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The testimony of the NT writers

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
@Kenny this is what makes your latest source worthless:

Doctrinal Statement

"The final authority of our beliefs is the Bible, God’s infallible written Word, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe that the Bible was uniquely, verbally, and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that it was without error in the original manuscripts. It is the supreme and final authority in all matters on which it speaks (2 Tim 3:16,17; 2 Peter 1:21; 1 Cor 2:13, 10:11; John 10:35).

We explicitly affirm our belief in these basic Bible teachings:"

In other words "The Bible is right now matter what and we will not even consider anything to the contrary"

The site that you used disqualified themselves from rational debate by doing so. They made themselves untrustworthy.
 

Kenny

Face to face with my Father
Premium Member
It does not make me "happy". It just means that I am far more likely to be correct than you are.

If someone could only support the existence of the Tooth Fairy by referring to sites where one has to swear that the Tooth Fairy was real and the opponent only sites based upon observations which one would be more likely to be correct? Sites that support a person no matter what are worthless. I used to argue against AGW years and years ago. I never used the Kool Aid sites. I would get my ideas from scientists that were deniers and would use the peer reviewed papers that they cited. The problem was that those papers could be refuted. You use sites that only make claims. They do not provide evidence. There is no "there" there. And to make it worse they have to swear to ignore the evidence to the contrary.


That is conspiracy theorist territory that you are entering.
Please review:
#630
 

lukethethird

unknown member
I have covered that before.

I get tired of going over the presented argument again and again when you can just google it and see it for yourself.

It was substantiated with website and logical application of what evidence we do have.

Of course you can view it differently, but your view hasn't presented enough evidence to invalidate what I have given.

I haven't found anything that supports Matthew as a witness and obviously you have nothing to substantiate your hollow claim.
 

Kenny

Face to face with my Father
Premium Member
@Kenny this is what makes your latest source worthless:

Doctrinal Statement

"The final authority of our beliefs is the Bible, God’s infallible written Word, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. We believe that the Bible was uniquely, verbally, and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that it was without error in the original manuscripts. It is the supreme and final authority in all matters on which it speaks (2 Tim 3:16,17; 2 Peter 1:21; 1 Cor 2:13, 10:11; John 10:35).

We explicitly affirm our belief in these basic Bible teachings:"

In other words "The Bible is right now matter what and we will not even consider anything to the contrary"

The site that you used disqualified themselves from rational debate by doing so. They made themselves untrustworthy.
Shoot the messenger fallacy ... (a more modern way of saying it)

please review:
#630
 

SkepticThinker

Veteran Member
Plagiarism:
THE PRACTICE BEFORE THE 17TH CENTURY

Until the seventeenth century writers did not think twice about borrowing passages or themes from one another. As Thomas Mallon points out, the classical view prevailed. As iterated by Aristotle:"Imitation is natural to man from childhood [and] the first things that he learns come to him through imitation." No one, in other words, bothered with footnotes.

569

You can't use modern western thought on eastern 1 century culture and thought.
Uh no. Copying word for word is still copying word for word. Whatever century it may be. And it's a fairly clear indication that one was taken directly from the other, as in my example that you didn't even bother addressing. I mean, just saying "well everybody used to copy from everybody else" isn't an argument against obvious plagiarism. My point stands.
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
The Romans kept good records of their censuses. They would definitely keep good records of their largest census ever, but there is no record of an Empire wide census at that time. I can't find the source right now, but I do believe the first empire-wide census was done about 70 years later.

Second who crazy person would require people to go to their ancestral homes for a census? How would that allow them to be taxed?

#1 Times were different then, but I'll get to this point about requiring persons to return to place of birth for a census. Because it has to do with Quirinius and Herod, and that's a bit detailed.
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
"commonly". That is a big statement with no supportive documentation.

I had written, "You commonly commit logical fallacies." That's correct. I made a claim and didn't attempt to support it. Examples are coming.

Perhaps you also have been accused of logical fallacies?

Yes, in your last post to me, when you implied that I committed a straw man fallacy, and again in this reply where you imply an ad ignorantiam fallacy (coming up).

At this point... I think it is irrelevant to the real issues not to mention I don't want to go down that path - for time sake.

I had written, "Are you implying that you made a claim and I refuted something else? If so, what was the claim and where is it (post number)? I'd like to review it and my response. And if you can't do that, isn't it you that's introducing the straw man here?"

So, I must accept your position because there isn't (in your opinion) enough evidence?

You responded to, "Again, so what? Also, with these alternate sources for Matthew and Luke, we don't know that they didn't just make it up themselves when text in their Gospels appears nowhere else. And even if they didn't, we would have no way of corroborating most of those claims."

No. You can just disregard it, but I doubt that you can successfully rebut either sentence. Can you falsify either claim? I think that if you comment at all, you're forced to either agree with them or dismiss them with the wave of a hand.

Watch out for the appeal to ignorance fallacy.

That was also in response to that same comment. I didn't see such a fallacy. Do you know what an as ignorantiam fallacy looks like? It's basically saying that if something hasn't been shown to be correct, it is incorrect (or the opposite - if one can't disprove a claim, it is correct). We see it when creationists, for example, argue that if the evolutionary path from arboreal ape to man hasn't been elucidated yet, it didn't happen, or that if one can't prove that an intelligent designer wasn't involved, one was. Do you see an example of that in there?

