Beauregard Bottomley
Chesterton believes the following:
Humans could not have possibly evolved from apes since humans aren't apes and things must always be what they are. Evolution is impossible therefore God of the Bible is the only God.
Sin is real and we can't avoid sin and we require forgiveness just for being sinful humans and it is up to us to seek forgiveness from imaginary beings.
Magic, mysticism, and meaning are necessary and must come from outside of us. Magic requires a conjurer and fables give our life its meaning. Chesterton learned everything he ever needed from his early fairly-tales. Jordan Peterson believes the same today.
Miracles are real and ongoing. Martyrs are necessary and prove the paradox of human existence. The white western European proves their superiority and demonstrates God's Christian Grace upon the real-Christians of the world.
Religions all suck except for his version of Christianity while Quakers and Buddhist have it backwards and wrong. Nietzsche doesn't understand anything which is obvious from all these mischaracterizations Chesterton provides.
Chesterton would have been wiser to have remained silent than poorly justifying why he believes. If I said those things he said, I would laugh at myself. Evangelical Christian apologist still defend their weird-world-view spouting the same tired tropes. Chesterton can make a better case by being less judgmental towards non-Christians and demonstrate kindness, tolerance and acceptance and argue that is what he means by his version of religion. He doesn't in this book, but he does in the “Father Brown” series.
In this book ten creepy Nazis got to justify and defend their atrocious beliefs and behavior and not even one thought they did wrong. We are so doomed as Americans.
We get the government we deserve. MAGA is never wrong they can always blame someone for when they get it wrong. I laugh when people say ‘Americans are better than the Nazis and there is nothing to worry about.' Southerners justified slavery; Germans justified race purity. The privileged justify their superiority at the expense of the non-privileged. The Bible endorses slavery, genocide and misogynism, white evangelicals support Trump at 82% level for a reason.
The ten Nazis know the Jew can't be trusted and it wasn't 6 million murdered it was only 1 million according to them and far more Germans died, they didn't lose the war since they were betrayed, Hitler was right except there weren't enough true believers, the Russians were worse meaning the Germans weren't guilty.
MAGA believes what they are told and for them vaccines don't work, Trump won in 2020, tariffs aren't taxes, windmills are useless, Hitler made some good points, and transgender people can't possibly exist. Ideology trumps science, and atrocities are justified if it makes them feel good. Feelings matter when it justifies hate. The ten Nazis would fit right in to Trumpism.
Indifference is contributing to the secularization of society. Society is becoming more secular and the authors give a master class in why that is happening.
Unfortunately, anecdotal shapes reality: people will say things like ‘a football player got a heart attack a week after getting a covid vaccine, therefore vaccines are dangerous,' or ‘I heard a nurse tell a friend that a Covid vaccine was dangerous.' These are anecdotes about the world that re-enforced a person's priors. The problem, of course, anecdotes can mislead. That's where a fact-based story with convincing narratives come in handy. I harp on the efficacy of covid vaccines because I had never seen a more well-designed statistical experiment than the certification of the early covid vaccinations.
Rigorous data analysis using context, contrast and relations is the best way to understand the world. All other approaches are just feelings, the best stories we tell about the world use facts and rigorous data analysis as their guide. Science is beautiful to behold and this sociological approach does it right and gives compelling conclusions. I suggest the reader just sit back and watch the process unfold and note how the authors derive their conclusions.
I did not know South Korea was no longer hyper-religious, and the decline in the USA is real and on-going. Indifference will make Christians crawl into their own caves and just disappear by everyone else saying ‘who cares.' I find that appealing. 82% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. The sooner the MAGA base disappears the better.
There's a way to use statistics correctly and the authors tell the story that the statistics are saying while covering the context, contrast, and relations.
Even when a presumption of truth of the NT is assumed the incoherence of the beliefs come through. Prophecies are not fulfilled when they're thrust into a non-existent spiritual world or into a future date yet to be determined. This author gave me insight into Revelations, Paul is the stranger who spread the false doctrines the author of Revelations warns against. The NT ignores and misquotes the OT while justifying itself through its own lens. What a messed-up system people stumble into.
An eclectic set of essays covering a wide range of topics including politics, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, language theory, culture, vaccine denialism, Trump stupidity, action theory and each covered mostly with a Hegelian Marxist slant.
“Your opinion is subjective, my opinion is objective,” and “in the beginning was the deed, not the word.” Those are two Hegel like sentiments that appear often in these essays. Hegel is never far from the central point in any of the essays.
