Hey, now! I have a friend who is a professor of rock music at York University and was a pioneer in the scholarly treatment of popular culture. He was once talking about the early days when he and his colleagues had to struggle to be taken seriously by academia, and I remarked on how different it was for my daughters, who were able to take courses in subjects like horror movies and science fiction. With a glint in his eye he said “That’s because we won.”
1 Like
Every Christian college and university in the world that teaches the life sciences teaches evolution and has for quite some time now. Anyone who has been to one of these schools knows that. If anyone needs any more proof that this Eddie person has never set foot on a college campus his last post is that proof.
1 Like
No thanks. I’ve already had some. You specialize in it. And straw-manning. And, by golly, appeal to “the average citizen”, when you have just pissed on Mr. Badenoff for something similar.
2 Likes
That’s an excellent description of your post – the one to which I am replying.
I wonder why you raised that up in the first place. Don’t bother setting up a new thread.
A little harsh…
2 Likes
That’s weird! Seems pre-moderation has been switched off, for me at least. My last comment went straight through, unlike the previous comment that languished for seven hours.
Regarding a discussion on the competing hypotheses that the Jesus narratives describe a legendary character or a mythical one (or indeed that the accounts are largely factual), I’d be happy to start the ball rolling but I’m unfamiliar with the forum mechanics.
1 Like
Perhaps. I put it in Biblical Greek because I knew the “Bible scholars” here wouldn’t be able to read it.
Maybe one of the moderators will read your post and do it for you. They did it for me.
I beg your pardon, Sir! Accuracy is indeed key. I have a record of objecting to binarism. I forget a lot… but not the attempt to be less wrong.
Well, indeed. A few data points would be a start.
1 Like
Then why didn’t you learn from them when they told you that a historical Jesus existed?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You just failed Epistemology 100. Evidence is only meaningful in the context of an overall argument. Darwin said essentially the same thing, that evidence is only meaningful when marshalled in the service of some theory. And philosophers of science, and historians, and just about everybody else with advanced theoretical accomplishment, knows that evidence and argument are dance partners that can’t do without each other.
It doesn’t follow that those mentions were written in Rome; nor does it follow that those mentions were written by people who had never lived in Judea, before living in Rome. Apparently logic was not a subject you studied as your college. (By the way, you were right when you said that I had never been to “college”. All my education, including two graduate degrees, was received at universities.)
Hardly. You’ve given a smattering of loose connections, nothing like a tight textual argument. If you had spent as much time learning narratological theory as you have spent dabbling in writers who offer irresponsible speculations regarding “myth”, you might be able to say something coherent about the Gospel texts, regarding their literary form.
Nobody here claimed that the Gospels were “historical narratives”. At least, I didn’t. But that hardly proves that they could not have presented a figure who actually existed in real time. A work of literature doesn’t have to be a history to contain historical facts, and to feature historical personages.
I didn’t even say that it was a fringe theory. I said that most scholars think that Jesus was a real person who lived in Palestine in the first century, and that they have provided hundreds of reasons for thinking so in their books and articles. That does not mean that the Gospel writers couldn’t have “mythologized” Jesus. We’ve seen in our own era the “mythologizing” of Elvis Presley, and the building of what amounts to an ancient hero-cult around his residence, etc., and no one denies the Elvis was a man who really lived.
I’m actually quite open to a scholarly study that would take one particular Gospel and treat the entire work as a work of myth-making But even a successful treatment of that sort (which you certainly have not provided here) would not prove that Jesus never existed, and it would be compatible with firm historical evidence that Jesus did exist. You don’t have to deny that Jesus existed to hold to your “mythical” thesis. You’re making unnecessary work for yourself by doing so. Again, if you had proper graduate school training in the subjects you are writing about, you would be able to make the distinctions I’m making, and then you could produce something that might be useful, instead of a series of absurd overstatements that aren’t necessary to make your point.
The whole graduate department in which I studied, at the time ranked in the top five in the world for religious studies, talked exactly as I do – faculty and grad students alike. My teachers were trained at places such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Oxford, etc. My approach reflects that kind of training. Perhaps it wasn’t the same at the (little provincial?) college you attended?
1 Like
The average citizen is quite capable of determining the motives of angry, belligerent atheists who have tipped their hands in hundreds of ways in countless venomous statements against religious belief, Christianity, and the Bible, on the internet and elsewhere. The average citizen is not capable of making fine philological judgments about the relationship of the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Jewish scriptures. The former requires only a knowledge of human nature such any half-intelligent and half–observant person can acquire from several decades of living among human beings; the latter requires specialized training.
The two cases aren’t at all parallel.
I suspect you knew this even before you offered your jab, but even if you didn’t, I hope I’ve made it clear to you now.
[quote=“Eddie, post:405, topic:14127”]
The average citizen
Are you average, Eddie? Aren’t we all special in some way? Any scholar who is incapable of explaining his speciality to a layman is pretty crap, in my view.
