January 2009 Screwballs

[Anon]

Screwball to myself for continuing to read Dave Hunt and James White's written "debate" on Calvinism thinking it would actually have answers.

If anyone sees on the news "Ames, IA man stabs own eyes out with plastic KFC spork" you'll know what happened.

[MarcusAndreas]

Screwball to "Mikey" for this ridiculous statement.

DiscHuker: You’re right, the Bible doesn’t specifically condemn the child sex trade. It condones it.

Link here: • Edited by a Moderator •
Go to comment 118 for the statement.
I posted a slightly vulgar response.

Moderated By: QuantaFille

Only slightly?

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Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publically complain or whine, please take it to the Psychotherapy Room unless told otherwise.

[LilPunkishOfTerror]

Then don't link to it here, we don't want linked vulgarity.

[mig_killer2]

3 screwballs to hand out

2 screwballs to a gamespot forum-goer by the name of "Foxhound_fox"

"Scientism." That's a new one. Science IS the be-all-and-end-all of objective rationalism.

[if the resurrection happened] the resurrection of Jesus would be considered a fact and not a myth.

and screwball to myself for trying to actually reason with this guy.

[Manwë Súlimo]

and screwball to myself for trying to actually reason with this guy.

<Sarcasm>

Jerk.

This is a fair warning to those sarcastically impaired the preceding text was written in jest.

[mudcake]

• Edited by a Moderator •

Moderated By: QuantaFille

Having facts wrong is not the same as willful misrepresentation of the truth. Your accusation of lying is still unsupported.

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Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publically complain or whine, please take it to the Psychotherapy Room unless told otherwise.

[The Curtmudgeon]

Some moron named Guy Stroumsa is trying to resurrect Morton Smith's Secret Mark by proving it wasn't a forgery (at least, not a modern forgery by Smith). Article here.

The Nation

The newly published letters [earlier described as "a fascinating collection of primary sources: Smith's correspondence with a lifelong friend, the twentieth century's greatest Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem"], though they suggest and support this reading ["Could Scholem's teaching have inspired Smith to rethink the nature of religious experience, and Christianity, and find new meanings in the life of Jesus? It seems very likely, to me at least, that Scholem's way of thinking about redemption and salvation, religion and sex, acted slowly but irrevocably on Smith..."], don't quite clinch the case: indeed, they suggest that Smith, writing years later, may have remembered as conversations exchanges that actually took place on paper. I believe that Smith really found his letter, and that Scholem gave him the framework into which he inserted it. But that's just what I think. Many will disagree. This time, the professor is the Cheshire cat. He smiles and is gone.

© source where applicable

[MarcusAndreas]

Screwball to myself to linking to profanity...

[jpholding]

Screwball to myself for continuing to read Dave Hunt and James White's written "debate" on Calvinism thinking it would actually have answers.

If anyone sees on the news "Ames, IA man stabs own eyes out with plastic KFC spork" you'll know what happened.

Dude... If you didn't nominate yourself for that, I sure would.

Why don't you just wait til I do MY book on TULIP in maybe 4-5 years? I'll be digging deep into how the patronage model affects the whole shebang (so far, it makes Calvinism look sick).

And frankly....while Hunt and White are earnest guys....they don't have any kind of scholarly rigor at all. You need to read threads here were I discussed my debate with White onm Romans 9.

[jpholding]

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspo...n-amherst.html

DL pulls over and inflates his head to 700 lbs of pressure:

Call me arrogant if you will, but I am one person who has the arguments that can be the undoing of Christianity. [BTW, Keith Parsons emailed me recently and said: "Humility is a Christian virtue. Be proud of your accomplishment!"] I’d like for CFI and Paul Kurtz to send me on a speaking tour, allow me to revise my book one more time (if I had time I could condense it and make it more accessible to the masses), fund me to debate some high profile Christians, make me a research scholar for the CFI institute. These requests have been made by me to them, with one important person who is advocating on my behalf, and maybe some or all of these requests will pan out in the near future. But my goal is not just to understand the world, as Marx said, but to change it.

Can you imagine what jimbo would do if *I* talked like this?


(Carrier's entry is full of hoots too.)

[jpholding]

Email from the Pithy What in Hades Department:

Your brain is like a parachute,it works better when it opens up!

