Interbane wrote:

I am calling you out. This post is not objective it is contrived argumentation with no point and whose purpose is to divert the discussion.

It is no more contrived than your criticisms. If you are going to falsely criticize someone, you should at least be prepared to defend it. Your criticism is based on the premise that "a reader is not allowed to know more about what's written than the author." And you're criticizing Wright for making an amazingly ridiculous statement?

Is this the Twilight Zone? Of course the 'author' of a Book of the Bible knows more than the reader.

johnson1010 wrote:I am sure you can think of any number of instances where a reader might know more about a subject than the author, Star.

Your original "point" in this regard was silly in the extreme, and Interbane was just pointing that out.

To say that Paul was confused was confused was just another example of Wright's prejudice and his attempt to justify his nonexistent theory.

Of course the 'author' of a Book of the Bible knows more [about a particular passage] than the reader.

Back to where we started... Do you have any reasoning to support this assumption?

Post the surrounding text on page 308, as well as the passage in question. We can work with the details, but your assumptions have no place here.

This thread is a Chinese finger puzzle.

stahwre wrote:

interbane wrote:This makes no sense. Could you rephrase what you mean? Do you mean the person reading the book is not allowed to have a greater understanding than the character within the book?

No, the person reading the book is not allowed to have a greater understanding than the 'author' of the passage he is reading.

Does not your statement automatically disqualify everything you've said about Wright's errors in his book?

Edit: The most important point of my last post that you don't address is what your criticisms have to do, centrally, with Wright's thesis in the book. That is why your posting comes across as at best tangential to the themes of the book. Please try to tell us why Wright's errors detract from the substance of his thesis. Remember that he has not written a book about the Bible.

stahrwe wrote:

johnson1010 wrote:I am sure you can think of any number of instances where a reader might know more about a subject than the author, Star.

Your original "point" in this regard was silly in the extreme, and Interbane was just pointing that out.

To say that Paul was confused was confused was just another example of Wright's prejudice and his attempt to justify his nonexistent theory.

I think Paul's confusion was just that "confusion". Pauls so called Jesus was not earthly, and Paul had his own agenda, his teachings countered everything this Jesus was suppose to stand for. The Damascus Road incident is just one where he dreamed up a so called meeting with this Jesus.

I am sure you can think of any number of instances where a reader might know more about a subject than the author, Star.

I can name hundreds of examples of instances where I know more about a subject than the author of a book on the subject. Can anyone here NOT claim to know more about the origins of the universe and our planet than the author of Genesis? There are thousands of books written by people about subjects that were not fully understood at the time of them writing on the subject. (was that sentence proper English?)

stahwre, I hope you'll find me here. There was a request from a member to keep debate about the debate away from the topical threads, which is a good idea. Let me just say, you are one stubborn cuss. That has its complimentary side. But in this case I think you are intransigent in refusing to acknowledge any "forest" regarding Wright's book. It's not obvious to you why your focus on "trees" fails to engage either the topic or other readers of the book. In compiling a list of what you see as errors, are you thinking, but not saying, that with regard to the New Testament Wright fails to support his thesis that Jesus evolves in specific ways throughout the Gospels and into Paul's writings? If so, it's a simple matter to make this explicit, rather than assuming that just by pointing out an error you've actually made a point relevant to the claims in the book. You expect that your finding errors has some global significance that you don't even need to explain, but you do. What you've said so far, in my recollection, is only that if he is wrong about any supporting details, he is also wrong about larger matters, and that just ain't true as a generalization.

You've also objected to "omissions" in the book, most notably that Wright doesn't talk about the sudden arrival of monotheism one fine day on the way to Canaan. What you're complaining about is actually that Wright doesn't follow the party line. To claim that he isn't aware of Abraham receiving his mandate is ridiculous, as he says several times that the history of the polytheism-to-monotheism switch accepted as official isn't credible. He gives what he thinks is a better-supported timeline. In a similar way, when Wright gets to Islam, he doesn't spend any time disproving the origin of the religion back in the days of Ishmael, where some believers would put it. He doesn't "omit" this explanation, because it isn't one. He simply offers an origin that is more soundly based in evidence.

stahwre wrote:In one of the Evil Bible stories we got wrapped around the axle arguing about whether the population of the ancient world was sufficient to support the statistics of the story, a salient point if the discussion was about the accuracy of the Bible but in that case in wasn't.

If you will think back: I had said that you were assuming in your vignette that the perspective taken by the Bible writer was the only correct one that could be taken in the situation. Why couldn't that view be the wrong one, just as the view of how many fighters participated is clearly the wrong one? You did not have to then pursue the proof of the Bible's numbers, but you chose to. It takes two to tango.

Since we are done discussing this book, I wanted to add a few final thoughts about the decision to invite Stahrwe to the discussion. I have said many times this was a mistake, but I don't think I articulated my thoughts very well. At any rate, I would first point out the very fact that we had to create this "spillover" thread as testament to our irreconcilable differences.

No matter what you might say about Stahrwe's position, we have done him and ourselves a disservice by inviting him to participate in this discussion. We are expecting him to read and discuss a book that analyzes the Bible from a materialist perspective. We are asking him to read a book that requires him to suspend his belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. I don't believe this is possible any more than I could read the Bible from a true believer's perspective. I simply could not do it.

As many of us have said on numerous occasions, there is simply no common ground here.

A relevant point, I think, is that Wright is very upfront about where he comes from in his book. He tells us in his introduction that he is approaching the Bible from a materialist perspective.

Wright wrote:In this book I talk about the history of religion, and its future, from a materialist standpoint. I think the origin and development of religion can be explained by reference to concrete, observable things—human nature, political and economic factors, technological change, and so on. (2)

Wright also makes it clear that the materialist perspective doesn't preclude the validity of a religious worldview. And he even argues that the history of the idea of god, though an illusion, may be evolving toward truth.

Throughout this discussion, Stahrwe has berated the author and his ideas based on the omission of this and that, all the while NOT stating where he comes from—but which we all know to be a literal interpretation of the Bible. Naturally, Wright's perspective is going to place hugely different emphases and different priorities on the texts of the Bible. This is a scholarly study which assumes the Bible as a collection of texts written by humans from vastly different cultures over a time period of more than a thousand years. Stahrwe operates under the assumption that the texts come from God himself and that their meaning is infallible.

Unfortunately, Stahrwe's many posts seem to touch off our reflexive argument mode. And so it goes, this endless loop of bickering that never gets anywhere because the two positions here are, at their root, irreconcilable.

Stahrwe cannot see this and continues to put forth his "arguments," never acknowledging that they are deeply contingent on the premise that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. And somehow it seems to matter not at all that no one is receptive to his "arguments." He frequently uses passages from the Bible as supporting evidence for their own correctness—a fallacious circular argument as has been pointed out to him many times. Wright who, of course, does not adhere to this twisted logic, comes under attack as being "mistaken."

To be perfectly blunt, though Wright doesn't preclude the validity of a religious worldview, he certainly would preclude the validity of Stahrwe's worldview. That the Bible is the inerrant word of God and must be read literally is not a rational viewpoint any more than stories of alien abductions, the existence of leprechauns, or an orbiting tea pot between Earth and Mars.

As I have already pointed out, Wright makes it very clear where he is coming from, but Stahrwe doesn't seem to want to address where he's coming from as if he knows deep down inside that his is an untenable position. I believe he's been rationalizing for so long he doesn't even know he's doing it. And it's this lack of forthrightness that will always sabotage any kind of meaningful dialogue. Normal rules of logic don't apply because all of Stahrwe's arguments fall back on this faulty premise.