Do you like living in a world where there are definitely sobriety programs without god in them? Then help save pretty much the only one there is. Read this post buy Ophelia: Secular Organizations for Sobriety / Save Our Selves. That will give you the links and info to check them out, and to help donate so they can hit their target to stay funded (and it’s a steep target, so help is needed–please consider it).
Meanwhile, I’m in studio again this week to finish audio for Hitler Homer Bible Christ, and just completed two chapters for John Loftus’s final anthology in the trilogy (Christianity Is Not Great, which completes what we began with The Christian Delusion and The End of Christianity, both awesome volumes, and I have seen the content for this last one, and it’s even more awesome still).
And I just turned around the corrections for the first half of the proof of On the Historicity of Jesus, and Sheffield promises the second half is coming this week, so we’re on the final slalom on that project.
And I have a talk Thursday to a Christian youth group led by Josh McDowell’s son (no kidding) and a doctor’s appointment Friday (a follow-up–I’ve been sterilized!–so, have had and will have a sore crotch this week to supplement my still-healing innocuously broken toe, so I have that on top of all the tasks this week enumerated above).
And…drumroll…I am hoping to have my review of Maurice Casey’s anti-mythicism book done and up by this Friday evening. (I’ve already been impressed with the critiques at Vridar, which I’ll be citing.) I’ve had his book for over a week now, I just have been too busy to get to it!
And for all that, I’m sure I’m even forgetting something.
This is a hectic week for me.
First up, anyone reading my comment GO DONATE – don’t let what I’m about to say stop you. I’m just popping in to point out that “pretty much the only one there is” isn’t entirely accurate. Moderation Management is another good secular option for people looking to take control of their own risky drinking patterns through a social support program. I have atheist friends who have participated in the program and recommend it. Anyway… GO DONATE!
Cool. For readers’ benefit I’m assuming you mean this group.
Isn’t that the group founded by the woman who went on to kill a man & his daughter in a drunken head-on collision? That Audrey Kishline & her group. Yeh, not so much.
Links would be handy. Please provide them. Otherwise I know nothing about that.
But also, non sequitur. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, which is way worse. That doesn’t discredit the present United States or its Constitution. So I will assume you meant something more than you stated.
You’re depriving the world of Richard Carrier Jrs’ !!?
Who’s going to do battle with the deluded offspring of William Lane Craig and Kirk Cameron!?
P.Z. Myers may have to get back into the baby-making game to take up some of your slack.
Kidding aside, I’m really looking forward to your critique of Maurice Casey’s book.
I don’t put much value in DNA. Culture is king. I’m breeding Richard (or Rochelle!) Carrier Jr.’s with my writing, speaking, and blogging, and, selectively, mentoring.
Likewise every other outspoken and active atheist scholar, writer, entertainer, who are making their own intellectual babies left and right.
That’s why the quiverfull movement is doomed. They are just making babies for us.
Before completing your review I should advise you of one little detail you may not be aware of — Neither Tim Widowfield nor me are mythicists.
Tim is an agnostic on the question. I am not interested in arguing a case for mythicism per se — I have always arguing pretty much along the same lines at Thomas L. Thompson- – that is, the question is irrelevant for understanding the origins of the gospels and the Jesus of the gospels. That question is primarily literary and theological and any role a historical figure may have played is probably irrelevant given the state of the evidence.
I have never argued for a mythicist position. My critiques of the methods of theologians has led some to falsely assume I’m a mythicist. I’m not.
That’s a good point and I’ll definitely be mentioning that.
This isn’t really on topic, but I read Jesus, Interrupted based on your recommendation, and I really enjoyed it. Do you recommend any books about the Old Testament that would help a non-scholar understand current OT scholarship, how the OT came to be, etc.?
Yes, Bible Unearthed is the perfect analog to Jesus Interrupted.
Is the Maurice Casey book a better one than Bart’s?
They are both awful. Ehrman’s has the more errors. But Casey’s is the most useless. I know, you’re wondering how that can be. I’ll summarize when I get the review up. Casey’s book reads like something written by a crazy person. It’s almost exactly like some weird blog by some wildly unorthodox Christian apologist who just randomly stream-of-consciousness rants about these other blogs he read. Ehrman’s book at least had an intelligible structure. (And authorial discipline and skill.)
We need a scholar who actually takes mythicism a serious possibility to write a book and answer some points. To be honest I think Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd did a pretty good job on explaining some things in Paul that I find convincing, but I think more scholars should try to investigate the matter. I believe, personally, that Jesus did exist, but I just think scholars are just doing a bad job of proving that he did because they do not want to take such a view seriously. I understand because many of these scholars have written thousands of pages on a historical Jesus, and all of it would have been utterly worthless if Jesus was mythical.
I would rather someone who isn’t a Christian fundamentalist obsessed with possibiliter fallacies and just-so stories. Eddy and Boyd are too biased to see clearly or argue well.
Goodacre, Crossley, Davies, I think possibly they could do a good job pro-historicity, even Bermejo-Rubio (after he reads On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History, since they go together to make a complete argument). I don’t expect the best historicity defense to be successful (though welcome one that is), but it should at least be worth reading, enough that people can fairly compare the two views.