Do mimsy atheists gyre and gimble in the wabe?

[Kyuuketsuki]

What gets me is the way these theists dismiss the contradictions so evidently there in their bible.

I mean just to take one, Jesus's supposed genealogy ... they are completely and utterly different, there's no getting away from it, they are WRONG! They do contradict each other and it is seriously irritating to have them written off by the kind of pathetic re-interpretative arguments the whack-jobs always give us.

And then they wonder why some of us get so fucked off with them? Oh I don't know ... maybe it's coz we think they're a bunch of disingenuous fraudsters?

Kyu

[LEDO]

Have you read any of Bart Erham? He is a biblical scholar and atheist, so he has a rather unique take on everything. What do you make of his assertions of contradictions?

I find his writing boring and I disagee with much of it.

[Ryft]

Have you read any of Bart Erham? He is a biblical scholar and atheist, so he has a rather unique take on everything. What do you make of his assertions of contradictions?

Certainly heard of him. I have paged through Misquoting Jesus at the bookstore a couple of times, contemplating whether to buy it this time or not. I purchase books the way I rent movies, selecting three or four I want and then narrowing it down to purchase one. (My income limits me to about six books per year.) The reason he has not made it beyond my shortlist yet is because scholars reviewing Erham's work report him using questionable methodologies (e.g., distracting the reader with the quantitative strength of the evidence that effectively hides the qualitative weakness thereof) and selective citations (e.g., calling upon the work of Johann Bengel for the former, but quietly passing over his conclusions about the latter), etc. Although I am aware of Erham's argument and the evidence he lays out, I still want to hear him in his own words and will eventually buy the book despite its weakness. Lack of intellectual honesty will not necessarily prevent me from buying a book; I did purchase The God Delusion, after all, which suffers from innumerable weaknesses.

What gets me is the way these theists dismiss the contradictions so evidently there in their bible.

Theists who simply dismiss these allegations are unimportant on the issue, but what do you make of those scholars who have taken the time to refute the allegations (which is very different from dismissing them)? There is a wealth of publications on these refutations which spans centuries (from at least the mid-17th century, so far as I know; e.g., Joannes Thaddaeus, c. 1662). Would I be correct in assuming that you have interacted with at least a couple of reputable publications and are, therefore, dispensing an intellectually honest conclusion that is responsibly informed? For instance, can you name a publication, cite an example of one of its refutations and prove how it fails?

Or is this just gratuitous invective boldly engaging in the Prejudicial Language fallacy?

[Tiberius]

I did purchase The God Delusion, after all, which suffers from innumerable weaknesses.

Such as? Not that I overly disagree with you on the point, I just wanted to know what weaknesses you saw from a theist's angle.

I can't really comment on Bart Erham that much. I've read the first few chapters of Misquoting Jesus and he seemed to present a few good contradictions that even other biblical scholars agree on (because of errors copying the text, etc). The main problem he has is that since the earliest copy of the Bible is 1,600 years old, there are a lot of errors to be expected from copying copies. As he puts it, "we don't have the copies of the originals; we don't even have the copies of the copies of the copies..."

[LEDO]

The problem I have with contradiction writers is they are clueless as to why the contradictions exist. This is especially true in the OT where contradictions typically appear in sequence. Where the writers really that stupid? There are cosmic myth reasons why those contradictions exist. These have never been explored by any scholar. Unless you know the " cosmic code" and historyof the text, these contradictions make the authors look stupid.

The stucture of the OT was set by Wellhausen and scholars have not altered much from it, except for unified text theory. But how about another theory which combines the two and eliminates the texual problems associated with each theory? The OT was written as a living document. It was not sewn together or written at one time in one era. There is ample evidence for this within the Bible itself.

Tigay's work on Gilgamesh shows that it was a living document. The contradictions within the text were added later. (We know this because we have both older and newer texts for comparison.) Tigay outlines writing techniques such as resumptive repetition used soley to add new material to Gilgamesh. Those same identical techniques desribed by Tigay for Gilgamesh are present in the OT Bible.

