masses, at extreme speeds, it falls to pieces. It is absolutely (HAH! Word games.) not absolute.
But you’re clearly deceived. God is not required for absolutes – only the magical chicken who lives in the middle of the sun and keeps it from going nova is required for absolutes. And you KNOW that the magical chicken exists, because it’s imprinted upon us all at birth, don’tcha know?
Anyway, this is already a massive comment… /wall o’ text
(tl;dr – nope)
Al Dente,
Oh but of course.
Louis
@sugarfrosted, 4
oO
What? Thigh gap? What? I don’t even… is this an MRA thing? “If I can’t look between a woman’s legs from across the room, it’s an infringement on my manly rights,” or something? I don’t get it.
impact #842 (previous thread):
I think I see the source of your confusion. Now, read carefully, because, for a religi-bot, this is difficult to grasp. In religion, your one and only source of knowledge is something that you are told is the divine word of your god, so knowledge is purely digital – if it’s not in your holy text, you cannot know, at all, that it is true, but, if it is in your holy text, it MUST be true, with absolutely no possibility of being wrong whatsoever, under any circumstances at all. However, outside of religion, knowledge is actually analog, and on a sliding scale with those two extremes at opposite ends, and you very rarely, if ever, get to the ‘is definitely true without any possibility at all of ever being wrong’ end. The position of where a particular bit of knowledge on that scale is determined by the quality and quantity of evidence and data indicating it’s true.
Now, the really difficult part to grasp for religi-bots is that this is also true of the ‘knowledge’ in holy texts, because there is the possibility of those texts being wrong, but only people outside that particular religion can clearly see that, because they are not religiously mandated to believe absolutely that that text is absolutely true (even if some get around certain problems by doing things like reinterpreting passages and adding context that simply isn’t present in the original text). For example, if I asked you if the Qur’an was true, you’d probably reply ‘no’, correct? If you’ve actually examined it, you may even be able to point at suras and ayat that clearly show the falsity of it. Well, you can only do that because you’re not a Muslim, and, as such, you do not take on faith that the Qur’an is true. In much the same way, only non-Christians (discounting, for the moment, that ‘cultural Christians’ are actually Christian) can clearly see the falsity of the Bible because they do not take on faith that it is true.
Psalm 14.1:
I’m ok with Christians thinking I’m a fool. Definitely not with anyone assuming they know what I believe better than I do. But evidently at least one of the authors of Bible is willing to grant that some people believe in their hearts that there is no God.
@20 This is a thigh gap, it’s a body image thing being pushed as something required for beauty. There is a backlash against it for causing body image issues. The Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thigh_gap
Libertarianism is funny. What happens, in Libertopia, when someone who dislikes you buys up all the land bordering your property, and declares that your setting foot on their land is trespassing, a violation of their property, and that killing you to defend it is justified? That would be fine if it was just a hypothetical that never happens, but that’s not far from the likes of company towns, is it? Libertarianism is not a moral ideology. It is an ideology that supports the rich and the brutal at the cost of the poor and the noble. It supports the replacement of government maintained roads with toll roads, effectively limiting the ability of the poor travel, which is somehow solved by the “fact” that, without taxes, the poor will be rich, ignoring the fact that, without a government to enforce minimum wages, the poor will be paid as little as employers wish.
Libertarians may well be intelligent, logical people, but they’re pretty ignorant of history.
@sugarfrosted, 23
Oh, ffs. And, of course, the backlash is “real women’s thighs touch!” rather than “real women are whatever, whoever, however the fuck they want to be, and are comfortable with”… which would make me a real woman! :3
yubal @853 previous thread:
I imagine our ancestors were, like other apes, carrying infants around instead of leaving them alone for extended periods. Wouldn’t that have reduced crying a lot?
Also, I don’t think high frequency sounds carry very far on the open plain.
Actually it is quite literally not “beyond dispute”. If we apply the same standards of historicity, we have a stronger reason to think Jesus rose from the dead as to think that Julius Caesar was assassinated. Applying different standards so you can accept the one and reject the other is blind faith.
What does this have to do with anything? All of these criterions are made up by people trying to prove a particular point. None of these criterions are used on any other historical matter.
sugarfrosted:
Oh, ffs, that’s not new, it’s been around forever.* Back when I was growing up, in the early 70s, the term “thunder thighs” was used for people (both women and men) who didn’t have a space between their thighs. Some people like skinny legs, some don’t, some people have a large space between their thighs, some have a medium one, some have a small one, and some don’t have a space at all.
*Not yelling at you, sugarfrosted, just at how stupid people get.
Tomas C:
You should check out what happens in the modern world when there are no government regulations, no taxes, and everything is privatized — including armies. Do you know what nation I refer to?
Much of the last hundred-odd years of history has seen the western democracies push back against the liberties of the rich in an effort to protect the many against the depredations of the wealthy few. The job is not yet done and the wealthy have, sadly, made great inroads into rolling back that progress. However, the kind of society libertarians posit would be a hell on Earth for those who are neither well-to-do or are toadies to those who are. Just look at the history of 19th century industrial society to see what sort of horrors await us if the libertarians get their way. There’s a word for that kind of excess: it is ‘Dickensian’.
I regard those die-hard libertarians who are not themselves wealthy as toadies and courtiers of the rich. They have picked their tribe and are in the business of chucking the rest of us under the bus.
Gee, this from an evidenceless fool who obfuscates instead of illuminates? I think we have another presup fuckwit.
I think I meant to say: “the kind of society libertarians posit would be a hell on Earth for those who are neither well-to-do *nor* are toadies to those who are”. Damme my poor proof-reading.
Oh, look, after John A’s pathetic ignorance of history was exposed for all to see in the Giordano Bruno thread (Read any Sumption yet, numbnuts?) and his pathetic ignorance of science was exposed in the Deep Thinkers thread (“I don’t want to believe in dark matter, so I’ll say gravity wavers like a mirage instead”.), he’s moved to Thunderdome to parade his historical cluelessness again:
This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read! Good going, birdbrain!
If the Absolute Truth in the bible is so perfect and obvious, how is it possible that so many different sects of Christianity have interpreted it in such radically different ways?
Does the Absolute Truth forbid contraception inside a committed monogamous marriage? Does the Absolute Truth allow blood transfusions? Can women serve as leaders of the church?
Interestingly, there have been periods of history where all this has been true. There were times when a king would rely on his nobles to raise regiments to fight, for which they would pay little or no taxes. Where monarchs raised money by granting letters of patent and monopolies to private firms who would in turn gouge their customers. These were ages where there were few or no regulations, with the result that many folk suffered.
They were good times for nobility and the wealthy merchant class. They were mean times for the masses. Though who amongst the libertarians gives a shit about the proles?
Maybe we should appreciate all the effort religious apologists and their rabble have put into arguments that don’t boil down to “you can’t explain X, therefore my favorite sky wizard”.
On the other hand, all PoG seems to be able to do is make naked assertions, which he keeps on repeating as if that obliges his readers to accept them as fact. He doesn’t put any effort into explaining why anyone should believe his assertions at all.
So, in the spirit of matching his debating skills…
1. Gods don’t really exist.
Did you read that PoG? Maybe read it a few more times…
Are you convinced yet?
Not really. Try again.
John A #27
What are you arguing for and against? Your two points seem to be pointing in opposite direction. First you seem to be arguing that Jesus was a historical person, then you’re dismissing an argument often made for that position.
Can you be a bit more clear? I wouldn’t want to laugh in your face if it wasn’t warranted.
Seven of Nine criticized the methods used in the field of new testament historicity.
Tomas C objected to this and seemed to think that the methods were just fine.
I jumped in and gave an example of a criterion often used in arguments about the historicity of Jesus and explained why I thought it was unreliable.
It’s pretty straightforward, really. Read the last few posts of the previous thread, for context.
According to Daddy Hovind, the only accurate and correct version of the bible is the KJV, so we can be pretty sure of POGlet’s bible preference. Given all the “bible is perfect!” nonsense, it would be amusing if it weren’t so sad. The KJV might be the prettiest translation, but it is also the most-error riddled one. There’s also that troublesome business of King James’s sexual proclivities, but it amazes me how many xians handwave it away. Apparently having a very bad translation of the bible done forgives all.
John A:
Since you scarpered from the two previous threads where people were engaging you, I guess we’ll move to this one.
Until you’re so backed into a corner you have to bail here as well, but in the meantime…
Ok, let’s apply exactly the same standards of evidence:
We have seen lots of people get stabbed and die. Tons of evidence for that happening.
We have never, not even once, ever, seen an actual dead body come back to life.
As we have evidence for the former being a fairly mundane event (albeit not for the stabbee), no additional verification that such an event could have occurred is needed. The only question has to do with a particular person being stabbed to death at a given time by other given people.
As evidence for the latter is utterly lacking in any verifiable sense, the question becomes can that happen?, which requires vastly more evidence that name-name-date-location.
We are applying the same standard of evidence to the events. You are wrongfully conflating the event’s evidential requirements.
That’s a failing on your part, not ours.
I mean this seriously – sit and think about what you’re writing. So far, it’s making you look stupid.
You’re failing.
Badly, obviously, embarrassingly failing.
If that’s not what you’re trying to do (for some reason), either do better or quit.
LykeX:
It’s Seven of Mine. An easy nym to mess up, like yours. :)
So now Chas is playing victim because Inaji “started it” when all Chas said was “?”.
That sure as shit doesn’t explain why Chas felt compelled to follow up with calling de-baptism “fucking silly” and then double down when it was explained. On a thread about someone’s fucking death.
Go fuck yourself Chas.
yubal, last thread 855
The short answer is big rocks and pointy sticks. Lions and hyenas mostly learned a long, long time ago that you don’t fuck with medium-large primates unless you can catch one alone. Even chimps have been observed to drive off (and occasionally kill) lions they feel are getting too close with a shower of rocks and sticks.
Tomas C
Shut the fuck up about libertarianism until you’ve answered the critique I posted at 658 in the previous thread.
leebrimmicombe-wood:
However, through the high middle ages, much of the economy was a social economy — king to lord to knight to peasant (with lots of extra layers and semi-layers added in) rather than a money economy. The rules governing the relationships were sometimes written down, but more often were layers of tradition. These rules and regulations, though not formal, helped to keep medievel France or Poland from going completely Somalia.
Anteprepro:
Okay, I missed something. I answered a question, one that Chas was perfectly capable of answering on his own, which I pointed out.
So, answering questions is now bad. Got it.
John A: If you are claiming that history can be done without assessing the accuracy of the sources, then you are either woefully ignorant or lying through your fucking teeth. The Bible is not a credible source. The Bible is not a historical text. Just as “liberal” Christians like yourself will swear up and down that it isn’t a science text either when it’s fantastical elements are proven wrong.
If you believe otherwise regarding historicity, then the consequence is not just dismissing the assassination of Julius Caesar as less “historical” than Jesus’s resurrection. The consequence is also to believe in the historicity of Beowulf and Odysseus. Blind credulity is not how history works.
@inagi 28
So THAT’S what “thunder thighs” means, at least to some. I always thought it was a generic “your lady thighs are bigger than I think they should be” insult.
@sugarfrosted 23
ffs seconded, not directed at you. So now I have “thigh gap” piled on “cankles” in my brain, and no way to get rid of them. When I first heard of “cankles” I was so baffled I looked it up, and even with the aid of photos cannot see what is meant by the term. But I think I’m happier not being able to see them (meaning: not being able to tell which legs are deemed to have them).
@41 Inaji/LykeX
+Infinity trekkie points to anyone who gets the reference without recourse to Google.
Fetchez la Vache:
I can’t speak for what people mean now, but way back then, it wasn’t always an insult. Lots of people thought thunder thighs were mighty attractive.
Ack, sorry: @inaji 28
Yes Inaji, answering questions is apparently very very bad. Enough so that, according to Chas’s official decree , you were The Asshole of the Kagin Thread.
With the bonus point that Chas has decided that no one actually Really Liked Kagin because his blog didn’t get as many comments as Pharyngula does, and thus everyone expressing condolences over a member of FTB fucking dying are just disingenuous and therefore Chas is perfectly justified doing whatever the fuck Chas thinks he is doing.
@John A, 27
Hypothetically accepting for the moment that this is entirely true, and not just something that people say in order to make their claim seem more reasonable than it is, so what? If we accept that Caesar was assassinated, are we rewarded with eternal bliss? If we deny it, are we condemned to an eternal torture chamber? Does it ultimately matter if Caesar was assassinated by a group of his senators? Does it matter if, upon seeing Brutus among his assassins he sighed, “et tu, Brute?” and resigned himself to death? Is it the most important fact in the history of history that he died in this way, and not by tripping on his way out of the bathtub and breaking his neck?
So why does it seem like a reasonable argument to say that we have just as much reason to believe that Jesus was ressurrected than that Caesar was assassinated? The ressurrection is supposed to be the most important event in all of history, so why is it considered a good thing that it is no better evidenced than a historical footnote of no real historical importance?
@John A #27
First of all John, the criterion of embarrassment is something theists came up with to assure us that particular passages MUST be true. I don’t mind if you want to throw it out, but you should know that your “side” made it up and continues to pretend it is a valid way of determining what is true.
Second of all. Julius Ceasar death, taking place in the first century, is very well attested to through many lines of evidence. One reason is exactly because the first century is relatively well documented. For one thing, at least we can be pretty sure he was actually alive given his face on the coins minted for the empire, inscriptions of his name in monuments he erected, his own friggin’ biography, just to name a few things which your boy Jesus doesn’t have going for him.
Jesus supposed resurrection and life is only attested to through the words of anonymous fellow cultists decades after the supposed fact, and not even in all 4 gospels, since Matthew originally forgot to mention a resurrection. Besides them, nobody anywhere apparently knew about any Jesus, let alone him resurrecting, not even historians living their lives at the same time and not even a days travel away found it worthy to mention any of the things the gospels authors claim to have happened.
Maybe you could produce some coins with your saviours face on it, minted during his lifetime. That way we can at least establish your main man actually existed, just like Ceasar which is a prerequisite for resurrection don’t you think?
Anteprepro:
Oh, I see. Well, that was certainly silly of PZ to chastise the wrong person then. Tsk.
:shakes head: I rarely comment on other FTB blogs, however, I do read a lot of them. As far as Kagin is concerned, I donate to Camp Quest every year because I do think it is a great and wonderful thing, and that’s a legacy worth being thankful for and noting.
*Sound of brains exploding out through back of head*
I didn’t notice at all. I’ve been reading it as Seven of Nine throughout. And I’m not even cool enough to earn infinity trekkie points. This is a bad way to start a Thunderdome.
On the whole “thigh gap” thing, I’m an old man, so perhaps I can share a little historical perspective, as to which I can only say that things have changed enormously in my lifetime.
I was 18 when The Mary Tyler Moore Show premiered, and she was really emaciated from her diabetes at that time—something of course I wasn’t aware of going in. I remember being absolutely shocked: “Holy Hell! She’s just standing there and I can see daylight all the way up between her legs!”
I hadn’t seen a lot of footage of concentration camp survivors at that point in my life either, but that’s the effect it had on me—I was stunned, and I admit it: More than a little repelled. Since then I’ve see society more and more pressure women into emaciating themselves into a walking skeleton, and I can’t understand it to save my life. (Sometimes I’m glad I’m not going to live much longer to tell you the truth, if it’s getting so bad now that “thigh gaps” are a requirement.)
Now, I don’t want to criticize anybody for the way they look, and I have seen (since then) a lot of very thin women who look healthy and natural that way, and if that’s the way someone is naturally, without half-killing themselves from starvation, that’s great. I’m sure there’s a new crop I’m not familiar with, but Téa Leoni was the last one I really noticed—she looked perfectly healthy and normal the way she was. (But then so does Rebel Wilson from Super Fun Night.) Society (or Hollywood or the advertising industry or whoever the shadowy cabal is that decides these things) should just back off and let people be the way they are.
The “criterion of embarrassment” is not used in any other field of history, so it is arbitrary and not needed to attest to historicity.
The original KJV was based off of a single group of Byzantine texts (a reference to one of the three families of texts with a similar range of scribal characteristics) that turned out to have a high rate of scribal errors. As such, about 10% of it amounted to a poor translation of the original bible. Within about a decade (approximately 1630), this was mostly corrected. By the end of the 17th century, the entire thing was corrected. The current KJV (to say nothing for the NKJV) is a perfectly accurate translation.
I have never seen a Roman dictator get stabbed and die. No one alive has either. By your standard then, since no one alive today has seen it, it must never have happened.
Caesar’s assassination was a “fairly mundane” event? Even though it triggered a 15 year civil war that resulted in the creation of the Roman Empire?
In both cases (Caesar and Jesus), we have historical writings going back to the eyewitnesses. In both cases, these writings come from many different people with no shared motive, and no reason or ability to make the store up. What we know about the subsequent events in both cases also agrees with the original events (Caesar’s assassination and Jesus’ resurrection). Actually the case of Jesus is stronger, given the fact that the NT was written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, and mostly by eyewitnesses themselves. The main sources on Caesar’s life and death come from Dio, Appian, Suetonius and Plutarch. All three wrote centuries after the event, drew on earlier writings of uncertain providence, outright contradict in many places. All also were involved in the Roman government in some way (Dio was a senator and governor, Suetonius was Trajan’s personal secretary) and so had a motivation to skew it in one way or the other. So yes, we can be more confident that Jesus’ resurrection happened than that Caesar’s assassination did. But then this would mean atheism is wrong, so a completely different standard has to be invented to keep the faith.
I am applying the same standards used by historians to assess the reliability of any other written record from antiquity.
I certainly am not. I am noting the fact that the bible is, by the standards of assessing ancient written historical documents, the most reliable of all surviving works from antiquity. It doesn’t mean you have to believe it, it just means that if you don’t, then you have to dismiss all other ancient written works.
Of course it is. Read the first few versus of Luke for one such example of many.
What do you mean “proven wrong”? David in the Psalms says that God “laid the four corners of the Earth”. Since we know that the Earth doesn’t have corners, does that then mean that this verse is “proven wrong”?
No it isn’t. The ancients didn’t believe that the Iliad was any more historically true than we do.
Inaji @ 49:
I can testify to that because I’m one of them. (Maybe I can get away with saying that since this is Thunderdome?)
The Very Rev @ 56:
That would be nice. Things were a bit more relaxed in the ’60s and ’70s, and no one got upsetty if women actually had a layer of fat. I’m naturally thin, but I don’t look starved. It used to be that plumpness was seen as a sign of wealth and health (being rich enough to afford a good diet). What does young women starving themselves now say, that we’re rich enough to eschew food? It’s a mess.
What a fucking sophist John A is. Assassination isn’t mundane in comparison to a dude fucking rising from the dead, apparently, because John A didn’t personally see Caesar stabbed. And the only book of myths that is historically true is the Bible, because HISTORY. Also “it’s just a metaphor, everybody!”
“Liberal” Christianity, everyone!
dutchdelight @#53
*cough*
You mean Mark (the Marcan appendix, chapter 16 verses 9-20, appears only in later witnesses to the text), but your point still stands.
John A, confirmed liar and bullshitter:
*snicker*, another batch of non-linked evidenceless assertions dismissed without evidence. If you have honesty and integrity, you will either start linking up (putting up real evidence), or shutting the fuck up. Only liars and bullshitters can’t put up, and won’t shut up.
The
you must with solid and conclusive physical evidence demonstrate false are:
1) your deity doesn’t exist
2) the babble is book of mythology/fiction
More idiocy from John A. @57:
Oh Brother.
Absolute crap.
Absolutely it does. How could you possibly think otherwise. There’s something seriously wrong going on inside your head.
Dang, blockquote instead of url for the null hypotheses in #62. The link does appear, but out of context.
John A:
*snort* Wrong again, Cupcake. The KJV is an unholy mess of fuck ups. This information, and evidence of it, has been around for ages. I realize that god of yours doesn’t much like it, but just try thinking for yourself, instead of regurgitating the nonsense which has been fed to you.
@57 John A.
No. We don’t have eyewitness reports of Jesus’ resurrection. We have fables that were created decades after the alleged events. And in one case (Luke), the author BEGINS his account by saying he is an historian, and NOT an eyewitness.
In addition to the Luke problem, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection in Mark are admitted by pretty much every biblical scholar to being a late addition (as in the year 200 or so). So, now you have two out of the four “gospels” where the account cannot possibly be eyewitnesses. John is a mishmash of late sources, and that leaves Matthew, which was cribbed from Mark (well, technically, the source document Q).
We do have eyewitness accounts for Caesar’s assassination. Not Jesus resurrection. In fact, of the well-known chroniclers of that time and place, there’s not a mention of Jesus’ life anywhere, much less his death, and certainly not the unloading of the graves of the saints who walked around Jerusalem. Don’t you think someone would have noticed that? Anyone? Nope. Not a mention anywhere from anyone actually living in the area at the alleged time and place.
It’s mythology. About as boldly mythological as the Labors of Hercules. And why not? The whole story of a corporeal Jesus was invented by the Greek Jews to make the cult more palatable to the local populace.
I am very glad that I have never until now thought about how my thighs were “supposed” to interact with each other, and now I am going to try my best to forget it. Do I even want to know what a “cankle” is? (probably not)
Human bodies have a lot of variation, yay for variation.
The “resurrection is as well-attested as Caesar” thing is a weird meme that’s been mutating for a while. The original claim as I heard it from pro-apologists in the 90s, was that Jesus, the guy, was as well-attested as Socrates, which is fair enough. This morphed quickly into “as well-attested as anyone in the ancient world” which attached itself to Caesar and various other figures with more or less plausiblity, and at some point “the historicity of Jesus” became conflated with “the resurrection of Jesus,” which doesn’t make any sense but came I think from a lot of people repeating the “well-attested” thing from memory without really thinking about it.
The most recent variation on that claim I’ve heard lately is “the resurrection is the best-attested fact about the ancient world,” which is pretty obviously false if you think about it for 10 seconds and know what the words “attested” and “fact” and “best” mean.
Future historians will undoubtedly use The John A method to determine the historical veracity of The Book of Mormon. I mean, people believed in it and everything, so it must be true! And because it was written during his lifetime, dontcha know? Who cares if it is blatantly unreliable, contradicts known facts, and relies on illogic and magical thinking? People believed it and it was written by “eyewitnesses”, so HISTORY.
If it’s perfectly accurate, why does it list the commandment as “Thou shalt not kill”?
The standard answer to how to reconcile this commandment with all the war and executions God demands in the Bible (and all the war Christians have condoned since), is that the Hebrew word is closer to murder than kill.
So if it were perfectly accurate, why isn’t it “Thou shalt not murder”?
Ok, John A’s not stupid, he’s dishonest (But I guess I knew that – he’s a Christian apologist, goes with the territory).
But, what the hell, I’m having fun, so…
Unless, of course, you are under the impression Roman dictators were human beings.
In which case, we’ve seen that lots.
Do you believe Roman dictators were inhuman?
If not, you were arguing dishonestly. Stop doing that.
A human dying from being stabbed is a mundane event, regardless of the surrounding fallout.
I’m fairly sure you knew that, and were just arguing dishonestly again. Stop doing that.
No, you are (deliberately and dishonestly, I suspect) missing my point.
If histories had stated that Caesar had been killed by being eaten by a fire-breathing dragon, the accounts would not be taken seriously, regardless of the number of them, as there aren’t any such things as fire-breathing dragons.
Likewise resurrections.
You write too well to be too stupid to understand this, so it’s dishonesty again. Stop doing that.
As to the concept that the writers of the bible didn’t have a vested interest in anyone believing that the bible was true – and therefore no vested interest in demonstrating the divinity of Jesus – you clearly don’t believe that yourself and are therefore arguing dishonestly.
Please stop.
Please.
Try – it will be hard for you, I know – but just try to not lie in your arguments.
Quit asking yourself what can I have plausible deniability of? and just stick to what you actually believe.
You’ll feel better.
You might lose the argument, but in the long run, being honest with yourself is better. I’ve tried both ways (here, even), so I know whereof I speak.
@John A, 57
Oh, come on. That’s not possible! PoG and impact both tell us that there are no scribal errors, so how can this group of scriptures have had a high rate of them? No, you’re not making any sense at all!
So you’re saying that something happens upon becoming a dictator that shields you from knives? Is a dictator no longer a human or something?
I have a comic book that tells the story of a group of superheroes. The fist chapter of that book tells, quite accurately, the story of the bombing of Nagasaki. Therefore it is a reliable historical text, yes?
John A, most of what we know of Jesus is obviously wrong, because the four gospels contradict each other most of the time. Even if we leave out John, the other three have enough differences that we can’t say that anything much is really attested to.
The Christmas story we all know is cobbled together from the three. You can assume that each bit really happened, but the others failed to mention it, for some reason, but that’s you taking it on faith. From outside, it’s obviously just three attempts at an humble-origin myth that John blows right past.