I told him an open mind is like an open mouth....useless unless it has something to clamp down on, because otherwise all it produces is hot air.

[Mountain Man]

"Call me arrogant if you will, but I am one person who has the arguments that can be the undoing of Christianity."

If only I had a dime for every skeptical meathead who's said that since 33AD.

[ApologiaPhoenix]

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspo...n-amherst.html

DL pulls over and inflates his head to 700 lbs of pressure:





Can you imagine what jimbo would do if *I* talked like this?


(Carrier's entry is full of hoots too.)

DL? Has his head expanded so much he needs another letter now?

[jpholding]

http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/2...ld-times-sake/

Dumplin' Dumbass shows why he's ahead in the Platinum race for 2008:

t’s been a while since we’ve had any real Sunday Toons, but since Mr. Holding has seen fit to award me the highest honor he has to bestow, it seems like a good time to stop in for another visit. Holding, for those of you who may not yet have had the pleasure, is a self-styled Christian apologist whose approach is perhaps best typified by this insightful analysis:

Having now read more than 50 books on the subject, I can say without qualification that you are stupid in this regard.

In fact, it’s amazing how many of his analyses end with “…and therefore you are stupid,” or variations thereof. It’s a defense mechanism of sorts, a tactic intended to discourage critics from hanging around long enough to pose a real problem, though from my perspective his best defense is the relentless mediocrity of his scholarship and apologetics. It doesn’t take long to exhaust his repertoire of social maneuvers and rhetorical ploys, and after that it gets fairly repetitive and uninteresting. He’s read a lot of books, and therefore you are wrong (though sadly he has trouble providing any specific articulation of what those books contain that actually proves you wrong). Ok, yeah, we get it, that’s your schtick and you’re schtickin’ to it. Ha ha.

Yep. Spoken like a true ignoramus out of his depth.

Still, he does now and then come up with an actual argument for his beliefs, and some of them are actually interesting to consider. It’s not that they’re right, exactly, but they’re wrong in interesting ways. One of these arguments appears in his attempt to debunk what I said about I Cor. 15.

For example, he says that “the reason Paul wrote [1 Cor.] 15 isbecause, as verse 12 tells us, he was unhappy with the number of believers who did not buy this whole resurrection business.” Um, not quite, Dumplin’. Their issue was not with whether the resurrection of Jesus happened; their issue was with what was thought to be the impossibility of resurrection (point 3) according to pagan philosophical principles. There’s no room to say that doubted that Jesus was raised; but they did doubt that they could be. As I noted in replies to The Empty Tomb, this does mean they were holding inconsistent positions. Paul’s appeal to Jesus as a model is for the purpose of saying, to persons of a collectivist mindset, “If you deny that it can happen to you, then how do you explain that it happened to our ingroup leader?”

Ok, so they weren’t denying that it did happen, they were merely denying that it was even possible for it to happen. I can see this is going to be good already.

Indeed it is, since that's not even my argument. 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' doesn't get this for a little while though:

Holding proposes an interesting solution: “There’s no room to say that [they] doubted that Jesus was raised; but they did doubt that they could be.” In other words, they believed that Jesus rose from the dead, but they thought that only Jesus was raised, and that no one else would be. Now, this might lend some credence to the notion that they regarded Jesus as some kind of god, and was therefore possessed of powers that no one else had, but it does rather deflate Paul’s argument doesn’t it? I mean, let’s assume that the Corinthians did indeed believe that Jesus was raised and that no one else was. Paul’s argument, in historical context, turns out to be, “But if Jesus was the only one who was raised, how is it that some of you say that Jesus is the only one who was raised? For if no one but Jesus is raised, then Jesus himself is… uh… raised. Just like you said. Never mind.”

No, Dumbass. Once again you're too ignorant to get the whole point; 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). Ypu'll notice Dumplin' ignores that part; he's too ignorant to realize that it is the most critical!

What Holding is doing is what a lot of apologists and theologians do: try to take the ideas discussed at the end of the chapter, and overlap them onto the beginning. The end of the chapter does indeed focus on the question of what kind of body are the dead raised in, and addresses it with a number of comparisons that contrast the inferior body that was buried and the spiritual body that is raised. But we’re not up to that part yet. We’re still at the beginning of the chapter, where Paul tries to convince the Corinthians that their beliefs are wrong because Jesus (allegedly) did rise. In Paul’s mind, at least, there is a clear contradiction between what (some of) the Corinthians believed, and the doctrine of the Resurrection.

