Bart Ehrman. Best critical bible expert.

[mistermack]

I love the way Bart Ehrman expresses himself, and the fact that he knows his subject so fully.

The apologists hate him, you can tell by the way they bad-mouth him.

Check him out on youtube :

[Tero]

I had one book once. It was pretty good. Another useful...if still interested in Jeebus...is
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Christianit ... ristianity

[PsychoSerenity]

I've never spent much time on the bible, and found that lecture really quite interesting.

[mistermack]

I had one book once. It was pretty good. Another useful...if still interested in Jeebus...is
http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Christianit ... ristianity

I wouldn't be that interested in Jeebus from a point of view of taking it seriously.
It's just that I keep meeting people who do, and I like to be one jump ahead, if challenged.
Especially if challenged by a complete wanker.

So I like to have a few facts about how christianity started etc. And how little of the New Testament can actually be taken seriously.
And Ehrman is the best source of real unbiased information I've ever come across.

[John_fi_Skye]

I read a lot of the bible when I was at uni, because I did English Literature and most of my options were mediaeval ones (Old English, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin, etc), and so for an atheist like me it was an interesting exploration of a totally different mindset. One of my classmates was from a family of Plymouth Brethren, and so (in the days long before the internet) if she needed to check on a biblical allusion she'd just ask her mum, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the allegedly good book. I had a Crudens Concordance.

But it still makes me laugh when xtians imply that if I just read the bible a bit more I'd see the light. I bet I've read more of the bible than most of them, and of course the more I did read the more I was confirmed in my conviction that it was moronic bollox.

[mistermack]

I've never spent much time on the bible, and found that lecture really quite interesting.

He is good, isn't he?
I realised he was worth checking out, when I saw a little clip of William Lane Craig running him down.
That's recommendation indeed.

The main thing that interests me about Christianity is the supposed resurrection. If you take that away, it's literally nothing. Just a man with some fresh ideas for his day.

Apologists will tell you that the resurrection is pretty much proved by some of Paul's writing, and some of the gospels. So it's nice to know how and when the gospels were written, and how they got copied and copied and altered and changed.

I would like to see him take on St. Paul's writings, in the same way. I think he has debated the resurrection, but it wouldn't run on youtube. If I find it working, I'll post it.

[mistermack]

and of course the more I did read the more I was confirmed in my conviction that it was moronic bollox.

I agree that it is now. But it wasn't then.
It was actually as good as anything else available at the time. Better than a lot of it. So it's not completely surprising that it caught on.

But it's bollox now, and you would have to be moronic to go for it as an adult.
But of course, tiny children are moronic, in a way. I regard religious people as victims of indoctrination, abused when they were at their most vulnerable. And abused people very often become abusers, as we know.

[mistermack]

Found this about the resurrection :

[rasetsu]

Clinicians who believe in repression, therefore, see it everywhere, even where no one else does. But if everything you observe in your clinical experience is evidence to support your beliefs, what would you consider counterevidence? What if your client has no memory of abuse not because she is repressing, but because it never happened? What could ever break you out of the closed loop? To guard against the bias of our own direct observations, scientists invented the control group: the group that isn't getting the new therapeutic method, the people who aren't getting the new drug. Most people understand the importance of control groups in the study of a new drug's effectiveness, because without a control group, you can't say if people's positive response is due to the drug or to a placebo effect, the general expectation that the drug will help them. For instance, one study of women who had complained of sexual problems found that 41 percent said that their libido returned when they took Viagra. So, however, did 43 percent of the control group who took a sugar pill. (This study showed conclusively that the organ most involved in sexual excitement is the brain.)