The author with his Marxist perspective at times would remind me of the Marxist Lefebvre's wonderful three volume work “Critique of Everyday Life” where there is an unfolding of a regret that Hegelian Marxist thought has slowly disappeared and to save the theory the world needs to be reconceptualize through its opaque glasses.
Blunden (the author) surprised me with trying to save his Marxist perspective by appealing to Alasdair MacIntire's return to virtue. I really didn't like MacIntire's book “After Virtue,” and I describe him as a conservative who thinks all value systems after Aristotle have been wrong except when they have been slightly modified through a lens of Christian thinkers like Aquinas or Jane Austin and according to him, we should return to Aristotelian values and the world would be better. Conservatives are weird.
Psychological developmental stages in infants to adults, deaf children in Nicaragua, alienation and exploitation of workers, humans' evolutionary development into upright creatures and many other various topics all have a basis in Hegel's dialectic system and the author connects the abstract to the concrete back to the abstract giving meaning to the being back to its essence, after all ‘your opinion is subjective, and my opinion is objective', or ‘the deed comes before the word.'
Paul's writes in one of his seven authentic letters ‘Christ died for our sins according to scripture.' I have always had a problem by what that meant, and Carrier reinforces my trouble with that phrase.
Carrier will say Paul is probably using an esoteric reading of sacred documents and applying his ‘pesher' on to it. According to Paul ‘Christ appeared to 500 at the same time.' That would easily be performed by a celestial being and Carrier's thesis makes Jesus celestial, spiritual, or as I like to say imaginary.
An apologist will always put on his holy-spirit decoder ring and say otherwise. So, for those who already believe as believers no convincing would be possible. The burden is on the claimant who makes the statement that 500 saw Christ at the same time. Tell me how that happened if it wasn't imaginary.
Carrier doesn't get too far ahead of his argument and he uses nuance when appropriate. He stays away from a formal Bayesian analysis and describes the world as it really was. The Bible writers were primitive people and believed absurd things just as evangelical Christians do today.
The messiah was to come through the seed of David and there was always going to be an anointed king on his throne except there wasn't. To make that prophecy true Paul could have made Jesus rule in heaven and made his kingdom celestial, a spiritual imaginary kingdom, and it would only take a ghostly visitation or two to convince him that was true.
The Gospel writers come latter and the writer of Mark does his best to return Christ back down to earth, and the other Gospel writers spin the story from there.
Paul's Jesus is not an earthly Jesus for him. The Archons of this eon (possibly: the celestial rulers of the world) is what Paul refers to while the early church fathers argue against that framing. In the “Ante-Nicene Fathers Volume I,” they warn against Docetism (Jesus only appeared to be bodily) and Gnostics (Truth is inherently known), the early church fathers made sure they argued against the gnostic ‘archons of this eon,' and the only gospel they had was the good news according to Paul and they use their holy spirit decoder ring to re-orient Jesus back down to earth by mocking Docetism.
Mohammad did not reveal Islam; The angel Gabriel gave it to Mohammad so Gabriel revealed it. Joseph Smith did not reveal Mormonism. The angel Moroni gave it to Smith so Moroni revealed it. Carrier argues persuasively that Christianity was given through an angelic Jesus to earthlings of this eon through celestial means. Paul's seven authentic letters seem to indicate that.
Carrier's book “On the Historicity” irritated me because of his Bayesian non-sense. This book strips out that mode of thinking and develops a pretty good theory on what really happened. His other book of his I read “Sense and Goodness without God” lacked depth and was overall superficial towards the nature of science.
Carrier finds the sweet spot with this book and gives a good alternative explanation to what could have happened. Peter could have been the first recipient of a celestial Jesus and then Paul runs with that and Mark humanizes Jesus making him Christ in the process.
Sturgeon's law is 90% of everything is crap, and it's clear from this book that 90% of generative AI is crap, and that 99.9% of predictive AI is worse than crap.
Harari's “Nexus' is the perfect illustration for the crap book on AI, and this book falls into the not-crap camp.
AI can be useful. Humans don't need AI to do bad, but it helps hide their complicity behind clever programming.
Our relationships make us human. The story works even if you did not know who Elvis is.
There is a rot within the world and the unfettered greed of the oligarchs lead to pain and suffering. Lisa Marie after having twins was prescribed opioids and became addicted. Doctors, pharmacies and Krogers in Kentucky (today a $110 million lawsuit settled) all greedily participate.
We all just want to experience life, but the world we are thrown into distracts us from actively engaging in our authentic interpretation.
Richard Carrier goes too far and Bart Ehrman doesn't go far enough. This book hits that sweet spot between the two scholars. David Fitzgerald, also, hovers in that sweet spot in his books “Jesus: Mything in Action.”
