Homosexual Sues God

Cross-post from Havoc and Chaos,,,

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. The lawsuit has been filed. Personally I think Fowler offers an interesting argument according to USA Today:

,,,referring to homosexuality as a sin have made him an outcast from his family and contributed to physical discomfort and periods of "demoralization, chaos and bewilderment."

The intent of the publisher was to design a religious, sacred document to reflect an individual opinion or a group's conclusion to cause "me or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence ... including murder," Fowler wrote.

You see, 1 Corinthians 6:9 presents a very interesting conundrum in regards to interpretational history of the Greek malakoi (and arsenokoites). 

For the most part if one studies the history of how the word has been translated throughout history going all the way back to Tyndales 1526 version, it was first translated as "weakling".  In 1609, starting with the Douay-Rheims, it "changed" to effeminate.  Early 20th century, a meaning of male prostitution was adopted (in reference to the shrine prostitution).

It wasn't until the McCarthy era of the 50s that words such as "sexual pervert" or "guilty of homosexual perversion" was adopted.  And this point is important, it was cultural factors that influenced modern translators to inject anti-gay bias into their translation.  But it wasn't until the early to mid 2000s that the word "homosexual" in the derogatory sense was fully adopted.

(Conservative) Translators, and their publishers, are imposing a 20th-21st century cultural meaning on a "word" (text) written in the 1st century. And that is not even taking into account the grammatical issues of the Greek language at the time of Paul's writings. 

Another issue that are often overlooked by modern day agenda driven translators, the use of malakoi in antiquity.  In other words -Plato, Aristotle and Josephus to name a few - malakoi meant soft or weak.  Then there is the  cultural issues, as well as the vice lists.  (I have addressed shrine prostitution elsewhere, but that also needs consideration as well.)

As for arsenokoites, let's just say that Paul was the first to use this term, "a composite word, made up from two previously existing words that do not seem to have been put together before in Greek literature."  In antiquity it was again used only in reference to the "vice lists,"

So to borrow from David Gushee:

Clear yet?

How might the history of Christian treatment of gays and lesbians have been different if arsenokoitai had been translated “sex traffickers” or “sexual exploiters” or "rapists" or "sexual predators" or “pimps”? Such translations are plausible, even if not the majority scholarly reconstruction at this time. And they are at least as adequate, or inadequate, as “homosexual,” a term from our culture with a range of meanings including sexual orientation, identity, and activity, and not a word from Paul’s world.

It might have been nice if in our English Bibles the genuine uncertainty about how to translate Paul's neologism arsenokoitai, or the two words malakoi and arsenokoitai together, at least had been mentioned in a footnote.

But alas — most of the translations we got read as if every "homosexual" person was being condemned — to eternal fire. This overly confident translation decision then shadowed the lives of all LGBT people, most sadly gay and lesbian adolescents rejected by their mothers and fathers (and pastors and youth ministers) as hell-bound perverts. 

Very high-level scholarly uncertainty about the meaning and translation of these two Greek words, exacerbated by profound cultural and linguistic differences between what we (think we) know about Paul's world and what we do know about our own, undermines claims to the conclusiveness of malakoi and arsenokoitai for resolving the LGBT issue.

I deeply lament the damage done by certain questionable and sometimes crudely derogatory Bible translations in the lives of vulnerable people made in God's image.

And that my dear readers is why - as odd as Fowler's lawsuit appears - Bill Muehlenbergher may be eating his words, "Don’t like what the Bible says? No probs, just sue the publishers. Silence all opposition and stamp under foot any contrary points of view. And of course all this homofascism and pink tyranny is being done in the name of tolerance, diversity and acceptance."

Well sir, maybe if the translators and publisher's actually did their jobs and presented a well rounded translation we wouldn't be having this issue. (Ignoring the the fact that - uh, god doesn't exist.)

And that is just what we find. An American guy is not quite suing God, but the next best thing: he is suing God’s Word. Yep a homosexual is suing the Bible. And it is not hard to imagine why. Here is how one article on this begins:

A homosexual man is suing a third national Bible publisher for “mental anguish” after he says the company published Bibles with a negative connotation toward homosexuals. Bradley LaShawn Fowler of Canton, Mich., alleges Tyndale House Publishers manipulated Scripture when it published Tyndale’s New Living Translation Holy Bible and the New Life Application Study Bible by using the term “homosexuals” in a New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:9….