How could it be two texts written in the same era by similar or the same culture could use the same writing techniques, but one be a living document and the other a unified text, or a piece job? Here Gilgamesh supplies us with a template on Biblical construction. It is also possible to de-contruct the text by reversing the process (with a little logic and admitted prejudice) to obtain the original OT text. If i can do it, Bible scholars can do it too. The problem is they have certain ivory tower beliefs that prevent them from thinking outside the box, even when it is obvious.

[LEDO]

I did purchase The God Delusion, after all, which suffers from innumerable weaknesses.

Such as? Not that I overly disagree with you on the point, I just wanted to know what weaknesses you saw from a theist's angle.

I can't really comment on Bart Erham that much. I've read the first few chapters of Misquoting Jesus and he seemed to present a few good contradictions that even other biblical scholars agree on (because of errors copying the text, etc). The main problem he has is that since the earliest copy of the Bible is 1,600 years old, there are a lot of errors to be expected from copying copies. As he puts it, "we don't have the copies of the originals; we don't even have the copies of the copies of the copies..."

I skimmed through that copy in Book-a-Million today. It looked like my book "Bible Bloopers: Evidence That Demands a Verdict Too!" that I published a dozen years ago. Not that Bart read and copied my book. He most likely used the same sources. What I didn't like is that Bart's writing seems to pretend he has made these discoveries on his own, when really is simply copying scholars that have come before him. I didn't see anything unique that he had to offer.

The idea that contradictions exist isn't as fascinating as why they were created. Bart doesn't seem to speculate on that point, but rather just catalogs the errors, which to me is a bit mindless for a Bible scholar to do.

[Ryft]

Such as? Not that I overly disagree with you on the point, I just wanted to know what weaknesses you saw from a theist's angle.

They are the same weaknesses that any self-respecting intellectual would find in this embarrassing piece of propaganda, I should think. As Terry Eagleton pointed out in his critical review of The God Delusion, Dawkins sets up a number of Straw Man caricatures and then courageously battles them to the death. He defines faith as "blind trust" in the absence of evidence, a "process of non-thinking" that is "evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument." It is a definition of faith utterly foreign to Christian philosophy, an irresponsible Straw Man invention that serves incompetent polemic purposes. He describes God as "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." This can only be biographical material about Dawkins, describing his take on the Judeo-Christian God, because it is not in any sense representative of what Christianity actually affirms; ergo, another vituperative and intellectually bankrupt Straw Man.

Ironically, after such scathing moral denouncements, he later in the book tried to assert that "good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own," his apologetic reference to Huxley's astonishing racism. And Dawkins seems oblivious to this incongruency. But he contradicts himself elsewhere in this prejudicial twaddle; e.g., he tries to argue for a who-designed-the-designer argument in various places, "that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable." Ignoring the fact that improbability does not preclude actuality—we're here, after all (Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable)—he blissfully contradicts this notion when writing previously, "That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing'," this counter-intuitive feature contributing to what makes it so "revolutionary." In other words, the causal force behind a complex thing would have to be even more complex than it—unless it's evolution.

But then Straw Man and Special Pleading are not the only fallacies he commits in this anti-religious drivel. He also engages in the fallacy of Unrepresentative Sample, presenting the fringe as if it were the center, the fanatics as if they are mainstream, which is highly irresponsible and contrary to the principles of scientific integrity. His characterization of the 'science vs. religion' tension is frankly a comparison of apples to oranges, contrasting the worst elements in religion against the best elements in science. "Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science?" Marilynne Robinson asks in her review for Harper's Magazine. "Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions [related to] cloning in South Korea? If by 'science' it is meant authentic science, then 'religion' must mean authentic religion." Eagleton, in his review for London Review of Books, thought it rather incredible "that in a book of almost four hundred pages he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false."

