927 thoughts on “What Makes Something Right or Wrong?”
Well what I got, Barry, was that it was unknown whether or not the prophets – and that would include Isaiah – wrote their own, but they were certain that of those, Micah did, and that Zechariah wrote all but the last six chapters of his.
Traditionalists on the other hand believe Moses wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy, Paul wrote all the Epistles, the Disciples wrote the Gospels – with John also penning Revelation.
And Will and John Kellogg still write those really interesting Vitamin Lists on the side of the Cornflakes packet.
Yes, one can do this. But surely it is a mark of one’s integrity that one follows fact rather than one’s personal version of the truth, no matter the outcome?
This is honest. To do otherwise one might as well align oneself with Eusebius.
“You remember what I suggested to godsmanforever involving paper mache over on Violet’s blog?” – One of your finer moments.
I’m not accustomed to walking on eggshells, but then I haven’t been banned from as many blogsites as you have. Only one, actually – perhaps you might recall that incident, Old Bean —
So we have exposed and thoroughly refuted UnkleE’s logical fallacy of appealing to Argumentum ad Populum as sufficient evidence to state that the stories presented in the four anonymously written gospels are “historical facts”.
I now challenge anyone to present actual evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and let’s debate this evidence.
I now challenge anyone to present actual evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and let’s debate this evidence.
There is no real evidence. Once again, one has to begin with a major presupposition before one can even begin to evaluate the tale in the gospels.
And in the case of the story of the resurrection of the character Jesus of Nazareth there are any number of presuppositions one can choose.
The resurrection is a philosophical exercise in faith and is simply reliant on the cleverest argument.
Only unfortunate indoctrinated people or credulous fools will even entertain this nonsense.
I agree with you Ark, but UnkleE has been asked to provide evidence for the Resurrection and his only response has been to use the fallacious logic of Agumentum ad Populum over and over and over again. However, he is not the only Christian reading this blog. Let’s see the evidence, folks, or, let’s simply agree that believing in the reanimation of a dead first century prophet is based on faith alone.
The problem you face is that no christian of unklee’s ilk will admit to this. He has stated he has evangelical leanings. Cherry picked to his specifications, but evangelical to an extent.
There is no true historical method when it comes to theology. It has never passed muster.
If you have visited unklee’s site you will find he has used his reasonable ”facts”/evidence argument ad nauseum, subtly blending the ” what all peer-reviewed, mainstream scholars currently employed at a recognised facility ( thus negating someone like Carrier) agree on” with hand picked experts of all stripes then carefully blending their views, while condemning Carrier, Price, the Jesus Seminar the Acts Seminar and similar as fringe or worse.
Yet, genuine, secular scholarship dismisses the Resurrection as nonsense. It is not even entertained.
But sadly, genuine scholars often have to wallow in the mire and argue it at bootstrap level if they are ever going to make an impression on credulous indoctrinated religious people.
It’s sad, but we are dealing with people who believe in the supernatural and consider themselves sinners.
So, the apologists’ (unklee) arguments.
From the front, they are exquisitely tailored. However, get him to ”turn around” and the arse is hanging out of his trousers.
The contemporary evidence argument is swept aside; Philo is never addressed, and any challenge mounted against the resurrection is treated with disdain and condescension as if you are an imbecile for simply raising your hand in class.
I mean , who the Frakk are you , Gary, to challenge Sanders, NT Wright, Maurice Casey,Habermaas, etc and even that bloke he dredged up from the Secular Web?
Every time you ask the reply will be, What do the ”experts” say? His experts. Not yours.
He might genuinely believe in what he says. And remember also, he is obliged to proselytize, which maybe why he ventures away from the comfort of his own site. The internet version of door knocking, perhaps?
Failing that, he is just tripping on ego, as he has never addressed these issue with any meaningful degree of honesty.
You won’t get an honest answer, because honesty, fact and truth do not feature very highly in religion.
When they come to the fore, one is soon addressing a deconvert.
I have made this point before but I think that it is worth repeating:
If the evidence for the Resurrection were as strong as the evidence for any other alleged event in Antiquity, as many Christian apologists claim, why is it that not one single secular university in the United States uses a course book in its history classes that includes as historical fact the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? And even more, I would bet that not one single history text book in these same universities lists Jesus as an historical figure along with Herod the Great, Julius Caesar, Philo, etc.
It’s not history, folks. It’s religious legend.
I know the Christian response will be: There is a conspiracy in secular universities against Christianity, but this is the typical response of a cult.
