This reminds me of when I'd hear conversion stories many decades ago. "I used to be (atheist, death metal head, Catholic, Buddhist, etc.) but now I'm a Born Again Christian! I'd wonder "How do you know you weren't just a completely incompetent (atheist, death metal head, Catholic, Buddhist, etc.)???

Stats like conversions 1K to 1 in a certain direction could be due to incompetence or sheer cultural popularity, not necessarily Truth.

the contrast

creationist change to evolutionist

compared to

evolutionist change to creationist

is interesting, fascinating........long deep meditative contemplative pause....

i think i just saw achilles heel

LanDroid wrote: Stats like conversions 1K to 1 in a certain direction could be due to incompetence or sheer cultural popularity, not necessarily Truth.

Yeah, there are Markov chain analyses that suggest you have to watch out for random transitions. The percentage of Californians moving out is about the same as the percentage of non-Californian Americans moving in, but California starts out "under-represented" so it looks like people flood in and thus demonstrate that it is a better place to live. (Of course, the rising price of California real estate is an equilibration mechanism, as well, so even if it was originally better it eventually gets so expensive that it loses its great attractiveness.)
Anyway, good observation.

DWill wrote: There's another fallacy we can talk about. I don't know its name, but it occurs whenever someone says about another's position, "Oh, I used to think that way, too, but now..." The implied message is that the eyes have been opened, where formerly they were closed to reality. The direction taken has to be from benightedness to enlightenment, obviously, in the mind of this someone.

Conversion is only fallacious when it fails scientific standards of falsification. If a person converts to a false religious perspective, such as creationism, they will hold views that are unsupported by scientific evidence and full of false reasoning. By contrast, a conversion from supernatural myth such as the Historical Jesus to scientific history should be rigorous, with all claims testable against scientific method.

The application of sound method in history is a highly controversial topic. For example where evidence is thin, analysis of how beliefs and practices evolved can blur into unproven speculation. But there are some sound methods; for example Richard Carrier explains how Bayesian Logic can test the probability of rival hypotheses about the Historical Jesus. This involves analysing the probability that alternative prior events could have led to events that we know occurred. Orthodoxy and heresy present highly conflicting interpretations of these probabilities.

In explaining belief in the Historical Jesus, the real rival hypotheses are the orthodox Big Bang – the emergence of an empire wide church founded by Jesus Christ as an individual messiah – and the heretical Cambrian Explosion – the evolution of similar beliefs in many places that reached a tipping point of explicit unity after Mark placed them in history through his story of Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed Saviour.

DWill wrote: There is, however, no justification in that belief of arrived-at correctness. Many other reasons can account for a change of position besides the epiphany that we might want to think happened to us. We commonly hear about born-agains who used to be atheists, and the reverse. The direction of their conversions has nothing to do with the truth of their claims. The fact that you used to accept Jesus as a human being, and now you don't, doesn't mean you're more likely to be right now.

Epiphany is not a valid process in scientific method. While there are Eureka moments, these are only accepted as valid when subsequent analysis connects the dots. As Harry has pointed out, a shift from unreason to reason is likely to be much more reasonable than a shift from reason to unreason, in terms of the truth of the beliefs in question.

DWill wrote: And if you're saying that your "opinion is that astronomy is at the base of theology," but that's okay because you're using science to investigate it, you've hardly shut the door against motivated reasoning. How do you know that it isn't your belief, which has all the appearance of being cherished, that is running the show?

‘Opinion’ was a term I used here to mean ‘hypothesis’. The astronomical basis of theology is a vast topic which should be central to the analysis of religion. It touches on all sorts of areas, such as history, politics, sociology and psychology. My belief in question here is that the ancient seers who wrote the Bible viewed astronomy as fundamental to their perspective on the cosmic order of God. The reasons for the concealment of astronomy are highly complex in terms of the cultural dynamics, and appear due to the political primacy of distinguishing Christianity from paganism, where cosmology was pervasive. The church threw out the cosmic baby with the pagan bathwater.

On a side note

Lately I have been struck by the superiority of pagan thought

And thus horrified by the negative connotations built up on the word pagan over years of papal bs

I might be a pagan atheist on Thursdays from 9 to 5

With an hour off for lunch as a liberal hedonist.

Alas so many destroyed words, religion, pagan, God, etc etc it gets so you need a new word for everything because the old ones are poisoned.