Obviously, if you are a psychotherapist, you can't randomly put some of your clients on a waiting list and give others your serious attention; the former will find another therapist pronto. But if you are not trained to be aware of the benevolent-dolphin problem, and if you are absolutely, positively convinced that your views are right and your clinical skills unassailable, you can make serious errors. A clinical social worker explained why she had decided to remove a child from her mother's custody: The mother had been physically abused as a child, and “we all know,” the social worker said to the judge, that that is a major risk factor for the mother's abuse of her own child one day. This assumption of the cycle of abuse came from observations of confirming cases: abusive parents, in jail or in therapy, reporting that they were severely beaten or sexually abused by their own parents. What is missing are the disconfirming cases: the abused children who do not grow up to become abusive parents. They are invisible to social workers and other mental-health professionals because, by definition, they don't end up in prison or treatment. Research psychologists who have done longitudinal studies, following children over time, have found that while being physically abused as a child is associated with an increased chance of becoming an abusive parent, the great majority of abused children — nearly 70 percent — do not repeat their parents' cruelties.” If you are doing therapy with a victim of parental abuse or with an abusive parent, this information may not be relevant to you. But if you are in a position to make predictions that will affect whether, say, a parent should lose custody, it most surely is.

Similarly, suppose you are doing therapy with children who have been sexually molested. They touch your heart, and you take careful note of their symptoms: They are fearful, wet the bed, want to sleep with a night-light, have nightmares, masturbate, or expose their genitals to other children. After a while, you will probably become pretty confident of your ability to determine whether a child has been abused, using those symptoms as a checklist to guide you. You may give a very young child anatomically correct dolls to play with, on the grounds that what he or she cannot reveal in words may be revealed in play. One of your young clients pounds a stick into a doll's vagina. Another scrutinizes a doll's penis with alarming concentration for a four-year-old.

Therapists who have not been trained to think scientifically will probably not wonder about the invisible cases — the children they don't see as clients. They probably will not think to ask how common the symptoms of bedwetting, sex play, and fearfulness are in the general population of children. When researchers did ask, they found that children who have not been molested are also likely to masturbate and be sexually curious; temperamentally fearful children are also likely to wet the bed and be scared of the dark. Even children who have been molested show no predictable set of symptoms, something scientists learned only by observing children's reactions over time instead of by assessing them once or twice in a clinical interview. A review of forty-five studies that followed sexually abused children for up to eighteen months found that although these children at first had more symptoms of fearfulness and sexual acting-out than nonabused children, “no one symptom characterized a majority of sexually abused children [and] approximately one third of victims had no symptoms .... The findings suggest the absence of any specific syndrome in sexually abused children.”

Moreover, children who have not been abused do not appreciably differ from abused children in how they play with anatomically detailed dolls; those prominent genitals are pretty interesting. Some children do bizarre things and it doesn't mean anything at all, except that the dolls are unreliable as diagnostic tests. In one study headed by two eminent developmental psychologists, Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci, a child pounded a stick into the doll's vagina to show her parents what supposedly had happened to her during a doctor's exam that day. The (videotaped) doctor had done no such thing, but you can imagine how you would feel if you watched your daughter playing so violently with the doll, and a psychiatrist told you solemnly it meant she had been molested. You would want that doctor's hide.

Many therapists who began to specialize in child abuse in the 1980s often feel extremely confident of their ability to determine whether a child has been molested; after all, they say, they have years of clinical experience to back up their judgments. Yet study after study shows that their confidence is mistaken. For example, clinical psychologist Thomas Horner and his colleagues examined the evaluations provided by a team of expert clinicians in a case in which a father was accused of molesting his three-year-old daughter. The experts reviewed transcripts, watched interviews of the child and videotapes of parent-child exchanges, and reviewed clinical findings. They had identical information, but some were convinced the abuse had occurred while others were just as convinced it had never happened. The researchers then recruited 129 other mental-health specialists and asked them to assess the evidence in this case, estimate the likelihood that the little girl had been molested by her father, and make a recommendation regarding custody. Again, the results ranged from certainty that the child had been molested to certainty that she had not. Some wanted to forbid the father to see his daughter ever again; others wanted to give him full custody. Those experts who were prone to believe that sexual abuse is rampant in families were quick to interpret ambiguous evidence in ways that supported that belief; those who were skeptical did not. For the unskeptical experts, the researchers said, “believing is seeing.”

Other studies of the unreliability of clinical predictions, and there are hundreds of them, are dissonance-creating news to the mental health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that their expert assessments are extremely accurate. When we said that science is a form of arrogance control, that's what we mean.

