Was Jesus a Progressive Socialist?

[DesertBerean]

Several times you refer to Jesus and John the Baptist together. Why?

[Machinist]

They put the coats on the donkeys, and put the lotion in the basket. Next, Jesus sat on the coats that were on them donkeys. So Jesus sat on them donkeys. The question is whether He sat on them one at a time or whether he did the splits.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

In which case every comment about those writings - including your own comments - would be utterly worthless. Uncertainty attaches to some of what is said to be sure, but for the overwhelming majority of writings, the writer will have successfully fulfilled the aim of communicating his thoughts. That is what writing is intended to achieve.

All we can do is offer interpretation and speculation as to what the original text may have conveyed and what the author's actual intentions might have been.

[Mountain Man]

To try and pretend that you know what the writer of that verse actually intended is ludicrous arrogance.

What's ludicrous is your suggestion that it was Matthew's intent to convey the absurd image of Jesus doing the splits across a pair of donkeys as he rode into Jerusalem.

[Sparko]

I have very briefly put forward overviews of arguments concerning these texts. However, no one [not even @Mountain Man] can know what the writer was thinking he wrote his text.

Nor can anyone [not even @Mountain Man] know where, if, and in precisely what way, those texts may have been interpolated and/or corrupted in later copying because we do not have an original complete MS for any these texts from which to work.

In case you missed my earlier post I will repeat it here


"he sat on them" - "them" refers to "the coats" not sitting on both the donkey and the colt.


https://www.blueletterbible.org/niv/.../t_conc_950007
21:7 ἤγαγον τὴν ὄνον καὶ τὸν πῶλον καὶ ἐπέθηκαν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶν τὰ ἱμάτια καὶ ἐπεκάθισεν ἐπάνω αὐτῶν

and brought | the | donkey | and | the | colt | and | laid | their coats | on | them | and | He sat | on | the coats

[rogue06]

Mein Gott don't you know how to link to a post? And while tab at least linked directly to it when I click your link I don't even go to the right freakin' page.

Here's how you do it:

I think that studying gun violence is legitimate but I think the problem has been the amount of pure garbage research that has been produced by the anti-Second Amendment crowd that was designed to push forth an agenda rather than look at the issue has made people leery. Now before Sam et al. start spinning on their eyebrows I'll be delighted to point out specific examples of exactly this sort of thing.

Arthur L. Kellermann, who has won many honors and awards and has served as Director of the RAND Institute of Health and founded the department of emergency medicine at Emory University, concocted "research" that showed that a homeowner is 43 times as likely to be killed or kill a family member as an intruder. This statistic immediately became etched in stone by the left and was uncritically repeated by politicians and the press for several years. There of course was one problem with his statistic, it was the result of incredibly shoddy to the point of dishonesty, methodology. In fact Kellermann himself has been forced to downgrade his original estimate to "2.7 times" (a figure nearly 1/16th the original figure), but he still persists in using discredited methodology.

The biggest but not the only problem was that Kellermann only cited examples of where an intruder was shot and killed and, in his own words, did "not include cases which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm" and now admits that "Simply keeping a gun in the home may deter some criminals who fear confronting an armed home owner" conceding that "a gun can be used to scare away an intruder without a shot being fired."

Further, Kellermann acknowledged that of the original 43 deaths for every intruder killed figure, 37 were suicides. While this is obviously not good while restricting the access to firearms bans could lower the rate of gun suicide deaths it would likely have no effect on the overall suicide rate since people intent on suicide just find another way (O.D., hanging, jumping). Japan is an excellent example of this. They have a suicide rate well above average, yet private gun ownership is almost non-existent.

The honest measure of the protective benefits of guns is the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected, not Kellermanns burglar or rapist body count. No one suggests that the only measure of the benefit of law enforcement is the number of criminal suspects killed by the police. Multiple studies show that only 0.1% (1 in 1000) of the defensive use of guns results in the death of the predator. And it should be noted that people are rarely attacked by complete strangers, usually the attackers are someone they know and that includes the people they are living with. This tends to dramatically skew the family member/intruder ratio as well.

Finally, in a April 1994 interview with the San Francisco Examiner, Kellermann said that if his wife was attacked, he would want her to have a gun for protection, indicating that even he doesnt believe his own study.



