I'm the sort of person who gets giddy and nearly wets themself with overwhelming joy and satisfaction (like when I succumbed to Linda the stripper) when my blogs and books get recognition and I gain profit without even having to work according to an employers demands or having some other idiot tell me what to do. Anyway, as of today my book is ranked 3,635th on amazon, 11th in the category of atheism books, and 12th in apologetical books. Yep, my book is not only in defense of atheism but also serves as an apologetic reference for Christians! Wow, I must be something else, huh? And the thing about it all is, IT'S NOT EVEN OUT YET! Whoo! You certaintly wouldn't think that after about a thousand and some published book revisions that people would be so incredibly hyped about the 2008 edition!
This is what I typed about myself on Amazon.com!
Link.
16 comments:
Thanks for the heads-up. I was able to get a bulk discount! Now I have enough copies so that I can drop a few by the local churches but I just can’t decide what’s best, lit or unlit? Since they are going to be burning them in the church parking lot anyway, that after all is the Christian thing to do, I want to be nice and make sure that they have the tools necessary to defend the Kingdom of Christ.
After giving it some thought, I think I’ll include matchbooks in the few that I leave outside but set fire to the copies I leave right next to the front doors. That way they can have a few books to burn themselves and show how brave and pious they are in front of the faithful, but they’ll be sure to notice the copies that I leave for the pastors, priests, and elders.
As always, my thanks to your informative blogging…
This is an atheist blog. We don't advertise religion here, especially Christianity. If you don't have something meaningful to say then don't comment, idiot.
I swear believers and their reasoning these days. Sheesh.
If you consider flames shooting out of the church steeple as advertising, then I must humbly apologize. As an Atheist I know nothing about religion. I mean that might cloud my judgment just like when I read the Bible (sorry to mention it) and discovered that the four most important books in it, all four about that Jesus (my bad!) fellow don't even match and were written at least 40 years after his death. I mean we can't even remember what was on TV forty years ago but supposedly they remembered everything word for word? I even heard something like that Paul (got me again) guy never even met the Christ.
Knowledge is just so confusing but I'm looking forward to your book all about religion that doesn’t mention religion. That's as it should be...
Hey, John Locust, john deering gave me an idea! You ought to sell matches with your picture on the box and quotes from your awesome book! Then you can say:
BUY MY MATCHBOOKS!
And make a fortune!
Hey john deering, maybe you can help! You seem to know a lot so can you help me rebut some stupid Christian arguments?
1) How can we answer arguments about ancient oral transmission practices that supposedly make the words of Jesus reliably transmitted? I tried arguing that oral transmission actually sucked back then but no one was impressed.
2) How can we answer arguments about the mismatches in the Gospel that appeal to contemporary literary practices and narrative procedure? I tried sticking my fingers in my ears and singing LALALALALA but the dumb fundies just laughed at me.
mr. deering, the depth of your knowledge and wisdom is astounding! I know that you can help me beat back these dumb Christians!
I did try your answers, but I need a little more help if you don't mind.
1) I told them what you said here, and they asked me what that had to do with ancient oral transmission memorization procedures. They're making this wacky claim that people in the time of Jesus used some kinds of memory enhancing techniques, stuff like....what was it....alliteration and whatever. They're just making this all up out of their bums, right? Please tell me!
I also told them what you said about hearsay. Unfortunately I am not a legal expert so I don't know how to answer. They said 1) there are some things we call "hearsay" that are allowed in court -- such as, "Statements of fact concerning personal or family history contained in. . . genealogies, charts . . .or the like" and 2) the reason hearsay isn't allowed in court in other cases is, according to the most recent Supreme Court decision on the subject, because of the Sixth Amendment right to confront accusers, not because hearsay is unreliable. Help!
Then I told them what you said:
"God would have foreseen this and written things down but Yeshua apparently didn’t want them that way because, he being a literate man, didn’t write anything down at all, not even his name apparently." But they replied that this was a stupid argument because widespread literacy has been very rare in history. I don't know what to say!
