A Response to Professor Paul Allen: The Supposed Myth of Religious Violence and Religionism in Secular Academia
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Prof. Paul Allen of Concordia University |
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Prof. Paul Allen of Concordia University |
Labels: "Avalos" 106 Comments
As a New Testament scholar, I see my job as always listening first and foremost to the text in its historical context, and allowing its theology to be the first voice to which we respond. In the end, I will affirm creeds or confessions, if I do, because I believe they contain the right things to say at a given moment in time in which they were written, in light of what scriptures says. In this, I thought I was just being a normal biblical scholar. And Protestant. And Evangelical.This is typical of a conservative creedal requiring institution, which leads me to say once again that Honest Evangelical Scholarship is a Ruse. There is No Such Thing!
However, a couple of my senior Bible colleagues found this disturbing. It was not enough to affirm that some confessions were correct. One had to start with the confessions and use them as hermeneutical guides in the strong sense. One had to like the idea that we define Christianity by what we believe.
Integrity is crucial for both of us. I define integrity as being true to the historical critical scholarship and bringing that into theological dialogue with the church. They define integrity as being true to the “Grand Tradition of the Church” and allowing that to guide what we see in and say about history.
So when I say, “The Synoptic Gospels show Jesus as an idealized human figure,” I have not said enough. If I cannot say, “And it also shows the divine Jesus, as we learn in the creeds,” I have articulated a theology that “is on a trajectory” away from our shared statement of faith. My senior colleagues and I give different answers to the question, How do we relate the Bible to the theology of the church? And this is one major reason why next year will be my last at Fuller. LINK.
Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the university—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small, unsung liberal arts college. Oord, however, was controversial. He strongly supported evolution and had long been a target of creationists in the denomination. He embraced “open theism,” the view that God does not know the future but responds in love—rather than coercive control—to events as they occur, rather than foreordaining everything. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years.This is typical of a conservative creedal requiring institution, which leads me to say once again that Honest Evangelical Scholarship is a Ruse. There is No Such Thing!
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Friday that it is legal for all Americans, no matter their gender or sexual orientation, to marry the people they love.Robert Price in his essay, Changing Morals and the Fate of Evangelicalism, predicted that the issue of sexuality, all by itself, could be the death of evangelicalism. If so, with this Supreme Court decision the death of evangelicalism has arrived. It's been long overdue
The decision is a historic victory for gay rights activists who have fought for years in the lower courts. Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia already recognize marriage equality. The remaining 13 states ban these unions, even as public support has reached record levels nationwide.
The justices found that under the 14th Amendment, states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex unions that were legally performed in other states. LINK.
The question is not really a matter of dispute among experts, even though mythicists as a rule would like it to be and sometimes even insist it is. But the reality is this: if you were to look at the program of the annual meeting of (the many thousands of English-speaking) professors of Biblical Studies, the Society of Biblical Literature meeting (this year in Atlanta), you will not find a session (out of thousands) devoted to arguing both sides of this issue. That’s because there is no debate. LINK.There are some signs this is not as rock solid of a consensus as Ehrman makes it out to be. For Richard Carrier has defended Jesus mythicism in a book published by Sheffield Phoenix Press, the most prestigious Christian scholarly publisher around, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. His massive book is a magisterial treasure trove of research and information. There is a minor difficulty in using Bayesian math to establish something in the past, which seems quite fashionable right now in some circles. For my part I don't have a stake in who wins this debate, so long as both sides agree that the Jesus depicted in the Gospels never existed.
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Kenneth |
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honeymonster |
Labels: Ridicule 6 Comments
Labels: Ridicule 0 Comments
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I have been to a lot of discussion forums, and I have never read so many intelligent and civil posts in my life. Tempers flare from time to time, but this is a great site.
I'm As Bored As I Can Get! |
I've been hanging around Mr. Loftus' Debunking Christianity for many years, and now my default position is that Christianity is thoroughly debunked since no Christian can show any Christianity-specific claim to be true... LINK.His comment was in response to a Catholic who came here to tell us which religion is the trooth. One of the reasons I'm posting less is because I haven't seen anything that warrants accepting one specific religious sect over the others that exist, or accepting religious faith itself. There is nothing coming from the believing side that's even worthy of mentioning. It's all been debunked. But later today, or tomorrow, or the next day, some believer will repeat this same claim with a different religious faith using many of the same tired arguments. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. I'm as bored as I can get of this.
1. Can you make a moral judgment against rape or slavery using only scripture?By going to the link and subscribing to Atheist Republic you can download the book "Your God is Too Small" for free.
2. Would you sacrifice your child if god asked you to?
3. Is it acceptable to cherry pick the bible and only follow the parts you agree with?
4. How did animal X get from point Y to point Z after the great flood?
5. How did carnivorous dinosaurs supposedly eat plants before the biblical fall of man, when their teeth and digestive systems were not equipped to process a vegetarian diet?
6. Can god tell a lie?
7. Is observable physical evidence more important and valid than what the bible claims to be true?
8. Is there any amount of evidence that would change your views?
9. What physical proof is there that your particular god even exists?
10. Do you believe hell is a justifiable punishment for a simple lack of belief? LINK.
It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067."The deadliest enemy of western Christianity," he writes, "is not Islam or atheism but the infinitely complex process of secularisation."
That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned.
Our cathedral buildings will survive, but they won’t be true cathedrals because they will have no bishops. The Church of England is declining faster than other denominations; if it carries on shrinking at the rate suggested by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain in 2033. One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that.
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities - 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences.Dr. Hector Avalos speaks to the masses by writing a monthly column in the Ames Iowa Tribune. For my part I'm writing for the university student and the educated person in the Pew, bringing scholarly arguments down to them.