And, historically, the date given—reign of Caesar Augustus and the other guy—never happened. They never overlapped. And the Romans never conducted a census by telling people to go back to their home town. So there is good historical evidence that the whole thing is made up.
So your holy book contradicts itself, and history, too.
If we root through the four gospels, and discard everything on which they do not agree, MOST of what we know of Jesus is indeed gone. If we take what little is left—preacher, crucifixion, and resurrection–we can’t confirm that by any outside sources.
Yeah, there’s a stone with Pilate’s name on it, but there are no records of darkness, earthquake and walking zombies. There are, however, millions of people living a religion that assumes it never happened. The Jews, most of whom are far better religious scholars that the average Christian, and far more dedicated to their religion, and who regard the city of Jerusalem as their home, and who pray for a Messiah, all shrug off the supposedly big event that happened in their home town.
Christianity grows and spreads through a self-contradictory book, among people who were not part of the culture it sprang from, and is in no way supported by history. It is obviously a matter of faith, and that faith cannot be distinguished from obsession, delusion and madness.
John A, Proof, you guys popping in here and popping off are just making it more and more obvious that there is no God. Your actions are driving us away from God, and according to your book, you will go to Hell for that.
What does that have to do with the reliability of the claim? That you don’t like something makes it less true?
Shakespeare was not an historian. Caesar never said “et tu Brute”, at least according to all of the sources, even though Shakespeare put those words in his play.
That you don’t like something doesn’t make it less historically reliable. Apply the same standards as you would any other ancient writing, and the bible not only passes those standards, but does so much more than any other ancient work.
Actually it was a product of anti-semetic 19th century German writers trying to discredit the Old Testament.
As is Jesus’ resurrection. And all of the sources on Caesar’s assassination come from centuries after his death. If we are going to expand the allowable sources that much, then we have to include not just the NT, but all Christian writings at least up through Eusebius of Caesaria in the early 4th century. If we don’t do that, then none of the writings on Caesar can be accepted at all. But even if we do apply a double standard, and allow the loser criteria for Caesar, and only the NT for Jesus, then the sources for Jesus are still superior. They certainly come from eyewitnesses, both the authors and (as Luke mentions) the eyewitness sources that the authors consulted and interviewed. The writings on Caesar, in contract, come from and unknown line of transmission from the eyewitnesses to the authors living centuries later.
The mid 1st century BC (up through 27 BC) is relatively well documented, mainly due to the sources on Caesar. And yet the sources on Jesus are still superior.
Almost no one disputes that Jesus existed. You are moving to a different topic than what we are talking about (the resurrection).
They aren’t “anonymous”, and Matthew doesn’t (and didn’t) leave out the resurrection, despite whatever crack theories you might find on the internet about source criticism. In Luke’s case it is irrelevant anyway, since Luke wasn’t an eyewitness but tells us outright in the first verses of his Gospel where his sources come from.
Oh and as for “decades after the fact”, the writings on Caesar’s assassination come from “centuries after the fact”. So if decades after the fact aren’t reliable, then surely centuries after the fact aren’t either.
No historians whose writings survive were active during Jesus’ lifetime. The main sources immediately after, however (Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus, and even Pliny the Younger) do mention him. Oh and of course all Christian writers mention him, going back to Clement in 96 AD.
Hey if you want to argue that he didn’t exist, fine by me.
Claims require evidence. Extraordinary claims, like the resurrection, require and extraordinary level of evidence, more than needed to say show that a Jesus, son of Joseph, existed about 20 AD.
Unevidenced (no links) and fuckwitted presuppositional assertion, disimissed without evidence.
John A, provide real and conclusive physical evidence from scientific sources that:
your deity isn’t imaginary
your babble isn’t a book of mythology/fiction
Both are the null hypotheses at this blog.
Show me a source that wrote of Jesus within 100 years of his supposed existence that has NOT been conclusively proven to be fraudulent.
Exact source, please, not just a half-assed claim that something to that effect exists.
Don’t tell us you’re still trotting out that ridiculous interpolation in Josephus? And the others just testified that there were cultists who worshipped a crucified Jewish carpenter, not that he ever existed.
@John A, 73
Like it? I said nothing about liking anything… the point was how important the claim was. Not my personal feelings toward the claim. Whether we accept that Caesar was assassinated or not makes precisely zero difference to anything. Whether we accept that Jesus resurrected is, according to the Christian worldview, The Most Important Fact Of All History. So why is it no more supported by evidence than the idea that Caesar was assassinated? (And this is still accepting the hypothetical that it is actually true that it was equally evidenced.)
Exactly – that’s why I put those words in there.
Uh…huh… I’ll just copy and paste then.
Like it? I said nothing about liking anything… the point was how important the claim was. Not my personal feelings toward the claim. Whether we accept that Caesar was assassinated or not makes precisely zero difference to anything. Whether we accept that Jesus resurrected is, according to the Christian worldview, The Most Important Fact Of All History. So why is it no more supported by evidence than the idea that Caesar was assassinated? (And this is still accepting the hypothetical that it is actually true that it was equally evidenced.)
The John A method to history continues.
Me, right now: “There are some people who contend to this day that Elvis is still alive…”
John A historian, 100 years in the future: “And in fact, we have internet records showing that as late as 2014, there were people confirming that Elvis was still alive. See anteprepro, Thunderdome 45, Pharyngula.”
John A:
So, you’re agreeing with me on the criterion of embarrassment, but you still maintain that Jesus was a historical person and that the evidence bears this out, correct?
Now you’re just being willfully obtuse. We know that people can be killed by stabbing. We know that Romans were people. Whether it happened or not, there’s clearly nothing particularly outrageous in the claim itself.
However, a person being crucified and buried, lying dead for over 24 hours and then suddenly coming back to life? That’s an outrageous claim; one that requires evidence for us to even accept it as a possibility, much less a fact.
The results of the thing isn’t what’s being discussed. It’s the likelihood of the thing itself. A person being stabbed is something that happens every day. Leaders being assassinated is something that, while not a daily occurrence, certainly happens with a fair regularity.
The idea that the assassination of a leader (especially such a powerful, central figure) then results in civil war and other upheaval is similarly quite what we’d expect. There’s nothing really out of the ordinary here.
In the case of Jesus, there’s a lot you could claim without going off the rails. For example, the idea of a charismatic religious leader starting a new sect and running afoul of existing religious authorities, that’s all quite reasonable. Saying that those leaders then spread rumors about him to the secular authorities and getting him killed is also nothing unusual. So far, while we might discuss the strength of the evidence, there’s nothing here that’s really too unbelievable.
You, however, decided to include the claim of a resurrection and that drastically alters the situation. You now have to prove not only that it did happen, but that it even could happen. It’s the equivalent of proposing that Julius Caesar was actually stabbed to death by a time traveling Captain Kirk. You’d better have some rock solid evidence if you’re expecting me to buy that Golden Gate bridge.
Oh, come now. You know better than that.
And now you’re just being silly.
John A @#27:
Because so many people throughout history have risen from the dead that one more resurrection is easy to believe, and so few people have been assassinated that an assassination is an extraordinary claim?
John A @#57:
So now you’re saying that Roman dictators are immortal? So where are they? Or are you promoting a conspiracy theory that Caesar simply retired and lived to an old age in a villa in Tuscany?
Mundane in the sense of not being supernatural, of course.
Obviously false. Christians who believe in Christianity have the shared motive to promote Christianity, and do have the reason to make stories up — or promote misunderstood events as being a resurrection.
Nonsense. This is not a fact, since the dates of the gospels are in dispute, as is the authorship. At least in the case of Luke, he appears to plagiarize some material from Josephus for his “historical” background. The authors of the gospels can’t agree on the basic course of events of Jesus’ career, arrest, and supposed magical coming-back-to-life-after-being-totally-and-completely dead.
As do the gospels, of course.
We cannot have any confidence in Jesus’ resurrection, because Jesus is not around to demonstrate being alive. We can be confident that Caesar was assassinated because Caesar is not alive, and there’s no reason to claim that he was assassinated if he had in fact died from disease, accident, or old age.
Or do you have an immortal Roman dictator as a neighbour that you can show us?
Now you’re just being silly.
Still nonsense. This was originally believed by most Christians; but much of the OT of the bible was demonstrated false by archaeology. The NT cannot be claimed “reliable” given its obvious problems.
No, we don’t. But then, all other ancient works are not automatically assumed to be 100% true either.
That would be the same Luke that contradicts Matthew on when Jesus was born and what his genealogy was?
Why wouldn’t they?
Indeed, even demonstrating that there was a preacher called Joshua son of Joseph, the Nazarene, and this preacher was crucified, taken down from the cross and put into a tomb, the tomb was later found to be empty and Joshua the Nazarene was later seen to preach to other people, the parsimonious conclusions is not “Joshua the Nazarene was dead and then came back to life’, but rather ‘Joshua the Nazarene was not, in fact, dead when he was taken down from the cross, and those who claimed he was were mistaken and/or lying’. People who aren’t dead being mistaken for dead but then recovering is a well-attested phenomenon, that continues to happen today in areas with little proper medical diagnostics available.
@ John A
Unless your copy of the KJV comes from the 1620s, it is fine.
John, Matthew and Paul were all eyewitness to the resurrected Jesus. Oh and those same verses of Luke tell you exactly where his sources came from.
Ironic that not only do none think Mark’s final verses were later than the 1st century, but copies of the entire gospel from long before 200 survive.
No one ever disputes that two of the four are not from eyewitnesses.
We have eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, including from Paul, who not even the most skeptical scholars doubt were written by Paul.
Actually there is, even excluding the massive corpus of writings by Christians. Besides them, we have Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Josephus and Tacticus. We also have writings of others (usually people trying to discredit the early Christian movement), such as Celsus, whose writings are lost, but where surviving claims admitting to the resurrection were cited in Christian writings.
So you want to actually ignore the whole resurrection question and just claim instead that Jesus never even existed? I guess that line of thought might be easier for your side, since you can ignore all of the contradictions between your approach to the bible and to all other historical works.
Actually they already have, and it doesn’t do well. It makes too many claims that are known to be untrue (such as the ancient Israelites coming to America).
You aren’t?
If you frame it that way, true. If you frame the exact same event in many other ways, no. How about “a Roman dictator, two months after being made dictator for life, about to embark on a war to conquer the Parthian Empire, is betrayed and murdered by fellow senators, one of whom (Brutus) may have even been his son, and so began a 15 year civil war that resulted in the creation of the Roman Empire.” That is a less mundane event.
I understand your point very well. I just don’t agree.
But they don’t.
Actually there are almost no claims of supernatural events from antiquity that were taken as historically true at any time. The ancient authors were just as skeptical of unusual claims as we are. The existence of the Amazons is a good example.
John A:
Nonsense. The bible is, in fact, a bunch of stories cobbled together at different points in time, written by various people decades after Jesus was supposedly wandering about. There are no eyewitness accounts, only people writing that there were. That’s terribly unreliable, after all, stories are just that, stories.
Also, throughout the years, bits of the bible stories have been excised, others have been put in, and so on. FFS, the first attempt to figure out the base rules of xianity wasn’t until 325 CE, with the first council of Nicea.
oh no, I forgot to end the blockquote :( :( is there any way to edit comments?
Let me guess: Brian O is slyme.
Brian O @ 83, go away, we’re trying to have a discussion here. Oh, and an alert has been sent.
Barnestormer:
No. It’s no big deal, happens to everyone. :)
Josephus never mentioned Jesus. Never. That one single passage was inserted much much much later — the evidence suggests by a 3rd century Christian bishop.
The second passage mentions a guy named Jesus (well, Joshua, actually). Since Joshua was as common a name back then as John is today, it would be pretty hard not to have a history with no mention of any John.
And, FWIW, Josephus wasn’t an eyewitness. He was born well after the alleged time and events. Nor were any of the others you mention. They were all 1st and 2nd century figures born well after the alleged time and events. No one is arguing that the cult of Jesus did not exist. And clearly, that’s what they were writing about. This cult that existed. And since cults sprang up all the time (still do) based on fictional characters (ie, every god ever invented), you can’t claim that they were writing with knowledge about a real person. They weren’t. They were writing about the mythology surrounding the cult.
However, if you look for potential eyewitnesses who were contemporaneous to the alleged time and events, you find plenty. Among them Philo-Judaeus, Martial, Arrian, Appian, Theon of Smyrna, Lucanus, Aulus Gellius, Seneca, Plutarch, Apollonius, Epictetus, Silius Italicus, and Ptolemy. Not one of them mentions an insurrectionist named Jesus. Not one of them notes someone who preached to 5000. Not one of them mentions someone who rode into Jerusalem as a new king and was greeted by thousands. Not one of them mentions any of the stories contained in the Jesus myths. Not one.
Philo in particular was pretty famous for writing about all of the alleged “messiahs” hanging around Jerusalem at that time. He kept a list. No mention of Jesus. If Jesus was famous enough to preach to thousands, Philo would have noticed. He most certainly would have noticed someone who claimed to be the new king riding into Jerusalem.
There is no contemporaneous eyewitness corroboration of any of the stories contained in the myths. None.
Dishonesty would make editable comments a nightmare to deal with during a heated discussion
John A, none of the namesakes and supposed eyewitnesses were the actual authors of the texts. The texts were written well after the events as well. You fail.
“While the Authorized Version remains among the most widely sold, modern critical New Testament translations differ substantially from it in a number of passages, primarily because they rely on source manuscripts not then accessible to (or not then highly regarded by) early 17th-century Biblical scholarship. In the Old Testament, there are also many differences from modern translations that are based not on manuscript differences, but on a different understanding of Ancient Hebrew vocabulary or grammar by the translators.” — Wikipedia.
Except there was historical mythologizing of Julies Augustus Caesar that are not treated seriously, just as the existence of a historical Troy is a fact but the Illiad’s is not treated as accurate
Brian O first
Brian O now
Disingenuous troll is disingenuous and trollish.
Similarly the histories of the time report a lot of things about Mohamed that Christians probably would accurately reject as mythological (such as having the Koran dictated by an arch angel and ascending into heaven), yet historically we acknowledge that either Mohamed, or a figure that has come to be designated Mohamed existed
Bwahahahahahahahaha….!
And with that, the last shred of John A’s credibility vanishes in a puff of idiocy.
You know it’s always frustratingly inane to have to discuss what is the basics of history and reading comprehension to people who are citing something.
It’s like trying to discuss biology with someone who keeps referencing the humors
anteprepro:
No, they were not. The evidence for this has been around for fucking ages, y’know. Do your own research for once, and think for yourself. Not a single one of the story writers was writing at the time, and saw anything with their own eyes. You can even find the evidence and confirmation of this from theologians, ffs.
@86 Inaji
Every time I read it, I am struck by how obviously this is the case. I strted reading last night because I was hoping Proof of God would take me up on my offer of an exchange and read something about how evolution works — got as far as the Cities of the Plain. There’s so much cobbling in Genesis it looks like a patchwork quilt the Quilter’s Guild rejected for being too patchy. And that’s just within a single book!
Is that actually true? I don’t know, either way, but it sounds like one of those things that apologists are fond of throwing out there, exactly because they know most people won’t have the background to dispute it.
I think I’d like confirmation from someone slightly more trustworthy than John A before accepting it, especially given his demonstrable idiocy on the subject. To wit:
No, we don’t. We have Paul describing his religious fantasies. He never describes meeting an actual, physical human being.
If we’re going to accept that as eye witness testimony, then why are you leaving out all those people who will right now tell you about how they got a vision of Jesus? If we use the same standard (remember how that’s your shtick?) then those people also count as eye witnesses.
And of course, once we do that, we also have to accept the religious hallucinations of people from all other religions as eye witness accounts. Do you realize what a can of worms you’re opening?
Actually, I think “Perfectly accurate” in that statement means something like “good enough”
“The burnt meatloaf I gave you was a perfectly edible dinner. Quit complaining you’re hungry and go to bed.”
The Gospel of John was written, what, 200+ years after Jesus’ purported death?
If John was an account of an eyewitness testimony, that would be a miracle on par with the resurrection itself.
As for Paul, it is explicit in the New Testament that he was NOT an eyewitness to the resurrected Jesus. A fever-dream induced by heatstroke, even if you accept it as a legitimate religious vision, does not an “eyewitness” account make.
@85 John A.
Paul? Paul never saw a corporeal Jesus. Paul mentions only having visions of Jesus. He also claimed that every else who saw Jesus saw a vision. He claimed that the VISION of Jesus appeared to Peter and the others. Not a corporeal entity.
For someone who is convinced your book of myths is accurate, you sure haven’t taken any time to actually read it, have you?
@ 93
Oh my goodness, you’re absolutely right! I apologize for my naivite — didn’t even think of that.
Inaji, wrong person :P
Ingdigo Jump
It’s reminiscent of having philosophical and scientific discussions with people who still subscribe to Aristotle’s substances and forms version of “physics”, and still believe in substance dualism.
John A:
Jesus Fucked A Duck, dude. Paul never saw Jesus. NEVER. All he had were visions, and he says as much in that bible of yours. Read the damn thing already!
@Brian 0
I agree with that assessment. Please remedy it as you see fit
Anteprepro:
:face palm: Apologies, I know you’d never say anything that stupid.
Brian O, then revert back into being a belieber. No one will miss you and your incompetence will be overlooked by the religious.
In John A’s world, Joseph Smith must be a true prophet, since he had an eyewitness encounter with the angel Moroni.
John A must convert to Mormonism. Eyewitnesses and all.
Or Islam. Since Mohammed claimed that he dictated the Koran from the archangel Gabriel. Another eyewitness.
Which is more likely John? That so-called “eyewitness” testimony might not be 100% credible? Or that Mohammed was visited by Gabriel?
Anteprepro:
Perhaps our little troll is floundering about in an attempt to make a case for Mary being a virgin, and her and PZ’s children all being little miracles of immaculate conception. At least that would fit with the rest of the nonsense in the last few Tdomes.
No worries, Inaji. I’m just glad that you and others had the same assessment of the matter that I did! I’ve only learned about this shit indirectly, ya see, since I was never religious and history was my least favorite subject in school anyway. Amazing what you can learn about religion, history, and philosophy when you spend enough time wandering the interwebs.
Wait, no, that wasn’t in any of Paul; they were some migraine-sounding visions that Paul had (not a doctor, but I do get some migraines). I used to be a Christian and even the most anti-Jesus Seminar Christians I know didn’t pretend that was eyewitness testimony; it was a conversion experience, like you might have any day of the week if you pray regularly.
I don’t feasibly see how even believing in supernatural entities you can trust first hand testimony from any of them. The Supernatural Trickster Hypothesis should be a valid interpretation of ANY scripture even if we take it at face value and an honest account.
Even if Abraham was told to sacrifice Issac there’s no way of knowing if he was told to do so by Satan, The Devil, Loki, Robin Goodfellow, a Mischievous Djinn, Dickbag Aliens, or Time Travelers
Ew, ew, I know this one… Real Libertarians™ don’t believe in the use of violence, so would never do such a thing. And, they would probably be saying so, right up until they got riddled full of bullets by the “false” libertarian that actually owned the property, or both sides started a sort of Hatfield and McCoy war over it, thus proving to all the “real ones” that neither the property owner, nor the ones trying to cross it without paying, where Real Libertarians™. lol
Barnestormer:
There’s long been speculation that Paul of Tarsus had temporal lobe epilepsy.
Menyambal @72
Since the Romans were taking censuses so they could take head and property taxes, they would want people to stay where they were living. According to the Bible, Joseph lived in Nazareth so the Romans would want him there so they could get some idea of his property and family.
Question: by traveling to Bethlaham was Joseph attempting tax fraud?
Actually they don’t. Provide an example if you honestly believe that. Oh and if contradictions are enough to discredit a writing, then we would have to dismiss not just every other ancient writing (the contradictions in them, such as for example the sources on the emperor Tiberius, are vastly most blatant than anything you can argue from the NT), but even modern eyewitness testimonies (such as when you have multiple eyewitnesses for a car accident, each from a different vantage point).
What does the modern reading of the story have to do with the reliability of the original writings? Should we dismiss Easter too since the bible never mentions an Easter bunny? Oh and if it is an attempt at a, as you say, “humble-origin myth”, it seems odd that the Herod the Great would have been so obsessed at the birth. It is also odd that a “humble origin” would be considered a virtue for the birth of a king. Oh and saying that God is his father also doesn’t amount to much of a “humble origin”.
Augustus died in 14 AD. Jesus was born in 4 BC. So yes, they did overlap. And yes, the census did happen. The Roman census, going back 600 years to Sextus Servius, occured every five years, and in the way described in the NT (census occurring by Tribe, in the location that Tribe originated, with one’s Tribe being the Tribe of their ancestors).
Examples?
Like what? And should we apply this standard to all other ancient writings? We, then, know almost nothing about ancient history.
This is a made up standard that is not, and cannot, be used in any other area of of history, since the sources contradict almost always. Take the main accounts of the life of Socrates: Plato and Xenophon. They disagree in nearly all ways. This is a typical example, but fortunately the NT is one key exception to this.
Actually the early Christian critic Celsus admitted that the eclipse occurred. And what is your point on Pilate? Speaking of him, he is known to have been a “procurator”, which the gospels mention. Tacticus, arguably the greatest of the Roman historians, refers to him as “propraetor”. Should we ignore everything Taciticus says then? This is one example of all of the gospel writings, not just the historian Luke, being more accurate than the greatest of the Roman historians.
Yes, they wanted desperately to discredit this movement, which was considered a branch of Judaism until the 2nd century. So why could these “far better religious scholars” never find Jesus’ body? They (and the Romans) had every reason and motivation to discredit the movement, but never could. Nor did they find a smoking gun that Christians ignored. The earliest anti-Christian Jewish polemic is found in the Talmud from the 2nd century, and it mentions no evidence that the whole thing was a scam. They simply referred to Jesus as a trickster.
Why would they possibly do this? Why would so many Greco-Roman pagans follow a crucified Jew as the Son of God?
Again, a question of framing. Actually you are inventing reasons why it is different. Everything about Caesar’s life was extraordinary. Much of what ancient authors write of the lives of their subjects is extraordinary. Caesar claimed to have conquered Gaul (roughly modern France), and in the process to have killed a third of the population, and enslaved another third. This seems pretty outrageous. Maybe we should think this untrue?
And the fact that the sources on the resurrection are so much more numerous and reliable (closer to the eyewitnesses, far more eyewitnesses, etc) provides this higher standard of evidence.
How often is a leader assassinated, and his death triggers a 15 year civil war that results in the end of a 5000 year old civilization (Egypt) and the creation of the first true Empire in history? It is all a question of how you frame the event.
John A: one more thing. Biblical scholars agree pretty much 100% that many of the writings in the bible that are attributed to Paul were not actually written by him. First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, and Ephesians are definitely written by someone else. Probably also Colossians and Second Thessalonians.
Oops. There goes the inerrancy of the New Testament. If they can’t even get the authors right, how credible are they? Not at all.
Um John I think your assessment of Egypts fall and the “first empire” is greatly historically inaccurate.
John A @ 85:
So, are you arguing that a Roman dictator is human, and therefore will respond predictably to being stabbed – and there therefore “this guy was stabbed and died” isn’t something requiring substantial explanation?
I’m checking here, because your dishonest arguing runs the risk of getting convoluted.
I’m arguing that a human dying of stab woulds isn’t something that requires extraordinary explanation.
I’m arguing that a human rising from the dead is.
Are you arguing differently?
Try for honesty this time.
Are you arguing that the various authors of the bible had no vested interest in portraying their work as true?
Are you arguing that they were not portraying their subject as divine?
I’m arguing that they were writing to persuade their readers that Jesus was divine.
And that in so doing, they were no more honest in their writing than you have been in yours.
Like I said, honesty is hard for you, and might cause you to lose the argument.
If that’s a good enough reason for you to avoid it, in your opinion, keep on lying.
In doing so, you’re providing an excellent lesson in the honesty of Christian apologists.
Brian O seems to have taken a wrong turn on the way to the middle school lunch room.
@126 John A.
The gospels disagree on when the crucifixion occurred. The synoptics place it on the day before Passover. John places it on the previous day.
Can’t be both. And unlike the two wildly different geneologies, you can’t claim one is maternal and the other paternal.
You’ve been pwned.
John A, you’d benefit from reading Bart Ehrman’s works. He’s a NT scholar.
Ehrman has written widely on issues of New Testament and early Christianity at both an academic and popular level, with over twenty five books including three college textbooks and four New York Times bestsellers: Misquoting Jesus,[8] Jesus, Interrupted,[9] God’s Problem,[10] and Forged.[11][12] Much of his work is on textual criticism and the New Testament. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
In The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture Ehrman argues that there was a close relationship between the social history of early Christianity and the textual tradition of the emerging New Testament. He examines how early struggles between Christian “heresy” and “orthodoxy” affected the transmission of the documents. Ehrman is often considered a pioneer in connecting the history of the early church to textual variants within biblical manuscripts and in coining such terms as “Proto-orthodox Christianity.”
In Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium Ehrman argues that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, and that imminent apocalyptic beliefs are recorded first in the earliest Christian documents (the authentic Pauline epistles, 1st Thessalonians and 1st Corinthians) and then later in Jesus’ preaching in the earliest Christian gospels: the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. Paul’s epistles and Jesus’ preaching indicate Jesus believed the Son of man would soon arrive, and all present powerful nations would fall and God’s kingdom would be established on earth. The twelve disciples would each get a throne alongside the Son of Man and judge each of the twelve Jewish tribes. [Matt 19:28]. Jesus may have come to believe he was to be the Son of man, or else a gospel writer may have put those words and that idea in Jesus’ mouth. The early Christians believed Jesus to be the returning Son of man. There are no “end times” predicted in the latest, and last gospel, the Gospel of John.
In Misquoting Jesus he introduces New Testament textual criticism. He outlines the development of New Testament manuscripts and the process and cause of manuscript errors in the New Testament.
In Jesus, Interrupted he describes the progress scholars have made in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years and the results of their study, results which are often unknown among the population at large. In doing so, he highlights the diversity of views found in the New Testament, the existence of forged books in the New Testament which were written in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later, and the later invention of Christian doctrines—such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the Trinity.
In Forged Ehrman posits some New Testament books are forgeries and shows how widely forgery was practiced by early Christian writers—and how it was condemned in the ancient world as fraudulent and illicit. His scholarly book, Forgery and Counterforgery is an advanced look at the practice of forgery in the NT and early Christian literature. It makes a case for considering falsely attributed or pseudepigraphic books in the New Testament and early Christian literature “forgery,” looks at why certain New Testament and early Christian works are considered forged, and the broader phenomenon in Greek and Roman world.
Kenya makes a stand for traditional marriage:
Kenya’s parliament passes bill allowing polygamy
I honestly don’t know what’s worse: an automaton like Proof Of God who copy pastes the same thing a pastor once whispered in their ear over and over again all over the internet without actually understanding what they are pasting, or an idiot like John A who actually engages in discussions but is ignorant on any subject he dares bring up (history, logic, philosophy, science, theory of science).
And John A throws away his last shred of credibility by declaring he honestly believes the four gospels don’t contradict each other in any way. Man, count the bible as another subject he knows nothing about.
Zenlike @ 134, I’d say someone like POGlet is worse, it’s just the same pile of shit being flung, over and over. Too tedious for words. I gave myself wrist strain typing out that bloody list of god’s killings in the bible, and what did I get? “Out of context! You don’t understand!” It’s not like I was going to type the whole book out – you can’t even get them to read.
John A!
Here is a convenient, hypertext list of contradictions in the bible (KJV). Do some reading.
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html
Seriously…there were other empires throughout Egypt’s history…what the hell?
None of those events violate the known laws of physics or biology. Each and every single component of the above list is a type of event that has happened before. Each and every one is a logically consistent follow-up on the events that preceded it.
A powerful political leader assassinated? Unprecedented!
A civil war occurring in the power vacuum left by the death of a very powerful political leader? Unheard of!
A civilization being destroyed as the result of a war? It’s a miracle!
An empire forming in the aftermath of a war? Surely evidence of the divine!
Here’s one of my faves:
(There are about three or four, at least, Chinese Dynasties that would like to have a word with John A about his claim that the Romans were the “first true Empire” in history. A couple Persians too, I’d wager. Maybe an Assyrian as well.)
By the way, John A, are you praising Judith every day? You should, you know, otherwise you might piss of an already pissy god, what with Judith being blessed above all women on earth. Judith 13:23 – 31.
Libertarianism, are you fucking kidding. Libertarianism is largely responsible for the grotesque inequality in this country which started largely with Reagan. Libertarianism gave us Alan Greenspan, the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, the collapse of the economy and the modern criminality of the Banksters, the Koch Bros, etc etc etc etc. Fuck libertarianism. The first step towards civilization is abolition of libertarianism from our economic policies.
@Amphiox
Not to mention you know, Alexander the Great?
This latest tack in John A’s stupidity keeps reminding me of somebody, but the Dungeon has disappeared from the old site. Wasn’t there some dimbulb who named himself after one of the Scipios that trotted out the same mindless garbage about the reliability of the NT vs. Caesar’s assassination?
You know it is rather obscure…him having cities named for him…in Egypt
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge, it is very common trope in religious apologetics to compare Jeebus to Caesar on the metric of historicity. I guess the smarter subset of people who use this idiotic meme at least refine it to comparing one event in the life of Jeebus to one event in the life of Julius Caesar, because if they keep it at its traditional scope (that the person existed), the argument is laughable on its face.
John A @ 145:
No, just that it requires more corroboration than a common event.
Which is what I was arguing.
Remember, when you said that we were applying a different standard of evidence to similar occurrences?
My point was that as they weren’t really similar instances, they didn’t require similar standard of evidence.
I assume you’re conceding that point and admitting you were wrong?
Or should I presume you’re still being dishonest?
John A, just to add insult to injury, it turns out Jesus may have never existed. I’m agnostic on this, but check this out. Also check out anything by Richard Carrier as well which is even more comprehensive.
@148 Rev.
I dunno, the whole “jesus is as well attested as somethingorother” meme is pretty common among apologists. Usually it’s the crossing of the Rubicon though, in my experience.
Early Empires:
The Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (24th century BCE), was an early large empire. In the 15th century BC, the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, ruled by Thutmose III, was ancient Africa’s major force upon incorporating Nubia and the ancient city-states of the Levant. The first empire comparable to Rome in organization was the Assyrian empire (2000–612 BCE). The Median Empire was the first empire on the territory of Persia. By the 6th century BCE, after having allied with the Babylonians to defeat the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Medes were able to establish their own empire, the largest of its day, lasting for about sixty years. The successful, extensive, and multi-cultural empire that was the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE) absorbed Mesopotamia, Egypt, parts of Greece, Thrace, the Middle East, and much of Central Asia and Pakistan, until it was overthrown and replaced by the short-lived empire of Alexander the Great.
The Maurya Empire was a geographically extensive and powerful empire in ancient India, ruled by the Mauryan dynasty from 321 to 185 BCE. The Empire was founded in 322 BCE by Chandragupta Maurya who rapidly expanded his power westwards across central and western India, taking advantage of the disruptions of local powers in the wake of the withdrawal westward by Alexander the Great. By 320 BCE, the empire had fully occupied past northwestern India as well as defeating and conquering the satraps left by Alexander. It has been estimated that the Maurya Dynasty controlled an unprecedented one-third of the world’s entire economy, was home to one-third of the world’s population at the time (an estimated 50 million out of 150 million humans), contained the world’s largest city of the time (Pataliputra, estimated to be larger than Rome under Emperor Trajan) and according to Megasthenes, the empire wielded a military of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, and 9,000 war elephants.
Tomas C, last thread
That’s nice. I believe in a world of bears the size of housecats and raccoons that brew moonshine, myself.
So John A’s latest:
“Magic can happen and therefore it is just as likely as anything else! Religious ideas are always thwarted when refuted with direct evidence, therefore Christianity can’t be false! Paul, John, and Matthew wrote their respective gospels, because fuck you real history! Paul saw the real living dead Jesus, therefore he counts as an eyewitness! 200 years after Jesus’s death? No, it was a mere 100 years, ya ignorant heathen! And it couldn’t have been heatstroke, therefore Zombie Jesus Lives.”
What is the difference between a “liberal” Christian and a creationist fundie? Time until onset of bullshit spewing and level of bullshit density.
John A, I dispute that Jesus ever existed.
I argue that someone named Jesus may have been a carpenter, and later a preacher, and even crucified, but that doesn’t make him THE Jesus. Not that you have defined who you will accept as the historical Jesus.
See, I used to read the Dick and Jane books as part of my early reading classes. Now, I have met kids named Dick, and named Jane, and I have lived in suburbs much like those in the stories. But that doesn’t mean that the real-life, actual suburban family closest to the mythical Dick-and-Jane—which MUST exist—is the real one, or was even the inspiration for.
A common name, a common profession, a common problem and a common end, make it certain that some Palistinian bugger MUST be closest to a Yeshua who left his job to rave around the country and got killed by the Romans.
There has to be a historical Jesus, just like there has to be an historical Peter Cottontail. There were bunnies in English gardens, there were gardeners and farmers with English names–that’s what the story is based on—and there were adventurous bunnies. But they didn’t wear waistcoats and talk, even though waistcoats and talking are both real things. But somewhere in England is a place more like the stories than any other place, depending on your criteria.
There was a real Alice, by the way, of the Alice in Wonderland stories. They were made up for and told to an actual girl named Alice. They included things and places she knew, obviously. Again with talking rabbits in waistcoats, and again obviously fiction. So she was the real Alice, except that the character seems to be based on her sister …
So, yeah, an historical Jesus must exist. It isn’t like the stories were about a tentacled Cephalopoid named Ng*thock who was a neo-Vorticist holophonor, peddling LSD, who got sucked into a black hole. The stories are based on Palistine. Somebody, somewhere, must be closest to the biblical Jesus, and may even have been the inspiration, but that doesn’t mean squat.
Carpentry, by the way, was probably not the profession. The word used meant worker and could have better meant stone-worker. Jesus came from a quarry town, and told a lot of stories based on stone-working ideas. Carpentry is just another myth that has accreted. (I like the story that Joseph made the cross, though. I need to make up one about Joseph making the stone for the tomb, and making it escape-proof.)
A coin flipped and lands on the edge==A coin flipped and turned into a panda
@145 John A.
Wrong again. Different guy named “Joshua”. Different guy. Completely different guy. Not “your” Jesus at all. As I duly noted in my first post.
Your reading comprehension skills seem to be — limited.
Of course, I won’t go into the business about a guy born of a perpetual virgin having an actual brother — heresy in some circles, not in others. (Hint: “brother” did not connote blood relation; only membership in the “brotherhood of the lord” — aka the Jesus cult.)
Ah, and so you agree that of the ALL of the Pauline epistles, he was NOT the author of at least 4 of them, and probably 6 in total. So, 6 out of the 13 attributed to Paul aren’t by him? And this is what you declare an inerrant bible to contain? Almost half of the epistles are FORGERIES, and so therefore, the bible is inerrant?
Wow. Just. Wow.
Actually they always did, going back to Servus Tullius 600 years earlier.
Actually almost none do. True the ones who believe that believe that, but there are very few of them. They are a very peculiar group.
The death of the last Pharaoh (Cleopatra VII) is typically regarded as the end of Pharaohonic civilization, and the beginning of Roman Egypt.
In terms of the gospels (and Acts), the readers already believed Jesus was divine. They were writing to tell them the Gospel. The epistles, in contrast, were private letters written to people who already believed both, but to address administrative issues.
Look John, you are free to make stuff up and regurgitate ridiculous claims about “multiple lines of evidence for JC’s resurrection”, but the reality is there are no such things. Show me one physical object testifying that Jesus walked the earth, and I’ll show you thousands testifying to the historicity of Ceasar.
Trying to present obvious lies about evidence for a historical Jesus doesn’t get you anywhere here, this is not a church. Nor does pointing to historians who were long dead or not even born yet during the events in the gospels. You should know that it’s really boring having godbots repeat the same pointless list of authors who are completely irrelevant to the matter. Please up your game theists.
Also, i have no need to actually claim JC is a myth, I’m just telling you there’s no evidence that supports the idea that he’s an actual historical person, and there are many, I repeat MANY more, simpler explanations that do not need JC to be a historical character at all. Nowhere did I claim JC is a myth, so it would be nice if you didn’t misrepresent my words so glibly. I’m sure you can defend your position without outright lying about mine if you try.
If you want to go into a spiel about a missing body in a tomb (quite possibly the most ridiculous line of argument ever devised by apologists), that’s ok, but you should know that until you can actually point us to that tomb, that doesn’t really get you anywhere.
Maybe you should just make a run to the last line of defense of the apologist scoundrels pretending to study the bible and it’s history, and accuse us of being biased against miracles. ‘Cause i do enjoy dismantling that obfuscatory canard too.
Just in case the Hovindians reappear, I must ask about this:
Perhaps you can answer a question I’ve long had about this – who was stuffing the pumpkins?
John A, you fail to answer the simplest question – did Jesus even exist. As the you tube video I posted notes – how many contemporary historians and writers (during Jesus supposed life 4BC – 33AD not later like the faked testimonium flavianum – one evidence Origen very thorough early apologist never mentioned it) and there are a number of them even mentioned Jesus – answer – precisely Zero.
It could, possibly, maybe, perhaps, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction and the boll weevils aren’t infesting the cotton fields. But has a supernatural event happened? If you make that claim then you need to have massive evidence to support it. As Carl Sagan put it:
Greta Christina makes the point:
The likelihood of a supernatural event happening is as close to zero as makes no difference.
I wish John A. would make up his mind. In older posts he seemed to be a Sophisticated Theology type, now he’s doing the Biblical Literalist schtick.
So you don’t dispute that he existed. Well at least we are getting somewhere.
Why does his having a younger brother affect the question of Mary’s virginity when he was born?
John A @158
Bullfuckingshit! The Romans didn’t have perform censuses that way for the simple reason I explained @123. It made no logical sense for them to have people go back to their “ancestral” home and there were reasonable, practical reasons for the people not to. As a result, the Romans ran censuses on where people lived, not where their great-great-granddad lived.
The only reason why Luke (and Matthew) claimed that Jesus was born in Bethlehem was that the Messiah was supposed to be “of the line of David” and David originally came from Bethlehem. The Romans couldn’t have cared less about Joseph’s ancestry, especially since Joseph was either 35 or 42 descendents away from David. Also why would Joseph bring a nine-month pregnant wife with him? The Romans only counted heads of households, not dependents. Parking Mary with her mother would be more reasonable.
John A, proven liar and bullshitter, with more evidenceless unlinked claims dismissed without evidence:
Since the stupornatural doesn’t exist without you showing conclusive physical evidence for it, NO, nothing stupornatural happened.
Since the resurrected jebus never existed, it couldn’t have happened. Delusions are not evidence.
John, you make an assertion, link to a paper from places like this: Google Scholar, to back up your assertions, or they will be dismissed each and every time as nothing but you lying and bullshitting for your imaginary deity.
John A, exactly what facts do we share? I don’t see much beyond the fact that we are all alive right now. I’d be nice if you presented some facts first, before asserting that we share them.
Chas:
Bayesian priors, dude. Don’t think that I and others don’t remember you giving various commenters the “let me Google that for you” treatment in recent threads. And seeing as pretty much every comment you’ve left lately has been of the smarmy passive-aggressive testing of people’s patience, it fits in perfectly there too.
PZ is married, so that’s an easy inference to make.
John A,
There is something else you might want to pull your head out of your ass and consider.
Even if, right this very moment, you actually HAD indisputable evidence the god of the bible existed, there is still nothing that suggests he would be deserving of our worship. Have you ever actually read the bible? He’s a bloodthirsty, abusive, tyrannical sociopath.
John A, don’t you get tired of having your ass handed to you constantly? (Dark matter, moron!)
You’re latest tack is just embarrassing. Bart Ehrman’s “opinions aren’t widely shared?” Maybe not among the drooling fundie apologists you’ve been using as sources, but here in the Real World, he is the authority on the matter. The fact that Saul of Tarsus didn’t write most of the epistles attributed to him is a “fringe opinion”? Dude, it’s a universally-accepted fact except among the creationists and flat-earthers you get your crap from.
Seriously, you’ve got to get out more. Actually, your question “just because we know the earth doesn’t have pillars, does that mean the verse isn’t true?” might indicate that there’s actually something wrong with you.
John A #164 wrote:
I don’t think you give yourself enough credit. As long as we agree to remain in the field of reason and evidence, it isn’t impossible in theory for you to change our minds, nor is it impossible in theory for you to change your mind.
If you are mistaken, you’d want to change your mind, right? That is what we would say — and hope — about ourselves. Is it what you’d also hope for yourself?
That ‘faith’ does not guide you, but only the evidence and where it leads.
WithinThisMind @ 170, it was pointed out, more times than I count, in the previous two Thunderdomes, that the biblical god is not worth worship, and if it existed, the only morally right thing to do would be to destroy it. It would be nice if John A could demonstrate his reading abilities by clicking back and reading all that for himself, just to save us a bit of wear ‘n’ tear at this point.
The fact that it doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t change the fact that this was how the Roman cesnsus was conducted, going back to the time of the kings 600 years earlier. And no, it wasn’t where their “great-great-granddad” lived, it went back much further than that, to the foundation of the city itself. The Romans had a much different view on ancestory than we do. Ancestor worship made up a major part of Roman religion, and geneologies were much more than an interest of hobbyists. They were extremely serious. The practice was confined to “Rome” (mainly the city itself) until the Social War of 85 BC, when it started to spread out deeper into Italy. Caesar exported the practice beyond Italy, and Augustus made it empire-wide.
It has always struck me as odd that some people fixate on this point: it is perfectly in accordance with the way the Roman census worked going back to the time of the kings.
Why would it matter where Jesus was born? If Joseph was of the line of David, he was of the line of David whether he was born in Bethlehem or elsewhere. Being in Bethlehem doesn’t fulfill any prophesy. The only reason the different sources record this, the only reason they would record it, is because it happened. There is no need to make up a birth in Bethlehem, and no reason to make up a census reason for the trip to Bethlehem.
i can’t wait until “On the Historicity of Jesus” by Richard Carrier comes out!
John A, please get this much through your skull – the truth matters. The fact that truth is not important at all in religious books/concepts/creeds should bloody mean something to you.
More unevidenced assertions from JohnA, proven liar and bullshitter:
*only if it gets you closer to admitting you are wrong*
*sorry, you first, show me any physical evidence to back up any of your assertions*
*since it never happened, no body to find, as jebus resurrected doesn’t exist*
*no such evidence exists, and you haven’t even attempted to link to any*
*yes, but the difference is that your presuppose without evidence that your imaginary deity exists, and Xian theology isn’t lying and bullshitting, whereas we know otherwise. That requires you to twist your perception of the facts into something that supports your delusions *
John A, fail again. There is no evidence whatsoever that there ever was a world wide census as described in the bible, or that they returned to their ancestral homes or other BS. There may have been localized census but that is about it. Think for a minute. A global census where everyone returned to their ancestral home makes no fucking sense. Romans were ruthless but the were also practical, they didn’t do things that make no fucking sense, unlike many things that happen in the bible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius
Yes, it pretty much is impossible. One difference is our definition of “reason and evidence”. For example, you have a stronger inclination to dismiss supernatural events than I do. Your view of “evidence” is also more limited than mine is (giving a much stronger weight to physical evidence, and a much weaker weight to non-physical evidence like historical, sociological, psychological, etc). I am probably also a bit more deductively minded than you are, and you are probably a bit more inductively minded. I have relatives who have technical jobs and are more open to religion, so I have always been used to a default reconciliation between the two (though I was an atheist for a long time). The reasons for all of this are buried deep in our minds. I have an understanding and appreciation for certain things that you don’t, and you have and understand and appreciation of certain things that I don’t. Most of this is stuff that we are unaware of and wouldn’t seem to have much relevance to this topic.
None of this will changed based off of a rehashing of facts we are both already well aware of.
Of course, as would you. But our opinions are the result of a lifetime of learning and experience, and by nature are developed so that they only change under unusual circumstances. Otherwise, our deepest held values would be changing all the time, which would be bad for obvious reasons.
The creator of the universe isn’t entitled to worship? I suppose everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
How exactly is he a “bloodthirsty, abusive, tyrannical sociopath”?
John A., meet Reality. Reality, John A. I think the two of you should get acquainted.
John A, proven liar and bullshitter:
I don’t and won’t take your unevidenced assertion for this. Either supply a link to support your claim, or shut the fuck up about it. Otherwise, you give prima facie evidence you lie and bullshit.
Damn you, John A, I already mentioned this, and now I am doing your work for you on a fucking tablet …
37 And set up over his head his accusation written, This Is Jesus The King Of The Jews.
26 And the superscription of his accusation was written over, The King Of The Jews.
38 And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, This Is The King Of The Jews.
19 And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was Jesus Of Nazareth The King Of The Jews.
20 This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin.
There are all four Gospels, referring to the most important moment in history, quoting the only document written by the Romans, by Pilate himself, in enough languages to ensure proper translation, up where all could see and memorize during that awful afternoon, critical enough that the priests even bitched about the wording, and yet it can’t get into English with even the poor bastard’s hometown in or out consistently.
There, you raving fuck, the gospels contradict.
I maybe could format better, but fuck you.
Oy vey.
There is no creator, and you, like our other two presuppers, supply zero conclusive physical evidence for one. Zero, Zip, Nada, Nil, Nothing.
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe, 146
He’s reminding me of someone too… though this is from another site.
It was another discussion about the evidence for Jesus’ existence. I argued that, unless a god actually exists, then it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus existed, since without a god, he cannot be the son of the god, and so cannot be anything more than a man who had ideas. Essentially he would simply be another Laozi – it would be the philosophy, rather than the man, that truly mattered. I got a response (which I remember being from a guy with the nym of John A right now, but, honestly that that could easily be confabulation) berating me for asserting that Jesus never mattered. I repeated my statement, clarifying that I meant that it didn’t matter, religiously speaking, whether he existed unless the god existed. He again berated me for asserting that Jesus never mattered, claiming that this was an unskeptical position and that he was a true skeptic.
It’s very reminiscent of this guy’s tendency to (seemingly deliberately) misunderstand what’s being said to him in order to ‘win’ debate points.
I suppose I should be glad that he hasn’t responded to my clarification that it’s not a matter of disliking the idea of the resurrection that’s making me question the value of his assertion that the resurrection and Caesar’s assassination are equally evidenced, because I’m not convinced it would go anywhere.
No.
John A:
There is zero evidence that El Shaddai exists, let alone created anything.