I think you are both right. Perhaps polite isn’t the right word here. How about tactful? Regardless, I still believe that Pastor Bill may be on the verge of showing his nasty side, and I’m just trying to err on the side of precaution since he is somebody that Gary holds dear (or so I assume).
It’s also perfectly fine that you guys are ok with it. Maybe this is just my Asian lineage talking.
Onto more interesting things:
My Christianity?
Well, I was a non-devout Buddhist who used to think Buddha is useless since everything is karma based, so I am always extremely irritated when my parents asked me to pray to Buddha for good exam results. Then I went to a Pentecostal charismatic church at the behest of my then-and-now-ex girlfriend and I was saved! Spoke in tongues, slain by the spirit and all. Within 5 years later I rose through the ranks, became a cell group leader, young adults leader, and subsequently director of the worship team. However, the more I read the bible, the more fundamentalistic I became, and I thought that the only to truly follow God was to follow the bible strictly. It was clear to me that my charismatic church wasn’t following clear doctrines/dogma stipulated in the bible, and the “prophets” of my church was talking trash, while speaking in tongues shouldn’t be a universal christian trait as what most if not all Pentecostals believe.
So, I felt that God wanna teach me something (holy spirit guidance you guys), and I went church hopping (easy thing to do when you live in a city) and ended up in a Methodist church. Anyway, same thing happened, became a leader, served in various ministry, yada yada yada, then after that I decided to pop and read infidels.org and everything made more sense and answered all my christian queries that I’ve accumulated in a decade much better then my pastors and bible college lecturers could ever did. And then I started reading atheists blogs and this lovely one was one of the first or perhaps the first that I came across.
All in all took me around 2-3 months to shed my faith, another 1-2 months to convince my wife that she didn’t have to divorce me and we’re still good people. She deconverted in pretty much the same pace as me. And yupz here I am.
I can’t see how any time-based physical universe or multiverse can have existed forever. (a) you can’t count from 1 to infinity, so I don’t think it makes sense that you could have a physical chain of events from infinite past to now
I think if we are in a multiverse that has no beginning then we should not expect to be able to count to the first event, because there is no first event.
It would be similar to saying that a bottomless pit could not exist because if you jumped into the pit you would never reach the bottom. But a bottomless pit does not have a bottom, so you should not expect to reach one. If you did, it would not be a bottomless pit.
Now it may very well be the case that a bottomless pit (or infinite time) does not exist, but I don’t think this particular argument can be used to prove that. Perhaps a better argument is that it does not make sense to us and that we cannot visualize it. This much is true, but I’m not certain if that alone disproves it as a possibility. There are several claims by theists that are also difficult to comprehend such as a mind made of nothing or that a being exists outside of time while still being able to do things. So I think both sides of the coin have some absurd notions that we cannot easily comprehend. Also, many theists already believe that infinite time is possible in the future direction of time.
and (b) and in infinite time, all physical processes must have come to an end unless perpetual motion is possible.
Yes, perpetual motion must be possible if we are in an eternal multiverse. Not at a visible level within the physics of our local universe, but perhaps at a quantum level or within a false vacuum state.
The multiverse only pushes the fine-tuning problem one step further back. If a multiverse produces bubble universes by some physical process, how does it happen that every one is random and therefore different, which is required to explain fine-tuning? The multiverse would have to be as fine-tuned as this universe has to be, as Paul Davies has argued.
I don’t think a process that creates random outcomes is usually thought of as being fine-tuned. If the outcome is random then the pre-conditions are also probably random. The paper you linked to, while interesting, was not really related to this argument. If you have a link to this particular argument by Davies, I’d be interested in reading it. Thanks.
I am not close to Pastor Bill, but he has always been polite…even while he warns me of my impending eternal damnation and that of my children. My ex-fundi-pastor-turned-Christian-universalist father avoids him like the plague.
I will continue to be polite to him, but at the same time blunt and upfront about his superstitious belief system. Bottom line, no one is making him stick around.
Thanks for your honest response. I have just come from a church service. It was the final one in the church that sits on our front lawn and began as a Methodist church in 1901. I compiled a history, which I presented to the congregation of about 65 people tonight. I am 57 years old, am an Elder, have taught Sunday School (14 years), been on almost every committee you can name and have come to believe much the same as most of the people who comment on Nate’s blog. So I appreciate YOUR journey – thanks for sharing. Believe it or not, I had tears in my eyes when we sang the last hymn, as that church has been a part of my life for almost 38 years (that’s how long I’ve been married). Everyone has a story, eh?
