Posted by:
janeeliot
(
)
Date: March 28, 2015 10:50PM
Dark Lord Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It's interesting how much hatred these guys elicit
> from religious fanatics. Then again, the religious
> have always shunned enlightenment and persecuted
> its harbingers.
>
> I do find Erhman to be disingenuous, with his
> unfounded insistence that Jesus must have existed.
> He knows full well there is no good evidence for
> this, but if he admitted it he would be
> invalidating all of his earlier books.
(sings)
Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about science books
Don't know much about the French I took
Erhman: Clipped from Wiki -- please feel free to trace out the footnotes. Wiki is surprisingly well-sourced:
Virtually all scholars who write on the subject accept that Jesus existed,[7][8][9][10] although scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the accounts of his life, and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[11][12][13][14]
Most contemporary scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and most biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his nonexistence as effectively refuted.[7][9][10][27][28][29] We have no indication that writers in antiquity who opposed Christianity questioned the existence of Jesus.[30][31] There is, however, widespread disagreement among scholars on the details of the life of Jesus mentioned in the gospel narratives, and on the meaning of his teachings.[14] Scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the biblical accounts of Jesus,[14] and historians tend to look upon supernatural or miraculous claims about Jesus as questions of faith, rather than historical fact.[32]
But of course YOU know more than an entire field of scholars. You and Daniel Peterson -- a match! Why should the Smithsonian be right about BoM claims -- when we have the entirely brilliant Brother Peterson to rely on. And why should the whole field of ancient studies be right -- when we have the brilliant -- you.
Moving right along -- Dawkins -- from pedophilia to abortion is just a cornucopia of -- er -- "brilliance."
From that bastion of religious defense, the Telegraph --
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/11381529/Richard-Dawkins-wants-to-fight-Islamism-with-erotica.-Celebrity-atheism-has-lost-it.html"Richard Dawkins’ insanity has now become an English institution – like warm beer and rain. On Saturday morning, a tweet from his account asked why we don’t send lots of "erotic videos" to theocracies, adding that it should be “loving, gentle, woman-respecting” (I guess this involves the pizza delivery boy calling the next day). If we’re going down this road, I also hear that Islamists aren’t very keen on bacon, so perhaps we should bombard the Iranian countryside with pig carcasses? Also, miniature bottles of gin. And photos of hot guys making out – in a “men-respecting” and “gentle” sort of way.
"After a few minutes of mockery, the tweet was deleted. Perhaps even he realised how utterly mad it was. Which suggests a degree of self-awareness that I didn’t think possible in Britain’s nuttiest professor."
Or we can try Hitch --
"But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.
"Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”
"I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/You don't get out much, do you?
And you guys -- at least some of you guys -- are REALLY looking around for someone to replace the GAs, aren't you? Me -- not so much.
Just be careful you don' replace them TOO perfectly -- with equally bad examples.