What is the equivalent of a bible basher...

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The whole Jesus Seminar is commonly regarded as a fringe group, one that puts stock in theories that the rest of the historical community (especially the secular historical communities that focus on Roman history) considers conspiracy theories. And what are conspiracy theories? Far too contrived to be considered rational. This whole movement to consider "Paul a gnostic", to put works that were authored hundreds of years later than their predecessors on the same pedestal, and to basically discard the NT altogether simply because of bias (even though historians actually have methods for figuring that in and can very well use the resources they are given to come to solid conclusions anyways), goes completely against the grain. They are the definition of a fringe group.

Both Dawkins and Sagan have/had foregone peer review for popular publishers in order to disperse their work. That is the definition of being on the fringe of the academic community. Your idea of well respected I am assuming stems from things like membership in an emeritus society? I say that because several members of Dawkins' own emeritus society criticize him regularly. Of course, I mentioned Sagan not because of his agnosticism but because of his militant stance against theists, treating religion like a disease in a similar manner to Dawkins and Hitchens.

And on the subject of physics and religion, let me draw up a few different surveys to give us an idea of the subject soon. But for the time being here are some prominent religious scientists, both in physics and fields like physiology.

Contemporary but dead (just a few):

Sir Robert Boyd
Richard Smalley
Mariano Artigas
Arthur Peacocke
Georges Lemaitre
John Billings
C.F. von Weizsäcker
Stanley Jaki
Allan Sandage
Ernan McMullin
Joseph Murray
Ian Barbour

Living (in biology):

Werner Arber
Robert T. Bakker
R.J. Berry
Francis Collins
Darrel R. Falk
Charles Foster
John Gurdon
William B. Hurlbut
Brian Kobilka
Denis Lamoureux
Noella Marcellino
Alister McGrath
Kenneth R. Miller
Simon C. Morris
William Newsome
Martin Nowak
Ghillean Prance
Joan Roughgarden

Living (in chemistry):

Gerhard Ertl
Henry F. Schaefer, III

Living (in physics and astronomy):

Charles Hard Townes
Antony Hewish
Antonino Zichichi
John Polkinghorne
Owen Gingerich
Russell Stannard
Michał Heller
Robert Griffiths
Joseph H. Taylor, Jr.
Colin Humphreys
Christopher Isham
Frank J. Tipler
J. Richard Gott
William Daniel Phillips
John D. Barrow
Stephen Barr
Karl W. Giberson
Andrew Pinsent
Jennifer Wiseman
Pamela Gay
Ard Louis
Don Page

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, I've only mentioned prominent names in science that are Christians. These Christians have posts at Princeton, Imperial College London, Brookhaven National Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Oxford, Tulane University, etc. Big names, big places. Christianity seems to be doing well in physics in particular with great minds like these, especially Barrow (who has some notable writings on the anthropic principle and the issue of teleology) and Louis (who has made some notable contributions to the BioLogos Forum).

Yes, there are Christian and Islamic and Jewish scientists (or whatever faith). But by your own "publish or shut up" standard the overwhelming majority aren't publishing or even writing on that subject. Those are just their personal views and most aren't bothered enough to engage on the subject in any format. It's also true that in today's world the highly educated are *less* likely to be theists than the general population. Something about the nature of the work attracts or creates such people.

As for the Jesus seminar, I only know some bare facts but Ehrman is critical of their conclusions. The fact is that scholars will always disagree on what Jesus did or did not say, which book are "forgeries" and the severity of the issue, where the interpolations are and which bits touch on the earliest traditions. A committee or seminar won't resolve fundamental disagreement. Didn't really work at Nicene either.

Everyone is a genius, just don't judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree.

Details please? Can you give a specific example? You haven't said anything more about this than you did in the post that I replied to and I doubt that anyone could of just come up to you out blue and and told you that your beliefs were virus if you had kept them to yourself. If you don't go around telling people what what your beliefs are then generally, they wouldn't know.



That's easy. Dawkins did not choose the title of that documentary. It was actually BBC's Channel4 (British TV channel that produced it) who insisted on the name simply to create controversy. Dawkins himself actually opposed the title because he thought it was a bit silly and that's why Channel4 made a concession by adding the question mark at the end.

If you look at the content of the second episode of the documentary "the Virus of Faith", you'd see that it's exactly what I said in the paragraph you quoted from me above. He was talking about religion as a meme. A meme is just an idea that spreads from person and religion is normally spread this way (regardless of what religion it is) to the children in a religious family from their parents. The term "virus" is just a metaphor referring to how a meme spreads, he wasn't actually calling religion a virus.



