|
Post by fortigurn on Jul 28, 2012 4:12:16 GMT
Carrier's reply; typical of his reaction when confronted with inconvenient facts.
|
|
|
Post by sankari on Jul 28, 2012 8:44:39 GMT
Stay classy, Carrier!
;D
|
|
|
Post by fortigurn on Jul 28, 2012 15:58:03 GMT
|
|
|
Post by sandwiches on Aug 1, 2012 17:23:21 GMT
Well done fortigurn. Larry Hurtado needs a bit of support in dealing with such types.
|
|
|
Post by fortigurn on Aug 1, 2012 18:35:33 GMT
Well done fortigurn. Larry Hurtado needs a bit of support in dealing with such types. Thanks. I actually think he is way too nice on them. In other news, Carrier has made the mistake of criticizing Lester Grabbe's article in the Thompson/Verenna book. He is going to learn the hard way that when it comes to down and dirty street fighting, Grabbe is hard to beat; he certainly has years more practice than Carrier. Verenna has posted on his own blog, the comment Grabbe left for Carrier on his. It is unintentionally hilarious. There are penises.
|
|
|
Post by sankari on Aug 1, 2012 20:03:24 GMT
What a brutal beatdown! ;D It's always fun to watch mythicists and skeptics tearing at each other's throats, but this exchange is particularly valuable because it exposes Carrier's dishonest tactics for what they really are. In his review of Is This Not the Carpenter?, Carrier observes that Grabbe believes the extrabiblical evidence for a historical Jesus is 'sufficient to confirm historicity.' That'll be the real reason Carrier attacks him: because he's not a mythicist. Actually, Carrier seems pretty miffed with the entire book as a whole. The agnostic position taken by many of the contributors seems to irritate him, which is odd because it's the same position Carrier claims to hold. At one point Carrier even accuses Grabbe of being a historicist ('His claim that “Tacitus probably obtained his information from a document or archival source” is given without argument or evidence (demonstrating how badly historicists struggle with even basic logic)') which I'm sure is not true. I have long suspected Carrier is actually a closet Jesus mythicist posing as a Jesus agnostic in an attempt to bolster his claim of objectivity, and this review appears to support my theory. This gem from Carrier (in the comments) amused me: Might explain some of his pique!
|
|
|
Post by sandwiches on Aug 2, 2012 18:56:35 GMT
|
|
|
Post by timoneill on Aug 8, 2012 20:21:36 GMT
In other news, Frank Zindler's myther-friendly American Atheist Press is apparently preparing a volume of essays responding to Ehrman's book. This notice prefaced the latest addition to Rene "Piano Man" Salm's silly "Nazareth Never Existed" website: The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book published by American Atheist Press addressing Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? It is part of my contributory chapter.—R.S.The Nazareth coin boondoggleLet's see if we can guess who the other contributors will be ...
|
|
|
Post by unkleE on Aug 9, 2012 2:03:33 GMT
I won't attempt to guess, but I did notice on the web page you referenced that their opening quote is dated 1899 - truly cutting edge archaeology!! : ) (Although, to be fair, the article itself is contemporary.)
|
|
|
Post by sankari on Aug 9, 2012 4:19:36 GMT
Zindler's a joke. If you ever get your hands on his debate with William Lane Craig, you will be well rewarded. Craig expertly dismantles Zindler piece by piece, and at the end of it he's just a fumbling wreck.
|
|
|
Post by fortigurn on Aug 9, 2012 5:15:33 GMT
Verenna has posted on his own blog, the comment Grabbe left for Carrier on his. It is unintentionally hilarious. There are penises. Carrier took his time responding, and wrote a mini-essay in reply.
|
|
|
Post by sankari on Aug 10, 2012 22:57:35 GMT
He's resorting (as usual) to the old 'you didn't read scholar (x), so you're totally uninformed and I can now ignore all the parts of your response that I would otherwise fail to rebut.'
|
|
|
Post by fortigurn on Aug 11, 2012 8:04:22 GMT
Yep, the song remains the same.
|
|
labarum
Master of the Arts
Posts: 122
|
Post by labarum on Aug 21, 2012 10:27:05 GMT
He's resorting (as usual) to the old 'you didn't read scholar (x), so you're totally uninformed and I can now ignore all the parts of your response that I would otherwise fail to rebut.' And what I have found is that with Carrier is that the odds are about 50/50 that his "scholar (x)" has actually said something completely different from what Carrier has presented. I wonder what that does to calculations in Bayes' theorem?
|
|
|
Post by fortigurn on Aug 22, 2012 1:19:36 GMT
And what I have found is that with Carrier is that the odds are about 50/50 that his "scholar (x)" has actually said something completely different from what Carrier has presented. Good point. I've also noticed that when Carrier says there's a scholarly consensus on a particular issue supporting an argument he's making, the odds are about 70/30 that no such scholarly consensus actually exists, and the view in the relevant literature is overwhelmingly against the view he is citing as consensus. He quotes some scholar from the 1970s and then claims (without any evidence), that this is the new consensus, or that this was 'proved decades ago', without any evidence.
|
|