skepticdude

:

"...I said they use the exact same REASONING behind the CoE..."

And the court then instructs the jury to use the "reasonable person" test.
I was talking about how a jury would reason. If the witness admits something embarrassing, and the jury cannot figure out how such admission was made to benefit her cause, the only reasonable conclusion is that people only lie to benefit, so the testimony, not being beneficial to her cause, is likely objective.

Not true, Juries convict on purely circumstantial evidence all the time. They are always found being limited to "he said, she said" when trying to figure out if the rape charge is true, etc.

Obviously, as anybody could tell from reading the context, I meant that people don't lie to look bad, if looking bad doesn't further their interests. I figured it was too obvious how we can further our interests by lying to hurt our integrity (such sane people pretending to be insane, a blow to their integrity, to further their cause to avoid prison.

Again, the piviot point here is: Can this witness's embarrassing admission further her cause or not? The insanity defense is case in point, where the defense risks looking bad by lying in the hope of avoidng prison.

which agrees with my previous defenses of the CoE, namely, that lying more often than not is done to benefit the liar, not to make them look bad period.

Criminal bragging is usually for the benefit of fitting in with the other neanderthals in the cell. See? Lying and benefit go hand in hand.

Yup, which is why the key to the whole affair is whether the testimony benefitted the cause of the witness. The less benefit to their cause, the more likely it was objective. The more benefit to their cause, the less likely they are telling the truth or whole truth.

nothing you have said has demonstrated that people might lie for no reason at all. Everything you have said actually supports the CoE argument that lying is nearly always for benefit.

aa5874

I told you already that no judge instructs a jury to look for embarrassing details of a testimony to determine veracity, and you cannot deny that.

And, in many sexual abuse cases, there are no other witnesses or corroborative evidence since the sexual abuse may have occurred many years before the abuse was reported and no other person knew of the abuse.

I think you are just wasting time now.

rlogan

I see now that you did now. Willing to look into it, and would like you to show us the context.

Could you please provide to us the citation where you got this from, first of all, and second show us the complete context in which it was quoted.



All the more relevant then that Christians preen around shouting from the highest mountaintops about how their savior was Crucified according to the prophecies - how proud they are of this - and then have some of them claim it is "embarassing".

Solo

Well, look up Galatians where Paul rages against the "Judaizing" church (or as I believe, against the Petrine hypocrites in the James' Church who preach the law and themselves do not keep it).

In Gal 5:11, he asks rhetorically : Brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished (NIV).
It is true, this does not show that the Jamesian Jesus proclaimers actually believed that Jesus broke the law and under the law was executed lawfully (as Paul did), but in 6:12, Paul hurls an accusation at them which if he hoped to have an effect among the believers must have had some grounding:

Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. (NIV)

This wording makes it difficult to argue that the Petrine Jesus followers commonly accepted Paul`s messianic symbol - the cross - in Paul's time. It evidently was embarrassing (or threatening) even after Paul's death. In Mark's gospel, Peter is rebuked by Jesus for arguing against the preordained fate of the Messiah, and is replaced by Simon of Cyrene (a complete stranger) as the one who takes the Jesus' cross up the hill.

Jiri

No Robots

Hi Jiri:

Isn't it rather the case that Paul is saying in Galatians that Peter is to be blamed because he was practicing freedom from the law in Antioch; but, when some of James' people came to town, he reverted?

But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.
For before that some came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them who were of the circumcision.

Solo

Hi No Robots,
Not sure what you are after: Peter's mission was to the circumcised, and he was eating with Gentiles, presumably breaking the Jewish dietary law.

Jiri

No Robots

Right. But Paul wanted the Jews to accept full fellowship with the Gentiles. Peter was willing to go along with this, but then chickened out when some of the Jerusalem people showed up.

skepticdude

I see what you mean: while this relates to the criterion of embarrassment, what you pointed out indicates that the death of Jesus was, for his original apostles, something unexpected. The death of Jesus could very well have been something that wasn't on the agenda!

DCHindley

This may not have even been the issue. Ritual purity was. Technically, once you are outside of the "holy land" (and that was variously defined, but was usually just Judaea, maybe extended to Samaria, Galilee and Peraea to include Solomon's traditional region of reign) you were assumed to be as good as unclean due to the un-kosher practices of the local gentiles. If "those from James" expected to remain ritually clean even outside Judaea or the other regions just mentioned, then they were possibly super vigilant.

Still, I think it was an issue of the James gang preferring to eat kosher, and assuming they could not get kosher foods in Antioch, and reverted to fruits, vegetables and nuts. Cephas agreed. Paul faulted him, asserting that kosher is meaningless outside the holy land.

DCH

premjan

Funny, most Hindus were also considered ritually unclean after crossing the sea and had to purify themselves on return to India.