Thank you for your response. I will look at those. You do great work!

No, Prager’s pretty much full of shit even in other subjects.

If you want short and easy, and a demonstration of his being full of shit even in political subjects, follow the links I gave to Shaun’s YouTube video take-downs of PragerU videos. They are short. On point. And demonstrate each point clearly.

Second, I think you’re too harsh toward Dennis Prager. I agree that he is scientifically ignorant in a lot of ways, and this video in particular is pretty bad, but I think he raises some valid points regarding morality and problems with “the left”. He may be easy to dismiss because he’s a conservative theist, but he also seems to really value intellectual truth. I’d love to catch you two in a conversation and see what you agree on.

That’s all confused and muddled apologetics long since refuted.

We have no evidence James “the brother of Jesus” ever had a vision of Jesus. No story of it exists anywhere, nor any reference to it in any ancient sources. That’s entirely a modern speculation. We likewise have no evidence that that James (if he even existed) was not already a convert by the time Jesus died. That he wasn’t is only another modern speculation. And we further have no evidence he wasn’t motivated to claim a role of power and authority in the movement his brother founded, which is the most common primer for hallucinating divine confirmation of your desires and entitlements in religious movements worldwide, if even he ever claimed he did (and for all we know, he didn’t).

As for Paul, there are lots of ways he could be primed to hallucinate to motivate and vindicate a desire to change sides (he gives us several clues in his letters). I cover this in Element 15 of Chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus and in my chapter on the resurrection in The Christian Delusion (pp. 307-08) and The Empty Tomb (pp. 187-88 w. n. 348).

On the “individual minds” thing, I must assume that incomplete remark is supposed to imply mass hallucination isn’t a thing, but this misunderstands how mass hallucination functions. See my article “Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!”.

Finally, that last comment confuses origins with legends. The belief that Jesus rose from the dead was not a legend. The later stories of his resurrection appearances are the legends. The first Christians were convinced Jesus rose by dreams and visions of a Jesus telling them he had. Just as most central doctrines come to vision-based religions throughout history. Narratives of those appearances were then invented later, and exaggerated over time. See my article “Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply”.

But also, yes, many Jews expected a dying messiah to be resurrected. It’s entailed by Daniel 9 and even explicitly stated as an accepted belief in the Talmud. No Christians were “orthodox” Jews. They were anti-orthodox Jews. So what “orthodox” Jews thought isn’t even relevant. But even orthodoxists believed in the conveivability of resurrected messiahs, and staged resurrections (where some people would rise before others). As to how Christians got the idea of turning theirs into one, the reasons are numerous and obvious. See all the references I cite above, including other elements in OHJ Ch. 4 and 5 and other sections of Empty Tomb where I discuss what Jews actually thought about staged resurrection, and so on.

What would be your response to these?

50:45
“The nature of hallucinations. Hallucinations are like dreams.
They happen in individiual minds. Also the Aposotle Paul and James (brother of Jesus) was not pysholologically primer for visions.”

53:35
“Evidence against the legend theory is that legends must fulfill some preconceived expectation.
The resurrection of Jesus as it happened was not expected or anticipated by anyone.
not even the most fundamentalist of orthodox Jews expected one man to be resurrected first
before all of the rest of us are later.”

Yeah, then that’s an inaccurate video. First, until last year, we couldn’t even detect planets like ours reliably enough to know what their count was (so that video confuses “didn’t see” with “wasn’t there” which suggests significant incompetence in its authors). And last year’s statistical analysis found planets like ours are in fact very common (so that video is also out of date).

He did not explain in the video that solar systems like ours are still invisible to current instruments. He simply said that the size of the planets in our solar system is not common and this is established by simulations of its formation. He, then, explained this is because Jupiter probably attracted most of the matter during its formation and etc. And thanks for suggesting the articles. I’m going to read them!

Hopefully that video explains solar systems like ours are still invisible to current instruments?

We can only detect unusual systems because they have visible signatures (e.g. very large planets close to the star produce much more visible perturbations in the star’s position detectable from earth). So it is a fallacy to infer anything about the frequency of our type of system from current observational data. (We only just last year started being able to estimate the frequency of planets mostly invisible to current instruments, but that’s still not the ability to fully map out all the planets in any system and their sizes and distances.)

And also hopefully you fact-checked its claims before believing any of them?

You know, like, say, reading this.

Etc.

You article is very nice; I’m sure you researched a lot before publishing it here.

And this of course conflates early accounts of visions with late fabricated accounts of bodily encounters. Among other nonsense. See Dating the Corinthian Creed and Resurrection: Faith or Fact? My Bonus Reply. It’s just a rebranding of Habermas’s “core facts” apologetic (which actually has dropped “empty tomb” for having been so thoroughly refuted.)

As for claims of the paranormal, I’d wait for real investigators to fact-check them, like Joe Nickel, who has been investigating miracles for decades. I suggest you bring this book to the attention of CFI’s national office as well as their LA branch, where James Underdown is in touch with a team of investigators who do this sort of thing (that’s the Center for Inquiry, if you are unfamiliar). I’d also write to Skeptic magazine about it. No doubt Shermer already has how own plans. But the more they get written asking about it, the more likely they’ll do a study and publish it.

You can find all those contacts online with a quick search. If you want to see something interesting done on this, please do that.