2) I did what you said here and pointed to the Synoptic Problem, and those dumb Christians threw a bunch of material at me and I don't know what to do with it! Can you help? It's at
http://www.tektonics.org/qm/qmhub.html
They also said you got it wrong because John had nothing to do with the Synoptic problem. Then they said just because Origen says one thing doesn't prove anything, and that John was a Greco-Roman biography that was meant to be literally true! I can't believe these idiots can't see how smart you are! Then they demanded backup for your claim that "a whole lot of people wanted to leave the Gospel of John out of the Bible for just this reason" but I told them just what you said, that it is a fallacy to ask for backup to claims! After that they clammed right up! Ha ha!
Thanks for your best wishes! I hope you can help me!
Poor Mattchu. You got trapped I see by the Christian’s desperation to believe that people kept accurate records in their heads of things that didn’t even happen to them, without turning those events towards or away from their own biases. Historians correct for this knowing that the human mind writes down what it wants to believe, not what actually happened. History, as they say, is not about facts, which are hard to come by, but interpretation, and since the winners get to write the history and often destroy competing narratives, we usually get only what the author wanted to pass on, not the actual words and deeds of a person or someone they are speaking of. It’s just one of those unfortunate facts of life that humanity cannot accurately record its own history.
As for writing things down, well you might want to remind them that Jewish Rabbis, like Yeshua, attended school and read from the Torah. They may not know what that is but it will be good practice for them to look it up. BTW, if you saw someone raised from the dead, wouldn't you write that down right away? I mean, how often does that happen? It should have made news all over the world but half the world today still doesn’t know about it even 2,000 years later.
On the accuracy of John issue, that is one they will always dismiss because they love John, as I said. There is nothing you can do about this because they don’t even believe their own historians, even those like Origen who was also a believer. It’s best to just let them see the Synoptic Gospels through the eyes of John even though we have no idea who actually wrote the Gospels. They can’t believe that either even though the earliest Gospel was written forty years after Yeshua’s death. Can you imagine yourself trying to accurately, word for word, write down our conversation of today forty years from now? It would be impossible you just as it was for them.
As for the fights over John, they can read that in any good history of Christianity. It is a well-known fact and a good deal of the reason why the Catholic Church made it a crime for a normal believer to own and read your own Bible. They were afraid the faithful would begin to questions things when the Gospels didn’t line up. They were pretty smart guys even then since that is still a BIG problem to this very day.
As I said, fighting with Christians like this is a lot like picking your nose with a garbage can lid. You can try but I don’t advise it…
John, this is great stuff! Unfortunately I have some really desperate people on my hands (of course, since they are Christians!) and I'm not as experienced or as intelligent as you are. Please help again.
1) They asked me to quote some historians who say that, as you say, "History, as they say, is not about facts, which are hard to come by, but interpretation, and since the winners get to write the history and often destroy competing narratives, we usually get only what the author wanted to pass on, not the actual words and deeds of a person or someone they are speaking of." They also want to know if this is true, how you can possibly know that the words and deeds are NOT recorded accurately, and why you should be believed since what you write is a product of your own biases. They say your epistemology is a train wreck! HELP!
2) I told them what you said about rabbis attending school, and they said, so what, what's the point, they agree with that! Huh?
3) They say your claim that a resurrection would be written down is just the same mistake you made before of assuming everyone was literate enough to do it and that writing took precedence over oral transmission like it does today! And also that they rightly believed it didn't happen. They also said that it was written down, in the New Testament.
John, please, I ALSO need an answer on the reliability of oral transmission. They threw all kinds of stuff from me now about oral tradition experts like some guy named Vansina, another named Lord, and they also pointed to fieldwork studies in anthropology that have shown that a wide variety of cultures have been found to be able to preserve extended epics orally, some of these epics as long as 25 hours performed over several days! They said your conversation example doesn't account for how ancient teachers encouraged students to remember and recite things over and over, and how educational circles of that time corrected each other. Please, John, how do I answer this?
3) They said about what you said, that "we have no idea who actually wrote the Gospels," how I decide who wrote an ancient work and when. They asked me to prove Tacitus wrote his works. I have no idea what to do! Can you explain how we decide the authorship and date of something written a long time ago???
