No. It was too crappy to bother with even when it came out, and now it’s so obsolete as to be irrelevant.

Lowder already covered it well enough.

Have you reviewed ‘I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist’ by Dr.Frank Turek? Be interesting to hear your views on his approach to albeit some classical arguments (because much of apologetics is arguing a historical event besides ongoing debates on the science of creation) but with more meat on the bones. Also presentations by Sye Garte, ex atheist bio chemist on abiogenesis.

Hundreds of people would. So I would need a reason to debate you specifically. Because otherwise it would be redundant and thus unnecessary. I’ve already debated the existence of God from nearly every conceivable angle. See the “debates” category dropdown menu (and that’s just for the last ten years; my debates go back twenty).

There is more gatekeeping in lower schools because they house kids rather than adults and thus parents have more control over censoring what their kids are exposed to, just as they do in the home. They of course abuse this privilege, but then so do they do that at home as well. This dynamic does not exist in colleges. Nor is it to be envied by colleges. The solution is not to replicate the abuse, but to end it.

I might be the only person who thinks this but I got the impression over the past year or so that there is more gatekeeping at lower level schools (high school, etc.) than there is at Princeton or Yale. It isn’t the background check thing either (even my undergrad requires those just to clean toilets) but a seeming ignorance of how actual teachers are supposed to teach. In other words, secondary schools are looking, in large part, for babysitters whereas universities want actual teachers trained in X field. I’ll come clean and say that I don’t oppose people teaching CRT in public high schools so long as the person teaching it has a degree in philosophy or at least sociology rather than a B.S. (pun intended) in education.

I think if Catholic schools can’t realize that it lost the intellectual property rights to the Bible back during the Reformation, then we should join hands with Calvin and say that we are the “elect”. That might sound pretentious, but we’re talking about a church that had pregnant mothers burned alive for teaching their kids the Bible, a fact certainly ignored in any Catholic school curriculum.

I really feel like the guy from Plato’s Cave who couldn’t convince his fellow prisoners to come outside and see the sunshine.

Yeah, I’d be worried about that as an academic freedom issue. The issue shouldn’t be some a priori statement of agenda or beliefs, it should be whether someone can act rationally. We all have areas where we have beliefs that are controversial or unpopular or may not be as well-founded as would be ideal, no one is perfect, and I wouldn’t want to settle some issue in advance.

It’s a shitty thing that so many of the most discriminatory people and bad actors in the world can’t ethically be shown their own medicine, an issue I was just thinking about tonight in the context of Tucker Carlson, but that is the unfortunate reality.

But I do think we could as a society do more to deal with the kind of prestige economies and abuse of systems that allow people like professors to effectively be inexcusably bad at their jobs without any consequence.

That would only make sense for explicitly atheist schools, e.g. if there was a University of Humanism or something, a specifically sectarian private school, on analogy to seminaries and Christian colleges.

Otherwise, schools cannot claim such dogmatic control over academic opinion. Secular private schools cannot, because doing so would make them as corrupt as Christian schools (forcing faculty to swear ideological fealty on pain of being fired is not a desirable academic model to emulate); and public schools cannot, because it is literally illegal (it violates both the Bill of Rights and the Civil Rights Act).

The Aramaic in Mark appears derived from targums (paraphrases of scripture; cf. OHJ, index, “targums”) or doesn’t exist at all (most are actually Septuagintalisms). See my discussion in respect to Casey (the section after that shows more errors in his work on this point, where he keeps mistaking ordinary Semitic Greek for Aramaicism).

Gleaves is thus correct. Mark is simply writing in Semitic Greek, and emulating (sometimes even quoting) the Septuagint. Which indicates he isn’t translating.

As to Mark’s Christology, we can’t make any conclusion statements. Mark is not composing literally, so we do not have direct access to what he is selling. So we have to infer, and inferences can be fraught. We also can’t conclude based on canon selection, because the canonizers clearly did not care about contradictions (Matthew is directly refuting Mark on many points, for example; yet both were included). Inclusion of texts were more likely political rather than ideological decisions. The compilers wanted to include as many texts revered by the sects they counted allies as they could, without so blatantly undermining their own mission as to make apologetic “fixes” untenable.

In short, as long as they could “explain away” contradictions, a text would not be excluded; its exclusion would solely be based on whether it was too closely associated with an enemy sect, or wasn’t popular enough to politically require including. The same logic governed the invention of the wildly self-contradictory Nicene Creed. On which see Bart Ehrman’s excellent summary at the end of How Jesus Became God.

As with the case of Christology: one can easily “explain away” Mark’s apparent low Christology as compatible with rather than in rebuttal to high Christology. Since that was easy to do, it would not matter to them what Mark actually meant. It only mattered whether enough Churches they wanted as allies used Mark. So we cannot determine Mark’s Christology by appeal to the intentions of the canonizers. Since those intentions were so disconnected from what Mark “really meant,” it tells us nothing about what Mark really meant.

Okay, I’ve been thinking: let’s assume that Mark pushes a high christology. The fact that a NT text (Mark) is in a canon organized by those who also held to a high christology is evidence of nothing since if it contradicted, say, Paul, it would not have been included. I don’t believe the apologists who argue that Mark was included (among other reasons) because it is the earliest since that fact was not known until the advent of higher criticism.

I’ve also heard that Mark has more Aramaisms than Matthew and that there may therefore be an Aramaic original behind our Greek Mark. G.Scott Gleaves however argued that Mark and the other gospels betray no evidence of being “translation Greek”.