Read your damned bible! Things that your god actively causes, participates in, and condones: genocide, mutilation, murder, wars, mass killings, rape, slavery, famine, plagues. Your god is an ugly, jealous, petty psychopath with an anger control problem. Just for you, a repeat:
A list of God’s killings:
1. The flood of Noah: All flesh died that moved upon the earth. Estimate: 20 million.
2. Abraham’s war to rescue Lot. Estimate: 1,000
3: Sodom and Gomorrah: Shall I hide from Abraham the thing I do? Estimate: 2,000
4. Remember Lot’s wife. 1
5. Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord (so the Lord slew him). 1
6. Onan spilled it on the ground (so the Lord killed him too). 1
7. God’s seven year, world wide famine. Estimate: 70,000
8. The Seventh Plague of Egypt: Hail shall come down upon them and they shall die. Estimate: 300,000
9. The Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. Estimate: 500,000
10. The Lord took off their chariot wheels, at least 600. Estimate: 5,000
11. The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. Estimate: 1,000
12. Who is on the Lord’s side: forcing friends and family to kill each other. 3,000
13. The Lord plagued the people because of the calf Aaron made. Estimate: 1,000
14. God burns Aaron’s sons to death for offering “strange fire”. 2
15. A blasphemer is stoned to death. 1
16. When the people complained, god burned them to death. Estimate: 100
17. While the flesh was still burning between their teeth, the Lord smote them with a very great plague. Estimate: 10,000
18: Ten scouts are killed for their honest report. 10
19. A man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. 1
20. The opposing party is buried alive (along with their families). Estimate: 9
21. God burns 250 people to death for burning incense. 250
22. God killed 14,700 people for complaining about God’s killings. 14,700
23. The Massacre of the Aradites. Estimate: 3,000
24. God sent fiery serpents to bite the people for complaining about the lack of food and water. Estimate: 100
25. A killing to end God’s killing. 24,002
26. The Midianite Massacre: Haave you saved all the women alive? Estimate: 200,000
27. God slowly killed the Israelite army. Estimate: 500,000
28. God the giant killer. Estimate: 5,000
29. God hardens King Sihon’s heart so that all his people can be killed. Estimate: 5,000
30. Og and all the men, women, and children in 60 cities. Estimate: 60,000
31. The Jericho Massacre. Estimate: 1,000
32. Achan and his family are stone and burned to death. Estimate: 5
33. The Ai massacre. 12,000
34. God stops the sun so that Joshua can get his killing done in daylight. Estimate: 5,000
35. Five kings killed and hung on trees. Many more than 5. Estimate: 10,000
36. Joshua utterly destroyed all that breathed as the Lord God commanded. Estimate: 7,000
37. The genocide of the twenty kingdoms. Estimate: 20,000
38. The Anakim: some more giant killing. Estimate: 5,000
39. The Lord delivered the Canaanites and the Perizz. Estimate: 10,000
40. The Jerusalem massacre. Estimate: 1,000
41. Five massacres, a wedding, and some God-proof iron chariots. Estimate: 5,000
42. The Lord delivered Chushanrishathaim. Estimate: 1,000
43. Ehud delivers a message from God. 1
44. God delivers 10,000 lusty Moabites. 10,000
45. Samgar killed 600 Philistines with an ox goad. 600
46. Barak and God massacre the Canaanites. Estimate: 1,000
47. Jael pounds a tent stake through a sleeping man’s skull. 1
48. The Lord set every man’s sword against his fellow. 120,000
49. A city is massacred and 1,000 people burn to death because of God’s evil spirit. More than 1001. Estimate: 2,000
50. The Ammonite massacre. Estimate: 20,000
51. Jephthah’s daughter. 1
52. 42,000 killed for failing the “shibboleth” test. 42,000
53. The spirit of the Lord came upon Samson and he murdered 30 men for their clothes. 30
54. The spirit of the Lord came upon Samson and he killed 1,000 men with the jawbone of an ass. 1,000
55. Samson killed 3,000 in a suicide terrorist attack. 3,000
56. A holy civil war (having to do with rotting concubine body parts used as messages). 65,100
57. The End of Judges: Two genocides and 200 stolen virgins. Estimate: 4,000
58. God kills Eli’s sons and 34,000 Israelite soldiers. 34,002
59. God smote them with hemorrhoids in their secret parts. Estimate: 3,000
60. 50,070 killed for looking in the ark of the Lord. 50,070
61. The Lord thundered great thunder upon the Philistines. Estimate: 1,000
62. Another Ammonite massacre. Estimate: 1,000
63. Jonathan’s very first slaughter (not counting the one before.) 20
64. God forces the Philistines to kill each other. Estimate: 1,000
65. The Amalekite genocide. Estimate: 10,000
66. Samuel hacks Agag to death before the Lord. 1
67. In the Valley of Elah: Goliath. 1
68. David buys a wife with 200 Philistine foreskins. 200
69. The Lord said to David, Go and smite the Philistines. Estimate: 10,000
70. God killed Nabal (and David got his wife and other stuff). 1
71. David commits random acts of genocide. Estimate: 60,000
72. David spends the day killing Amalekites. Estimate: 1,000
73. God killed Saul (and his sons and soldiers) for not killing all the Amalekites. Estimate: 100
74. David killed the messenger. 1
75. David killed Rechab and Baanah, cut off their hands and feet, and hung their bodies over the pool. 2
76. God helps David smite the Philistines from the front and rear. Estimate: 2,000
77. God killed Uzzah for trying to keep the ark from falling. 1
78. David killed two thirds of the Moabite POWs and enslaved the rest. Estimate: 667
79. The Lord gave David victory wherever he went. Estimate: 66,850
80. David killed every male in Edom. Estimate: 65,000
81. Thus did David unto all the children of Ammon. Estimate: 1,000
82. God slowly kills a baby. 1
83. Famine and human sacrifice. Estimate: 3,000
84. David’s mighty men and their amazing killings. Estimate: 3,400
85. God killed 70,000 because David had a census that God told him to do. More than 70,000. Estimate: 200,000
86. Solomon carried out the deathbed wish of David by having Joab and Shimei murdered. 2
87. A tale of two prophets. 1
88. Jeroboam’s son: God kills another child. 1
89. Jeroboam’s family. Estimate: 10
90. Baasha’s family and friends. Estimate: 20
91. Zimri burns to death. 1
92. The Drought of Elijah. Estimate: 3,000
93. Elijah kills 450 religious leaders in a prayer contest. At least 450 (used as estimate), possibly 850.
94. The first God assisted slaughter of the Syrians. Estimate: 10,000
95. God killed 100,000 Syrians for calling him a God of the hills. 100,000
96. God killed 27,000 Syrians by making a wall fall on them. 27,000
97. God sent a lion to kill a man for not smiting a prophet. 1
98. God killed Ahab for not killing a captured king. 1
99. God burned 102 men to death for asking Elijah to come down from his hill. 102
100. God killed king Ahaziah for asking the wrong God. 1
101. God sent two bears to rip apart 42 boys for making fun of a prophet’s bald head. 42
102. The Lord delivered the Moabites. Estimate: 5,000
103. A skeptic is trampled to death. 1
104. God’s seven year famine. Estimate: 7,000
105. Jehoram of Israel. 1
106. Jezebel. 1
107. Ahab’s sons: seventy heads in two heaps. 70
108. Ahab’s hometown family, friends, and priests. Estimate: 20
109. Jehu killed Ahaziah’s family. 42
110. Jehu and his partner show their zeal for the Lord by killing the rest of Ahab’s family. Estimate: 20
111. Jehu assembles the followers of Baal and then slaughters them all. Estimate: 1,000
112. The priest of Baal and Queen Athaliah. 2
113. God sent lions to eat those that didn’t fear him enough. Estimate: 10
114. An angel killed 185,000 sleeping soldiers. 185,000
115. God caused king Sennacherib to be killed by his sons. 1
116. Josiah killed all the priests of the high places. Estimate: 100
117. Just another holy war. Estimate: 50,000
118. God killed a half million Israelite soldiers. 500,000
119. Jeroboam. 1
120. God killed a million Ethiopians. 1,000,000
121. Friendly Fire: God forced “a great multitude” to kill each other. Estimate: 30,000
122. God made Jehoram’s bowels fall out. 1
123. God killed Jehoram’s sons. Estimate: 3
124. Ahaziah of Judah. 1
125. Joash, the princes, and army of Judah. Estimate: 10,000
126. God destroyed Amaziah. Estimate: 1,000
127. God smote Ahaz with the king of Syria. Estimate: 10,000
128. God killed 120,000 valiant men for forsaking him. 120,000
129. The fall of Jerusalem. Estimate: 10,000
130. God and Satan kill Job’s children and slaves. Estimate: 60
131. Hananiah. 1
132. Ezekiel’s wife. 1
133. Ananias and Sapphira. 2
134. Herod Aggripa. 1
135. Jesus. 1
Totals:
Biblical numbers only: 2,476,636
Estimate: 24,634,205.
Drunk with Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible by Steve Wells (if you want chapter and verse, buy the book. I’m done typing the bleeding obvious.) John A, get this book, and read it. It has all the relevant bible verses in it, from the KJV, all the context is there, and this barely touches on what an evil creature your god happens to be.
Well, this pretty much confirms that John A’s earlier “sophisticated theology” facade was simply that, a dishonest act.
To be unaware of the theological significance of Bethlehem pretty much cinches it. He doesn’t even understand the very book he’s trying to defend. Probably hasn’t even read it. At least not for understanding.
Oh seriously, why the fuck can’t christians deal with reality when it comes to their own claims.
So you do not contest that there is extant physical evidence for Ceasar and not for Jesus. So far for your “better attested to then Ceasar” spiel. Why the hell do you even bother throwing out lies when you should surely have learned by now that you will be called on them every time?
You pretend to be informed about this subject and you have no idea? I would give you examples but you’ll just bring out your ignorance and pretend they couldn’t work because “reasons”. The fact is, myths can spring up in a matter of years if not months and Jesus fits the mold as a composite character. No actual godman is needed to explain the facts around the origin of christianity.
I don’t think you ever established that someone couldn’t find a body. Are you treating the gospels written by anonymous cult members as factual history? Are you asking me to do so? And if yes, where did you even try to explain why we should take this text as authorative? Doesn’t a body require an actual person? Did I miss where you established that JC is most likely an actual historical person? Where is this friggin’ tomb anyway?
So much for thorough apologetics… all I’m seeing you do is telling us that you can show JC to be a historical person if we first take the gospels as truth. *sigh*
For the last time, the gospels are the claim, start giving us the evidence for your assertions!!!
Oh, and don’t you even try to pretend that we’re all working from the same facts, you’re still denying the gospel authors are anonymous, yet your friggin’ bible wil tell you so in the footnotes or the back. Stop lying is my advice, and start studying the facts.
Heck, he’s ignoring me again.
That’s three threads he’s unwilling/unable to answer my pretty basic questions.
BTW, John A – your ‘no-one will ever change anyone’s mind’ bit is what Christian apologists have been telling themselves literally for centuries.
And yet, religion gives way to science a bit more each year, each decade… not uniformly, of course, but over time the trend is clear.
Your side’s losing this fight, John A.
That doesn’t mean our side’s going to win it, of course, in any meaningful way, but your side pretty much lost when they were no longer able to kill people for heresy.
Wikipedia is your source? Believe it or not, there are facts out there that Wikipedia does not include. One fact, as I said earlier, was that this was the common practice for the Roman census. Again this gets to what I was talking about earlier. There are certain nuances that behind both of our opinions on this and other topics that we largely don’t think about. In this case, there is the fact that, by any normal historical standard, if a sources says something, and there isn’t a reason to doubt it, it is accepted. The lack of additional citations of this event is not a reason, which is good since many events (such as most of Roman history before the Punic Wars) comes to us from a single source. Applying this standard (only believe ancient claims if at least two sources attest to them) is simply not used anywhere because it would mean most historical claims would be invalid. It is used by the narrow band of skeptical bibilcal scholars for some reason (since it is necessary to confirm what they already think), but it is used no where else. To you this no doubt sounds like splitting hairs, but to me, it is simply applying the same standard to two different but similar situations.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/government/qt/052311-The-Servian-Reforms.htm
Also, John A, read this thread, there are *two* pages of comments: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/03/28/thunderdome-44/comment-page-1/#comments
Ehh, none of those count. Out of context. Those people had it coming. Um…historians.
@John A, 179
So many issues with this comment… but very little patience for someone who, either intentionally or accidentally, is not doing a very good job of responding to what is actually being said to him… I’ll just keep it to one thing:
No. Why do you imagine that being a creator entitles that creator to worship? Why do you imagine that a being of the power and intelligence required to create an entire universe would crave worship? Why would such a being be so driven by ego? Why would this creator be so human?
Why would the act of creation excuse multiple acts of mass slaughter, simply because they created the beings being killed? If I had the power to create an ant farm, then decided to drown them all, because they weren’t milling around in a way that pleased me, would I be worthy of worship? Would I even be worthy of respect? Or would I be derided as a petulant and needlessly cruel child?
37 And set up over his head his accusation written, This Is Jesus The King Of The Jews.
26 And the superscription of his accusation was written over, The King Of The Jews.
38 And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, This Is The King Of The Jews.
19 And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was Jesus Of Nazareth The King Of The Jews.
20 This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin.
There you go. The big event, the Roman document, plenty of time to read it, the priests quibbled over the language, there were multiple languages to translate from, everybody could see it, and it was important enough to get mentioned in each of the four gospels.
But the words don’t match. The gospels don’t even agree on whether the home town was in there. This was a real thing, that would have made a lovely souvenir, and it isn’t accurate.
Sorry that I didn’t format better, but I am on a tablet and fuck John A.
Just for the sake of argument, here is a short take on the resurrection. As pointed out by Bart Ehrman and many others, even if you accept that Jesus existed, the a priori probability that he resurrected are next to zero. Experience teaches that people don’t resurrect from the dead. Even if we play the game and can’t account for the so called evidence of the empty tomb, appearances, etc, as played by WLC and others, it is still a priori more likely that some natural thing happened even if we can’t come up with an account for it. There are numerous other possibilities like one of the disciples stole the body, it was buried in the wrong tomb so was mistakenly though to be missing, the body was put in a shallow grave, grief inspired hallucinations account for the appearances, etc, etc. I don’t know if any of these are true, or countless others which could be thought of, but we can’t rule any of them out. The burden of proof is on the person who claims the resurrection occurred and not the other way around, circumstantial accounts like the gospels simply won’t do. Of course if you presuppose there is a god, then anything is possible. But I could also presuppose that there are aliens and then explain the Roswell coverup.
Rey:
*snort* That’s biblical reasoning, alright.
John A:
“supernatural” and “deduction”, are mutually exclusive. How can you accept the first and be more of the second?? SUPERNATURAL means “non-physical”, and yet, you call that “evidence”? You are just spouting off what you think “sounds” intelligent, but you are failing, big time.
Yet you haven’t linked to any source to back this up, and nobody here believes your unevidenced assertions. So, either supply a link, shut the fuck up about it, or acknowledge you have lost the argument as you are nothing but a pure fabricator of history….
Another repeat: This quotation is attributed to Marcus Aurelius – “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your
loved ones. I am not afraid.”
I’m good with that, because in all conscience, I could never worship the god of the bible, who is an evil creature through and through, and if it existed, one of the worst fuck-ups of all time.
Wikipedia may not be the best source but it’s better than no source at all.
@179
John A
all you are demonstrating with this reasoning-defeatist nonsense is that you do not understand reasoning.
if something is evidence, you should be able to show and describe how it is evidence. this is not impossible, unless what you have is simply not evidence and you are incoherent.
reasoning-defeatism is one of the only hiding places for dishonest irrational people.
Was Dr. Frankenstein entitled to worship from his monster?
Sometimes being a creator not only does not entitle one to worship, it makes one deserving of damnation.
“Fact”.
You seem to like to use that word.
Yet you also evidently don’t know what it means.
I’ll just ask, like I did to the Hovindites, how exactly you define “worship”. Because I don’t think I’ve ever done that for anyone or anything, I feel like I couldn’t even fake it.
@Inaji
I always love when godbotherers do the whole “But what if you’re wrong? What will you say to god when you die?” thing. I’ll say I did the best I could with the hand I was dealt. If that’s not good enough for god, so be it.
Well, since John A is now onto pure lies (aka, the Roman census’ always had people return to their home towns), we can pretty much dispense with him.
And John, you should know that some branches of Christianity claim that Mary was a virgin her entire life and is still now a virgin in heaven, having been bodily assumed “up there”, just like Jesus. So, the issue of him having a “real” brother is definitely a theological question, which if you were living in the 12th century or so would probably get you burned at the stake for claiming your point of view.
Idiot @ 190:
You just completely shot down your whole argument. It’s patently obvious that this only applied to Rome itself. Maybe it’s conceivable it might have been extended to the Latin Confederates, but I can categorically assure you that the Romans didn’t give Shit One about what “tribes” a bunch of Barbarians divided themselves up into.
@190
John A
LOL!
you complain about wikipedia as a source……and then give absolutely no source for your own assertion!
Seven of Mine:
I’ve told theists before that if their god turns out to be waiting when I’m dead, we’re gonna have a long chat about what a massive fuck up he is, and I’m going to want answers.
John A hallucinates that Romans went house to house in the entire empire (not just the Jews) asking people to travel each to their ancestral homelands to register for taxation. First, how is it possible to verify this and how far do you trace it back. Imagine that I was a tribe who was relocated from the Babylonian captivity and my ancestors were from Egypt. The Romans ask me to travel back to Egypt to register for taxation. It would probable cost the entire wealth of the empire to accomplish this plus the total chaos this would entail. Why pray tell would they need such a census to tax people. Even without evidence this makes no fucking sense. Show us the evidence and rationale why the Romans would do such an asinine thing. The story is almost as nonsensical as the 2,000,000 living on Manna in the Sinai peninsula, or the flood story.
Seven of Mine replied to Tomas C way back in #866 of the last thread
Indeed, real historians acknowledge over and over just how bad and limited the evidence is. I know I flogged Philip Harland last night but I am going to do it again. To understand just how little historical evidence there is for Jesus some people might want to listen to his series The Historical Jesus in Context where he talks at length about the sources we can use to know Jesus, Josephus and the canonical and non-canonical gospels, and that is about it. Both have severe problems and flaws. Even though he goes on to discuss Jesus was though he is a historical figure he does this by looking at what we know about the time and context, what it was like in Galilee at the time, what it meant to be Judean there at the time, because there is so little evidence for a historical Jesus.
Also, there are a fucktonne of Underworlds. What happens if a xian lands in one of them?
Seven of Mine @ 205:
(Love the ‘nym, by the way)
Like I told impact in the last thread, if YHWH actually existed, and I met up with him, I’d kick his ass. And I’ve got an iron chariot parked right out back, so I think I can take him.
lol, the troll that keeps on giving.
Are you saying there are no reasons to doubt the veracity of texts from the hands of anonymous cult writers when they claim dozens of things with zero prior probability happened which nobody else took note of?
You do realize that things like the sky darkening during the day, earthquakes and zombies walking the streets are quite unusual right? All we are asking for is just one friggin’ account to corroborate these events which would surely have affected tens of thousands of people. And you can’t even get us that.
huhuhuh historical standards huhuhuh
What a joke, everything is turned upside down by these ignoramuses. Try applying the same standards as christian biblical scholars do to any other ancient text.
@173 – Yes, but we all know that these folks have a short term memory limited to 100 posts and no long term memory at all, so I thought I’d repeat the question.
@179 – I play this game called Universe Sandbox and build a couple universes a day. Am I worthy of worship?
As to your question about ‘how is he a tyrant’, you might want to someday read that bible thingy of yours.
Ah yes. You think the creator of the universe was not God, but inflation.
Yes, this is true. My path from atheism was a result of the opposite line of reasoning: if Jesus did rise from the dead, then God must exist.
I think this just sums up John A’s argument style in a nutshell:
John A #164:
Menyambal tells John A something, quite categorically. Through either an epic level of stupidity, or blatant malicious intent, he completely misrepresents what Menyambal actually said to such a degree that, according to John A, Menyambal said the precise opposite of what they actually did say, even though they said it in as simple, straightforward language as it is possible to do. I would say that John A is either too imbecilic or too dishonest to be worth bothering with any more.
Your unevidenced assertion, dismissed without evidence. Your creator doesn’t exist and never did. You, like your fellow presups, are missing the needed physical evidence to prove you aren’t delusional fools. And it never, ever, appears.
Except jebus was never resurrected, as your deity doesn’t exist. Checkmate theist.
Yet you can’t/won’t evidence that properly.
What is your point of your continuing to lie and bullshit without providing third party evidence to back up any assertions. I don’t believe one word of your testament, which is delusional fool buffoonery and other idiocy.
Oh my, seriously? There are almost always reasons to doubt historical sources, they have limitations due to what they are, for instance, ancient biography. Historians acknowledge that all sources have flaws and problems and try to understand the limitations of their source material to pull out information that is likely true. They acknowledge that it is about making probabilistic arguments that some things are likely true, but they know it is not completely solid evidence.
Really? You have calculated the probability? Tell me exactly what the probability that you calculated is.
No, experience teaches that it doesn’t happen often, not that it can’t happen. One would have to prove a negative to prove that it can never happen.
Did you calculate the probability?
There are numerous other possibilities, certainly. And during my transition from atheism I went through them. The problem is that they create more problems than they solve. For example, the lack of a body answers the question of why no one ever found one. Other possibilities create new problems: if they mistakenly put the wrong body in the tomb, where did the original end up? And what happened to this wrong body? Did it rise somehow? Okham’s razor applies here. Your hallucination option is an example. You are going to claim that thousands of people hallucinated, and all had the exact same hallucination?
The only reason to jump through all of these hoops is because you want to believe something.
Yes, non-physical events can have non-physical evidence.
Your definition of “evidence” excludes anything you find unpersuasive.
I will credit John A with being polysyllabic which is a refreshing brake from monosyllabic POC. He also writes in complete sentences with and sometimes with complete thoughts. I won’t criticize spelling because I am a confessed terrible speller.
@John A, 216
? Inflation isn’t a creative force. It came after the “start” of the universe, not before it.
Why? Even assuming that Jesus really did rise from the dead, surely, before we presume a god, it makes more sense to consider the possibility of an impressive capacity for healing, and a tenacious constitution that, rather than dying, lead to Jesus being unconscious and his signs of life simply being beyond the technology of the time to detect? Why not assume that fairies with the power to heal and restore humans existed, and that he impressed them with his passion and willingness to face execution for his views?
What is the path from Jesus raising from the dead to your god’s existence?
More importantly, before we even consider any of that, what is the evidence that shows Jesus raising from the dead?
John A, you need to provide evidence, sources, and citations for your claims. Credible ones. Your belief doesn’t mean jack shit. Someone can believe that tiny polka dot aliens are recreating their underwear every moment of every day, it doesn’t prove that is actually happening.
Do you believe in absolute truth?
@175
Yay, me too!
John A, I was just coming in here to second the reccomendations for Bart Ehrman, but then I saw that you’d already dismissed them. Where did you get the idea that Ehrman is “fringe” in any way? Did someone tell you that? He’s not even a little bit fringe in his field. Ehrman’s a scholar and he backs up his opinions with evidence; not everyone in the Historical Jesus-o-sphere agrees with him on everything, but that’s par for the course in any kind of scholarship.
Anyway, give him another chance. He made several lecture series for the Teaching Company that are accessible, enlightening, and fun — you can listen in the car or while you exercise or wherever you like.
Dear Lying John A,
There are numerous problems with wikipedia, but it is good for giving sources. The wikipedia article that Mickey B linked to has sources (something that your bathering lacks). As it happens, I have one of the sources, E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, Penguin, 1993, p86:
Guess what Sanders says. Go ahead, guess.
Okay, you aren’t going to guess, so I’ll tell you. Sanders says:
Please note that Sanders is a Christian who accepts the historicity of Jesus. He’s a professor of religion at Duke, was previously an Oxford fellow, and is considered a reliable Biblical scholar by other Biblical scholars.
The contradictions of the Gospels make me think of how DC Comics has rebooted their universe several times during the company\s existence. Basic details have remained the same, such as that Batman is Bruce Wayne. But the way the character has been written and various background details have changed. So anyone who read summaries of the various continuities would be rather confused if they didn’t know this. They’d be scratching their heads at mentions of Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s son, who has only been part of canon since 2006. The Gospels seem the same way. You have Mark, who mentions nothing about Jesus’s father Joseph. Which isn’t a surprise if you consider the subsequent Gospels different continuities, meaning Mark could hardly have written for a character who hadn’t been created yet. Yet it’s still a story about Jesus, just as the early Batman comics were still stories about Batman, just not one who had a son with the daughter of one of his arch enemies.
@220
John A
here you go, noob.
Oh hell no. If anything, he (of course he’s male, right, creating things is what males do, LOL) deserves a swift kick in the pants for doing such a shittastic job. Don’t get me wrong, the sunsets are nice and all, but what’s up with the planet being mostly water and we’re land animals? Couldn’t I have some gills or something to go along with these lungs? Why can’t I see as well as an octopus? And this whole “bearing children in pain” business is bullshit. So Eve fucked up. That means every woman ever has to endure excruciating pain to propagate the species? Fuck your dumbass god.
John A, in my people’s mythology, Inyan is the creator.* Why aren’t you worshipping Inyan?
*Inyan (Rock) had no beginning for he was when there was no other. His spirit was Wakantanka, and he was the first of the superior Gods. Then he was soft and shapeless like a cloud, but he had all the powers and was everywhere. Han was then, but she is not a being; she is only the black of darkness.
Inyan longed to exercise his powers, but could not do so for there was no other that he might use his powers upon. If there were to be another, he must create it of that which he must take from himself, and he must give to it a spirit and a portion of his blood. As much of his blood as would go from him, so much of his powers would go with it, for his powers were in his blood, and his blood was blue. He decided to create another as a part of himself so that he might keep control of all the powers.
To do this, he took from himself that which he spread around about himself in the shape of a great disk whose edge is where there can be no beyond. This disk he named Maka (Earth). He gave to Maka a spirit that is Maka-akan (Earth Goddess). She is the second of the superior Gods, but she is part of Inyan.
To create Maka, Inyan took so much from himself that he opened his veins, and all his blood flowed from him so that he shrank and became hard and powerless. As his blood flowed from him, it became blue waters which are the waters upon the earth. But the powers can not abide in waters; and when the blood of Inyan became the waters, the powers separated themselves from it and assumed another shape. This other being took the form of a great blue dome whose edge is at, but not upon, the edge of Maka.
Inyan, Maka, and the waters are material or that which can be held together; and they are the world. That which is Tanka (the Sky), is not material but spirit, Nagi Tanka (Supreme God or Sky God) is the Great Mystery who is all powerful and the source of all power, and his name is Škan (Almighty).
Thus in the beginning there were Inyan, Maka, and the waters, all of which are the world; and Nagi Tanka, named Škan, the blue from which is the sky above the world. The world is matter and has no powers except those bestowed by Nagi Tanka.
When these powers assumed one shape, they said a voice spoke, saying, “I am the source of energy. I am Škan.”
This was the beginning of the third superior God who is superior to all because he is spirit. This was the beginning before there was time. This was the beginning of the world and of the sky over the world.
Another unevidenced assertion. Won’t you ever stop?
But both creation and your resurrect ARE physical events. You lose again, as you present no evidence, and your unsupported word isn’t evidence.
Nope fuckwit, the definition of evidence is that which is repeatable, and not a stage magician trick.
Of course, the existence of such evidence would be impossible to demonstrate to any physical being.
John A I see the linchpin for you is the resurrection, and all else follows. Toss out all your William Lane Craig books. Read Ehrman, read Richard Carrier and others. If there is a rational bone in your brain left, you can undo the power of the Sith with a little bit of work.
