Freethought & Rationalism Archive

hjalti · 04-12-2011, 08:29 PM

Quote:

I don't know if Marshall Applewhite was ever considered God.

Well, he was considered to be a space-alien. You can learn all about it on this great YT-channel (it also has fascinating "exit videos" from stundents, stuff like: "I'm so happy, I'm finally going to die!")

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Cult leaders almost always claim to receive their exclusive knowledge from a transcendent authority, be it God, gods, angels, ghosts, ancestors or aliens. But never do they claim their knowledge, seemingly, from a merely-mythical-human cult leader, though of course they may claim to have received their knowledge from an actual-human cult founder who preceded them.

Right. So the question is:

Was Jesus a cult leader who later was thought of as the creator of the universe and Yahweh incarnate?

Or, was Jesus actually the god Yahweh that some cult leader(s) claimed to hace revelations about and only later was historicised and then got sayings attributed to him, that made the historicised Jesus sound like a cult leader?

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But never do they claim their knowledge, seemingly, from a merely-mythical-human cult leader, though of course they may claim to have received their knowledge from an actual-human cult founder who preceded them. There is a very plausible explanation for that--given the choice, it is much easier and more convincing to claim that your information comes from God than it is to claim that your information comes from another man who you also claim was God. There is no need to complicate your lies like that.

Well, this seems to be wrong in a sense. As a religion becomes somewhat established, you want to put a clamp on "revelation" to keep things stable. So you prefer an earthly, distant, authority. If the authority is based on current revelation, some guys walking in the church can turn things upside down. But if you have a historical founder, who passed the teachings down to the bishops, you are "safe".

I'm no expert in mormonism, but I think we can see similar things there. First it was based on revelations, but now it's all about what the founders taught, and although the leaders officially have the ability to get revelations from god, they don't actually do it. Just think of how wary the catholic church is of miracles and revelations, they don't want some kids with connections with Mary saying stuff like: "Mary told us she was the third person of the trinity!"

Sheshbazzar · 04-12-2011, 08:45 PM

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sheshbazzar

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I'll quarter you, but I won't draw you. I could never draw very well.

You seem to have an elaborate explanation for the beginning of Christianity, and I would like to know what you find improbable about my argument, or more generally what you find improbable about an actual-human doomsday cult leader Jesus of Nazareth. I think the patterns of history count for a lot, but maybe you have a different perspective. For example, you propose that the book of Revelation was originally a fiercely anti-Christian polemic, and I don't think any similar thing has ever been known to have happened in the history of the world, either. I don't want to debate that particular point about the book of Revelation, but I get the sense that maybe the patterns of history don't matter all that much to you, that maybe you really do think that the events surrounding origin of Christianity were extremely peculiar events.

Not that I find it so totally improbable. My quotation was from GakuseiDon's post and I was agreeing with Dorherty's view of multiple 1st century sect figures holding up an imagined messianic figure as being the heavenly and earthly representative of their cultus.
This being is that like that shadowy figure portrayed within the DSS, the so called 'Teacher of Righteousness' likely nothing more than a figurehead, one that could be employed as a threat to keep the brotherhood in line, IE. "The Teacher of Righteousness will come and....." but who is always conveniently somewhere else at the time, so that his representatives, the local human cult leaders are really the ones running the whole show.
Really, just like it is now, when the Pope or a Pastor says "Jesus said..." and "Jesus wants you to do... this or that" and the followers act on the words as though they had proceeded directly from the figurehead whom they have never actually seen, always being somewhere just over tomorrows horizon.
It works now, no doubt it worked just as well back then.

OK, so maybe I got the wrong idea. Do you think the patterns of history are at least somewhat important? Or maybe you think the patterns of history are important, but the evidence indicates in your opinion that Christianity breaks some of those patterns?

The problem with all of these presented 'patterns' is that all are just way to recent, and thus cannot be counted on to accurately reflect how things may have developed in a primitive and entirely different religious and cultural milieu thousands of years ago.

Moroni was Joseph Smith's conveniently absent cult figure, no one could ever know what 'Moroni' told Joseph Smith unless Joseph told them, and of course he could invent anything on the fly, (and apparently often did)
He managed to insert himself into the same position as the Gospel writers or 'Paul'. There never needed to be any real figure behind their stories, and it always served their purposes best that there actually was not, making it so much easier to craft a purely literary figure perfectly suited to their theology. And of course because NO ONE had ever met the 'real' Jebus or 'Moroni' there would be no one able to dispute or refute the stories being crafted. The Perfect con.
One with age-old origins and played out in almost every culture. The ancient village shaman would claim that the great Hubooboo had spoken and all must obey! Who do you think was speaking for Hubooboo?
I do not believe that Jebus was ever one bit more real than 'Moroni' or Hubooboo.

