Beauregard Bottomley

Even before reading this set of essays, I knew they would quote from Deleuze, Jung, Hegel, Weber, and Marx. I've read their works, I enjoy them but I know better than to take them seriously, since one can apply them to any half way decent TV series.

There was a theme in most of the essays that stood out. Freedom is an illusion and our choices aren't meaningful while we look for meaning in our meaningless world except for the meaning we create ourselves and the myths we create for ourselves about ourselves should be the right myths (I hope we stop choosing fascist or religious myths). Religions, corporations, and media turn us into robots possessing no freewill while giving us the illusion that we are free to choose beyond our genetics, culture, society, and personnel robotic programming. Everything happens for a reason is a universal when cause precedes effect is true and we realize there is no predetermined end point known by us or by a mythological sky daddy.

Nero Redivivus is the believe that Nero would come back from the dead. Habermas believes Jesus returned from the dead is a fact, but he assumes Nero did not. History records 20000 followers of the resurrected Nero all at the same time believing Nero had returned. Habermas devotes a whole chapter to only Jesus ever came back from the dead. The NT in the Book of Revelations warns against false prophets and warns against falsely claiming Nero's return by giving the number of the name as 666 in Greek texts and 616 in the earliest Latin translations. The numerical equivalent for Nero in Greek is 666 and Latin 616. Habermas makes a big deal that Paul claimed that 500 at the same time saw the risen Jesus, I think it's even a bigger deal that 20000 at the same time saw the risen Nero and were willing to fight and die for him. I don't think Habermas is a follower of Nero as a risen God.

Livy in about 1 BC believed Romulus died and resurrected to heaven, Dio Cassius in 200 AD reported that credible sources stated Vespasian (69 – 79 AD) was a God and had ascended into heaven and performed healing miracles and that multiple witnesses swore to it and Dio Cassius knows the names of those who swore to it under the penalty of death. The literature of 100 AD plus or minus a hundred years assumed miracles, Gods and resurrections were a real thing. The Jesus myths are just part of the literature of that time. The Aeneid was real to the Romans, Homer to the Greeks and Romans. The NT is written by Greeks under Roman occupation and is about Hebrews whose world was collapsing and their stories were real to them. The time was inundated with superstitious magical thinking. Jesus' myths were competing with OT nonsense and magical thinking was part of the background.

Habermas' arguments are always within the assumption for a kernel of truth for the NT getting its authenticity from the OT. The kernel of truth is no bigger than a grain of mustard seed as far as I can tell while that doesn't stop Habermas to force his arguments from within a series of mostly fictional books known as the Gospels and the Book of Acts. To read the Book of Acts is to see it for the absurdity that it is. Without Acts most of Habermas' arguments would fall flat. Peter's shadow creates miracles, Paul's handkerchief heals, two dead people return to life (resurrection is not unique to JC), people speak in tongues, and the holy spirit kills for lying when you only give almost everything you have and hold back a small amount.

The eight authentic letters of Paul are meaningful because they are his feelings about his emotions and his visions and represent his truths and Paul's sightings of Jesus are spiritual not physical according to him. I want to note Thomas Aquinas in ‘Contra the Gentiles' believed that Paul's visions were spiritual not physical, while the other Jesus visitations were physical. Habermas forces Jesus' return for 40 days per the Book of Acts as a physical return. He does that because he thinks it's not possible to explain away a physical return, but forgets that the Bible is a not a reliable guide for truth.

Acts is bogus and the 19th century German theologians which Habermas refutes never get past keeping their arguments within the story as told in the Bible and forget that most of the myth is explainable by overzealous writers writing what they heard and wanted to believe. Was Tabitha (Dorcas) really risen from the dead? The OT God is cruel and Jesus is God of the OT as well as the NT, and promises darkness for those who don't believe. Where is the good evidence for why anyone should believe that anything but error prone men with sincerely held wrong-headed beliefs wrote the Bible?

Habermas says that people must have known the truth because they were so committed to the cause and were willing to die for their beliefs and pool their money as told in Acts. Has Habermas ever gone to Pentecostal church on any given Sunday and seen the people dance with what they would call the Holy Spirit and sincerely believe the nonsense causing them to jump up and down. I have. It doesn't take much discernment to see that they are willing to believe in what they ‘know that they know what they know.' Zealous nuts exist today and overzealous nuts existed in even more superstitious times.

All it takes is a non-discerning person to be swayed by a charismatic leader to be willing to believe absurdities. Jimmy Swaggart, Falwell, Hitler, and Trump had their cult followers in modern times. Peter, James, John, and Paul had their gullible in ancient times. The background of Biblical times was full of myths and superstitious nonsense.

Habermas says that natural explanations for the appearances of Jesus don't exist since group hallucinations can't explain them, and that the martyrdom of the Apostles prove that they really believed in the myths and that James the brother of Christ must have had a visitation from JC and for Habermas that is the only possible explanation. The real explanation is probably more mundane. Perhaps, Peter grieved so much he believed he had a PDV (post death visitation) and James got convinced that his brother was special and had the same feelings and so on. All it takes is one charismatic leader to convince the gullible. Christianity had at least three: Peter, Paul, and James.

The ‘natural explanations' that Habermas refutes are always within the Bible box of some kind. First, he fails to show that the Gospels and Acts aren't mostly fiction before he can use them positively.

Habermas is big on PDVs today and believe they are real and offer further proof for JC's resurrection, but Habermas ignores Nero's Godhood or any other emperor worship. His PDVs of today are just as convincing for me showing that Nero was really a god, or that spirits are real and guided Joseph Smith into finding gold tablets. There's a slippery slope that Habermas is opening but he special-pleads for his Godheads (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) only.

