Loaves and Fishes

[Peter Kirby]

he said his description of my work as "wilfully evil"

That never happened.

I will call you a drama queen tho.

[Andrew]

neilgodrey wrote:

The only discussion with which you will engage is one where you do not feel that your foundations will be threatened. Anyone coming from that angle is a wilfully evil sod.

Neil indirectly called him that by calling anyone who acts like Robert a wilfully evil sod. Robert is a bit of a drama queen though. I think, Robert, that it's time you get over it.

[Peter Kirby]

neilgodrey wrote:

The only discussion with which you will engage is one where you do not feel that your foundations will be threatened. Anyone coming from that angle is a wilfully evil sod.

Neil indirectly called him that by calling anyone who acts like Robert a wilfully evil sod. Robert is a bit of a drama queen though. I think, Robert, that it's time you get over it.

Put it back in context. Next line in that post by Godfrey:

You do your condescending armchair psychoanalysis of me and consider it discourteous when I demonstrate from the works of others that my comparison of your entire approach and belief-system fitting so neatly into standard cultish phenomena does indeed hit home.

The description is completely comical if you take it the wrong way. "You're a willfully evil sod." LOL, tell me what you really think...

What Neil was doing was attempting to attribute certain points of view to Robert Tulip. He was saying that Robert Tulip had this or that view of things that included viewing disagreement as grounds for suspicion of character. That is, Neil said Robert thinks that the disagreement of others with his astrotheology isn't motivated by goodness or intelligence but rather that the default presumption is of malicious ignorance (the kind of a "willfully evil sod").

Nuance, I guess, and I can see taking it the wrong way... once... but that's not what's happening here. It's now a touchstone talking point to bring up (and misinterpret all over again) even though the misunderstanding (if it had ever been an accidental misunderstanding by Robert Tulip) had already been corrected.

Robert Tulip can be assumed to have intentionally misinterpreted things to be as offensive as possible because of the substitution of "sodomite" as the meaning of "sod," which is not natural for an English speaker unless he's being a **** (fill in your own blank).

[Robert Tulip]

It is not at all a matter of me feeling wounded about being insulted by Neil as I thought his comment was so wacky as to be seen as ridiculous. This can be brushed off as exuberance. My point is simply that Godfrey made a claim, and when I called him on it he denied he had made the claim, even though it is there for all to see.

Lets check, just for the sake of grammatical agreement. Neil said "The only discussion with which you [ie Robert Tulip personally] will engage is one where you do not feel that your foundations will be threatened. Anyone coming from that angle [ie Robert Tulip's angle, so Robert Tulip personally] is a wilfully evil sod." (Bracketed text added.)

This means: Neil thinks I engage only where I do not feel threatened and am therefore a wilfully evil sod, which Neil later clarified he intended as a mild and harmless criticism.

The claim he denies is that my summary of his clarification is accurate. He says "I did NOT call you wilfully evil at all. I have explained that already. Do you choose not to read what I say and then accuse me of saying the opposite of what I write?" (Bold added)

I will leave that for others to consider against Humpty Dumpty's theory of glory.

I am happy to have my foundations challenged, as long as people use logic and evidence rather than name calling. My foundation is that Biblical texts should be analysed against the premise that they describe reality, as far as possible. Where the purported reality lacks evidence and coherence, as in the Jesus story, it should be read as allegory. Where an actual reality, as in astronomical observation, can be found to cohere with the text, that hypothesis should be examined in detail. This is all a perfectly reasonable and productive scientific assumption, hardly evil.

[neilgodfrey]

You did the same misleading trick to me, too.

I did not mislead in the slightest. Anyone who can parse English grammar can see that my quotes extracted the key intent of their authors, from posts which are readily available in the thread for context.

Neil is referring to my explanation that he said his description of my work as "wilfully evil" is "harmless or mild".

Of course he doesn't like me pointing out his exuberances like this, since they don't make much sense. I encourage interested readers to review that exchange. Calling someone evil just for raising scholarly arguments is not a mild comment.

It is no great worry for me if Neil says such things, since that comment only reflects badly on his methods of argument, and does not engage with anything real. The relevance here is that Neil claims to be methodical, but is not.

I don 't believe this. Robert, I explained to you exactly what I meant -- that I was mocking what I perceived as your intimation that by refusing to accept your interpretations someone was being wilfully perverse, psychologically damaged, calling evil good, etc. I even quoted your words that led me to believe this is how you view those who do not accept your views. You subsequently explained that you did not mean to say I call evil good etc, but that the church says that. Okay, I didn't argue. I accepted that and let it drop.

I do not believe you are a wilfully evil sod. I am sorry you interpreted my words that way -- they were certainly not intended to suggest you were like that. I repeat. I do not believe you are a wilfully evil anything.

