Amaleq13

Based on his participation in this forum, I suspect Richard recognizes that the best way to fight flawed arguments and false information is not to forbid them from being posted but to publicly demonstrate the logical errors, misinformation, and absence of supporting data for the conclusion.

Your initial post in this discussion appeared to be motivated toward this same goal and I hope you choose to continue to participate in that manner. I think your criticism of the forum, however, is misplaced because what you hope for actually does take place here. That it does not occur as rapidly as you might like does not change the fact that it is happening. Faulty scholarship and misinformation are exposed here and it would be directly contrary to the "mission" to prevent that exposure from taking place by forbidding such posts.

Vorkosigan

It WAS a compliment. I was looking forward to the unwary suddenly finding out that here there be tygers.

The "hate campaign" that underlies "reductionism"? ....... ROFL.

We don't moderate for content, Jeff. The purpose of this forum is also to instruct, and to build community. The learning process inevitably carries with it a stage in which one is uninformed. By not editing for content, the uninformed can get informed. Bad ideas can get a hearing and then get exposed, instead of simply being dismissed. That way not only do we get to examine how ideas are taken apart and put together, we avoid looking like we are engaging in censorship of ideas that we don't like, the way, for example, the Fourth R looked when it turned down a third party offer of five big ones to stage a debate on mythicism and historicism between Earl Doherty and an NT scholar.

Further, by inviting everyone to participate, we build community among secular types. This is not a discussion list like the email lists that you own, Jeff -- the goals are fundamentally different. This is a discussion forum for a secular community. Hence content will be wider.

In other words, the list isn't about crap detection. Whether crap gets detected is entirely up to the listmembers themselves -- not up to the moderators. Your lists are composed of people who don't have time to respond to crap, and so some moderation of content is inevitable. You are welcome to hang out here and respond to any "crap" that shows up, though. We can always use more educated and incisive commentary.

Although I have to admit, that as a representative of a field you appear to be claiming has superior powers of crap detection, I am puzzled by the way so many members of your profession are able to publish their personal theologies and get them accepted as scholarly texts -- like NT Wright, for example. And let's not even discuss that absurd James Ossuary, which was spotted as a fake on Day 1 here at IIDB.

Nonsense. What you are really engaged in here is a kind of rhetorical jujitsu, in which the speaker accuses his opponents of engaging in what in fact he himself has long engaged in. For it is the norm among NT scholars and historicists in general to accuse skeptics of being engaged in hate campaigns and similar, as Pearse --- he of the question to Toto above -- hinted at just last week, or to be in it for the money, as Pearse claimed a couple of weeks before that, and Meier did in vol. 1 of A Marginal Jew, or patronizing them by accusing them of being obtuse, like the unnamed person who responded to Earl from the Fourth R. The vast majority of commentary on Jesus-skepticism by NT scholars is essentially accusations of conspiracy theories. But to return to your comment:

I own a large number of skeptical texts, and not one makes such a claim as its "primary" argument (in fact only Liedner's The Fabrication of the Christ Myth makes such a claim anywhere in the text as far as I know, and he is a non-scholar making it in the context of pro-Jewish polemics). But perhaps you can come up with a list for us?

Mods, perhaps this important discussion needs to be broken out into a new thread.

Vorkosigan

jgibson000

No. In clarifying what you were doing, we have reached an understanding. But I do wonder whether anyone else saw your questions as loaded.

"We believe all people should be allowed, even encouraged, to hear all sides of every religious claim and choose for themselves, **using evidence and reason** rather than force, intimidation, deception, or any other **underhanded tactic**."

I took this to mean that you expected your posters to know what they were talking about, to be responsible for the claims, and to refrain from using ad hominem arguments, resorting to the genetic fallacy, and employing the "scholarly cover up" card when they were arguing against something they disagreed with. I also took it to mean that you would not tolerate such deceptive and underhanded tactics.

Was I wrong to do so?

I apologize. I assumed that it was.

But as evinced by the remark from Roger Pearse, it seems that there are others besides myself who see "real hatred" as the motive behind any number of posts.

Be that as it may, I'll drop this now. But it would be interesting to see if others besides Roger and myself feel that hatred is indeed a motive behind many of the messages posted
here.

Yours,

Jeffrey

jgibson000

And again, my thanks.


Please note that you have misquoted me. I said "the hate campaign that undelies"**a lot of** reductionism". I did not say, as you present me as doing, that **all** reductionists (i.e., those who say that Christianity is merely or really only in the end warmed up/transformed X, or Jesus is really only Mithras/Osiris/Apollonius etc. in a different guise) are,in arguing their claims, engaged in a hate campaign.

But if you doubt that hatred of Christianity (or at least a certain expression of it) stands behind attempts to show that "Christianity" is really only X, may I suggest you read D.Z, Smith's _Drudgery Divine:On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity_.