Habermas cites Hume and that atheists are close minded because they can't have supernatural explanations by default. Who cares what Hume says? Give us data to show that Jesus was really the Messiah. None of the OT prophecies about the Messiah were fulfilled except for trivialities. Even Jesus butchers his promise about ‘some of you standing here will see the second coming,' and that was written 40 or so years after he purportedly said it. I'm open minded and if the prophecies get fulfilled, I'm all in. Albert Schwitzer was right as reported in this book when he said the NT contains unfulfilled eschatological assertions. Jesus was returning imminently within the NT and did not.

Habermas is a poor apologist. He forces his truth into the reliability of the Bible without showing why anyone should believe the Bible in the first place. Habermas still thinks the Shroud of Turin is real. He thinks miracles have happened based on feelings and that means the resurrection is more likely for him. I'm not a Muslim, Mormon, Shinto, or a Buddhist, but they think their miracles are real too based on their feelings and personnel relationship with imaginary figments in their mind while rejecting Habermas' inanities. Which group should I believe? In the absence of good rational arguments, I'll continue to believe none of them.

Habermas criticizes and refutes the 20th century theologians too and especially calls out Barth. To read Barth is to understand that incoherence applied to fictional truths still has no relation to reality. I'm not even sure why Habermas wants to refute Barth's feelings over facts approach to truths about reality. Habermas once again diverts from why should people accept the Gospels and Acts as reliable resources to truth. Refuting incoherent arguments still does not mean Habermas is right.

This book was a step down from the first volume in the series. Habermas' only considered refutations that stay within the framework of the mostly mythological fictional stories that have been created such as the empty tomb, Joseph of Arimathea, group visitations, people in groups speaking in tongues, disciples all witnessing the risen Christ and so on. The reality is that those kinds of things are claims without substance and refutations from the 19th century German liberal and conservative theologians that use those premises can easily be dismissed too. Habermas refutes those refutations and adds nothing to his main thesis and I don't believe Nero is God nor Jesus is God based on bogus assertions, while Habermas believes Jesus is God. The bogus assertions need a foundation and Habermas never provides them.

Fitzgerald shows the Gospels are a muddled mess and read as a poorly constructed series of fictional books. It's amazing that the incoherence gets harmonized through repetition and dogma.

I wish Fitzgerald took the argument a little further. It's the 8 or so authentic letters of Paul that matter to me. Paul wrote them and he persecuted Christian followers and met with James, the brother of Jesus. Paul's visions were real to himself and led him down his mythological false path and James (Jesus' brother) was real. The Book of Acts is phony and obscures Paul and is Tabitha still alive today? Will the holy spirit kill you and your spouse if you give only 90 percent of your wealth to the church but claim you gave everything. Fitzgerald mentioned the ‘disciples' behave mostly as a Greek Chorus and by the Book of Acts they fade into obscurity as if they never existed except for Peter and Judas who dies by hanging while his stomach explodes.

There was a war going on between legalistic Jerusalem early Christians (Peter and James) and Paul and it gets played out in the NT. Paul basically says he visited them in Jerusalem and didn't learn anything from them that he did not already know. Paul was real and his letters are and they show what he thought while thinking he was special because of his psychotic break from reality. He clearly believed something crazy and there was a reason he had his psychotic break from reality and thought James was the brother of Christ and that Peter was real.

Fitzgerald writes a good book that shows it's reasonable to doubt the existence of Jesus, but I lean towards ambivalence on that question since Christianity is empty of truth beyond trivialities and that is the real reason why I think it's toxic.

This book illustrates how an evolving set of mythological fantasy stories got morphed and reimagined such that they became generally accepted throughout a culture. This book describes the mythmaking from 300 CE to 1200 CE.

I was fascinated at the irrelevance and the marginal influence of the Roman Catholic Church during most of the time studied in this book, and the author does note the three different eras it takes before the Roman Catholic Church's relevance exceeds their exaggerated self-importance of today.

When the lens of superstition and false beliefs in absurdities get recognized for the nonsense that they really are and the veils of ignorance get removed only then will we be able to move forward past the worshipping of myths. 81% of all white evangelical Christians voted for their MAGA leader and the nonsense gets to continue for a few more years. For now, the trickster Gods (Anansi, Loki, Hermes, Jehovah, Coyote, and Jinn) are in control and are as real as the Christian myths meaning both are fantasies which belong in the land of Narnia. The Leopard ate my face party needed the myths to be true, but for them they'll be the last face eaten.

Western Civilization from 300 CE to 1200 CE becomes humorous when the Truth becomes myth and the legend is realized for what it really is.

I regret ever taking the Bible as a serious inspired book. It only appears that way when I ignored the context it was written in while contrasting it only with itself univocally and relating what it said only to itself. Bowen gives the context I wish I had years ago that would have saved me from years of stupidity.

The Book of Daniel is a travesty unless you assume special pleading that ignores relations, context, and contrast with reality. That book of the Bible has the most spot-on accurate prophecies in the Bible and proves that it is prophetic if you fabricate an alternate reality and assume it was written before the events it talks about except for the fourth prophecy and that prophecy has yet to be fulfilled and according to Christians foretells the second coming of the messiah and a make-believe end times. Of course, it's all convoluted nonsense. Only the gullible and the writers of the New Testament think that Jesus was the Messiah and no messianic non-trivial prophecy was fulfilled through Jesus (I rode a donkey, but I'm not the messiah). Bowen does a good job of putting Daniel in context and how nonsensical it really is.

I just as well use the Book of Mormon or the Koran rather than the New Testament to re-imagine the Old Testament. The sad reality is that neither Christians, Mormons or Muslims will ever easily step away from their presuppositions until they look at context and include reality as the basis of their worldview. Talking snakes and donkeys, Noah, and Adam and Eve in a garden with magic trees are not part of any reality I can ever accept without sufficient evidence; besides I would never accept slavery as moral, rape as okay with a bride fee, or capturing young virgins as war brides, misogyny (women keep your mouth shut in church!) and so on. I regret ever entertaining the possibility of any of that stuff to be divinely inspired and my original crack in to that false belief was from the Book of Daniel. My bad.

