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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 16, 2010 12:52:22 GMT
Thanks Hibernicus. There is a theory that our atheist friends came on this forum to destroy it, and I know some Catholic posters found their presence intimidating. At one stage, Guilluame told them to get a life. I would not have put it like that, but I did think they appeared to have a lot of time on their hands. I think Hibernicus nicely dissected some of the so-called scholarship above, showing that some posters were not quite so erudite as they wished to give us the impression of. In simple language - bluff.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 16, 2010 19:26:47 GMT
Another point; Hemingway uses the argument from authority when he expects us to accept the Jesus |Seminar's conclusion (or rather presupposition) that Jesus wasn't divine, but he disregards the fact that the Jesus Seminar's stunt of voting on which of Jesus's sayings were authentic implies Jesus did really exist. If he expects us to accept their authority without question, he should note when they disagree with him.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 19, 2010 10:34:08 GMT
Both Hibernicus and Askel McThurkill are too polite to mention that the Jesus Seminar arrive at conclusions about authenticity of Christ's words in the Gospels (all five of them) through voting with coloured beads.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 26, 2010 15:40:19 GMT
I didn't mention it because it's not directly relevant to the point I was making - they use different shades to indicate whether they think a statement is more or less likely to have been said by Jesus. Naturally, since they start from the assumption that Jesus was not divine, statements that express a high Christology are automatically dismissed as inauthentic. They revise their ratings from time to time - I must say this smacks of the Eurovision Song Contest rather than scholarship. Wikipedia gives a gooda ccount of their activities and the criticisms that have been made of them. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar One thing I notice straight away is that (especially since the second World War) there has been a strong tendency for biblical scholars to emphasise the Jewishness of Jesus, whereas the Jesus Seminar present him as breaking decisively with Judaism and being in some respects more like a Greek Cynic. (They assume that the more Jewish a saying is, the less likely it is to derive from Jesus - a very dangerous methodology.) They also dispute the view of Jesus as apocalyptic preacher which has been pretty dominant since Schweitzer's QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS over 100 years ago. Both these features methinks reflect the influence of John Dominic Crossan, who was one of the Seminar's founders, and they suggest that when Hemingway claimed the Seminar represents the mainstream of scholarship (even among scholars who don't believe Jesus was divine) he just didn't know what he was talking about.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 31, 2010 10:15:24 GMT
I thought the Jesus Seminar were bucking the trend by downplaying Christ's Jewishness.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2010 10:59:35 GMT
My point exactly - the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Holocaust have led to an increasing emphasis on Jesus' Jewishness (the Scrolls have shown that some of the features of Jesus' teaching which are not replicated in later Judaism and which were therefore regarded as distinctly non-Jewish innovations were in fact present in first-century Judaism).
I suspect Crosan is the source of this, since Crossan (whom Mark Shea describes as "Jesus' Body Was Torn To Pieces By Dogs" Crossan) sees Jesus as a preacher of social justice in a socially differentiated and cosmopolitan world and therefore exaggerates the extent to which first-century Judaea was permated by Greek cultural influence. (Schweitzer's point was that writers who try to describe the historical Jesus are really describing themselves, and I think we see here something of Crossan's own trajectory from mid-century rural Ireland to the US. It has often been pointed out, BTW, thatCrossan seems to see the ruling classes in Jesus' Palestine as much more culturally distinct from the people and on worse terms with them - much more like nineteenth-century landlords in his native Tipperary- than was in fact the case)
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 21, 2010 10:27:18 GMT
I looked in on our atheist pals recently and I noticed that they are finding Eccles as much of a nuisance on their board as he was on ours.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 20, 2010 13:09:33 GMT
In his recent debate with Tony Blair Christopher Hitchens began by citing the following passage from Cardinal Newman's APOLOGIA: “The Catholic church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail and for all the many millions on it to die in extremest agony than one soul … should tell one wilful untruth or should steal one farthing without excuse.” [HITCHENS CONTINUES] You’ll have to say it’s beautifully phrased, but to me, and this is my proposition, what we have here, and picked from no mean source, is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality. Its essential fanaticism, it’s consideration of the human being as raw material, and its fantasy of purity. END OF EXTRACT I might add that Hitchens is not the first unbeliever to cite this passage as evidence of Catholic dementia (George Moore loved to do so) and I was inclined to think that it represented an example of Newman being carried away by his own hyperbole. I still think it is somewhat unfortunately phrased, but on reflection I note that Newman is making an important point. What he is talking about is the difference between NATURAL EVIL (harm arising from some accident without being willed) and MORAL EVIL (that deriving from an evil will). Let us suppose I were to say "it would have been better that the sun should fall" etc than than the Holocaust committed against the Jews should have been planned and carried out, or that men should be found to murder their fellow men and women as professional hitmen do, or that robert Maxwell should have looted his employees' pensions and left them threatened with destitution, or that so many Church authorities sat by and twiddled their thumbs while Fr Tony Byrne raped so many children, and it at once becomes understandable. Newman is just saying that once willed evil is present, the difference is one of degree and not of kind; the smallest theft contains all theft, the least murder contains all murders. I think the expression unfortunate because such a natural evil would in all probability be the occasion of many moral evils, but its central meaning is essentially correct.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 10, 2011 16:51:46 GMT
