I’m an agnostic who leans pretty far toward atheism, and I think RTFirefly has done pretty well with your game while you keep changing the rules. By your own rules as they stand now, even one of your examples would not pass muster. You said earlier something to the effect of, “Abraham Lincoln, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves.” Only, the signing of the EP did not free the slaves, only a specific subset of slaves. Based on some of the facts you’ve shot down, that error would be enough to get Abe Lincoln buzzed out as not accurate.
What’s wrong with saying, “Give me the person now known as Jesus, who was a carpenter-turned-preacher. He lived approximately 2,000 years ago, with most of his teachings and story being written decades after his death and becoming the work known as the New Testament.” Either such a historical person existed or he didn’t.
Hell, by the current restrictions of your game, you couldn’t even summon Pythagoras, due to a lack of concrete proof he was exactly who we think he was.
I am perfectly willing to believe that there was an historical person that we might be able to trace back to some day. I also believe that he was a practicing Jewish rabbi who was interested in fixing the problems of his faith, not starting any kind of movement. I also think that, if we could get him for the dinner party, once we explained what Christianity was, his first words would be “What the fuck?”.
And I think he’d want us to bring Paul back so he could go upside his head a few times, but maybe that’s just me.
What’s wrong with “Give me the person now known as Jesus, who was a carpenter-turned-preacher. He lived approximately 2,000 years ago, with most of his teachings and story being written decades after his death and becoming the work known as the New Testament” is the same thing that’s wrong with “Give me the person now known as Odysseus, who was a king and a warrior. He lived approximately 3,000 years ago, with most of his adventures being written decades after his death and becoming the work known as the Odyssey.” Being written about after one’s lifetime is NOT something that one does oneself, so that wouldn’t count. Odysseus’s dates can be fudged with the weasel-word “approximately”–okay the actual guy lived 4,000 years ago, but what’s a millennium between friends? Either you are willing to assert his dates, or you’re uncertain. If your dates are wrong, you get a big BZZZT, and if you’re correct (or very lucky) you get to have dinner with Odysseus. Me, I wouldn’t take that chance.
How has **RT **done well when he won’t even venture a provisional description? If I find fault in someone’s description, he (or someone) can try again to come up with a better one, until you have one that works, that even a fault-finder like I am can’t really find much to complain about. That’s what I’ve been doing myself with my own flawed descriptions with Jesus and others. I agree that Pythagoras, and others whose biography is hazy, are hard to conjure, and I don’t see why people are upset that this is true, with this very particular game and its demands–you can’t get Pythagoras easily (though I think you could posit that he was the first man to realize the truth of his theorum, which you could simply re-state, if you think he was the first) and you can’t get Jesus, and you can’t get Odysseus–you can try, and that’s what I’m asking people to do. I’m hearing a lot of “WAHHHH–this is hard! Unfair!”
Because authors often have distinctive literary signatures which have survived intact, and because Kings had scribes to record their dates and their deeds, and because inventors and painters left behind artifacts for which they can be held responsible, they are identifiable by my strict standards further back than others, but that’s just how it is, not how I’m seeking to punish Christians for their foolish faith. Far as I’m concerned they can play the Jesus card, and who knows, maybe they’ll hit the nail on the head with whatever facts they choose to play. I’m just asserting that I think that’s far too risky and I’d rather play a safer card. I wish we could settle this by a bet, but this is an outcome that can never be more speculated about. I’d be interested to see who would actually bet on Jesus appearing based on the scarcity of facts they would confidently put forth.
I’m not changing the rules, though I am defining more completely as people raise valid questions about them, and I am being agreeable to fault being found with my provisional description, as I find ways to improve them. You get on my case for noting about Lincoln that his proclamation didn’t free every slave in the universe immediately, and I agree: even before you posted this objection, I had agreed that the facts of Lincoln’s death are the least ambiguous and also specific enough to limit it to one person only, so I’d try to stick with those rather than ambiguous facts, even though if I had to use Lincoln’s writing, he was a unique enough stylist that a swatch of his prose would certainly suffice, such as the delivery of the Gettysburg Address on such-and-such a date.