Beat the Dealer influenced my life more than any other book I had ever read. I read it when I was 16 and it pointed me to the journey that I would take the rest of my life of understanding the mathematical structure behind stochastic processes and its application to financial products.

The casino gambling and the stock market inefficiencies the author exploited and his story of how he got there made for a good story. Edward O. Thorp has always been one of my heroes for opening my eyes to realizing the efficient market hypothesis means that markets are efficient only up to the point when they are not.

I'll fault the book's later chapters with the author's bestowing quotidian investment advice. It wasn't necessary and was somewhat plebian. Thorp's life and his real-life adventures made for a worthwhile read.

Spinoza uses the same Aristotelean metaphysics as Aquinas but reaches different conclusions. Aquinas assumes reality needs a foundation; Spinoza makes his substance the reality we participate in, Aquinas makes God's potential his actuality thus putting a ground to reality.

In the first half of this book, the philosophical part, not the theological, Aquinas twists Aristotle, Maimonides and pseudo-Dionysius into a world-view that necessitates a foundation to reality. I'd even say that the first half of this book was fun to read. The second half Aquinas goes off the rails justifying blood sacrifice, bread turning into mystical substance of body of Christ, three separate but equal beings while each being a separate but equal part of a triune God structure but giving one God; Aquanis tells what exactly is in heaven and what exactly happens to our resurrected bodies and so on. Fantastic stuff without real foundation to support the assertions.

Contras can't exist therefore God, Jesus and Holy Spirit must exist. There are connections that never get connected and become convenient certainties within Aquinas' necessary, certain, and True beliefs.

For Aquinas, human life maters not individually since participation in the species towards an ultimate heavenly reward is through Grace and the vicarious suffering of another for inherited sin through belief justifies eternal heavenly life or its lack of belief justifies eternal suffering since God's Grace is so magnificent that evil cannot ever know the good. Sin is an imaginary problem with an imaginary solution or as Aquinas says sin is an affront to God and God through his Grace must erase it. As Nietzsche would say just don't enter into that circular reasoning in the first place.

I noticed a lot of bad modern day Christian arguments center around the same way Aquinas would defend his absurdities. Aquinas' arguments only stand if the correspondence theory to truth is replaced with a presupposition of a supernatural that specifically assumes a necessary being whose existence is its essence (its potentiality is its actuality).

Woven within this book are all the bad arguments that get tossed around by Christian apologists such as objective morality proves God, there must be a first cause and that cause is God, something can't come from nothing, design of the world proves there is Biblical God, and the Bible is not absurd since it has no contradictions, or finally that there are talking snakes, a Global flood happened and Adam and Eve were created from dirt and evolution is not real.

I've read the complete works of Aristotle (I don't recommend it since it is dry), I've read all of Spinoza (I do recommend him since he is brilliant), and I've did all of Aquinas' Summa, I can appreciate good philosophical arguments and Aquinas does that nicely in the first half of this book. The second half of the book is a real travesty. I've noticed that the smarter Christians when they explain their relationship to Jesus Christ and the resurrection use Aquinas' arguments and assume the literal and physical realities, and then fabricate a spiritual metaphysical realization when the contras inevitably arise (something cannot be and be at the same time and in the same way, that leads to a contradiction therefore the juvenile appeal to supernatural for justification for the absurdities that arise). Zombies did not arise out of the graves in Jerusalem the day Jesus arose from the dead, but Aquinas will tell you that they did.

This book provided an underwhelming re-presentation of all too familiar well worn-out tropes of Jesus while never straying too far from the unoriginal orthodoxical.

Perhaps in 1991 this book was breaking new territory. Today it at best would be called superfluous. There's a real story that could be gleamed from the time-period, but the author purposely never ventured beyond the Biblical mundane.

There are a lot of stories that can be gleamed from the time-period and generalities can be inferred from other sources. I get the feeling that Jesus believed he was the fulfillment of messianic prophecies and his followers believed that too. There's a story to be told when a society's norms are collapsing and the Jews of Galilee are becoming economically marginalized and Herod is building Caesaria at the expense of the down-trodden and a social justice warrior such as Jesus wants to affect change. This book never tells that story because the author always keeps the story dull and within the Biblical point-of-view.

The claim that there are no UFOs with an extra-terrestrial origin is a non-falsifiable hypothesis. There is no data that I could provide that could show that UFOs don't exist. The burden of proof lies with the claimant. The UFO claim is a pseudo-science and is as meaningful as saying ‘reindeer can fly.' I can't prove reindeer can't fly but one could easily prove the statement true by showing Santa Claus in his sleigh with flying reindeer on Christmas Eve; it would only take one convincing data point. This book gave no convincing data point.

All the babble presented in this book seemed to have been presented elsewhere and I've been reading these kind of stories for the last 50 years. I'm not sure why this book was written except to rehash all the dubious claims that we have already read about elsewhere.

There's a better book then this book that connects the psychological reason for why people want to believe in UFOs with an extra-terrestrial origin called “American Cosmic” by D. W. Pasulka. That book connects how at the root of UFO conspiracies is the search for a meaning to life outside of a quotidian existence.

At times this book would get beyond the humdrum nature of obviously bogus UFO sightings and slip into the same language that religious people use when trying to defend their claims while ineffectively proving their version of a God. This author would have been wise to connect those various threads and give the reader a better narrative that tied together the history of the UFO phenomena with human psychology. Instead, the author mostly just presented a dry recitation of mostly familiar items that anyone who has followed UFO stories was already very familiar with.

I reject magic, mysticisms, and non-demonstrable truths from authority without foundations and all non-falsifiable assertions. The experiences of those who enter the weird and find their way out makes for a good story. Lloyd tells his story and a good story based on personnel experiences is more persuasive at edifying than generalities about theological, historical inconsistencies or not allowing blood transfusions can be. Lloyd bores in this book when he tells the generalities, but he is spot-on when he tells his own story. JWs are scary dangerous, but the scariness comes through when Lloyd tells his wife's and his personnel story.