Holding proposes a solution to that problem as well: the Corinthians were simply being inconsistent in their beliefs. That one certainly has the ring of plausibility, right? We see Christians hold inconsistent beliefs all the time, like the belief that “God is in control” and that “the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One.” But this one seems a bit much just the same. How on earth do you convert to a religion in which the most important principle is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, a religion that you join by a ritual of baptismal union with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and not notice that there’s any contradiction with your conviction that the dead do not rise?

So yeah, people can hold widely inconsistent beliefs; but not after conversion?

There’s a Monty Python sketch in which a new recruit comes up to his commanding officer and wants to be let out of the army because he didn’t realize there were going to be guns and fighting and such. (”I mean, blimey, someone could get hurt!”) It’s a funny bit, because it’s ridiculous to suppose that anyone could be dense enough to join the army and not realize that there was any fighting involved. How, then, do we explain the existence, within the Church, of believers who did not believe that resurrection was possible? Not just that their own resurrection was impossible, but that resurrection itself was impossible, in a way that contradicted the resurrection of Jesus, and which the resurrection of Jesus could thus be used to refute?

Um, well, the heavy influence of then-present pagan beliefs about resurrection might help there...

I can think of a couple of different ways. One is if the resurrection is an afterthought, a little-known doctrine that Christians sheepishly share only with those who’ve been absorbed deeply enough into the religion to be willing to accept the hard-to-swallow stuff. Based on Paul’s declaration that the resurrection was a core element of the Gospel he preached and by which he converted the Corinthians, that seems unlikely.

The other possibility is if the resurrection, as originally preached, was a spiritual resurrection, the raising of a spiritual body, as per the latter half of the chapter. A person who believed in a spiritual afterlife, you see, could easily adopt a religion based on the spiritual resurrection of Jesus, even if they denied the possibility of a physical resurrection. The inconsistency between accepting resurrection and rejecting resurrection would not appear until later on, when it came time to discuss the implications of the resurrection—or, for example, if the doctrine itself began to morph into the idea that Jesus had a real (as in physical) resurrection.

Yawn....that canard again? Wrong. http://www.tektonics.org/lp/physrez.html for the 165736th time....

Dumplin' rambles on in the "spiritual resurrection" vein for a while, then changes gears:

I’m pretty much done with that topic, but I can’t resist sharing just a couple more toony gems from Mr. Holding.

Beyond this, Dumplin’ offers the usual canards. “Paul doesn’t mention an empty tomb, bwaaaah.” (No, I guess when he says “buried” he means they buried Jesus in midair, or at sea.) “The body could have decayed so that it was unrecognizable, bwaaaah.” Doesn’t matter, Dumplin’. ANY body could have been produced by the authorities, who could have tagged it “Jesus,” and no one could have said boo to contradict them.

Right, Mr. Holding. So why didn’t they take just any decomposed body and call it the body of Christ? Perhaps because they didn’t need to, since it was already widely reported that the body had been taken by disciples, as Matthew records?

Nope. Because the tomb was indeed empty, and they couldn't get around that no way, no how. Not even with a convenient scenario like yours where you just make up an idea that "it was widely reported" -- and also ACCEPTED.

And by the way, when you bury someone in a tomb, doesn’t that mean that the tomb is no longer empty? The question isn’t whether burial produces an empty tomb, it’s whether a resurrection does. A spiritual resurrection would make the contents of the tomb irrelevant and not worth mentioning, but all four of the stories that claim a physical resurrection take pains to assure us that the tomb was indeed empty. Paul, who says the body is “raised” as a spiritual body, does not.

Whatever that was supposed to be. It's mostly incoherent, aside from the spir rez canard again.

BTW he says elsewhere:

Maybe some of y’all could drop by and help him out with the voting, though. So far he’s only found twenty people interested enough to cast a ballot.

Sorry, Dumplin' -- just a reflection of the poor quality of the candidates. Mind you, this from a guy whose post only got 2 comments, and whose pissant blog gets as many visits in a day as my article on Mithraism alone gets in 3 days!!

[MarcusAndreas]

Um... JP. You just said "Dumbass"