Although Revelation is claimed to be written by ‘John’, there is some doubt as to John who. What Scholars are clear on is that there is no way the person who wrote Revelation could have been the author of the fourth Gospel. The difference in writing style is just so dramatic.
We don’t appreciate the differences in the English version. But apparently Revelation is a pretty shabby piece of work grammatically. It is filled with grammatical errors and is in essence written in the gutter Greek vernacular of the day.
The Gospel of John claims to be written by the ‘Disciple who Jesus loved’. Most scholars question this.
Personally, Peter, I’ve had my own questions about the ‘Disciple who Jesus loved,’ as to exactly what form that “loving” might have taken – maybe Paulie can share his thoughts on that —
Knowing Carmen as I’ve come to, I don’t think she’d mind if I tell you that in the tiny Nova Scotian town in which she lives, that church is more than a church, it’s a social center for the community – think “Church” in the sense that church meant to early American colonists.
I shall take that as a compliment unabashedly and assume that you’re referring to good o’ characteristic and not the nasty version that we see all too often on this blog.
I do enjoy some schadenfreude here and there, but I think melt downs saddens me. As much as it’s a good laugh for me sometimes, and exposes assholes for who they really are, I think a break of civility generally means that everybody loses.
I read about someone writing about it last time round – talking about violence. I want to punch the bully back and break his bone for breaking mine. I think I’ve won when that really happens, but it’s not true, violence won twice.
@Carmen
I’m surprised. Thought that you were a seasoned swimmer in the atheist pool. Well, we learn more about each other each day.
Peter, I once wrote a 25 page thesis on Revelation, and my research led me firmly to believe that the author of Revelation was John of Patmos. You are right to say that the writing styles are completely different. I also agreed with a number of texts I studied (the logical ones not written by the likes of John Hagee). They claimed that Revelation was not a prophetic book in the sense of future telling. In fact, the only future telling they were willing to acknowledge was the eschatological promise presented in the text as the main theme. Everything in Revelation was presented in the context of the Roman Empire and it’s “divine” emperor – Nero being the focal point of 666. There have been numerous attempts throughout history by misguided Christians to pin Revelation as a book speaking about their present time in history, with whatever looming national threat as the big bad boogieman-antichrist, but soon that time passes.
Finding Truth 
Well what I got, Barry, was that it was unknown whether or not the prophets – and that would include Isaiah – wrote their own, but they were certain that of those, Micah did, and that Zechariah wrote all but the last six chapters of his.
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@Arch
You remember what I suggested to godsmanforever involving paper mache over on Violet’s blog?
I have been warned to tread lightly! 🙂
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@barryadamson2
And Will and John Kellogg still write those really interesting Vitamin Lists on the side of the Cornflakes packet.
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Unklee said:
Yes, one can do this. But surely it is a mark of one’s integrity that one follows fact rather than one’s personal version of the truth, no matter the outcome?
This is honest. To do otherwise one might as well align oneself with Eusebius.
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“You remember what I suggested to godsmanforever involving paper mache over on Violet’s blog?” – One of your finer moments.
I’m not accustomed to walking on eggshells, but then I haven’t been banned from as many blogsites as you have. Only one, actually – perhaps you might recall that incident, Old Bean —
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Rather an Old Bean than a Has Been, right?
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Better either than a Never Bean.
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So we have exposed and thoroughly refuted UnkleE’s logical fallacy of appealing to Argumentum ad Populum as sufficient evidence to state that the stories presented in the four anonymously written gospels are “historical facts”.
I now challenge anyone to present actual evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and let’s debate this evidence.
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Going once…
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There is no real evidence. Once again, one has to begin with a major presupposition before one can even begin to evaluate the tale in the gospels.
And in the case of the story of the resurrection of the character Jesus of Nazareth there are any number of presuppositions one can choose.
The resurrection is a philosophical exercise in faith and is simply reliant on the cleverest argument.
Only unfortunate indoctrinated people or credulous fools will even entertain this nonsense.
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I agree with you Ark, but UnkleE has been asked to provide evidence for the Resurrection and his only response has been to use the fallacious logic of Agumentum ad Populum over and over and over again. However, he is not the only Christian reading this blog. Let’s see the evidence, folks, or, let’s simply agree that believing in the reanimation of a dead first century prophet is based on faith alone.
And faith is just another name for superstition.
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The problem you face is that no christian of unklee’s ilk will admit to this. He has stated he has evangelical leanings. Cherry picked to his specifications, but evangelical to an extent.