As WND reported, Fowler, who had a blog on Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign website last year, filed his initial complaint against Christian publishers Zondervan and Thomas Nelson Publishing. Fowler, who represented himself in both lawsuits, said in his complaint against Zondervan that the publisher intended to design a religious, sacred document to reflect an individual opinion or a group’s conclusion to cause “me or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence … including murder.” He told the Grand Rapids’ WOOD-TV in 2008 that he wants to “compensate for the past 20 years of emotional duress and mental instability.”

Well, he got the ‘mental instability’ part right at least. This guy is a real nut job. This is just one big sick joke. Unfortunately however the mindset behind this is becoming more common and more serious. For years now the militant homosexual activists have been claiming that the Bible is a book full of “hate speech”.

Homosexual Sues God

Q::Lk 1:1-4, is the whole passage a later interpolation?

A re-post of a Facebook "note" made in December of 2013,,,

Been doing some research in regards to the "relationship" between OT/NT writings. Currently trying to write up a piece to counter the "eyewitness" claim many apologists use in relationship to Acts 1:1-4 and others (2 Peter 1:16-17 and John 19:35 are used as well): "[T]he internal evidence test reveals individual authors of individual books claiming to be eyewitnesses or to have carefully investigated the truth." These apologists approach the defense of their faith from a fundamentalist evangelical perspective, (willfully) ignoring the scholarly work.

I happen to be a fan of Dr. Robert M. Price (the Bible Geek), below is a "transcript" of a 2008 podcast (0-8:35) specifically dealing with the Lukian passage, which got the ball rolling (in other words RABBIT HOLE). In this cast he mentions a paper he did concerning the NT as OT midrash,

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls lent great impetus to the recognition of the widespread use among New Testament writers of the pesher technique whereby prophetic prooftexts for the divine preordination of recent of events was sought. Slower (but still steady) in coming has been the realization of the wide extent to which the stories comprising the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are themselves the result of haggadic midrash upon stories from the Old Testament (as we may call it here in view of the Christian perspective on the Jewish canon that concerns us). The New Testament writers partook of a social and religious environment in which currents of Hellenism and Judaism flowed together and interpenetrated in numerous surprising ways, the result of which was not merely the use of several versions of the Old Testament texts, in various languages, but also the easy switching back and forth between Jewish and Greek sources like Euripides, Homer, and Mystery Religion traditions.

which is a new way (for me) of looking at the genesis of the NT gospel narratives.

The original question as posed to Price:

If authentic do you think the author is guilty or innocent? By innocent I mean does the author think his sources are historical in nature having genuine historical information to add from his "eyewitnesses and servants [ministers] of the word" or is he guilty in the sense of being one of the earliest known Jesus historicists who knowingly takes symbolic source stories and construes them as a Jesus biography?

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught [informed].

RP: The passage is an addition in the sense that I'm convinced that canonical Luke, catholic Luke is a worked over padded out addition of the gospel first used by the Marcionites. The so called Gospel of the Lord, Gospel of Marcion, whomever wrote it (we don't know.) That version certainly did lack this, and probably began with the syncronism, as it's called, chapter 3:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,,,

That's were the gospel first started. Hans Conselmann first pointed that out, he didn't think/believe that Marcion's version was the original, but even he for other reasons thought that chapter 1 and 2 were later add-ons. I think they have been added on as well as a lot of other material plus the whole book of Acts by our buddy Polycarp of Smyrna and that he was writing to Theopolis of Antioch, a fellow 2nd century bishop.

Whether he was innocent, did he believe this stuff was true? No doubt that he did. Was he engaged in double think? Did he realize that he had altered things and how could he believe they were accurate if he altered them? He probably thought that he was restoring the truth. He no doubt seriously believed that Marcion had abridged a gospel that was catholic leaning. I don't think was true (in regards to M) but he (Luke) probably did. And so he figured he was restoring what the gospel must have said or what it really meant.

Where he got that stuff, I doubt that he made up the first couple of chapters. They're not like the book of Acts exactly, which he did construct. These first 2 chapters seem to be based on Aramaic originals, at least in the case of the John the Baptist nativity. It's possible that Polycarp then sort of xeroxed it, paraphrased it as a Jesus Nativity; inter-spliced them as we now read it. He based, I think, it on an independent John the Baptist nativity circulated by those who believed in a John the Baptist.

