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Religion Detoxification Link Change Clark , Clint Jun 18, 2005

To All,

After a year's worth of feedback and numerous requests for a print version, I have edited The Gospel Writers down to a version that can be downloaded and printed.

I have also re-titled it, "The Galilean: A Human Rights Activist. An alternate look at Jesus of Galilee," with the following description: The book is based on the 1959 work of author Robert Graves and a book by Joshua Podro called, "The Last Pharisee: The Life and Times of Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananyah." It compares the similarities between Galilean Rabbi Jesus, who may have been a Pharisee, with Galilean and Pharisee Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananyah. It also explores the possibility of Galilean John the Baptist as being John ben Zakkai, who was also from Galilee at the same time. It uses the ending of Jewish Blood Rites (sacrifices) in Jerusalem to tie the story together, along with the rise of Rabbanic Judaism and advancement of Human Rights, also at the same time.

This new version seems to be what readers want, so I've taken The Gospel Writers Religion Detoxification website offline and replaced it with this download.

Table of Contents

Preface - 3

The Word - 4

Why Do We Have Old Testament Using Religions? - 7

Moses and Leontopolis - 11

Jesus ben Joseph - 15

The Apocryphon of John ben Zebedee - 17

A Teaching Version of "The Word" Needed - 33

A Public Health Plan Needed - 37

Jesus and Serapis, The Healers - 42

The Ugly Rabbi and The Shroud of Turin - 49

The Nazarites - 51

Jesus the Pharisee - 53

Hillel and John the Baptist - 57

The Last Shedding of Blood for the Atonement of Sin - 59

Jesus ben Hananyah - 61

References - 67

You are welcome to download a copy and distribute it as a download on your website, or you can link to it at this address:

http://www.pianonanny.com/galilean.zip

The zipped file size is 775 KB and in Microsoft Word 2000 Format.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Clint Clark
Secular Humanist
For Our Planet and Our Species

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aliens built the pyramids Coward, Anonymous Jun 09, 2005

An idea for "Serious Notions with a Smile":

Someone could do a side-by-side comparison of Intelligent Design's notion that some outside intelligence created life on earth and the idea that aliens helped the egyptians build the pyramids. I think it would be hilarious and take a good stab at ID's jugular vein.

It could compare stuff like "scientific principles violated" by each idea and show how similar and unscientific the two are.

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Name That Pundit... hardindr , Jun 02, 2005

One pundit on this topic (I forget who) had a more useful proposal: That humans are born able to accept what they are told implicitly and
unthinkingly, because being able to follow directions without question or analysis was for a few hundred thousand years (or more) an essential survival trait, without which children could not have reached the age where
they could reproduce.

I believe Richard Dawkin's has expressed this idea before:

So why do we insist on believing in God?

From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian
reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and
other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.

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minor quibbles in "Why Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial and ..." Kettenring, Thomas May 25, 2005

Hello!

I just read "Why Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial and the "Intelligent Design" movement
are neither science--nor Christian."

I think it's really excellent but found some small mistakes.

1. "The best modern example of this is the fact that the entire edifice of Newtonian physics was found by Einstein to be wrong--"untrue"--even after engineers used it successfully to land manned spacecraft on the moon."

This sounds as if Einstein worked after 1969 (when manned spacecraft landed on the moon). Of course the Theory of Special Relativity was finished in 1905, the Theory of General Relativity in 1915, and as far as I know both
theories may well have been used by NASA in 1969, 14 years after Einstein's death.

2. "rhiphistidian" should be "rhipidistian".

3. 8a. Selective use of evidence
Johnson claims that evolutionists select evidence. All you do as a response to this is demonstrating that Johnson does it himself. Showing that Johnson does it himself is fine but has the drawback of not refuting his claim.
That's an instance of the fallacy "ad hominem tu quoque" (http://www.fallacyfiles.org/tuquoque.html). Does he quote any evolutionists selecting evidence? If no, you should mention that his claim is empty and not testable. If yes...well, that would be more work. Someone would have to find out if the claim is true. If there is no time for that, I think the whole "selective use of evidence" part should be dropped.

4. The same fallacy appears for "vague and untestable statements". But under 11c, there are examples of Johnson wrongly ascribing vague and untestable statements to evolutionists, so all that is needed here is a cross-reference.

5. Under 9. you say that Johnson refused to provide you with any information. But under 6a, you say that "Johnson reluctantly supplied me
with a transcript of this speech". Sounds like a contradiction to me.

6. "Second, since any group sharing a single common ancestor is by definition a monophyletic group" should be "Second, since any group sharing a single common ancestor exclusive to them is by definition a monophyletic group"

But, as I said, these are minor quibbles. Great work! The best is the paragraph under 10 starting with "It is useless to try to explain science to someone who isn't interested in what the facts have to say." Would you please allow me to quote that paragraph in EvoWiki, on the page about Johnson (http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Phillip_E._Johnson, which is still pretty empty)?

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Intelligent Design Gaudia, Gil May 05, 2005

I enjoyed Taner Edis' article on "The Return of the Design Argument", but I'm curious about an important concept. Are "ID-like" and "ID-lite" separate constructs or are they typos? Sometimes the context suggests a different meaning, but it generally seems to be "ID-like" Can you please clarify?

Gil Gaudia, Ph.D.

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