There is no true historical method when it comes to theology. It has never passed muster.
If you have visited unklee’s site you will find he has used his reasonable ”facts”/evidence argument ad nauseum, subtly blending the ” what all peer-reviewed, mainstream scholars currently employed at a recognised facility ( thus negating someone like Carrier) agree on” with hand picked experts of all stripes then carefully blending their views, while condemning Carrier, Price, the Jesus Seminar the Acts Seminar and similar as fringe or worse.
Yet, genuine, secular scholarship dismisses the Resurrection as nonsense. It is not even entertained.
But sadly, genuine scholars often have to wallow in the mire and argue it at bootstrap level if they are ever going to make an impression on credulous indoctrinated religious people.
It’s sad, but we are dealing with people who believe in the supernatural and consider themselves sinners.
So, the apologists’ (unklee) arguments.
From the front, they are exquisitely tailored. However, get him to ”turn around” and the arse is hanging out of his trousers.
The contemporary evidence argument is swept aside; Philo is never addressed, and any challenge mounted against the resurrection is treated with disdain and condescension as if you are an imbecile for simply raising your hand in class.
I mean , who the Frakk are you , Gary, to challenge Sanders, NT Wright, Maurice Casey,Habermaas, etc and even that bloke he dredged up from the Secular Web?
Every time you ask the reply will be, What do the ”experts” say? His experts. Not yours.
He might genuinely believe in what he says. And remember also, he is obliged to proselytize, which maybe why he ventures away from the comfort of his own site. The internet version of door knocking, perhaps?
Failing that, he is just tripping on ego, as he has never addressed these issue with any meaningful degree of honesty.
You won’t get an honest answer, because honesty, fact and truth do not feature very highly in religion.
When they come to the fore, one is soon addressing a deconvert.
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I have made this point before but I think that it is worth repeating:
If the evidence for the Resurrection were as strong as the evidence for any other alleged event in Antiquity, as many Christian apologists claim, why is it that not one single secular university in the United States uses a course book in its history classes that includes as historical fact the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? And even more, I would bet that not one single history text book in these same universities lists Jesus as an historical figure along with Herod the Great, Julius Caesar, Philo, etc.
It’s not history, folks. It’s religious legend.
I know the Christian response will be: There is a conspiracy in secular universities against Christianity, but this is the typical response of a cult.
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Tick tock, tick tock…
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“Going once…”
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@Carmen + @Gary
I think you are both right. Perhaps polite isn’t the right word here. How about tactful? Regardless, I still believe that Pastor Bill may be on the verge of showing his nasty side, and I’m just trying to err on the side of precaution since he is somebody that Gary holds dear (or so I assume).
It’s also perfectly fine that you guys are ok with it. Maybe this is just my Asian lineage talking.
Onto more interesting things:
My Christianity?
Well, I was a non-devout Buddhist who used to think Buddha is useless since everything is karma based, so I am always extremely irritated when my parents asked me to pray to Buddha for good exam results. Then I went to a Pentecostal charismatic church at the behest of my then-and-now-ex girlfriend and I was saved! Spoke in tongues, slain by the spirit and all. Within 5 years later I rose through the ranks, became a cell group leader, young adults leader, and subsequently director of the worship team. However, the more I read the bible, the more fundamentalistic I became, and I thought that the only to truly follow God was to follow the bible strictly. It was clear to me that my charismatic church wasn’t following clear doctrines/dogma stipulated in the bible, and the “prophets” of my church was talking trash, while speaking in tongues shouldn’t be a universal christian trait as what most if not all Pentecostals believe.
So, I felt that God wanna teach me something (holy spirit guidance you guys), and I went church hopping (easy thing to do when you live in a city) and ended up in a Methodist church. Anyway, same thing happened, became a leader, served in various ministry, yada yada yada, then after that I decided to pop and read infidels.org and everything made more sense and answered all my christian queries that I’ve accumulated in a decade much better then my pastors and bible college lecturers could ever did. And then I started reading atheists blogs and this lovely one was one of the first or perhaps the first that I came across.
All in all took me around 2-3 months to shed my faith, another 1-2 months to convince my wife that she didn’t have to divorce me and we’re still good people. She deconverted in pretty much the same pace as me. And yupz here I am.
Not sure if this is what you asked for haha.
Thanks
Powell
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Hi UnkleE,
I think if we are in a multiverse that has no beginning then we should not expect to be able to count to the first event, because there is no first event.
