In a message dated 05/12/00 22:49:00 GMT Standard Time, sejones@iinet.net.au
writes:
I can't see any point in continuing with this. These arguments are just
rat holes of errors.
Arguments are just slung together in a totally ad hoc fashion with no
degree of consistency. As an example, arguments from silence are
applied to suit. I hear repeatedly "Why were there no rebuttals", and
a few lines away is a comment about Christians not copying documents
that don't agree with them, or missing documents not demonstrating
something.
Or my pet favourite, connected with the 70 weeks, where Jones
apologists disagree and (because he presumably doesn't read it
but just cuts and pastes it) he didn't notice.
Or we get catch all arguments ; Tacitus is like this. Jones claims that
Tacitus' note about Christians isn't, as one would expect in a Historical
book, an explanatory note, but is there in case Christianity wasn't
important at a later date. [despite the lack of any real information]
Of course, if it wasn't there, he'd say it was because knowledge was
so common. If there was a complete history of Christ there, it would
be "proof" of all his claims.
A common one is this kind of false dichotomy. In Jones' mind,
there is no mid point between "they were frauds" and "Jesus was who
he said he was" (the assertion in the line before this). This refers
to the passage at the bottom.
This of course also contains the "die for a lie" fantasy, which suggests
a lack of knowledge of how human beings operate ; and as ever
assumes the truth of the Gospel.
The two main approaches, though are :-
1] Flood posting. Basically, flood with arguments. This is very easy to do
because there are umpteen apologetics books, and it seems that Jones
has most of them. This also has the handy side note that anything that
is found to be well, wrong, can be "not what I said".
2] Debate associative abuse. I called it this because it's used orally mostly.
It refers to the endless stream of "anti supernatural liberal atheist"
buzzwords
that populate his writings. It's function orally is to set the tone for the
next passage in a debate ; it is an instruction to fundamentalists basically
saying "... so what they say isn't true".
======================================================
======================================================
>PR>Or unless the Gospel authors fashioned the story to fit the prophecy.
See previous post on this. It is easy for amateur critics like Paul to
blithely
say this, because they never have to work through the details and
implications of their `the Gospel authors were frauds' theory. My
understanding is that few (if any) of even the radical critical theologians
have maintained this. It is just too psychologically absurd that a group of
Jews would author some of the highest ethical teaching the world has ever
seen, and then be prepared to die for those teachings, when all along they
were just frauds who made the whole thing up.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Dec 06 2000 - 05:29:43 EST