Intro:

This is part of my review series on the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (ET).  Basically I've lifted this little bit from my material on chapter 4 of that book, which is the essay, "Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation" written by Robert Price (which can actually be found many places online).

The reason I'm bumping this up is because J. P. Holding and Richard Carrier recently debated in person on the related topic of the textual reliability of the New Testament and I hope to build on what's gone before between skeptics and Christians.  I wanted to split my massive posts on the material into readable blog nuggets anyway rather than leaving them as book length posts.

Steve Hays from Triablogue (in the ebook, "This Joyful Eastertide") and Stephen Davis (his criticisms are in a philosophy paper you'd have to pay for) are addressing Price's arguments.  I've tried to play all their points against each other to see what the arguments amount to from an outsider perspective.

In this case, Hays tries to pit Robert Price against agnostic scholar, Bart Ehrman:

Ehrman, however, makes his case on the basis of comparative textual criticism, based on different kinds of textual variants.  But that would constitute external rather than internal evidence. So Price is citing Ehrman to support a position to which Ehrman does not subscribe.

So Hays honestly thinks Ehrman believes there are NO interpolations before the time period where manuscript comparisons are viable and that ONLY comparative manuscript evidence is viable in finding early interpolations?  That's just plain silly.  Ehrman recites the Bible Skeptics Creed just like the rest of us anti-Jesus drones (and pay no attention to his most recent book, "Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are").  It is as though Hays didn't read Price's note:

Ibid., 614; cf. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 277: "this study has reinforced the notion that theologically motivated changes of the text are to be anticipated particularly during the early centuries of transmission, when both the texts and the theology of early Christianity were in a state of flux, prior to the development of a recognized creed and an authoritative and (theoretically) inviolable canon of Scripture." See also pages 55 and 97.

Clearly Bart and Bob are on the same page here, despite Hays' shallow attempt to pit them against each other.  

But Hays adds:

In addition, Ehrman admits that “by far the vast majority [of textual variants] are purely ‘accidental,’ readily explained as resulting from scribal ineptitude, carelessness, or fatigue.”

If only the tug of war here in this chapter weren't over one wittle passage, that might mean something.  Hays goes on to quote Ehrman's critics and I agree with them.  Ehrman often oversells his case.  But, as I just said, this is just over one wittle passage that happens to be vastly important to conservative scholarship (truly a thin thread to hang your explanatory hat on).  And petty human politics behind some overly convenient inserted verses is more probable than something supporting a genuine historical supernatural core any day of the week (as I've explained before).   Further the "appearance" claims of 1 Corinthians 15 aren't particularly strong anyway in any event.  So it's a lot of fuss over nothing.

Stephen Davis definitely read Price's Ehrman footnote and says:

Price sympathetically quotes Bart D. Ehrman, who says: "theologically motivated changes of the text are to be anticipated particularly during the early centuries of transmission, when both the texts and the theology of early Christianity were in a state of flux, prior to The development of a recognized creed..." If we were talking about the church's theology of the incarnation or the Trinity, this claim might have some plausibility. But when we are talking about the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead, Ehrman's argument is hardly convincing. I would have thought that everyone recognizes that this claim was bedrock in the Christian movement from the very beginning. At that point, there was a recognized creed.

But "...the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead..." is what the entire rest of 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is about.  The premise doesn't vanish from the argument without verses 3-11.  A later Christian group may have had an interest in re-characterizing the nature of that core assertion just as Price has been arguing.  If it is just a recharacterization that doesn't destroy the argument, then there's no reason that Ehrman's argument can't apply.

Further, Price challenges Davis to defend that the resurrection really was the core assertion of the original Christian movement:

Was the resurrection of Jesus the bedrock teaching of Christianity from the hour anybody first believed? We cannot assume that. (And by the way, my argument does not suppose that Christians had a loose grasp on Jesus’ resurrection, only that the list of appearances is an interpolation.) I guess Davis owes us, for the sake of the argument, an explanation of why he rejects Burton L. Mack’s rejection of the Big Bang model, held by Bultmann as well as by Calvin and Luther, i.e., that some Easter morning experience is the singularity from which all Christianity expanded. What if, instead, there were many types of Jesus or Christ belief, and that some developed resurrection faith to answer certain needs, while others (e.g., the Q community) did not? It’s at least an open question whether the resurrection doctrine was the beginning of Christianity.