That is actually something that he said that was controversial even in the sceptic community, which he later apologised for. Nonetheless, there is such a thing as an irrational "fear of hell" or stygiophobia. It often happens to people who grow up in religious families where images of hellfire are drilled into, not so much in catholic families though.



Well, there is some debate on the gene centred view of evolution in the academic community and there may be other mechanisms for natural selection but that doesn't mean that the selfish gene theory is completely disproven. As far as I know, I haven't seen evidence that biologists have ruled out the selfish gene as one possible mechanism. The selfish gene-theory was actually proposed by other evolutionary biologists and only popularised by Richard Dawkins. He's science populariser, which means that he writes science books for the general public. Just because he has written a book about it, that does not mean that the book was meant to an academic work to be taken seriously as a primary source of information by other scientists and does not mean that he was publishing a book in order to circumvent peer review. His colleagues already knew about the theory because it was developed and published in peer review journals by the biologists W. D. Hamilton, Colin Pittendrigh and George C. Williams. The only reason for writing the book was to explain his field to non-scientists and non-experts who might nonetheless have an interest in his field. This is the same reason why Carl Sagan wrote popular level books, who despite what you have said in your previous posts, was actually a well-respected astronomer in academic circles.

As for Dawkins' academic papers, you can find a list of them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins_bibliography#Academic_papers

One more thing. When Dawkins is debating belief in God exists, then it's actually quite logical to be debating church elders (they are experts in the christian faith aren't they). If he's debating science in response to the critics of a gene centred view of evolution, then it's logical to debate other scientists. If he's debating creationists (which he no longer thinks are even worth debating), then obviously his opponents are going to be uneducated because there are no scientists or experts in the field who don't believe in evolution, or at least there is no serious debate in academic circles whether or not evolution is fact and "intelligent design theory" is scam. The sole reason for debating creationists is because they harm science education.



Are you an expert? You do know that Christianity only solidified in terms of what is today in the third century, right? Before that, there there were quite few competing sects in Christianity, including the gnostic sects which were later banned. Originally, Christianity was just a small sect of Judaism and it was during those first three centuries that it diverged from Judaism. In fact, any religious Jew at the time would not of accepted that Jesus was literally the son of God and even if you talk to any modern Jew today, would know that they would consider such an idea blasphemy. Due to that fact alone, it would not surprise me that at least this idea that Jesus was the literal Son of God rather than simply a prophet could of been borrowed from pagans during those first three centuries of Christianity's existence.



Ok.

Yeah, and from what Ive read many scholars do believe Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism during the exile. And there are scholars who believe that the bible contains restated Babylonian, Canaanite and Egyptian mythology as well. So any resistance to syncretism was not absolute.

You could argue that the backwater Jews that Jesus hung around with were not up to date on their Hellenistic mythology. Setting aside that they'd been living in the Hellenistic world for hundreds of years but maybe they were unwilling to use it. They could create a myth based purely on the adoption and elevation of their prophet without outside input. But the much later gospel writers were educated Hellenistic writers and they could do whatever they wanted with the story.

I have been engaged in conversation with students and professors at UOP, MJC, Berkeley, and several other universities near where I live. During these conversations in most occasions by far I didn't personally bring up the topic of religion, it was brought up by my peers who often discussed it just to bash on and insult the religious. And on some of these occasions I either indicate my own views (which in no way validates the idea that they aren't proselytizing or that I was doing it myself) or am asked about them. Normally when they learn that I am Christian they try to proselytize me, most often regurgitating the same tired points of how I believe in a "bronze age religion", and so on and so forth. I would give you a series of specific examples if I actually cared to remember times when atheists insulted me and tried proselytizing me. One instance in particular I can remember is when my friend Mitch from the anthropology department did this.



Yes, I have realized all along that Dawkins was referring to religion as a meme. What I was meaning to emphasize was his militant language and how he has used virus as a caustic expression, not just to refer to the way religion spreads but to illustrate that it is a spreading disease. I think that is supported quite well by his statements in that documentary, his statements in public, and his literary statements.



Regardless of there being such a thing, I wonder how atheists would take it if theists just went around saying "atheism is a virus of arrogance that makes pseudo-intellectual narcissists out of people". That wouldn't be very fair to atheists as a whole, and it would be consider caustic and militant, right? "Nonetheless", there is such a thing as narcissism and I've seen that trend in atheists. So it's tomAtoes and tomAHtoes here, friend, narcissism and stygiophobia. Neither is a fair stereotype and only "bashers" actually have to come up with such attacks to produce anything of note.



