The Oldest Game of Telephone

Are you advocating piracy? And not the Spaghetti Monster type but Music Piracy.

You see it by torrent to see if it is worthy to buy.. Geesh, everyone knows that.

I’d really miss this blog if it got shut down for advocating piracy.

You can’t have your personal blog or website shut down just for being in favor of filesharing (or “media piracy”). Only if you openly admit (ie. confess) to have, yourself, committed acts of “media piracy” can you end up in legal trouble – and this still requires someone to actually A) find out, B) give a damn, and C) make the effort to report you. And even then, someone has to be interested enough to snoop around and, then, discover incriminating evidence, if any.

So, yeah, Hemant’s blog is pretty much safe. =)

Seems to me that getting it via a torrent would be a “legitimate” means. The problem with current law is that the government asserts that only certain people have the right to determine what means are legitimate, which is of course an inaccurate assessment.

Wow, it’s Newton from Men In Black II! I wonder if he ever managed to get to Cambodia with his girlfriend for $1 lobster dinners … or if he settled for his palsied mother’s mini-pizzas?

And yes, I know he was also the morgue attendant in the first MIB movie.

(Sorry, I just saw MIB2 the other night. Couldn’t help it.)

Actually, although this video is humorous, evidence in the last 1 or 2 hundred years has shown great accuracy in the transmission of the Bible from the first century to today. Many critical of the authenticity of the content had to eat their words when archeology and the finding of earlier texts verified this. Now whether you believe it reflects TRUE events is another story, but let’s not have this bunk that there was massive re-editing going on.

[...] full post on Friendly Atheist by @hemantsblog [...]

@John2: Whether or not it was translated correctly is not really the main issue. These were oral stories passed down long before they were written. Have you ever played Telephone? It’s like that, only much, much worse over a longer period of time.

John2: What you said is not even half the truth. The only bits that have survived relatively unedited are the pieces that weren’t among the huge swaths of text that were discarded wholesale. Dozens of verses have been added, and modern translations have completely altered the original story to circumvent logic and consistency errors.

For example, when God warns Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit, the older translations read “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Newer translations reword it to get rid of the pesky fact that they didn’t die the day they ate the fruit.

Familiar, frequently quoted passages were also made up from whole cloth. Example: John 7:53-8:11, the story of Jesus protecting the adulterous woman and saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” This part simply does not exist in any of the oldest extant biblical manuscripts. Nor does Mark 16:9-20, which is the part of Mark’s gospel where people actually see Jesus after he rose. Originally, the gospel ended simply by saying that he rose and leaving it there.

Your mention of the first century is funny on several levels, seeing how some of the books were yet to be written by the end of that century and the biblical canon was certainly far from finalized. Even in the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest ‘complete’ bible in existence (around 1600 years old), there are books that nobody today would recognize, such as the Book of Barnabas and the Book of the Shepherd of Hermas.

To say that there has been “great accuracy in the transmission of the Bible from the first century to today” is to ignore entirely the history of the book.

The gospels are historical fiction

Only taboo prevents grasping that the life of Jesus is identical to the life of Sherlock Holmes. They had no lives. They are fictional characters.

Holmes and Jesus/Christ have also taken on a “life of their own” outside of canonic primary writings “about” them. Witness first-rate Holmesian fan fiction novel, ‘The 7% Solution’ — the title refers to Holmes’ addiction to injectable cocaine. Theology starting with Paul (fl. 50-65 CE) is fifth-rate fan fiction about a typical hellenistic world savior.

Even if a stage set is historically appropriate, Holmes’s London and Jesus’ Jerusalem are also fictionalized. There never has been a 221B Baker Street. Dr Watson did not write The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Pilate was never governor of Judea — that office did not exist until after Jesus’ death. None of the four gospels was written by the people whose name each bears.

And Jesus certainly did not talk to Pilate, especially not using the grandiloquent rhetoric attributed to him by John. Pilate was noted for cruelty and disdain for the people. Jesus was an apostate from Judaism; such local affairs were of no interest to Rome. The penalty for his religious crime was being stoned to death by religious authorities.