If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has actually been read. According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually been read. We estimate that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely by no more than 10 people. Hence, impacts of most peer-reviewed publications even within the scientific community are minuscule.
Many scholars aspire to contribute to their discipline's knowledge and to influence practitioners' decision-making.
However, practitioners very rarely read articles published in peer-reviewed journals. We know of no senior policymaker or senior business leader who ever read regularly any peer-reviewed papers in well-recognised journals like Nature, Science or Lancet. LINK.
Labels: "Rauser", God or Godless 75 Comments
Labels: "Avalos" 3 Comments
I have become convinced that the only origins issue that really matters to most Christians is Adam and Eve. Leave Adam and Eve—and their Fall—in place, and most opposition to the Big Bang, evolution, and the great age of the earth will recede. The historicity of Adam and Eve is the single most important issue driving evangelical Christianity’s widespread, deep, and disturbing opposition to science.
Evangelical opposition to science is no small matter. It spills over into Catholicism, and moderate and liberal Christianity to a degree. It has taken up residence in the GOP where it is worn as a badge of pride by leaders who reject much of mainstream science and deflect concerns with the populist refrain “I am not a scientist.” This opposition plays a significant role in America’s declining global leadership in science. It plays into a general distrust of science in America that nurtures the rejection of modern cosmology, climate science and vaccinations.
Adam and Eve stand on the bulls-eye of this controversy, which has risen steadily over the past few decades as the human genome has been mapped. This progress has established with near certainty that humans are closely related to chimps and bonobos, with whom they share a common ancestor; that the human race originated in Africa millennia before the events in Genesis took place; and that the human race never consisted of only two people. Link.
[Alter's book next to my favorite brew for size comparison.] |
Labels: Bayes Theorem, Real Atheology 7 Comments
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The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th
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That's why sensible folk give cats their own doors which cats don't need opening for them..
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 2 hours ago
But AI is also the glaringly obvious solution to disinformation.
People tend to forget: the developers are in charge of AI, not the other way around. You're assuming...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 4 hours ago
https://uploads.disquscdn.c... I'll just leave it at this.
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 6 hours ago
The dangers of AI are immediate. For instance, AI being used to flood social media with highly convincing fake content (videos, news, social posts) designed to manipulate public opinion...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 12 hours ago
The U.S. is the nation that split the atom, put men on the moon and created the internet. When facing fundamental scientific challenges, Americans mobilize and win. China is already...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 12 hours ago
The dangers of AI are immediate. For instance, AI being used to flood social media with highly convincing fake content (videos, news, social posts) designed to manipulate public opinion or...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 13 hours ago
There is almost certainly no way decisions on AI will be taken "properly", any more than past decisions on building our entire economy on fossil fuels were taken properly. When those...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 13 hours ago
To be fair, religion has had centuries to trigger skepticism, whereas AI just got here, comparatively speaking, and most people are just starting to figure it out.
Sure, but...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 13 hours ago
However what is surprising - to me - is on DC where most have their skepticism full blast in matters of religion, but somehow that skepticism seems to have evaporated on an article...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 13 hours ago
LOL. However what is surprising - to me - is on DC where most have their skepticism full blast in matters of religion, but somehow that skepticism seems to have evaporated on an article that was...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 14 hours ago
Interesting question I haven't seen addressed before: How would we know if AI's solution to a societal problem is morally good or morally bad, given that moral realism is...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 14 hours ago
In fact there is NO INTELLIGENCE in AI if you understand how LLM works.
There is also no intelligence in a human brain if you understand how a single neuron works. Nobody...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 14 hours ago
Exactly — and that’s why the ethical responsibility lies not with the machine, but with its makers.
Only true if "Artificial Intelligence" isn't really...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 14 hours ago
Or maybe AI wrote the article to cover its tracks by leaving enough breadcrumbs for you to convince yourself that it didn't really just obtain sentience. LOL. Hey, it's fun down here in...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 14 hours ago
A virtual lobotomy machine might result from AI demonstrating its superiority so many times that people come to rely on it for guidance without thinking. That would only be a bad thing if AI, on...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 14 hours ago
Some years back I read an AI researcher who characterized AI research as a quest "to make computers act like the ones in movies." (But without the shopworn plot twist of "and then...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
From the OP:
An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.
That is...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
The general hill-climbing strategy with animal training seems to be: try a bunch of things on your animal, and notice the animal's responses. If any of those responses are even slightly in the...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
Very possibly, if a method exists and is learnable. An AI could test billions of motivational strategies on millions of cats, and converge reliably on (a) method(s) that work(s), if such method(s)...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
And another point:
the reason AGW was generally replaced with the term Climate Change
Rebranding isn't a solution to the fundamental problem here, which is the fact...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
Also, to this point:
Even when it is explained [...]
This is where Socratic questioning/dialogue may sometimes help. Many human brains resist being lectured, as brains often...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
One of those flimsy rationalizations, of course, is Ehrman's appeal to credentials and academic appointments. Which as Carrier explains is self-fulfilling due to policing of academic...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
Note in particular from the chat transcript the analogy with the Cognitive Reflection Test, which illustrates the snap judgement tendencies of System 1, along with System 2's tendency to be...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
I'm surrounded by such folk.
Relatable! Particularly in the USA just now where such folk control all three branches of the Federal government.
Even when it...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 15 hours ago
I've (provisionally) concluded that the human species is like a shipwreck victim who drowns within sight of land, because they can't swim that last bit to reach safety. Science is getting...
Debunking Christianity: An AI model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down! · 16 hours ago