The Chavez Review of Jesus from Outer Space

The Review of Biblical Literature recently published a brief “review” of Jesus from Outer Space by William Chavez (RBL 03/2024). It is quite useless as a review, because it merely complains about aesthetics, ignores the academic study the book summarizes,...

Quantum Consciousness Is Bullshit (But Quantum Cognition Is Not)

You may have heard a lot about a thing called “quantum consciousness.” Most of what you’ve heard is bullshit. The Not Bullshit First let’s discuss the bit that isn’t bullshit. Many papers in various sciences that have words in their...

Dispelling the “Anonymous Sources Are Kosher” Argument

I’ve been getting the same question a lot lately, which suggests an old Christian apologetic trend has risen from the dead and is making its rounds, zombie-like, across the internet: “I’m being told it was normal in the ancient world to publish...

Simone’s Series on How to Read the Talmud: On Jewish Diversity

My attention has been brought to a long series on my treatment of Jewish sources in On the Historicity of Jesus by a certain Simone (actual name unknown). The series is extraordinarily long-winded, almost entirely impertinent, and makes strange errors in vocabulary or...

Dr. Carrier’s Third Reply to Alvaro

We are here debating the Kalam Cosmological Argument from a deistic rather than theistic perspective. Carlo Alvaro is taking the affirmative; Richard Carrier the negative. See our initial entry for all the details, including an index to all entries yet published. -:-...

Dr. Alvaro’s First Reply to Carrier

We are here debating the Kalam Cosmological Argument from a deistic rather than theistic perspective. Carlo Alvaro is taking the affirmative; Richard Carrier the negative. See our initial entry for all the details, including an index to all entries yet published. -:-...

Dr. Carrier’s First Reply to Alvaro

We are here debating the Kalam Cosmological Argument from a deistic rather than theistic perspective. Carlo Alvaro is taking the affirmative; Richard Carrier the negative. See our initial entry for all the details, including an index to all entries yet published. -:-...

A Meteor Did Not Destroy Sodom

I still hear the myth repeated that “scientists” proved the ancient city of Sodom was in fact destroyed by a meteor, and this therefore became the basis of the Sodom & Gomorrah legend in the Bible. But that never happened. The science has been proved...

Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?

There have been two really weird and unexpected turns in mainstream peer-reviewed scholarship lately: multiple independent studies are redating the entire Bible—Old Testament and New—far later than consensus imagines. What’s Up with the Old...

Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?

In my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, he defended the theory that Jesus can only plausibly have been historical if he was an armed militant who was later whitewashed as a pacifist. I argued that that might be plausible in concept, but not when we look at the...

Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio

I was hired recently to look into the claims of the German philosopher (really, now, theologian) Holm Tetens regarding why Naturalism has to be false because it can’t explain conscious experience. There’s nothing new about the idea. The Argument from...