* * *

— Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), pp. 113-116

[Cormac]

Clinicians who believe in repression, therefore, see it everywhere, even where no one else does. But if everything you observe in your clinical experience is evidence to support your beliefs, what would you consider counterevidence? What if your client has no memory of abuse not because she is repressing, but because it never happened? What could ever break you out of the closed loop? To guard against the bias of our own direct observations, scientists invented the control group: the group that isn't getting the new therapeutic method, the people who aren't getting the new drug. Most people understand the importance of control groups in the study of a new drug's effectiveness, because without a control group, you can't say if people's positive response is due to the drug or to a placebo effect, the general expectation that the drug will help them. For instance, one study of women who had complained of sexual problems found that 41 percent said that their libido returned when they took Viagra. So, however, did 43 percent of the control group who took a sugar pill. (This study showed conclusively that the organ most involved in sexual excitement is the brain.)

Obviously, if you are a psychotherapist, you can't randomly put some of your clients on a waiting list and give others your serious attention; the former will find another therapist pronto. But if you are not trained to be aware of the benevolent-dolphin problem, and if you are absolutely, positively convinced that your views are right and your clinical skills unassailable, you can make serious errors. A clinical social worker explained why she had decided to remove a child from her mother's custody: The mother had been physically abused as a child, and “we all know,” the social worker said to the judge, that that is a major risk factor for the mother's abuse of her own child one day. This assumption of the cycle of abuse came from observations of confirming cases: abusive parents, in jail or in therapy, reporting that they were severely beaten or sexually abused by their own parents. What is missing are the disconfirming cases: the abused children who do not grow up to become abusive parents. They are invisible to social workers and other mental-health professionals because, by definition, they don't end up in prison or treatment. Research psychologists who have done longitudinal studies, following children over time, have found that while being physically abused as a child is associated with an increased chance of becoming an abusive parent, the great majority of abused children — nearly 70 percent — do not repeat their parents' cruelties.” If you are doing therapy with a victim of parental abuse or with an abusive parent, this information may not be relevant to you. But if you are in a position to make predictions that will affect whether, say, a parent should lose custody, it most surely is.

Similarly, suppose you are doing therapy with children who have been sexually molested. They touch your heart, and you take careful note of their symptoms: They are fearful, wet the bed, want to sleep with a night-light, have nightmares, masturbate, or expose their genitals to other children. After a while, you will probably become pretty confident of your ability to determine whether a child has been abused, using those symptoms as a checklist to guide you. You may give a very young child anatomically correct dolls to play with, on the grounds that what he or she cannot reveal in words may be revealed in play. One of your young clients pounds a stick into a doll's vagina. Another scrutinizes a doll's penis with alarming concentration for a four-year-old.

Therapists who have not been trained to think scientifically will probably not wonder about the invisible cases — the children they don't see as clients. They probably will not think to ask how common the symptoms of bedwetting, sex play, and fearfulness are in the general population of children. When researchers did ask, they found that children who have not been molested are also likely to masturbate and be sexually curious; temperamentally fearful children are also likely to wet the bed and be scared of the dark. Even children who have been molested show no predictable set of symptoms, something scientists learned only by observing children's reactions over time instead of by assessing them once or twice in a clinical interview. A review of forty-five studies that followed sexually abused children for up to eighteen months found that although these children at first had more symptoms of fearfulness and sexual acting-out than nonabused children, “no one symptom characterized a majority of sexually abused children [and] approximately one third of victims had no symptoms .... The findings suggest the absence of any specific syndrome in sexually abused children.”

Moreover, children who have not been abused do not appreciably differ from abused children in how they play with anatomically detailed dolls; those prominent genitals are pretty interesting. Some children do bizarre things and it doesn't mean anything at all, except that the dolls are unreliable as diagnostic tests. In one study headed by two eminent developmental psychologists, Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci, a child pounded a stick into the doll's vagina to show her parents what supposedly had happened to her during a doctor's exam that day. The (videotaped) doctor had done no such thing, but you can imagine how you would feel if you watched your daughter playing so violently with the doll, and a psychiatrist told you solemnly it meant she had been molested. You would want that doctor's hide.