JWs are a cult and as with all religions necessitates magic being real and with feelings and outside authority as a guide for Truth. The how of why somebody belongs to such a dangerous worldview and remains in it makes for good story telling. Lloyd tells his story well.

The interesting part of the book were Evans' experience within the mind control system he was part of. About 2/3 of the book was about how crazy JWs are and were the least interesting part of the book.

Evan's story itself is the heart of the book and makes that part of the book an interesting read. I already know JWs are nuts, but the more interesting story is how somebody remains in that crazy worldview and how they finally breakout. Evan's makes the incredibly interesting point his main waking-up to reality came when he moved to Croatia and his weekly Witness Hall indoctrination meetings weren't coming through to brainwash him, he was able to break free from the indoctrination when the non-sense wasn't getting forced upon him.

As with all good biographies (and memoirs) the secondary character becomes more interesting than the protagonist. For this story, his wife and her tribulations became as focal to the story as Llyod's story. That's a compliment to the author and he was wise enough to tell his story that way.

This book is free on Kindle Unlimited. Lloyd and his wife's story make for a very good story. My only complaint is I didn't need JW nuttery that didn't have to do with Lloyd and his wife's experiences. I've already read the general JW stuff elsewhere.

Just because all the arguments in this book are ineffective doesn't mean that there is no God.

There is no way to falsify the Christian god since it is a non-falsifiable assertion.

Christians first need to agree among themselves who their God is and what they believe before they try to defend their God and their non-falsifiable hypothesizes.

Tell me what you believe and what is your evidence. The moment you quote from the Bible you lose me unless you prove the Bible is reliable or speaks with authority. It does not as far as I know.

Tell me about your dreams last night so I can make-up any old shit about your inner most thoughts and use that to get at your repressed thoughts and then wow you with my deep understanding of your all-too-human psyche. If you think that dreams with a splash of psychoanalysis is useful, then read this book with its out of synch with today's truths.

The book is written in 2008 while still having the 1970s vibe with its supernatural reliance on psychoanalysis as if psychoanalysis was anything else but a non-falsifiable hypothesis. I think the quote the author gave from Dostoevsky that humans want ‘mysticism, magic and authority' was the talisman the author seemed to follow in his advice for overcoming terror from death. Kierkegaard has it best when he says ‘anxiety is about nothing' and that ‘authenticity is jealous of irony,' the paradox of existence leads to our absurdity of life while this author is not able to bring the reader to what Kierkegaard already knew.

The dream analysis the author inflicted on his patients seem primitive. The man who dreamt of cigarettes leading to him being resentful towards his wife since she was a ‘marijuana addict who smoked pot for 40 years,' what a prudish thing for the author to have said and by 2008 the author should have known better. The author's claims that his dream re-interpretation was the only way to get at the fact that the patient was resentful at his wife's ‘marijuana addiction,' only a psychotherapist could praise their own tail in such a silly way.

I've read this author's book on Nietzsche (“When Nietzsche Wept”). It was a novel with an unfortunate comic book characterization of my favorite philosopher. He quotes from Nietzsche frequently in this book and really seems to miss the mark. I would say Nietzsche's will-to-power means actively engaging your own interpretation for deriving your own meaning in the world, and that Nietzsche understands why we need to say ‘Yes!' to life and that the author seemed quaint in his simplistic longing for a Freud/Yung/Lacan type hidden meanings hidden in the back recesses of our mind that needs a therapist with ‘mysticism, magic and authority' to properly interpret the narrative of our life with a fictional meta-narrative.

Overall, I find this book fun to read because it was so insulting to who I am today and that I can't believe people still cling to the mystics because they seem to speak with authority but don't. Read Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Freud, Jung, Lacan on your own and learn to mock Ernst Becker (‘Denial of Death') and books like this one. Heidegger's mother said on her deathbed to him “I have no time to think about you now and you're on your own,” because of that Heidegger wrote a book on being and time that focus' on being-unto-death and probably ended up being the most famous philosophy book written in the 20th century during the 20th century.

I find it incredible that juvenile books like this one still sell 500 copies per month according to Amazon.

It's ironic that ‘reality TV' is fake and that Trump's narcissistic nature as shown in this book found the perfect myth making vehicle through a TV show that was artificially staged and was ably presented in this book.

The book's interviews (six in total) with the convicted felon, adjudicated sex offender, election denier and fined fraudster demonstrates Trumps inability to care about facts. I already knew Trump had an unhealthy relationship with reality and this book focused on his TV show that I never watched and had no interest in, at times that made the book a little dull for me.

Overall, Trump's role as a host on a phony TV show clearly was his perfect venue and his reformatting of reality that he kept trying to sell to the author only adds to the fake myth creation of Trump, and the book shows Trump to be a lying buffoon since the author would sandwich Trump's lies between facts or incongruities with reality. That's one of the most effective tools one has in combating a pathological liar who is a convicted felon, adjudicated sex offender and heavily fined fraudster.

This is my third time reading this book. I first read it in 1988, next in 2010 and finally again this year. For me, it ranks as one of the most influential books I've ever read.

There is no greater danger than those who embrace conspiracy inspired pseudo-science. Trump has an intuitive grasp on spewing nonsense and framing his world with non-falsifiable hypothesizes while creating alternative facts which aren't facts in as much as facts are good evidence that support a hypothesis.

I cringe when a neighbor says that vaccines don't work against Covid. The gold standard in science is a double-blind experiment with sufficient sample sizes and the early vaccines showed that the vaccines worked with high efficacy and caused no significant illnesses beyond chance with minor exceptions. The playbook for MAGA nuts is to warn against government conspiracies and not being able to trust ‘fake press' (Hitler called it “Jew Press,” and Trump euphemistically refer to “Sorors controlled press”).