Reindeer can't fly. I can't prove that statement. Jesus is made up. I can't prove that statement. The burden of proof is on the one who makes the assertion: the one who says Reindeer can fly, or Jesus is real. This book clearly lays out a strong foundation that an earthly Jesus might not be real. The burden of proof has not been met on whether Jesus was a real person.
The author states in his summary that: “The facts are, that the theology underpinning the HB (Hebrew Bible) opposes everything the NT (New Testament) stands for.” Facts don't matter for the religiously inclined. The lens of truth goes through their certainty that Jesus is savior and all facts for them must align through that presupposition. In Aramaic and Hebrew Jesus means savior. The savior was a given for the early Greek Gospel writers, but the author shows that there doesn't have to be an actual person there for the concept to become accepted.
I used to wonder why we couldn't have the cool Greek pagan religions in modern times. This book shows to me that we do and we just call it Christianity and base it on a mythical savior that we call Jesus. Jesus is savior literally means savior is savior and is a tautology.
Martin Heidegger breaks the world up into present-at-hand, ready-at-hand, and Dasein (being human, taking a stand on our own understanding about the world). For him, foundational to our world is ‘care' and it is weighted by what we think we are becoming that we aim for and that gets weighted by our past that gets actualized through our present understanding.
We are always going to believe based on the lens we see the world with. Christians see the world through the NT, Mormons see it through the Book of Mormon, Muslims through the Koran. Facts don't matter for those who have feelings determining their truths. Nietzsche warns that we use the perspective that subsumes the most truths and that we actively engage in interpreting our meaning. Nietzsche's admonition is anti-thetical to those who outsource truth to a book of claims without facts.
This book was a delightful read and gave a good overview on how myths become fact and shows the inherent truth within the last line in the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.'
The author writes one of my all-time favorite sentences when he talked about the forced labor of indigenous South Americans by the Spanish: “Ironically, the effort to relieve the labor shortage by importing Negro slaves from Africa simply compounded the problem by introducing African diseases also.” The value of history books is not the history they are telling, but how they tell the history. Dissect that sentence the author wrote and you will get a sick 1963 way of not only blaming the chattel slaves imported from Africa but also demonstrating how the indigenous people would have been better as slaves than allowing imported slaves to replace them.
H. G. Welles wrote a better world history book with his “Outline of History” from 1919. McNeill frames his story within the first few pages by justifying permanent patriarchy through evolutionary certainties and defining civilization through expertise and specialization within cities making for progress through civilizations. Welles warned against ignorance, superstitions and the privileged classes perpetuating their privileges for themselves, while McNeill frames the world as barbarians verse the civilized with their superior values and character.
McNeill assures the reader that Moses really existed and he thinks ordered civilized people need ideological superstitions to prevent the chaos of barbaric peoples. I loved it when he said ‘the war-like barbarians from the south' started invading China, as if human groups have ever not been ‘war-like.' Later, in the history he will say ‘the war-like peoples' because by that time they are no longer barbarians. The Brits, for example, have always been ‘war-like' but McNeill never calls them that.
McNeill falsely thinks there is a meta-narrative to be had in his history. That is, he thinks there is a universal story about the story within a world history. There is not. “The Dawn of Everything” written in 2021 understands that there is not a meta-narrative to be had while telling history, and it is a better world history book than this book.
McNeill loses his perspective during his modern history part of the book. He knows the end point and forces the conclusion onto his story as he's telling the story as if the superiority of the West over the rest of the world was a given. From a 1963 perspective it would have seem so, but as history is unfolding the survivors aren't known until after the fact.
This is a good history survey book, but it is even a better history book about the history of 1963 and illustrates how myopic a historian could have been. Blaming chattel slaves for exterminating indigenous peoples as the author did could only be written in 1963.
The author is a “recovering Egyptologist.” The first step necessary in solving a problem is to admit you have a problem and that you don't need a higher power to solve it. The monsters that we've created is of our own making and it is the myth that we ourselves enable.
The monsters need our worship to exist. Patriarchy, absolutism, racism, vaccine denialism and nationalism don't exist in vacuums. The author relates all those ideologies to the “Great” Egyptian Pharaohs.
Monotheism leads to an us verse them mentality and quickly enables a Shibboleth, the Pharaohs use the superstitious nonsense to control and create their preferred realities thus falsely empowering the people while really enslaving them to the will of oligarchies and false prophets.
Mary Beard (who is mentioned in the blurb on this book) mentioned in “SPQR” that she finally realized that Roman History is only justified because it was fun to study and that we really don't know why Caesar Augustus did what he did and we just act like we do. Edward Said in “Orientalism” showed how everything most of the experts think they know about is crap and becomes nothing more than self-reinforcing subjective non-sense. Kara Cooney in this book knows the trap and warns the reader that our myth makers of history worship the monster-makers and they are at their best when they see the history through the lens that created them.