ApostateAbe · 04-12-2011, 08:56 PM

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Originally Posted by Sheshbazzar

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

OK, so maybe I got the wrong idea. Do you think the patterns of history are at least somewhat important? Or maybe you think the patterns of history are important, but the evidence indicates in your opinion that Christianity breaks some of those patterns?

The problem with all of these presented 'patterns' is that all are just way to recent, and thus cannot be counted on to accurately reflect how things may have developed in a primitive and entirely different religious and cultural milieu thousands of years ago.

Moroni was Joseph Smith's conveniently absent cult figure, no one could ever know what 'Moroni' told Joseph Smith unless Joseph told them, and of course he could invent anything on the fly, (and apparently often did)
He managed to insert himself into the same position as the Gospel writers or 'Paul'. There never needed to be any real figure behind their stories, and it always served their purposes best that there actually was not, making it so much easier to craft a purely literary figure perfectly suited to their theology. And of course because NO ONE had ever met the 'real' Jebus or 'Moroni' there would be no one able to dispute or refute the stories being crafted. The Perfect con.
One with age-old origins and played out in almost every culture. The ancient village shaman would claim that the great Hubooboo had spoken and all must obey! Who do you think was speaking for Hubooboo?
I do not believe that Jebus was ever one bit more real than 'Moroni' or Hubooboo.

OK, so you think that patterns are important, but I have the wrong idea of the relevant patterns?

spin · 04-12-2011, 09:00 PM

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

spin, my objections to your criticisms are listed. If you would like to focus on only a few and leave out the rest, that would be better, in my opinion. It is always a big useless mess when debates exponentially expand into many different topics and balloons into countless one-liner points in every post.

"Really? I mean because all your observed cases are X, then all cases are X? You still want to present that as an argument?"

Yes.

It's called argument from ignorance. What you don't know will come back to bite you. Failed.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"Not one of your doomsday prophets comes from a period close to the one you are trying to analyze. Your argument is based not on context, but modern themes projected into the past."

My argument is about both.

But you haven't shown any relevant examples, so it isn't about both at all. It's about modern experience projected into the past. Failed.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"You don't get to dictate how things go here. This is a dialectic."

Well, it is generally good manners to focus on the topic of the original post of the thread.

I cannot help it when you wander off from the opening of your OP, an opening reflected in much of the post.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

You introduced your own theory, which is related--at least you explain the same verses that I brought up.

I pointed out that you were going beyond evidence. You have text and no way to get from there to reality.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

But, I got a little miffed when you completely ignored my argument except by saying I didn't have one.

Reality bites. You can't just tag on a list of a dozen modern cult leaders to your basic claim that prophetic errors point to reality and say that you are offering something new.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I think you should be explaining how your own theory is better than mine.

You have no theory that lets you claim that a figure in text is a figure in reality.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

This forum is filled with people who parade their pet theories, and it helps when they make the case of how their own theories compete.

Does that in some way validate them?

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"Saying that the reference to 'birth pangs' has no explanatory power is empty rhetoric, as you misunderstand my comment. The birth pangs and related material help to show that the work in Mk 13 is of origin text not speech, which removes it from the mouth of Jesus and in the case of 1QH text which originates prior to the epoch of Jesus."

I did not misunderstand your point, and my criticisms have equal applicability in light of your rephrasing. You go to a very different context to make sense of "birth pangs," when you can make perfect sense of it by examining the immediate context.

Are you somehow claiming that there is not a very strong Jewish influence on early christianity? You know Jewish god, Jewish texts, Jewish... umm messiah?

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"I'm demonstrating that you are starting with your hands tied. You make assumptions about the text which you have no reason to make. Somehow you extract a real Jesus from a figure in a text, a text which in the case of Mk 13 evinces redactional effort rather than an oral source."

Sorry, what assumptions? I don't think my argument is significantly affected if Mark was very much redacted. Myth is myth.

Who's talking about myth? You assume that there is a real figure behind the text, yet when shown that the text you are trying to use is the work of much redaction and traditional sourcing, you close your eyes to those facts and say that you claim isn't significantly affected, when you've got a literary figure with words placed in his mouth that you want to be words that were really said by that figure.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"Your making perfect sense equates to a form of naive literalism, ie you are bound for no clearly stated reason to try to make the text reflect some reality, when the text doesn't allow you to do so... That's your assertion. Naive literalism in any form doesn't make much of a theory."

"Naive literalism" is something that we may associate with ideological or personal trust in all of the claims an author makes on the face. I do encourage interpreting written text literally most of the time (when there is no good reason to interpret it metaphorically, etc.), but I don't necessarily encourage believing it literally.

If you cannot integrate indications from the context of the literature you only have the literature. If you ignore the genre then you have fewer criteria with which to analyze the text. You fall back on analyzing a text without sufficient knowledge and expect that you can still say something meaningful about it... and that is plain hogwash.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Anyone can find bizarre interpretations for anything, but some interpretations are better than others.