I imagine that he figured, that yes it is all true, that it was literally true. His reason for thinking that would not be historical in nature in terms of our view of history, a scientific critical view of history. But I doubt that he was actually foisting some sort of a scam (though it not above people to do that) in the ancient and modern churches to engage in pious fraud but one need not assume that was occurring. Take for example, Matthew, who generates so much of his story based on what he thinks the OT predicted therefore must have happened. Our gripe with him is epistemological, not ethical. We dont think one can get facts that way. It's like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi Dowling. Where does he get this stuff, he thinks he is getting it from the Akashic Records. I say he is getting it from his imagination, BUT he is not lying about it.

It is the same thing here. In so far, more or less, the whole gospel narrative, does matter which one your talking about, it is derived from OT passages as I have tried to show in my essay New Testament Narrative as OT Midrash. But again, it is an epistemology. Once you came to believe that Jesus was a recent historical figure (a flesh and blood human being) and you decided when he must have lived, then you go to the scriptures to determine what must have happened and you crack the code as you believe to get that information. So they figured they could rewrite these OT passages to yield the facts of what had happened with Jesus.

We'd never do that. I don't think they were necessarily deceptive. It's a mind game and it would never count as history today. Apologists don't want to admit things like that happened, they are too modern to accept something like that though some of them still do it. Have you ever heard some say- well, Jesus must have had a beard just like in the Sunday school books because doesn't the prophecy say "I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting." (Isa 50:6, KJV) Since "we" know that has to be a prediction of Jesus, Jesus must have had a beard. People still do that. Though they don't think they should if they really thought about it.

The fact that "these guys" did, I don't think you can accuse them of lying about it. Not that there isn't some prevaricating in the NT. There is a much bigger gap and we think automatically, deception and posture because we find it hard to believe the processes of the ancients some times.

Luke's Preface

Seven Myths about Ussher | NCSE

So why exactly would some religious dude's writings from 1650 have any bearing on modern day apologetics or in our case, counter-apologetics? Well, when one considers that some Young Earth Creationist (YEC) - who use Ussher's Chronology - accuse those of us who hold to the scientific view ("notion") of a 4.6-billion-year-old Earth as being circular in our argument, it poses a we bit of a conundrum (in the mind of the YEC).

You see, a YEC may say that in order to hold our scientific view (4.6 billion) and not the "biblical" view of 6,000-year-old earth, our scientific view is based on a prior rejection of the Biblical account. Makes sense, huh?

If P, then Q (If age of earth is 4.6 billion years, then Ussher is wrong)
P (Age of the earth is 4.6 billions years)
Therefore, Q (Ussher is wrong)

The problem with this, YECs are operating from the mind-set that all philosophical systems start with axioms, and deduce theorems from them. When in reality, science has only one axiom: that the scientific method is the best way of knowing things about the natural universe.

In other words, we know P to be true and valid. We know the age of the earth based on science and utilizing the scientific method. Unless you're willing to deny science,,,oh wait, they are!!

But anywhoo, this little piece by Glenn Branch is nice for two reasons.  It gives a bit of history of the Chronology as well as dispelling some of the myths.  Here are two I was guilty of:

Myth 4: Ussher’s estimate relied only on Biblical genealogies. In fact, if you try to add the ages and dates in the Bible, you’ll be stymied at various turns. Not only are different ages and dates given in different texts, but also there are gaps in the data (from the reign of Solomon to the Babylonian captivity; from the fifth century BCE to the birth of Jesus). Accordingly, Ussher consulted ancient records beyond the Bible; in fact, according to Martin Rudwick’s excellent new book Earth’s Deep History (2014), “[b]y far the greater part of Ussher’s evidence, like that of other chronologists, came not from the Bible but from ancient secular records” (emphasis in original).

Myth 5: Ussher’s chronology was antiscientific. On the contrary, while Ussher—who rejoiced in the ecclesiastical titles of Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland—certainly accepted the truth of the Bible, his purpose was to provide a scholarly, evidence-based, detailed history of the world. Stephen Jay Gould remarked in his “Fall in the House of Ussher” (1991) that “Ussher represented the best of scholarship in his time,” and Rudwick argues, “what 17th-century historians such as Ussher [or Newton!] were doing is connected without a break with what Earth scientists are doing in the modern world.” The fact that he lacked the tools available to today’s chronologists is not to his discredit.

Seven Myths about Ussher | NCSE

The Feuerstein Fallacy - YouTube

Although not hard-core counter-apologetics per se, Seth Andrews of The Thinking Atheist has put out a most excellent video in response to Josh "my watches are more expensive than what a minimum wage worker makes in a year" Feuerstein's $100,000 challenge. Seth in a simple but thorough manner hits on burden of proof, following scientific evidence to its logical conclusion and the problem of evil to name a few.