This book warns the reader against how it's not possible to prove the negative, and Trump's conspiracies of today are no different than the garbage that was spouted on to us in the 1980s. As demonstrated in this book, Uri Gellar was a fraud in 1980s just as he is today, and I'd like to note that the New York Times about a year ago wrote a glowing piece about him and only mentioned James Randi in passing in their article while this book gave Randi the credit he deserved.

Science never can prove the negative, ‘reindeer can't fly,' for example, there's no data I can give someone who believes reindeer can fly to show that they are wrong. I can drop them off the roof one at a time, and the person can just say that the reindeer didn't want to fly, or they are forbidden to fly when they are observed and so on. (This example comes from James Randi and was not in this book).

MAGA throws its nonsense at you such as ‘vaccines don't work' or ‘climate change is not real', and so on and they hide their claims enshrined in a non-refutable hypothesis, that is a hypothesis such that no data could refute their assertion. MIAs are still in Vietnam, there is nothing I can give them to show them that statement is not true.

The three legs holding the MAGA stool are Evangelical Christians, Fascists (authoritarians) and Racists and all three require conspiracies wrapped in pseudo-science (non-refutable hypothesizes). The value of science includes simplicity (Occam's Razor), predictability, analytical, belonging within the Web-of-knowledge (William Van Orman Quine's structure), and the story we tell about the data. Trump and MAGA only have the story as their value and start with the conclusion and they let that shape their reality (vaccines work as far as we know) while they tell their story void of facts and rely on the impossibility of refuting negative hypothesizes (prove to me that there is no dragon in my garage (Sagan), or there is no teapot in space between the moon and earth (Russell)).

The big themes presented in this book are priceless. The specific refutation of some of the pseudo-science and para-normal is tedious and not as necessary today because the internet has it covered today, but the methodology presented for how to think about reality are as necessary today as when this book first came out.

Barth creates a fictional truth with no relation to reality. He does advocate for a separate magisterial between theology and science while ignoring reality and all biblical exegesis that transpired 50 years before him (he's writing in 1933) by claiming authority of the word of God as self-evident revelation creating dogmatics of The Church and its obvious stewardship as the keeper of the faith. For him there is ‘the church' while ignoring that the early church was fragmented and has remained an amalgamation of various interpretations ever since.

His special brand of faith through his interpretations gives a faith of the specialness of his holy books through mediation with his heart. He'll say the ‘bible answers for itself as we answer for ourselves' and that the truth through the word must speak for itself, and the ‘holy scripture, gathered about which the Church from time to time becomes the Church.' He often appeals to a double bind while asserting circular tautologies which restate what he was demonstrating while selectively stating assertions that have no substance.

Barth is mostly within a brainwashed frame of mind and his use of ‘regular irregular dogmatics' makes no sense except within the confines of his circular reasoning. There's a real crisis going on in Germany in 1933 and the best Barth does is double-down on dogmatic statements while the world is melting around him and defend the absurdities by ignoring realities.

Barth establishes the divine hiddenness of his God(s) while stating Free Will must exist by inverting the phenomenology about things and making the existential philosophy about the presence of the things (Heidegger is frequently mentioned in those sections of the book). Husserl's phenomenology considers everything but the thing to understand and Heidegger inverts the observation by invoking present-at-hand, ready-at-hand and dasein (human).

The first half of the book is a poor defense of theology being relevant beyond mental gymnastics. Barth realizes that the Trinity is not well laid out within the Bible and he mumbles his assertions to why it must be right and that God must have three modes. It all makes sense to him or anyone else who already is brainwashed or in the mythological cult. Dogmatics by their very definition never can improve.

Barth will say the trinity is the kernel of faith and grace comes through the holy spirit. Barth does appeal to the Book of John frequently. John is a frightening book. Jesus will explicitly promise the Holy Spirit after he comes and for anyone who doesn't believe him ‘darkness' is promised. Paul participated in revelation through witnessing Jesus through lordship which according to Barth freedom is freely given. This volume seems to have convoluted reasoning throughout.

He did irritate me with some of his proofs for God such as since morality is written on our hearts that proves God(s) exists (Kant says the same thing, but by the end of the complete works of Kant one realizes that he doesn't believe in God, read him for yourself and see what you think). According to Barth, Jesus must be of the truth because those who knew him best died for him. Barth spends over 100 pages defending that tingling feeling in the stomach that he calls the Holy Spirit and makes one's personnel experience as proof for the incomprehensible but necessary triune nature of one God in three.

Barth writes in 1933 in a fascist state while advocating for feelings over reason in support of dogmatics. Barth doesn't like the enlightenment and his conservative religious approach to dogmatics is useful for Hitler and the horror that well come. Barth never questions the tingling in the stomach as anything but his version of brainwashing while special pleading away a Mormon, Hindi, or a Muslim's same personnel experience to dogmatic truth. The Holy Spirit is a feeling that acts as a Comforter and Barth says that feeling is real and necessary. Hitler uses that similar feeling to install madness while making Germany great again.


He'll say that Jesus's reconciliation is not synthetic but is analytic (that's Kantian language), by saying that Barth means that mental gymnastics mixed with feelings trump reality. For Barth, the holy word itself proves God's love such that His son revealed Himself. Barth will say only God can reveal Himself. Stop thinking and follow me and let your feelings be your guide cries every fascist leader that ever lived and Barth's interpretation readily endorses that throughout this work. Wiki tells me that years later he'll standup to the fascists controlling the Churches, but how did Barth not understand the threat around him and what his dogmatics would lead to?

Barth did mention Ananias and his wife were killed (murdered!) by the Holy Spirit because they held back a small amount of money. Is that the Holy Spirit that is part of the triune God that Barth thinks is certain and special pleads for? Do our feelings ever prove reality while acknowledging others exact opposite truth from feelings contradict our own? Fascists, Christians, Muslims, Hindis, and Mormons all have had a tingle in their stomach and they pretend it comes from a higher power; that doesn't make the feeling universally true for Barth's special brand of religion. If anything, it should make one question one's interpretation of assigning outside holy agency to that feeling.

