Is Accepting Christian Evidence Special Pleading?

[TheBeardedDude]

Other people who wrote about Jesus...long after Jesus supposedly lived. There are no contemporary accounts. So while there are many people who believed the same things as Paul and/or believed Paul, that doesn't corroborate the claims coming from Paul's head. So no, there is no more reason to believe Saul of Tarsus than Joseph Smith, and yet some do choose to believe one over the other (special pleading).

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And there is the special pleading. So while the delusions of one man are unacceptable, they are acceptable for another. This is an excellent example of Christian special pleading.

Perhaps a refresher...

Special Pleading: Applying standards, principles, and/or rules to other people or circumstances, while making oneself or certain circumstances exempt from the same critical criteria, without providing adequate justification. Special pleading is often a result of strong emotional beliefs that interfere with reason.

The only circumstances that were similar in this situation were that something was written. Everything else was different. So, we have one similarity and hundreds of dissimilarities. Therefore the circumstance were not even close to being similar and therefore no special pleading can occur.

They are literally the same thing. Joseph Smith makes claims of visions and conversations with God and claims to have been divinely-inspired to write about Jesus. Saul of Tarsus does literally the exact same thing. One is accepted, the other not. Both have the same level, type, and quantity of evidence to back-up their claims (none at all).

So yeah, it is literally a textbook example of special pleading. Thank you for demonstrating it well 

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Other people who wrote about Jesus...long after Jesus supposedly lived. There are no contemporary accounts. So while there are many people who believed the same things as Paul and/or believed Paul, that doesn't corroborate the claims coming from Paul's head. So no, there is no more reason to believe Saul of Tarsus than Joseph Smith, and yet some do choose to believe one over the other (special pleading).

That sounds like a claim, in need of support.

What "claim" are you referring to? The paucity of contemporary accounts of Jesus? I've never encountered any. The closest anyone seems to be able to get is a reference by Josephus (who doesn't provide any corroborative details of the gospel accounts), who never met Jesus and never witnessed anything Jesus did (so not a contemporary source). Saul of Tarsus lived at least a generation after Jesus died, so he's not a contemporary. And while the gospels exist, the earliest any of them has been dated to (as far as I am aware) is ~70CE, so none of the gospels are contemporary accounts in any verifiable way (and we don't even know who wrote much of them).