And yet this was how they always did it. That is sounds unreasonable to you is besides the point.
That is not official Catholic doctrine, but they do allow for it.
During the time of Servius Tullius, Roman land was limited to the city itself. The practice continued and expanded until late in the empire.
I, and all the ancient historians. If you don’t think it is reasonable, too bad.
How did you calculate the probability?
It is unusual, which is why Christian writers brought it up in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, as evidence against anti-Christian writers. The events were documented in the larger Roman world, and this point wasn’t disputed at the time (the polemic against Celsus is one example).
You seen pretty sure of that, despite the lack of evidence that you are right. You have a lot of faith.
This is absolutely true. And you can believe that the bible is fallible, has mistakes and contradictions (like most other ancient writings) but that the main points are true (same standard as is applied to other ancient writings) and therefore that Jesus did rise from the dead. This was the path I followed. Accepting the bible as the inspired Word of God came later, but wasn’t necessary.
SallyStrange:
I have an invisible dragon in my garage, and you can’t prove I don’t!
I’d distinguish between saying the gospels were written by eyewitnesses and the idea that the sources of the gospel traditions were eyewitnesses (like what Bauckham says).
Oh, so do I. Everyone’s got an invisible dragon these days! I keep mine in the attic though. Bet mine’s prettier than yours.
Al Dente,
Thanks for bringing up E. P. Sanders. His work is definitely interesting and when you compare it to the work of John Dominic Crossan one can start to understand just how little information there is about Jesus and just how much disagreement there is within this field. Due to their different analysis of the sources they come to starkly different conclusions about the historical Jesus, Sanders concluding Jesus was a apocalyptic prophet, that he was calling on a coming kingdom of god, whereas Crossan believes he was an egalitarian peasant, that god’s kingdom already existed. Historians, even staunchly Christian historians such as Sanders know that the evidence is flawed and requires careful analysis and that there is huge room for disagreement. Both Sanders and Crossan are both really worth reading and it highlights just how difficult it is to say what is true and what is not.
At least we’re in agreement that “having lots of faith” is not an optimal state to be in vis-a-vis evidence and truth.
SallyStrange:
Hey, mine’s made of moonbeams and unicorn farts, she’s beautiful!
@john a
back this up.
back this up.
back this up!
First you entertain the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead, then the possibility that he was near death. These aren’t the same things. I suppose it is possible that Jesus had some ultra-rare genetic mutation that allowed him to be dead for three days (crucified, organs exposed through flogging, stabbed right through the heart) and then not only come back to life, but have all of those wounds fixed (though still holes in his hands, which would be very convienent. Oh and that on top of spending 3 years telling one monster of a lie. Some luck.
Not being a pathological liar with some ultra-rare genetic rise-from-the-dead genetic defect, and instead, having told the truth the whole time, seems the more likely occurrence.
Just think it through yourself, just enter an alternative reality where you accept that Jesus was dead for three days and then rose from the dead. Which of those two options is the best explanation?
I really hate to tell you this, but even allowing the possibility that Jesus really did rise from the dead brings you dangerously close to Christianity. For me, the first step was even less than that: I just accepted that Jesus thought he was the Son of God. That was much further than I ever thought my atheist mind would allow, and it opened the door.
Good news for you, I am sure you won’t continue down that path.
Wait…”non-physical events have non-physical evidence”?
Um…I thought you said the resurrection was a physical event…therefore, should have physical evidence.
And supernatural events (aka “miracles”) are physical manifestations in any event. The burning bush — physical event. Plagues — physical events. Red Sea parting — physical events.
The fact that none of them happened shouldn’t stand in the way of understanding that supernatural events are — by definition — physical events that break the laws of physics.
So, in addition to being a liar of the facts, you’re too stupid to realize that you just handed yourself over to defeat by claiming that non-physical events have non-physical evidence.
Way to go, John A. You just scored an “own goal”.
But as long as I’m on the subject, why is it that none of the supernatural events claimed in any holy book has left tangible evidence? Why isn’t the bush still burning? Why didn’t the Red Sea part again after drowning the Egyptian Army? For a god, this would be a trivial thing and one that would go a long way toward proving its existence.
Instead, we get “the dog ate my homework” miracles. Moving into the NT:
* Where’s the wine? (We drank it)
* Loaves and fishes? (We ate it)
* The healed sick? (Dead)
* Lazarus (Dead again — which means he was only temporarily resurrected. Shitty job, that one)
* The risen Jesus (Invisible in heaven)
Sure — that’s credible. Not. Any true god could leave unmistakable signs of its existence and not badly written mythologies coming from an age when 90%+ of the populace was illiterate.
John A @234
According to EP Sanders the Romans did censuses the way us reasonable people think they did, not in the incredibly impracticable way you and Luke seem to think.
So to show us you’re not lying, you’re going to have to produce some evidence that you’re not lying. Got any? Saying “nope, you guys are wrong” isn’t evidence.
I have three witty bitty dragons who are getting bigger now and ready to take the seven kingdoms back for the House of Targaryen. Gotcha there.
The insane asylums are full of people who think they’re god…or Napoleon…or a jellyfish.
Inaji –
Oh yeah? Well mine’s made of rainbows and faerie wing moltings! He’s WAY prettier than yours!
SCHISM!
LOL why? they are a dime a dozen!
how could that be hard for an “atheist mind to allow”??? how can you write anything that you do thinking that you can be taken seriously? you are ridiculous.
The lady doth protest too much. Me thinks John A you are a wee bit unsure about the resurrection. Look into it some more and you might come out the other side seeing that is totally implausible BS, and there are tons of ways to account for the so called facts with out concluding that the resurrection occurred.
John A, my 194 was to show you that the four gospels do contradict.
You said that nobody here will change their mind. I certainly would, if there were evidence, and most of us have changed their mind about God nce in their life—you even say you have. Projecting your current inability to change off onto others is wrong.
You say that you are just conducting this clusterfuck for entertainment. That is trolling, then, and PZ will ban you. I certainly am not doing this just for fun, but for education, and to possibly change your mind. But you now assert that that will never happen, in either direction. You are operating in bad faith, and you are dishonest, by God.
You have a sneering, snarky attitude that is certainly un-Christlike, although it is very Christian.
You remind me of a guy that I used to argue theology with. He could blow off impressive-sounding philosophy all day long, and sneer at any counter argument. But when we sat down to a game of Jeopardy, it became clear how little else he knew, and how profoundly stupid he was. And when I got to college and took philosophy, I learned how old and unoriginal his arguments were, and how the counters that I had come up with, out of my own little head, were much the same as those brought up by philosophers of great renown. And that kid, working in a factory, acted like he was the wisest of men, and that nobody else made a damned bit of sense. So fuck him, and John A, fuck you too for being a condescending, pretentious, dishonest, hate-filled, trouble-making, waste of a human life.
TRIPLE SCHISM!
John A
John A doesn’t understand probability. Pathological liar: Not that rare. Recovering from wounds: Not nearly as rare as fucking magical resurrection.
All the handwaving in the fucking world doesn’t change that.
Oh for the love of rats, this is sheer idiocy. What you think some man thought (assuming that man ever existed) constituted valid reasoning? You may have been an atheist at some point, however, you weren’t a thinking one.
SallyStrange:
Godsdamned deep rifts, they ruin everything!
That is official Catholic dogma. The Catholic Encyclopedia says:
Sorry, you lose AGAIN!
About the whole Son of God thing–why IS God male? What does that mean, exactly, in theological terms? When he impregnated Mary, did his holy sperm just materialize inside her fallopian tubes, or did he also manifest a nice holy phallus and give her a good time too while he was at it? I would imagine sex with the creator of the universe would be pretty mind-blowing. Then again, maybe he just magically willed her egg into thinking it had been fertilized and then manifested the divine chromosomes during meiosis. Too bad we never get to hear Mary’s perspective on it.
And what kind of useless God needs a human’s help to make one more human? After all he is the one who created them in the first place, right?
But you just don’t feel like providing the evidence, even though you know people here are practically begging for you to provide some? That seems odd, given that it should be obvious that people here require evidence to change their opinion, and now you are suddenly holding out on us. From what I gather from your holy book, that means you’re not following your gods instructions.
No, you read a book where the author (I’m guessing McDowell, Strobel) held your hand while pretending to be taking a skeptical look at Christianities origins by assuming the gospels are true, then removing one assertion from the story (the resurrection), and unsurprisingly reaching the conclusion that the story now makes even less sense. Therefore your favorite god.
Yea, sorry pal, you were played like a fiddle, and nobody here will buy into such nonsensical motivated reasoning.
Like you said, it sure seems like you are desperate to reach a particular conclusion at any cost.
John A
Do I really need to say anything, Mr. same-standard-applied-to-similar-cases?
And your evidence is? See, this is a claim beyond what your previous source says. Your source talked about using this method within the fairly limited area of Rome itself, at one specific time.
I could go on, but I think the more important point here is your tendency to claim more than your sources actually support. When you’re talking to people who disagree with you and you claim A, B and C, but only provide evidence for A, you end up looking quite dishonest.
I would suggest providing evidence for this method of Roman census-taking used in an area the size of Palestine. That would help your case a lot. Even if the Romans used this method in one case, there’s every reason to think they wouldn’t use it in the case of the Jewish population of Palestine. For one, using it in an area like that would disrupt the local economy; people traveling here or there, unable to work.
Aw dang it. I’d really like to know what constitutes worship.
Inaji @ 230:
Well, when it comes to battling creation myths, yours has no pillars and no “waters above the firmament”, so you’re already ahead on points.
<OT>I would really like to learn Lakota; I know Harry Flashman probably isn’t a popular literary figure in these parts, but he did say it was the most beautiful language in the world</OT>
Why does God have a penis? Well I think this complex theological point makes sense when you look at Genesis, look at Eve, look at the nameless daughters and nameless wives, and realize that only Men are Human. Women are just walking and talking ribs that are born when a woman fails at pregnancy and the man’s sperm isn’t Mighty enough.
John A, the quote you posted about Severius says that he made new tribes based on location. Which is pretty much the opposite of what you wanted it to say.
You really show poor reading skills. Why should we trust you around a Bible.
In my 194, I listed the various versions of the inscription on the cross. Please notice that in none of them did the Romans reference Bethlehem, the place that you say they thought his family belonged. The Roman census must have messed up there, eh?
To LykeX, at #8:
.
There is not only no credible public evidence that Jesus ever existed, and plenty of evidence that the so-called “evidence” is fraudulent (the spurious interpolation(s) in Josephus, for example) but there is a very powerful additional reason to reject the “Jesus” hypothesis, as follows:
.
If there were credible evidence, for example contemporary, independent documentation, such as reports from the Roman governor(s) – either or both civil and military – of the area at that time (which there should have been, considering the reports of matters of far less import than massive crowds following an upstart preacher, causing near riots), then this would be an entirely different debate.
.
And one would expect that the Roman Catholic Church, which is the successor to the Roman empire, would have, in its copious archives, verifiable copies of those reports. And one would expect that, given the furor over the existence of said “Jesus”, that such reports would have long since been trotted out, inspected by credible experts on the various disciplines involved to come to some rational conclusion as to veracity.
.
The fact that it would be all to the Church’s benefit to have such proof made public, AND IT HASN’T BEEN, is more than enough evidence to me that the entire subject is a massive fraud, con game, what-ever-else-you-wish-to-term it.
.
Therefore I utterly reject any and all efforts to convince me otherwise, and refuse to bother investigating, or debating, the subject any further.
SallyStrange:
But, but if he did that, then the Son of God wouldn’t be the Son of Man!* And the whole mess wouldn’t be needlessly torturous, either. Can’t be having with that. Besides, sex sells. What better way to sell stories?
*Which brings to mind Charlie Manson’s cogitations on him being the Son of Man, because of his surname.
SallyStrange @256
I am not making this up. Some medieval scholars claimed that Mary was impregnated through her ear.
Yeah geez. The Phoenix Force didn’t need nobody’s help to come down to the physical universe in the form of Jean Grey.
This, by the way, is over and above any and all consideration of the incredible STUPIDITYof the contents of said bible.
.
It is filled with contradictions, confusions, out-and-out impossibilities (pi equal to 3?????), beyond counting, or at least my patience to count.
.
The deity portrayed therein is a mean, vicious, evil, homophobic paranoid – one to make Hannible Lector look like a fine upstanding citizen.
.
‘Nuf said.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge @260
JRR Tolkien felt that Finnish was the most pleasant language to listen to. He based Quenya on Finnish.
The Very Rev @ 260:
For the most part, Lakota cosmology is based on natural things. You can read the rest of it here: http://1onewolf.com/lakota/cosmo.htm
I would really like to learn Lakota; I know Harry Flashman probably isn’t a popular literary figure in these parts, but he did say it was the most beautiful language in the world
It’s a lovely language. There are a number of places you can learn it online: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Lakota+language+lessons&t=i
No need for periods between paragraphs! THUNDERDOOOOOOOMMMME!
Al Dente @ 265:
Curses, you beat me to it. Even with Javascript disabled, this page takes forever to load!
So I decieded to look up Saunders on the census and apparently he has been criticised on this point
Cited here
http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2009/02/non-issues-in-lukan-birth-narrative.html
This is a hell of way to spend Anpetu Wakan (Sunday).
Tomas C
Have you got a defence of liberatianism yet that addresses the problems brought up in post #658 of the previous thread?
Although I detest some of the ideas in Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, he makes some very good points that monotheism evolved from polytheism to monoladry to monotheism. Monoladry is loyalty to one god but recognition that there are other gods. Though it is speculative, I can imagine that the original Yahweh in the polytheist or monoladry stage was a statue with a penis and he had a consort such as Astarte. Pretty much every other Canaanite god was like that, so why not Yahweh. This also illustrates that the bible is not a static book, it represents quite diverse and contradictory representations of the deity evolved over hundreds to thousands of years.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge @260: Coulda sworn Flashy said Persian was the most lovely language (probably in Flashman at the Charge), but he may have changed his fictitious mind.
Al Dente @ 268:
Oh, I’m already learning Quenya.
Mikeyb @ 275, you left out Henotheism.
John A @126:
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The tribes all gathered on the Field of Mars, organized by affiliation. Lotsa sources. Here’s one, with pics!
Bob Grigjanis @ 276:
Yeah, he said that in Flashman and the Redskins.
Tomas C. check out Luke 2:3.
and Luke 2:4
I don’t know about you, but that seems to contrict that blog post’s claim a little bit. It most definitely appears to say where and that they went to the places of their ancestors.
@272 Tomas
That article is saying Luke probably wasn’t claiming that Joseph went to Bethlehem because his ancestors were from there but because he owned property (or something) precisely because it’s known that censuses were not done the way John A. claims. It’s criticizing Saunders’ reading of Luke, not his claim of how the census would have been done.
sigh, contradict.
*winces*
@ John A
That’s an interesting story, but I dunno if the slope is as slippery as you think. I mean, Caesar Augustus thought he was the Son of God, or at least had himself declared that way for political puposes. He wasn’t the greatest guy and he always seems like kind of a cold fish in the histories, but he didn’t have any trouble raking up followers or managing Roman politics for several decades. Self-mythologizing, with greater or lesser degrees of sincerity, is a very common thing. Is this a Trilemma thing, or what is the “danger” supposed to be here?
Anyway, no, if I had physical proof of a resurrection, that would be super interesting, and it would definitely improve your case for a resurrection. But it’s a big jump from accepting that “a guy seriously came back from the dead one time!” to accepting a very large bundle of claims about the meaning and purpose of that resurrection. We might have to re-evaluate a lot of what we know about the way the world works. But we’d still have to re-evaluate it.
Al Dente @265, this makes me wonder if someone shouldn’t warn Marten and Dora of Questionable Content.
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1572
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1574
PoG, unless your bible contains the books of Maccabees 1 & 2, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch, your “unchanging” bible was changed as recently as about 500 years ago. Blame Martin Luther. He also excised some length from Esther and Daniel. He also, also shoved the letters to James, John and the Hebrews as well as the book of Revelation into an appendix, apparently feeling they weren’t canonical. He stated later that he was feeling pretty waffly about not having removed Revelations altogether–he didn’t like it.
Since you seem to have been pointing to the Dead Sea Scrolls as some sort of proof, fragments of the books of Tobit and Sirach have been discovered amongst the DSS–why aren’t they in the Protestant bible? Other than Luther took a scanner to them and took them out, I mean.
General question: has PoG ever ‘fessed up which version of “unchanging”, “inerrant” drivel he prefers?
b. @ 287:
No, however, one of Kent Hovind’s teachings is that the KJV is the only proper and accurate version, so I think it’s safe to assume that’s the one they use.
“Fringe” means that he holds a view that very few people do. This certainly qualifies him as “fringe”.
I already read his books. Doing so a second time won’t change anything.
Give me the reasons why I should, and why these reasons convinced you.
Their historical views are shared by almost no one. Especially Crossan, who is known only due to the fact that he was instrumental in the long-dismissed Jesus Seminar.
There are, but they create more questions than answers. One way to explain it away was that everyone was delusional. But then the questions arise, how could so many people have been delusional? Why all about the same thing? At what point and why did it transfer from delusional to non-delusional people.
I have read a wide range of books, both skeptical and non-skeptical.
That was about Bethlehem? Seriously? Do you even know why Pilate put the sight above the cross?
There is no surviving documentation from the time of Gius Marius. Therefore, he did not exist? Or if he did, we can’t admit that anything, even the major points of his life, are true?
Again and again, you have to apply an entirely different standard in order to get the result you want.
So why has there been no discussion of the Great Green Arkleseizure?
@John A, 242
Actually, I was entertaining the possibility that the gospel writers were not lying when they said that Jesus died and raised again – not that they were accurate in their assessment. The point is that there are more possibilities, even if we assume that they were not lying when they wrote about it, even if we assume that it maps even close to a historical event, than “god did it.”
I know! Laughable isn’t it! Far more likely that it was the fairies.
I’m not entirely sure what difference the lie makes though. Surely, if a single person was so fortunate with their genetics, then at least a handful of others would have been, likely in the same area. If that same combination of genes lead people to believe that they were demi-gods, either by delusion or experience of their healing abilities, without the ability to explain it, surely it would be expected that some number of the people who claimed to be related to gods would demonstrate this healing ability?
Or he was a pathological liar who impressed the fairies!
There are far too many options to reduce it to a coin toss, even if I grant that the crucifixion happened, and I grant that he left his tomb after his apparent death, it is not even remotely as simple as narrowing it down to a semi-naturalistic explanation hastily yanked from my rear or god.
I write sci-fi and fantasy. I allow an awful lot of possibilities for the sake of literature and argument alike. I do not, however, accept them as true without cause. I also allow the possibility that Mohammed really spoke with Gabriel. Does this bring me dangerously close to Islam?
So what if Jesus, if he existed, thought he was the son of god? There are far more options than liar, lunatic, or lord, you know. There’s myth but also, already mentioned in this comment, there’s the possibility that his own experience had lead him to believe it to be true without him being a lunatic – it’s entirely possible for him to have been mislead.
Btw, could you drop the “I used to be an atheist” routine? Even if we accept that it’s completely true, it doesn’t make your conversion reasonable – not all atheists are reasonable. The idea that your mind was restricted in what it could allow especially makes me question that you were ever a reasonable atheist. There is nothing in an atheist mind that would forbid the hypothetical granting of any premise. The only issue is finding a reason to believe that the hypotheticals are actually true… and that’s a matter of skepticism, not atheism – plenty of atheists believe ridiculous things.
I won’t unless I stumble across a reason to take any of these hypotheticals seriously… and several years of listening to and discussing with believers certainly hasn’t presented that reason to me yet. Usually I’m simply expected to prove that Jesus didn’t exist. For some reason, weird though this may sound, that isn’t convincing evidence that he did.
What if a decree was issued in 2020 that all US citizens return to their ancestral city. Where would we begin. Which of my four grandparents cities would I go to? If they came from four different cities would I go to all four. Why would this be necessary for tax purposes. I understand that people moved around a lot less in the ancient world, but the logic remains the same. I can imagine some localized tax census, but can’t see a reason why there would be a worldwide census, or even how it could be carried out or why. If there was evidence for such a census I would accept it, but I’d be curious to know what the rationale was.
I think it’s important to separate the art from the artist
Chas you remain a unbelievable hypocrite. You are absurdly uncharitable in interpretation when it suits you (to the point of either being willingly obtuse or having your disdain for some reduce your reading comprehension and grasp of context to embarrassing levels) but demand total benefit of doubt from everyone.
Chas makes mistakes, other people display stupidity.
Chas just makes comments, other people snipe
Chas just makes typos, others are too dumb to use preview or can’t spell
Chas produces fine strawberry soft serve, others have to use a toilet
Inaji @ 284:
I know, my apologies. I almost put a disclaimer on it, but then figured I didn’t say it, it was the title of the book.
The burden of all of Fraser’s Flashman novels was really what an asshole Harry was, and the feeling the reader is left with is approximately the opposite of what some of the language used (they’re all first person) would lead you to think.
The fetishizing the KJV always fascinates me. I have so many questions on it. I mean for one it’s a horrible translation, but what I really want to know is how they square the Wicked Bibles? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
It was a reprinting of KJV by the official printers yet it rendered one of the commandments “THOU SHALT COMMIT ADULTERY”
It’s the official version OUR family uses and I really wish I could have gotten a copy to be used for our wedding ceremony.
If the Good Lord is able to let such a glaring error be printed in his one true version, how can we really expect fine nuance or proper translation? There is clearly no divine over sight. I’d imagine angels if God were real and KJV is the favored script would damn well make sure no such embarrassing problems come about.
Then let us pray for the deliverance of our new sheriff.
Will the congregation please rise?
I shall now read from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke…
…and duck!
John A I just can’t explain away the Roswell Crash in 1947. There is a newspaper clipping from 1947. There are lots of eyewitnesses both pro and con. I have read both skeptical and non-skeptical accounts of the crash. But I can’t get rid of this nagging doubt that there is something to it. After all government coverups go on all the time, and wouldn’t there be a really good reason to cover this up. I have a new found respect for Fox Mulder, the truth is out there, if you bother to dig deeper.
I also think Sri Sathya Sai Baba is the Messiah. He performed many miracles that thousands of people publicly witnessed. I could provide you tons of citations but don’t have the time right now. I hope someday you will examine the evidence and come to the light.
Actually, if you accept the occurrence of the resurrection, then you have already crossed that Rubicon.
Or is it more reasonable to assume that a rise from the dead occurred due to naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic phenomenon? And if you believe naturalistic, was Jesus aware of his resurrection illness, and lied the whole time to take advantage of it?
Those books you mention that are excluded from the Protestant cannon are also excluded from the catholic cannon. They are considered by Catholics “Deuterocannon”, not inspired like the rest of the cannon.
That is still closer than I got on my initial move from atheism.
Exactly. But you think that would be a better explanation?
If you allow for that, you have already opened a can of worms. Where did the body go? Why could no one find it? Why did thousands soon believe they say him risen from the dead?
That would be a very dangerous thing to believe if it wasn’t true. It was this that resulted in his conviction and condemnation to death. He said he was Daniel’s escetological figure “one like a Son of Man descending on the clouds of heaven”. If he believed this and it wasn’t true, he was crazy. It is very strange that so many followed a crazy person, and then so many more after his death.
I would say “what is more reasonable” but I know how you think. You rule out the possibility of supernatural events (I know you think you could be convinced, but that is certainly not true), so since the most obvious explanation is ruled out, whatever is next most plausible is what to go with.
So all non-atheists are unreasonable?
Unevidenced assertion, dismissed without a link.
As if YOUR word means anything other than lies and bullshit here. You need to learn. Failure to do means we don’t trust you.
Your first, your conclusive physical evidence for YOUR imaginary deity. Bupkiss expected, since we both know you are farting in F-flat.
Unevidenced assertion, dismissed without a link.
The evidence for that is lacking your posts….it is all presuppositional wankery, not real evidence.
Do YOU? Were you there? There were no eyewitnesses….you haven’t evidenced that claim, amongst others….
Look in the mirror liar and bullshitter. If you had any real evidence, you would lead with that, not your bare testament of lies pretending to be scholarly. Scholarly does require third party evidence, which is …….LACKING.
Or mistaken.
People followed Joan of Arc, did them dying for her prove that God chose her to defeat the British?
People were willing to die for Charles Manson and Joseph Smith.
Or to take another question, people died for the beliefs in blasphemies and heresies at the hands of the church. Is the church proven false because those honest people died for their beliefs? Fuck, countless Jews specifically died because they refused to acknowledge Christianity as true
Athywren @ 291:
Having spent some time on Apple-centric forums, where every Micro$haft-loving or Fandroid troll starts out with “I own tons of Apple products, but…” followed by a criticism that shows he’s never used an Apple product, I just dismiss “I used to be an atheist but…” in the same way. Everything after that is automatically a lie.