Haven't seen a response to this anywhere and I'm not qualified to take this any further.

Outro:

Hays just doesn't seem to pay too close attention to the arguments he's addressing.  He was covering a lot of ground with "This Joyful Eastertide," but it seems his book length review greatly suffered for that on numerous counts as I will be demonstrating again and again (so stay tuned).  And Davis just gets things wrong in no particular pattern it seems (at least not one that I've discerned yet).

Ben

Intro:

Christians who saw the debate between Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, and atheist, Sam Harris, are baffled.  Why didn't Craig's amazing arguments work?  Isn't it obvious that Harris didn't even begin to provide an objective ontological account of morality and wasted all his time throwing red herrings at Abrahamic religions? 

Wintery Knight blog says:

I really think that what is behind atheism’s philosophical flirtations with the language of morality is an effort to put a respectable smokescreen around a worldview adopted by those who simply cannot be bothered with any moral obligation that might act as a speed bump on their pursuit of happy feelings and pleasures here and now. They want to be happy, and being good gets in their way.

What kind of "being good" is Wintery Knight talking about?  Did he listen to the same debate I did?  I thought Craig said that he probably agreed with Harris generally on applied ethics.

Steve Hays, from Triablogue, says:

To judge by how infidels handicap the Craig debates, Craig is caught in a hopeless dilemma. No matter how often he wins, it never counts. The usual excuse is that when he wins a debate with an atheist, that’s just because he’s a better debater. Not because he was right. Not because he had the best of the argument. Had the facts on his side. No, couldn’t be that. Never that.

One wonders that even if an atheist said that a theist provided better arguments than an atheist in a particular debate if that would "count" for Hays.  *coughCommonSenseAtheismcough*  In reality, Hays just doesn't like being disagreed with at all and his words that seem to be about something else really aren't.  I've seen him move the goal-post soooooo many times, it's not even funny.

William Lane Craig himself says:

So how can some atheists fail to see [that Craig's arguments are better], I ask myself.  One reason, I think, is that some people don't know how to judge a debate.  They think that the winner is the person who delivers the one line zinger like "Senator, you're no John Kennedy."  [...]  But my friend Dennis has pointed out something else to me:  there are cheerleaders and there are analysts.  The role of a cheerleader is to support the team, no matter how badly it is losing.  If a team is getting drubbed, the cheerleaders don’t lay down their pom-poms and give up.  They keep cheering to the end.  That’s their role.

All those years of experience and this is what Craig comes up with?  Okay...  That's actually called just not empathizing with the diverse landscape of where tons of different people are coming from.  Natural human epistemology is wwaaaaaayyyy more complicated than that.  If Craig doesn't want to be portrayed as a dishonest hack as he often is by equally unsympathetic atheists, and knows that he is an honest person that believes in his own arguments, he can shut up. 

Dr.Craigvideos on youtube makes much the same point as Craig.

Bnonn says:

In fact, the most annoying thing about Harris is how he can say the most outrageously illogical or irrelevant things, and make them sound utterly reasonable and topical with his soft-spoken earnestness.

As though it's clear Harris believes in what he says...

So the consensus is that a bunch of monkeys are miffed that not everyone in the world agrees with them.  Join the club.

Why atheists remain unconvinced:

I'll reiterate and elaborate on what I said in my original review of the debate (Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig on Moral Realism).  It's pretty simple actually (as others like Wes Morriston pointed out a long time ago).   If Harris isn't allowed to "redefine" good and evil conveniently to bridge the fact/value divide (as Craig claims), then Craig can't do the same thing with his god's "good" nature (as Harris pointed out, ftw).  Craig meaninglessly tried to spear-head this objection in his opening statement with an argument from boldness.  He said..."far from being arbitrary...," and then changed the subject from god's commands to god's arbitrary nature.  So no, it's still arbitrary.  We're just not fooled, Craig.  You can't point to "god's nature" when we attack the arbitrary "commands" any more than it makes sense to point to the commands when we the arbitrariness of his nature.   "Good" has to actually be defined at some point.  Craig is playing a moving cups game with only two cups that both have the very same problem underneath.  Somehow, as usual, it's always opposite day in religulous land and losing either way still turns into winning over all in the minds of indignant Christians everywhere. 

