Ben C Smith

Too late, sorry. Getting a student of the New Testament off the New Testament is like getting a junkie off of crack.

Ben.

Vorkosigan

Damn! I didn't know you had such a subtly ironic sense of humor, Roger! "Why not think for yourself?" <wipes eyes> That was great!

...probably to counteract the ex post facto cultural imperialism of the winning version of Christianity, which does not recognize that there were other Christianities than those propounded by Irenaeus, Tertullian and Eusebius. That's in fact why Price produced this book.

I too wish that there would be more critical scholarship among people who study the ancient texts, but as long as they subscribe to an authoritarian religious belief which, after two millennia, is still struggling to gain control of its past and prevent exploration of it, I don't think that is really going to be possible.

Just last month I visited Lukang, where I saw a folk crafts museum that showed some textiles and clothing from the '20s and '30s in Taiwan. The exhibit discussed Republican Chinese trends in clothing, and new laws for ceremonial clothing. Unfortunately during this period Taiwan was not part of the Republic of China but was a Japanese colony, a fact that the former ruling party, the KMT, longs to blot out. Thus no visitor there will ever learn that Japan ruled Taiwan in the 1920s and 30s, and everyone wore kimonos.

You sound just like the KMT, Roger.

Vorkosigan

Dean Anderson

He does!

His Cthuhu Mythos fiction is among the best out there.

I particularly liked his tongue-firmly-in-cheek fictional essay where he used Higher Criticism methods to investigate the "quotes" from the Necronomicon that appear in various Mythos stories and to "reconstruct" the book and its authors (and their beliefs) from them.

It was that essay (and his mentioning that his day job was doing similar criticism on the Bible) that got me interested in the subject of Biblical Criticism and led me to find the Secular Web and IIDB.