Mikeyb:
A great deal depends on how you’d define ancestral. Just how far back are people expected to go? It would make much more sense to simply list ancestral cities.
Of course, the bible is weirdly obsessed with such things, as anyone who has slogged through 1 Chronicles knows.
Ugh I hate this. This is really the worst of the Christian world view; it completely stunts and hobbles believers knowledge and sense of human nature. These are basic things that you would expect to have to explain to a child one beyond the age of reason.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge @294: Fraser was a Tory who pined for the days of Empire, but he was not as blind as most are to the horrors that came with it.
Decent obit by Hitchens.
@mikeyb, 275
Yahweh consorted with Astartes? Holy crap, space marine sex would have to be intense! O_O
Wouldn’t Yahweh count as xeno scum, though?
Ing:
If there’s one thing all flavours of xianity share, it’s that learning, thinking, and questioning are all very bad things to do.
John A,
I’ve noticed a difference between what I’ve posted and what you’ve posted. I’ve given sources for what I said. You’ve just sneered at other peoples’ sources if they disagree with your preconceptions but you neglect to provide any sources to back up what you say. Somehow I doubt this is pure happenstance.
http://news.discovery.com/history/religion/god-wife-yahweh-asherah-110318.htm
Fine, give on concrete and proven example of a resurrection, outside of your imaginary jebus, occurring……Put up or shut the fuck up.
Wow, wow, I do not know how you can possibly make this claim without feeling disgusted with yourself. Plenty of people agree with them, they are extremely influential, just look at the influence of “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” and what became New Perspectives on Paul. I am sure there are plenty of biblical literalist out there that dislike them, but within historical studies they are both well respected. People disagree with them all of the time, but that, I hate to tell you, is the nature of academia. It is not about raising followers.
You didn’t do very well on your SATs did you? If some X are not Y, are all not-X not-Y?
Like all godbots who claim this, I find it difficult to believe. Typically they misrepresent what atheism really means. Just another reason to call you a liar and bullshitter.
Yes, New Perspectives on Paul has been criticized by conservative and evangelical scholars but let’s not pretend that is definitive or representative of the field.
Inaji@302 In our still pretty patriarchal sexist USA we probably know what it means – only the male line counts.
Athywren@305 Interesting speculations (with reasoning and evidence where it exists) along these lines can be found in Tim Callahan’s The Secret Origins of the Bible, if it can still be found in print.
John A:
No, the most reasonable assumption is that it didn’t occur.
I know you have to keep begging that question for your worldview to work properly, but the rest of us don’t have to follow down that particular yellow brick road.
(Still haven’t answered the question about biblical writers having a vested interest in having the bible believed or not, but hey, that’s a tough one…)
What makes you think that anyone needed to be convinced of anything besides characters in the text of an anonymous cult writer? You still seem work from the baseless assumption that the gospels are somehow historically reliable.
So what? You are the one who is desperately clinging to “facts” that are not in evidence from an anonymous cult writer and telling us these “facts” need to be accounted for while categorically declining to explain why we should take any of the text as factual.
You are not making any sense, none of what you’ve said is convincing in any way to the unbiased observer that wants to know what is most likely true. It doesn’t even make sense that any of the stuff you are saying here convinced you, because if it did, your “strict” methodology would lead you to believe in a great many more religious fables. You would really be better of joining the great majority of christians who just believe because of personal experience, even if you’re afraid of sharing that personal experience.
From what I understand, you focused pretty much exclusively on “researching” christianity. Maybe a book about islam too, just for laughs. Talk about bias… ugh.
I prefer to call it idolatry, myself. Beyond idolatry of holy texts, I lean towards thinking of religion and/or faith as acts of idolatry. They typically involve treating some entity, idea, or ritual as perfect. They look at everything else in terms of how it syncs with that thing, and when contradictions spring up, it seldom occurs to them that their idol could be what’s wrong. If the Bible says something about the universe and the universe says something else, it’s the universe that’s in error. In preserving the alleged perfection of the idol, they stagnate.
Science is anti-idolatry because it acknowledges its imperfection and is willing to change positions when better evidence and more accurate theories become available.
Actually yes, with no other info a natural explanation is more likely than a supernatural one. Coincidence or confusion would definitively be more common than miracles.
Resuscitation by a technologically advanced human, time traveler or alien is more plausible even because it relies only on extrapolations of things we know for sure exist (life+technology)
Even if it is preternatural we have no way of knowing if it was aliens, trickster gods, demons, djinns, etc
The most you could say is that something happened, no divine (*smug chuckle*) the cause without more data.
Why? I don’t get it. If I had really, really good evidence that 1) a guy actually died, and 2) the same guy came back to life and hung out with his friends for a while, that would tell me that physical resurrection is possible. In the absence of further investigation, it doesn’t tell me anything about what caused it. It definitely doesn’t tell me anything about the existence or nonexistence of gods or other supernatural entities, or whether those entities are basically good guys or capricious crybabies, or anything at all about the character of the guy who came back to life.
But I’m not sure I even understand your statment. What are we counting as Italy in this Rubicon-crossing scenario?
I have no idea what Jesus thought or didn’t think about this not-at-all-established phenomenon. If anyone managed to establish it, I still wouldn’t have any way of knowing what he thought. Do you?
@289
John A
lol
um, that doesn’t matter. what matters is whether it is fringe among qualified historians, not the rest of the population. nice to see you hiding behind such an empty statement.
Sorry to post twice in quick succession, but…
Hey, that’s a good point, because no-one who believed demonstrably false things has ever attracted a following before.
That’s why, according to John A, there are no religions aside from Christianity.
Or is it that all religions are true?
Well, I’m willing to be convinced.
You would have to start with a definition of ‘supernatural’, as it’s a very very slippery word.
Thousands of years ago, if anyone fell into a coma, and then came out of it, they would find all manner of magical reasons for what happened. So what?
The only definition of supernatural that seems to work is along the lines of “something that’s only causative agent is a mind” or along those lines
The other one of being “unnatural” doesn’t work because if it manifests in the world it is definitionally a natural occurrence.
If we lived in a Tolkien fantasy world Wizardry would be a branch of the natural sciences
So no takers on the historicity of the Roswell Crash and the coverup. I’ve provided as much evidence and citations as John A. To quote the illustrious Fox Mulder:
“I’m the key figure in an ongoing government charade, the plot to conceal the truth about the existence of extraterrestrials. It’s a global conspiracy, actually, with key players in the highest levels of power, that reaches down into the lives of every man, woman, and child on this planet, so, of course, no one believes me. I’m an annoyance to my superiors, a joke to my peers. They call me Spooky. Spooky Mulder, whose sister was abducted by aliens when he was just a kid and who now chases after little green men with a badge and a gun, shouting to the heavens or to anyone who will listen that the fix is in, that the sky is falling and when it hits it’s gonna be the shit-storm of all time.”
@Inaji
Thousands of years nothing, people STILL do it today even seeing the actual trained medical practitioner do all the work!
Ing:
Sadly true. Too many people will say anything to give credence to goddidit.
John A:
It isn’t strange, though. It’s as ordinary and predictable as anything else in history. That “liar or lunatic??” thing isn’t even mutally exclusive. L. Ron Hubbard suffered bouts of mental illness throughout his life, AND he was a skillful, highly sucessful con artist whose con continued to grow and thrive after his death.
I’m not saying that Jesus was delusional OR a con artist; I don’t know what he was like personally (or if he existed). But the fact that he had followers and continues to have followers doesn’t rule out either possibility, and it doesn’t even make either possiblity obviously unlikely.
Citation need, or it didn’t happen.
The last is an unevidenced assertion, dismissed without a link. And there is a book call the Passover Plot, on how the deception was to be pulled off….
Only if they claim, like you, that we must believe in their imaginary deity and mythical/fictional holy book. The reasonable ones keep their mouths shut on those subjects.
ya, that happens. inquisition, “heresy” and all that.
Man someone who doesn’t believe people would die for a false belief have clearly never had to try to correct a middle manager on something
[rhetorical]
In arguing with presuppositionalists, and asking them to back up their assertions, I feel like the one woman in this commercial….
[rhetorical]
If Jesus existed, who’s saying he was crazy? There are always people who will follow someone who sets themselves up as a preacher, messiah, or whatever.
One of the reasons that xianity spread so fast was because women embraced it, as early xianity provided women with something they did not have otherwise – a choice, in regard to marriage. There were a couple of other major perks for women as well. Of course, this changed, radically, but to begin with, it spread like wildfire among women, and most of those women insisted their husbands convert, then the kids were raised in it, and bob’s your uncle, you have a major religion.
Is there NO LIMIT to the asinine comments possible on this particularly unintelligent subject?
The whole thing is inconsistent, irrelevant, nonsense.
Why oh why to people insist in beating a very dead and rotten horse?
i’d need evidence that such events even occured. but meh, things can go missing. shocker.
lol, have you heard of scientology? mormonism? frauds who “channel” alien spirits? were you born yesterday?
OldEd:
Obviously there isn’t, as you decided to drop an asinine comment. Do you have anything of substance to add?
If not, I’ll point out that Thunderdome is not required reading. Try the front page. Lots of other stuff there.
I dunno, the god delusion in its various facets affects perhaps 3/4 of the human population, most of history, has ramifications on how we structure society, vote, etc etc, so it probably is a very inane subject to discuss.
If you want to believe the alien theories, go ahead.
If by “plenty” you mean “hundreds” or even “a couple thousand”, you are right. Also, the “New Perspective on Paul” isn’t new at all, despite its name.
Why?
How often does a case of confusion continue and perpetuate generation and generation, century after century, until it leads to a new global religion?
We know aliens and time travelers exist? You really want come up with any other explanation don’t you?
Exactly, it does.
It is fringe in both groups. You would have to limit the group to biblical minimalists to find a group where this isn’t fringe.
Tell me about the other world religions, the claims they make, how they are alike, and why none are reconcilable with any other.
No you aren’t.
No nothing rules out anything else completely.
So why were women successful on this, but nothing else? Given that the Thracian mystery cults were mainly cults of women, why did those disappear? I thought popularity among women was what led to success.
In other words, you would rather not answer. Fair enough.
Considering I can name at least a dozen global religions, and could easily provide references for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of smaller ones: all the time.
(Sorry that was obviously for John A at 337.)
relevance? particularly the “global” religion bit lol.
mormonism and scientology are good examples. but there are countless others. just like evolutionary biology, some variations perform better than others. this isn’t difficult to understand.
your line of questioning is a poor way of hiding that you don’t have any evidence to present.
what i gave you was very much an answer! you just didn’t like it, and you apparently have nothing.
*countless other small religions/cults/whatever you want to call the small ones.
Tell me about the other world religions, the claims they make, how they are alike, and why none are reconcilable with any other.
This is an absurd challenge. Okay, I pick Buddhism (generally speaking, discounting denominational subsets, of which there are many) and Christianity. Buddhism is completely inconsistent with Christianity because it allows for multiple or perhaps even infinite lifetimes of a single soul, whereas Christianity only allows for one lifetime of significance, and distinguishes quite clearly between human and nonhuman intelligence. You’re saying that it’s consistent with Biblical scholarship that a human being could in the past or future be reincarnated as a grasshopper?
(@ John A again at 337. Sorry, quick on the trigger.)
John A no sense of humor or irony, so typical. Still not a shred of evidence that Jesus even existed much less rose from the dead. Using the bible to prove Jesus is like using the Iliad and Odyssey to establish a historical Odysseus. We need outside contemporaneous eyewitnesses just to establish that he existed. The Roswell crash parable was meant to show that cult believing insiders provide no evidence for the alleged events, especially if the supposed events involve miracles or resurrections. And as Sai Baba shows, miracles can occur if you are a good enough con man, like Uri Geller, can get enough people to believe you if you’re convincing enough.
Except your babble isn’t conformation of that, no matter how you try to spin it. It was all put down well after the fact. Unless, of course, you actually want to give us citations to the evidence you claim you have????
Unlinked assertion, dismissed without evidence….(are you so stupid you aren’t seeing the pattern by now?)
Except, with the important and critical question of where the fuck is your solid and conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity not from the babble is one you must address…Bawk bawk bawk….
@344
ya, but it almost looks like john a doesn’t find believing in the roswel crash to be unreasonable. after all, is it really incompatible with every world religion? that’s all that seems to matter.
I would just like to revisit some points that John A. threw out in desperation.
On the criterion of embarrassment :
Yea, like the point that JC must have died on a cross because it’s an embarrassing way to be die (a common criminal). John A for some reason tries to paint this as a method used by fringe scholars, yet it is the opposite and features in many apologist screeds that try to assure us JC was an actual person and the gospels must be reliable. Consistent methodology my ass. Biblical scholarship fail on Johns part, again .
On the fact that complete religions can get jumpstarted on fiction in a short timespan:
And a good chuckle was had by all. Assertion not in evidence, assertion countered by everything we know about the religious landscape at the time, assertion countered by contemporary evidence in “developed” societies. This is another blatant dodge on Johns part, blurted out with the confidence of a proper conman who doesn’t give a shit about the facts because hey, he has a conclusion he needs to reach at any cost.
On witnesses of the resurrection:
Uhm, no, you don’t. Paul is pretty clear that he’s hallucinating Jesus, so again you’re caught in a blatant lie. And the gospels are pretty much worthless, given they were written by anonymous cult writers who were mainly copying from Mark (the earliest gospel of the 4), whose story ends at a supposedly empty tomb with two women who never tell anyone. Of course, you’re free to interpret the fanfiction that follows afterwards as reliable, but nobody interested in what is most likely to be true is going to swallow that.
Try harder, lie less John.
John A:
Let’s just stick with Christianity, John. Do a bit of reading here, then explain why none of these brands of xianity are reconcilable with the others.
After all, given that your god is so holy awesome and perfect, and provided that holy book of happiness, why isn’t there simply one brand of xianity?
John A:
Are you so unfamiliar with other religions that you don’t think any of them say they are the only way to achieve godhood/immortality/etc?
If the teachings of Buddha are the only way to achieve peace, the teachings of Jesus can’t be, as they are different.
If Mohammed was the only true prophet, no-one else can be. If Allah is the only true god, no-one else can be.
If the Milky Way was caused by an incident involving an enthusiastic Zeus on his wedding night, it cold not have been placed there by anyone else.
Are you truly claiming to be ignorant of all of these examples?
Because if so, you are too ignorant to be saying anything all about religion.
If not, you are being dishonest. Again. Still. Which is it? (You won’t answer, presumably.)
Try me.
Start with your definition of ‘supernatural’, and let’s see how good you are at making a case.
If you refuse to do this, you aren’t proving my unwillingness to be convinced, you’re just proving your unwillingness to convince others.
That’s your issue, not mine.
She said one of the reasons, you obtuse ass.
To quickly follow up on Inaji@348 it gets even worse. The notion of an “orthodox Christianity” is a manifest fiction itself largely the product of accidents of history and particular figures in the 5th century. Check out Jesus Wars by Phillip Jenkins if you want the truth in all its gory details. I know you don’t read dissenting points of view, but I’d thought I’d point this out for the record anyway.
@John A
Sorry for the laggy reply – had pots to wash, teeth to brush, and clothes to put away. Also lots of words to type and a quick proofread.
Ok, story time. I recently had an accident, quite heroic in fact! I came very close to slicing the index finger on my left hand off… on a broken ceramic mug. Yes, it was a dish washing accident. *Heroic pose!*
I had to go to the hospital to get the wound closed, because it was extremely deep, cutting almost a third of the way through the finger. At the hospital, they glued and bandaged the wound, which obviously helped with the healing process.
After a week, I had the dressing replaced, and found that the wound was almost completely healed – it was still tender, and I didn’t have a full range of movement available, but the healing was astonishing.
So… is it more likely that Jesus was the son of god, bodily resurrected and healed by divine power, or that some people have a more impressive healing ability than I do? I find it incredibly difficult to imagine that degree of healing ability over a three day period, but is it more likely that a miracle occurred than that a natural process that we see every day can be greater than we usually expect under certain circumstances? No, I’d put my money on the healing. Healing is a well documented phenomenon, even if this one would be more difficult to accept, but I’ve never seen a convincing miracle claim in my life… and many of those I have seen were revealed to be entirely mundane, mistaken, and occasionally fraudulent.
I’ll just list a few options that spring to mind.
It was cremated.
A heretical follower stole the body, dressed it up, and stashed it in their attic, Norman Bates-style.
He was raised by the fairies and swept off to Never Never Land to fight Captain Hook alongside Peter Pan.
A clerical error meant that his body was buried in the wrong place. Soon after, there was an earthquake, burying his body beneath tons of rubble. Nobody believed there was anyone there, so nobody ever looked.
Aliens from the Andromeda galaxy flew by and beamed his body into their cargo bay, falsely believing him to be Ednu Arbaz – their own Messiah. They keep his body in stasis, preserving the flesh and worship him to this very day.
The whole thing is a myth.
Dogs snuck in and ate his flesh, they carried many of the bones home with them, as something for their puppies to chew on.
He never actually died. It was all staged by Jesus and Pilate. After three days, Jesus came out of the tomb to surprise everyone. However, the prank backfired and everybody believed that he had actually resurrected and refused to be corrected. Soon after, he fled from his followers, staging a bodily ascension with the aid of a catapult, fearful that their view of him would lead him into dangerous situations. He moved to America, where he preached his message to a lost tribe of Hebrews who had found their way to America until his natural death. He never again pranked his followers.
He had a twin brother, “Kesus,” who dressed as him, tricking people into believing that he was Jesus, before ducking behind a hedge, changing back to his normal clothes, and nonchalantly asking the victims of his prank if they’d seen anything odd recently.
None of these thousands of people ever actually saw him. In fact, the whole “thousands of people saw him” thing was cooked up by Paul to hide the fact that he had no evidence for Jesus ever having existed.
Holograms.
The Andromedan aliens left an android behind on Earth, using it to study our planet. Since they had only encountered one human – Jesus – they used his likeness to construct the android’s body and personality. It encountered many thousands of people in its first few years of life and, since Jesus was its pattern, gave them his name as its own. Over the years it has modified itself to look, act and sound more like the local people as it travelled the world. It is currently the Prime Minister of Britain, where it is testing the human ability to tolerate incompetent leadership.
Sentient bees swarmed together in such a way that, in the right light, they looked just like Jesus. They even spoke with his voice, although it was a little slurred because, hey, they’re bees.
The inventor of the mask was abroad at this time. The first mask he ever made was the face of Jesus. Nobody had ever seen a mask before, and simply assumed that he was Jesus, but had caught his head in a mechanical rice picker.
People still follow David Koresh. People still follow Joseph Smith. People still follow Sun Myung Moon. People still follow L. Ron Hubbard. I disagree that believing something false, even as bizarre as that, automatically makes a person crazy if they have been lead to believe that they have reasons to believe it, but even if it did, it is not at all strange that people would follow such a person. Delusional people can be very convincing, and very charismatic, and humans, though we’re capable of being rational, are not very good at being consistently rational. If you’re not careful in thinking through what’s being claimed, it’s very easy to be lead astray.
I don’t know how you think, and don’t pretend to. You don’t know how I think. Don’t pretend to.
I do not rule out supernatural events, I simply don’t assume them as truth when there are mountains of possibilities and no reason to believe any of them are true. And don’t pretend that I cannot be convinced. You claim that you were an atheist, which would mean that you were also incapable of being convinced, at least by your reckoning, and yet you are no longer an atheist. You also claim that my mind is far more open than yours was. How then is it possible for you to have been convinced but impossible for me? What is not true is not that I can be convinced, but that you have given me cause to be convinced. Your failure, so far, in this matter does not make my mind any less open, nor will any continued assertions that I refuse to be convinced… though such assertions won’t convince me either.
It’s not a matter of running down the list of “most obvious explanations” and crossing off the ones we don’t like until we find one we’ll accept. It’s a matter of seeing which explanations match up with whatever evidence we have. If you’re sick and pray for healing, and you get better, many would believe that the most obvious explanation is that god healed you… the evidence, however, suggests that you have an immune system. The obvious explanation for the plague was that god was angry with humanity… the evidence, however, suggests that there were rats who carried fleas that had bitten… marmots, I think… something like that. The obvious explanation for eclipses was the end of the world… the evidence, however, suggests that we have a moon.
The real question, though, is whether you think your god is the obvious answer because you believe in him, or if you believe in him because he was the obvious answer. If it’s the latter, I’d appreciate it if you shared the reason it was obvious, because I fail to see why your god is more likely than the Andromedans that I invoked for this response.
I’m going to need to see your working on that one… I don’t see the link between the two statements.
If not all carrots are orange, does that mean that anything that is not a carrot is not orange?
An obvious question for anyone who believes in a specific religion is how you know you aren’t the victim of deception, that the religion you follow isn’t the creation of the “bad guy” in some other religion, or even the one you believe. Why isn’t Christianity the creation of Satan to keep you from the true path, Islam?
John A, I said earlier that you reminded me of a guy that I used to argue with. Then you used one of his favorite pointless putdowns. What an idiot.
You say that thousands of people witnessed the resurrected Christ. Were you there? Can you provide affidavits from each of those people? Or are you just taking the gospels as true? To be clear, just because the bible says it, doesn’t make it true.
There is no evidence that anyone at all saw your zombie. There is complete silence from the Romans, who would have at least tried to kill him again, or cover their asses with Rome, and there is an entire religion, centered in that area, that didn’t notice the thing they had been waiting for.
Why are you so bent on the resurrection, anyhow? The important thing to you, earlier, was that Jesus died. That somehow paid for all our sins. Doesn’t a resurrection kinda backsies that schtick?
Jesus wasn’t dead for three days, by the way. Once again you believe the fables, not the book. He died at evening, spent a night, a daytime, and some part of another night dead. And that is at fucking maximum. The tomb was empty in the morning, but it could have been vacated any time before without any Jews around to notice, due to the Sabbath and all.
Seriously, you couldn’t dispose of an unwanted body? Therefore God?
Good point inaji!
One of the most damning facts on religion is the fact that they all have divergent beliefs. If there was a central truth to this whole enterprise, the expectation would be that religions, or sects within major religions at least, would be converging on the same ideas. Yet they don’t, just look at the departure of mormonism from mainline christianity or JW’s or baptists for all I care.
This indicates that their methodology for arriving at what is true is severely flawed.
Now look at the scientific method, this is a methodology that actually works, and what we see is that everyone involved in the scientific pursuit of knowledge is converging on the same ideas.
As far as reasons go why not believing in gods makes sense, this one sticks out as a major one, and I’ve never ever seen any apologist come close with an attempt to rationalize this problem in as far as they even recognize how damning it is.
Which form of Buddhism are you refering? Originally, Buddhism was a reformed and secularized form of Hinduism, which doesn’t conflict with Christianity in any way. So which form and why that form?
The Illiad and Odyssey were not regarded as historically true, not even in antiquity.
Such as?
What kind of hallucination exactly is it that involves multiple people witnessing the same non-event?
Almost all forms of Christianity are completely reconcilable. With a few exceptions (Mormanism for example), the disagreements are in form and approach, not theology. The Catholic use of formal confession to a priest is mirrored by the Protestant use of informal confession to God directly.
There is, it is called Christianity.
The teachings of the original Buddha contain much wisdom, as do the teachings of any other major philosopher.
Muslims don’t believe that Mohammed was the only true prophet, but the last of the prophets, starting with Adam and climaxing in Jesus before Mohammed. They believe that Jesus’ message was God’s message, but that it became corrupted through the Trinity (hense all of the Quranic verses of “there is no God but God”). They also believe, going back to Mohammed, that while Christians confused Jesus’ message, their worship of him brings them to God, even if in an imperfect way.
Outside of the Abrahamatic religions, most don’t. Confucianism has no belief in an afterlife. Neither do the forms of Buddhism that mirror the earlier forms. Hinduism (and its cousin, the other forms of Buddhism) don’t believe in an afterlife but perpetual reincarnation, with the goal not being heaven, but release from this endless washing machine. Islam and Christianity are largely reconcilable too, although for that one has to involve substantial errors. They both worship the same God, the God of the Jews, and both seek to be restored to him. For Christians it is through Jesus, for Muslims it is through submission to God.
So no, there is actually not much disagreement among the major religions.
I had a full day in meat space.
Then I came here to catch up.
I admire the hard work by the Horde.
because, to refer back to the top pic
My god
it’s full of stupid
@The Very Reverent Battleaxe, 301
Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it more than enough times myself. I actually own an iPod, btw, but apple totally sucks! Except for all of the ways that it doesn’t.
I think my favourite “I used to be an atheist” line was, “believing in God was the last thing I ever wanted to do! I loved the freedom from responsibility, I loved to sin, and I hated the idea that god wanted to take away my fun!” (not a perfect quote… but close in spirit if not in letter) because, you know, it’s all about no responsibility and non-stop sinning with us atheists, amirite? amirite?! Anybody? No? Oh… hmm… back to sudoku then.
