Mitch Versus the Monster

The following is a script I wrote for a response to ProfMTH’s comments on my vid titled, “It’s Time to Go, ProfMTH!” In this, the monster who ate Mitch at the end will explain why Mitch’s excuse for wrongly portraying John 16:5 as occurring at the Last Supper doesn’t wash, and also why his dismissal of the importance of location doesn’t wash.

I may or may not turn it into an actual vid…we’ll see if ProfMTH actually tries to foist these excuses in one of his own first.

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And now it’s time for Fundy Atheist Follow Up. Here to follow up – Nigel Monster.

Hello everyone. Nigel here. It’s rather slow here lately so we’ve decided to follow up on a couple of excuses that Mitch gave us for his erroneous presentation. Tally ho.

Let’s start with the simpler one – where we called Mitch down for falsely presenting the statement of John 16:5 as made at the Last Supper rather than on the way to Gethsemane. He gave the rather petulant excuse that:

There's no error. I was telling the story in a quick way.

Hmm. Telling the story in a quick way. Well, if that’s true then we can perhaps excuse it somewhat if it were not essential to the claim of error – more on that shortly. But does this claim to be telling the story in a quick way bear out?

Mitch didn’t quite say what he meant here and it could mean one of two things.

One thing it could mean is that he intended for his video presentation to be quick so as not to in some way hamper viewers – as though perhaps the change of scene might make the video too long, or too confusing to viewers.

If that is the case, then that doesn’t bear out at all. Indications are that Bible Blunders #1 was released on July 22, 2009. It’s length is 1:38. However, Bible Blunders #2 was released only three days later. It’s length is 3:00 – nearly twice as long. And it includes several changes of scene and much more complex graphics.

So then. It seems hard to swallow that anything changed between the release of these two videos that ought to have made viewers of Mitch’s programs more accepting of longer presentations, or changes of scene. So that can’t be it.

On the other hand, Mitch might say that he was trying to tell the story quickly because he had not enough time personally to make something more detailed.

But, then again, the release of Bible Blunders #2 a mere three days later – of Bible Blunders #3 a mere four days after that – of Bible Blunders #4 a mere week or so after that – well, these all tell us that Mitch wasn’t in any sense under the gun timewise in a way that forced him to have to tell the story quickly. Certainly no one was imposing any deadline on him.

So. This bit about wanting to tell the story in a “quick way” – if you ask me, it’s a lot of (foghorn sound effect).

That’s the simple one. Now let’s look at Mitch’s main argument shall we? He said:

… the location is utterly irrelevant. It's the same group of people on the same night talking about the same thing in a relatively short amount of time.

Mmm, no. Same people, same night, close in time – all irrelevant, you see, because the questions at hand are related to travel and location. In short, not the same place. The old bean tried an analogy as an excuse:

If one evening, while a friend & I were in my apartment, I asked her a question & she answered it, and then a bit later that evening while we were walking down the street my friend complained that I wasn't asking her the same question I'd asked & she'd answered, the location wouldn't make her complaint any less odd.

Not so at all though – not if the question is specific to location: “Where are we going?” And that’s especially so if the question is asked the first time and answered, and then in the second instance, the parties effect some physical movement towards a location that would be incongruent with the prior location.

Put another way: The trip to Gethsemane certainly would not be perceived as congruent with Jesus’ earlier answer to the “where are you going” question – unless God the Father was waiting in Gethsemane for them, eh? And that’s hardly something anyone would have in their mind, especially if the disciples had no hint that they were even heading for Gethsemane.

So – sorry Mitch old boy. Nice try though.

Mitch: MMMmmmm (from inside monster)

Oh do hush up.

Farrell Forgotten

Things are pretty stale over at Farrell Till country these days. The last new articles by the weasel were added in May 2008. Prior to that there were single articles added in February and September 2007. 2006 was the last year there was any serious activity.

Over on the forum, things aren’t much better. The last message was posted in 2009, by one of Farrell’s regular sad sacks, who wrote rather plaintively:

I think it's just a shame that this board is here but is going to waste. Not only do I think it's a good place for members of the list to meet and continue discussion here, but it might draw new members and attention to Farrell's website as a whole.

New members? How droll. Prior to this desperate shovel, the last post had been nearly two years earlier, and there had been only 27 posts since the whole thing started. That’s not counting all the messages that were once there by Viagra spambots. Maybe Farrell should invite them back.