Yours,

Jeffrey

Toto

Loaded? vs Rhetorical? I'm sorry, I don't think we have reached an understanding.

The quote is from the Mission statement for the Internet Infidels. The full quote is: I am not sure where in this quote you found the idea that the moderators would monitor postings on the IIDB boards and actually censor offending posts - the equivalent of using force to shut up a speaker.

We generally discourage posters from speculating on the motive behind posts, and ask that you interpret everything in the most charitable way possible. You don't know the other poster, and may not understand their posting style.

It is too easy and too inimical to real communication to decide that someone who disagrees with you is motivated by hatred, instead of either lacking information that you have, having information that you lack, or just having a different perspective.

Vorkosigan

Ah. Now I see. By "reductionism" you meant reducing Jesus to X. I thought you were making a complaint about "reductionism" in the sense of the way skeptics do not accept the supernatural (which I thought was rather an odd complaint for you).

I am well aware that hatred of Christianity underlies many of the writings about it. Just as hatred of communism underlies many of the attacks on that authority-philosophy, and hatred of Fascism underlies many of the attacks on it, and hatred of the anti-American Bush administration underlies attacks on it, and hatred of the Leninist Kuomintang underpinned my participation in a democracy movement here inTaiwan where I live. Why, precisely it is bad to look at destructive, totalizing, anti-human, anti-freedom philosophies, and conclude they are hateful and should be opposed, is a mystery to me.

But what's more, Jeff, is that critiques of Christian origins driven by dislike of Christianity can be quite insightful, just as discussions of Christian origins created by apologists for Christianity can be quite insightful. Attitude often drives insight. It widens the boundaries of discussion. It finds new data. It assembles new arguments. And it is no respecter of shibboleths and sacred cows.

And that's good.

Vorkosigan

Chris Weimer

I think there's a misunderstanding here. The evidence and reason is for the readers to have, not the posters. The posters may post whatever they want, as long as it is within the rules of IIDB. The readers, then, can use the evidence and reason whether or not the argument holds. We do it this way instead of preventing them from being heard at all. If you look through this forum, you'll find many posts from both sides of the fence whose posters had no idea what they were talking about. We got some saying that the KJV is the perfect truth of God and we got some saying that the Jews even in the first century were polytheists, worshipping Abraham, Noah, etc... all as gods. These claims are both quite ludicrous, but they're presented here anyway. It is up to us, they who read the posts, to decide for ourselves which is reasonable and which is garbage.

I sincerely doubt that actual hate motivates many here. Few at best, and we disregard them as as the fringe. There are probably more who merely find Christianity discomforting and so go out of their way to disprove it, but I still wouldn't call it hatred. The more usual posters here have often agreed with Christians. There are quite a few respectable Christians here - Roger Pearse, Stephen Carlson, Andrew Criddle to name a couple - but at least to me and certainly others here as well one's religious beliefs are only problematic when they stand in front of reasoning.

I think this assumption of yours of our motives is unwarranted, unfair, and unreasonable. As Toto already had shown you, we've made more than enough effort to quell the Mithraic misunderstandings in the past - how could we if we were inspired by hate? Quite the contrary, actually. I am not inspired by any emotion except the drive for knowledge and reason. Is that not enough?

best regards,

Chris Weimer

Amaleq13

I second that motion.

John A. Broussard

Your view isn't necessarily wrong, but it is certainly very, very naive.

Roger Pearse

Actually I think labelling dislike of only certain values "hate" is a political con-trick, since you notice that all of these are shibboleths of the political liberal-left, which it prefers not to have criticised. As you no doubt know a British academic is presently in an Austrian jail for expressing doubt about the holocaust. No-one who expresses opposition to any of these values will be permitted to hold state employment here.

If we say that defaming Christians is agreed by those who decide these things not to be a hate-crime, in the way that defaming Jews is, of course this does accurately reflect the (rather nasty) politics of our day.

But since 'hate' is a moveable feast, and indeed the Moslems here are getting some laws passed making it a 'hate-crime' to express any criticism of them, surely we might reasonably wonder whether, if this site were dedicated to unmasking the evil of Judaism and Jews, would it qualify as a hate-site?

You know no doubt that truth is not a defence against an allegation of committing a hate-crime (unlike libel).

So we may ask: "Does this site contain material likely to incite dislike, contempt, or hatred of Jews^H^H^H^HChristians?"

It would be a very curious position to assert that it does not!

Likewise: "Is it motivated by advancing a world-view which involves atheism, or insulting Christianity?"

In view of the current thread promoting the Koran, this question seems to answer itself.

Not that this is something I necessarily object to. Since nearly all of these laws deny ME free speech -- I belong to none of the groups our masters intend to privilege -- I naturally am in favour of freedom rather than legislation! I merely wanted to point out that Jeffrey was correct. Whether this is a useful discussion -- or indeed relevant to this thread, or this forum, I think might be questioned.

All the best,

Roger Pearse