A few months ago, secular philosopher John MacDonald (a Vice President of Internet Infidels) wrote an article for The Secular Web, titled “Jesus Mythicism: Moral Influence vs. Vicarious Atonement—and Other Problems,” which he bills as “in part a...
I am gradually transitioning my online courses to a high-quality video-and-syllabus format through MythVision. The first to launch is my course on New Testament Studies for Everyone. You can check out a five-minute video describing that course and how it works. And...
Recently Tim O’Neill once again engaged his usual arrogantly dishonest methods and lied about the evidence in the very act of denouncing an actual expert (me) as incompetent, but in the process proving he was incompetent and I was not. Which is standard...
Every few years I check what the top ten books are in Christian apologetics (by Amazon ranking). And what I have recently noticed is that Christian apologetics is in a state of intellectual stagnation or even decline. Seven of the top ten are old, long-refuted,...
The Global Center for Religious Research (GCRR) is hosting the 2023 International eConference on Atheism next month, March 4–5. I will be among the presenters. Registration is affordable, between ten and thirty dollars depending on your status. GCRR members get a...
Last month I launched my three-part series on analyzing peer-reviewed philosophy papers with my Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency, where I explain my process and how I selected the articles for review. I followed that with my Bayesian...
Last month I launched my three-part series on analyzing peer-reviewed philosophy papers with my Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency, where I explain my process and how I selected the articles for review. Second up is “Uncomfortably...
Last September I ran a project testing the merits of peer-reviewed history articles, by selecting three articles at random and analyzing their methodology and its underlying Bayesian logic (because, really, all sound epistemic reasoning is Bayesian: see A Bayesian...
It’s the growing consensus in Jesus studies now that the first Christians believed Jesus was the incarnation of a pre-existent celestial being. Even Bart Ehrman has gotten aboard this trend (see Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God); and even Larry Hurtado, who...
Robyn Faith Walsh, a professor of New Testament studies at the University of Miami with a Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University, has recently hit the circuit promoting her “controversial” thesis (building on her dissertation at Brown) that the...
The fundamental goal of legitimate critical thinking (as opposed to the fraudulent kind) is to ascertain what is true, about yourself and the world. So the tools that constitute critical thinking must be tools for finding the truth. And that means tools for...
I had a thought recently about abortion ideology that I wanted to explore. I used to think the only prime driver of anti-abortionism is literally just Christian patriarchy (predominately in the West at least; elsewhere it might be Islamic patriarchy). In other words,...
The Epistle of 1 Clement, a diplomatic letter from elders in Rome to the Christian community in Corinth seeking to persuade them to return to a more orderly appointment of leadership after a recent internal rebellion of sorts, ultimately didn’t make it into the...
Lately I’ve seen a flurry of repeated mistakes in reasoning about probability. I realized a primer is needed to correct some people so they can stop making those mistakes (assuming you care about not making mistakes; an alarming number of people don’t, but...
I have successfully produced several debates on the historicity of Jesus with qualified PhDs (live and online; see: Crook; Evans; Goodacre; Waters; and twice now with MacDonald; in Akin and Horn, Horn has multiple masters degrees). But I have long wanted to get one...
My first article this month established with extensive evidence that Gnostic Informant (Neal Sendlak) is completely unreliable and cannot be trusted to tell you the truth or get key facts right or even understand how arguments and logic work. Among the copious...
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.