Harry Marks wrote: "Nothing to do with truth" is too strong. If we know of 1000 changing from pagan to Buddhist for every one Buddhist who changes to pagan, this provides useful information. Certainly it does not prove the case for Buddhism, but it suggests that Buddhism is a better fit for the time and place in which we are observing the decisions.

Other factors could intervene. But truth is a major contributor to many of these decisions, and a preponderance in one direction is an indicator, however imperfect, for truth. I doubt, for example, that you could find one "convert" from believing evolution is responsible for the current configuration of species to believing it is not, for every 1000 who "convert" from Creationism to evolution.

Sorry to quibble, but a good point stated too strongly is a burr under my saddle.

My wife would tell you I do that--state a point too strongly. She wouldn't always say a "good" point, though. it's a habit of mine that could use some modifying, but I'm getting to my later ages so don't know what the odds are.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote: There's another fallacy we can talk about. I don't know its name, but it occurs whenever someone says about another's position, "Oh, I used to think that way, too, but now..." The implied message is that the eyes have been opened, where formerly they were closed to reality. The direction taken has to be from benightedness to enlightenment, obviously, in the mind of this someone.

Conversion is only fallacious when it fails scientific standards of falsification. If a person converts to a false religious perspective, such as creationism, they will hold views that are unsupported by scientific evidence and full of false reasoning. By contrast, a conversion from supernatural myth such as the Historical Jesus to scientific history should be rigorous, with all claims testable against scientific method.

I don't know if it makes sense to talk about conversion as fallacious. You're talking about the ideas that the person has taken up as being fallacious in some cases. All I was saying is that the "been there, too" retort that we can sometimes give means nothing in itself (though as Harry Marks said, maybe it could in the aggregate). Applied to the HJ topic, it doesn't signify anything that you once thought Jesus to have lived and now you believe him never to have existed. You changed your position, but it doesn't have to be because you were led by the truth. Maybe you were simply too susceptible to enticing, iconoclastic theories. I really don't mean to personalize this and could be talking about anyone. This historical Jesus matter isn't as cut-and-dried as you're making it, either. It's not on a parallel with creationism/evolution. You're stating the choice between HJ and myth as black-and-white, when it really isn't. As I've said several times, I'm with the HJ only to the extent to object that your claim that Jesus was not even viewed as real (until Mark invented him and then people mistakenly believed in the reality), lacks plausibility and does violence to what evidence we do have about the times. There isn't proof that anyone thought Jesus to have been entirely a myth until relatively recently.

Epiphany is not a valid process in scientific method. While there are Eureka moments, these are only accepted as valid when subsequent analysis connects the dots. As Harry has pointed out, a shift from unreason to reason is likely to be much more reasonable than a shift from reason to unreason, in terms of the truth of the beliefs in question.

I do not think you have such a shift, unreason to reason, in HJ to mythicism. That seems a big overreach.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote: And if you're saying that your "opinion is that astronomy is at the base of theology," but that's okay because you're using science to investigate it, you've hardly shut the door against motivated reasoning. How do you know that it isn't your belief, which has all the appearance of being cherished, that is running the show?

‘Opinion’ was a term I used here to mean ‘hypothesis’. The astronomical basis of theology is a vast topic which should be central to the analysis of religion. It touches on all sorts of areas, such as history, politics, sociology and psychology. My belief in question here is that the ancient seers who wrote the Bible viewed astronomy as fundamental to their perspective on the cosmic order of God. The reasons for the concealment of astronomy are highly complex in terms of the cultural dynamics, and appear due to the political primacy of distinguishing Christianity from paganism, where cosmology was pervasive. The church threw out the cosmic baby with the pagan bathwater.

I would say that your "hypothesis," though, has that 19th-Century feel of a grand, unified explanation that probably is hopelessly inadequate to explain a complex phenomenon like religion. I'm reminded of the character Causabon in Middlemarch, who labors over his life's work, to be called "A Key to All Mythologies." The narrator remarks that he is unaware that this approach has already been abandoned by scholars. This also is a hypothesis, almost needless to say, for which you won't be able to gather support if the evidence was erased. Isn't is likely, anyway, that astrotheology is but a single stone in the foundation of religion? Think of all we know about the functions that religion has for people, the emotional and spiritual needs that it answers. With cosmology you seem to offer only aesthetic contemplation, scientifically based, as what satisfied needs prior to the church spoiling everything. I could also ask who did the spoiling in the case of other religions, if astronomy was all humankind's prelapsarian worldview.