Craig wants us to merely appreciate his definition of the Christian god and go from there with moral facts.  But Harris just wants us to appreciate his definition of the worst misery for everyone and go from there with moral facts.  Both propositions depend on the appreciation factor that is ultimately coming from our human nature (as Harris says, we're "smuggling" in well being either way).  It's the only way we understand either proposition which is actually the same continuum in concept.  In either event we're simply able to recognize the gist of good and bad when we see it (just as Harris says we can recognize fuzzy concepts like health vs. being dead). 

Incidentally, Harris' side of things has two significant advantages:

1.  The Christians have no reason for their god's nature to be the way it is.  Metaphysically speaking, it's just a huge fluke of reality.  Why are we not supposed to abuse children...because god's arbitrary nature happens to be against that.  Kinda weird, huh?  On the other hand, if we evolved as social creatures in the context of the need for group cooperation and survival, there's a very obvious ontological reason for our brains to be wired the way they are (as even Craig explains). 

2.  The facts of human nature (as opposed to god's hidden nature) are much more immediately evident and verifiable to all.  We may be confused on how best to define the good derived from our natures, but at least it's pretty obvious we definitely have that to work with. 

The scandalous thing about Harris' position is that it isn't even an argument.  It's an observation.  The argument part of that observation is to show to any and all contenders that in fact his observation matches reality and where they err, but also that it matches the inherent realities of their own moral perspective and they just have yet to recognize it.  Harris did this more than sufficiently for Craig and I've noted how superficial the summations of Harris' position have to be in many Christian blogs in order to avoid this (especially Wintery Knight's conveniently trite overview). 

As an observation, of course everyone agrees from there (as Craig clearly did) that science can play out the facts of maximizing well being.  That was all Harris was aiming for and clearly pretty much everything I've said can easily be derived from what Harris said on stage. 

Outro:

We'll get around to fishing out the myopic Christian attempts to save Craig from his hypocritical circularity as well as addressing similar double standards when it comes to Craig's supposed "knock down" argument against Harris' position.  Stay tuned.

Ben

Intro:

Previously I went over the dialog between Christians and skeptics over the possibility that the early Christian churches conveniently adjusted their sacred writings for religious and/or political ends.  That was a sort of a warm up to getting into the Richard Carrier vs. J. P. Holding debate.  And...we're still warming up here (see my last post on expectations) with the organizer of the event's preliminary remarks on the basic cases that each party laid out.

Cameron says:

Throughout his presentation Carrier focused on the period 50-120 A.D. This is when the NT was initially written and copied; it's also the period we know the least about because we have no surviving manuscripts from this early in the NT's transmission. This is significant, according to Carrier, because the copies of the text we do have were made to agree with each other (harmonized) where they originally disagreed, contain interpolations (later additions not found in the original text) and spelling errors, some of which have serious implications. 

Carrier is not completely wrong in his analysis. The text was edited in hundreds of places as it was copied, and he provided several examples for each of three kinds of changes he mentioned. But the important question is one of significance. And despite illustrating that changes were made, I think this is where Carrier failed to make his case that we can't know what was originally written.  I'll look at some of these examples in the next couple of days

Significance?  We'll have to see the details of course, but generally speaking there is already significance.  For those of you that read apologetic rebuttals like I do, the "significance" is that skeptical explanations of the evidence do not have to take seriously every little detail of every account. When all is said and done, the "evidentialists" want to take the Bible at face value like "The Bible tells me so" is a reasonable position.  Perhaps secretly they are advocating for Biblical inerrancy even when they attempt a "minimal facts" approach, or their subjective level of trust in the New Testament documents simply shines through no matter what.  They may just not process reasonable doubt and this is an important level of ambiguity to point the skeptical stick at.  Skeptical explanations often get portrayed as "magic bullet" explanations just because the apologist isn't willing to own up to how ridiculous it is that they won't doubt a single detail from the texts.  Skeptical explanations of the naturalistic variety are necessarily more general, because we don't trust what we have for many reasons.  Carrier's case here contributes to that end (or at least, is meant to).