[neilgodfrey]

Lets check, just for the sake of grammatical agreement. Neil said "The only discussion with which you [ie Robert Tulip personally] will engage is one where you do not feel that your foundations will be threatened. Anyone coming from that angle [ie Robert Tulip's angle, so Robert Tulip personally] is a wilfully evil sod." (Bracketed text added.)

I haven't checked the full context of what I was saying (this is all too tedious). But taking those two sentences in isolation I can see how you interpreted my words the way you did. All I can say is that I meant the one who is the willfully evil sod (meaning in my mind clump of dirt, certainly not sodomite -- it never occurred to me the expression meant sodomite till you said so here) is the one who challenges the foundations of your argument with pertinent questions you rarely seem to ever directly answer.

I suspect that in the larger context of my replies to you you would see that I have at other times slipped into some form of expression of what your thoughts are in some sort of mock dialogue.

I am sorry my words came across the way they did to you. But at the same time I would ask you to quote exactly what people say without the deletions and leave it up to others to draw their own interpretations.

[Robert Tulip]

Okay fine, "that angle" is an ambiguous phrase. Glad to clear that up. Good example of why to avoid pronouns.

The issue is method and foundations.

I do not think it is wilfully evil, even with the hyperbole ratcheted down, for anyone to question my foundations. Foundationalism within philosophy is a highly controversial topic, for example through Rorty. The opposition to the old idea that thought should have foundations is a postmodern theme that I simply reject. But against the challenge of relativism, philosophy has struggled to articulate systematic explanations of the foundations of thought.

My view is that objective foundations of thought can be explained against Joseph Campbell's framework of the four functions of religion - summarised as reverence, reason, ritual and role.

This leads to the view that ethics should be nested within an ontology to obtain epistemic foundations for values in facts, and to a method of enquiry of seeking to base values on facts. In the case of the Bible, this means analysing the factual context of the writers in order to assess the real influences on their values and intentions.

I do think there is a significant problem of wilful evil in religion, and that seeking to reconcile faith and reason is a way to identify and reduce the evil within religion. The wilful evil does not include people who engage in honest dialogue aiming at mutual learning.

[neilgodfrey]

. . . . The issue is method and foundations.

I do not think it is wilfully evil, even with the hyperbole ratcheted down, for anyone to question my foundations. Foundationalism within philosophy is a highly controversial topic, for example through Rorty. The opposition to the old idea that thought should have foundations is a postmodern theme that I simply reject. But against the challenge of relativism, philosophy has struggled to articulate systematic explanations of the foundations of thought.

My view is that objective foundations of thought can be explained against Joseph Campbell's framework of the four functions of religion - summarised as reverence, reason, ritual and role.

This leads to the view that ethics should be nested within an ontology to obtain epistemic foundations for values in facts, and to a method of enquiry of seeking to base values on facts. In the case of the Bible, this means analysing the factual context of the writers in order to assess the real influences on their values and intentions.

I do think there is a significant problem of wilful evil in religion, and that seeking to reconcile faith and reason is a way to identify and reduce the evil within religion. . . .

I don't think I really understand what any of this means, sorry.

My only interest is in testable and logically valid arguments.

[Robert Tulip]

The testable and logically valid argument is that main symbols in the Bible match to empirical astronomy, and were therefore based on observation.

I am responding to your comment "The only discussion with which you will engage is one where you do not feel that your foundations will be threatened." The foundations of my philosophy as a systematic existential ontology are:

Reverence: Awe for the orderly grandeur of space and time is the starting point of thinking

Reason: The orderly structure of space and time can be comprehended and described by logical observation.

Ritual: Social institutions seek to align to the rational order of reality. Ritual promulgates and simplifies what reason and awe describe as objective order.

Role: Personal identity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the eye of eternity, describing what is universally and eternally true, can seek a foundational understanding in terms of systematic philosophy, and thereby understand the proper ethical role of the individual person.

These foundations are as relevant in ancient times as today. From a framework of reverence and reason, the ancients had a basis to develop ritual practices that explained the deep reality observed by reason. Watching the stars, the shift of the stellar equinox axis at the time of Christ was a foundational feature of time. Based just on the work of Hipparchus more than a century before, let alone probable older knowledge, together with their desire to explain a new covenant, the Gospel writers had ample motive, method and opportunity to encode accurate knowledge of the heavens in their religion. But this encoding was only understood by a small elite. That is why they had Christ express such frustration at the blind, deaf and ignorant people he had to deal with.

[neilgodfrey]

That is why they had Christ express such frustration at the blind, deaf and ignorant people he had to deal with.

And you are following in His footsteps, I see.

I actually think the rest is religious gobbledegook and cannot see why anyone would want to bother thinking like that, but to each his own.

Meanwhile, I'm very happy to engage in any testable and logically valid argument. But you're going to have to do a bit more than just declare all the Bible passage encoded astronomical observations. You're going to have to give us some real evidence. Demonstrate what astronomical knowledge there was at the time of the evangelists. Start with some star-charts and the constellation names as understood then. And give us something that we can build specific expectations/predictions on that we can test.