January 2009 Screwballs

[Little Shepherd]

Tell me that I am NOT the only one who thinks TyRockwell needs a visit from those nice men in the little white suits after reading his response to Kabane...

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...7&postcount=95


Also, please tell me that I'm better at insulting than he is (not that you need to. It's not hard to top him. )

I thought that was from the Christian TV thread, and lo and behold I was right. Let's just nominate Ty's performance throughout that entire thread for a screwball and be done with it.

[Manwë Súlimo]

I thought that was from the Christian TV thread, and lo and behold I was right. Let's just nominate Ty's performance throughout that entire thread for a screwball and be done with it.

Too late. I already did.

[Pumbelo]

someone pon youtube tries to respond to mig's resurrection-argument:

So you're first accepting that the Gospel account is accurate, and using that basis to extract witnesses from the story.
Thousands of witnesses were at the battle of Minas Tirith. They witnessed Gandalf's magic firsthand. That proves he was a real wizard right?
No.

[Brandalf85]

someone pon youtube tries to respond to mig's resurrection-argument:

YOU..........SHALL NOT............PASS.............basic logical argumentation classes.

[Manwë Súlimo]

YOU..........SHALL NOT............PASS.............basic logical argumentation classes.

I am a servant of the secret wisdom, wielder of the logic of Arnor! The Dark Stupid will not avail you, Flame of Jimbo!

[Manwë Súlimo]

Thousands of witnesses were at the battle of Minas Tirith. They witnessed Gandalf's magic firsthand. That proves he was a real wizard right?
No.

Wow. Even I'm not so geeky to believe this stuff was real.

[MarcusAndreas]

I don't think he seriously thinks that the battle of Minas Tirith actually occurred... but then again this is YouTube where stupidity knows no limits.

[DoomRater]

Well, this argument isn't going anywhere, but I can't figure out who's the screwball, him for his anti-religious bias or me for not shutting up already. Paraphrased:

(you refers to Gom Jabbar, as I intended to post this in the thread until I realized it's going nowhere)
Me: Arguing against homosexuality isn't homophobic
You: And you can of course construct even one logical argument against homosexuality of course...
Me: Not arguing the immorality of homosexuality...
You: You did argue that.
Me: Where? Or maybe you'll actually just address an actual argument against homosexaulity
You: Where'd I say you argued about immorality of anything? lol
Me: Just answer the challenge already, god
You: There are no rational arguments against homosexuality, especially yours
Me: Wow, that's fail
You: so offer one
Me: Can't you (censored) READ? I said I'm not arguing the immorality of homosexaulity!
You: What's the matter, scared? BOO HOO
Me: No, I don't argue things I haven't studied yet, like what you do!
You: Haha so you drool about having arguments and then you don't actually have any, congrats on making yourself look even MORE stupid than I could ever bother to.
Me: Wow, you really can't read can you? I'm only saying you can argue against it and not be homophobic.
You: DUH, except you just admitted you know nothing about it, so you don't even know there IS a rational argument against homosexuality
Me: so refute the ones in existence already. Otherwise you're no better off than myself
You: Durr they come from either a religious stance (fail) or some argument from natural law (also fail)

[jpholding]

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspo...n-my-book.html

DJ whines about how reviewers (guess who he means) say he has nothing original in his book (he doesn't):

A few Christian reviewers of my book, some of whom show no evidence they have even read it, claim there is nothing new in it. I beg to differ.

For people looking for new arguments I actually think I can count five new ones that have probably never been used before in one book (at least not in the way I do that I know of). That's quite an accomplishment since most people don't come up with a new argument their entire lives. It has been quipped, "Confound the ancients; they've stolen all of our ideas." New arguments are hard to come by because there have been thousands of years of books that predate ours. A.N. Whitehead said all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato (This is a gross exaggeration).

And yet, I think there are five things in my book that are probably original to it: 1) My outsider test for faith; 2) my version of the problem of evil (which assumes God exists); 3) Testing the results of prayer by praying to change the past; 4) Looking at the superstitious nature of the people in the Bible (this has been suggested before but mine is probably the first detailed discussion of it); 5) the structure of the whole book itself having three parts containing one cumulative and comprehensive argument against Christian theism.