Dawkins mischaracterizes Luther's angst about reason in the life of faith, which seems to stem from a presumption that both Luther and himself are using 'reason' in the same sense, when in fact Luther was describing something quite different (that reason would dictate that salvation should be something earned). He mischaracterizes Aquinas' "Five Ways" as a priori proofs for God's existence, which they were not (they were a posteriori demonstrations of the internal coherence of theism). When it comes to Stephen Jay Gould's position that science has nothing to say about the question of God's existence, Dawkins dismisses it saying, "I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in Rocks of Ages," as if personal incredulity is a substitute for a substantive response. (I choked at him calling Gould's tone "bullying." Dawkins loves his irony.) He snipes at president of the Royal Society, astrophysicist Martin Rees, for making the same argument, that there are questions which "lie beyond science" (Our Cosmic Habitat, 2001), and Peter Medawar feels warranted in expanding "that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer" (The Limits of Science, 1985). Eagleton appropriately wishes that Dawkins could have made his points "without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate."

If I don't stop soon, I'll end up writing an entire book. But before I close this off, I want to underscore what is perhaps the greatest irony of all. His book is titled The God Delusion, and he opens the discussion with his feeling that 'delusion' is most fittingly understood in this context as a "persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence." Yet in the entire 400-page tome, he does not present a single solitary piece of evidence that contradicts God-belief! There is a lot of material that allows for skepticism and disbelief, but absolutely nothing that proves God-belief as false with strong contradictory evidence. Not a thing.

[LEDO]

Such as? Not that I overly disagree with you on the point, I just wanted to know what weaknesses you saw from a theist's angle.

They are the same weaknesses that any self-respecting intellectual would find in this embarrassing piece of propaganda, I should think. As Terry Eagleton pointed out in his critical review of The God Delusion, Dawkins sets up a number of Straw Man caricatures and then courageously battles them to the death. He defines faith as "blind trust" in the absence of evidence, a "process of non-thinking" that is "evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument." It is a definition of faith utterly foreign to Christian philosophy, an irresponsible Straw Man invention that serves incompetent polemic purposes. He describes God as "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." This can only be biographical material about Dawkins, describing his take on the Judeo-Christian God, because it is not in any sense representative of what Christianity actually affirms; ergo, another vituperative and intellectually bankrupt Straw Man.

Ironically, after such scathing moral denouncements, he later in the book tried to assert that "good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own," his apologetic reference to Huxley's astonishing racism. And Dawkins seems oblivious to this incongruency. But he contradicts himself elsewhere in this prejudicial twaddle; e.g., he tries to argue for a who-designed-the-designer argument in various places, "that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable." Ignoring the fact that improbability does not preclude actuality—we're here, after all (Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable)—he blissfully contradicts this notion when writing previously, "That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing'," this counter-intuitive feature contributing to what makes it so "revolutionary." In other words, the causal force behind a complex thing would have to be even more complex than it—unless it's evolution.

But then Straw Man and Special Pleading are not the only fallacies he commits in this anti-religious drivel. He also engages in the fallacy of Unrepresentative Sample, presenting the fringe as if it were the center, the fanatics as if they are mainstream, which is highly irresponsible and contrary to the principles of scientific integrity. His characterization of the 'science vs. religion' tension is frankly a comparison of apples to oranges, contrasting the worst elements in religion against the best elements in science. "Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science?" Marilynne Robinson asks in her review for Harper's Magazine. "Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions [related to] cloning in South Korea? If by 'science' it is meant authentic science, then 'religion' must mean authentic religion." Eagleton, in his review for London Review of Books, thought it rather incredible "that in a book of almost four hundred pages he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false."

