Dr. Hector Avalos Has Joined DC!

[Written by John W. Loftus] He said he might not be posting that often, and that's okay. Now he has an outlet to express himself in response to the many battles he has online. He's already posted several things at DC and I linked to others. Here are some of them: 

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am thrilled about it! This is now a much much better Blog to debate the issues that separate us.

District Supt. Harvey Burnett said...

Wow-weee...Get this Anti-Christ Advocate reved up and lets take him out for a TRUTH thrashing too!

Can't wait!

In All Love and Sincerity!

PHB.

Harry H. McCall said...

Wonderful news John! We truly have added gentleman and a scholar!

Christians may not like what Dr. Avalos has to say, but then real objective truth has few religious friends anyway.

Welcome aboard Dr. Hector Avalos!

Evan said...

Let me pile on and welcome Dr. Avalos as well. Having such an articulate and erudite scholar join us will be an immense benefit. From what we've already seen, I'm sure the benefits will be Brobdingnagian.

Ty said...

I, too, am excited about Dr. Avalos' participation on this blog. I have benefited greatly from his scholarship!

BTW, here is link to the Avalos/Craig debate. http://www.stuorg.iastate.edu/isuaas/audio/Avalos-Craig%20Resurrection%20Debate.mp3

I've only listened to Craig's opening remarks, but he infuriated me by using the first 5 minutes of his speech talk off topic about Dr. Avalos' previous debate tactics. It was hypocritical and unprofessional of Dr. Craig to not simply set the standards of the debate up with Dr. Avalos ahead of time. That is when Dr. Craig's concerns about Dr. Avalos' debate tactics should have been addressed given the FACT that it had nothing to do with the actual topic of the debate. But instead, he does exactly what he is accusing Dr. Avalos of doing, he tries to win a debate by embarrassing his opponent for a mistake or flaw.

On the other hand, I have one small , but hopefully constructive critique of Dr. Avalos. In my opinion only, he sometimes does over highlight the ignorance of his opponent. For example, I think that Dr. Avalos could have been more gracious with Dr. Shelly in illustrating that Dr. Shelly was wrong when he claimed that there are complete copies of three of the gospels dating between 175-225AD Instead of posting examples of the fragmented copies and asking Dr. Shelly if he could identify them, I believe it would have been more humane to simply post the pictures of the fragments to and state, "Dr. Shelly made an unfortunate error when he wrote that we have complete copies of the gospels dating from 175A.D. to 225A.D. As you can see from this picture of the actual source from which Dr. Shelly is making his claim, the copy is not whole and is missing significant portions of the text." Perhaps this is not as effective, but it still would have won the point and would have been immensely less embarrassing to Dr. Shelly.

However, Dr. Avalos does use this tactic quite successfully when illustrating the missteps of others (as evidenced by its effectiveness against Dr. Shelly) and maybe it is actually just a brilliant debate tactic. I certainly am not oppossed to when he has used a similar tactic against Frank Walton or the posters at Tribalogue. In these examples, I believe the tactic was justified because the presentation and substance of the opposition's arguments. They needed to be shamed for some of their horrible comments.

DingoDave said...

This is excellent news.

Dr. Avalos may ruffle a few feathers here and there among the conservative apologetics community (which in my opinion is a good thing and well deserved), but I have yet to see any apologist defeat the broad thrust of any of his arguments without resorting to outright sophistry and barefaced lies.
Bravo!

Nightmare said...

Awesome! I always love reading Dr. Avalos' material (even though he's WAY out of my league in some cases)and I look forward to more :D

And to Burnett, because I can't resist biting the head off a troll, there is no truth in your false beliefs, simply the biggest lie that has ever been told. I know, like John and the rest here I've been there, done that. You on the other hand continue to preach the lie. Nuff said.

Anonymous said...

Welcome Aboard! I think this raises the bar quite a bit, I hope I can hang!

Jason Long said...

welcome

Shygetz said...

Welcome aboard, Hector. Very glad to have you here.

Dr. Hector Avalos said...

Thanks for the most gracious welcome.