I wonder what Barth is trying to accomplish with this hodge podge of inane arguments. He's trying to defend his flavor of Evangelism, but he is really doing a poor job at defending his dogmatics beyond assertions with no substance. He'll claim that the essence of theology is the word through revelation through his brand of interpretation. I recently completed the Summa Theologia by Thomas Aquinas and it made for better theology than Barth was able to achieve.

This book can only appeal to someone who is already in the mythological framework of Bible inerrancy and thinks the Bible comports to reality. For those people who believe their personnel experiences as interpreted through a superstitious book and believe witches really do exist will find this book a worthwhile read. As for me, I find this book an insult to my intelligence and highly recommend it to those who are brainwashed and believe in myths.

Thomas Aquinas quotes pseudo-Dionysius 1702 times. The early Church (500 AD) used the authority of the fake writings to defend extra-biblical claims. Aquinas' defense (1250 AD) for the substantiation and necessity of the holy sacrament clearly gets filtered through the non-sense spouted by somebody who claimed authority based on assertion and the early orthodoxy of the Church from 500 AD onward pretended to go along with the absurdities. A lie gets half way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on, or in this case the toothpaste never can be put back in the tube after it gets out.

The foundation of the Church's belief as proven by Aquinas relied on Church tradition and that tradition was started by a fraudster who defended his position against the other and becomes dogma while becoming heterodoxy. Pseudo-Dionysius gets relegated to a footnote by the 1800s but the orthodoxy he instigated gets ingrained as obvious certainty while his inauthentic claims are forgotten. It's quite interesting how much of what is believed today was based on a known liar with his own agenda regarding petty disputes.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The medium is the message (massage) and the shaping of society does not take place in a vacuum. This book is from 20 years ago and is looking back forty years from its point of writing and the tone-deafness of the time it is written in comes through.

John Wayne is a racist (read his Playboy interview from 1967 for verification) and his movie The Alamo is almost unwatchable today for its Song of the South portrayal of the single black man in the film who valued his master over his own freedom. For John Wayne freedom wasn't for everyone just for those who he felt deserved it.

The movies from that time were shaped by the rot in the society and make-America-great-again morons want that return to those anything but desirable days. I enjoyed all the movies mentioned in this book but one needs to see them for the world they came out of and offer an apology for the manliness, misogynism, and racism they have ingrained within them before defending the art that are within the movies.

John Ford is a brilliant director and The Searchers is a masterpiece in hate, but the western is a metaphor for a world that never was and the legend of the west became fact even though it never was.

It's easy to write a book like this which clearly took its theme too seriously and never quite takes itself out of the year 2002, the year it was written.

Yahweh has a big nose. Moses said that. Those who knew Yahweh best decided to build a golden calf rather than wait another day for the return of Moses. Baal as lord, Asher as a God's wife, a committee of Gods, Leviathan the sea monster, the face of God are all part of the bizarre tidbits that are in plain sight within the Bible.

Someone once told me that the only evidence that could dissuade them from believing in Jesus as God incarnate is if His bones were found. I know now the proper response to that is I will only believe in Jesus if His divine most perfect foreskin from his penis is found. In medieval times that foreskin was available, unfortunately it has been lost.

Maimonides disappears the body parts of Yahweh while the early re-writers of the holy books harmonize the various Gods in the Old Testament into one person and act as if His body parts are metaphors and analogies while a plan reading of the text tells a different story.

The OT has two religions in it and the book of Isaiah is the dividing line between the two. Read the Bible and it shouts at you. God has body parts and there are multiple Gods in the first part of the book and they even had Titans in the land of Cannan before they claimed to have committed genocide. Women wear a covering on your head as Paul warns you and the author says that is so that the women don't tempt the spirits that lurk around them. Those Gods have body parts and will use them if women tempt them too much (always blame the victim).

Philo of Alexandria started the allegories, Maimonides makes the composite simple by making the real into metaphors and turning the plan text into an abstract substance for the Jews and Aquinas for Catholics makes God's essence into His existence taking away all attributes that made the plan original reading of the text by ignoring context, place, and meaning.

Aquinas will even go as for as to argue that when Jesus spent three days in hell fighting the devil for the bones of Moses that was only the human part of Jesus not his divine nature. If only I had the foreskin of Jesus, then I would believe the analogies and metaphors, until then I'll see the Bible as a collection of myths that it is with Gods who have anatomies. “God created man in his own image” means what it says.

The Bible makes sense only if you don't give it special status and read later synchronization and harmonization on to it after the fact and you see it as the collection of myths trying to explain the world to a people in search of an identity that was constantly changing.

All religions are nihilistic since they outsource truth to a book based on authority and negate the individual's ability to determine their own meaning. The internet makes it easy to see their foolishness and high control religions are the most vulnerable.

Testimonials based on feelings from a holy spirit are no longer enough to keep the people hooked on absurdities. I learned when I was 10 years old that the personnel testimonials on the back of my comic books were hogwash. The author gave a brilliant testimonial in her Church on how Joseph Smith was a polygamist and had his problems but she was grateful that the holy spirit (ghost?) still showed her the truth inherent in the Mormon church. Her testimonial did not go over too well, because the others in her group only wanted to share the truths that made them feel good.

The author points out Mormons are latent misogynists. ‘Don't be a sissy be a man' is ingrained in the system, women only need a career in case their husband dies. First, I thought how could a woman be part of such a system, then I realized the man is even more at fault for perpetuating that kind of belief.

Here's a hint: as an adult never let another adult tell you what you can eat or drink. Don't outsource your happiness to an institution. Drink coffee if you want to. Don't be part of any institution that denigrates others for how they were born, either as a woman, transgender, or gay. The problem is with you not them.

The author's Mormon bishop paid for her therapist and his wife took her to her meetings probably saving her from real harm. The author's future husband mentions that religious beliefs shouldn't be forced on to others because matters of conscience should not be forced. These are interesting tidbits that the author shares with the reader. Mormons are just as bizarre as every other religion but they have an epistemological bubble that makes the questioning of their own reality as difficult as it was for Truman in “The Truman Show” movie, and when the bubble is pierced the truth becomes overwhelming.