It’s not too hard to see why Farrell used to scream until his head burst demanding that I link to his fundy-atheist foolishness. My reply as always is that such people need to get traffic the Smith Barney way – they need to earn it. Farrell knew he couldn’t do that, and the results are clear now that he’s being ignored.

Oh, there are reasons his production is down, I’m sure he’d say: He’s gone the way of writing fiction these days (though I would say that’s not actually a change), as I just now uncovered a blog of his in which he offers a single post in January, 2010, pushing his fictional writing (he now has two fiction e-books out). Interestingly, he tells the reader of that blog:

Those who may want to read my religious writings can Google my name and find them listed there, but this blog will focus only on my fiction.

They can Google his name and find them? Isn’t that what I’ve been saying all this time? Can we now call him Farrell “No Links” Till?

The aforementioned blog isn’t much more inspiring, though. It has had just that one entry, and one obeisant comment, not surprisingly by the same sad sack that last posted on Farrell’s forum. I also found another blog with a single entry dated April 2010 in which Farrell complains about grammar and spelling errors in letters sent to him by his e-book editor. This blog entry has only 4 comments, 1 by Farrell himself and one by a spambot selling lottery prizes. Those spambots sure do like him.

But all that’s not any sort of explanation for why he isn’t getting any sort of persisting legacy, as he no doubt hoped he would. It doesn’t look like anyone cares about the fiction books, either, and they’re not helping him any. He once bragged about how a Google search turned up so many more hits for him than it did for me. These days a Google search for “Farrell Till” brings up a mere 3,290 results.

It wasn’t hard to anticipate that someone whose primary weapon was the 10,000-word off-topic bloviation would end up this way. One reason I said I’d not respond to him any more was because it was clear that he was one of several who leeched parasitically off those they responded to in order to draw attention to themselves. As expected, now that no one is responding, no one is paying attention either. Bloviation just doesn’t have a very good shelf life.

Farrell’s right where he should have been all along – with a disappearing legacy that was never bigger than his mouth in the first place.

Laziness, Inc. Part 3

Ministry associate Nick Peters told me about a sign he saw on a van that said, “Life's Too Short To Clean Your Home.” It reflects a sort of laziness that permeates modern Western life these days, much like the copy on the side of a box containing a projection clock my wife and I once received as a gift (which did not work, by the way):

Go ahead

Stay in bed

With [this projection clock] you don’t even have to lift your head.

I think that’s a good way to thematically close out our look at objections from the bums at Laziness, Inc.

You say inerrant copies would implicitly coerce people into conversion. But don’t you also say that the evidence we have now is sufficient for faith? Wouldn’t inerrant copies be “more than sufficient”?

No – coercive elements (whether inerrant texts or not) would not be "sufficient" for anything in the way of faith. This objection makes the standard bungle of equating “faith” with belief; it is not that, but loyalty, and coercion does not produce loyalty – it produces resentful and disloyal people just along for their own self-interest, like those who are too lazy to do the spadework needed for a depth understanding of the Bible.

And of course, let’s not abuse John 20:24-9 on this either. It is precisely because these klutzes don’t have contextualized meanings of words like pistis that they continually abuse this story for their purposes, thinking their “plain reading” is sufficient – and all it takes is a very tiny amount of searching to uncover the meaning of pistis in its patronage contexts. Whining about the Bible not being “clear” on points like this, because of our own willful deficiencies in understanding, is pure laziness and nothing more.

Bottom line is this: The critics at Laziness, Inc. deny that they are asking for much, and cry incessantly about the detailed and allegedly convoluted, subjective, or contradictory answers they get from our side. In other words, those who call themselves freethinkers are whining about God requiring them to think, which is not only ironically delicious, but also says volumes about their relative maturity, and just how useless they would be as putative disciples.

You said your point about the Declaration of Independence’s copies being under tight guard proves your point. But this is just a case of supply and demand in action.

Precisely! And if the copies of the Bible were inerrant, there would inevitably be a choke point on the “supply” restricting the copies to those who could pay the price for them – as happened with relics. Yet the demand for these inerrant Bibles would be extraordinarily high.

But I have an inerrant copy of the Declaration of Independence right here. I bought it for a few bucks at a gift shop.

So what? This has no application to the matter up until the time of rapid and accurate duplication techniques which ensured that making accurate copies didn’t involve a lot of effort – and it also involves a work that is a mere handful of words (the Declaration) versus a work which is a huge volume (the Bible). It wouldn’t take a divine effort to keep copies accurate now, or of just a few words; in contrast to keep a large document inerrantly copied, using only ancient techniques of copying, would require divine intervention.

