When exactly did I say that there is some kind of clinical difference between hallucinating spiders and hallucinating angels?
To state the obvious, revelatory experiences are not limited to seeing and hearing, and those which do not involve seeing and hearing are not generally ‘a warm cozy feeling from prayer’. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, has a careful and thorough discussion of, well, the varieties of religious experience. Why don’t you talk about those that exist rather than inventing your own false dichotomies?
Well, perhaps you should keep that last point in mind the next itme you’re tempted to claim that you’ve got a medical/neurological explanation for religious experiences. Now, if you’ve got a cite–remember that’s an outside source, not just repeating yourself–that religious experiences are always psychotic experiences, I’d like to see it, but continuing to insist that your claim is true by definition has already failed in this thread and others. Remember, you already told me to “read the papers”, so these papers have to exist. (Unless you read these papers during a psychotic experience, that is.) So tell me what papers you were refering to. If you’re unable to do so, perhaps you should admit that the papers in question don’t actually exist and be more circumspect about making that sort of challenge in the future.
I so love word games…but not when they are used to dodge a question. To rephrase the question: Would you say that there is a clinical difference between hallucinating spiders and seeing angels?
If you want to see the evidence, you can read the books and webpages. (Your claim that I only linked to books is flatly untrue.) If you’re going to continue bragging about the fact that you’re not willing to read anything that I link to, then you can’t simultaneously say that you want to see evidence at the same time. And you know perfectly well that I can’t post chunks of copyrighted material here.
But earlier you said.
So there we see your entire argument condensed in a single post. When shown anything that’s not a peer-reviewed study, you declare that it’s a fake because it’s not peer-reviewed. When shown a peer-reviewed study, you declare that it’s a fake. In that way, you have an airtight proof that everything you disagree with is a fake. Airtight in your own head, anyway.
It is very disputable and there are people who dispute it. The most famous names in Bible scholarship would be those like William Farmer, Mark Goodacre, and Austin Farrer. This article by Michael Goulder gives references to plenty of others.
We do not know for sure whether it existed or not. If it did exist, we do not know what it said, and therefore there’s no basis for the claims that you made about it. How do you know that Q had no resurrection scene? Or that it had no miracles? The traditional approach to Q is simply that it’s the material in Luke and Matthew but not Mark. It’s entirely possible that Q, if it existed, had those particular elements and that Matthew and Luke didn’t need to include them from Q, because they included them from Mark.
Where?
Ah yes, Richard Carrier, the man who makes Glenn Beck look reliable by comparison. None of the similarities listed there are conclusive proof of influence.
In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman says that Luke and Matthew were written “within at most 20 years” of Mark. (p 135) Having earlier dated Mark to 70 A.D. at the latest, that means he puts Luke at 90 A.D. at the latest, unless my math is wrong.
I can’t recall all of them. I have read The Book of Mormon and the Koran. I’ve read James’ The Varities of Religious Experience and Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. I’ve read some stuff by Huston Smith about world religion. I’ve read a number of books and journals by people such as Thomas Merton and E. F. Schumacher who not only investigated but practiced different religious disciplines. And a lot more. I’d admit that for the eastern religions I’ve not read many books, but more textbook chapters and articles. I’ve been warned that for a westerner to plunge into Hindu and Buddhist writings without preparation just leads to frustration. I hope I’ll have time to do the preparation sometime.
Yes, but the question I was raising was not why they catch different amounts of flak, but rather why they’re approach with different amounts of honesty. For Mormonism, as demonstrated in a recent MPSIMS thread by an ex-member, it’s quite sufficient to simply tell the truth about Mormonism. Most folks within the LDS Church, once they start learning about the Book of Abraham, changing doctrines, archaeology, and other issues, they’re going to leave and the leaders of that church know it. By contrast, those who attack Christianity have no similar set of truths to attack with, so they make stuff up instead.
I’m familiar with William James, and I assure I’ve probably studied mor about religious experiences than you have, and at a more formal level. I studied mysticism obsessively in college, and exprimented with several techniques. I was successful at achieving some of the classic “religious experiences” (including an OBE), and I was not impressed. It was fun and games, but ultimately I recognized that it was all internally generated and that I acquired no new external knowledge or wisdom from it.
Having said that, the only religious experiences which are relevant to this conversation are those which could be claimed as evidence for gods. Nothing in what James calls the “universal” religious experience represents any evidence of the supernatural. They are just altered states of consciouness, all of which can be stimulated artificially
The kind of religious experiences you constantly try to cite as evidence for sky gods are nothing but psychotic ones. Going to church is a religious experience, but is not evidence for gods.