The modern world is not immune from the propaganda that enslaves us while pretending to empower us. Vaccine deniers are denying science as they search Qanon conspiracies on their Iphones. Patriarchy is threatened as women realize their inherent worth, LBGT humans no longer need deny their own identity because the self-appointed privileged class thinks theirs is the only identity, and thankfully, it is only a few Christian apologists who are only talking among themselves defending biblical slavery as reasonable. Nationalism needs hate of evil imaginary others to thrive and is entwined in evangelical certainty that becomes less certain as the internet quickly shows that evolution by natural selection is a damn good theory, and those biblical prophecies about a coming messiah don't align with Jesus. A rump of people still ‘lay hands on to' Trump, but they scare me for their idiocy, they worshipped the Pharoah in 1250 BC, today they worship Trump and the oligarchs.
Kara Cooney writes a book that connects the old to the modern and that only a ‘recovering Egyptologist' would be capable of writing. History is the story we provide to the anecdotes of the past while creating a meta-narrative that we pretend must be true. There is no story about the story, just the stories we pretend to believe in. This book warns us of our present by connecting the past to today.
This is an easily digestible book providing a chronological development to a syncretic system of belief. The authors live in a demon haunted world and Paul sets the ball in motion with his letters and his not of this world visitations.
Docetism (belief that Jesus was not physical) gets shut down by the early church fathers and make Gnosticism anathema. It is as if the early Church Fathers had a competition between spiritual Gods not of this earth, and they do their best to make the story about earthly Gods intersecting with reality. The early writers accept Paul's tall tales as the real Gospel and they don't yet have the other Gospels until Justine's time. Paul's Jesus is not of this world and the early writers return Him back to earth.
Judas blew up to the size of a gate and stinks to this day and his eyes are so big that they can't be seen and you can see for yourself according to one of the writers. The truth hasn't yet been written down in the four Gospels and Paul's assertions are assurance enough and the Biographer Luke in Acts has an exploding Judas while another Gospel has a hanged Judas as he tells his story about Paul, Peter, and the Holy Spirit by combining Paul's spiritual Jesus with Peter's earthly Jesus and having the Holy Spirit interacting with the world. These writers aren't quite in agreement whether miracles are still active in the Church.
The Jews are naifs according to Justine. Can't they see the messiah was clearly predicted. Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey as Zachariah said the messiah would, and ‘the Lord said to my Lord' means the messiah was foretold with the coming of Jesus. Ignore the part about being a king and triumphant against Judah's enemies. Moses held up a snake towards heaven and that points directly to Jesus rising from the dead, and Jonah was three days in the belly of the whale just as Jesus visited hades after he died fighting over Moses' bones. It's obvious, according to Justine, can't those close-minded Jews not see the connections and Justine's books prove he must be right and they are wrong. Jordan Peterson, not quite a Christian apologist, but, rather a myth apologist, dwells on these exact points proving that Jungian Archetypes are real in his latest book which I had unfortunately just read.
By 180 AD Irenaeus uses written authority of others to show his truth and deny other beliefs. After all, Jesus said through his apparition to Paul ‘it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.' That quote is in this book and it's from Acts (King James version), a work of fan-fiction. The Gnostics with their Aeons, preroma, Sophia (wisdom), demiurge synthesis can't be true since Jesus spoke directly to his Father on the cross and predicted his own destruction and the temple, at least writers will at times argue by quoting the NT before it became the NT.
The depth of apologia is at the same level as I hear today. Today's Christian defenses get glossed over by 2000 years of muddle and it's easy to think they must be right in their incoherence because how else could no one seen through the crap, it must be true. Though, when you see the same poorly constructed arguments in their original form it strains credulity.
That reminds me, Justine had some good Platonic necessary God arguments and one substance for reality and that reality is God the creator. If you read a hundred years later, you'll get Plotinus and his better formed more coherent system with the One. I would say that Augustine will take these early fathers, and mix them with Plato and Plotinus and he creates a theology that lasts from 400 AD to 1100 AD.
Paul's Jesus gets reimagined as one reads this book. By the end, Irenaeus will have Jesus threatening us non-believers with a lake of fire in some distant future, and dwelling on what 666 means ignoring that it revealed to Nero. The world gets understood through the context of one's time and myths become truths when we forget the chronology and context of what transpired.
