Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. So you allow me to be authoritative in my field and you expect me to give you allowances in that regard, but when it comes to yours you expect everyone to be on your level? You're full of shit and you know it. Case in point - the "posting while drunk" retort. You have single-handedly made a mountain out of a molehill through me speculating on the basis of a blogger's reasoning and doing little more...and you have been so upset by it you've carried on your grievance for days on end. Well, come on big boy. Grow a pair and let me "school" you in my field. Why not play fair? Twat.
Ummm, no. You keep saying this stupid thing, but nowhere have I ever said or even implied that everyone should know the stuff I know on history. One more time - you claimed I "cherry picked" my sources, I said that was garbage and challenged you to support your claim and you whined that you couldn't because you don't know the subject. So I said that, therefore, you should not have made the claim in the first place if you didn't actually know enough to make it. Very simple. How you manage to get "you expect everyone to be on your level" from that is a mystery. And, interestingly, your claims about what I said re Sagan, Dawkins and Tyson have now been quietly dropped from your reply. What a surprise ...
Anyway, Jesus still didn't rise from the dead, or perform wizardry, Paul didn't talk to his ghost, and homophobia and misogyny are still homophobia and misogyny. Even when you call them "deeply held beliefs". And as long as Republicans suck up to fundamentalist Christians, they're an invalid philosophy. That's what matters. The rest is wank. Crusty wank.
For the record, I don't think Tyson is average. I think he's above average at pretending his way into fame.
and one Yeah, well, this is one of those posts 10 years from now, people will dredge up, and go "oh, fuck, he was right".
Like a lot of public scientists, he has a bad tendency to think he is an oracle on all things, including the history of science. Except ... he isn't. So he makes blunders like declaring on Twitter that the idea the earth is round was known to the Greeks and Romans but then was "lost to the Dark Ages". Except that is total crap.
Um... Are you saying the Greeks and Romans didn't know the earth was round? Or that the info wasn't "lost"?
Forgotten. Not taught. Suppressed. Take your pick. None of those things were true for the medieval period. That the earth was round was taught as part of basic cosmology, was the basis for all calculations for time keeping, was understood as the reason the earth's shadow on the moon was curved and was popularly accepted, as evidenced by common folk sayings and stories. The idea it was "lost" or "suppressed" is a myth invented by Washington Irving in 1828 to spice up his novel about Christopher Columbus. Because most people get their grasp of history from popular culture, this fantasy idea became fixed in popular perception and continues to be believed to this day. You can find my detailed article on how the myth arose and how and why it is nonsense here: "The Great Myths 1: The Medieval Flat Earth".
Some questions for @TimONeill since he's here... I think I have a decent laymans understanding of the period we're discussing, having read some about it. Are you familiar with A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid McCulloch and if so, what's your view? I've read a bit of historical Jesus stuff, including Ehrman and a couple of others, but also Robert M. Price who I gather you don't credit. I lean towards some kind of minimalist interpretation of the historical Jesus. I find Ehrman's ideas on how Christology evolved over time from exaltation to incarnation and so on to be compelling but one issue that he seemed to sidestep a bit (which mythicists home in on) was around how Paul had such a high Christology within only a decade or two whereas similar ideas took several more decades to develop through the gospels (as can be seen with Mark having an exaltation Christology, Luke & Matthew an incarnation Christology and John presenting Jesus as an eternal being). Any thoughts? Do you give any credence to the views that Judaism was not as ossified as commonly percieved in the first century, and that there remained elements of henotheism (for example) and other divergences from the standard Second Temple stuff in the backwaters, of which Galilee was presumably one?
I haven't. It's not a book I feel a need to read, given that I have been studying Christian history for decades. I think Ehrman's How Jesus Became God (2014) explains this pretty well, and can't see that he "sidestepped" it at all. The Judaism of the early first century had a number of ideas about God, emanations of God and active elements of God that derived from its centuries long contact with Greek philosophy, particularly with the Neoplatonic concept of hypostasis. This meant that it already had the idea that there could be emanations of Yahweh that were subordinate to him and distinct from him yet also in some sense "divine". Paul simply accepted this very prominent Jewish idea, as well as the already existing idea that the Messiah, like the Torah and the Temple, had a heavenly pre-existence. So he saw Jesus as having a heavenly pre-existence as a celestial being who was elevated to a position of pre-eminence above all except God by his death and his being raised by God (Paul, like the synoptic gospels and Acts, never talks about Jesus raising himself - God does it). gMark has an adoptionist Christology with Jesus becoming the Messiah at his baptism and being exalted at his death, with no hint of any celestial pre-existence - ditto gMatt. gLuke has some vague reference to Jesus referring to a heavenly pre-existence. gJohn, of course, has Jesus as the "logos" at the beginning of time. Ehrman lays out all this quite well, though I think Philip Jenkins' recent book on Judaism before the time of Jesus, Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World (2017) makes it even clearer. The Mythicists over emphasise the high(ish) Christology of Paul while ignoring the much lower Christology of the synoptics, especially gMark. Their claim that the gospels are a historicisation or (to use Carrier's term) "euhemerism" of a celestial and divine Jesus doesn't take into account the fact that the Jesus of the first three gospels is not presented a divine at all and only becomes so in gJohn. So he goes from less celestial and divine to more so as time goes on, which is precisely the opposite of what we should see if Mythicism is correct. Yes, and not just in the backwaters. The Judaism of Jesus' time was dynamic and highly varied. Again, I'd highly recommend Jenkins' book mentioned above. For a long time I've been trying to find a book that summarises the highly various welter of theological and apocalyptic Jewish ideas that sets the context of Jesus as a eschatological Jewish preacher but Jenkins has finally written it. If you want to understand Jesus' preaching and the rise of the early Jesus sect I'd say you can't go past Jenkins' summary of the relevant context. The fact that Mythicists seem, collectively, completely ignorant of this context and how Jesus fits into it is one of the reasons people like me find their stuff so completely unconvincing.
Hmm, 37 posts and then silence? I suspect he may not have found the accolades for his erudition he expected and has sought greener pastures. I'd like to be wrong, but...
He said above that he had zero interest in participating in the community and would fuck off as soon as people stopped basking in his glory. He came here for one reason only, to lord his knowledge of the subject matter over people he knew were unlikely to be as well read on it while furthering his rubbishing of the writer Catherine Nixey. He obviously decided he got as much mileage out of the place as he could.