I just wish they wouldn’t use it to imply that they understand where we’re coming from, because they clearly don’t, and then they act as if it’s just that we’re incapable of changing our minds, rather than that they’re failing to convince us. Bleh.
Don’t know about all, but the one calling himself John A. certainly is.
The only difference between John A and POG is John A thinks he has good reasons for his delusions, while POG is so clueless and idiotic he can’t even recognize his delusions. Christianity is only one of thousands of delusions infecting the human race, but one of the most dominant. Ideological indoctrination (religion being the most common, libertarianism a political example) of various kinds is perhaps the most powerful drug know to humanity. When you think you have found the “truth” you are capable of anything. The real miracle perhaps is how a small minority of people are or can become immune from so many different kinds of nonsense. Science and reason are the only tools that exist to keep us all from plunging into delusion.
If the god of the bible could be arsed to perform just one miracle, it should be to hold a press conference (god style, natch) to announce just how everyone is getting it wrong, and lay down the correct version for once and for all. After all, as the stakes are eternal torture, it’s pretty nasty to just leave people guessing about it all.
And the babble is historically true, despite absolute no evidence for genesis or the exodus? Try thinking through your attempts at dismissal. They ALL apply to your babble, and your imaginary deity.
Only in your delusional mind, and CITATION NEEDED. Same old assertions without a link….
Except that god doesn’t exist, never did, never will, as folks like you can’t/won’t provide the conclusive physical evidence to back up your claim. And a philosophical deity is simply imaginary, can’t do anything to effect to real world, and isn’t the deity of the babble.
#361 @John A
No, you’re not trying to protect your desired conclusions at all. lol.
Pretty much any bog standard hallucination can involve loads of people. Are you really pretending it’s hard to imagine yourself in a stadium with people? Hasn’t any kid with aspirations in sports done that at least once? Why would it be hard to experience that in a hallucination exactly? Are you being serious here?
1. Please show that the first christians considered the gospel stories we have today as historical fact.
2. This is relevant because?
3. Stop dodging the question.
Do your own research pal, you’re the one who continuously assumes apologist screeds and excuses to be accurate and so far you’ve been shown to be wrong every time.
The lack of introspection is interesting. Everyone is beholden to their own mix of ideologies. You are no different. But somehow you think you are immune from this, which is a bit unusual. It isn’t unusual to just assume this, but to actually think it through and make the claim that everyone else is wrong but I am right a bit unusual. “science and reason” or rather “Science and Reason” is what you label your own ideology (while not realizing it as such), which is a mixture of much deeper philosophic and cultural biases.
Seriously, how is it you think you are exempt?
Mikeyb’s Roswell crash analogy is quite pertinent, and John A’s “So you want to believe in alien stories” shows the ossified literalness of his mind. That quality almost proves he was raised a fundie, and his “I used to be an atheist” is bullshit, but we knew that already.
The point is, intelligent aliens are possible. No matter how skeptical some people are on the subject, they would agree to the physical possibility.
Starfaring aliens are less likely. We believe that FTL travel is impossible. What’s the probability that we’re wrong about that? Not zero. On the other hand, if it took a truly massive effort and thousands of years to get here, maybe that’s why they’re hanging around so long to study us? And as I said in the last thread, Ardra is much more believable than YHWH.
Someone mentioned time travelers. We think time travel is impossible. Again, what’s the probability that we’re wrong about that? Not zero. The problem is, if we take all these alien encounter and abduction and Alien Autopsy™ stories and agree to accept them at face value for the sake of argument—all of these aliens are human. Some of them may be a little funny-looking, but they’re human.
The possibilities of evolution are so enormously large that I think aliens evolved in another star system resembling humans as closely as that is as close to zero as makes no difference. If these stories are precisely true, then I think an origin in the future, or in a very close parallel universe are much more likely, despite the fact that we think time travel is impossible, we don’t know if parallel universes exist and certainly reject the possibility of travel between them—the probability that we’re wrong about that, small as it is, is still much greater than the possibility of these slightly odd humans having evolved completely separately from us.
Why do I bring up all this speculative crap? To point out that I consider the least likely of these scenarios to be many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than some Jew with a long white beard “creating” the universe. There is essentially nothing, no matter how absurd, that I wouldn’t believe before I would believe that.
And yes, John A, I very carefully measured the probability of all these things with my patented probability meter, and the results are accurate to 11 significant figures.
I think John A. is onto something here. If you squint really hard, “the major religions” all look pretty much the same. And squinting really hard is probably a good idea, since it’s pretty boring to argue about one false assertion after another after another, so I’ll grant John A. that much just to try to end the pain. So, they all look pretty much the same, so they’re all wrong about reality in pretty much the same way.
Well done, John A. You’ve made your point.
John A I don’t believe my own BS. I check it out and see if it agrees with the facts. I’m willing to change my mind if there is if better evidence exists and have done on many occaisions.For example, if you were able to convince me that Jesus existed and he rose from the dead, I would be forced to believe it. However given that you have provided absolutely Zero evidence that he even exists, I remain unmoved. Unlike you I don’t make knee jerk statements like “the Illiad and Odyssey were not regarded as historically true, not even in antiquity.” How do you fucking know. What sources can you site, as been repeated to you ad nauseum.
Logic, reason, and EVIDENCE.
You lack the evidence….
We are different, as we will look at real third party evidence. Since all you offer is your testament, which is obviously nothing but lies and bullshit, we aren’t and won’t respond to your testament (not evidence, your testament is never evidence), as you would like. We sneer at your attempts to smooth over gross problems with your deity and babble. Like the non-existence of the former, and the mythical/fictional properties of the latter, both of which are EVIDENCE based.
What third party evidence have you provided in your scores of posts? Essentially, NONE.
That is your problem. Stop talking, and start pointing.
A bit unusual? It’s exactly what you’ve been doing here the entire time.
You apparently haven’t read this (or most) parts of the bible. If you had, you would know that Paul’s experience involved other actual people, not imagined people. Multiple actual people don’t have suffer from the same hallucination.
So reconcilable that their members have been killing each other by the millions over minor quibbles, for centuries.
So give us an estimate on the number of people who saw Jesus dead AND also saw him resurrected.
Who saw him really, really dead, in that awful evening of hustling him underground before the Sabbath? Remember the dying was faster and easier than most, and the Romans gave him something weird to drink. So maybe he was just faking it—I’d be playing possum up there—or really close to death, and the Romans just said fuck it, put him in a hole with a rock on top, and let the gods sort him out. The book doesn’t say they had his head and body in two different places, it describes something that devout Mexicans used to go through in their re-enactments, up until the spear, and even that was written down as being odd.
So who says he was really and truly completely dead? Do you have a coroner’s certificate? Were you there?
After the resurrection, he was lurching about with holes in him. Why not patch them up? Who actually saw the impossible holes? Who just saw him at a distance?
Who just saw a man that they knew, and were told that he had been killed?
It might even be possible, in those days of poor calendars, to present a guy as resurrected to one bunch, then take him into town and get him executed, and do some fast talking about when was what. I’m not serious wth that, as it just occurred to me, but I will give it some thought.
==========
Notice, please, that in all John A’s blather, he has not said that God is alive and active to him. All that he has trolled here had been about the past, the written account, what he considers to be evidence.
It’s good in that it sticks with stuff we can argue, but I miss the classics. I always like it when a religious person starts arguing from their own insanity.
Where’s some evidence of an intelligent being with magical powers who created everything and interacts with the universe? I don’t see any such evidence, so I don’t believe in it. Is that what everyone does?
John A @ 356:
And how, exactly, is this not in conflict with Christianity’s notion of a heaven reachable through good works and God’s grace?
And how, if we were to be transported back in time to ancient Greece, would this argument of non-conflict not be evidence that Zeus and the other pantheon of Gods really existing, given that you think it is a good argument for Jehova’s existence?
Hell, back in those days, the Romans claimed that the Roman gods (Jove/Jupiter and whatnot, I’m not too read up on the Roman gods) were the same as the Greek ones only with different names, therefore there was no need to fight over religions. I’d invite anyone who actually knew something about history to explain if there was a huge amount of massaging to fit the two religions together.
Thing is, this argument has nothing to do with positive evidence for a religion. It boils down to “there are common threads among different religions, therefore there is probably a single God (my God) that is the common element.” Except that religious texts and beliefs usually boil down to stories and myths, and these stories and myths usually contain archetypes common to human stories and myths all over the world. Perhaps those archetypes arise from the shared experience of being human, or perhaps people hear stories from other cultures and include archetypes from those stories into their own. The archetypes don’t have a common single source, since they always address different people from different times and different places. Pretty sure there are plenty of resurrection myths that predate Jesus.
Common elements among different stories aren’t enough to say those stories are true. It is not enough to say major religions are reconcilable (as long as you ignore all the details and fudge around with the major themes). This whole line of argument fails immediately until you find positive evidence outside of the stories.
Oh, that’s not true. According to our resident expert John A, none of these wars were religiously motivated. The Albigensians were wiped out, for example, because they rebelled against the almighty Sun King phillip Augustus, who controlled all of France with an iron fist. Doncha know nuthin?
#364 @John A.
No shit Sherlock.
Assertion without evidence.
Assertion without evidence.
Assertion without evidence.
Science and reason are methods and tools that allow you to break through personal biases by way of evidence. That’s the whole fucking point you halfwit. Science and reason is not an ideology, just because you are married to some halfbaked ideology I can understand you want to tar everyone with that brush, but i’m afraid you fail once again.
The scientific method is not bound to any cultural or unwarranted philosophical biases, anyone from anywhere can employ the method and as long as they have the evidence, they can’t be ignored. That’s how progress is made in rational circles.
Nobody here believes they are totally free of biases, what they do believe is that the scientific method allows anyone to cut through those biases, present their case and clinch it with evidence.
Please explain us how your ideology/religion provides a reliable and respected path to bring cultural and philosophical biases to light. Maybe then we’ll take you more seriously. Now you’re just looking like the town idiot who doesn’t have a clue about anything and thinks his miseducation holds special knowledge we aren’t aware of.
Inaji @ 361, that’s definitely another problem with Christianity, the unwillingness of its version of God to show himself to the world. Christian theology states that the only way to avoid eternal punishment is to believe in Jesus. Yet for most of its history the majority of people on this planet knew nothing of Christianity. Even today a large percentage, perhaps a majority, of the people on our planet have not had enough exposure to Christian doctrine to make an informed choice. And that’s even before you get into the question of which version is right. Is it one of the American Protestant sects, with their ideas of the Tribulation and the Rapture? Roman Catholicism? The United Church of Canada, with its very liberal version of Protestantism? The Copts, who actually come from the area Christianity originated in?
Well, reasonable people would acknowledge that the differences are minor. Or at least that a just God isn’t going to punish you for being wrong about whether the blood and wine actually turns to Jesus’s blood and flesh or whether it’s just a symbolic gesture. But I guess the Bible is evidence against such a God.
It is interesting that Paul never met the actual Jesus. His gospel was based on private hallucinations and not interactions with anyone else, he says it himself (Galatians 1:12) numerous times.He does talk about hallucinations of 500 brothers in 1 Corinthians 15, which I’m sure is ironclad proof to John A.
John A @ 371:
The bible is a series of words on a page. Those words could refer to anything. They could be purposeful myth, they could be accurate history, they could be mistaken history, they could be the ramblings of mad people.
Words on a page are not, by themselves, enough to prove the truth of those words. All they are proof of is that those words were written down (and even then that isn’t necessarily true when you are talking about translations of translations of translations). You need outside confirmation, and you need context.
Unevidenced claim, dismissed without evidence. Besides, the babble is book of mythology/fiction. It isn’t historical, like the prophecies that were made good after the fact…..
Somebody a hundred years after the fact can’t claim historically true either…which is your babble being assembled from mythical tales.
I’m sure once you try to write “These words are inspired by God” on the page you are magically prevented from lying.
@mikeyb, 314
Thanks! Even if it’s not in print anymore, there’s a decent chance it’ll be available at the open library so I’ll look it up there. :3
I don’t mind saying that I know more about the gospels then Paul. But that really doesn’t make much of a difference, Paul is making a claim, like many other claims he makes, you have still not provided any reason to believe “Paul”, whoever he is supposed to be, is making accurate claims about anything. Also, please look up mass hysteria. It’s quite well documented and can involve many thousands of people. Still no reason whatsoever to assume anything supernatural occured, because well, you still didn’t provide us with any reason to believe that.
I don’t know why you seem to think that attaching the supernatural label to something means you don’t have to provide any evidence. It doesn’t work that way.
What are your sources for the opinions of the first christians? Are you hiding something from the rest of the world or are you just pulling facts from your ass here? What makes you think the first christians ever even saw our versions of the gospels?! Why do you lie so cavalierly about early christian history? Do you have some conclusion you need to protect?
@mikeyb, 361
Just remember to include not believing that you’re immune to nonsense alongside science and reason. I’ve noticed a lot of MRAs claim that their being skeptics means they can’t be wrong about the evil feminazi party’s hatred of all men everywhere.
Paul gives the number (the first encounter anyway) at “over 500 brothers”. Unclear how many that would be with women and children included.
You really need to learn how to close those blockquotes.
Preview is good, too.
John A @ 388:
Your responses show you weren’t really paying attention to what I was saying… For instance, your question “which version of Hinduism” is in response to my response to your statement at 357:
I don’t know how you could ask me “what version” and not ask yourself the same question. Seems like you’re just trying to throw out questions rather than lay out an argument that goes somewhere.
@John A, 356
You know, I’ve heard this many times, but I have no idea why people believe it. Is there an evidential basis for this claim?
I know you’ve already responded to a similar question, but it’s the evidence I’m interested in, not your assertion that the evidence exists. I haven’t seen it, you see, and I’m interested to do so. Maybe I should look more closely at my copy of the Iliad? I’ll have to take it with me tomorrow if I can find it, and have a look through the foreword.
John A, you are doing what I call the different-drummer bit. You accuse us of being just like you, except that we are marching to the beat of a different drum. My response is that we are dancing, not marching, and playing the music, and writing the music and discovering new instruments and beating the analogy into the fucking ground.
The key here can be reduced to two words: science and faith.
You adhere to the Christian faith. You are trying like fuck to present us with reasons and logic and evidence, but at the end of the day, 99% of all Christians would not take offence at the word faith, and many present that believing that Jesus was the son of God is the whole blessed point. Faith is the key.
Science, on the other hand, is about using reasons and logic and evidence to arrive at reasonable approximations to the truth, but not to take them so seriously as to have faith in them. Science is about doubt, and beating the living crap out of every assumption until only truth remains, then snarling suspiciously at that. And getting very snarly indeed at accusations of faith.
To simplify: When someone makes a claim, religious people give him money, scientific people give him a hard time.
You may believe differently, but that is because you are a believing-type person. You may have been atheist once, but now you sound just like all the trolls who believe they are wise.
Notice, John A, that you keep presenting us with logic and reasons and all sorts of science-like stuff (all of it crap), because that is what it takes to make a case. You are attempting to use the procedures of science, and that is what science is about. Facts, logic, evidence.
Notice, also, that when you wish to insult us, you start accusing us of being just like religious people. Stuck, ignorant, blind, obsessed.
Your tools are scientific, your insults are religious.
You are marching to a drummer. We are not.
@Athywren
Blatantly false as the Romans believed it enough to try to link the founding of Rome to the Troy for nationalistic pride reasons
John A, every thing you have written comes down to “nuh uh!”. You need more than that. Much more. Honesty would be a start. Just why are you here? Are you trying to convince yourself, perhaps? Because I’d think it would be apparent by now that people here aren’t going to all of a sudden holler “Jesus!”* and get on their knees.
*outside of cussing, that is.
They arrive at many more truths than your method of “the Bible is true, so it is true, so it true, so it is true….” How many more? Since yours doesn’t produce any, it is as many more as we can actually determine. Whatever that number may be, it is a non-zero positive integer, which is larger than zero. So, ultimately, it is better than your method.
Perhaps true only in the sense that the religions never felt any need to contradict the cultural beliefs in afterlife in the societies it was embraced.
But hey sure maybe the fact that those cultures had gods of the underworld and a celestial bureaucracy doesn’t mean they had any cosmological beliefs. FFS
I mean it’s not like there’s a popular Buddhist/God/Goddess that actually is said to have been sent to Hell or anything. FFS
Still no citation, and your word is dismissed.
Your deity is imaginary. Heaven doesn’t exist. To think so is a delusion, and your haven’t evidenced otherwise.
Another unevidendced assertion dismissed as it should be. Science is not a ideology, but a methodology of discovering how the real world works. I if conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary was there, it would be included. But, like all deities, it appears to be MIA when crunch time comes, and all explanations happen without your imaginary deity. Tsk, tsk, that should tell you something, but you are too ideological/pathologically involved with your delusions to notice.
Science is designed to acknowledge and work around those follies. And how are you working around your follie of believing in a delusion?
Pharyngula had a surfeit of shovels today.
Everyone be careful where you step.
The holes, they be deep.
Apparently you’ve NEVER hallucinated, nor ever read about anyone else’s hallucinations.
Hypothesis: Paul’s hallucination included many people that were also seeing the resurrected Jesus.
.
To refute that hypothesis; provide me the documents that those witnesses wrote, saying, that they too witnessed the resurrected Jesus. Give documents other than the Bible, any other document will do, just provide a single link to a document that supports your assertion. Please, you say you have all the documents, that converted you away from being an atheist, share those documents. Yes, we refuse to read the Bible, but you claim to have many others. Give us a list of the documents that changed you. Enlighten us, please. You want us to change also, so share your documents with us; and see if we change. Prove to us that we are delusional by rejecting your assertions. You like evidence as much as we do, so here’s your opportunity to get evidence that we are delusional. [but, my delusion tells me; you will just take my requests as evidence that I am delusional. So prove to me that I am delusional, don’t just tell me; prove it]
John A:
Which, of course, contradicts religions that do, such as Christianity, Islam, etc.
Which, of course, contradicts both religions that teach a single, eternal afterlife and those that teach none. Yanno, like most of the others you list.
Fortunately, adherents of neither faith make the claim that their teachings come from a perfect teacher and contain no errors.
Oh, wait…
Right. In other words, they require different things.
Yep, when you ignore all of the differences between them, they’re pretty much the same.
No real reason to assume Christianity’s correct, then, right?
(I’m assuming you have also found the ‘definition of supernatural’ question too rough for you. To be polite, you could at least tell me when I’ve stumped you with a question so I can quit asking it).
twas brillig:
Um, no. I’m sick of stating that I have read the bible, in its entirety, more than once, more than one version, and in more than one language. I can play scripture pong all day long.
That has nothing to do with refusing to accept the bible as evidence.
Buddhism doesn’t have an afterlife?
oh, I see
rebirth ≠ afterlife
yup
nod nod
@Inaji 397 – yet another knee jerk false statement comes off the board.
The whole “science is just another ideology” baffles me… The only way I can make it make sense is if I assume the person saying it isn’t thinking about what they’re saying, and I don’t like being that uncharitable. It’s like claiming that walking (a method of moving from point A to point B) is just another version of GPS (which tells you where you are).
Chigau:
Not according to John A. Of course, it’s a different afterlife than the xian one, so naturally it doesn’t count. As John A insists on believing xianity is monolith, I’m sure he also thinks Buddhism is the same way.
Mikeyb:
At this point, I’d be shocked if John A was right about anything.
Chigau, have you had a chat with PZ about ‘Da Schneib’? Idiot is serial posting just to be annoying.
Ugh isn’t the idea that people never believed their own mythology the standard line of one of the famous conmen?
Religions are quite different, though it would be incredible if there weren’t a lot of similarities. They are a combination of mythologies and particular cultural conditions. Gigantic differences exist even within Christendom as most believers fail to appreciate. A case could be made that there isn’t nor ever has been actually a coherent common thing you could call Christianity, but that is another argument in and of itself. Read God is Not One by Stephen Prothero for a good expose. So what before science people had thousands of years to concoct different mythologies to explain things, so why would we expect them to be identical.
John A
teehee
You ain’t a Catholic, that’s for sure.
Ináji
PZ had a word with Da Schneib.
It only made it worse.
@Ingdigo Jump, 393
Thanks for the info. Funnily enough, that’s a really easy one to look up, far easier than them never being considered historical, considering that everything I’ve found so far suggests otherwise, even to the point that, apparently, the Trojan war stories were considered as historically relevant as Abraham when Greece was Christianised. Of course, it’s not extremely thoroughly sourced, and I’m having trouble finding an easily accessible copy of “Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian Chronography” (the source provided for that claim) online, but I might find a copy at the library tomorrow.
Btw, don’t want to be too sensitive, but could you not make it look as if you’re quoting me saying that? Makes it look like I’m the one making the unsupported claim, and not the one questioning it if people aren’t paying attention.
Chigau:
Yeah, I know. Does PZ know the idiot is serial posting now?
Inaji @ 407:
Well, y’see, it’s just the same enough so that all religion essentially teaches the same thing, but just different enough to make Christianity correct.
The Fine Turning Argument, am I doin’ it right?
Mikeyb:
Yes. I’ve posted the different denominations of xianity twice now. 38,000 something of them. John A ignores that completely, insists they are all reconcilable, which they are not, or else there would be *one* denomination. Saying “I’m Christian” doesn’t mean a damn thing. That’s why people will say things like “I’m a Lutheran/Baptist/Protestant/Anglican/Episcopalian/7th Day Adventist/Jehovah’s Witness/Catholic/and on and on and on on on on on/” instead.
Anri @ 416:
I’d say that was an outstanding job.
I find the idea that all religions are reconcilable pretty funny, considering that it’s a common argument among Christian apologists that Christianity is unique among all religions in providing a saviour from their particular flavour doom for disbelief.
I also find it quite funny that they think it’s a failing of other religions that they only concentrate on the solution for their own invented problems, and not the invented problems of other religions, while themselves failing to concentrate on the invented problems of all the other religions.
Ináji
re: Da Schneib
I just sent PZ a note.
Inaji @417
Yes in the past it wasn’t just being a Christian, but the kind of Christian you were that mattered. It still does in many fundie and Catholic circles. Wrong belief in the trinity=burned at the stake. Ask Michael Servetus, or dare I say the name – Giordano Bruno….Ooops sorry, don’t want to go down that rat hole again.
re @402:
apologies for using the royal “we”. Even so; I was actually lying. I too have read the Bible, many times (and won’t ever refuse to do so). And, it was reading It, that converted me to an atheist, but don’t let John A know that<wink>. Just between you and me, right?
@Inaji, 417
“Hi! I’m a Lutheran!”
“Hi! I’m a Calvinist!”
“We have literally no disagreements of any significance!”
“Of course, you’re only saying that because it’s what God ordained at the beginning of time. Which is also why you believe such heretical nonsense. You’re wrong because God decided you were unworthy before you were even conceived. Have fun burning in hell, heathen!”
“Haha, you’re so funny, Calvinist, god doesn’t want robots, he wants us to choose him freely, of our own accord!”
“Damned hippy.”
twas brillig:
Natch. ;)
It was Catholicism that did it for me, however, if that hadn’t of done it, reading the bible most certainly would have.
Did those 500 brothers see Jesus while he was dead? Did they even see him when he was alive before crucifixion?
A Sciencetific Poll
How many people who became atheists were helped in that endeavour by actually reading their HolyBook?
–
Me.
That’s 1.
Chigau, thanks.
Athywren:
Pretty much.
Calvinists believe in predestination, which is seriously irreconcilable with other flavours of xianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_%28Calvinism%29
chigau
Not me. Never even saw a bible until waay after I learnt how to read. Then TLDR. Moon shots and science coloured my childhood dreams.
Chigau:
:Raises hand:
2
I never understood Calvinism.
“So, I’m already either damned or saved and there’s nothing I can do to stop it? Well, I’m not going to bother trying to be a good person, then.”
Chigau 3. You have stumbled upon what I call Asimov’s rule.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/94609-properly-read-the-bible-is-the-most-potent-force-for
Chigau:
Sorta? I read the bible out of a sense of duty, and I found it really, really boring. Apart from some stories that weren’t found in Sunday School, it struck me as tedious and repetitive rather than divinely inspired. Eventually I just skipped ahead to Revelations, since that at least was amusing in its absurdity.
Eh, what the hell. It certainly didn’t help.
3
From what I recall from reading the conversion to atheist stories, about 2/3, plus or minus perhaps a significant amount, of ex-believers read the babble, and that started them toward atheism.
They manage that feat by each ignoring 95% of what the other one is saying, 95% of the time.
@Chigau
I actually haven’t read all of the bible, and most of what I’ve read came after my realisation that I didn’t believe. I’m not convinced that my initial drift toward atheism was particularly rational to be honest with you. I don’t think it was actively irrational either, it’s just where I found myself one morning. I’ve discovered the value of skepticism since then, though, thanks to Papa Hovind, actually, and I’m at least confident that my disbelief is reasonable even if there is a god, given the arguments and evidence I’ve been presented with so far.