It would be similar to saying that a bottomless pit could not exist because if you jumped into the pit you would never reach the bottom. But a bottomless pit does not have a bottom, so you should not expect to reach one. If you did, it would not be a bottomless pit.
Now it may very well be the case that a bottomless pit (or infinite time) does not exist, but I don’t think this particular argument can be used to prove that. Perhaps a better argument is that it does not make sense to us and that we cannot visualize it. This much is true, but I’m not certain if that alone disproves it as a possibility. There are several claims by theists that are also difficult to comprehend such as a mind made of nothing or that a being exists outside of time while still being able to do things. So I think both sides of the coin have some absurd notions that we cannot easily comprehend. Also, many theists already believe that infinite time is possible in the future direction of time.
Yes, perpetual motion must be possible if we are in an eternal multiverse. Not at a visible level within the physics of our local universe, but perhaps at a quantum level or within a false vacuum state.
I don’t think a process that creates random outcomes is usually thought of as being fine-tuned. If the outcome is random then the pre-conditions are also probably random. The paper you linked to, while interesting, was not really related to this argument. If you have a link to this particular argument by Davies, I’d be interested in reading it. Thanks.
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Hi Powell,
I thought you were a Christian for some reason.
I am not close to Pastor Bill, but he has always been polite…even while he warns me of my impending eternal damnation and that of my children. My ex-fundi-pastor-turned-Christian-universalist father avoids him like the plague.
I will continue to be polite to him, but at the same time blunt and upfront about his superstitious belief system. Bottom line, no one is making him stick around.
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YAY, you, Powell!
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Hi Powell,
Thanks for your honest response. I have just come from a church service. It was the final one in the church that sits on our front lawn and began as a Methodist church in 1901. I compiled a history, which I presented to the congregation of about 65 people tonight. I am 57 years old, am an Elder, have taught Sunday School (14 years), been on almost every committee you can name and have come to believe much the same as most of the people who comment on Nate’s blog. So I appreciate YOUR journey – thanks for sharing. Believe it or not, I had tears in my eyes when we sang the last hymn, as that church has been a part of my life for almost 38 years (that’s how long I’ve been married). Everyone has a story, eh?
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Hi Barry
Although Revelation is claimed to be written by ‘John’, there is some doubt as to John who. What Scholars are clear on is that there is no way the person who wrote Revelation could have been the author of the fourth Gospel. The difference in writing style is just so dramatic.
We don’t appreciate the differences in the English version. But apparently Revelation is a pretty shabby piece of work grammatically. It is filled with grammatical errors and is in essence written in the gutter Greek vernacular of the day.
The Gospel of John claims to be written by the ‘Disciple who Jesus loved’. Most scholars question this.
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Personally, Peter, I’ve had my own questions about the ‘Disciple who Jesus loved,’ as to exactly what form that “loving” might have taken – maybe Paulie can share his thoughts on that —
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Knowing Carmen as I’ve come to, I don’t think she’d mind if I tell you that in the tiny Nova Scotian town in which she lives, that church is more than a church, it’s a social center for the community – think “Church” in the sense that church meant to early American colonists.
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@Gary
I thought you were a Christian for some reason.
I shall take that as a compliment unabashedly and assume that you’re referring to good o’ characteristic and not the nasty version that we see all too often on this blog.
I do enjoy some schadenfreude here and there, but I think melt downs saddens me. As much as it’s a good laugh for me sometimes, and exposes assholes for who they really are, I think a break of civility generally means that everybody loses.
I read about someone writing about it last time round – talking about violence. I want to punch the bully back and break his bone for breaking mine. I think I’ve won when that really happens, but it’s not true, violence won twice.
@Carmen
I’m surprised. Thought that you were a seasoned swimmer in the atheist pool. Well, we learn more about each other each day.
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Peter, I once wrote a 25 page thesis on Revelation, and my research led me firmly to believe that the author of Revelation was John of Patmos. You are right to say that the writing styles are completely different. I also agreed with a number of texts I studied (the logical ones not written by the likes of John Hagee). They claimed that Revelation was not a prophetic book in the sense of future telling. In fact, the only future telling they were willing to acknowledge was the eschatological promise presented in the text as the main theme. Everything in Revelation was presented in the context of the Roman Empire and it’s “divine” emperor – Nero being the focal point of 666. There have been numerous attempts throughout history by misguided Christians to pin Revelation as a book speaking about their present time in history, with whatever looming national threat as the big bad boogieman-antichrist, but soon that time passes.
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