Now Rome had no problem putting upstart rebels to death on a cross — but there was no crucifixion, no stoning because Jesus could no more die on a cross than Holmes could die from a cocaine overdose.

Only after the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) did xians commit to writing the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish religious authorities and “the people” had accused Jesus of claiming to be “King of the Jews.” Siding with Rome in appearance — as Paul also advises — was a survival strategy. Xians, emerging as they had from jewish roots, had to distance themselves from those traitors in Palestine and possible sympathizers in large cities of Rome’s empire: Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome itself.

Even Pilate got a coat of whitewash — the famous Ecce Homo scene where he is willing to return Jesus to his fellow Jews or release another criminal. “Then Pilate announced to the chief priests and the crowd, ‘I find no basis for a charge against this man.’” Luke23:4 NIV. Even if he had been aware of it, Pilate certainly would not have observed a Jewish custom of mercy during Passover. In the middle ages a sanitized Pilate became a minor saint.

Xians are fond of claiming that better evidence is available for Jesus’ life than for that of Julius Caesar. They lie. I propose a counterargument: our evidence for Sherlock Holmes is more solid than that for Jesus. And, that’s the gospel truth.

the anti_supernaturalist

lol at John2. How much you wanna bet some other Cristian that had no idea what he was talking about told him that. I would like to see your sources there buddy. I’m talking real science and evidence. Repeating what the pastor at your church told you isn’t gonna convince many people. for sure not the crowd reading these comments.

Oh, and as for archaeology confirming the bible: Archaeology confirms Spider-Man comics in exactly the same way – the settings existed.

I torrent movies/music that I own on DVD/CD which are scratched and cause the movie to skip or jam when I try to watch it, I also torrent uncopyrighted material (there is tons).

And on rare occassions I torrent movies I’m interested in seeing; usually I end up buying them but if they are not worth it then I delete the file after a day.

Stealing is wrong: the US government hates competition.

MikeTheInfidel: jebus was scapegoated into being ‘the savior,’ every story told about jebus was previously told about the Egyptian ‘god’ Mithra, who was also born of a virgin, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, turned water to wine, used 2 fish and 5 loaves to feed a sea of people…

Hope you catch my drift.

There is no god. Get over it.

MikeTheInfidel: jebus was scapegoated into being ‘the savior,’ every story told about jebus was previously told about the Egyptian ‘god’ Mithra, who was also born of a virgin, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, turned water to wine, used 2 fish and 5 loaves to feed a sea of people…

This is not true.

Seriously, people, stop listening to Acharya S. Her “primary sources” for her research are all quack historians.

The actual story of the development of the various savior myths is more interesting. It is NOT a simple ripoff, and they’re much more different than Acharya or Zeitgeist would lead you to believe.

I recently got into an argument with her on Facebook because she apparently searches for posts where people mention her, and I had said that she made stuff up outright. Started screaming about libel, about how I clearly hadn’t read anything she’d written, how she had thousands of primary sources (clearly she doesn’t understand the word “primary”), etc. She then went on to assert things that were not true about the myth of Horus – that he was born of a virgin on December 25 – and I went on to show her several sources that confirmed he was the son of Osiris and Isis (no virgins involved) and that December 25 was not originally part of the Christian legend. But apparently that’s standard for Acharya; if something is now part of the legend, she acts as if it was always part of the legend.

The “Jesus is just a ripoff” meme is just another example of people accepting easy – and incorrect – answers to more complicated questions. Finding out the real story is much more rewarding.

BTW, the cult of Mithras was popular among members of the military of the Roman Empire. He was not an Egyptian god.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraic_Mysteries

Ahh, forget those guys. Get it where you can, watch it, if you want to, buy it. It’s David Cross, it will be exceptionally funny. I’ve seen him live and it is quite the show. Enjoy!

Lee Strobel: The Case for Christ
The guy said religion is for the uneducated and unrealistic. Then his wife became a Christian, so he went to leading professors to get expert opinions to prove his wife wrong. Check it.

Checked it. He didn’t talk to a single nonbeliever. He just swallowed the BS believers fed him.