Well, those early copies of the Declaration weren’t signed or written by the Founders. They’re just from the time of the Revolution, so they don’t have any prestige value as you said.

Wrong. Again, this is nothing more than proof of my point. If they weren’t even touched by the Founders, yet are considered deserving of all that security, how much more so the inevitably rare copies of the inerrantly-copied Bible? Rarity and prestige value are two sides of the same coin: The rarity grants prestige, and the prestige is what enabled the rarity in the first place.

And so, in the end, the couch potatoes have nowhere to hide – though I daresay they’ll end up on Gehenna’s couch in just the way they have asked.

Laziness, Inc.: Part 2

So, let’s continue peeling the couch potatoes from last week, shall we?

You said explaining apologetics to a critic is like explaining nuclear physics to an infant. So that must mean you think apologetics is complicated, and the Bible even more complicated.

Wrong. It simply means the critics are extraordinarily dumb.

You compared potential inerrant originals of the Bible to the original of the Declaration of Independence. But the Founders are all dead, so they can’t make new copies. That doesn’t apply to God, who is alive.

Well, there’s another example of missing the point. It doesn’t matter if an author is alive or not; if they don’t produce any more originals – whether because they can’t, won’t, or whatever – then that original is all the more valuable and all the more subject to abuses or special protections.

We have people today who think their copies of the Bible are inerrant. Yet they don’t seem to be in any difficulty.

Wrong. Those sorts of people are full of difficulties and problems: They are precisely the sort who fall most readily for scams of the sort perpetrated by cult figures like Darwin Fish; they are also the sort who (like Fish) will refuse any contextualizing information and wield the Bible like a club in other areas (like politics). The only reason they do not cause more trouble is because we live in a modern democracy and they don’t have the guns – in contrast to Islamic societies, where the copies ARE still held in high esteem by all, including those in power. If that doesn’t let you know what kind of trouble inerrant copies can foster, then you’re too dumb to be rehabilitated. Look at Islam’s example, and at the example of relics in the medieval period – not at manifestations in a modern, democratic society where those who believe in inerrant copies are a fringe minority that the majority look at as benighted.

You say God would be a micromanager if He assured that every copy was the same. Well, isn’t that what you would be if you wanted to make sure your own books were reprinted accurately?

Yes. That’s why I wouldn’t do it. But it doesn’t matter anyway. When it comes to places like Xulon Press, it is totally the author’s job to check the galleys before printing is actually done. So I don’t need to bother anyone that way in the first place. They don’t do any editing unless I pay them to (and I don’t). Xulon does not have any “techniques” or other means to assure a faithful reproduction beyond that, unless one wants to be so absurd as to suggest that merely converting my Word file to PDF and running the software is a “technique” for ensuring accuracy in transmission. To put it simply, no one “micromanages” the copies, and unless someone wishes to make the exceptionally stupid suggestion that God ought to have imported modern printing technology into the ancient world – just to satisfy a few modern crybabies who don’t want to pursue a serious education – there’s no parallel to be drawn here.

Not that it matters. Precision copying is an obsession of modern graphocentrists; as Jocelyn Small has pointed out in Wax Tablets of the Mind:

Exact wording is rarely crucial in oral societies, but often of great importance in literate ones, though this aspect took centuries to develop…Most oral societies are not only uninterested in the detail of the words per se, but even unaware of the unit of the word…for oral cultures it is not the words but the story or the gist that counts.

To that extent, there is no reason for God to be a micromanager and assure that every word gets transmitted exactly; this is the petulant, childish demand of fundamentalist minds. Rather, as long as the ideas were accurately transmitted – and there is no reason to say, even with errant copies, that they were not – then there is no basis for objection other than childish whining.

Relatedly, one should not confuse accurate transmission of the text with clarity of ideas in the text, which are two separate issues. If the Bible as we have it had been transmitted with 100% correctness from the originals, this would have no bearing on the “clarity complaints” of critics.

Surely God could have come up with some way to do this, like maybe making it part of the natural order that copies of His Word would come out inerrant – you know, like gravity works.

How funny. When someone comes up with specific mechanisms rather than vague fantasy, they can give us a call.

But aren’t natural laws examples of God micromanaging?

No. It’s not constant interference with the process.

But those laws do restrict our free will.