So still at 3, assuming nobody else has commented while I rambled.
John A, I have adequate familiarity with the Bible, thank you, to be aware of Doubting Thomas.
As you may not know, many of the regulars here were raised as Christians, and became atheist after reading the Bible for themselves. (My family hosted prayer meetings and brush arbor revivals, and I have been employed by several different religions, et c.) This site is also a home for the Courtier’s Reply, which has to do with accusing one’s opponent with inadequate familiarity with the religion under discussion. It is also a place where the recent Pew poll on religion, the one that determined that atheists scored best on a general religious-knowledge quiz, was greeted with “well, duh” and “dead easy”.
I also have too-great familiarity with passive-aggressive snark, and you, John A, remind me of a certain teenager I know.
My question that you answered with Doubting Thomas and an insult was about how many people saw Jesus BOTH after he was taken off the cross, who would have been prepated to certify that he was dead, AND ALSO saw him after he was resurrected, and would have been prepared to certify that he was indeed alive. I was asking how many people were sitting there babbling, “But I buried you!” Doubting Thomas, God love him, doesn’t get listed among the crucifixion crowd.
You, John A, skipped all the questions that I was asking, to go for an insult that turns out to be a wrong assumption on your part. You aren’t discussing this issue, you are just flinging insults. I can get that from the kids, thanks.
But, to take your response seriously. Are you seriously saying that all of the 500 brothers were in the burial party, and would rate as those able to certify that Jesus was indeed dead, from first-hand evidence, and also all 500 were close enough to the resurrected Jesus to indisputably say that he was THE Jesus, indeed alive, with some wounds that alone, 3ven then, should make him dead?
I am asking you, oh so familiar with the Bible, the number of people who could testify to the death AND to the resurrection.
I’d like the 33 AD equivalent of a doctor, but let’s see what you come up with.
Another irreconcilable matter between different sects of xianity is the bible itself. Different bibles, with different books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible
kinda funny how John A is capable of spending an entire day on here without providing anything.
Like a lot of others on this site, I was raised xtian. In fact, I was quite the bible thumper when I was young. Like a lot of others on this site, I have also read the bible (in my case the King James version) from cover to cover. I would say that most people on this site are more knowledgeable about the Bible than your average Christian.
Me. +4
Couldn’t have said it better my self. Here’s a pertinent quote from Alan Sokol from an essay on Science recently posted in the Scientia Salon. Applies to everything John A and POG have been blathering about.
“Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all “faith” is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: “By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.” It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. “Faith” is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. “Faith” is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.”
@U frood
I think that’s basically the same argument as the one for determinism. If everything’s predetermined , I don’t have to do anything.
Chigau:
Count me out. I became an atheist at around the age of ten or so, when I had the epiphany that deities were just Santa Claus for grownups. Reading the Bible came later.
Well, to play Calvin’s advocate….
It’s hedging one’s bet. You are already damned or saved but you are also predetermined to sin or be virtuous. So if at this moment if I sin then I’ll *knew* that I’m predetermined to be damned. Shit! But if I’m virtuous then there’s still a chance that I might saved. So I’ll be virtuous.
It’s like not being testing for a genetic disease because if you test positive you’ll give up all hope, so you remain in doubt to keep the hope of maybe being positive.
…. or maybe Calvin didn’t give a shit about *motivating* people; he just wanted to judge them… and *know* he was right in his judgement.
I was raised an atheist. I read the bible because I wanted to know what I was talking about and if I might be wrong. I wasn’t.
Yup.
Right around Mark 13, where Jesus talks about coming back before the present generation kicks off fully.
If he couldn’t even get that right, why the hell believe in any of it?
“Well, to play Calvin’s advocate….”
Calvin realized that to be omniscient meant to know EVERY thing that will EVER happen, therefore everything is predetermined. Since God KNOWS what sins you will commit, he can damn you now, and not have to waste his time waiting for you to die. God is timeless, so to him, the future, to us, is the past, to him. When we read history, we can skip around. reading about 1800 before 1700 means that when we read about 1700 we can know what will happen in their future. So everything we read that happened in 1700 is predetermined, cuz we know what will happen in 1800. etc, etc.
God knows everything. How can I say that? Cuz it says so in the Bible. who wrote the Bible? God. How can I believe the Bible is true? How could I not believe God? Why would God lie? only people can twist their words into falsehoods. Bible says so. Bible is true, cuz the Bible says so.
woozy #445
Yep. Me too. Another poll? How many were raised atheist?
Tomas @442:
But you will anyway, because you have no choice! Cue dramatic horror film music.
@Dalillama, Schmott Guy
In response to your critique of libertarianism, even if you do acknowledge your problem , keep in mind your “solution” is to start threatening peaceful people with violence for money. Is this really a valid solution? Also many racist and sexist practices and gov’t endorsed monopolies have gone on with the full endorsement of big gov’t over the years , so its unclear whether big gov’t really solves the problem.
In a free market society , if some group is being denied service or treated badly , the competitor who does offer service and fair treatment has a competitive advantage. If women/minorities can do jobs as well as white males , the non-discriminatory employer has a whole labour force he can get .
@opposablethumbs
Your Somalia thing is a strawman. That’s like saying all big gov’t will lead to North Korea.
In a free market society everyone has the ability to participate. Employer who get more profit will be able to hire more workers and competition mean everyone gets competitive wages. Prosperity will spread around the whole nation. Everyone will be better off.
I think its the gov’t of the gaps fallacy you employ as well. We’ve got a sound theory , with IMO better moral and economic reasons for adoption , than our failed system of big gov’t.
@Al Dente
Its based on love o our fellow man , and realizing its wrong to threaten peacful men like him for violence. Its based on freedom.
Tomas C. #450
It’s based on a dog-eat-dog world-view, and does nothing for fellow people who lose out. And their will always be those who lose out, because that’s the nature of any competitive system.
If I may ask, how did you manage that? Just one read-through of the KJV has taken me years. It’s awful.
And speaking of unquestioned deities…the Free Market!
I was not raised as an atheist, but I was raised without a significant amount of church attendance or religious influences. It was largely not part of my life and my parents are non-religious. All I remember from the Anglican church we went to when I was really young (I think my parents were trying to make some relatives happy and we did not go for long) was sitting in the basement colouring Jesus and pals with my favourite crayons, the metallics. There was also an unpleasant weekend when staying with Baptists relatives where I went to their Sunday school, which I strongly remember finding quite distasteful.
Quit this fuckwitted and totally ignorant, emotional, and egotistical wording. There is no violence in taxation. If you don’t like the taxes, MOVE. YOU MOVE. You need to mature up your reasoning, and also get empathy for others.
Tomas:
First question: how accurately is that portraying what actually happens when people pay taxes? The simple, cartoonish picture you’ve painted in your mind about it: does reality look much like that picture, or does it not look much like it?
Therefore, let’s do nothing whatsoever to even attempt to address the problem. Every single time you appeal to “the free market,” you are effectively saying “we have no intention of solving problems, just letting shit happen however it happens, no matter how much shit there is.”
Also, you’ve been arguing for zero government. Don’t even start talking about “big gov’t” until you openly admit those arguments have utterly failed. Is this supposed to be an admission of failure?
Meanwhile, those people are being denied services and are treated badly. When that’s happening, who the fuck cares whether some employer could get a particular fucking labor force?
Rey:
That was during my Jesus Freak days, when Calvary Chapel was a tent. I kept hoping I’d find it was different, that it wasn’t really so appalling. It is, and it definitely sealed my atheism.
Yes, it is.
King James 1/6 shoulda stuck to kinging. He was a terrible author.
Like Nerd, I am a vociferous opponent of libertarianism. Enclosed are a couple of many good critiques.
http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/liberty.htm
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/
John A, 179
This tells me more about you than you could possibly know
@Athywren
Sorry was just tagging you because you asked about it.
Better to be wrong and stay that way?
You keep good company
I think we’re at a count of 8 for those who realized their atheism after reading the bible, so put me down for count of 9.
‘Course I first declared my atheism at the age of four but those were some harsh years of indoctrination afterward. I supposed one could say I re-realized my atheism thanks to the bible.
Tomas C. @ 450
Except that in the kind of situation you’re arguing for, people can be excluded from the economy. If every company refuses to employ women/black people/Jews/immigrants/etc, then those people won’t be able to participate in the economy, and thus their labour will have no value. No member of the non-excluded classes will gain any competitive advantage by offering goods and services to them because the excluded classes will have _no money_. They won’t be able to take advantage of things like education and medical care, and thus get caught in a poverty trap. Helpful hint: Lifting people out of poverty is not profitable. We can see this because profit-driven entities do not do this. This happens everywhere, repeatedly. It’s happening today, it happened in the US after the Civil War, it happened in the Great Depression, it happened in Victorian England…
Did you not pay attention to the previous post about the existence of company towns? No, people can be excluded from the economy by non-government coercion just as easily as by government coercion!
So it’s wrong to threaten people with violence, but it’s not wrong to threaten people with starvation? Economic coercion is still coercion, whether you’re forcing peasants to give you a share of their harvest at the point of a sword or forcing sweatshop workers to work for less than a dollar a day because you control all the factories and food sources nearby.
@450
Tomas C.
the free market didn’t fucking fix the denial of hotel service to black people. try again. the answer you are looking for is “g.o.v.e.r.n.m.e.n.t.”.
Inaji:
What a small world: I spent my childhood being indoctrinated at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. My family started attending just a couple years after they built their main sanctuary. I wasn’t able to shake off the brainwashing until I hit my teens.
Not “people”, it’s “
innocentpeaceful people”.Dunno about the rest of them.
Tomas –
This is simply, baldly, factually untrue. You seem like a rational person; you should be ashamed of yourself.
That is, unless you are asserting that children, the elderly, and people with temporary or chronic illnesses, people with permanent disabilities, and parents of infants aged 0 – 6 months (conservative estimate; in reality it should probably be ages 0 – 2 year) are not people.
If that were true, then it might be broadly accurate to say that “everyone” has the ability to participate in a free market economy.
Is that what you believe, Tomas? Because if not, I would suggest not supporting an economic system simply ignores people who cannot participate in a free market economy for whatever reason. It affords them no protections; makes no provisions to meet their needs, condemns them to drudgery and life on an economic treadmill that always goes just a bit faster than they can keep up with.
You are like the godbots on the thread when it comes to this subject. People keep asking you how the free market will meet the needs of those who aren’t well-situated to sell their labor at the moment. You are basically in denial about the existence of these people. You keep responding, “The free market will do it!” without explaining how it’s going to do what it has failed to do so many times in the past. As was pointed out, your hypothetical scenario for righting bigotry via the free market required a large proportion of the workforce who are the targets of that bigotry to basically take a time out from the market while some good-hearted business man suddenly overcame all his childhood conditioning and basic human self-interest (which would dictate that if only he and people who looked like him had access to the market, they would be able to access a greater portion of its wealth, therefore excluding sizable minorities from it, so long as you can keep them pacified makes sense) and said, “Ah! My competitor is hiring only people who look like us; I shall hire people who look different.” How long is this process supposed to take? And suppose no business owners come to that conclusion, obvious though it may seem to you or me. For centuries white people owned black people as property, brutalized them, raped them, and murdered them with impunity–why is it so inconceivable that it might take a few more centuries before white people realized that it’s also not cool to refuse to hire black people just because they are black?
This is why libertarianism is inherently bound up with bigotry and is endorsed by right wing big business supporters.
Stop fucking up, Tomas. It’s clear you have the capacity to do better.
Come now, Tomas C., look at how the free market operates. It operates with opposition.
Buyer is opposed to seller in multiple ways. This includes quality, safety, price, etc.
And this will also be true for private education standards.
Maybe you only see the pushing force on one side, none from the opposing side. Maybe you don’t realize that the companies will have diminishing returns for their efforts to be good. You somehow think that the opposing forces will balance at a good position, but you have not showed this.
And that’s before we get to items that need funding yet cannot provide a service.
And also you have ignored so much criticism of your analogies about “threats” and stuff.
Inaji, thanks for the Lakotah creation story. That was lovely.
I find the religious trolls to be fascinating because after a long session, I can kinda see how their brain works. What they ignore, what they respond to, how they respond, what they know. Their thought processes are laid bare, and all religions start to look like a spoiled teen.
Tomas C. @450:
But not equally.
Those who have greater market stake have greater power within the free market society, by definition. In a free market, those with greater economic power have greater market power. So, those with a greater share of the market have a greater ability to participate.
The problem with unregulated free market is this: there’s no such thing as an unregulated free market. If society as a whole (perhaps by elected representatives in a body granted regulatory power) doesn’t regulate the market, those with greater economic power will. This has been demonstrated time and again. I can think of several from the last 150 years alone — Standard Oil, IBM, and Microsoft, to name just a few. (Microsoft alone set the computing industry back 10 years by regulating the market in their own favor.)
The people with essentially no ability to participate, except as allowed by those who have majority share: the poor. Anyone without market representation. (And as white males hold the vast majority of market power, that leaves anyone not a white male at a disadvantage.)
Those who hold great economic power have no incentive to grant more economic power to those without. So, no. Those who pay workers a living wage aren’t necessarily at an advantage over those who don’t. Those who don’t discriminate aren’t necessarily in a better economic position than those who do.
In fact, it’s naive to believe that to be true, and goes against the immensity of history.
But you “vote” for the Good Companies™ in the Free Market™ with your dollar bills. You take them elsewhere, if they aren’t Good™ and only if they aren’t Good™. Obviously.
And if you have no dollars with which to “vote,” then you must not be an innocent, peaceful person. Obviously. So fuck you.
This is the thing about libertarianism and morality and force, you see.
Some people are going to be predisposed to treating each other well. A minority seems to be disposed towards treating others badly, as objects to be disposed of rather than people with agency and desires. The problem for everyone is what to do about that minority. People like that, who see others as objects, may be convinced by the rational and sound argument that ultimately, if everyone acted as they do, society would crumble. That it’s good to honor contracts and bad to initiate force because it’s unethical to take a person’s resources from him (libertarians skew male) without his consent. (And no, the social contract doesn’t count because sociology isn’t a real science.) Libertarianism makes that gamble, that the sociopaths and cheats and liars among us are truly enlightened individuals who will see the value of the free market and participate without subverting its mechanisms to tilt the playing field in their favor.
Unfortunately, the sociopaths and liars and cheats among us generally don’t make that calculation, and it’s not because they’re irrational. It’s because they see that the vast majority of the rest of us will continue to treat others fairly no matter what, because that’s just the way we are, and therefore they won’t generally have to worry about society falling apart. Except when it does, and then you get the New Deal and all that. But it takes a long time to get to that point. And in the meantime, as demonstrated by historical record, a great many people suffer malnourishment, homelessness, trauma, entirely preventable and curable illnesses, economic desperation, people turning to crime, and so on.
consciousness razor:
Exactly. Which in the US leaves the top 1% of the population with 40% of the vote.
And since most poor folks can only vote for their own bare survival, and don’t have enough votes left to vote for income security and a decent living wage, I guess it’s up to that top 1% to make sure the vote turns out right, in favor of the majority.
I mean, I know if I controlled 40% of the vote, I’d vote to shift some of those votes away from me to the people who could use them.
In a system based on unregulated greed, the greedy will prosper. The greedy do not tend to be noted for their altruism.
It really is that fucking simple.
Jagwired:
Yeah, there was intense brainwashing going on. I was still there after the buildings were in place. It was a discussion with Romaine that led me to leave. I had asked him if fear of hell was a good enough reason to believe in god, and he treated it like a joke. I didn’t get any sort of actual answer.
Menyambal:
You’re welcome. I think it’s a lovely story, too.
I’m guessing you haven’t read very many of his comments then.
Libertarianism sickens and disgusts me even more that creationism or fundamentalism. I would go as far as to say that libertarian inspired ideas going back to Reagan threaten the very foundation of democracy. Without libertarianism, how do you explain how one family, the Waltons have a fortune representing the bottom 42% of all Americans combined. If that isn’t sick beyond belief, I don’t know what is.
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2013/dec/08/one-wisconsin-now/just-how-wealthy-wal-mart-walton-family/
Hey. I’m trying to be nice, okay? He has demonstrated the capability to apply reason to the claims of godbotters.
There’s this thing I like to call “casual selfishness.” It manifests in some of the simplest ways: the driver who has to rush up in the fast lane and cut across two lanes of traffic to jam in at the last second in the congested off-ramp. The shopper at the supermarket who leaves their cart roaming free in the parking lot rather than putting them in the car corrals. The co-worker who leaves dirty dishes in the sink. The person who is an asshole on the phone to customer service representatives.
Those sorts of things.
Next time there’s a storm, look at how many people leave their carts in the parking lot. These are people who are willing to thoughtlessly fuck over another person for their own minor convenience. If these folks are willing to do this for a minor convenience (or to avoid a minor inconvenience), just imagine what they would do, how many they would fuck over, for something truly rewarding. Y’know, like a bigger paycheck at the cost of others’ paychecks.
Casual selfishness. It’s all over the place. And it’s the #1 reason libertarianism simply can’t work.
(Or, as my wife likes to say: “Communism. In theory, it works.
“In Theory.”)
@453 Rey Fox
That’s more true than you realize. According to classic economics as taught in evern Econ department in the country The Market is
Omniscient
Omnipotent
Omnibenevolent
Perfect except when sinful Man in the form of gubbmint believes he knows better than The Market
Capable of creating any quantity of anything desired
Capable of doing anything if enough money is provided
Creates a perfect morality
Provides simple answers to all problems
Is capable of setting aside laws of nature. Seriously I’ve heard economists argue that things like sleep, water and oxygen could be replaced if only we got the price and demand structure right or offered enough incentives.
Daz (#448)
I was raised Christian (Episcopalian), then Unitarian Universalist and then neo-pagan. My mother wanted to be a minister at one point, but her take on Christianity was heavily influenced by people like Elaine Pagels, and she was a big fan of syncretism. Later, when she had the basement remodeled, she had different color tile laid to indicate the four cardinal points and held pagan rituals and drumming circles down there with her friends.
My dad (who divorced my mom when I was 6, so had less influence) isn’t religious, but he believes in stupid shit like ancient aliens. He’s a very gay-leaning bisexual and likes to joke about there’s no way a bunch of nice Jewish boys like Jesus and his disciples were running around in the desert for years and years without banging one another.
I have this diary from when I was around five in which I wrote about how Jesus loves me and I love Jesus, but I don’t remember ever believing that. Whatever cured me of Christianity happened early on. Apparently when I was really young I confronted the bishop of our church at the time and said (with the encouragement of my mother), “I understand the father, and I understand the son, but what the hell is the ‘holy ghost’?” His failure to explain it very well (though he did try) probably contributed to my loss of faith. I was also taught about sex, pregnancy, and birth early on, which led me to wonder seriously about whether Adam and Eve would have had belly buttons, another question nobody could answer.
Anyway, I wasn’t raised atheist in the least, but it’s hardly surprising that’s how I turned out!
I was basically raised Unitarian. I can’t credit the Bible with turning me atheist, since I’ve never quite gotten around to reading the entire thing. I would give credit to the Christian homophobes who wrote letters to the editor of my local paper, which I read every day while eating my breakfast before school for turning me away from Christianity. But I still maintained a pagan sort of deistic belief, similar to my parents, until college and Phsryngula allowed me to realize that it was okay not to have an open mind about stuff that wasn’t obviously religious mythology as well.
I was raised fairly fundy. Reading the entire bible didn’t turn me atheist.
It wasn’t until almost a year after I became an atheist that the, perhaps suppressed, memories of my mom telling us about Abraham and Isaac (yes she would have to kill us if instructed) (and so many other fucked up stories) flooded back into my brain and I finally remembered and faced how fucked up those specific moments and memories were, and how they impacted me as a young kid.
I distinctly remember crying after Religion class in HS because of the genocide and rape shit in the Bible
@Tomas
1) Innit funny how the employer is assumed to be male?
2) What if the women and minorities don’t happen to live near the employer who hires people who aren’t white males?
3) Who says the allegedly non-discriminatory employer is paying a comparable wage to the discriminatory one?
It is government, with the implicit threat of force, if necessary, that guarantees, or at least attempts to, the ability for everyone to participate.
No free market is even remotely possible without a government willing to use the threat of force to guarantee access and the ability to participate for everyone.
@SallyStrange
Most of the time when discrimination has occurred , the gov’t wasn’t trying to prevent it , it was legitamizing it Look at the Jim Crow laws , racist rulings and all the ethnic cleanising that has occurred. Just as businessmen can be corrupt or selfish and biased , gov’t officials can be equally corrupt and selfish and biased. So if you’re going to reject libertarianism for those reasons , you should reject big gov’t as well,
The difference is a businessman who has to decide between a more productive black employee and a less productive white one has a compelling reason not to discriminate. A businessman who sees a demand for teh product in the black community can see opportunities to make money by providing it.
The gov’t official has not stake either way , as long as he gets re-elected
And to go back to the GOTH video . I agree George ought to help. It would be better if George did give some money to Oliver. George might be a selfish person for not deciding to donate money to Olver , but is it really moral to threaten him with violence and imprisonment to give his money to Oliver?
Opportunity to participation is very important
On an unrelated note: everyone remember when Libertarians Penn and Teller did a whole episode about how awful wheelchair ramps and giving access to the disabled are?
No, I shouldn’t. You know why? Because I have a voice in government. Yeah, okay, right now the mechanism is super corrupt, but at least the mechanism is there. You? You have ZERO mechanism. But there needs to be a mechanism. Remove the corruption, not the mechanism.
Frankly, I think our economics have the potential to be organized such that I would have more of a voice in any company I worked for. There’s no reason that economic entities should be ruled by a guild of the wealthiest, instead of being subject to democratic vote.
Face it: your position is untenable.
Now, Tomas, no dodging: do you acknowledge that it is a falsehood to state that everyone can participate in a free market?
Tomas C. #488
The difference being, we can change the government.
Yeah, that’s why we never read stories of businesses discriminating against people on grounds of gender, sexuality, colour, religion…
Oh, wait…
Have you thought about checking this theory against reality sometime?
Taxation is not violence. Stop saying this. Taxation is the price we pay for the benefit of living in a society.
Sorry, late to the game, but:
John A (Liar for Jesus)
(Emphasis mine)
Um. But I thought Paul was a Pharisee who persecuted Christians before his meeting Jesus on the road (unwitnessed by anyone else of course). Why would he wait until then if he’d seen Jesus’ resurrection? Unless that is the resurrection he saw that you were referring to. But, this was after Jesus went up and promised the second coming and yada yada.
@SallyStrange
You have a say in the free market as well. You can boycott or get people to people to boycott companies who use discriminatory hiring practices. You might say your money might not count for much overall relative to to business’ total income , but your vote doesn’t count for that much overall either
Inaji,
I’m going to try sending you an email.
If you think about it for more than one minute, you’ll realize that the comparison is false.
Now, are you going to admit that it is a falsehood to state that EVERYONE is capable of participating in a free market?
Or are you going to go on record as considering children, the elderly, and people with disabilities or illnesses as non-persons?
I confess that I haven’t read the Bible all the way through. Every time I get into it, I find something that leaves me incredibly pissed-off.
Fair disclosure: I am forbid the congregation of the lord in two different ways that are totally beyond my control. Some bastardy in a previous generation had me condemned before conception (gotta remember that for the next abortion discussion), and a medical condition that incidentally reduces my chances of passing on the curse. Fortunately I figured out that I was atheist before I noticed that shit.
I use the KJV because that is the version I grew up with, and the only version for a lot of the crazies. It’s also Shakespearean. Not that any of them understand Shakespeare.
I have a KJV with the translators’ letter to King James around here somewhere.
Well, that changes everything! You never mentioned that your libertarian fantasy system involved every person only having a single unit of currency and using that as their ballot.
So, you should have no problem redistributing everything you own, except possibly your last dollar, so we’ll all have equal votes. That way everyone is treated fairly.
But make sure you don’t call any of it a “tax,” because I hear those are really, inherently, bad. And make sure it isn’t a “big” government that does it — just a very small one that can actually take care of all of its responsibilities. Perhaps one made of tiny, libertarian robots. The smaller, the better. Or if nothing else, make sure they at least have small brains, or think very little about what the fuck they’re saying and doing.
You know, if you are going to efficiently boycott businesses, you need to get people organized, figure out a way for them to agree on standards for boycotts, let them participate in the decision making, let the people of the group refuse to supply those businesses, set up a system to protect businesses from overzealous boycotters who are not of the group, give the businesses the standards that the group has decided on, and systematize the whole schmeer so most folks don’t have to bother with it ….
So it only works if the idealists are right about the world.
If the idealists are right anyway, why not try socialism? You get more sex and art museums that way. The food’s not as good but the sex, museums and health care are exceptional.
Of course, idealists aren’t right about the world so … that basically makes the libertarian saying “We know it can’t work but we don’t give a fuck”.