Another much celebrated case of fraudulent research was published in an award-winning book (recipient of Columbia Universitys prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy for instance) that was the most heralded anti-gun book in a decade, Michael Bellesiles Arming America: The Origins of the National Gun Culture stands exposed as an utter hoax. Bellesiles was an Emory professor and director of the Center for the Study of Violence and his book caused a sensation with Second Amendment opponents with its claim that gun ownership in the U.S. was "an invented tradition," but ended with its author being charged with perpetrating what the New York Times called "one of the worst academic scandals in years."

The media went nuts over the release of the book the Chicago Tribune called it an "exciting new book that absolutely devastates the myth of the gun in early America." The New York Times said "the evidence is overwhelming" and the Los Angeles Times hailed the book as a "great achievement," while the Philadelphia Inquirer gushed that it was "the most critically praised book of America history in many years." The Journal of American History called the book's research "meticulous and thorough," and wrote that Bellesiles had "attacked the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment". It declared Bellesiles' evidence was so formidable that "if the subject were open to rational argument", the debate would be over.

IOW, Bellesiles' book had reassured the liberal establishment that their belief that what they had believed about guns, what they had hoped to be true, was correct: that the Second Amendment protects only the collective right to bear arms, that individual gun rights were deemed unimportant at the time of the writing and ramification of the U.S. Constitution.

But then things started going wrong. Seriously wrong. It turned out that Bellesiles' alleged research was based on distorted interpretations of historical records and often cited evidence that appears to have been completely fabricated. Scholars who examined his data couldn't substantiate his claims that the 11,000-plus probate records from 40 counties in Colonial America showed fewer than 7% actually owned working guns. Academics trying to corroborate Arming Americas sensational findings were stunned by "an astonishing number of serious errors," and found his estimates to be way off at best. Further, Bellesiles assured would-be replicators of his research that for all but a few of the 40 counties he examined, he did his probate research via microfilm at the Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia. The problem is that the archives in East Point have no such records.

Even worse, Bellesiles repeatedly claimed that he had managed to obtain detailed probate records from 1849 through 1859 from the San Francisco Superior Court. The problem is that all the probate data from that decade had been destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906. Bellesiles couldnt have examined them because that information was destroyed decades before he was even born! When confronted with this inconvenient fact, Bellesiles suddenly recollected that it was from one of the other two Bay area libraries that he got the records from. But as the New York Times reported, "[The San Francisco records] were not available in two other Bay area libraries either."

Bellesiles then claimed that it was actually at the Contra Costa County Historical Society that he found them. Unfortunately for him, the Contra Costa facility not only said that it didnt have any such records, but also said that it had gone back through all its logs and didnt even have a record of Bellesiles having ever visited its collection until recently -- long after Bellesiles published his book.

In the end Bellesiles' awards were rescinded, his publisher did not renew his contract, the National Endowment for the Humanities withdrew its name from a fellowship that the Newberry Library had granted him and Bellesiles resigned his position at Emory. The author of the piece in the Journal of American History that had so enthusiastically praised Bellesiles wrote "It is entirely clear to me that he's made up a lot of these records. He's betrayed us. He's betrayed the cause. It's 100 percent clear that the guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He's breached that trust."


Those are two of the more notorious instances. One of such sloppiness that one can reasonably ask if it was deliberate and one of unquestionable fraud and deceit. Both were touted as "scripture" by the left even though problems were apparent from the very start. And to be clear there are many other examples that I could cite.

For instance, in 1989, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a stud that erroneously claimed that, "firearms are responsible for the deaths of 45,000 infants, children and adolescents per year." What was the problem with that claim? The 45,000 figure was much larger than the total number of gun deaths for all ages combined.

And then there was the following quote which appeared in a reputable academic journal: Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled. Research is not even needed to disprove this outrageous claim. All that is needed is simple, basic math. If there had been just 2 children gunned down in America in 1950, then doubling that number every year would have meant that, by 1980, there would have been 1,000,000,000 (one BILLION) American children gunned down. That is more than 4 times the TOTAL population of the U.S. at that time. And by 1995, when the claim was published, 16,384,000,000,000 (over 16 TRILLION) children were being gunned down that year. This statistic was declared the "worst social statistic ever" by Joel Best author of Damned Lies and Statistics.

Now, I'm sure there have been garbage studies produced by the pro-Second Amendment crowd but I seriously doubt that they were scooped up and uncritically parroted uncritically by the media for years often even after they were discredited.