I attempted to explain where I thought an informed skeptic is typically coming from when engaging the historical claims of Christianity on this topic and it would be a shame if Christians ignored the basic principles of the infamous "outsider test for faith" expecting a massive amount of evidence to drop out of the sky (or emerge from history in this case) and push back on their level of Christian-encultured incredulity.  In any other similar circumstances, we probably wouldn't be that trusting of the origins of a religious or political movement if that movement had ample opportunity to fudge the data in various ways even if we had no definitive reason to believe they did.  If these were ancients Democrats and Republicans making their case, and you were on either opposite side of that fence, would you just believe the one side of the story?  Would you take their factual claims at face value?  Would you believe in their assertions of sincerity?  What would you make of the silence or absence of their opposition from the historical record?  Etc. 

Their credibility may not be guilty until proven innocent, but it won't be compelling until thoroughly scrutinized and heavily proven, either.  Any historical assertions are allowed to fly otherwise as long as history just so happens not to directly bust the claims in some definitive way.

Outro:

Note, that David Fitzgerald had a pretty good comment on that post. 

Video and/or audio on the debate is still unavailable, but apparently it is forthcoming. 

Ben

Intro:

In the debate with William Lane Craig on the ontology of moral realism, Sam Harris seemed to ignore the issue of free will and how that relates to coherent concepts of moral responsibility.  He even seemed to go as far as to say that Craig misquoted him in his book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values."  I've listened to Harris' book as an audiobook on my ipod and Harris does indeed cover the topic.  I couldn't pick out from memory a misquote, though Harris seemed to say that Craig was quoting Harris quote others or maybe he wasn't saying that about these quotes on this topic...  Not really sure what's going on there.  Perhaps it was a debate tactic to not have to deal with the subject and move on to what he wanted to emphasis or perhaps he mashed Craig's derived argument with those quotes in a defensive brain fart kind of way.  Not sure.  

I thought I'd take a moment to address the issue directly.

1: First off, it doesn't matter if determinism negates moral responsibility.  One has to actually address the arguments for and against determinism that Harris presents in his book or else in any event theistic or not, certain conceptions of moral responsibility are negated.  Plenty of popular theistic worldviews are deterministic anyway and pretty much the same concepts have to be worked out to attempt to absolve the morally perfect god from the responsibility of everything that transpires if he is the ultimate cause of everything.  (Naturally, I think even if successful, it still fails:  see argument map on "The Logical Problem of Evil.")

2: Secondly Craig, with his framing, attempted to blow off the responsibilities of his entire worldview.  He wanted to frame things so narrowly as to not have to deal with the existence of the Christian god or the problem of evil, or any of the practical epistemic problems that stick us in the same boat in any event when it comes to trying to figure out what moral facts are actually facts.  A difficult-to-process-abstraction in terms of "well being" (as Harris conceives of it @ 11:55) is just as difficult to deal with as a god's invisible nature with divine mandates recorded under layers of "cultural context" which even theologians of all stripes struggle to pin down.  If Craig is allowed to disown this wing of the debate, then why can't Harris disown the free will issue as I've argued above and just point to his book (as Craig specifically did with Paul Copan's apologetics for evil, which liberal Christian scholar, Thom Stark, takes quite to task)?

3A: Third, there are two things about moral responsibility that matter and one that does not.  There is the type of responsibility that is merely a matter of cause.  And in a brute sense we say that a tidal wave is "responsible" for killing lots of Japanese people (incidentally, see Craig's, um, "interesting" take on it in terms of his worldview).  But that's not a moral claim right?  But it does matter, since sometimes evil comes from moral agents who couldn't have done otherwise at the time.  We still need to describe accurately the picture of how things go down and often mere cause is a necessary piece of any moral picture at some level to some degree no matter what you think philosophically. 

