Friday, April 10, 2009

Oh, the horror!

Lee Randolph over at DC put all of his eggs in a post trying to scare Christians out of observing Easter. When I pointed out that his post was mainly polemic and bullying, he countered by asking me to tell him where I think he is wrong. Here it goes.

Lee never makes a sustained argument in this post. It sounds like a 10 point atheist sermon. I don't even think pointing out the problems with some of his arguments is worth the time, since all of the choir is going to say "good post, those Christians are brainwashed." How can I argue with that, since I'm brainwashed?

But the deeper issue is that it seems that Lee can't conceive that someone could look at the same facts and come to different conclusions. I know all about propitiation and atonement, but I don't think it is bloodthirsty or savage. I see in it (gasp) love and redemption. I see a hope of a new life, beyond all of the junk we create for ourselves.

But just to get to specifics, here's a tasty treat: The authors of the Gospels cannot be identified, therefore neither can their credentials or if they were in a position to know. Therefore the information is of low quality.

Notice how Lee wipes away 200 years of biblical criticism with one argument. This is his haymaker, that we don't have the signatures of the authors to verify. I might as well never read an AP article until I find out who submitted it and where they are from and what their biases are and whether they are delusional and whether they have any hidden ideological motivations.

But if atheists wanted to get together this Sunday, Lee would make a good fire and brimstone preacher.

11 comments:

  1. I'm afraid that htis is standard fare.

    The ever-so-logical Atheists tend to be rather limite din their actual use of Logic, prefering to praise it, and lablng their own words as logical because they are their words.

    Lee doens't really see the same evidence and arrive at a different conclusion, though. Rather, he see's his cpnclusion before he arrives at the evidence, and simply seeks to spin the evidence in favour of his own conclusions to valudate them, and presents the views he presents in order to depict the whole of CHristianity in a negative light.

    Its very much about Agenda, I'm afraid. I know, because I've spoken to Atheists who have an actual desire ot be fair, and when presented Christian theology, while not agreeing wiht what it teaches, still see a Beuty to it, in much the same way I see a Beuty to Buddhism or to the Greek Classics.

    The Failure to see a beuty or menaing in CHristianity, or anythign that speaks of a higher principle and greater, more noble element in Human thught in general, is more the product of their own hatred of Christianity, and need ot justify their ropesent Atheism, than it is in objective evaluation of the evidence.

    Does anyone reallythink that wearign a Crucafix is flauntign it? No mroe so than wearign an American Flag pin is flauntign ones patriotism if American, or wearing a medal from a rotari club, or a Star Wars pin.

    But Lee would alreayd know this, just as he knows that referign to Jesus as "A dead man on a stick" is a really childish and incredibley asinine thing to say.

    But it works since it uts the reade rin the mood to hate Christianity and see it as silly by ridicule, which is the main objective of his posts.

    Its not relaly about reason, its about polemic, and about generating hatred and snide ocndescension.

    I'd pay it no heed, for it is in the end hollow, and woudl post only to note this.

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  2. Hi Brad,
    Hi Brad,
    on your blog you say

    But just to get to specifics, here's a tasty treat: The authors of the Gospels cannot be identified, therefore neither can their credentials or if they were in a position to know. Therefore the information is of low quality.

    Notice how Lee wipes away 200 years of biblical criticism with one argument. This is his haymaker, that we don't have the signatures of the authors to verify. I might as well never read an AP article until I find out who submitted it and where they are from and what their biases are and whether they are delusional and whether they have any hidden ideological motivations.

    So when you read anything you don't give any credence to
    - who was the author
    - what are there credentials
    - were they in a position to know
    - is the author biased
    - is the information accurate
    - can the information be cross checked

    and you consider yourself an educator?

    your AP analogy doesn't fly because if you wanted to, you could check all those things about any given article.

    and you can logically conclude that the reputation of the news source is derived from the quality of the information it publishes, so you can reasonably expect an article on genetics from Nature to have a higher quality than the AP, and you can expect the AP to have a higher quality than the average tabloid.

    Get serious will you?
    Information quality can be measured and graded. The list above is just a simple one for School Kids doing research papers, or did you recognize it as such? It doesn't appear to me that you did.

    Where does adam fit in history?

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  3. as you already know this is the same comment I made over at DC, but I'm not going to continue our dialogue here. I'll continue it over at DC.
    see ya there.