Yeah, most of it is irrelevant to the discussion here since it was about a completely different subject. What a surprise Tab posted a few snippets to show that even respected academics can not only be wrong but commit fraud (citing Bellesiles' conduct as an example).

However, you decided that you would take the opportunity to falsely declare that

And we see that the tendency for rogue06 to make comments with no supporting citations goes back to at least 2015

Of course anyone who read the post can see numerous supporting citations in the text.

You tried to excuse that by saying that none of those citations were in tab's snippets -- but then neither was the date it was originally posted. To have gotten that you had to go to the original post^[1], which means you saw the various supporting citations but decided to lie instead.

You also thought you were being clever by changing what you said didn't exist (but obviously did) from "supporting citations" to "links." But that's just the sort of games we have all come to expect from you.




1. something you never did the time you dismissed my statements about Christmas and paganism as ridiculous nonsense without ever reading them

[tabibito]

No one can be certain what was in the mind of a writer two thousand years ago. You are reading these texts in a translation [which by its very nature is an interpretation] and you are reading a version based on copies of copies of copies.

To try and pretend that you know what the writer of that verse actually intended is ludicrous arrogance.

In which case every comment about those writings - including your own comments - would be utterly worthless. Uncertainty attaches to some of what is said to be sure, but for the overwhelming majority of writings, the writer will have successfully fulfilled the aim of communicating his thoughts. That is what writing is intended to achieve.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Hardly surprising to see you double down on the flaccid "We just can't be certain!" defense as you begin to have an inkling of how stupid your argument really is but think you can save face by refusing to concede.

No one can be certain what was in the mind of a writer two thousand years ago. You are reading these texts in a translation [which by its very nature is an interpretation] and you are reading a version based on copies of copies of copies.

To try and pretend that you know what the writer of that verse actually intended is ludicrous arrogance.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

First

snipped for irrelevance

I can only assume you are persisting in this either to draw attention away from your gaffe where you referred to "Agrippa's military", or that you are bored.


What you posted on the rest of the thread entitled Knife Control! Yep, Next After Gun Control! is entirely immaterial to the link to which tabibito directed me. https://theologyweb.com/campus/forum...ge4#post368817

Here is that link.

• 10-10-2015, 11:19 AM
  Originally posted by whag View Post
• I talked about the OP plenty. Cow Poke said we should research the whackos who kill people with guns, failing to realize that gun nuts in congress shut that research down. His response was "Politics."
• I think that studying gun violence is legitimate but I think the problem has been the amount of pure garbage research that has been produced by the anti-Second Amendment crowd that was designed to push forth an agenda rather than look at the issue has made people leery. Now before Sam et al. start spinning on their eyebrows I'll be delighted to point out specific examples of exactly this sort of thing.
• Arthur L. Kellermann, who has won many honors and awards and has served as Director of the RAND Institute of Health and founded the department of emergency medicine at Emory University, concocted "research" that showed that a homeowner <a href="https://www.blueletterbible.org/search/preSearch.cfm?Criteria=is+43&amp;t=NIV" target="BLB_NW" rel="NIV.is.43" class="BLBST_a" style="white-space: nowrap;">is 43</a> times as likely to be killed or kill a family member as an intruder. This statistic immediately became etched in stone by the left and was uncritically repeated by politicians and the press for several years. There of course was one problem with his statistic, it was the result of incredibly shoddy to the point of dishonesty, methodology. In fact Kellermann himself has been forced to downgrade his original estimate to "2.7 times" (a figure nearly 1/16th the original figure), but he still persists in using discredited methodology.
  
  The biggest but not the only problem was that Kellermann only cited examples of where an intruder was shot and killed and, in his own words, did "not include cases which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm" and now admits that "Simply keeping a gun in the home may deter some criminals who fear confronting an armed home owner" conceding that "a gun can be used to scare away an intruder without a shot being fired."
  
  Further, Kellermann acknowledged that of the original 43 deaths for every intruder killed figure, 37 were suicides. While this is obviously not good while restricting the access to firearms bans could lower the rate of gun suicide deaths it would likely have no effect on the overall suicide rate since people intent on suicide just find another way (O.D., hanging, jumping…). Japan is an excellent example of this. They have a suicide rate well above average, yet private gun ownership is almost non-existent.
  