This book is a fun read and the mystic-world with demons and out of this world visitations and miracles become sane to the writers while the pagan myths get replaced by their certainties. The recoding of myths to truth becomes fascinating to behold and I am struck wondering how I never became a believer of these wonderous Gods (father, son, and holy ghost). After all Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and these authors repeatedly assure me of such.
Tabor knocks it out of the park. He is a Christian, yet gets the reality of what happened. Paul of Tarsus and the Book of Acts shaped Western Civilization more so than most people realize.
Paul and his seven authentic letters state what he believed and experienced, and the Book of Acts for me is nothing but fan-fiction while Tabor takes it as depicting a reality of sorts.
Tabor understands that there is a tension within the New Testament between earthly Jesus and heavenly Christ. The NT is best read in the chronological order that it was composed and Tabor lends his expertise to that.
Tabor did one thing that surprised me. He put the Epistle of Hebrews later than I thought it belonged. I checked wiki and it tended to affirm my position, Tabor is a specialist and I'll go with his expertise. Also, when I re-read the NT, there is always one thing that stands out Hebrews is the most ‘polished and eloquent' as wiki says and the most philosophically coherent as I would say. It's obvious that it wasn't written by Paul since Paul's letter s are never eloquent and at best are philosophically juvenile, just read them for yourselves.
Paul and Hebrews make Jesus not earthly but a Christ of another world, a spiritual world, or one could say a heavenly world. Acts (Luke) reshapes Paul and makes Paul allies with the Jerusalem Church (Peter, James, John). Paul mocks them in his authentic writings as so-called apostles or super-apostles. They are at cross purposes and are not harmonizable unless the differences are glossed over.
Paul's Christ gets revisualized by the Gospels. For Paul as Tabor points out ‘gospel' meant Paul's affirmations. The four Gospels take that to mean ‘good news' for Christians. Paul says ‘Christ was resurrected according to scripture', yet the NT didn't exist and the OT doesn't have a resurrected figure who forgives sins. Taking out the chronological time-line of date of writing as the NT does, perverts the meaning for what is going on theologically. Tabor provides the correct chronological order and interpretation.
Tabor puts the real story about the story back into what is really happening. I'm currently reading the Ante-Nicene Father's early writings and something stuck-out in relation to this book. The early Church fathers are fighting against the ghost of Docetism (Christ is spiritual and only appeared physical) since they need to reshape the Church as part of reality while at the same time, they need Paul's certainty in Christ such that they create their version of Jesus Christ which remains with us today.
Tabor doesn't mention but Elaine Pagels does in her book “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations” the author of Revelations tries to undo Paul's teachings as much as possible while mostly speaking of a spiritual realm with a Christ who is anti-thetical (promising a ‘lake of fire') to the Gospels.
There is one criticism I would heap at this book. Tabor tries to defend Paul's tolerance for slavery. There is no earthly way I could excuse the divine for allowing slavery which means they can not only beat you at will but can rape your mother, sister, daughter or even your brother if you are slaves. Apologists just need to say it is wrong and admit that context doesn't justify such cruelty and perhaps their God is not real.
The author shows that there is no reason to fabricate a new Jesus when his own fabricated Jesus proves the others are wrong. I always hate when authors sneak in the Book of Acts and the Book of Daniel and pretend they are anything but fan-fiction as this author does. The author is so deep into the Bible as reliable history that he doesn't realize that his argument are ultimately ‘the bible says so therefore it is true.'
Are all Christian apologists' book as weak as this one? I keep searching and find nothing but rubbish.
The author possesses a cornucopia of misdirection through nonsensically creating make-believe certainties about the present by twisting myths from the past while defending vile and juvenile non-sense.
His beliefs on women's proper role were a hoot and wouldn't pass the sanity level of a fifth grader. Peterson weaves a spool of nonsense by connecting Adam's Eve and her desires to Cain's disobedience through the Whore of Babylon from Issaiah and Revelations representing the non-submissiveness of an inerrant women to how today's woman doesn't know herself hence her proper place is to serve her man thus making her equal to her place in society by what the masculine desires. It is nonsense and spoken with a straight face by the author. According to him, women should know their place and that place is to serve men since that benefits them most of all and their agency is subservient to men's desire since a women's desire subsumes that. Peterson does have that non-sense explicitly throughout this book especially the first half.