It is interesting, though, that when I though I’d found a certain public utterance of Jesus, multiply recorded, and associated with the most well-founded and unambiguous part of Jesus’ life, his crucifixion, THAT got shot down as literary B.S. by Dio. So you’ve got an undocumentable historical figure who is, maybe because of that undocumentablity, the number-one pick in the parlor game of “Who would choose as your dinner guest?”
Oh, please. From this thread:
If you’re going to personalize the debate and press up against the limits of what sort of offensive language is acceptable in GD, I for one am going to insist we do this in the Pit before one or both of us get warnings from the forum moderators.
Well, I’d had some respect for you, and was wondering why you would get Pitted on occasion. Now I fully understand.
I will continue to reply in the Pit.
Response in posts 57 and 58 here.
But just for kicks, here’s the concise version of your argument, prr: ‘You keep complaining the game is rigged - why won’t you play? I don’t get it.’ :rolleyes:
Okay. Then you do this for me… Describe Pythagoras precisely enough to get him here. We know he lived, yet know almost nothing about him that can be described as absolutely true and accurate. Get him in front of me and I’ll get you a Jewish carpenter instead of a Mexican landscaper.
It’s not. Believe me, it’s not.
Precisely. It’s because he’s the best known historical figure who happens to be practically undocumentable historically. This brings in the questions “Did he really exist? What did he really teach? How much of what we’ve received has been corrupted?” Everyone wants to know that, so he’s the number one pick. But it’s precisely because of that undocumentability that we can’t even ask for him under your rules.
This post nails it. The thread should have been shut down after it.
Speaking as an atheist with zero desire to dine with the historic Jesus, I also fail to see what’s supposed to be fun or even interesting about this game/thought experiment of yours. “Who would you have dinner with if you could invite anyone, living or dead?” might be an interesting (if cliched) conversation topic, but creating a bunch of tedious, nitpicky rules and having a “genie” that behaves like a badly designed database seems like a great way to ensure that no one derives any enjoyment from this conversation. It might be amusing to talk about why one might want to have dinner with, say, Cleopatra and what one might hope to learn about her life and times, but I don’t see any entertainment value in this bizarre game of historic Googlewhacking you’ve devised. “Oh, but there were other queens of Egypt named Cleopatra! She wasn’t even really a ‘queen’, because they didn’t speak English in Egypt!”
If you just wanted to talk about how there’s little reliable historic information about Jesus you could have started a thread about that, although it’s a topic that’s been done before.
Okay. I’ll continue to ignore your Pitting. That works out for both of us.
But before you go, here’s what I wrote earlier and couldn’t get to post:
You’re being obtuse. I’m not changing the rules of the game, I’m testing out (and inviting you to test out) various descriptions that might work and that might not work. Obviously the only final arbitration of whether a try is successful IN THIS GAME would come if you could actually play it, which you can’t. So ALL descriptions are in practice provisional and you get as many attempts as you’d like to get to come up with a close-to-foolproof one. If this game could somehow be played, then whatever you (with everyone’s advice, corrections, warning, emendations, etc.) come up with would be subject to being accepted or getting a BZZZT!
As a fellow-player, IOW, I’m testing out various descriptions, and discussing them with the other players of my game. As the inventor of this game, I’m trying to describe the rules of the game as I understand it–since I didn’t post a definitive list of rules in the OP here, and since certain issues weren’t clear, I’ve tried to clarify–but there is no attempt to mislead, just the predictable problems of clarification, and of being simultaneously a player and and a explainer of the rules. But if you want to see this as malicious rather than innocent, I can’t stop you. But the rules of GD prevent your getting personal so I’d soon have this discussion here. I hope you understand, but if you don’t, thanks for playing anyway.
Is someone forcing you to play? If it’s not fun or interesting to you, I’m sure you can find better things to occupy your time.
Don’t be obtuse, please. If there were other queens of Egypt named Cleopatra (were there?), why wouldn’t you need to specify which one you mean? And we’ve dealt with the language issue on page one of this thread–if you’re conjuring up someone who doesn’t speak English, you might need to conjure up a translator as well. My assumption is that whoever you’re making this request OF, however, understands all languages, among his or her many powers to summon up dead people (but not dead fictional or semi-fictional people). Why this is so hard to grasp is utterly beyond me.