When following the coverage of the Arizona shootings, I noticed a claim that the alleged killer had been influenced by an online conspiracist movie called ZEITGEIST. On looking up its wikipedia entry I find it includes the following: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist:_The_Movie"Part I", entitled The Greatest Story Ever Sold, questions religions as being god-given stories, arguing that the Christian religion specifically is mainly derived from other religions, astronomical facts, astrological myths and traditions, which in turn were derived from or shared elements with others. In furtherance of the Jesus myth hypothesis, this part argues that the historical Jesus is a literary and astrological hybrid, nurtured politically... Chris Forbes, Senior lecturer in Ancient History of Macquarie University and member of the Synod of the [Anglican] Diocese of Sydney, severely criticized Part I of the movie, asserting that it has no basis in serious scholarship or ancient sources, and that it relies on amateur sources that recycle frivolous ideas from one another, rather than serious academic sources, commenting, "It is extraordinary how many claims it makes which are simply not true.".. Forbes also criticizes the movie's use of Roman sources to suggest that Jesus did not exist, noting that the list of supposed contemporaneous historians alleged by the film to have not mentioned Jesus is actually a list of geographers, literature professors, poets, philosophers and writers on farming or gardening, who would not be expected to mention him, and that the modern sources cited in the film are either experts in fields other than ancient history, such as German literature, or uncredentialed amateur Egyptologists. Forbes challenges the film's allegation that Josephus' mention of Jesus was doctored by pointing out that Josephus actually mentions Jesus twice, and that only one of these mentions is believed by scholars to have been doctored in the Middle Ages, in order to change an already existing mention of him. Forbes also argues that while Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity, it was Theodosius I who made it compulsory later in the 4th century, and that contrary to the film's thesis, Constantine did not invent the historical Jesus, as early records show that his historicity was already a key element of early Christianity prior to Constantine's conversion to it www.publicchristianity.com/Videos/zeitgeist.htmlEND QUOTE This list of irrelevant writers sounds very familiar - clearly Hemingway is not the only one who shouldn't believe all he reads on the Internet! To be fair, I suspect Hemingway did not get his list from ZEITGEIST but that they both got it from some unknown common source.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 14, 2011 15:32:19 GMT
To be fair, I suspect Hemingway did not get his list from ZEITGEIST but that they both got it from some unknown common source. Like Q?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 14, 2011 15:36:00 GMT
When I look at some of the description of Zeitgeist and some of the stuff Hemmingway has posted here, I realise how currrent and relevant the opening dialogue in Bulgakov's 'Master and Margarita' (see video links above), which parodied the official attitude to religion in the USSR of the 1920s and 1930s, actually is.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 18, 2011 12:46:39 GMT
I suspect from the comments on the "Public Christianity" video that the common source may be a Professor George A Wells who has written several books arguing that Jesus never existed and who has been described by Richard Dawkins as "making a credible case for the view that Jesus never existed". The combox I mentioned has Christian and atheist posters arguing about the significance of the fact that Wells' academic specialty is modern German literature and he has no qualifications in ancient history, Semitic studies etc. I didn't specifically raise wells' name in my original post becaause I have not read his work, but the form the row over Wells takes in the combox strongly suggests that he is the hypothetical "Q" drawn on by Hemingway and Zeitgeist.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 19, 2011 12:28:23 GMT
I suspect from the comments on the Public Christianity video that the common source may be a Professor George A Wells who has written several books arguing that Jesus never existed and who has been described by Richard Dawkins as 'making a credible case for the view that Jesus never existed'. The combox I mentioned has Christian and atheist posters arguing about the significance of the fact that Wells' academic specialty is modern German literature and he has no qualifications in ancient history, Semitic studies etc. I didn't specifically raise wells' name in my original post becaause I have not read his work, but the form the row over Wells takes in the combox strongly suggests that he is the hypothetical Q drawn on by Hemingway and Zeitgeist. This is fascinating. This really is like the opening scene of Bulgakov's 'Master and Margarita', where a literary bureaucrat, Mikhail Berlioz, and a second rate poet, Ivan Bezdomny ('Homeless' in some translations) discuss an anti-religious poem written by Bezdomny. Bezdomny portrayed Christ as a negative, but actual character. Berlioz rehashed the arguments against the very existence of Jesus. The conversation is interrupted by the mysterious Professor Woland who is in fact Satan. Bulgakov wrote the novel in the 1930s, but it lay undiscovered in a drawer until the 1960s when on publication it became a cult novel. Anyway, back to Professors Dawkins and Wells, I wonder if it occured to either that the existence of Jesus is immaterial to the question of the existence of God. If you want to insult Christians, fine, that is the way to go about it. But as Hibernicus comments, Wells' speciality is far removed from Semitic or Hellenic studies and it is hard to believe anyone could seriously entertain such a case, or why the professor would venture amateur speculation into print. The whole episode does neither credit and it is obvious the atheist poster just came on the board here to attempt to wind us up.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 19, 2011 12:55:16 GMT
Dawkins has a tin ear on a lot of things. His comments on Judaism quite regularly get him accused of anti-semitism (not racist or religious, but Enlightenment anti-semitism based on contempt for the Abrahamic religions and for the idea of a particular revelation). He has, for example, listed among the evil effects of religious belief not merely the persecution of Christians by Jews but the willingness of Jews to die rather than conform to religions which they considered to be false. Here we see him getting hauled over the coals even by some sympathisers for his comments that the "atheist lobby" he desires should seek to imitate the alleged power of the "Jewish lobby". scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/10/dawkins_walked_right_into_that_one.php
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 19, 2011 13:02:26 GMT
In one sense alasdair's comparison is unfair to Wells. Berlioz after all was a state-supported bureaucrat taking part in an official atheist campaign backed up by the secret police - Wells may mislead simple souls like Hemingway, but at least he is not backed up by force. (Dawkins - who has insinuated at several points that he regards teaching religious beliefs to children as a form of child abuse, and has recommended writings by people who argue that parents should be forcibly prevented from teaching their religious beliefs to their children - is a slightly different category.) Personally my favourite bit of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is Woland's public demonstration of magic, the bureaucrat who complained that this was incomplete because it didn't include a demonstration of how it was faked, and the "demonstration" he was given.
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