DWill wrote:I do not think you have such a shift, unreason to reason, in HJ to mythicism.

the only people that find the HJ stuff convincing are believers generally.

sure you get the odd atheist that likes a HJ but they usually have no reading on the subject.

HJ is a red herring really

i mean no-one worships any of the HJ's and i've never seen a HJ put up for consideration that was worth worshipping.

if there was a HJ who cares, except believers, who then still haven't got a leg to stand on with their apologetics getting to all that BS in the bible.

i'm getting to the stage where i think, well if you want him that much you can have him.

if it takes the literal crucifixion of some as yet unspecified HJ to cleanse you of all sin, well more fool you.

i'll keep on reading the connotation while they die on the denotation.

people generally only want a HJ so they can feel less stupid about believing orthodox twaddle.

good on 'em i say, i used to be one of 'em, now i feel like i've been let out of prison.

as Campbell used to say

people quote "the fool has said in his heart there is no God"

but theres another kind of fool who says there is a God and our guy is IT!!

those other guys are mythology, and then they have the hide to accuse others of special pleading

sometimes it takes a while to put away childish things

As I've said several times, I'm with the HJ only to the extent to object that your claim that Jesus was not even viewed as real

not by the docetists at any rate.

In Christian terminology, docetism (from the Greek δοκεῖν/δόκησις dokeĩn (to seem) /dókēsis (apparition, phantom),[1][2] according to Norbert Brox, is defined narrowly as "the doctrine according to which the phenomenon of Christ, his historical and bodily existence, and thus above all the human form of Jesus, was altogether mere semblance without any true reality." [3][4] Broadly it is taken as the belief that Jesus only seemed to be human, and that his human form was an illusion. The word Δοκηταί Dokētaí (illusionists) referring to early groups who denied Jesus' humanity, first occurred in a letter by Bishop Serapion of Antioch (197–203),[5] who discovered the doctrine in the Gospel of Peter, during a pastoral visit to a Christian community using it in Rhosus, and later condemned it as a forgery.[6][7] It appears to have arisen over theological contentions concerning the meaning, figurative or literal, of a sentence from the Gospel of John: "the Word was made Flesh".[8]

ebionites a different story

Ebionites (Greek: Ἐβιωναῖοι Ebionaioi, derived from Hebrew אביונים ebyonim, ebionim, meaning "the poor" or "poor ones"), is a patristic term referring to a Jewish Christian movement that existed during the early centuries of the Christian Era.[1] They regarded Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah while rejecting his divinity[2] and insisted on the necessity of following Jewish law and rites.[3] The Ebionites used only one of the Jewish Gospels, revered James the Just, and rejected Paul the Apostle as an apostate from the Law.

marcionites different again

Marcionism was an Early Christian dualist belief system that originated in the teachings of Marcion of Sinope at Rome around the year 144.[1]

Marcion believed Jesus was the savior sent by God, and Paul the Apostle was his chief apostle, but he rejected the Hebrew Bible and the God of Israel. Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament. This belief was in some ways similar to Gnostic Christian theology; notably, both are dualistic, that is, they posit opposing gods, forces, or principles: one higher, spiritual, and "good", and the other lower, material, and "evil" (compare Manichaeism), in contrast to other Christian views that "evil" has no independent existence, but is a privation or lack of "good",[2] a view shared by the Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides.

the doctrine is all there in the NT

why does "Paul" say

Therefore from now on we recognize no man according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer.

"Jesus" himself says

i am the way the truth and the life

to me christianity is only workable when read as allegory, metaphor.

if you read it literally it's comparatively worthless.

ooooooooh we've got an oyster

yeah, shame you're too ignorant and stiff necked to find a pearl.

youkrst wrote:On a side note

Lately I have been struck by the superiority of pagan thought

And thus horrified by the negative connotations built up on the word pagan over years of papal bs

I might be a pagan atheist on Thursdays from 9 to 5

With an hour off for lunch as a liberal hedonist.

Alas so many destroyed words, religion, pagan, God, etc etc it gets so you need a new word for everything because the old ones are poisoned.

You might enjoy a recent book, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity, by James J. O'Donnell. The traditional religion was practiced by devout polytheists and came in many flavors. Christianity was a first an upstart, often thought of as a dangerous one and consistently criticized even when tolerated. How Christians gradually turned the tables on the old religion, casting all of these others as pagans, sinful idol-worshipers thoroughly beyond the pale, makes a fascinating story.