Yours is pretty bizarre. It's based on ignorance and chutzpah.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I generally think that the best explanation for any given textual evidence, because of its plausibility and explanatory power, involves interpreting the meaning based on what is most apparently on the face of it.

You cannot talk about the best explanation. You exclude yourself from doing so when you ignore context and genre.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Literalism, in that sense, is not naive. It is straighforwardly obvious and rational.

Oh, why don't you just do a course in linguistics? Naive literalism involves commenting on the significance of a text or statement without having the tools to do so. This means what is obvious and straightforward is related to the experiences of the analyst without any necessary relationship to the source being analyzed at all.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"You're moving into new material. The central content of the OP was based on Mark 13. Why not try to deal with that first?"

Jesus speaks of the "kingdom of God" all throughout the gospel of Mark, there are two passages in Mark where Jesus directly implies that the "kingdom of God" is new, Jesus closely associate the "kingdom of God" with the apocalypse, and Mark 13 is all about the apocalypse.

Umm, in the following...

[T2]Ps 103:19 The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.[/T2]
what is the content of the possessive pronoun "his" in the bolded phrase?

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"If you want to call centuries of tradition rough similarities rather than see that much of Mk 13 fits into a well recognized genre, then you aren't dealing with the context of the literature."

Rough similarities are not all that is needed to conclude literary borrowing, nor is a shared genre, whatever that genre may be. Does your genre of fictional literature ever involve a character anything much like a doomsday cult leader? If so, that would really help.

Your category of "doomsday prophet" is a retrojection, as all of your examples show. It is clearly aimed at arbitrarily manipulating text for a priori reasons. You know what your conclusion is. It's too bad that you wish to ignore contemporary literature which is obviously related by genre.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

"Still shooting at the wrong thing. You haven't made it out of text. You are just assuming that you can get out. The problem that you have before you is an epistemological one. You don't seem to be able to show how you can turn text into history... There is nothing new in the material that you have offered as a means of showing that someone specific, who you claim must be Jesus, was responsible. You are trapped in text, pretending that you can get reality out of it... You can keep making crackpot theories until the cows come home that assume your conclusions, for you do assume that you can get history out of the literature. That is a conclusion that you need to demonstrate, but you don't seem to have the tools to help you, so you assume it."

To find an example of how I turn text into history, see the summary of my argument that I wrote for you before.

The retrojection of modern thought into the past and ignoring ancient thought.

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Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

We find history in the text by finding the best explanations for the evidence of the text (not by placing blind trust in the claims of the text). I prefer Argument to the Best Explanation. I hope you are not implying that all text is useless for history. If you think we can get history from text, then please let me know of your methodology. If you do not think we can get history from text, then you can have the last word so I don't waste any more of my time. Thanks.[/list]

E-.

ApostateAbe · 04-12-2011, 09:04 PM

Before, I was talking with spin about "naive literalism," and I recently discovered an online editorial of exactly that same title (keeping up with news about Bart Ehrman).

Naive literalism

Professor Bart Ehrman of UNC-Chapel Hill landed in agnosticism because of where he started - in literalism ("Evangelicals counter UNC-CH Bible scholar," March 28 news article). When his studies in historical criticism disabused him of notions of an inerrant, dropped-from-the-sky Bible, he lost his bearings (and his faith).

Theodicy, his whipping boy, is an ancient stumbling block for unmoored scholars like Ehrman who become impaled on the horns of its dilemma: the seeming contradiction between a God, an Ultimate Reality, who is both powerful and good in a world of suffering and evil, a creation in which unmerited suffering is inflicted by both accident and evil on the innocent.

Ehrman needs to listen more than he has yet done to those who have suffered. (He admits he has suffered little himself.) Many Christian witnesses like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose scholarly credentials and life experience qualify his voice on matters of theology, faith and suffering, attest to a powerful and loving God who brings out of infinite purpose good that overcomes evil. Martin Luther King Jr. is another voice affirming the same. Are we listening?

To be sure, Bonhoeffer was never a literalist whose naïveté could not withstand what Ehrman was flummoxed to discover. There is the problem.

Elizabeth Barnes, Ph.D.

Duke Divinity School, 1984, Cary

aa5874 · 04-12-2011, 09:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I think Joseph Smith is a very appropriate example, because Joseph Smith was a reputed-human doomsday cult leader who was an actual-human doomsday cult leader, and the Angel Moroni was a reputed angel and nothing else relevant to the argument...

Well, once you attempt to use Joseph Smith as an example for Jesus of the Synoptics then you will be THOROUGHLY DEBUNKED.