I wasn't referring to gene centered evolution in particular, however. What I was referring to was Dawkins' book the Selfish Gene Theory, and it's general reception by evolutionary biologists.



Church elders are people who have position in a hierarchy at a church. Dawkins should know well enough that that doesn't necessarily imply any credentials or even basic education on philosophy, religion, and science, especially considering the YEC people and other such folk he has debated with since he began using this standard. He has turned down a number of debates from leading scholars in Christianity, and has been criticized by members of his own emeritus society as a coward for refusing to debate Craig, Zacharias, Habermas, and other famous apologists. In fact, when asked why he was turning down debates with trained apologists and instead debating uneducated church elders and priests, he disparaged philosophers and said that he wouldn't debate them, basically saying in so many words that they were sophists.



Yes, I am. Not to say that I am any great man but I am an expert on 1st century history, and the anthropological study of middle eastern peoples. My degrees are in history, philosophy, and anthropology. At first during my post-grad studies when I went for my doctorate in history at UOP I focused on Rome from it's roots up to Constantine, and when I finished I had narrowed down my doctoral thesis to people living under Pax Romana during the 1st century, with a focus on interdisciplinary implications in understanding both historical texts and oral traditions, relying primarily on cultural anthropologists in the middle east. This was long before Kenneth E. Bailey wrote on informal oral tradition but there was still a healthy concept of haflat samar at the time.

Concerning the early creeds and councils of Christendom, I think that there is an alarming trend against appreciating the actual homogeneity that was present before the Nicene and which the Nicene council itself actually commented on. The simple existence of multiple sects, such as followers of Sabellius, Arius, Gnostics, Judaisers, etc. doesn't establish that there wasn't an established norm or that the Christian community at large hadn't made up it's mind concerning what was and wasn't apostolic material. The only such group that even came close to making up even a sizable minority amongst the early church were those who followed Arius before the Nicene council.

Your supposition that Jesus wasn't considered by the early church to be divine, most certainly doesn't stand up on "that fact alone", and even if it did have that grounding it wouldn't nearly pass muster when it comes to the practice of historiography. There is a difference between simply being educated to a certain extent and opinionated on the subject of how religious groups form and what history records, and actually applying the various principles of historiography as a litmus to your own assumptions.

Some examples of principles in this discipline: The principle of embarrassment. The principle of parsimony. The principle of derivation. The study of legendary details, their variety, and their rate of accumulation over time. The principle of similarity (a principle used in linguistic studies to support the idea that sources are closer to each other in time if they meet certain criteria), as evidenced by the use of cognate language and parallel instances of grammar that indicate quotations and translations. The principle of enemy attestation. The principle of multiple, independent testimony. The study of differences between hearsay and eyewitness testimony. The principle of literary anachronism, which is how we endeavor to keep ourselves in check when we make the error of injecting our own modern frame of reference into an ancient text, mistaking what the text says because of issues such as differences in culture, not recognizing and understanding ancient literary genres, etc. The study of author profiling and recognizing the author's audience, often referred to under the blanket study of textual criticism.

So suffice it to say that I am a little flabbergasted when folks just blithely say "you do know" this or that, making superficial references to very complex issues. I don't mean to come off in a condescending manner because my own mind isn't made up on these issues of early church history. But in spite of however condescending this may come off I do hope this helps to illustrate something: this is what I was getting at from the start, how that people have been coming to me, proselytizing and criticizing me for my beliefs when they are only superficially familiar with them. The mere fact that people say Christianity is a "bronze age religion", and that they compare Horus, Osiris, Mithra, Greek philosophy, Zoroastrianism, etc. to the OT and NT tends to betray a certain level of ignorance on the issue. As popular as it may seem, I rarely if ever read reputable papers that have radical ideas of syncretism in Abrahamic faiths and it is much more rare that I meet other historians who hold such views. And in all reality, the vast majority of such historians that I have read from and met have been historians who tend to focus on Abrahamic faiths in particular, not secular historians or historians who specialize in comparative religions and the study of syncretism. I'll elaborate some on why this is the case in my next post.