4) Um, I know what you said about the Catholic church may be true, but what does that have to do with what I asked?
John, I really do need your help with some of that other stuff too, especially the link on Q. My atheism depends on it! Please don't leave me in the lurch!
If it weren't for the comments this blog gets I would have wondered where the funny was.
I've already ordered 10 copies of this book. I told my Christian neighbor that I'll gladly give him two since that'll make it doubly sure he gets shaken out of his ignorance. He thanked me and said something about "running low on toilet paper". I wonder what he meant by that?
I'm not sure what Lord Doomrater means by "where the funny was"? I have yet to see a joke in here...
My Dear Mattchu.
You have fallen into the trap of arguing with the Christians. That is not something you can win because even if you showed them bombproof evidence that their faith was invalid, they would just say that you are aligned with Satan and got it from him. If you believe what they say, they win. If reject what they say, because they have been warned that people who they call “fools” will reject it, they also win. As you can see, they can’t lose an argument, at least not that they will ever admit to since would mean the end of their so-called “faith”. My advice to you would be to keep better company. You are judged on that you know and I think you are a far better person than nearly all of the Christians you might meet.
You can see the problem here when you look at their argument for Jesus rising from the grave: 1) God raised Jesus bodily from the grave
2) We know this because the Bible says so
3) Jesus is the Son of God and God wrote the Bible, so it must be true.
There’s just nothing you can do to help them out because just like the guys who flew planes into our buildings on 9/11, they believe every word of their Holy Book which they think God wrote. Why God used the Oral Tradition for thousands of years instead of inventing writing is hard to say but maybe He hadn’t thought to invent paper or pens until later on. It’s curious that the Jewish parts of the Bible were written down long before Yeshua walked the earth but no one thought to write down what he said even though he said he was and acted like God? You would have thought that something like that might make the papers but I guess maybe having God walk among you was nothing special to comment on then. Either way, the Christians don’t really care about accuracy as long as they still believe that Jesus will give them a happy life after this life, the only life we know exists, ends. To them, that’s all that really matters. There are mostly just waiting for Jesus to return when they hope to lord it over the rest of us that they are saved never realizing that most of us would like them to go away soon rather than later so that we can make a Heaven here and now instead of waiting until we die.
As for my epistemology being a train wreck, humanity and human lives are like that. That’s the human condition but you see the Christians believe they can rise above humanity just like Jesus did, so what’s perfectly acceptable evidence for the rest of us has to be turned in the perfect and unchanging Word of God in their minds. You are in a hopeless argument and if I were you, I would seek other company soon before they tell you that you are going to Hell all the while telling you how much they love you. That can be very confusing to rational people because it obviously isn’t true but they keep saying it is. Given time, you might just believe it and then they will offer to pick you up and drive you to church. You don’t want to go there because they bomb you with love and hand you things to read that sound perfectly rational until you remember that the whole thing is based on a Jew who never did so much as put two boards together to make a high-tech, big-screen, bouncing-ball lead, 10 person band and 30 person choir Worship Center. As they say, Jesus rode an ass but now the asses ride on him. You don’t want to get mixed up in that kind of morally questionable thing…
John, I agree! Turning tail and shaking the dust from my feet is the only way to win the argument. Thank you so much for your advice!
You are so welcome. You can’t win what can't be won, and the secret is not to get down in the muck with the Christians who are used to throwing their supposed Pearls before the Swine. If they’d bother to get naked and take a bath from time, they’d see that they are just Ants for God, running around in circles yelling "Praise Jesus" and "We’re Not Worthy" all day. You can’t win an argument against someone who believes they sinned against God just by being born! As you and I both know, we have never done such a thing and the very idea is ludicrous, but that's Christianity for ya.
I’m sure your new friends will appreciate how rational and calm you’ll become after not even trying to argue with those who can’t be bothered to live this life because they want something better, what they call the Afterlife, as if God giving them one life wasn’t enough…
This blog isn't a joke- it's a PUNCHLINE.
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