1) No, DJ. Your "Outsider Test" is nothing but a lame rehash of the old "if you were born in X you'd believe Y" genetic fallacy. The posing of the question implied the very thing your Outlandish Test suggests -- that you'd have a different view from some other external perch. Not original. Lame and reworked.
2) No, DJ. Your "version" of the problem of evil is the same one everyone has done since Day 1, which is, "Waaaaaaaah! Why doesn't God do it THIS way?"
3) No, DJ. Aside from being a dumb exegesis of Biblical prayer, that idea was on an episode of the Twilight Zone....which is where you get most of your scholarship....and the broad idea of testing prayer is older than the crease in your Fruit of the Looms.
4) No, DJ. It's not "original" to flap your yap more than anyone else about an old, bigoted idea.
5) Oh. It's original to have three parts in one whole. Like the Trinity.

Mind you, even if we allow this, DJ still has 400+ pages of old, rancid rhino snot permeating the rest of the book...much of it taken verbatim from his last book or from threads here on TWeb (while he ignored the responses). Bottom line though is no matter how hard you try, you can't polish manure.

[Sparko]

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspo...n-my-book.html

DJ whines about how reviewers (guess who he means) say he has nothing original in his book (he doesn't):



1) No, DJ. Your "Outsider Test" is nothing but a lame rehash of the old "if you were born in X you'd believe Y" genetic fallacy. The posing of the question implied the very thing your Outlandish Test suggests -- that you'd have a different view from some other external perch. Not original. Lame and reworked.
2) No, DJ. Your "version" of the problem of evil is the same one everyone has done since Day 1, which is, "Waaaaaaaah! Why doesn't God do it THIS way?"
3) No, DJ. Aside from being a dumb exegesis of Biblical prayer, that idea was on an episode of the Twilight Zone....which is where you get most of your scholarship....and the broad idea of testing prayer is older than the crease in your Fruit of the Looms.
4) No, DJ. It's not "original" to flap your yap more than anyone else about an old, bigoted idea.
5) Oh. It's original to have three parts in one whole. Like the Trinity.

Mind you, even if we allow this, DJ still has 400+ pages of old, rancid rhino snot permeating the rest of the book...much of it taken verbatim from his last book or from threads here on TWeb (while he ignored the responses). Bottom line though is no matter how hard you try, you can't polish manure.

What I find the most hilarious about DJ is how highly he thinks of himself. He believes himself to be an original thinker and genius who has come up with arguments that nobody else ever has, when in fact he is a mediocre hack with delusions of grandeur. He is a living breathing example of the Dunning Kruger effect and even when we point it out to him, it just reinforces his delusions. he thinks he really MUST be a genius or we wouldn't be trying to tell him he is an idiot.

:crazy:

[jpholding]

Dumplin' Dumbass wins again for banging his head against the brick wall of scholarship:

When I was young and full of zeal for Jesus, I met a woman who told me her approach to Bible study. “I only use the King James Version,” she told me. “I read through the passage, figure out how you would say it in modern English, and then I’m done.” Though I was too meek to say so at the time, my little Christian heart was horrified. The New Testament was written in the common language of the people of the time. By paraphrasing an archaic translation into her “normal” usage, she was stopping right at the point where a New Testament Christian would have started. How could she call that “studying” the Bible?

Like you don't know, Dumplin'? That's YOUR Bible study method to a T -- when I beat you senseless with ancient patronage, you fell over like a poleaxed cow.

JP starts with a clarification regarding his argument, which he seems to think I’ve misunderstood.

Which indeed he did, and pedalling your tricycle backwards won't get ya out of it Dumplin'! My sum last time was: The full argument is, they weren’t denying that JESUS’ RESURECTION did happen, they were merely QUESTIONING WHETHER it was even possible for THEIR RESURRECTION to happen. Dumplin' snorks back:

This to correct my somewhat snarky summary, “so they weren’t denying that it did happen, they were merely denying that it was even possible for it to happen.” Notice that JP makes a little edit in there. According to his rendition, the Corinthians “merely QUESTIONING” the resurrection, versus Paul’s description, “some of you SAY that there is no resurrection of the dead.” Not, “some of you are merely QUESTIONING whether there is a resurrection of the dead,” but “some of you SAY that there is no resurrection of the dead.”