Many therapists who began to specialize in child abuse in the 1980s often feel extremely confident of their ability to determine whether a child has been molested; after all, they say, they have years of clinical experience to back up their judgments. Yet study after study shows that their confidence is mistaken. For example, clinical psychologist Thomas Horner and his colleagues examined the evaluations provided by a team of expert clinicians in a case in which a father was accused of molesting his three-year-old daughter. The experts reviewed transcripts, watched interviews of the child and videotapes of parent-child exchanges, and reviewed clinical findings. They had identical information, but some were convinced the abuse had occurred while others were just as convinced it had never happened. The researchers then recruited 129 other mental-health specialists and asked them to assess the evidence in this case, estimate the likelihood that the little girl had been molested by her father, and make a recommendation regarding custody. Again, the results ranged from certainty that the child had been molested to certainty that she had not. Some wanted to forbid the father to see his daughter ever again; others wanted to give him full custody. Those experts who were prone to believe that sexual abuse is rampant in families were quick to interpret ambiguous evidence in ways that supported that belief; those who were skeptical did not. For the unskeptical experts, the researchers said, “believing is seeing.”

Other studies of the unreliability of clinical predictions, and there are hundreds of them, are dissonance-creating news to the mental health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that their expert assessments are extremely accurate. When we said that science is a form of arrogance control, that's what we mean.

* * *

— Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), pp. 113-116

Very interesting! What is the connection to Ehrman?


Someone should lob this little grenade into Apelust.

[Svartalf]

I read a lot of the bible when I was at uni, because I did English Literature and most of my options were mediaeval ones (Old English, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin, etc), and so for an atheist like me it was an interesting exploration of a totally different mindset. One of my classmates was from a family of Plymouth Brethren, and so (in the days long before the internet) if she needed to check on a biblical allusion she'd just ask her mum, who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the allegedly good book. I had a Crudens Concordance.

But it still makes me laugh when xtians imply that if I just read the bible a bit more I'd see the light. I bet I've read more of the bible than most of them, and of course the more I did read the more I was confirmed in my conviction that it was moronic bollox.

Actually reading/studying it is one of the best ways to stop believing... one still has to admire the Mom's mastery of the bollox, I wish I had such perfect knowledge of Tolkien's works.

[PsychoSerenity]

I've just been reading a bit of it, I had no idea how silly it all is. This is how the gospel according to John ends:

John 21:25 (NIV)

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

What a fucking cop-out!

[Cormac]

I've just been reading a bit of it, I had no idea how silly it all is. This is how the gospel according to John ends:

John 21:25 (NIV)

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

What a fucking cop-out!

It has that "my dad is everything proof" schoolyard braggartry about it, doesn't it?

[rasetsu]

Clinicians who believe in repression, therefore, see it everywhere, even where no one else does. But if everything you observe in your clinical experience is evidence to support your beliefs, what would you consider counterevidence? What if your client has no memory of abuse not because she is repressing, but because it never happened? What could ever break you out of the closed loop? To guard against the bias of our own direct observations, scientists invented the control group: the group that isn't getting the new therapeutic method, the people who aren't getting the new drug. Most people understand the importance of control groups in the study of a new drug's effectiveness, because without a control group, you can't say if people's positive response is due to the drug or to a placebo effect, the general expectation that the drug will help them. For instance, one study of women who had complained of sexual problems found that 41 percent said that their libido returned when they took Viagra. So, however, did 43 percent of the control group who took a sugar pill. (This study showed conclusively that the organ most involved in sexual excitement is the brain.)

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Obviously, if you are a psychotherapist, you can't randomly put some of your clients on a waiting list and give others your serious attention; the former will find another therapist pronto. But if you are not trained to be aware of the benevolent-dolphin problem, and if you are absolutely, positively convinced that your views are right and your clinical skills unassailable, you can make serious errors. A clinical social worker explained why she had decided to remove a child from her mother's custody: The mother had been physically abused as a child, and “we all know,” the social worker said to the judge, that that is a major risk factor for the mother's abuse of her own child one day. This assumption of the cycle of abuse came from observations of confirming cases: abusive parents, in jail or in therapy, reporting that they were severely beaten or sexually abused by their own parents. What is missing are the disconfirming cases: the abused children who do not grow up to become abusive parents. They are invisible to social workers and other mental-health professionals because, by definition, they don't end up in prison or treatment. Research psychologists who have done longitudinal studies, following children over time, have found that while being physically abused as a child is associated with an increased chance of becoming an abusive parent, the great majority of abused children — nearly 70 percent — do not repeat their parents' cruelties.” If you are doing therapy with a victim of parental abuse or with an abusive parent, this information may not be relevant to you. But if you are in a position to make predictions that will affect whether, say, a parent should lose custody, it most surely is.

