(May 10, 2017 at 7:41 pm)Shai Hulud Wrote:(May 10, 2017 at 7:20 pm)Lutrinae Wrote: You're Catholic and you didn't like a book about Jesus?
Not when it's a one sided pile of filth. On another board I posted notes per chapter that totaled over 15,000 words probably. Strobel... *tries to think of a good descriptor* This book contains many leaps of logic, much mental gymnastics, and several extremely dubious claims. He has a habit that's almost like a verbal tic, were he speaking instead of writing, where after every softball he lobs at his experts, he describes them like a champion prize fighter or something else, about to beat down the evil skeptical argument.
He also makes a rather glaring lie of omission in the book. He presents this quite heavily as the interviews that lead to his conversion, during his investigation in 1980 and 1981, and the last interview takes place in the 1990s, with a guy talking about his wife dying of cancer in 1995. He never mentions, until the post-book interview segment in my version, that he wasn't an atheist at that time, he'd accepted Christ more than a decade before the conversation. Even then he fails to mention that he was a "teaching pastor" at Willow Creek, a megachurch in Chicago, at the time of that interview.
He's also very bad about not presenting both sides of the argument. He bashes The Jesus Seminar repeatedly, but we just have to take his word and that of his "experts" on why it's not good. He bashes Karen Armstrong's History of God in a similar manner, but he never presents the other side of the coin, only the anti-position. He tries to downplay the Q Document Hypothesis (of the synoptic Gospels sharing a document they all draw from but is now lost) as something believed only by the fringe, instead of the majority of Biblical scholars. In the first third of the book he tries to establish why we should believe the Bible is historically accurate, and during Parts Two and Three, he never questions it again...and those two sections more or less strictly use the Bible as evidence.
Just cannot trust those Jesus believers.
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
~ Erin Hunter