3B: The second element of moral responsibility is the ability to be literally "response" + "able" in the future.  We can't go reason with that water that made up the tidal wave and tell it why it shouldn't kill Japanese people in the future.  But, no matter which conception of moral philosophy is true, everyone knows we can in fact do this with human moral agents (through reason/praise/shame/etc.).  It may be in fact the case that in hindsight, in that first sense, that person could not have even hoped to do otherwise.  Their activities were predetermined by physics to play out just as they did.  But that doesn't stop physics from striking again and allowing for a mental conversion of persuasion any more than it stops us from reprogramming computers (or from computers installing software on each other).  Hindsight can merely be a hypothetical framework that is productive and healthy for understanding future scenarios that may play out similarly.  And it simply doesn't matter if the past can never have been otherwise. 

Before I get into the final aspect (the imaginary one), it is important to note that even if we know for a fact that determinism is true, that doesn't mean we know what the response to moral persuasion will be for any given moral agent.  As biological computers, we simply aren't capable of judging each other to that precise degree.  We may guess at levels of particular stubbornness or credulity, but we never really know for sure.  That doesn't make it magic and unpredictable in principle (like some sort of libertarian free will tourettes), but it does make us ignorant and the objection to determinism meaningless, practically speaking.

3C: The third element is that element of entitlement.  People often feel overly morally entitled to be able to always reign down judgment on others even if that person couldn't have known any better or couldn't have done otherwise.  We don't like it as victims when it seems like the criminal has some kind of metaphysical excuse.  It seems undermining if determinism blocks some of our judgie-ness, but upon careful consideration, it isn't taking away anything that we actually need (see 3A and 3B).  The past doesn't change for anyone or any philosophy.  The obligation to be consistent as determinists just prevents us from being sloppy with our moral claims and relinquish what was never within our control to begin with. 

Outro:

Overall, I think Harris made some pretty good debate/presentation choices and that the misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and accusations of having not established his case are the fault of the listeners.  I will continue to show this as I review more reactions to the debate.  Harris was sensitive to the idea (@9:42) that many people would be particularly let down if he blew the debate with Craig, and I have to say, imo, Harris did great.

Ben

Atheist/historian Richard Carrier recently debated Christian apologist/librarian J. P. Holding on the "Textual Reliability of the New Testament" or more specifically, "Do we have what they had?" Tidbits are trickling through the internet, so I'll give my preliminary sentiments based on where I happen to be coming from.

There are so many debates nested around NT studies between educated believers and skeptics that no matter how dedicated you are, you simply can't dive into every single one of them in depth (and apparently this doesn't change even when you are a professional, and if you listen to others, it seems infinitely worse).  It seems I tend to be aware of many of them and at least have some idea of how the positions are argued, but the well justified clinching details that may sell one case over another are often beyond reach for practicality sake (especially if I identify upfront the end result of any given debate as having either little impact or relevance overall in any event, such as with the documentary hypothesis). 

Even having reviewed the entire dialog between skeptics and Christians over the arguments made by Robert Price in "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (including Price's response to those critics), it didn't really go that far.  Either there just isn't very far to go, no one happens to know how to make those cases in depth, or for whatever reason the sensibilities of either party just never takes us there (or some combination).  I've read a few of Bart Ehrman's books on the topic and even those didn't seem to have a lot going for them in this regard.  I'm hopeful that Carrier has pushed that envelope as far as it can go based on the available evidence since he seemed eager to have this kind of debate.  And at least Holding seems aware enough of skeptic arguments and what actual trained historians have said on the Christian side of things to perhaps shed that kind of light the other direction.  Maybe we'll walk away with a clearer view overall.   

So...I'm just asking for more depth and intellectual honesty from both sides.  I want to see people cite the actual sources, articulate their specific claims without relying on innuendo and worldview prejudice, and be reasonable with the relative weaknesses of their cases.  It's also nice to know (here and here) that perhaps the conversation moved up out of nonsensical defensive rhetoric land and into "explaining what the deal is" land thanks to those healthy social pressures of in person debate which tend to summon their better foot forward rather than the empathy-deficient internet banter does (though some exceptions do apply).  Perhaps folks on both sides can learn to take it down a notch thanks to this event.

Intro:

This is part of my review series on the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (ET).  Basically I've lifted this little bit from my material on chapter 4 of that book, which is the essay, "Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation" written by Robert Price (which can actually be found many places online). 