  The honest measure of the protective benefits of guns is the lives saved, the injuries prevented, the medical costs saved, and the property protected, not Kellermann’s burglar or rapist body count. No one suggests that the only measure of the benefit of law enforcement is the number of criminal suspects killed by the police. Multiple studies show that only 0.1% (1 in 1000) of the defensive use of guns results in the death of the predator. And it should be noted that people are rarely attacked by complete strangers, usually the attackers are someone they know and that includes the people they are living with. This tends to dramatically skew the family member/intruder ratio as well.
  
  Finally, in a April 1994 interview with the San Francisco Examiner, Kellermann said that if his wife was attacked, he would want her to have a gun for protection, indicating that even he doesn’t believe his own study.
  
  
  
  Another much celebrated case of fraudulent research was published in an award-winning book (recipient of Columbia University’s prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy for instance) that was the most heralded anti-gun book in a decade, Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America: The Origins of the National Gun Culture stands exposed as an utter hoax. Bellesiles was an Emory professor and director of the Center for the Study of Violence and his book caused a sensation with Second Amendment opponents with its claim that gun ownership in the U.S. was "an invented tradition," but ended with its author being charged with perpetrating what the New York Times called "one of the worst academic scandals in years."
  
  The media went nuts over the release of the book the Chicago Tribune called it an "exciting new book … that absolutely devastates the myth of the gun in early America." The New York Times said "the evidence is overwhelming…" and the Los Angeles Times hailed the book as a "great achievement," while the Philadelphia Inquirer gushed that it was "the most critically praised book of America history in many years." The Journal of American History called the book's research "meticulous and thorough," and wrote that Bellesiles had "attacked the central myth behind the National Rifle Association's interpretation of the Second Amendment". It declared Bellesiles' evidence was so formidable that "if the subject were open to rational argument", the debate would be over.
  
  IOW, Bellesiles' book had reassured the liberal establishment that their belief that what they had believed about guns, what they had hoped to be true, was correct: that the Second Amendment protects only the collective right to bear arms, that individual gun rights were deemed unimportant at the time of the writing and ramification of the U.S. Constitution.
  
  But then things started going wrong. Seriously wrong. It turned out that Bellesiles' alleged research was based on distorted interpretations of historical records and often cited evidence that appears to have been completely fabricated. Scholars who examined his data couldn't substantiate his claims that the 11,000-plus probate records from 40 counties in Colonial America showed fewer than 7% actually owned working guns. Academics trying to corroborate Arming America’s sensational findings were stunned by "an astonishing number of serious errors," and found his estimates to be way off at best. Further, Bellesiles assured would-be replicators of his research that for all but a few of the 40 counties he examined, he did his probate research via microfilm at the Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia. The problem is that the archives in East Point have no such records.
  
  Even worse, Bellesiles repeatedly claimed that he had managed to obtain detailed probate records from 1849 through 1859 from the San Francisco Superior Court. The problem is that all the probate data from that decade had been destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906. Bellesiles couldn’t have examined them because that information was destroyed decades before he was even born! When confronted with this inconvenient fact, Bellesiles suddenly recollected that it was from one of the other two Bay area libraries that he got the records from. But as the New York Times reported, "[The San Francisco records] were not available in two other Bay area libraries either."
  
  Bellesiles then claimed that it was actually at the Contra Costa County Historical Society that he found them. Unfortunately for him, the Contra Costa facility not only said that it didn’t have any such records, but also said that it had gone back through all its logs and didn’t even have a record of Bellesiles having ever visited its collection until recently -- long after Bellesiles published his book.
  
  In the end Bellesiles' awards were rescinded, his publisher did not renew his contract, the National Endowment for the Humanities withdrew its name from a fellowship that the Newberry Library had granted him and Bellesiles resigned his position at Emory. The author of the piece in the Journal of American History that had so enthusiastically praised Bellesiles wrote "It is entirely clear to me that he's made up a lot of these records. He's betrayed us. He's betrayed the cause. It's 100 percent clear that the guy is a liar and a disgrace to my profession. He's breached that trust."
  
  
  Those are two of the more notorious instances. One of such sloppiness that one can reasonably ask if it was deliberate and one of unquestionable fraud and deceit. Both were touted as "scripture" by the left even though problems were apparent from the very start. And to be clear there are many other examples that I could cite.
  