1. Joseph SMITH BELIEVED in JESUS CHRIST.

2. Joseph SMITH wrote about JESUS CHRIST in the Mormon Bible.

3. Joseph SMITH is NOT PRESENTED in the MORMON BIBLE as a GOD.

4. JOSEPH SMITH was killed in a shoot-out and is NOT worshiped as a RESURRECTED GOD.

5. The biography of Joseph SMITH is NOT at all like Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost.

6. The death or killing of Joseph SMITH did NOT cause his followers to DEIFY him or to LIE about his BIRTH and claim he did NOT have human parents.

JOSEPH SMITH turns out be the perfect example to show that Jesus was MYTH.

Joseph SMITH was a cult leader who was KILLED by his ENEMIES yet we have NO CANONIZED writings of the MORMON Church where Joseph Smith can FORGIVE the Sins of Mankind and was RAISED on the third day.

spin · 04-12-2011, 09:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

...
Adi Da
...

Hmm, I bet there are a lot of Adi Das about. It's probably enough to guarantee stink foot into the next century.

ApostateAbe · 04-12-2011, 09:09 PM

spin, I may continue to debate with you or I may not, but it depends on you telling me what your answer to this question is:

Do you think we should be getting history from text?

Thank you.

aa5874 · 04-12-2011, 09:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hjalti

...I'm no expert in mormonism, but I think we can see similar things there. First it was based on revelations, but now it's all about what the founders taught, and although the leaders officially have the ability to get revelations from god, they don't actually do it. Just think of how wary the catholic church is of miracles and revelations, they don't want some kids with connections with Mary saying stuff like: "Mary told us she was the third person of the trinity!"

The Mormon Bible is NOT like the NT Canon. The Mormon Bible is NOT the history of Joseph Smith and his followers.

The Mormon Bible contains information about Jesus Christ.

ApostateAbe · 04-12-2011, 09:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hjalti

N/A

Thanks, hjalti. I said, "There is no need to complicate your lies like that," and you said,

"Well, this seems to be wrong in a sense. As a religion becomes somewhat established, you want to put a clamp on 'revelation' to keep things stable. So you prefer an earthly, distant, authority. If the authority is based on current revelation, some guys walking in the church can turn things upside down. But if you have a historical founder, who passed the teachings down to the bishops, you are 'safe'."

You and I have two different ideas about what is plausible and what isn't. But, my explanation fits the evidence, and your explanation seems to continue to contradict the evidence. If you don't have an example of a merely-mythical doomsday cult leader, well, then maybe it really doesn't help as much as you think to have an earthly, distant authority. Do you think maybe no myth of an earthly distant doomsday cult leader existed at the time of the beginning of Christianity, so they had to do something highly unusual and invent that myth? I figure these are tough questions, but I think mythicists or HJ-skeptics need to either fit their proposed model into the patterns of history or else make a good case for why the beginning of Christianity needs to be so highly unusual. I don't think I'll be able to convince anyone in this thread of the point that Jesus really existed, but I hope I am at least making a few people correctly understand how MJ can be perceived by intelligent people to be on the losing side.

Edit: Sorry, I may have had the wrong idea of what you believe. I got a little mixed up with who was who.

04-12-2011, 09:04 PM	#65
ApostateAbe Contributor Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: MT Posts: 10,656	Before, I was talking with spin about "naive literalism," and I recently discovered an online editorial of exactly that same title (keeping up with news about Bart Ehrman). Naive literalism Professor Bart Ehrman of UNC-Chapel Hill landed in agnosticism because of where he started - in literalism ("Evangelicals counter UNC-CH Bible scholar," March 28 news article). When his studies in historical criticism disabused him of notions of an inerrant, dropped-from-the-sky Bible, he lost his bearings (and his faith). Theodicy, his whipping boy, is an ancient stumbling block for unmoored scholars like Ehrman who become impaled on the horns of its dilemma: the seeming contradiction between a God, an Ultimate Reality, who is both powerful and good in a world of suffering and evil, a creation in which unmerited suffering is inflicted by both accident and evil on the innocent. Ehrman needs to listen more than he has yet done to those who have suffered. (He admits he has suffered little himself.) Many Christian witnesses like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose scholarly credentials and life experience qualify his voice on matters of theology, faith and suffering, attest to a powerful and loving God who brings out of infinite purpose good that overcomes evil. Martin Luther King Jr. is another voice affirming the same. Are we listening? To be sure, Bonhoeffer was never a literalist whose naïveté could not withstand what Ehrman was flummoxed to discover. There is the problem. Elizabeth Barnes, Ph.D. Duke Divinity School, 1984, Cary

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04-12-2011, 09:09 PM	#68
ApostateAbe Contributor Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: MT Posts: 10,656	spin, I may continue to debate with you or I may not, but it depends on you telling me what your answer to this question is: Do you think we should be getting history from text? Thank you.

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