ETA all right, I’ll qualify “to an interested layman”
You mean in a spirit that misrepresents science as all debate and no data.
Do they suggest that for other topics in biology?
And it would be an utter waste of time, because ID is creationism dressed up to evade the prohibition of religion in the classroom.
2 Likes
Eddie, it’s preposterous to claim authority while hiding behind a pseudonym.
Why do you always tout your alleged training and rarely any alleged academic accomplishments?
That’s because you couldn’t care less regarding Christianity; but some of us do care. It’s one thing to reject Christianity, as Bertrand Russell did; it’s another to embrace Christianity, as G. K. Chesterton did; I respect both of those positions. But to claim to adhere to the most doctrine-bound of all forms of Christian faith, while denying or at least publicly casting doubt on several core doctrines of that faith, is to adopt an incoherent position, both intellectually and existentially. So those of us who value theoretical and existential coherence naturally ask questions when we see such a phenomenon. But as Michael has indicated that he has no intention of giving an account of his current religious and theological position vis-a-vis the Roman Church, I will respect his decision and not press him any further. He has the right to discuss or not discuss his faith and his theology, as he pleases.
I quite agree. There may be a few exceptions in some of the more abstruse areas of theoretical physics, but for the most part, I think you are right. But that is not responsive to what I’ve been talking about. Are you going to answer my question about Richard the Lionheart, or not? In case you missed it, I’ll repeat the question:
If you mean, teaches that evolution is true, you’re dead wrong – there are plenty of Christian colleges that teach life sciences yet are bound by their faith statements to say that evolution (beyond trivial levels) did not happen. But then, raised a secular Jew, you’ve probably had very little contact with conservative Christians, so it’s not at all surprising that you don’t have a clue about the educational institutions raised by that culture.
If you mean, teaches about the theory of evolution, i.e., makes its students familiar with what the theory says, you are probably correct. But in the conservative places, that teaching “about” evolution is accompanied by a rejection of evolution. If you leave that point out, you are misleading the readers here.
Why do I keep catching you in factual error after factual error? And not just little slips, but major falsehoods? Don’t you do any research before you write?
We all can read it. I taught Biblical Greek for seven years. (Also Hebrew once, by the way.) And of course, “προσποιειται” is not only harsh, but wrong in my case.
That applies when people choose to be entirely silent about their faith. One should not probe in such cases.
It’s a different matter when someone publicly announces that he is undergoing catechism classes with a view to very soon becoming an official member of the Catholic Church and then, a few months later, makes more public statements which are incompatible with such a decision. Once a person has chosen to break silence and make public statements, pointing out the logical incoherence between the statements is fair game, and not unwarranted probing. But as Michael has indicated that he has no intention of explaining the apparent contradiction, I will respect his decision and let the matter go.
I claimed no authority. I stated facts about how I was trained and the then-ranking of my school. I did not say that my views on anything should be agreed with because of my training. I was responding to false statements about my training levelled by Boris Badenoff. He said I had no university training at all. (False.) He said that nobody in religious studies academia talks the way I do. (False.) I was merely correcting him on facts about me and my field, since he neither knows me personally nor has the slightest clue of what happens beyond the BA level in religious studies, yet insists on making false statements. I did not say that my training made my arguments about Jesus, the character of the Gospels, the Septuagint, Greek, etc. necessarily correct.
Your remarks about pseudonyms are rather hypocritical, it seems to me, given that you hid behind a pseudonym for years on other sites, before coming here. Indeed, you even once gave a list (under your pseudonym) of biological journals in which you had published, but when asked for the title of any of the articles, you declined to supply one. (Obviously, since that would give away your identity, which you at the time wanted to conceal.) You could at that time no more verify that you actually wrote those articles than I can verify my own academic biography here. But you did not object at that time to your own use of a pseudonym. Also, you have not challenged the factual claims of “Boris Badenoff” about his own education, even though he, too, is quite obviously using a pseudonym. The double standard is quite obvious. But that’s what a number of biology/biochemistry Ph.D.s who argue about evolution on the internet specialize in: double standards. Nothing new here.
I know how to use the arrow to get back to the posts, but I’m not sure how accurate the numbering system is – it seems to vary by one number, depending on where I place my cursor. So I will simply reproduce the two relevant posts, that capture the last state of our discussion.
Here is the first post you should look at:
And here is the second post you should look at:
Let me know your answer, and then we’ll see if we have cleared up the confusion and reached agreement on at least one subsidiary point.
Binarist! Accuracy appears in degrees. We approach reality by being less wrong or more accurate. It’s a progression (ideally) not a contest.
Regarding Richard I as a historical figure, there’s no doubt he existed. He died 5 years before the sack of Constantinople. Would he have been horrified? Is that a legitimate question?
1 Like