It's sad that a book like this is required for those who were within a group think that was so overbearing, but a book like this has an audience, and for people like me who have never been religious it is informative on how lucky I've been to have never been religious.

“Mankind does not strive for happiness; only an Englishman does that,” and the English of 17th century did everything possible to prove that Nietzschean exception while a few voices cried in the wilderness under the threat of legal sanctions. It was almost impossible to be an atheist (or deist) in pre-enlightenment England since no safe forum existed for thinking a blasphemy against orthodoxy.

Imaginary friends are hard to show not existing and the default position that the Church of England was right and it was up to lone voices to show that they could prove the ‘dragon was not in the garage' as Sagan would say. This book does give long sections from brave thinkers appealing to reason over fiction and they were worth reading. Of course, definitionally atheism meant immoral by default and reason would have to wait for Spinoza to show the way. This book frequently mentioned Jonathan Israel's book “Radical Enlightenment” and it worth reading as a sequel to this book to see what would happen next.

American democracy won't survive if Trump is re-elected. He is an existential threat to all values that I hold dear. There is no middle ground, there is no ‘both sides,' the country's democratic values are dependent on that truth. Trump is a monster and white evangelical Christian nationalist are enabling his anti-democratic (fascist) beliefs.

White evangelical Christianity is not the answer; it is the problem. The author uses a no true Scotsman fallacy against Christians who don't believe in her special version of Jesus since to her they aren't ‘true' Christians. She says probably over 50 times ‘Jesus said'. How does she know what Jesus said? The way to fight Trump and his MAGA morons is not to quote a different version of Christ and claim you have the truth while claiming the MAGA brigades must not be right, because after all it was the evangelicals in the first place that gave us this existential threat to American democracy.

The author is ignorant on history. I want to give one example that irritated me. Two paragraphs before she said that Americans fail at history, she gave a quote from Thucydides who she claimed was the ‘father of history.' He is not. She meant Herodotus. No wonder Americans fail at history since they rely on superficial books such as this one for their sources.

Since she mentioned Thucydides, I want to use him for why this book just doesn't understand how real the threat is to American democracy by MAGA and Trump. Thucydides portrayed Pericles as a defender of Athenian democracy and the crowd cheered him on, later Thucydides had a Tyrant manipulating the crowd to support tyranny. The point is Trump is our tyrant and the crowd is cheering him on, Thucydides gets today's threat and he wrote over 2000 years ago. The threat is an existential threat to American democracy (and probably the world). I'm not being hyperbolic. All one need to do is read Trump's own words. He is the Mussolini of our time. America will become like Putin's Russia and no imaginary friend is going to save us. The author's nuanced belief in Jesus is not going to save us against the madness of white Christian evangelicals and dividing them into six separate sub-groups as she does is only an exercise in obscurity accomplishing nothing.

The author fears CRT (critical race theory), wokeism, and mentioned Marxist taking over as real threats generated by Fox News (sic), though I'll comment the author is no longer fearful of the Marxists as she once was. She thinks without her narrative concerning Jesus that nihilism is close at hand. The author recommends love going forward and her special flavor of Jesus to save us. Trump routinely tells his followers how much he loves them, and they shout it right back at him. Love without knowledge, compassion or kindness is foolhardy. The author recommends that the church members get themselves a gay friend named Bob and that will make them less hateful. I recommend they enter the 21st century and just learn to stop hating.

Trump is the problem. His enablers are the problem. White evangelical Christians and nationalist are the problem. Democracy is threatened and there is no coming back from another Trump presidency. The author is on my side, but her milquetoast Christian approach is dangerous and more evangelical Christianity is the problem not the solution, and one should just re-read Thucydides or Herodotus in lieu of Christ centric books like this one. Trump doesn't care about Christians but manipulates his followers through fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Trump has told us what he plans to do, just take him as his word.

At three times listening speed an interesting introspective reflection upon an artist's life and work.

Religious myths necessitate beliefs, behaviors, and identity among the practitioners. Of the three necessities, identity is the most important. For an identity to work there must be an in-group, the group that is the only group without an identity since it is the default group, all other groups are against them and most likely are of the devil and they are going to hell. The in-groupers have a ‘personnel relationship' with an imaginary non-material entity. Catholics don't, non-Christians can't, white evangelicals are special since they actively do and know the Truth.

White evangelicals vote 80% MAGA. The author was born in 1980 into a household where spanking was encouraged, purity culture enforced, and homosexuality was a sinful choice not an identity. A child's world was controllable by their parent. The cult needs to close itself to all challenges against the inerrancy of the bible and before 2000 was able to control what their children thought.

The author starts to realize that people not in her myth system seem as if they are regular human beings just participating in the human experience. Her homosexual grandfather seems human to her. Her parents believed that to protect their daughter against sin they should mostly shun the grandfather and keep his evil choices away from their children. What a messed-up way the author's parents see the world.

The author comes of age in the year 2000. She's lucky. Before that time, it was not easy to find like-minded individuals who also realized that the hate evangelicals participated in was just weird. Evangelicals make sin an affront against the goodness of God or Jesus not against the person who is being harmed by the evangelicals themselves. Sin is an imaginary problem with an imaginary solution and evangelicals never get that they've created a solution that makes no sense.

The author realizes that other religious people not in her tribe are not of the devil, homosexuals just want to be, and finally she starts to realize that “Cosmos” is a pretty good TV show, that science is cool, not to hate homosexuality as a choice and accept homosexuals for who they are, and that her inerrant bible has absurdities.