No, they do not. Free will, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy among others, is the “capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.” It doesn’t mean the ability to do whatever comes to our mind, even the impossible (what might be called freedom of action). This is a distinction that is generally beyond most theological neophytes. Gravity restricts our freedom of action (we can’t float in the air whenever we want), but not our freedom of will (it does not stop our choices to try to float in the air, or to overcome gravity in an airplane).

Part 3 and last sometime soon!

Laziness, Inc.: Part 1

Some time back I had an article titled “The Clarity Complaint” in which the follow excerpt could be offered as thematic:

John W. "the Liar" Loftus admits in his tell-all biography that while a professing Christian, he had an adulterous affair. He also has complained that the Bible is not clear on certain points. Yet when I asked him on the forum what he found "unclear" about this commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery. ...he had no answer.

The typical whiny Skeptic who has problems with comprehension has plenty of excuses, though; let’s look at some of these over the days we do this series.

Even if you are right in pointing us to some context that interprets the Bible, the very fact that you have to do this shows that the Bible sometimes doesn't mean what it clearly says.

How moronic. The objection (“it doesn’t mean what it clearly says”) is little more than a reiteration of the original reading in which contexts were ignored, and it was imperialistically assumed the God should accommodate our unwillingness to do a little legwork. With those contexts, the Bible IS clear – to its original readers who knew the contexts.

This idea that God should have provided explanatory information to cover every possible misreading, every possible language, every possible cultural context, and every possible expression of ignorance, is simply childish refusal to accept a reasonable responsibility. God wants earnest disciples, not couch potatoes, and if the critic wants to be a couch potato – he has selected his own fate.

But why would I need such tools of context to read an inspired document?

Why is it assumed that a document being “inspired” means that it will accommodate the lazy, the stubborn, the ignorant, and the whiny? There is nothing about the semantic contexts of “inspired” – either in English or in Koine Greek – that indicates that inspiration does, or is obliged to, produce a message that is universally understandable in every language and culture, and in spite of ever effort to inform the text with one’s own agenda.
God has the power and knowledge to inspire such a text, so why didn’t He?

God also has the power and knowledge to serve you breakfast, change your TV channels, and wipe for you when you’re on the toilet. However, He has no obligation to do any of these things, and neither does He have the obligation to service the terminally dense and stubborn with their own personal Bible versions.

As I replied to John Loftus in a rebuttal to The Christian Delusion:

Loftus loftily proclaims that “communication is a two-way street,” [182] and he’s right. But what he does here is object that God failed to walk down the street 99% of the way to meet him on the last 1%. Each of the alleged “communication” deficiencies he cites are easily resolved with a few minutes of checking, as we shall see; or else they amount to people being stupid, foolish, or sinful. (We’ll see what he says about that response further on.) But Loftus would rather blame God for not saving him that walking distance, which is exactly what we might expect from someone who rationalizes away and refuses to answer for their own manifest sins. How does that work out with, Thou shalt not commit adultery? We can guess: He probably had some rationalization back then, too, of the Clintonesque “it depends what ‘is’ means” variety.
All “the Bible is not clear” amounts to is the critic saying, “I refuse to walk more than a few steps to achieve the proper understanding. God is obliged to do the rest. Why? Because I say so!”

You said that the ultimate “inerrant” copy of any message of God resides with God Himself in heaven (the Logos). How do you know this?

Gee, how do we know this? It’s sort of a logical step thing, you know? Once we assume God exists, once we assume God is omnipotent and perfect – two steps that are taken for granted at this level of the argument – it stands to reason that whatever messages God transmits are inerrant. The real question regarding inerrancy then becomes whether or to what extent any purported revelation (whether the Bible, the Quran, or Aunt Jenny’s prophecy down at the Assembly of God) reflects either God’s own statements – or the actual truth; for of course, a message need not be inspired by God to be without error. And we determine whether error exists in the same way we would decide if it exists in any other document or claim.

All these informing contexts are fine, but they are not evidence of biblical inerrancy.

Oops, missing a step there, aren’t we? The informing contexts are evidence showing that a claim of error is misguided. This in turn is evidence that particular charges raised against a claim of inerrancy are false. That in turn lends support to the doctrine of an inerrant whole, but no one has ever claimed (unless it is a backwards fundy, or a Skeptic who used to be one) that all by itself one such solution becomes “evidence of biblical inerrancy” as a whole.

Frankly, even if I were an atheist, I would be embarrassed by most of the claims made by Biblical “errantists” – and my replies to them would not change substantially.

I’ll continue this series next week sometime. In the meantime, be on the lookout for Skeptics who palm themselves off as competent critics.