Similarly, suppose you are doing therapy with children who have been sexually molested. They touch your heart, and you take careful note of their symptoms: They are fearful, wet the bed, want to sleep with a night-light, have nightmares, masturbate, or expose their genitals to other children. After a while, you will probably become pretty confident of your ability to determine whether a child has been abused, using those symptoms as a checklist to guide you. You may give a very young child anatomically correct dolls to play with, on the grounds that what he or she cannot reveal in words may be revealed in play. One of your young clients pounds a stick into a doll's vagina. Another scrutinizes a doll's penis with alarming concentration for a four-year-old.

Therapists who have not been trained to think scientifically will probably not wonder about the invisible cases — the children they don't see as clients. They probably will not think to ask how common the symptoms of bedwetting, sex play, and fearfulness are in the general population of children. When researchers did ask, they found that children who have not been molested are also likely to masturbate and be sexually curious; temperamentally fearful children are also likely to wet the bed and be scared of the dark. Even children who have been molested show no predictable set of symptoms, something scientists learned only by observing children's reactions over time instead of by assessing them once or twice in a clinical interview. A review of forty-five studies that followed sexually abused children for up to eighteen months found that although these children at first had more symptoms of fearfulness and sexual acting-out than nonabused children, “no one symptom characterized a majority of sexually abused children [and] approximately one third of victims had no symptoms .... The findings suggest the absence of any specific syndrome in sexually abused children.”

Moreover, children who have not been abused do not appreciably differ from abused children in how they play with anatomically detailed dolls; those prominent genitals are pretty interesting. Some children do bizarre things and it doesn't mean anything at all, except that the dolls are unreliable as diagnostic tests. In one study headed by two eminent developmental psychologists, Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci, a child pounded a stick into the doll's vagina to show her parents what supposedly had happened to her during a doctor's exam that day. The (videotaped) doctor had done no such thing, but you can imagine how you would feel if you watched your daughter playing so violently with the doll, and a psychiatrist told you solemnly it meant she had been molested. You would want that doctor's hide.

Many therapists who began to specialize in child abuse in the 1980s often feel extremely confident of their ability to determine whether a child has been molested; after all, they say, they have years of clinical experience to back up their judgments. Yet study after study shows that their confidence is mistaken. For example, clinical psychologist Thomas Horner and his colleagues examined the evaluations provided by a team of expert clinicians in a case in which a father was accused of molesting his three-year-old daughter. The experts reviewed transcripts, watched interviews of the child and videotapes of parent-child exchanges, and reviewed clinical findings. They had identical information, but some were convinced the abuse had occurred while others were just as convinced it had never happened. The researchers then recruited 129 other mental-health specialists and asked them to assess the evidence in this case, estimate the likelihood that the little girl had been molested by her father, and make a recommendation regarding custody. Again, the results ranged from certainty that the child had been molested to certainty that she had not. Some wanted to forbid the father to see his daughter ever again; others wanted to give him full custody. Those experts who were prone to believe that sexual abuse is rampant in families were quick to interpret ambiguous evidence in ways that supported that belief; those who were skeptical did not. For the unskeptical experts, the researchers said, “believing is seeing.”

Other studies of the unreliability of clinical predictions, and there are hundreds of them, are dissonance-creating news to the mental health professionals whose self-confidence rests on the belief that their expert assessments are extremely accurate. When we said that science is a form of arrogance control, that's what we mean.

* * *

— Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), pp. 113-116

Very interesting! What is the connection to Ehrman?

But it's bollox now, and you would have to be moronic to go for it as an adult.
But of course, tiny children are moronic, in a way. I regard religious people as victims of indoctrination, abused when they were at their most vulnerable. And abused people very often become abusers, as we know.

+1 for use of the "as you know" fallacy.

[Tero]

I've just been reading a bit of it, I had no idea how silly it all is. This is how the gospel according to John ends:

John 21:25 (NIV)

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

What a fucking cop-out!

An innovator. He would have been a lawer writing disclaimers in our time.