"Little edit"! Yeah, right! Talk about trying to force a camel through the eye of a needle. Dumplin' wants to create a distinction between "questioning" and "saying" here but apparently he's too fundie-dumb to grasp the idea of "questioning" ideas by making statements about them. Duh ah....doh....not that this makes a lick of difference in my argument to begin with, but it seems poor Dumplin' Dumbass has to take what victories he can when you're as ignorant as he is, even if it means looking for a misplaced apostophe somewhere.

This little alteration is, I believe, the key to understanding what JP sees as the issue here, and why he is so befuddled by my apparent failure to address it on his terms.

No, Dumbass. Whether the Corinthian doubters were framing their doubts in terms of questions or statements doesn't change my argument one bit and doesn't change the fact that you didn't grasp my point, which rests on an inconsistency in the Corinthian argument when it comes to Jesus' resurrection in the past vs THEIR resurrection in the future. No wonder Dumbass' blog gets only as many visitors a month as my single article on Osiris.

We need to think like apologists here, and perceive the problem in terms of making Christianity sound like it has all the answers. Christians are highly motivated to believe what apologists tell them, so they don’t have to be good answers, or even correct ones, as long as the believer can feel like the problem has been addressed and has an answer.

If we take this approach, we’ll soon see that the most obvious problem in 1 Cor. 15 is the plain admission that there were people in Corinth who did not believe in resurrection.

Um, yeah, that's something I did NOT mention at all when I said there were people in Corinth who doubted that they'd be resurrected and also referred to pagan ideas that were hostile to the concept of resurrection. Duh ah....

That’s rather a problem for a religion that’s supposed to be based on a resurrection, so the apologist’s number one priority is to find some alternative interpretation of the Corinthian belief that allows you to claim that they weren’t denying the resurrection of Jesus. JP believes that he has found such an alternative, based on a certain amount of scholarship into pagan beliefs and the denial of resurrection among unbelievers. (He ignores the existence of Jews who denied the resurrection, even though the Corinthian church started in a synagogue, but then again, why spoil a perfectly good apologetic with distracting facts?)

Duh, Dumplin'? It's pretty clear that the Corinthians are NOT denying the resurrection of Jesus, precisely because Paul is able to bring it to them as something they believe in! Duh ah! If they DID doubt that Jesus rose from the dead, he'd have started from a different place in his argument, you moron!

"Certain amount of scholarship" -- yeah, this shows why that's foreign language to Dumplin'. I know about Jews who denied resurrection, you dip. Did you have some evidence that modern scholarship was unaware of that the Sadduccees existed anywhere except in Palestine (and in Corinth)? Oops.

Thus, JP’s solution to the problem of 1 Cor. 15 is to suppose that the Corinthians were adopting pagan beliefs about resurrection even though this is clearly a contradiction of the doctrine of the resurrection on which the Church is founded. He then makes the trivial and superficial observation that “Paul appeals to Jesus as their example, as leader of their ingroup. He is citing Jesus as precedent and also exposing the Corinthians on their inconsistency. They can’t reject resurrection for themselves on grounds that would also apply to Jesus (eg, the pagan idea that it was impossible at all).”

Dumplin' just shows how stupid he is when he says that my observation was "trivial and superficial." Dumbass, it's the key to Paul's whole argument! You're just too stupid to understand the relevance of appeal to the example of an ingroup leader within the context of a collectivist society. To the people of such a society, this was a HUGE burden to overcome.

This, plus the observation that “people are inconsistent,” is JP’s conclusion. After much hard work and diligent study, he as arrived at an alternative interpretation of what the Corinthians must have believed, and therefore regards the matter settled. (Like I said, it doesn’t have to be a good answer, it just needs to be an answer, so that the apologist can claim that the problem does have an answer).

Fact is, Dumplin', it's an answer that coheres with the reality of hard, Biblical scholarship....stuff so far over your head you can't even hear the roar of the engine.