The author's Biblical exegesis stumbles through his reliance on his peculiar meta-narratives. He claims a mystical certainty in Carl Jung's collective unconsciousness for the grounding of his twisted truths. Peterson is disparaging towards atheists while fabricating his nebulous collective unconsciousness spirituality and making that part of his spirituality or divineness. For example, he'll absurdly connect Moses holding his staff while destroying Amalekites with the certainty that the individual makes the whole as represented by the staff pointing up and we must therefore be true to our traditions and that brings order and that led to the 10th amendment reserving the powers to the people of the United States to its individual states. Peterson has a holy-spirit decoder ring that maps on to a peculiar weird-view of the world through his unique interpretations of myths and for him their inherent locus of universal truth. Peterson channels the logos and adopts Philo's stance, and I note that only because in the complete works of Philo of Alexandria I noticed Philo does the same kind of myth re-interpretations that Peterson does. Both have their end point they start with and use the myths to prove their non-sense.
Moses having snakes jump out mystically related to Jesus arising from the cross and that proved the divine nature of the Bible or the archetypal necessity of myths as patterns of the world, at least that's what Peterson promised he would show proving his divine universal through archetypes. I waited for Peterson to connect the dots and close the circle but he didn't.
Peterson shares the 10 commandments and didn't realize the irony when he mentioned that ‘thou should not covet thy neighbor's ass, wife or slave' and then said the next set of laws dealt with property rights. Come on, God made women as property and slaves are okay if you don't covet them. The 10th commandment is about property rights and mind control.
Peterson constantly warns against tyranny. That's nice. His stance against women knowing their place is tyrannical. Moreover, he preaches reverence for tradition, order and submission and warns against the fringe as dangerous. It's the same argument that people used to say against homosexuals and how they would be disruptive in the army. It's just an argument that the self-identified privileged class appeals to when they perceive that others might benefit contra to their imaginary mythical religious certainties while they used their tradition and mythical order to justify their hate. Today almost everybody doesn't care about homosexuals in the army and that position is no longer fringe; it's mainstream. Peterson shuts down any dissent from his myth-based certainties by labeling others as fringe.
Nobody really needs a holy spirit Jungian decoder ring for reading myths. Peterson's re-interpretations at times are vile or at best juvenile. Read the stories yourself and provide your own perspective. Peterson in this book says that morality is not possible without the proper imprinting of those myths on to your heart. Peterson warns against Nietzsche's nihilism, but Peterson twists what Nietzsche is getting at, never outsource your reality to a book and exercise your will-to-power by actively engaging your own interpretation. Peterson has a twisted weird-view. Though, it's clear that his system will collapse on its own and he presents his arguments so poorly I would recommend this book for everyone to see how weak his positions are. He's trying to save the Bible not theologically, but psychologically thus marginalizing the Bible religiously and his female inferiority stance highlights his vileness.
Peterson claims he is anti-post-modernist while creating his own meta-narrative based on his wanting of how society should be. His myths and their inherent truths as wanted by him are the correct myth's interpretations since they work for him. Peterson wrestles with God while replacing the God certainty with his Jungian non-sense and defends vile and juvenile weird-views. Peterson is a post-modernist in search of his own meta-narrative that he calls myth. There is no story about the story of the world we live in and Peterson is just making stuff up and calling it truth therefore he claims he is not a post-modernist.
We use are present reality to adjust for how we understand the past and the creators of that reality did the same. There is a recursive reliance that all history relies on to reach its truth, and by the time it gets handed down to us, it is up to us to remove those recursive glasses we see the world with.
Fitzgerald removes our recursive reliance on systematic revisionist history regarding the development of Christianity and gives a reasonable interpretation to Christianity's development. The story is just as easily explained with or without an earthly man named Jesus, or as he quotes Bart Ehrman a few delusional visions by no more than three people would be enough to explain the story.
I just recently read two overly long dull books and not very convincing on the necessity of the resurrection, one by Habermas and the other by Licona. They both needed to address but didn't the reality present in this book.
Hebrews and Paul have a supernatural Jesus in a spiritual world and only revisionist thinking undoes that interpretation. The single most destructive fantasy book ever is the Book of Acts. To read it is to see its nonsense and Habermas and Licona assume its validity based on nothing but their feelings since it allows them to prove their presuppositions recursively.
There are no Jesus color glasses that we can wear that makes the NT cohere when we don't recursively presuppose our conclusions Fitzgerald looks at the chronological presentation of the NT forcing the religious propaganda into its proper shape.
The Bible creators were smart to make Matthew the first book in the Bible even though it comes after Acts, Hebrews, and Mark chronologically. I'm irritated at myself that I used to think the Civil War was about state rights and Southern honor because we always see history with recursive lenses and when those glasses were removed, I now know it was about slavery. When the Jesus glasses are removed the mystery cult and magic become what they really are. Fitzgerald helps one remove those Jesus glasses.