Uh, I’m not playing your game. I was joining Rucksinator in attempting to explain to you why people didn’t want to play, something which seemed to be puzzling you. It’s not just Biblical literalists who don’t see the entertainment value here.
Because only one of them is well-known today (you didn’t even know there were others), and for any normal conversation about which historic figures I’d like to have dinner with that would be good enough. It is only the rules of your peculiarly tedious version of this game which would require me to specify Cleopatra VII, last pharaoh of Egypt, and even that might not be good enough if I didn’t use the correct historic name for Egypt or something.
I didn’t say anything about communicating with Cleopatra herself, so I don’t know what this has to do with my post.
I understand the rules of your game perfectly well, I’m simply pointing out that because of your rules the game is not fun or interesting at all and that this is why so few people are willing to play it. If you had just started a thread asking what reliable historic information we have about Jesus then you probably would have received a lot of interesting responses.
Actually, it’s only Biblical Literalists who would be willing to a) play, and b) pick Jesus. After all, if one believes the Gospels are literally 100% true, all one has to do is pick one’s favorite ten events from there that are sufficient to uniquely ID the historical JC, and there you go. They even have the benefit that if they pick some, they wouldn’t consider anyone else who’s not a Literalist to be qualified to give them the BZZZZT.
And then there’s the fact that there isn’t really a magic genie, so they’ll never risk any real disappointment finding out they lost.
You’re entitled to your opinion, and I’m glad to hear it. I think you’re wrong, though.
I think this game shows Christians how little OUTSIDE of the Bible is known about Jesus, and how little INSIDE the the Bible is reliably true (or logical, or non-contradictory to other parts of the Bible, or to history). On the SD, in particular, enlightened Christians like to point out to me how OF COURSE the NT is a mishmash of garbled nonsense written by fallible human jerks but THE ESSENCE of it is nonetheless of a rare unearthly beauty that gives meaning to their lives (paraphrase, of course). I think I’m illustrating how little of it is factual or knowable, and how much they’re relying on a deeply flawed text for their entire belief system. After all if there were a shred of fact that could be claimed reliably about Jesus, either in the Bible or out of it, that doesn’t rely on the authority (such as it is) of the Bible, he should be easy to conjure up. So far, all we have (I think) is that (if he existed) he would be known as Jesus of Nazareth and that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate’s administration (which I think we can nail down with some specificity). Maybe that is accurate enough historically, and contains no false statements, but I still wouldn’t go with it myself. If your mileage varies, enjoy yourself with that. It ain’t much to go on.
:rolleyes: Already addressed in post 165.
Really? You didn’t seem to be in your last couple of posts.
Well, I’m not wrong about why I don’t think your game is fun, and it’s sure not because I’m a hard-core Christian.
I believe others have already accused you of setting up this game as a “gotcha!”, and this looks like you’re admitting to it. If you wanted to point out that there is little historic evidence outside the Bible regarding the life of Jesus, or even his existence, there was no need to invent a game and spend a lot of time going over the rules. You could have just openly challenged anyone to come up with non-Biblical historic evidence relating to Jesus’s life.
Good point. You wouldn’t even need ten, I think the whole “only begotten son of God” thing would do it.
And that’s fine. Go to it. In my own personal opinion, for which I am being castigated, and Pitted (Oh, the agony!) they would hear a very loud BZZZZT! for this valiant attempt, and they would splutter “What a rotten game this is” and never know why, and would protest “Well, it must have because I stuttered, or because this game is rigged,” and never consider that they IDed the subject incorrectly and imprecisely, but that’s a matter of satisfaction for me to observe and irrelevant to the process. Not being a Christian, I find the term “only begotten son of God” to be entirely without meaning, and a matter of opinion, hardly of fact, and not even a good attempt to satisfy the rules of the game that calls for facts, but a Christian would rather be wrong and pious than correct and irreverent, which is fine with them and fine with me.