The reason I'm bumping this up is because J. P. Holding and Richard Carrier recently debated in person on the related topic of the textual reliability of the New Testament and I hope to build on what's gone before between skeptics and Christians.

Chris Price from Christian CADRE, J. P. Holding from Tektonics (in an essay that was online, but is now in the book, "Trusting the New Testament"), Steve Hays from Triablogue (in the ebook, "This Joyful Eastertide"), Stephen Davis (which is in a philosophy paper you'd have to pay for), and Norman Geisler are addressing Price's arguments.  I've tried to play all their points against each other to see what the arguments amount to from an outsider perspective.

Chris Price says:

However, Holding says:

Robert Price had quoted William O. Walker Jr. to explain himself (page 71):

...the surviving text of the Pauline letters is the text promoted by the historical winners in the theological and ecclesiastical struggles of the second and third centuries….In short, it appears likely that the emerging Catholic leadership in the churches ‘standardized’ the text of the Pauline corpus in the light of ‘orthodox’ views and practices, suppressing and even destroying all deviant texts and manuscripts.  Thus it is that we have no manuscripts dating from earlier than the third century; thus it is that all of the extant manuscripts are remarkably similar in most of their significant features; and thus it is that the manuscript evidence can tell us nothing about the state of the Pauline literature prior to the third century.

Although Hays complains:

I imagine someone like Hays would be disgruntled if we entertain both options since at this point the evidence would be compatible with either, right? Do we have to be dogmatic either way? 

Holding seems to think we do:

I don't see anyone claiming that there MUST have been interpolations. The skeptical case (as far as I can piece it together from Price, Bart Ehrman, and Carrier) seems to be: 

1.  We know such things did happen later (when it is easy to prove with manuscript evidence). 

2.  Inference to naturalism implying more modest starting conditions to any given religious movement. 

3.  Obvious political and/or religious motives given the ubiquity of such human politics. 

4.  Opportunity and our ignorance one way or the other in key early stages. 

5.  How much is on the line to believe otherwise (a worldview is making a pitch to the rest of the world). 

So, it is reasonable to assume that there *probably* were (as in at least more likely than not) and that there's no compelling reason to suppose we can rest assured there weren't.  This argument has the most force given 2 combined with 5 and it only has meaning when Christians in a positive sense wish to assert their arbitrary confidence that their religion *didn't* get tweaked in important ways when no one was looking. 

So apart from a much larger worldview and personal context, the skeptical argument doesn't seem to have much compelling force on the spot.  If this were just some random academic question between two professors of historical magic in a world filled with legitimate magical claims and we wanted to happen to know about particular instances in history where particular individuals inflated their cases, there really wouldn't be a lot to work with.  We'd just shrug our shoulders and walk away it seems. 

Holding calls Walker's line of reasoning a "fallacy of association" (as in, just because kid x hangs out with pot heads doesn't necessarily mean he smokes pot, too) as though certainties are being presented.  It is logically possible that there were no interpolations (just like it is possible you hang out with potheads and don't join in) and I don't think Price, Walker, Carrier, or Ehrman would disagree with that (though your mom probably won't buy the "fallacy of association" defense).  Why does Holding feel the need to overstate the claim?  Is it because there's no defense against these mundane uncertainties?  

Davis says that Robert Price wants to make up for the lack of manuscript evidence:

Indeed, he would no longer have to argue, along with William G. Walker, that powerful and sinister forces in the Great Church around the year 300 made sure to suppress earlier texts of 1 Corinthians that did not include 15:3-11.

Robert Price, in response to Davis, says:

Hays seems to have his doubts:

Geisler has his doubts, too, and calls it implausible speculation:

...[Price's] argument from the adage that “history is written by the winners” (71) is implausible and contrary to fact. For this is not always true. Indeed, on the accepted dates of 1 Corinthians (A.D. 55-56) by even most critical scholars, Christianity was not a political winner. In fact, it was not a winner until centuries later.

Um...I think by "political winner" Price is talking about Christian sect on Christian sect action...not Christian sect on Pagan action.