Where JP stops, however, is where I start, because his “answer” raises some very interesting questions. For example, JP uses “people are inconsistent” like it was some kind of magic wand: you just wave it around, and poof, all your problems disappear. He doesn’t dwell on why and how people acquire inconsistent beliefs, and he can’t understand why I focus so much attention on this aspect of the problem. But this is a key problem that his “answer” fails to even acknowledge, let alone resolve.

Duh ah...I did say "how," moron....they were influenced by pagan ideas about resurrection. "Why" is easy even for you: The ideas were there in that social milieu and they had been influenced by them for their entire lives...duh ah....the reason you focus on this aspect is because you have Dunning's disorder.

It’s true that people do end up with inconsistent beliefs, but they don’t do so knowingly and voluntarily. Who would want to make themselves obviously wrong? And the contradiction between “Jesus rose from the dead” and “nobody rises from the dead” is so obvious and easily pointed out that it’s worth asking how the Corinthians could have missed it.

That 9/11 wasn't a conspiracy is obvious and easily pointed out too. In such cases, Dumbass, people do like you do -- either ignore the problem, or let their stupidity cover for them, or contrive some convenient excuse for their errors. I'd say the Corinthians did the latter, say by saying that Jesus was an exception because he was a divine being.

What’s more, Paul points out that only some of the Corinthians were saying that there was no resurrection. That means that by the time Paul wrote back to them, a number of Corinthians had fallen into contradictory beliefs about resurrection vs. no resurrection, and nobody before Paul’s epistle had the wit to point out to the resurrection deniers that there was any conflict with the Gospel there!

Actually, Dumbass, I expect some of them did, but you clearly (again) fail to grasp the relevance of someone like Paul, in an authoritative position, delievering his own verifying judgment on such matters, especially in a collectivist society.

This might work for JP, who is naturally attracted to the idea that everybody else in the whole world is stupid, but for the rest of us it’s a rather remarkable curiosity.

"Rest of us" meaning victims of Dunning's?

After this Dumbass repeats himself some more, proposes some other answers from nowhere that no one here follows, and then props for the idiotic "spiritual rez" thesis that I've defeated 500 times now.

So there really is an interesting issue in I Cor. 15, even though JP hasn’t dug into the matter deeply enough to understand why I’m not spending all my time where he does, at the superficial observations.

So speaks the gnat to the elephant. As my link shows (which Dumbass ignored), "spiritual resurrection" just doesn't cut the mustard when reading 1 Cor. 15 or anything else in the NT. But don't expect him to pick up some real scholarship and find out. He's got too many coloring books to work on.

arise if someone was arguing that spiritual resurrections are not real (like “what kind of body do they rise in?” etc.) and that he conspicuously does not make any mention of pagan philosophers being wrong or deceived like JP might have expected him to…and so on.

Wrong, Dumbass. Questions like "what kind of body" were the typical challenges of pagans to the Jewish belief in resurrection....and philosophers don't need to be in the mix; that there was no resurrection was a general idea, one found in such lowly places as everyday Joe tombstones and the popular literature of the day like Homer.

Yep, just coincidences, every one. Really amaaaaaaaazing coincidences. That’s all.

Nope. No coincidences....just one big Dumplin' Dumbass whose scholarship stops at his Monopoly board.

[Pumbelo]

3) Testing the results of prayer by praying to change the past

My head almost exploded when I read this.

[Sparko]

My head almost exploded when I read this.

there is a whole thread about this somewhere.

his idea is so asinine. like.. duh if you did change the past, how would you know? It would become the past that you remember and then you would not bother to pray to change it!

edited to add: Here is the link: http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...ad.php?t=93643

[Pumbelo]

there is a whole thread about this somewhere.

his idea is so asinine. like.. duh if you did change the past, how would you know? It would become the past that you remember and then you would not bother to pray to change it!

edited to add: Here is the link: http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...ad.php?t=93643

It's the kind of argument I would expect from MikeWright.

[TheAnalogman]

A post from our beloved TyRockhead:

"A network like TBN that has a 99.9 % good track record shouldn't be attacked like you are doing. NOBODY is perfect. Not especially YOU."