Sensei Meela

Well, we did have Confucious lay down the Golden Rule some 4 centuries before Jesus copped it. Idealized moral avatars are not required to establish moral virtues, and even were that so, Jesus is far from the only one.

Or, simply put, Jesus is not a sine-qua-non of compassionate behavior.
I fear that this is the impression most will get: 'one of the more vocal "champions" of the JM is suddenly backing down? Must not be worth defending, huh?'

Could there be some truth in it?
True, but something tells me that most people would be satisfied with anything this side of a definitive rebuttal, anyway, so why should [academics] waste their time?

Chili

Mythicism is in direct conflict with academics because our faculty of reason is the only obstackle that prevents us from seeing it clearly and without error. That is why I wrote earlier that they must be able to tell the rest of the story which must be theirs before they can do this, and that will never be.

There is no difinitive historical rebuttal because Jesus was real in the myth that was attached to historic evidence to make it believable. This same will be true with the current wars that will become part of the evidence for the antichrist when the dust finally settles in the minds of those who remain after final battle is over.

The Christ is the follower of Jesus who cleans up his own world and the antichrist is the Jesus worshipper who wants to change the world around him to make it a better place to live. Hence, they will remain torn in the saved sinner complex and therefore will have no rest by day or by night until the/their final battle is over wherein they will die nonetheless.

Chili

No, drugs usually bring peace to the mind.

Intelligitimate

It really is shocking that Robert Price could write such garbage...it makes me want to question the validity of his books on the NT.

Toto

Robert Price is culturally a southerner. He got his start with Bill Bright's Campus Crusade for Christ, which we know is part of the vast right wing conspiracy that pushes a dumbed down form of Christianity to make it compatible with Republican activism. <mild sarcasm, but essentially true>

Price took apologetics seriously, and pushed things to their logical conclusion, and figured out that Bright's theology had holes in it. He apparently has never done the same thing with his conservative economics and politics, but economics and politics are less susceptible to logical analysis in any case.

The welfare state requires much more than the golden rule. It requires certain assumptions about economics and what economic incentives and subsidies are desireable, versus what distribution of income is fair.

To keep this connected to this forum, I think that anyone who takes the gospels seriously has to be something of a socialist, possibly an anarchist. Jesus tells his followers not to worry about material things, because God will provide. He tells them to turn the other cheek and not to resist. (Price thinks that these commandments were aimed at only the inner circle, and not the average householder.) I think that a lot of liberal Christians are attracted to their churches because they have a fondness for socialist principles (which they call "social justice"), even though they might realize that socialism was not the most successful economic strategy. But finding those values in the gospel, and knowing that Thomas Jefferson thought that Jesus was a great moral philosopher, allows them to avoid really examining how well they work.

But the ascendant form of Christianity in America comes out of the religious right, and Jerry Falwell in particular. It supports the values of small businessmen in rural areas - that people on welfare are just lazy bums, that military might is good, etc. However, even these values have been subverted to support the current Republican agenda, which favors the super rich and an economic philosophy that has about as much empirical support as socialism ever did.

Layman

That's funny. I was just thinking that I agreed more with the sentiments expressed in these articles than with anything else I had read by Robert M. Price.

As for Doherty, perhaps after climbing to the top and becoming king of the Jesus Myth hill, he realized it was not that high and did not offer much of a view.

And what's this I hear about Anthony Flew becoming and out-and-out theist?

Vorkosigan

Carrier has an article on that...where the heck did it go.

Here it is:
http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369

Toto

From what I hear, Flew sounds more like a Deist at most, but is still in flux as to what to call himself. He has definitely not become a Christian or anything similar.

Layman

If that makes you feel better. :angel:

Toto

I don't care one way or the other. I don't find most philosophy especially relevant to much beyond the word games that philosophers play, and I've seen too many supposedly rational people go off the deep end into bizarre belief systems for one more to make any difference.

But this is about the third time that rumors have circulated about Flew becoming a theist. The last time it happened, people here immediately started speculating that Flew was going gaga in his old age, but then the rumor turned out not to be true. We should probably wait for Flew to clarify things before we start that again.