What I found interesting, Seth brings up an informal survey he conducted concerning Abraham and Isaac.  Counter to that, I have seen "claims" from Christians who have also stated that they would follow God's command simply because God commanded it.  So it seems Christians can't seem to even agree on that simple point.

And, he "went there" with the men with nipples, got to love it!

BTW I am currently reading a book(let) How to Prove God Does Not Exist by G.M. Jackson,  I will be writing up a "review" some time in the near future.  But based on conversation and other readings, the so-called inability to prove a negative, is my one possible reservation to Seth's presentation.  I say possible because I am still formulating my own thoughts on the matter, but if my novice understanding of the topic is "correct" it comes down to this:

I know the myth of "you can't prove a negative" circulates throughout the nontheist community, and it is good to dispel myths whenever we can. As it happens, there really isn't such a thing as a "purely" negative statement, because every negative entails a positive, and vice versa. Thus, "there are no crows in this box" entails "this box contains something other than crows" (in the sense that even "no things" is something, e.g. a vacuum). "Something" is here a set restricted only by excluding crows, such that for every set S there is a set Not-S, and vice versa, so every negative entails a positive and vice versa. And to test the negative proposition one merely has to look in the box: since crows being in the box (p) entails that we would see crows when we look in the box (q), if we find q false, we know that p is false. Thus, we have proved a negative.

Simply explained by my friend Dave Foda, also borrowing from Richard Carrier,

"This box is full of crows." 

To "prove the negative," all we have to show is that the box is full of something other than crows. The negation comes in the idea that crows are in the box, but if there's something other than crows in the box, we've proved the negative.

Taken to it's logical conclusion, if God exists, certain things would be true, including the possibility that Newton's Third Law of Motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) has exceptions. But it doesn't, which is why it's a scientific law, rather than laymans' guesswork.

In other words, according to Dave's reasoning,

If we know of the reaction, and can measure it in some way, then we must also - by default - be able to assess and measure the causative action. If we can't measure what we think is the causative action (i.e., God), then either our thinking is wrong, or our methods (science) are wrong. Since our methods (science) otherwise lead us to viable, concrete conclusions, then it must be our thinking that is wrong (God exists; in the form of god-of-the-gaps).

 The Feuerstein Fallacy - YouTube

Welcome to (re)Learning Counter Apologetics

 "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." 

[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, 1974]

First off let me say this.  I find the whole topic of Christian Apologetics abhorrent.  In my opinion, it is the most asinine subject of study and if one carefully listens to the professionals you will understand why.  Three words,  "intellectual word salad" or as coined in a recent conversation "intellectual incoherence."

That aside, it is vital for those of us in the secular community to know and understand the tactics used by Christian religionists in their attempt of apologia. If one ponders the topic as a whole, it boils down to one thing - personal experience.  It is not God being defended but a delusion; a moment of insanity.  Then there is always the possibility of fabricating experiences of God, as there are no independent criteria which can be used to separate "real" experiences from false experiences; it is a claim that is not testable and therefore not valid. Not only is fabrication an issue subjectivity and perception come into play which ultimately leads to the grand daddy of them all, FAITH. I am confident for the moment that y'all know how that discussion plays out.

rLCA is a concept developing out of an interesting encounter involving a TAG (Transcendental Argument for God) proponent whilst listening to the Atheist On Air pod-cast and bullshitting in the attached chat.  For as long as I have been around, TAG is a "new" to me tactic (I think) but like the Kalam Cosmological Argument it has actually been around for some time (just not as long as KCA).  It is during these various exchanges - listening to various pod-casts, interacting with individuals in chat or on Facebook, searching terms I'm not familiar with - I find myself with a shit ton of information and resources and then said information sits in my bookmarks doing nothing.  Hence a "apologetics repository."

I am no expert, hermeneutics is more my thing, although not quite a "noob" as I did study apologetics in college, 20+ years ago.  So with that in mind this site will be geared more toward the novice with what I hope is simple and easy to understand information although I do not think I will writing as much original content as on my other blogs.  Then again who knows.

All I ask is that you bare with me as I get my footing and find what direction to actually go in as there is so much good information out on the inter-web.  My goal for now is 1-2 posting a week, not much I know but I do work full-time as well as maintain another blog on a daily basis.  Any and all suggestion are welcome.

With that being said, let's get this ball rolling,,,