Damn, MaryAnnKilledGinger with a hard hitting first post.
I'm not sure what is more noteworthy -- that there is a literate Miami Heat fan or this guy may know a way to get rid of Bonner . . .
Welcome
The "out-of-date" skepticism is that whose premises have fallen out of favor because they are unreasonable, or that has been debunked because of new evidence.
I readily admit that having Christmas on December 25th has everything to do with fitting in with the Sol Invictus festival, and nothing to do with when Jesus was actually born.
thats why i'm praeterist with a future bodily last day ressurection believer.
C'mon timvp, that's a big burden to drop on a new guest, wouldn't you say?
Don't scare him away so fast!
Welcome, I enjoyed reading your post. Please make yourself at home. Also, put on your kneecaps, as Im sure somebody is going to come around to challenge your views on abortion, a topic that has been previously discussed in other threads, but that always gets revisited
Not that it makes much difference on a message bored, but "her."
Gee -- I'd hate to hijack...Im sure somebody is going to come around to challenge your views on abortion, a topic that has been previously discussed in other threads, but that always gets revisited
Hi and thanks to all who said (and might yet say) welcome ;-)
That about sums it all up for me.
Ah-ha! My apologies-- and welcome again, ma'am!
In all fairness, I was mostly unschooled and didn't get to avail myself of the Miami public school system until I was already literate. But that's pretty much par for the course since I was a senior in high school before we got a basketball team.
+1 googol
Some of my favorite parts. Epic first post.
I'll jump back in on abortion. While my views certainly are informed by religion, I tie them to what I see a basic right to life that human beings need to respect in one another. The unborn child is an innocent human life, and the preference should be to protect that life. If you say, "then why do you oppose XYZ effort to keep it from getting to that point?" I say, try XYZ. I draw a distinction between having a basic philosophy to protect life, and trying to force people to follow some particular religious mores about sexuality. Sex education, birth control, emergency contraception, try it all. Yeah, in a perfect world, we wouldn't need the government to teach those things, but let's deal first with the world we have and assign priorities.
I understand that to be consistent in a pro-life position, that also means no capital punishment and no more pointless wars where the lives of non-Americans are devalued. For the first, it's a fair trade, all the more since C.P. serves only the vengeful instinct of the public, actually being more expensive than life imprisonment and providing no additional deterrent. For the latter, well it shouldn't even need to be debated.
You think I'm selfish and arrogant. I don't understand how the needless killing of human beings is just taken for granted. I understand that you can't just make the problem go away by outlawing the procedure and thinking everyone will just change their behavior. I'm more than willing to support programs both public and private to assist women so they don't get into the situation where abortion has to become an option. But ultimately, the direction I want to go is where almost no woman in her right mind would think aborting her child is a good idea.
Maybe someone can convince me that Obama is actually on my side on this after all, so I can furtively vote for him (if I admitted it openly, there would be problems). So far, I am not convinced. So far, I haven't seen substantial agreement. I see it not as a religious litmus test, but rather as a fundamental disagreement in the philosophy of government's role of protecting the lives of its people.
This thread has made my head explode. First I hear that Veronica thinks Obama may be the AntiChrist. Then the thread pops up on a blog of one of - IMO - the smartest conservative minds on the net. THEN we get all kinds of crazy posters going on in here including a bad ass troll. THEN we get some awesome posters like MaryAnnKilledGinger who may very well be the female equivlant of Extra Stout. Then this thread shows up on twoplustwo and FINALLY someone gets what my le is about.
Seriously. Head. Exploding.
It is common to argue over the historicity of Jesus by calling upon analogies with other historical questions. However, this is fraught with peril. Most analogies break down due to the unusual nature of early Christian history. First, there is the general incongruity between ancient and modern societies, which I discuss in "Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story" and "Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels." But more important than that is the peculiarity of Christian history itself. From very early on Christianity was wracked with bitter ideological disputes and competing sects with conflicting claims. Even the letters of Paul are full of references to his opponents and the desperate struggles he had with them to maintain control of his own congregations. Yet the sect that "won" this internecine propaganda war achieved victory by political rather than epistemic means.
Every Patristic historian remarks on how regularly the surviving ("orthodox") literature of the second and third centuries slanders opponents with exaggerated or even false charges, how they employed shunning and other acts of social intimidation rather than open debate, and how routinely complaints are heard of forged texts and other tools of deception in the ranks. Numerous extant orthodox works have been proven to be forgeries, and even many canonical texts are universally agreed to be dubious. There is also an endless record of persistent ideological doctoring of the canonical texts from the earliest dates (see Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, 1993, and the works cited there; also, my essay "The Formation of the New Testament Canon"). Though the New Testament in its entirety is a rather small book by ancient standards, it contains over a thousand passages that have so many early variants we cannot confidently identify the original reading (there are 19 such passages in 1 Timothy alone, a letter only 134 verses long, meaning 14% of the letter is to some extent uncertain; see my "Two Examples of Faulty Bible Scholarship"). Many of these conflicting readings cannot be explained as mere scribal errors, but are ideological in nature.