These are the kinds of mistakes that you make that undermine your criticism of critical thinking. I don't expect you to go learn that material - how to identify and name fallacies - but you could help yourself by recognizing that you fall short as you have a few times in these last few exchanges.

You committed the ad hominem fallacy of attacking the messenger instead of dealing with the issue that was talked about.

Did he? He wrote, "You were too lazy to find a scholastic source and you accuse me of not using elbow grease." The ad hominem fallacy is that an argument is incorrect because of some character defect in the source. He's telling you that your source wasn't a qualified source. But what he is not telling you is that that makes its conclusions false. He's telling you that he'snot interested in such opinions, not that they are incorrect.

One might also call it the genetic fallacy: "Basing the truth claim of an argument on the origin of its claims or premises." But it's not that, either. It's not a counterargument to the claim, just an unwillingness to consider it because of its source. And you might find that thinking flawed. You implied that he needed to address the source's claim whatever the source, but I disagree. The source needs to be a trusted source that shares the values and methods of academia.

Somebody once showed me a creationist argument against human evolution from other apes. The argument was that all existing great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but man has only 23 pairs, and could not have had a 24-pair ancestor that lost a whole chromosome without dying. If one evaluates only the argument provided, he probably won't find the flaw in it. Much better to go to a scientific teaching source, where one would never see an argument as dishonest as that one, where people who share one's agenda, values, and methods write to those wishing to understand, not a site whose authors' agenda is to promote their religion using any method they think will do that.

So, I just don't go to such sites for anything and would steer others away as well, not because I know that every claim is wrong, but because I don't trust the source. Yes, man only has 23 pairs of chromosomes, and yes, a chromosome dropout mutation would be lethal, and fact-checking those claims would reveal that they are both correct, but that's not what happened, and nobody is going to figure that out without an understanding of human chromosome 2, which won't be revealed either by fact-checking the premises of reviewing the validity of the reasoning provided. Once again, the claim is not that the argument is wrong because it comes from a creationist, but that the argument shouldn't be trusted because the source isn't honest.

This is also my answer to those who want to send me to conservative indoctrination site, who share the same methods and values as the creationist sites - to convince others to support their agenda by any means that might work however dishonest.
 
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Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
#1 Times were different then, but I'll get to this point about requiring persons to return to place of birth for a census. Because it has to do with Quirinius and Herod, and that's a bit detailed.


"Times were different back then" is hardly a valid argument.

[/quote]
Researching this though at wikipedia, it says in part, (birth of Jesus) "Both [accounts] agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the reign of King Herod, that his mother was named Mary and that her husband Joseph was descended from King David (although they disagree on details of the line of descent), and both deny Joseph's biological parenthood while treating the birth, or rather the conception, as divinely effected.

I don't see that the two accounts disagree as far as the lineage goes. One speaks of Joseph's lineage, the other of Mary's lineage. They don't "disagree." I won't go into further detail at this moment. (They don't DISAGREE, they give two lines of descent, mother and father, even though Joseph was NOT his biological father, a very important detail regarding the Christ, but he WAS considered Jesus' father by category, just as a father who adopts a child is legally but not biologically the father.) Joiseph took the position of being father on earth to Jesus, and husband to Mary.[/quote]

They disagree on the lineage because if you check those out they do not agree with each other. The "Mary's lineage" argument is not even biblical because both accounts state that they are Joseph's lineage. It is merely a weak excuse. In fact in the past it was switched as to whose lineage was whose. Do you need quotes from the Bible? I will gladly provide them if needed. Neither one claims to be Mary's lineage. Both claim to be Joseph's lineage.
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
from wiki
Herod
Born c. 72 BCE
Idumea, Hasmonean Judea
Died March–April 4 BCE (Schürer) or January–April 1 BCE (Filmer)
Jericho, Judea

I'm guessing 1 BCE favours Christian views.
On to a neighboring point, the history of Rome is interesting, although in the U.S. we don't study it as much as just mentioning it in history classes. In general. Unless a person takes a course in Roman history, which I did not. However, it is interesting and contingent to an extent on its effect to Jerusalem and Jewish culture. And world civilizations. One quote from the World History Encyclopedia explains about the importance of the Roman Senate, "Roman Senate - World History Encyclopedia" I don't know that much about Roman, but it is intriguing especially in regard to the mention of Quirinius in the scriptures.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
How about addressing the point instead of ignoring it and waiving it away, as you've done here?
He does not appear to be able to.

Sadly he does not even seem to understand how he could possibly use his bogus sites to help him. Those sites because of their obvious bias are not trustworthy. But he could use them for a source of ideas and see if those ideas are supported by history based sites. The problem with that, at least it was shown in an earlier discussion when I did his homework for him, was that the history based sources showed that his sites distorted what historians were saying. I am refusing to do that for him again.
 

lukethethird

unknown member
On to a neighboring point, the history of Rome is interesting, although in the U.S. we don't study it as much as just mentioning it in history classes. In general. Unless a person takes a course in Roman history, which I did not. However, it is interesting and contingent to an extent on its effect to Jerusalem and Jewish culture. And world civilizations. One quote from the World History Encyclopedia explains about the importance of the Roman Senate, "Roman Senate - World History Encyclopedia" I don't know that much about Roman, but it is intriguing especially in regard to the mention of Quirinius in the scriptures.
Yes, history of Rome is interesting but I am not well educated on the subject other than my own self re-education. When it comes to history in general I find a need to re-educate myself. Thank goodness for all the information we now have at our fingertips.
 
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