I don' like the way the author hid behind the word ‘caste.' Bigots, racists, patriarchists, Christianists, nationalists (fascists), anti-rationalists, homophobes, anti-trans each seemed more succinct and appropriate appellations than the word caste. Hitler said his brand of socialism was racism. MAGA makes the non-self-appointed privileged class the default identity and caste identification does that. There is no reason to hide behind that word just call them the hateful epitaph that they are.
This book is four years old and the bigotry is clearer today. The author didn't mention transphobia or homophobia, that's understandable, and she had no way of knowing that the MAGA Republicans in the House would force a trans-woman congresswoman to use the male bathroom (12/24). They're just hateful people. Call them the bigots that they are. How will people know what my birth sex is unless they look at my genital or birth certificate? It's a losing issue for the MAGA haters so let them show their idiocy in the process.
At the heart of many of the stories the author told there was Christian tom-foolery. The Austin bomber was a ‘conservative Christian', the KKK is a Chrisitan organization, the Mormons anti-black stance is Bible based (‘curse of ham'). There is a reason why 82% of evangelical white Christian support Trump. The author noticed that evangelical churches are more interested in politics than theology. It's hard to hate homosexuals if you aren't taught to first ‘hate the sin, not the person' as the Bible dictates.
Why are the MAGA bigots against vaccines, fluoride in the water, and think Trump won the 2020 election. RFK jr channels Joe Rogan and both are in this weird pseudo-science world that is driven by conspiracies that don't make sense to the non-occultist. They love to think that pyramids were built by ancient aliens because to them dark skin people could never have built the pyramids by themselves. Hitler's autobiography and Spengler's “Decline of the West” are the road maps to what is happening right now.
I'm in the minority. Trump won. A majority think RFK jr is a suitable candidate for HHS. He's against vaccines and fluoride in water for Gawd's sake and wrote a book saying that Fucci is wrong about everything.
I have hope for the near term. The leopard is going to eat MAGAs' face as the hate unfolds. Caste systems are fluid and when for example, absolute immunity for all cops is given, the bullets won't know what caste you are in. Watch him send back all recent immigrants and invoke the insurrection act. The MAGA people will see what happens when otherizing based on whims doesn't stop the leopard from eating their face, and seriously, what do they have against people who identify as a different sex than the one assigned at birth?
I think this book is weak. It's so bad, I would recommend it to all Christians so that they could see how shaky their belief system is.
I got irritated at the pre-amble to this book, it must have gone on for 5 hours. Licona railed against the same old critters that Habermas did: post-modernist, realist, and Hume. There's data that could convince me. Give me a real messiah prophecy from the Old Testament, or tell me how Jesus' ‘this generation should not past' makes sense today not imaginary windmills which if slayed would not necessarily mean your fantastic beliefs would be true.
Even if the resurrection were true the story of blood sacrifice through vicarious atonement makes no sense, and don't forget the New Testament authors believed the Exodus was real, Noah's flood happened, Adam and Eve and talking snakes and donkeys are real. The OT is rotten (slavery, genocide, child rape, animal sacrifice, etc.), and it can't be re-interpreted with the NT unless it can be linked through prophecy. Jesus was not the messiah promised by the OT.
Peter raised Tabitha (Dorcas) from the dead according to Acts. Jesus' resurrection is not sui generis. Licona relies on Acts to make his case, and that book (Luke/Acts) is full of fan-fiction. Though it's got my favorite quote ever ‘it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks' (Act 26:14 KJV).
Licona failed to mentioned the Tabitha miracle once in this book. Yet, he relies on Acts frequently to make his case that Jesus arose from the dead, while sanitizing Paul and Paul's visions.
It's not the gotcha that Licona thinks it is when he refutes the various natural explanations to explain the empty tomb, women at the tomb, multiple post-death sightings of Jesus, 500 at the same time seeing Him and so on. Licona uses the authenticity of his holy book to refute all possible non-canonical interpretations. Paul said, ‘according to scripture' Jesus arose. That's not scripture I know anything about.
I want to note something that bothers me in Licona's and Habermas' versions. They both say Paul's visions were physical not spiritual. Thomas Aquinas tells me that's not how he sees it. Paul is the only known first hand eye witness and it seems to me that all investigation should start there and ignore the book of Acts because it is so barbaric and fantastic.
Licona and Habermas both think miracles help prove their dogma. Mormons, Muslims, and Buddhists think so too. I've read Augustine and the Venerable Bede and they each had many recent miracles proving their truth. Bede had a floating monk and testimony from fellow monks. Augustine bores the reader with his numerous second-hand reporting of miracles.