MAGA makes all who are not inside their epistemological bubble alien and foolish just as the author's tribe of white evangelicals tried to do. A fool believes vaccines don't work, or Trump won the last election, or climate change is a Chinese hoax. Evangelicals feel threatened by a changing world and they embrace the nonsense spouted by Trump and long for the return of their epistemological bubble and they think Trump will preserve it for them. This author's parents lost control of their daughter's meta-narrative and they feel that the evangelical narrative will disappear without Trump, and want to preserve their threat of eternal damnation for all who disagree with them.

At times a very tough book to get through. It's one of those books as you're getting completely confused about one thing, the author then will start to confuse you about something else then repeat the first confusion but by the next point you start to realize the meaning of the original confusion and so on till things start to seem to make sense, then the author moves onto something else entirely.

Zuckert (the author) provides something that a casual reader of Plato can't get on their own. The connection between each dialogue and the significance of the characters between different dialogues. This book took 17 years to write and the reader gets to profit from the author's scholarship and the special knowledge that is inherent within the characters who speak. I think the author said Plato probably did write Alcibiades I and II, that surprises me because I would have said he did not because they were the dialogues that made sense to me and had conclusions, a very un-Plato thing to do. I yield to the author's authority.

Plato (through his Socrates character) warns against the ‘ego' being determinative for our self and that the most dangerous person is one who thinks they know but do not. All of Plato has that warning and not only can't sophist not teach virtue since they fail to understand what it is, politicians can't rule justly since they lack the meaning of justice. Sometime read Livy and you'll understand the difference between Greek thought and Roman: Greek lens is through justice; Roman lens is through liberty.

The author would relate Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, and Hannah Arendt often to the discussions within the dialogues. Plato like Kant has the ‘thing-in-itself' the unknowable real thing. Plato gives truth as out there, Kant redefines the nexus of truth through his Copernican revolution for the mind, and puts truth within us and confounds it with intuition, space, and time while Plato puts truth, the Good, the Just and Virtue ultimately outside of us and potentially reachable. For a Platonic realist Goodness is real, for a nominalist it is not. For Plato there is a horse, and there are horses and moreover there is ‘horseness'. For a nominalist there is no such thing as ‘horseness'.

Within Plato as shown in this book all the classical Christian arguments for the existence of the Christian God are within this book. The author doesn't say this but I will briefly note that Augustine takes Paul, Cicero and Plotinus and creates his version of Christianity. I don't think this author mentioned Plotinus but she did dissect the Timaeus, and it's clear that Plotinus' Enneads are greatly influenced by that dialogue, and Plotinus is fundamental for Western mythical beliefs.

Plato's classical Christian arguments include that without a God watching over us there can be no ‘objective morality,' though in the Euthyphro dialogue Plato shows how piety originating divinely can be problematic. Also, Plato would indicate that since we have the moral law within us that means there must be a God. That's exactly the argument that Kant ultimately used to save a place for his God.

The one and the many within the universe of the One (Parmenides) and the rearranging of the parts within the universe through Plato's crossing the Heraclitus River had the Kamal Cosmological argument popping out within the dialogues: everything that began to exist had a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe had a cause. Plato is wiser than modern Christians because he never attaches an imaginary creator to the argument.

With Plato it's always more complicated because the ultimate truth Plato strives for is that our ego can not be determinative for our truths. Another classical Christian argument that could be borrowed from Plato is that of the nature of Being as absolute. Heidegger rejects ‘cogito ergo sum' since Descartes assumes the world away and Heidegger writes Being and Time using the special status of Being as formulated by Plato.

Plato gets that the dichotomies of logic break-apart at being and not-being (non-existence). I'll even note from the Meyer book Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming, Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction, the PNC (principle of non-contradiction) assumes an existence of the non-existence. I know neither Heidegger or Nietzsche are Christians but their arguments can be employed by Christians who have read Plato and understand Aquinas' God such that His essence is his existence.

Thomas Aquinas (and Maimonides) use Aristotle as their basis for Reason rather than Plato. That's a mistake for religion but a boon for science. At the end of the age of the Scholastics (1350 CE), Platonic realism gets replaced by nominalism (i.e. things are just labels that we use, and absolutes exist only as ideals). As I was reading this book, it's clear that Platonic thought could more align with Christian dogma especially after being massaged by Plotinus, while the nominalism of William of Ockham replaces justice, truth, love and Good to mere labels. Plato consistently advocates for his Platonic realism and the Christians would have been better to never have integrated Aristotle into their myths.

The depth in this book was so deep and complex I would be able to say that someone could read this book and claim with little exaggeration that they've read the complete works of Plato. The author is that good at explaining the dialogues.

Jesus thought he was a fulfillment of prophecy and thought he was specially chosen to lead a revolution against the oppressors of the Jews, and his family after his death carried on that mission. Paul had a vision that told him differently. Paul's version became heterodox, and Mary's other sons got relegated to forgotten footnotes of history while she was turned into the paragon of womanly virtue and ultimately assumed her way into heaven in a blessed state of virginity.

Tabor does an excellent job of telling the historical exoteric (i.e. not hidden, known plainly) meaning of the New Testament. The Book of Acts, the muddled pile of childish nonsense obfuscated the real story and Tabor places the story in its real context and background while providing a fresh historical perspective adding believability missing from evangelical inerrant bible believing special pleading books such as presented by Josh Mcdowel's “Evidence that Demands a Verdict,” or Gary Habermas' “On the Resurrection.” I pick those two books only because I've read them in the last month or so as I searched for the best arguments for Christianity.

Eisenman's book “James the brother of Jesus” provides a more detailed, nuanced and complex telling of the basics provided in this book. Tabor on his Youtube channel provides this excellent one hour interview by Eisenman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NlteRvg2_k&ab_channel=JamesTabor Eisenman's book is one of my favorite books so far this year, but if you don't have the patience for 1000 pages of rigorously presented arguments you can just watch the interview or read this book instead.

Tabor strikes me as a believer in Christianity while entertaining a different perspective from the evangelical inerrant bible-believing non-compromiser. The story that Tabor tells is immensely more edifying than any Christian apologist can tell as far as I know.