  For instance, in 1989, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a study that erroneously claimed that, "firearms are responsible for the deaths of 45,000 infants, children and adolescents per year." What was the problem with that claim? The 45,000 figure was much larger than the total number of gun deaths for all ages combined.
  
  And then there was the following quote which appeared in a reputable academic journal: “Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled.” Research is not even needed to disprove this outrageous claim. All that is needed is simple, basic math. If there had been just 2 children gunned down in America in 1950, then doubling that number every year would have meant that, by 1980, there would have been 1,000,000,000 (one BILLION) American children gunned down. That is more than 4 times the TOTAL population of the U.S. at that time. And by 1995, when the claim was published, 16,384,000,000,000 (over 16 TRILLION) children were being gunned down that year. This statistic was declared the "worst social statistic ever" by Joel Best author of Damned Lies and Statistics.
  
  Now, I'm sure there have been garbage studies produced by the pro-Second Amendment crowd but I seriously doubt that they were scooped up and uncritically parroted uncritically by the media for years often even after they were discredited.
  
  I'm always still in trouble again
  
  "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
  "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
  "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

  ---

[tabibito]

I was going to post a quote from one of Keener's commentaries on Matthew regarding the centurion, but with the arguing about sitting on animals, this troll train is going off its rails.

Given that Matthew never says he was a Roman Centurion, it doesn't seem that there is anything to make an issue about.

[NorrinRadd]

I was going to post a quote from one of Keener's commentaries on Matthew regarding the centurion, but with the arguing about sitting on animals, this troll train is going off its rails.

[Mountain Man]

With these texts no one can claim they know what the writer intended. To try to pretend otherwise is quite ridiculous. We have the texts as they have come down to us. Everything else is interpretation.

Hardly surprising to see you double down on the flaccid "We just can't be certain!" defense as you begin to have an inkling of how stupid your argument really is but think you can save face by refusing to concede.

[rogue06]

My comment was stating the blindingly obvious.

H_A-dude.gif

[rogue06]

Obviously my comment was not clear enough for you, so let me repeat it.

At post #50 in the relevant thread there was nothing but an uncredited and unsupported cut and paste.

What you wrote elsewhere on that thread is irrelevant to that simple fact.

First, nothing was cut and pasted. Sources were cited and quoted.

Second, that is irrelevant to the fact that you falsely claimed that I had "[made] comments with no supporting citations."

So once again,

I guess you missed this like you missed all of the citations I provided that you falsely claimed I didn't provide.

Stop acting like a big baby and just admit that your snarky remark blew up in your face.

You declared that

[...]

And we see that the tendency for rogue06 to make comments with no supporting citations goes back to at least 2015.

Only to have it shown that I had actually cited and quoted from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and the Journal of American History (the first and last source twice) as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the book Damned Lies and Statistics. I also cited the San Francisco Examiner but didn't quote them.

Then you claimed that they weren't in the quotes from my post that tab provided so you couldn't be faulted for missing them

In the link provided by "our mutual friend" there were no links that I could discern.

Only one problem with that.

There is no way you could have known that post was from 2015 unless you looked at the original post. The one that had all of the citations you declared I didn't provide. So you can't hide behind tab's not including them in his snippets when you obviously saw the original post.

Moreover, you tried a bit of bait and switch here. You moved the goal post when you said here that I didn't provide any links because you hadn't said that I hadn't given any "links" but rather that I hadn't provided any "supporting citations."

I guess you thought you could slip that one past since I established that I had provided "supporting citations" in spades.

So, in the end, as the posts clearly reveal, you thought that you would slip a snarky comment in only for it to backfire which led you to keep on digging the hole you placed yourself in, first by trying to shift the blame for your screw up onto tab, and also by trying to change what you falsely claimed I had not done.

Now put your big girl pants on and take responsibility for your actions rather than trying to gaslight your way out.

You can keep moving the goal posts clear out of the stadium to the other side of town, but nothing will change that.

GIF Goal Posts.gif

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

But strangely enough, you make confident assertions about what the writers intended.

I have very briefly put forward overviews of arguments concerning these texts. However, no one [not even @Mountain Man] can know what the writer was thinking he wrote his text.

Nor can anyone [not even @Mountain Man] know where, if, and in precisely what way, those texts may have been interpolated and/or corrupted in later copying because we do not have an original complete MS for any these texts from which to work.