There was a weirdness in this book. Licona would give the tired old proofs that Christianity must be true because early martyrs prove it, or the number of miracles prove it, talking in tongues prove it, or four different historical books prove it, or natural explanations can't account for empty tombs, or visitations, or other just as lame assertions without substance.
Licona wins the argument if you assume his playing field is right and that the NT was a good faith attempt at recording history. The NT is a book with a lot of claims and no substance and start with the Book of Acts and you realize that Licona's basic assumption is flawed, then read the Book of John with Jesus on steroids, with a promise of darkness for all who do not believe. Enter this world of make-believe at your own risk, but at least have better arguments than what Licona brings to the table.
The Book of Hebrews is by far the best philosophically written book in the NT. Fitzgerald lets me know what Hebrews was about. As one reads anything we bring our preconceived notions with us, Hebrews concerns imaginary celestial realms and feelings and coheres only if the reader ignores an earthly Jesus, but most readers assume Mark's and Matthew's earthly Jesus since the NT is non-chronologically presented.
When I read the New Testament cover-to-cover the one thing that stands out is the philosophical naivety of Paul's letter as they get contrasted with the Book of Hebrews. Paul's and the author of Hebrews' Jesus is not of this world and what most readers do is impose earthly things on their celestial ramblings because they assume the Gospels' Jesus is the way for understanding. It was Paul and Hebrews that originally created Jesus not the Gospels. The Gospels made Jesus of this world through bringing him out of the celestial back down to earth. They needed Paul but ignored his version of Jesus.
Paul's creed in 1 Corinthians has Jesus rose ‘according to scripture.' He is not referring to Gospels since they had not been written and he is fabricating a risen Jesus from stories he had read and confirmed by visions ‘not of this world.' Without Paul there would never have been the Book of Acts and Acts is fantasy.
Acts is fan-fiction. It's probably the most perniciously harmful book ever written. Fitzgerald demonstrates what I had already suspected. Peter and Paul contra to Acts are at odds and Paul's authentic letters disagree with what Luke has him say in Acts. Acts is necessary to ground Paul's imaginary celestial certainties into reality. Funniest line in the Bible is when Jesus says ‘it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks' in Acts.
Paul's letters came first and the Gospel writers later. The Gospel writers fabricate narratives to make things seem earthly. John's Gospel is of this world but fabricates a Jesus on steroids, and Luke is the author of Acts and is well practiced with fan-fiction writing.
I'm currently reading ‘The Resurrection of Jesus' by Michael Licona and he seamlessly weaves Acts into his story thus falsely adding credence to his edifice of sandcastles in the air. Paul is a lunatic when viewed through his own writings. Hebrews re-enforces Paul's celestial imaginations.
Fitzgerald makes a compelling case that Jesus' myths were originally of a heavenly variety. The original myths got reformatted and their meaning got retranslated such that the reader loses sight of what the original author meant.
Reread the Book of Hebrews with a celestial non-earthly presupposition and its obvious what the best written philosophical book in the NT was saying. Paul's eight authentic letters (Fitzgerald says seven) when read with the absence of the nonsense of Acts show a Jesus not of this world.
The one part of the story I still can't understand if Jesus was totally fabricated who was Paul attacking when he writes about his own shame in persecuting the early Christians? I'm hoping the third volume in this series answers that question.
A devastating internal critique that demonstrates the absurdity of implicitly seeing the world through self-absorbed rose-colored glasses.
The narrative about the narrative becomes the truth and the experts create our reality such that we trust their story as if it correlates to reality. Today RFK becomes an expert on health and half the country believes vaccines are dangerous, fluoride in water is unsafe, Trump won the 2020 election, and so on. Just as Edward Said showed the madness within ‘Oriental studies', the madmen today are creating reality by ignoring reality.
The real strength in this book is when the reader realizes that the book is about all mythmakers who pretend to know the Truth, but are masters at perpetuating the great myths of their day creating a background of lies with no foundation while coloring our foreground into believing the absurd.
There is only one Whore of Babylon and that is Rome. There is only one beast with the number 666 and that is Nero. All prophecy is bunk and substantial visions about the future are never ever fulfilled and every substantial prophecy in the Bible is still waiting to be fulfilled, and therefore the Whore of Babylon morphs into the Catholic Church and 666 becomes the Pope.
All the Bible (except Ecclesiastics) seems silly and highly fictional and made-up on the spot, the Book of Revelations is particularly irritating because people take that non-sense as if it has meaning today. Pagels does show the nebulous morphing of Revelations over time into new zeitgeists' reinterpretations. At times, she spoke of Biblical stories as being a reliable indicator of truth and that would vex me.
This book had less about what Revelations was trying to say for its own original audience than what I expected.