Holding asserts:

And Hays complains:

At the very least, an elementary distinction needs to be drawn between the active destruction of extant writings and the failure to preserve them.

As though Carrier were psychic, in a footnote, in another chapter of ET (that book both Hays and Holding are responding to), Carrier partially agrees with Holding and makes that necessary "elementary distinction:"

Hays admits he has no imagination:

Cf. James Robinson, “Jesus from Easter to Valentinus (or to the Apostles’ Creed),” Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982): pp. 5-37.

So unfortunately this "dialog" ends with a whole bunch of back and forth assertions and an even bigger reading list as though between 7 or so authors commenting we couldn't do better than that?  *sigh*

Outro:

I've been working on my review of The Empty Tomb off and on since 2007ish and have always been disappointed with the lack of detailed argument from either side.  Getting intimate and non-defensive interaction that clarifies the state of the evidence would be nice.  Let's hope we get somewhere with more info on the Carrier vs. Holding debate.

Ben

Colbert volunteered Fallon's money to a charity without asking and so Colbert said he'd sing the infamously bad "Friday" song if Fallon would come up with the money anyway.  And so, he did: 

Lots of things to be mad about today.  How about that government shutdown!?! 

The Daily Beast recounts:

Republicans, however, aren't willing to let the president paint himself as the only adult in Washington, [...]"Adults take seriously the crushing burden of debt Washington is leaving for our kids and grandkids," says [...]a senior aide to Speaker John Boehner. "That's why Republicans are fighting for meaningful spending cuts that will [...] produce a better environment for job creation in America."

Too bad: "produce a better environment for job creation" = "make it easy for rich people to keep screwing everyone over." That's very "adult" and certainly leaves the rich kids with a bright future to look forward to. Think of the rich children!

Therefore, "down with the rich man!"?  Or perhaps there's a conception of society out there that both promotes the free market and protects people from the excesses of greed?  No wai...  Where's that conversation?

Here are some excerpts from a book I'm reading:

More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult.[...]

Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

[...]Union representatives can’t afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under.

Who wrote that?  You can have a cookie if you guess correctly.  Here's a hint: It's not a Republican.

Theodore Beale (Vox Day) deals with the problem of evil by proposing a lesser god most Christians wouldn't accept.  The only reason he seems to believe in theism at all is because he believes evil is so darn real (the exact opposite reaction many atheists have, see my extensive argument map on "The Logical Problem of Evil"). William Lane Craig, as I recall in the debate with Sam Harris, made the "evil therefore God" argument as well (in addition to falling victim to the same definitional circularity issue that Beale does which I noted that Harris successfully used against Craig ftw). 

I only had Beale's pre-debate comments before, but now he's posted his reaction to the debate:

No, we cannot simply accept that "moral" can reasonably be considered "well-being" because it is not true to say that which is "of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong" is more than remotely synonymous with "that which fosters well-being in one or more human beings." One might as reasonably substitute "wealth" or "physical attractiveness" for "well-being".

Of course, Harris already addressed this point in the debate itself when discussing how we can be wrong about the facts of well being and noting that it is possible to not know what we are missing when it comes to deeper virtues.  So if you arbitrarily substitute in "wealth" or "physical attractiveness" you have not actually provided a "just as good" account of the human condition on its own terms. 

On any other day of the week (when not trying to desperately seize morality for only their worldview) Christians will make haste to deride the superficial life of the heathen based on trite interests like looks and money (the exact things Beale uses as "alternatives") and brag about the unending blessings of the deeper Christian virtues that unrepentant sinners would agree with them about if only they would have faith and be obedient to their god's commands.  But they can't have it both ways.  We live in the same universe with the same facts of basic psychology as the same species.  Faith and gods are not required to understand the human condition when all you need is experience with those virtues on their own terms.  Some unseen divine nature has nothing necessarily to do with it and this is a millions times more easy to verify than anything important about Craig's or Beale's differing conceptions of gods.

So is Vox Day just that shallow in a morally Dunning-Kruger effect kind of way or is he being a defensive hypocrite who conveniently refuses to devote his whole brain to the conversation about morality at the same time when his views are threatened?  Either way is pretty pathetic. 

Ben