Perhaps people are being cued by the thread title to believe that the real question is different than what you have perceived it to be?
It is not, it’s the Received Word, and if people who are wrong on the Internet are not corrected immediately, the mistakes proliferate in Boolean fashion and are strung out all over the ether like turds in a bowl of Reddi-Wip.
Where’s your goddamned perspective??!?
Dessert must suck at your house…
I learn more from his religious posts than I do about anything else around here, especially since my knowledge of early Christianity is a bit weak. Given that the authorities usually cited against him are devout theologians, who seem unlikely to go where the evidence takes them, I buy his take on what scholarship says.
While the nativity stories have little or no bearing on the question of a historical Jesus, they have quite a bit on whether he fulfilled the Messianic prophecies. If he was not born in Bethlehem, he did not. The supporters of the truth of the Gospels remind me of spiritualists who claim that mediums were only cheating when they got caught, and really did talk to the dead all the other times.
I’ll go along with nearly everyone here and say that I love when Dio posts on Biblical matters. Always informative, and a joy to read. I take his “expertise” on other subjects (music especially) with a huge lump of salt, but he was doing an admirable job in the thread referenced by the OP.
Okay, I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed that. Some days I question my reading comprehension.
Let me be more direct. The thread is entitled “Is Diogenes a pretentious bombast?” If the OP was not asking if “Diogenes is a pretentious bombast”, I hope at least you can understand how people might be confused on the subject.
I’m glad someone noticed this. I was quite surprised by the several responses that missed this whole point.
I’ve another issue with Diogenes, leading to the title (“pretentious bombast”). I’m interested in historical events underlying the Exodus myth. Diogenes has interesting views on that. I know he’s expert, and his views on that may very well be correct, but they do conflict with Wikipedia, Cecil’s columns, etc; and Diogenes has never condescended to posting citations or specific archaeological facts to back up his views there.
I may start a GD thread ( Historical events underlying Exodus myth? ) when the sparks from this Pit thread die down. (Or, since I can contribute nothing to that thread but the question anyway, please start it, someone else!)
It get the impression that not everyone here has seen Dio at his worst. He’s not always pretentious and bombastic, but I think the OP’s point is that he can be extremely so. (though the OP doesn’t demonstrate anything near the worst of what I’ve seen from him)
I got that point too - however I think that there was a lot going on in the thread and Dio just lost track. Not a great thing, in a discussion, but not really worthy of calling him a pretentious bombast. I might agree if you were arguing that he just wasn’t paying attention.
I’ve been on and off of this board for years and while I can’t really comment on Dio now-a-days since I don’t really have a substantive grasp of his modern character on these boards (I don’t participate much on this board and when I do, I rarely see Dio), that said, when I was a lot more regular on these boards I seem to recall prodigious cites from him regarding religious matters. I can’t speak to Exodus in particular, but I would not be surprised.
I could imagine that after nearly a decade of arguing the same stuff that perhaps Dio no longer feels it necessary to post such cites. Is that fair to the reader? Perhaps not - but it’s understandable, so I cut him some slack.
It’s a good idea. I actually think the current thread is one that is worthy of discussion, but what is upsetting to me is that everyone is attempting to shift the burden of proof - which considering the personalities is a bit understandable, but from my point of view, it makes for a bad thread.
If you ignore the OP in favor of responding to the title of threads you’ll miss the boat on all sorts of threads. I think it’s pretty much understood that people sometimes engage in a bit of hyperbole in titles, especially in the Pit.
But that’s ancillary. The real point is this. If you feel that the OP does not support the title, then you can make that response and be on target. In this case, you can either claim that Dio did not repeatedly ignore what septimus and others were saying in the other thread in favor of posting non-sequiturs, or you can say that even if he did that it doesn’t mean he’s a pretentious bombast. Either of those responses would be on target.
To just say “no, you’re wrong, he does know bible stuff” after the septimus explicitly said in the OP that he’s not disputing whether he knows the Bible, and after this is reiterated again and again, is not a productive discussion technique.
[Whether this means that posters to this and other similar threads are themselves pretentious bombasts, is another question. As previous, I tend to think it’s actually a combination of intellectual laziness and bias.]
I did not.
Bombastic.
Dude, first I have to make a preamble:
Look, I respect your knowledge. I hold your knowledge and your posts here and other places in high regard. You generally know your shit. When I see you talking about biblical issues, I almost always check out what you have to say, even if I’m not really interested in the overall topic of whatever OP it is you are responding to. I also think that - from what I can tell - you get a bad rap. I can understand being a bit irritated with being asked for cites in the thread in question.
I can even give you a pass on the idea that you were asked to provide obvious errors in the New Testament and then when you present some (infancy narrative) the response seemed to be ‘oh besides that one’.
That said, it does seem pretty clear that ITR and Septimus were essentially on your side with regard to the infancy narratives. Now, other posters in the thread might have continued to press the issue (possibly JThunder, I’m not sure) and your responses were general as opposed to specific (with regard to ITR and Septimus and the infancy narratives) - but it does at least appear as though you were not paying attention to some of the responses from at least this readers general view.
To be fair, **septimus **didn’t say that. He said he wasn’t “qualified to evaluate Diogenes’ competence,” and then took several pot shots like calling **Dio **a “self-avowed world-class scholar (whose opinions are their own sufficient citation)” and then attacked his intelligence with “I’d like to see the slightest evidence that he’s intelligent enough to even comprehend the posts he responds to”.
So that’s what I was replying to. I didn’t pull it out of nowhere, it was in the OP. Yeah, Dio’s qualified in Bible matters. Lots of us, through lots of experience, have come to admire his knowledge of Biblical matters. If **septimus **believes himself unqualified to evaluate Diogenes’ competence in matters Biblical, there are many of us (even many of us who want to wring Dio’s neck in other topics) who will vouch for him on that matter.
**Dio **is many things, some of them very annoying indeed, but to insinuate that he’s unintelligent or that he doesn’t know the Bible is just way off, and it ends up undermining the Pitting to put those kinds of attacks in the OP.
That’s a good point.
No. Fictional contradictions are awesome!
Yep, that’s what made me raise an eyebrow. He may very well have been a dick in that thread. Focusing on any dickishness that may have been present instead of ignorance that does not actually exist would have been a better bet.