Name scholars, friend, and I'll go over their claims case by case if it would please you. "Many scholars" and "there are scholars who believe" doesn't establish the credibility of anything, that is just a particular form of the argumentum ad populum fallacy, a genetic fallacy that conflates people making arguments and the arguments themselves when it comes to assessing the arguments. In order to get anywhere we must argue against the arguments, not the man. The most credible and the least credible person can make the exact same statement, and base their conclusion, c, upon premises x & y. If premises x & y are valid and c follows from x & y either deductively or inductively then the conclusion is either probable or true. Whoever made the argument and however many people made it has nothing to do with the actual qualities of x, y, & c themselves. So I am going to extend this and emphasize that my expertise on a few relevant subjects here is not a qualifier for my arguments, and they should receive just the same scrutiny. You are my peers and I do not wish to condescend to you in any way. What I will do as it actually makes for entertaining discussion instead of arrogant browbeating, is discuss these issues with you folks as in-depth as you want, especially if it involves assessing original source material and applying academic rigor and discipline to both your claims and my claims concerning this. It should all be out in the air, I shouldn't expect anything I say to be taken for granted as true without me qualifying it, without me sourcing it.

Another issue we've got to get out of the way then is the idea that mere similarity implies syncretism. This idea has been an alarming trend lately in popular history, especially with the quacks that have been going on the history channel. In order for syncretism to occur, the receiving culture must actually not only come into contact but sufficient contact with the other culture, and it's cultural mores must allow for the intake and assimilation of such information to be acceptable. Now if you'd like to bring up some of those scholars I'd love to discuss in some more depth whether or not the Abrahamic religions, from Judaism to Islam, practiced radical syncretism as opposed to the more minimal levels of syncretism that are always present between cultures. Another two things worth noting on this topic: it has to be taken into account that ancient people were for the most part illiterate and they wouldn't have always easily accessed religious material from other cultures, and also it has to be taken into account that the mere similarity of religious symbols and ideas is not considered serious grounds for claiming that syncretism took place, as people can and have come up with novel concepts within their own cultures that coincidentally resembled concepts from others cultures, this is a widely observed phenomenon that extends beyond religion. There have been a range of multidisciplinary studies into the commonalities amongst humans and between different cultures, that can explain how we can come up with similar ideas to others without any input from them.

You asserted that Judaism showed "extremely strong trends against syncretism" and you provided no citations, evidence or arguments. But here's the thing: None were expected because it was in the context of a casual conversation. My comment was just to agree with Jono and add that views exist relating to Judaism's influences that were contrary to those you expressed. There was no burden on me to go into greater detail, as none had been upon you, and noting that other views exist is in no way a fallacy.



Well, yeah, to a conservative or evangelical Christian all similarities to other religions are simply instances of parallelomania. Of course to non-believers, and even some with faith, there are actual parallels that can't be dismissed that easily.



Define radical syncretism. Define minimal syncretism.



Yes, that will be your argument. That similarity is either coincidence or "minimal syncretism" of no importance whatsoever. As for the literacy of the common man, well, that's a good argument against the literacy of the followers of Jesus. But the priestly class would be literate. Thus, you know, the bible. If not we've got a real miracle on our hands.

It's also an unusual argument in that a recurring theme of the bible is the frustration of the Yahweh priests as they dealt with the return of the people (and some kings) to polytheism. Ezekiel walks out and finds women "weeping for Tammuz", a Babylonian god, on the steps of the temple. The women were very likely illiterate but they didn't read about other gods, they heard about them. Again and again the gods referenced are the gods of their neighbors.

So there are really two issues. The religion of the people, which both the biblical stories and archeological evidence have shown to be somewhat flexible, and the views of the priests. The views of the early priests can't be determined accurately since no Hebrew Bibles exist from before the Hellenistic period and archeology at the site of the Temple is not permitted. When it comes to the earliest priestly views all anyone can do is compare the current texts and the older myths.

I am a physicist. I was educated by physicists. I work with physicists. I belong to (and I am involved with) several physics professional societies. The majority are atheists. The only christian physicists I have met are all over the age of 40. You do realize that there are hundreds of thousands of physicists. I am supposed to be impressed with your little list? If you really want me to, I could do the same for prominent atheists in physics.

You could also make lists of scientologists in academia, but that doesn't mean scientology is flourishing in the scientific community.

And by the way, not getting a book peer reviewed means little, as much of what they use comes from their previous peer reviewed work to begin with. Peer review for a book takes a massive amount of time, and plenty of scientists forego the proccess for their books. Francis Collins is a Christian who has written non-peer reviewed book, but the scientific aspects are based on his peer reviewed work. That does not invalidate any of the scientific fact within.

You are free to believe what you want, but do not speak for myself or those I work with. If you want to know why there are so many ardent and angry atheists out there, go read your hostile posts again.