Robert Tulip wrote:
Neil Godfrey has my sincere sympathy. If others can put his ideas in terms that are slightly less flamboyant I would be keen to respond. I respect Neil’s analysis in his areas of competency, and I admire his successful efforts to escape the psychological damage of his decades of voluntary fundamentalist indoctrination.
What a load of condescending rubbish. I have explained in detail exactly what I mean by cultish behaviour and none of it has been contradicted.
Robert Tulip wrote:However, astrotheology is an area in which Neil has shown no comprehension, as far as I can tell from his responses here.
I have pressed the point about logically valid methods. That’s my point. You do not practice the 4 steps of the hypothetico-deductive method as you have professed.
Robert Tulip wrote:I have also heard criticism of his summary banning and censoring of reasoned discussion from contributors such as GodAlmighty and Tat Tvam Asi at his blog.
Relevance? Yes, I ban trolling and abusive comments. I seem to recall I gave you a pretty good run on the blog. I did draw the line when you wanted to do more than comments and asked to write a full post.
Robert Tulip wrote:Saint Mark presents a diagnostic dichotomy between people who can understand the story and people who are blinded by hardness of heart. That is just something in the Bible, as a core theme of the loaves and fishes story. Neil has told us he can fully explain ail the verses of this story, but I have not seen his efforts to say what Mark means by this claim.
You have already said you will not accept any alternative that does not embrace astrotheology. Why do you care what alternatives I present? (
Saint Mark?)
Robert Tulip wrote:Obviously this dichotomy has been abused by fundamentalists for delusional purposes. But that hardly means the dichotomy should simply be rejected on principle, as Neil Godfrey implied.
Rubbish. Of course Mark writes at two levels, for insiders and outsiders. That goes without saying.
Robert Tulip wrote:Truth is a highly contested concept, especially when seen in phrases such as “The Plain Truth”. Truth should be considered in purely scientific terms. And that is actually what astrotheology does, even if some people cannot understand it. Astrotheology is a method to analyse how the allegorical ideas in the Bible are grounded in natural observation. There is nothing deviant or secretive about that. I understand that Neil Godfrey is very familiar with the deviant secrecy of the World Wide Church of God cult, and his exposure of their activity shows his integrity and courage.
We are talking about the fallacious methods of your claims. If you think we cannot understand something then rethink your presentation or listen to what the other side is really saying.
Robert Tulip wrote:Unfortunately, Neil Godfrey’s derogatory projection of his own sad and extensive cult involvement onto D.M. Murdock lacks any evidentiary foundation.
I have given the “evidentiary foundation”. You ignore it. Projection be blowed. If I were projecting I’d see you as reasonable as myself!
Stop your self-serving Casey-like psychoanalysis and try to grapple with what is actually said.
Robert Tulip wrote:Cults apply personal visions of truth, and reject contestability. That is the complete opposite of anything in Murdock’s writing, and of her valuable work in helping people to escape from real cults. Where people have found actual errors in her work she has issued errata. But that is far from the impression created by the sloppy and baseless denunciation practiced by Bart Ehrman, whose great list of Acharya’s supposed errors boiled down on inspection to a small misdating of Augustine which she had already noted herself.
It is you and Murdock that reject “contestability” of your thesis. If we contest it we are accused of being wilfully blind and bigoted, etc.
Robert Tulip wrote:It is one thing to assert, as Neil has done, that interpreting Biblical texts as astrotheological is fundamentalist. It is another thing entirely to give that sweeping denunciation any content.
Have you actually read my criticisms? It’s not the content, it’s the method I have been addressing. The validity of the content rests on the validity of the method.
Robert Tulip wrote:What I think is happening here is that Neil is confusing fundamentalism with the making of absolute claims. The astrotheological reading of the Bible makes absolute claims about the most likely and explanatory original intent and meaning of the texts, claiming that the authors of the New Testament intended to allegorise the Sun as the Son. This is a hypothesis that is entirely scientifically possible, with potential to become accepted as a persuasive and even compelling interpretation of the texts, with rational and coherent explanatory implications for the entirety of Biblical interpretation.
It can only succeed if it abides by the norms of scientific methods and logically valid methods. “Absolute claims” does not sound particularly scientific for a start. No thought of any tentativeness at all?
Robert Tulip wrote:By contrast, fundamentalists hold to traditional magical readings in order to reinforce archaic systems of social control. The two approaches have no common content. So Neil has made a simple category mistake.
You are setting up the classic false dichotomy. You need to be comparing your approach with genuinely scientific inquiries.
Robert Tulip wrote:What the two different approaches do have in common is certainty about their opinions, even though one is certainly correct and the other is certainly wrong. There is obviously a political backlash against certainty, going back to Popper’s ideas about the open society. But this backlash has its own absolutes, such as tolerance and relativism. If we say we have no absolute certainty, we find ourselves stuck in a nihilistic morass with no basis for decision and action.
Nonsense. False dichotomy again.
Robert Tulip wrote:Wegener would never have convinced anyone of continental drift if he were not absolutely certain of it.
Another fallacy.
Robert Tulip wrote:Einstein’s indifference to the confirmation of relativity provided by the measurement of the perihelion of Mercury similarly shows he had absolute certainty of the truth of relativity.
So? He did not arrive at relativity by means of the fallacies described by Samuel Sandmel as parallelomania.
Robert Tulip wrote:Obviously proof of precessional content in the Bible is far from achieving the coherence of these modern major paradigm shifts, but my expectation is that this is a transformation of religious consciousness that is now approaching a tipping point.
This sounds like New Age gobbledegook. So you are peddling a "religion" but you say your "religion" is different because it is "scientific"?
Robert Tulip wrote:Murdock is pioneering new emerging ways of thought about theology. That naturally produces misunderstanding and reaction.
It’s not her ideas per se that cause me to reject her views. It’s the invalid means of reaching them that leads me not to accept them. But it’s
her abusive attacks on critics that produces “misunderstanding and reaction” in my case.
Robert Tulip wrote:She is completely isolated as an academic pariah, with the evil eye of her mad detractors bullying others to keep her and likeminded writers such as Earl Doherty in the outer darkness.
Yes, no prophet is without honour save in their own country . . . .
I see nothing likeminded with Acharya’s methods in any of Doherty’s writings. Don’t forget I deplored personal attacks on Acharya – and I still do – but I also deplore her gratuitous attacks on her critics.
Robert Tulip wrote:Obviously Murdock is not being actively persecuted, but she is certainly widely despised and rejected for very flimsy reasons.
Let’s stick to the point. Methods. Valid logic.
Robert Tulip wrote:The point, as I see it, is that the reconciliation of faith and reason can proceed through analysis of how religious ideas have scientific content. There is far more science in the Bible than is generally seen, because what Yeats called 'twenty centuries of stony sleep' have hidden the enlightened vision of the authors so comprehensively.
Again. Methods. Valid logical processes. That’s what it’s about as far as I am concerned.