lpetrich

What, in particular, do you have in mind?

Especially in books whose conclusions that you are inclined to agree with.

I've been willing to criticize claims on "my" side that I find unsupportable, like the claim that Mithra was almost exactly like Jesus Christ.

Why is that a "pseudo-discipline"?

I don't think that there is anything intrinsically fake about biblical studies.

Roger Pearse, what are you getting at? Most of your list is a collection of insulting stereotypes of atheists.

Doug Shaver

Not very. They usually make it obvious enough from the get-go.

Besides, strictly speaking, their bias is irrelevant. The cogency of any argument really has nothing to do with the bias or any other mindset of the person presenting the argument.

Only when it's really convenient to do so.

Whatever is conveniently available.

It depends on the author. For some there is lots of information online. For others there is none at all.

Doug Shaver

Use Google. If it's information about a person you want, if you can't find it within five minutes on Google, then either you're not doing the search right or else the information just isn't on the Web.

chrisengland

Hello
I don't know about scholars but there certainly is a problem with bias with articles on the internet written by non-scholars. (although some of it my be written by scholars)
I think alot of the time people both Christian and non-Christian seem to find what they want to and then not look any more.
This meens that alot of internet articles only tell you one side of the story.

Roger although atheist scholars have biases' I would imagine Christian ones may have aswell unfortunately.
Chris

Lugubert

If you can't find out any biases from reading the book, they won't be important, so you could save time in not trying to find them before reading.

This autumn, I plan to write a small third semester thesis in "Bible Science". Sure sounds like an oxymoron, but at least in Sweden, the subject means seriously digging into why what was written how and how that has influenced whom. I sure as (restart) I most certainly won't begin by telling the probably Christian majority of my fellow students that I'm an atheist. They will have to find out themselves, if they haven't already. Maybe they still just think I'm slightly irreverent in my interpretations, like, Gen 1:2b, "God, how the wind was blowing over the water".

DCHindley

It is not that important to ME. However, usually it quickly becomes obvious, upon reading the article or book or post, that *something* is influencing the quality of their reasoning.

Not at first. When it becomes obvious that there are biases at work, THEN I might check into it. I can Google pretty well, often finding things that others miss. I carefully choose my search words and craft the search phraseology so as to weed out false positives and keep the results focused. I also have to be persistent, as the best combination of terms and phraseology may not be immediately apparent and require some experimentation.

Wiki isn't bad for many searches, but now and then the info is sparse or in some cases mistaken.

I also have found the RBL reviews very helpful,
http://www.bookreviews.org/
but they don't review everything, even some things that they probably should have. Usually they ignore anything they consider unduly controversial, so expect middle of the road (say 1 standard deviation to either side of the mean in the bell curve of scholarship).

If I am looking for books or articles I often turn to OhioLINK
http://olc1.ohiolink.edu/search/
mainly because I live in Ohio (USA) and have library privileges at an affiliated academic institution, meaning I can get books through ILL. Surely there must be other such catalogues out there, maybe the Library of Congress in the USA.

Those who make a living out of the literary analysis of the works of historians usually like to know a little about the author before they dive in. Check out Hayden V. White's Metahistory for some theory and examples of analysis of a wide range of literary figures and historians.

DCH

DCHindley

Solo,

Most of us do not have a very good method for evaluating the truth value of sources. I think you are correct that it is too easy to go by gut feeling, because people tend to go with what "tickles their ears" (i.e., conforms to what they already believe).

One problem I had encountered in my own research on the letters of Paul was that of allowing myself to let go of preconceptions that were so tightly socialized into my mindset that I didn't even perceive of them as biases at all. This is often stuff that seemed, at first, "obvious". However, when evidence leads one to realize that "obvious" doesn't make sense, one has to go where the evidence leads. Unfortunately, now we're back to paragraph one.

I was not a logic major in college, so I cannot often find formal flaws in argumentation (except for some obvious cases of fallacies), yet if someone expounds on scientific research on toads, then jumps to conclusions about frogs, then I tend notice. Personally, my "method" is to store a lot of information in my head without making any immediate emotional commitment to it, especially if it seems to make some point at variance with my own preconceptions, noting keywords and phrases. Then I look at the sources of information from which the author drew his or her inferences and see if I detect those keywords and phrases. If I do, I pay attention to the context they were found in and often this process produces insights that allow me to accept or reject the conclusions of the author whom I am checking on.

DCH

yalla

Many years ago, in a previous life as a high school history teacher, I came across a book called "Destination Chungking" authored by Rosalie Chou. She was the wife of a high official in the entourage of the Chinese leader Chiang-kai-shek, whose Nationalist KMT government had retreated, about 1940, to their new capital Chunking in the face of the Japanese onslaught.
The book gave several eye witness portraits of CKS, his prominent followers, the government programs, daily life in Chungking etc..
So I gave [half] my class an intro to the book, and excerpts from it and had them answer questions about China, CKS, the KMT, Chungking etc..
Most kids repeated the praise, from the book, of Chiang as 'the Great Leader' and so on.

The other half of the class were given excerpts, on precisely the same topics as the previous book, from a different book "Birdless Summer", by famed author Han Suyin, also present in Chungking in the early 40s.
The students who read her work answered the questions about Chiang etc negatively, concentrationg on the incompetence corruption of his fascist regime, as portrayed by Suyin.

When the whole class was invited to discuss the isssues it became obvious that the bias of the author[s] was a fundamental factor in creating opinion, particularly when the readers were new to the topic and assumed the [biased] authors were authoritive.
This new awareness of that was my major aim in the exercise.

It was helped by the fact that Rosalie Chou and Han Suyin were the same person.
In the 1940s she was married to an abusive husband, in a circle that was racist [she was 'half-caste'], and misogynist. She had been encouraged to write the book to bolster the PR image of CKS in the US as a propaganda exercise. All explained in the latter book which was presented to all the students as a follow up exercise. Why and how to write propaganda.

Joan of Bark

Thanks, yalla. I think you made the point I was trying to get across. It's easier to spot biases in a subject we are familiar with (in this forum, Biblical stuff), than on a topic for which we have little knowledge.

Solo

Paul said that we can't do nothing against the truth but for the truth, iow, we have to follow the truth wherever it leads. The problem is that sometimes the evidence allows many interpretations, so then it's a judgment call which one fits or is consistent with the larger view. You go into a larger view and you find yourself in a company of people seen as having biases.

Seems like a good "method". Whenever someone harps to me on the importance of methodological approach, I recall the picture of the drunken buddy from Albert Camus: "Of course, my dear friend, you understand if one lacks character, it is necessary to have a method."

The devil is in the details, they say, but I think he is also in the contexts. When e.g. Mark says that people see but do not perceive and hear but do not understand, one needs to take that into account when evaluating Mark's Jesus cures of the "blind" and "deaf".

Jiri