GakuseiDon

Thanks Peter. Best to get it from the horse's mouth!

neilgodfrey

I try to avoid ExploringOurMatrix as a rule, but do check it out when someone either emails me that James McGrath has posted about a post of mine or when my blog "dashboard" informs me McGrath has linked to my blog.

I can assure you that the feedback I do get from these sources indicates to me that McGrath does regularly read my blog. He will sometimes address my name or blog directly, yet other times refer to my blog indirectly but clearly still with reference to something I have recently written.

Neil

neilgodfrey

I feel like an editor of the red top Daily Mirror.

I know I have my moments of exasperation, but there are others out there who do kindly attempt to remind me that McGrath appears to have "a very limited intellect" and it is not good to act like a bully with such a one.

Neil

judge

they might be trying to save you from embarrasing yourslef too much.
McGrath uses "it seems" too much ....sheesh its a pretty lame critique.
But of course Doherty is "darling" around here so people arent going to point that out to you.

neilgodfrey

Why do you sound so remarkably like Tim O'Neill?

Peter Kirby

The reply from James on the matter, "Peter, I had both in mind when I wrote it, and it may be that the multiple backgrounds/conversation partners made what I wrote seem less appropriate to either one of them. Ah, well..."

Zaphod

Methinks you have the wrong end of the horse.

GakuseiDon

Thanks for that Peter. That's pretty much what I suspected was the case, as I wrote just above. McGrath was responding to what he felt were general criticisms across a couple of blogs. Perhaps he should have responded to specific criticisms in one blog or the other, but for whatever reason he did not.

Peter Kirby

Still disappointed by the interaction with Neil Godfrey, even if that interaction is in the form of referencing him obliquely in a way that has "plausible deniability" that he was actually interacting with him.

I was never after McGrath's character. I don't see his writing as doing things according to the academic ideals I understand. The example that was my starting point can be argued to a standstill in this fashion. This means that the example was flawed as an example, epistemically. Nothing else follows.

What I wrote was not a tirade against McGrath. It had that touchpoint and this thread has gone back to that touchpoint. Accusations are interesting to talk about, I guess. It was more of an essay about how to address a public audience about a contested issue in your technical field. This is why it rubbed judge the wrong way. It wasn't an essay about the errors of McGrath.

The problem for me now is that it's unhealthy to keep focusing on that one paragraph in his blog or to go hunting for more examples. I've said what I needed to say. Because my starting point wasn't something that could be proven to any reasonable person as completely true, the reader's just going to have to form their own judgments. (They always do anyway.)

Interestingly, James McGrath himself seems to understand the thrust of my "open letter" better than some, as seen from his own comments and blog, as he doesn't belabor just the particular point at which my essay started, something that would be easy to do. Instead he takes it as the general consideration it is of how he is treating Doherty's work (and even his audience online - the part I commented on) differently because of his supposition that it is pseudoscholarship and, thus, the same kind of approach may give people the wrong impression.

EarlDoherty

Yes, and in the response to your review which I published in instalments here on FRDB a short time ago (and which is now up in full on my website here) I demolished all of those “problems” which you ‘found’ in my book, one indication of which is that you tried to rebut virtually nothing of what I said in that response. I (and others on McGrath’s blog and on Neil Godfrey’s blog) have done the same for McGrath’s review thus far, demonstrating that he is incapable of genuine and logical rebuttal against the mythicist case as laid out in my book.

I fully understand and expect that you will ignore that and simply cheer on McGrath as though he has actually accomplished something. But most of us know better.

Incidentally, I couldn’t care less if McGrath says not a word about the ‘positive’ points of my book, or the things he thinks I get right (and the latter, few as they are, he simply dismisses by claiming they are irrelevant, so in fact he never acknowledges that I get anything right where mythicism is concerned. That in itself is suspicious, because somewhere along the line, having researched and written on this subject for a quarter century now, and having had the influence I have had on many people, even the occasional scholar (like Stevan Davies, Robert Price, Richard Carrier, etc.) one would think that there would be something, some minor detail making up my case for mythicism, which would have some merit. Pissing on everything, the way McGrath does, reflects something on his part, and it ain’t honest scholarly judgment.

No, what I do care about is that his counter-arguments are usually so abysmal, so ineffectual, so often totally off the mark, so full of blatant prejudice and unbelievable unprofessionalism—and yet someone like yourself, Don, either can’t recognize this or chooses not to admit it, even in the face my many responses (and others’) to him on the Matrix and elsewhere pointing out those failings.

And I’ll tack on here a little response to “judge” from another thread (though pertinent here) who would make an excellent roommate for Jim McGrath—and Don, since he is as good at ignoring responses to criticisms as Don is:

This sort of thing is beyond immature and unprofessional, and it is the sort of thing that mythicists like myself have to deal with at every turn—people who simply can’t operate on the same wavelength of logical, adult debate. In subsequent discussion here about judge’s comment (his link above), it was pointed out repeatedly that my phrase “likeness of flesh” was not a quote from Romans, doctored or otherwise. It was a phrase meant to represent a common motif in the epistolary record, of which Romans 8:3, “the likeness of sinful flesh” was one example, while there are other examples (such as in Hebrews 2) which don’t even come as close to the representative motif phrase. Judge, in the posting he links to above, even quoted me, which made this clear:

This should surely have been a simple enough concept and explanation to understand. But judge apparently could not grasp it, and he continues to claim that I misquoted Romans 8:3, and for deliberately deceptive reasons. How is one to deal with someone like this? McGrath is very much like that in his arguments (though not, I have to say, quite as bad), it is so difficult to make him see the fundamental problems in his argumentation. The reasoning capacity just doesn’t seem to be there, or has been buried under biased preconception and vested interest, and I have to say that this sort of thing shines through in very many ‘professional’ commentaries on the NT that I have read (and especially those which contain any comment about mythicism). It is yet another reason why I do not attempt so-called peer review. When someone like McGrath can say with a straight face that they deliberately avoid praising anything, agreeing with anything, that I have to say because that would ‘encourage’ mythicists to think that they are something other than charlatans and deluded fakes, then we as proponents of a new paradigm that would turn the established one upside down realize that to look for an honest hearing on it is about as pointless as asking Hamas to recognize Israel.

Never the twain shall meet. We will simply do an end run around HJ-ism. We’re already a good part of the way there.

Earl Doherty