pseudotriton ruber ruber: ignorant and intellectually dishonest is no way to go through life

Just a few things, prr:

  1. If you’re going to title a thread, “Jesus Christ as your fantasy dinner guest,” you ought not to be upset when people stick with the example of Jesus in your little thought experiment.

  2. If you’re going to claim that you’re getting flak about your thought experiment because people are getting “all defensive about [their] poor picked-on little God,” you might want to be able to produce something, anything, in the thread that demonstrates that religion, not logic, was what the poster was pissed at you about.

  3. Asking immediately afterwards, “How am I “blaming” anything on religion[?]” is really pretty stupid, as well as disingenuous.

  4. Not bothering to define your rules at all well until post #90 could have been just sloppiness. Taking issue with people on the basis of those hidden rules up to that point in the thread may have simply been cluelessness. If that had been the extent of your jerkishness, rather than increasingly looking like part and parcel of a

  5. You really are ignorant about basic probability.

  6. You had no interest in rectifying your weakness. If I explain in post 108 that "P(invite Jesus|Jesus lived) = “the probability that you invite Jesus, given that he was in fact a real person,” then complaining about “your (intentionally?) cryptic formula for presenting” that probability in post 137 is simply being obtuse. Especially because that conditional probability was the only math I used beyond stuff like “P(Jesus lived)” and addition and multiplication.

Even you should have been able to handle that. And complaining that I’m using probability when it’s at the crux of my problem with what you’re doing, is pretty sad.

  1. If you’d bothered to state a clear purpose to your thought experiment, that would’ve helped too. In the absence of such a statement, the obvious goal was to invite Jesus to dinner if and only if he existed. I spent a lot of time banging my head against the roadblocks you threw up in the way of this, and trying to explain to you why they were roadblocks. (Hence the probability.) In the end, this was the best you could do:

Nice of you to tell us this up front, instead of enticing people into what looked like an interesting parlor game, and finding out by bits and pieces that the object was…well, damned if I know even now, but apparently to frustrate and annoy everyone who got suckered into the thread, regardless of their religious leanings.

Ultimately, it just seemed that you had this thought experiment about Jesus and other historical figures, and you wanted it to work the way you wanted it to work (basically, to make sure Jesus didn’t get invited to the dinner, whether or not he existed), for reasons that you weren’t interested in sharing with anyone.

Would have been nice if you’d made that clear upfront.

A few more things:

As I’ve already mentioned, the math wasn’t exactly incomprehensible, unless you’re a retard.

But the thing that a number of us in the thread had a problem with is that Jesus, if he existed, was quite easy to ID reliably: he was the person who was the basis of the Gospel accounts about his life. If there was one and only one such person, then bingo! Jesus shows up at dinner. If the whole thing was a myth, we get nobody. If ‘Jesus’ was actually a composite of two or more itinerant Palestinian preachers from that time period, then we also get nobody.

This would be your goal, right? To get Jesus as a dinner guest if he was real, but not if he wasn’t?

That was certainly how you set it up in the OP:

Underlining mine.

Obviously there’s some room to interpret ‘full description’ but the whole point, as you described it, was that you were gambling your ability to invite the rest of your historical-figure guests on whether Jesus actually existed.

But instead, your point seems to have been to come up with a way of maximizing the likelihood of excluding historical figures from eras where accurate, detailed, contemporaneous accounts were the exception. As you say,

IOW, you don’t want a ‘full description,’ and that’ll actually backfire!

So you’re creating this very small ‘sweet spot’ where you have just enough facts to exclude anyone else, without having enough to make it nearly certain that one of your ‘facts’ might be wrong. Seems like the goal is to not invite Jesus at all.

Is there a point to this?

I think he thinks he proved something important. I don’t agree.

I think your two posts in this thread are well-written and well-argued, and I agree with pretty much all of what you wrote. It appears to me that there is no strong disagreement with your posts, and that prr has decided not to engage.

Just what the heck is a “ruber ruber”?

Bri2k

I didn’t see any. I think he was going for some sort of ‘gotcha’ and it didn’t pan out. FWIW, I thought you did very well in making your points in that thread…kudos.

-XT

Pseudotriton ruber ruber is the scientific name of the northern red salamander. Ruber means red. The northern one is really, really red.

Yes. It was obvious that he was just trying to “trap” Christians into discovering that there isn’t much objective, historical evidence for the existence of JC. It’s the kind of thing we did in 5th grade. We thought we were really smart.

Agreed. I gave up on that thread early on.

And couldn’t they get a real triton?

Well, they could, but AIUI, the real ones were all insufficiently red.

Come on, man, Tritonis a mythological creature, like Jesus. :smiley: Pseudo is the best you can do.

Gotta admit, he’s kinda cute.

(Now, I don’t know if this is a pseudo- or real triton. Maybe it’s a spottylipstriton. I don’t even know if it’s a triton at all. It just came up when I Googled “red salamander.”)

That’s your basic Pseudotriton ruber. I can’t tell from the picture if it is P.r. ruber, P.r.nitidus, P.r.schencki, or P.r. vioscai.

And you call yourself a Doper. Tsk tsk tsk.

I can’t bring myself to read that thread, but if you all let a good PRR pitting die out, I will cut you. :mad:

Ninja knitting needles. Fuckin’ deadly!

As opposed to the Crotalus ruber ruber, which is just kind of a dusty pinkish.

Enjoy,
Steven

The whole thing was so silly anyway. If there was a magic genie/time traveler/whatever who was bringing historical figures to your dinner party, how specific would you need to be.

“Oh, and I’d also like Jesus. you know who I mean, right?”
“Of course, why even ask?”

I’m genuinely puzzled as to why you care how this pit thread goes. He’s been shown to be a recalcitrant debater in all things religious, really not much different from Der Trihs and the more energy one spends on arguing with him, or talking about him in general, is less energy one has for something more pleasant. So the goal of this thread isn’t to rehabilitate the man, that’s been shown to be fruitless, and the OP let off the steam he came here to let off, so why shouldn’t it devolve, or perhaps even evolve, into something which people learn from?

Enjoy,
Steven

I can! It’s a P.r.schencki. Those have the very distinctive feature of having names in the URLs for their picture files. Well, that and the black coloration on the chin. But mostly the name in the URL.

Enjoy,
Steven