To make matters worse, when the Church finally acquired absolute political power under the Constantines, opponents were compelled by force to fall in line. The sect that gained the emperor's ear did not win this trophy through convincing him by sound evidence and argument in an open and equal debate with opponents, but by mere luck: they just happened to be the ones in his entourage. As the threat of death, prison, or dispossession was used to eliminate opponents, "disapproved" texts were collected and burned, or simply never copied and thus left to disintegrate, never to be read again. And thus, though we know there were radically variant sects even in Paul's day, we have not a single text from them. Instead, the vast bulk of surviving material is solely what was approved by the victorious "orthodoxy," who did not win because of their greater adherence to the truth, but their more effective and fortunate politics.
Devout Christians have the most reason to be alarmed at this: a church that engages in murder, slander, deceit, compulsion, and intimidation could not plausibly be inspired by the Holy Spirit. Like Jesus himself, true Christians did not write down their beliefs to argue or prove them, but simply had faith, accepting their deaths without a fight. Thus, if there is any true Holy Spirit, it was more likely inspiring the first believers, none of whose literature survives, and those souls who turned the other cheek to the "orthodoxy's" bullying and machinations rather than fight back. And so true Christianity could well have died a silent death. But even if you turn aside from that awful possibility, you are faced with the original problem: Christian literature, and history, holds almost no analogy with any other literature or history we could care to name. From Homer to Tacitus, there is by comparison virtually no such background or context of ideological conflict affecting the texts--affecting not only the doctoring or editing of their content, but their very selection and preservation. Christianity's own history, and above all the nature of Jesus, was the very target of contention here. I cannot think of any comparable problem in ancient history that is as seriously challenged by such biasing of the source material.
Yet the "victorious" sect happened to be historicist. Since that was an accident of their tactics and good fortune, we cannot be entirely confident that the orthodoxy, much less the surviving source material, reflects the truth about Jesus. This is all the more troubling since we know the orthodox sect was credulously eager to latch onto any piece of nonsense that supported their historicist position. Prominent examples include the obvious fantasies inserted into the Gospel narrative by Matthew, the wild legends believed and repeated by the early 2nd century Christian Papias, and Eusebius' belief and reliance upon a forged letter of Jesus himself. More troubling, though more debatable, examples include Luke's "importation" of historical details into the basic combination of Mark and Q so as to make a hagiography look like a history (see my "Luke and Josephus"), and John's probable invention of the Doubting Thomas tale (not mentioned by anyone else, least of all Matthew, who was clearly prone to recording the fabulous, or (Ps.-) Peter, and Paul, who had several occasions to call upon the story, e.g. 2 Pet. 1:16-19; 1 Cor. 15:5-7, 35-58).
All this does not entail that the historicist sect was wrong and that Jesus didn't exist. But it does throw a wrench into any argument that draws on analogies with other historical questions which were not subject from the start to this unusually intense and persistent ideological conflict and behavior. Historians are in a worse position regarding early Christian history than any comparable (and comparably preserved) ins utional history (such as the origins of the major schools of philosophy), and the most suspect elements are, by an unfortunate coincidence, the very ones a historicist needs to settle his case.
Last edited by TheMadHatter; 10-22-2008 at 01:50 AM.
what the is twoplustwo
And don't anybody say 4
obama is not the antichrist, but to some, his believers, he is a Christ so in that sense, with it having nothing to do with Obama's will, he is a anti christ.
But i don't think obama is dangerous to our lives. So who cares.
ok he's talking about this
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...6/index21.html
and u hope they liked my sig cause if not it would hurt my feelings
kori showed up... gay.
Yet you support Senator John McCain who supports the continuation of the Iraq War and possibly war with Iran which would no doubt send hundreds or even thousands of troops to their deaths. It is death we can avoid if we choose Obama as President. You are a hypocrite.
Furthermore WTF is McCain going to do about abortion? Bush was FAR more religious than McCain and he had a full Republican House and Senate, and two SC appointments and did NOTHING TO STOP ABORTIONS. When will you ignorant s learn that the Republican Party has no plans to ever overturn Roe v. Wade. They use it as a wedge issue to get religious nutjobs to vote from their party.
all the views killed dark reign's photobucket sig.
Why do skeptics repeat the glaring falsehood that Constantine settled the debate in favor of Nicene Christianity? The theological squabble of his early reign was over Arianism, not the earlier subjects like Modalism, Montanism, Docetism, Gnosticism, Origenism, etc. And Arianism hardly died after 325; it kept going strong for centuries thereafter! Neither was it Constantine who began the persecutions; that was Theodosius in 381. Even then, as the fourth century became the fifth, successive emperors flipped back and forth between awarding primacy to the Nicenes and the Arians. A new emperor would be crowned, and one group would get the big church in the city back, while the other would be kicked outside the walls.
And if the texts of these second- and third-century groups the Fathers apparently so unfairly savaged were destroyed, then why do we have them on hand?
Now this idea that no other source text carries the ideological "baggage" of the New Testament is simply not credible. For example, Josephus embellished the exploits of the Jews both out of pride for his people and to serve the Roman government's propaganda campaign that defeating the Jews was a major victory. None of the ancients wrote history the way moderns do.
Claiming that the New Testament alone has to be distrusted among ancient manuscripts is the view of a small, agenda-driven minority. The distortions and inaccuracies in that excerpt which are apparent to the casual student of late Roman history make that readily apparent.
By the same reasoning, I think McCain & Palin need to call a press conference to address whether they do or don't molest goats.
Until they speak out against it, I don't really have enough information to judge one way or another.
x
Not-so-epic first post.
But point taken nonetheless.
I know they don't cause they don't have goat herpes, and that is everywhere.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
