CADRE Comments

According to Hebrew University, the tomb of King Herod has been found at a place called Herodium. This is the King Herod. The Great. King of Judaea at the time of Jesus' birth. He died sometime around 4 BC, having reigned around 37 years. In addition to his NT role, most notably in the Gospel of Matthew, Herod the Great was known for his vast construction projects as well as the length of his reign over a mostly united Israel -- though as a Roman vassal. After his death, his Kingdom was divided among three of his sons.

This is the first in an occasional series of posts about various bits of news or commentary that I come across that are simply so astoundingly absurd that it is beyond comprehension how someone can believe them. I base the title on radio and television talk show host Glenn Beck's comments that such things are so mind-boggling that they make your head want to explode. Hence, your head goes *pop*. ==== As I hung ten across the Internet, I came across a website that I had never heard of previously called The Canadian . The Canadian, according to it's own banner, is Canada's socially progressive and cross-cultural national newspaper. Now, while I don't agree with many issues promoted by social progressives, I ordinarily will take the time to listen to what they have to say. After all, contrary to what some readers of this blog may think, I do read and listen to a great deal of information with which I totally disagree. (Air America radio is even one of the pre-set stations...

Intro note from Jason Pratt, guest author for the Cadre... Warning: 14 page post approaching! The original discussion, such as it was, can be found scattered through here on the Cadre journal page. John Loftus eventually continued his replies, first to BK and then to myself, here on the Debunking Christianity journal. You’ll need to scroll down a while through the comments to get to mine, and then to John’s reply. I’m around #11. Where I quote John Loftus, I am sometimes using double-fancy brackets {{like this}}. For in-paragraph quotations, I’ll use regular double-quote marks. Single-quote marks indicate a paraphrase. Since I’m going to end up repeating myself several times, I won’t blame John if he synopsizes in any reply he makes. I would of course prefer that he recognize I made such-n-such reply and include some reference to it, at least in principle, in his own replies. This is one way how discussions ‘continue’ as ‘discussions’. {s} John, {{I hope that [mutual learning] happen...

From the comments to the post I Believe In One Fewer God than You Do : What I find very strange is that if someone told you a snake or ass talked you wouldn't believe it just because someone told you they did. But you believe it and everything in the Bible because it's in there. You would be skeptical of every single claim in the Bible if someone came running up to you and said an old lady turned into a pillar of salt, or that lifting up the hands of Moses caused a military victory. You wouldn't even believe it if someone else came up to you and confirmed it. You would want to see for yourself, wouldn't you? Or are you truly a gullible person? But here you are two millenia removed and all you have is a text that says these things happened. Where are your critical skills here? Be consistent. Be as skeptical about these claims as you are claims today. Test these claims as an outsider. If you conclude Christianity is false, then seen what you believe, like I have. But I ca...

I have often derided the so-called New Atheists for their determined lack of civility. These New Atheists, led by such anti-luminaries as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, are openly hostile to religion -- Christianity being among the chief recipients of their attacks. They have argued that we have too long been respectful of religion while religion is actually harmful to our continuing progression as a people. Now, I know that in some people's eyes, my complaints about their sayings and attitudes are irrelevant. After all, I am a Christian. Probably in their eyes, I am one of the fundamentalists that they think is leading to the downfall of civilization. When I and others like me complain that the New Atheists are being bombastic, over-the-top and rude, many think that the problem is that we (as the class attacked) are merely screaming in our death throes. But what if the criticism comes from other atheists who find the tactics of the New Atheists deplorable? Does that matter? An ar...

In the popular imagination, Jesus is seen exiting the tomb on his resurrection (which really did happen, by the way) after the large round stone that had sealed the tomb had been rolled away. The scene is reinforced in the imagination by paintings such as the one at right where Jesus is seen standing resurrected by the cylindrical stone. But was the stone really round or cylindrical? According to an article by the Associated Press entitled The latest look at Jesus' tomb , Professor Amos Kloner, an archaeologist at Israel's Bar-Ilan University and one of the people who early-on exposed the nonsense of Cameron's Jesus Family Tomb, the stone that was placed in front of Jesus' tomb was probably not round or cylindrical. [Kloner] says the New Testament depiction fits what we know from other ancient sources. Tomb entrances were indeed covered by massive blocking stones to avoid ritual impurity and to keep out scavenging animals. But contrary to what most people imagine, Klone...

In an earlier post I noted how the number of New Testament interpolations – meaning a word, phrase, or verse added to a writing by someone other than the author – Doherty entertains to advance his Jesus Myth theory has grown from two to eight. None have any textual support for them, including the one I address here, 1 Timothy 6:13: 12 Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 13 I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate, 14 that you keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Argument for Interpolation The main argument that Doherty makes as to why verse 13 is an interpolation is that a reference to Jesus’ confession before Pilate is inappropriate following the reference to Timothy’s “good confession in the presence of...

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting opinion piece entitled True Unbelievers -- A sectarian split among atheists by Christopher Orlet, about the rising backlash by more moderate atheists against the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. While Mr. Orlet clearly does not think much of atheists period, he makes some interesting points. For example, the article notes: The soft atheists have it in for three bestselling authors in particular: Richard Dawkins (author of "The God Delusion"), Sam Harris ("Letter to a Christian Nation") and Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"). Though they differ on many points of scripture, all three are passionately antireligious. Mr. Dawkins considers God "a psychotic delinquent." The doomsayer Mr. Harris thinks religion will destroy the world if not stopped, and Mr. Hitchens holds that "religion poisons everything." Mr. Epstein finds these authors rigid and intolerant...

(This is a republication of an earlier post regarding the genre of Acts and Ancient Novels). I have elsewhere responded to the notion that The Acts of the Apostles is of the genre of ancient novel. One example of this genre to which Acts has been compared is the ancient novel of Chaereas and Callirhoe . F. Scott Spencer, Journeying Through Acts , page 16. I have read Chaereas and Callirhoe (C&C), as well as other ancient novels, and studied them further through secondary sources. In this post I hope to elaborate on some points of comparison by using C&C as representative of some of the features of the ancient novel. C&C is probably the earliest of the ancient novels. Written around the mid-first century, it places its narrative around 500 years earlier. Its author was a lawyer named Chariton. The name means “man of graces” and many commentators thought the name “too good to be true for an inhabitant of the city of Aphrodite; but it can be shown to be authentic.” B...

I originally planned to post this response over on Neil's blog, but it was apparently too lengthy for his comments section to handle. Neil has responded to my posts in his fashion. He makes some odd arguments, such as that he never claimed there was a genre of "ancient adventure", that his whole argument was premised on the lengthiness of sea voyage accounts, and that he never really intended to respond to Loveday Alexander. Since I could not post my response fully there, I will put it here. Neil, APOLOGY I apologize for not including a link to your site. I meant to and realized this morning that I had not. I’ve fixed that. I do not have a "no link" policy to skeptics I criticize. Just the opposite in fact. REVISIONIST REFLECTING You are making arguments now that you did not make in your original post. Neil Before: "Historians liked to include as set pieces accounts of sieges or orations for dead soldiers, not shipwrecks." Neil Now: "Bu...