Dawkins mischaracterizes Luther's angst about reason in the life of faith, which seems to stem from a presumption that both Luther and himself are using 'reason' in the same sense, when in fact Luther was describing something quite different (that reason would dictate that salvation should be something earned). He mischaracterizes Aquinas' "Five Ways" as a priori proofs for God's existence, which they were not (they were a posteriori demonstrations of the internal coherence of theism). When it comes to Stephen Jay Gould's position that science has nothing to say about the question of God's existence, Dawkins dismisses it saying, "I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in Rocks of Ages," as if personal incredulity is a substitute for a substantive response. (I choked at him calling Gould's tone "bullying." Dawkins loves his irony.) He snipes at president of the Royal Society, astrophysicist Martin Rees, for making the same argument, that there are questions which "lie beyond science" (Our Cosmic Habitat, 2001), and Peter Medawar feels warranted in expanding "that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer" (The Limits of Science, 1985). Eagleton appropriately wishes that Dawkins could have made his points "without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate."

If I don't stop soon, I'll end up writing an entire book. But before I close this off, I want to underscore what is perhaps the greatest irony of all. His book is titled The God Delusion, and he opens the discussion with his feeling that 'delusion' is most fittingly understood in this context as a "persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence." Yet in the entire 400-page tome, he does not present a single solitary piece of evidence that contradicts God-belief! There is a lot of material that allows for skepticism and disbelief, but absolutely nothing that proves God-belief as false with strong contradictory evidence. Not a thing.

So did you actually read the book, or just critiques of the book? I haven't read any of Dawkins, but the idea of making up an invisible Jewish entity that created the universe speaking magical words doesn't seem scientific to me. The question is why would god create a universe in the first place?

[Dotard]

Such as? Not that I overly disagree with you on the point, I just wanted to know what weaknesses you saw from a theist's angle.

He defines faith as "blind trust" in the absence of evidence, a "process of non-thinking" that is "evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument." It is a definition of faith utterly foreign to Christian philosophy, an irresponsible Straw Man invention that serves incompetent polemic purposes. He describes God as "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." This can only be biographical material about Dawkins, describing his take on the Judeo-Christian God, because it is not in any sense representative of what Christianity actually affirms; ergo, another vituperative and intellectually bankrupt Straw Man.

Stopped reading right there. Mr. Dawkins astutely describes faith and the character of God in the bible in a factual, based on the bible, manner. It does not agree with the followers of such take on the creature therefore it is a Strawman?

No, just no.

I enjoy kicking cats. I have a follower who also enjoys kicking cats. He views me as a good person ridding the world of stinky felines.
You come along and call me a cruel cat-hating cat murderer. My follower affirms I am a good person doing Gods work. Is my follower now justified in calling your description of me a "Strawman" merely because he does not agree with you? Does it make my cat hating murderous actions untrue because my followers refuse to acknowledge the cruelity of cat smashing claiming it's all part of some grand plan for the greater glory of me?

I take a crap on the floor, you argue it's nasty and needs to be cleaned up. I can claim your arguement is a strawman because I disagree with your assessment. I'm calling it a work of art in need of preservation.

Bottom line is it is still a piece of shit no matter what color you paint it and try to label my assessment of it as a strawman.

Which it isn't. One who kills babies can rightfully be labeled as infanticidal no matter how you personally feel about it. IT DOES NOT MAKE IT A STRAWMAN BECAUSE YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THE DESCRIPTOR.

(Jeez... are you a follower of SntJohnny.com or something?)

[Purple Rabbit]

Dawkins gave rather a good description of the god that was presented to me in childhood. An image that was good enough to lure me into holy communion at the age of seven (since then I've been highly allergic to these flavourless holy cookies). Nowadays it seems that an advanced course in theology is needed to comprehend the deeper meaning of the christian god, to find the really, really, real christian god.

With more than 3000 denominations it certainly is possible these days to snack your own christian religion in a cafetaria model that draws from all these denominations and every personal flavour you like to add. If you attack Dawkins on his imagery than you also are obliged to attack 99% of mentioned denominations. The more liberal image of the christian god is only trailing liberal cultural developments on social and moral issues. The trouble is, the christian god lacks definition, but when someone like Dawkins adresses key elements that are present in most, scorn is the warm embrace of christianty.

Dawkins is no more interpreting god than any of the thousands of christian denominations.