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  4. Brad you are a complete idiot. The AP stands for Associated Press and as a corporate entity legally qualifies as a person. You stupid fool trying to seem intelligent. All you need do is examine the corporate charter of the AP to understand their reality and position. A single writer within the AP subsumes his or her individual identity for the larger corporate entity. So, any story written by the AP is verified as authorship by a single entity known as the AP. The AP would not contradict their own charter by publishing something by an author that didn't represent the entity. Now, if you want to make moronic statements as a means to sound smart how about answering me this, can God make something so heavy that even he can't lift it? Quit defending God and start opening minds to the horrors this world faces. I am so sick of you self-righteous middle to low brow fools defending a fairy tale to secure your delusion of life after death. There is life before death son and we need to learn things like logic, science and how the world works to face real problems. Not defend ourselves against make believe celestial war.

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  5. Chuck, I think this makes three times I've been called an idiot so far on this blog. That's why I'm not a real scholar

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  6. 'The authors of the Gospels cannot be identified, therefore neither can their credentials or if they were in a position to know. Therefore the information is of low quality.'

    This is called history. All historians use this standard.

    Ancient historians like Josephus actually named their sources.

    among them: Berosus, Jerome, Mnaseas, Nicolaus, Manetho, Moschus, Hesiod, Menander, Dios, Herodotus, Megasthenes, Philostratus, 1 Maccabees, Polybius, Strabo, Livy, etc. Not all these sources are good but at least we can see where Josephus is coming from. Some of these sources are still extant and we can see how Josephus used them. We can see where Josephus changed from one source to the next, as his knowledge gets more or less detailed.

    The Gospels never name the sources they used. Although some copying went on, none of the Synoptics tell us about it. But from what we can tell of how Matthew and Luke used Mark, the evangelists used their sources quite freely. The evangelists are always omniscient, even when it comes to knowing what is in Pilate's heart.

    And, of course, not one person named himself as ever having seen almost the entire cast of Gospel characters - Lazarus, Bartimaeus, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Salome, Judas, Thomas etc.

    They all vanish from church history - even the church history in Acts 2, only to appear in anonymous works which clearly are ripping off other stories and Passing them off as stories about Jesus.

    This is one reason why '200 years of biblical criticism' has failed to find an historical Jesus that people agree on, to such an extent that there are now books documenting why each quest failed the way it did.

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  7. Ok, this idiot is going to press the AP example a little farther...

    Chuck correctly pointed out that the AP as a company certifies everything it publishes. But why trust the AP? Do you place the same trust in CNN, BBC, or FoxNews? I don't think I get the entire story from any of them. I see biases in all of their stories, even the ones that report on sporting events in my hometown.

    I have been at sporting events for which I read the AP article and realized that whoever did the reporting was there, but not in my vantage point. So who do I cite when I'm telling someone about the game?

    What's more, sometimes I hear accounts from people who were at games that I wasn't, and they tell me more detailed information than the AP does. Do I cite those people when I tell someone else what happened? This is the nature of eyewitness testimony, for better or worse, and just because the string of information cannot be determined after two or three steps has no bearing on whether or not the event actually happened.

    So people, recognizing this, developed criteria to test the stories. In the early church this was the canon, our ancient AP news source about Jesus. Now you may protest that those people were not in a position to know or verify the sources. Ok, but that's what we've been doing for 200 years in critical biblical scholarship. Scholars have determined criteria to sift historical from non-historical, and for Lee to wipe this away in one stroke not only nulls all of this historical study, but it misunderstands 1) the nature of eyewitness accounts and 2) the strength of Jewish oral culture.

    Not to mention that authorship is universally attested in the early church fathers, and where the accounts can be corroborated, they are.

    Does inerrancy follow? No, but neither does labeling the Gospels as total myth follow either.

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  8. Was there a box score at the resurrection? If so then show me. No matter what the AP guy or gal writes as what happened I know it did happen because of the record. Thanks for playing.

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  9. Chuck, I'm not sure where you are going with this. My point is that we have better than AP reporting on the resurrection. No box score, no wrap up, no post-game comments, just the witness of the early Christians.

    A box score doesn't tell you everything. I've seen box scores where it looks like one person had a good game, but all the scoring came late after the game was over. I'd much rather go to a game than piece it together from the box score and wrap-up.

    You can choose to believe the early witness or not, that's a rational choice. But they would have the firsthand information that reporters would eventually want to get.

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  10. Early witnesses?

    Did one person ever name himself as seeing an empty tomb or a flesh and bone Jesus?

    There are no early witnesses.

    Just claims by Paul that Jesus 'appeared' to various people, which claims mean nothing.

    We don't even have any names of these 500+ brethren.

    In fact we don't even have any evidence that were 500+ Christians altogether before the ascension, where the 'early witnesses' report Jesus taking off into the sky, rather like a Saturn 5 rocket.

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  11. Steven, I love your tenacity.

    We should do a debate blog on the resurrection, or Gospels. Give me a few weeks to get my lexicon out of storage since we're moving right now.

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