All of this is beside the point.
How many religions did you study before you decided to choose your particular sect of Christianity, and what did it have that the other religions didn’t?
Are you Joseph Smith? That sounds exactly like him.
Uh, never mind. Smith never said anything like that.
[/quote]
The simple FACT of human fallibility — that there is no source of religious wisdom you can ever find that does not (or, where lacking, should not nevertheless) have the disclaimer “I might be wrong” affixed to it — is the first tenet.
Do not leave your own judgment at home. It’s your solemn duty to care and to want to understand this stuff for yourself and derive your own conclusions. No one else can do it for you, they can at best give you some useful and stimulating thoughts to consider.
So ITRChampion you are unable after 24 hours to come up with any credible evidence that a mythological fictional character in a fairy tale called a new testament existed in any historical document? So it is proved then that there was no Jesus who ever existed in any time frame on earth as you cannot come up with one credible source of historical fact. Why can’t you locate any historical record from the egyptians, romans, greeks? Surely if a man had impacted the world as it is said he did there would be so many writings in alexandria and all over rome in that time period. So why didn’t the emperor of rome write it down somewhere? Why aren’t there any records of death as rome had all people put to death written down?
Now surely if a man of this importance did live, there would be many historical records of fact and not fictional writing as such in a the bible. the bible is nothing more than a fairy tale.
I doubt you even know what those hyptheses actually are or how much support they have. Let me help you. It is indisputable that Matthew and Luke both use a quantity of non-markan material which is word for word the same, in the same order. The explanations are either that they used a common written source (the Q hypthesis which is the strongets and has the most support), or that either Mark or Luke copied the other. The Farrer hypothesis is that Luke copied Matthew, and has some support (though not much), but alternatives to Q are hampered by the fact that the Q material is used in a different order in Luke than Matthew and that neither Matthew or Luke shows any awareness of the other’s nativity or resurrection narratives, an in fact, they wildly contradict each other.
We know what it said because we can read it for ourselves, The Q material is the material is that material common to Luke and Matthew which did not come from Mark. That’s what defines it. The only question is where it came from, and that means a commonly shared written source.
Because both Matthew and Luke use Mark’s empty tomb story and then wildly diverge where Mark leaves off, indicating that they had no other shared source for a resurrection story. Also because Q does not contain narrative material in general, but only sayings
Because it doesn’t. It’s only sayings.
But they did need it because Mark has no appearance narrative and leaves off at the empty tomb. If Q had syuch a narrative (which would be strange since it contains no other narratiove material), they would have used it instead of eacgh one having to improvise and start making things up.
1 Corinthians 15:35
This ad hominem launched at Richard Carrier is based on what? What makes him unreliable? He is a credentialed, peer reviewed historian with a PhD in the relevant field. What about his work, or this piece in particular, is “unreliable?”
I can’t find my copy of Misquoting Jesus, but I do not believe this is an accurate characterization of Ehrman’s position, and even if he does set a terminus of 90 CE on it (which I don’t believe he does), he’s wrong.
Missed the edit window. That should be not in the same order. They order the material differently, though it is believed that the original sequence is better preserved in Luke.
My answer is that even if God exists, there is no way to tell what it wants. It does not communicate with humans or manifest its existence or desires in any discernable way.
ITR seems to want proof of a negative. I guess they never covered that in his logic courses, text books or whatever the source of his “reasoning process” happens to be.
Our understanding of neurochemical reactions in the brain is still very primitive so the idea of understanding what constitutes a religious experience from any so-called “scientific study” is pure sophistry at its basest level. It is no different than the infomercial for a psychic hotline. It is pure, unmitigated snake oil - or pseudo-science to be a bit more polite. There is no more obligation to disprove such quackery than there is to disprove the alleged effectiveness of the dance a witchdoctor might do. The suggestion is absurd on its face.
And it is impossible to disprove in any event. If the ceremony is performed and you get the desired result, well, obviously it was the ceremony. If it doesn’t, oh, well, something must have been done wrong or the timing wasn’t right or [insert excuse here]. How do you think things like astrology persist for century after century when there is absolutely no verifiable scientific basis for it whatsoever? Does that prove that astrology is accurate or valid? Of course not. But exactly what would you do to prove that it’s not? Are you starting to see the point? There is no way to disprove either astrology or your so-called evidence since neither have any basis in reality let alone any scientific basis - despite any superficial trappings to the contrary.
We could rule out certain combinations of goals, powers and personality traits because if God had them it’d intervene noticeably. The “Problem of Evil” disproving the omnimax god being an example of this.