militant agnostic

First off, you are claiming that I am ignorant of the facts and that has influinced my decision. That is not postmodernism. If Mcdonalds coffe cups are exploding for no reason and burning the faces off people then I would change my mind. I am not doing trial by media. I just can't imagine that there is any way that people being burnt buy these things were not holding them wrong, trying to drink them while driving, or any number of dumb things that people should not be doing when you are holding scalding hot liquid.

If people are being burnt by coffe from them because the holder disintigrated while they were holding it then I am factually wrong and should change my mind.

I never claimed to believe that these lawsuits were stupid because most people feel that way. Show me evidence they were burnt because of a defect in the coffee cup and that will mean that I and every one else who thinks the lawsuites are dumb are wrong.

Toto

Please stay on topic. MacDonald's coffee temperature and related litigation are not the subject of this thread.

militant agnostic

Although I can think of some good books I would actually start with the essays on this page. Many of them are rebutles to other ideas that you may or may not be familiar with, so I don't know how useful they might be to you since many of them assume a certain level of understanding before hand. Still they are free and usefully direct.

Golderoad? Are you still reading this?

By the way I was recently trying to find the thread on this forum that I put up regarding good books that helped to understand the basic people and places of the Bible and the debate over their authenticity. I really think that some of those books would be helpful for goldenroad. I would love a repost of some of those books since I cannot find that thread anymore. I don't know if it got deleted because of a time limit or if it was somwhere in there and I just couldn't spot it. I would appreciate some help on that.

Kosh

It seems the GoldenRoad is only good for drivebys...

Toto

militant = here's your thread: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=184428

militant agnostic

Thank you soooo much Toto. I have been looking for that thread forever.

Little Billy

The Apostles didn't write the gospels. MML&J wrote at least 100 years after Christ's death.

Agemegos

I hadn't considered it before, but now that you point it out, I guess it is rather unlikely for the apostles to fabricated documents that were not written until long after they died. Dead people don't generally do much fabricating.

As for the general reliability of the Gospels: if they were reliable they would not contradict themselves or one another. But they do. Copiously.

For instance, Matthew says that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod, who died in 4 BC, and makes no mention of any census. But Luke says that Jesus was born during a census while Quirinius was governor of Syria, which puts his birth now earlier than 6 AD. Matthew says that Jesus's parents took him from Bethlehem directly to Egypt, so as to avoid Herod, who was in Jerusalem. But Luke says that when Mary's days of purification was done they took Jesus to Jerusalem to be presented in the Temple. So it goes, with contradiction after contradiction. The Gospels give three entirely different accounts of Jesus' last words ("It is done", "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit", and "Lord. Lord! Why have you forsaken me"), and four different accounts of who discovered the Empty Tomb and what they saw there.

One more thing. The Gospels report several things that would surely have been noticed and recorded in other sources if they had actually happened. For example, Matthew says that on the day Jesus was crucified 'saints' arose from the dead, walked into Jerusalem, and were seen by many people. Don't you think the Romans would have noticed?

Three hours of darkness in the middle of the day, an earthquake, and zombies strolling around Jerusalem. If those things had really happened we would have expected that someone would have noted it. Other than a passel of religious nutters writing at least a generation later.

I have read the Gospels. I assure you that I did so wit an open mind. They looked totally bogus.

Steve Weiss

It is for the writer to verify the truthfulness and accuracy of his sources, and the reader must not assume a gratuitous validity that is not there on the basis of mere assumptions. Some claims can be dismissed as impossible like the sun freezing in its position in the sky. Other claims are just entertaining mythology. When one gets to the issue of truth, the standards are very much higher than those that have been set by the gullible. Though perhaps the majority believe in astrology, the devil and angels, believing is not a truth standard. A story remains a story until it is thoroughly verifed, and the proper assumption is that it is not true until proven otherwise.

Gamera

Most philologists approach history as if it is a group of discernable events that get accurately "recorded" by good faith historians, which they -- as if by magic -- have a way of culling out from the mass of texts we have about the past.

But in fact, as postmodernism has abundantly shown, all we have are texts to interpret -- we don't have the events of the past. And each of those texts were written in a political cultural institutional context for a particular agenda. "Historical" texts don't record events any more "accurately" than any other texts. They simply have a particular agenda the reader tends to agree with.

Thus, modern philologists like Tacitus, because he seems to uphold traditional virtues and sounds well meaning and doesn't have a fabulists mentality. Never mind he had his own nostalgic agenda and was a propagandist for Roman power.

The point is, it is naive to ignore the fact that history is simply a body of texts written by people with various agendas. It isn't the events themselves, since they are forever inaccessible to us. We are all doing textual interpretation, not empirical science.