A Drunken Madman

WTF?

Indeed. Long story short, this thread has been one long morrass of Godwinism, occasionally interspersed with logical failures and rebukes. Finally, it's reached the point where David is now redacting content which exposes his own logical flaws and retaining the final, entirely deliberate insult (not an ad-hominem, since I'm not using it to counter his "arguments") - which is frankly meaningless without the preceding content.

So, business as usual then. Theist selectively quotes atheist in order to make the atheist look bad and the theist look good. Film at eleven.

Here's the actual comment that David redacted:

Yes, David, I agree.

YOU were the one that started it, with a very-much-aware piece of innuendo. You should know better.

Plead innocent of that charge some more. Go on.

The rest of your reply, meh. whatever. Stalin, whoever. We also don't know for sure what Stalin's private beliefs actually were, though he was seminary trained and opposed the church as a threat to his absolute power. I'm over this continued smear campaign on atheists, whoever you happen to try and compare us to. It's cheap and it's a personal insult, David. You should be above that, but clearly you're not. If I overstate it's because I want to throw it right back into your self-satisfied face. Whatever, I'm over it.

But I find this interesting

And finally, you return to your claim that the NT is fiction.

Now, if it weren't for the supernatural claims, I'd render the scottish verdict and say "not proven", but the supernatural claims are outlandish and require a bit more than blind acceptance. I cannot prove a negative, and I kinda respect logic, therefore I add the qualifier "utterly" to "indistinguishable from fiction". If I'm feeling uncharitable, casual or using verbal shorthand, then I'll say the NT is just not true.

I have said in this thread, clearly and repeatedly, that it is indistinguishable from fiction. There's a distinction there you seem singularly unable to grasp, yet I've repeated it over and over, being careful to apply your logic to known fiction.

Let's recap, shall we? I'll paraphrase your claims, allowing you to come back and plead misrepresentation, which you're almost guaranteed to try:

1. "There are four gospels all following roughly the same story. How remarkable, that certainly attests to their reality."

Laying aside the fact that they do contradict each other, I countered with the fact that Grimm's fairy tales come in many differing versions. The fact a story comes in a few different packages has no bearing on its truth. Separate renderings of existing stories happen all the time. Shakespeare, for instance, is paraphrased and changed all over the place. The events are tweaked, the dialogue is updated, the situation changes, the costumes are swapped, songs are added, but they're still the same core story. And they're fictional. A "childrens pastor" once tried this on me and for her pains got four renderings of the plot of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, from four different atheists, for her trouble. She looked like a stunned mullet, but I think she got the point.

2. "We have several source texts and kinda sorta good analysis of them."

So what? Just because we have source documents still does not give us a link to the reality of the events described. We have numerous drafts of Dickens' novels, and I'm pretty sure they're fictional. We also have Shakespearean adaptation and multiple versions of the same story packaged differently. Still not real events.

3. "The text cites hundreds of witnesses"

Again, so what? Hundreds of people saw Superman save a falling child at Niagara falls. Is Superman therefore real? It gets all circular here (although you're apparently in denial of that). The bible is true because the bible says the events were witnessed by hundreds. Circular, circular circular.

4. "The bible contains descriptions of real places, people, facts"

And I've demonstrated that so does fiction. Moby Dick, King Kong and The Brentford Trilogy, remember? You can add Spiderman, if you like, since that takes place in a fictionalised New York.

5. "The text was successful and being copied widely in the 1st century."

Flawed logic again. Distribution does not equal veracity. A Tale Of Two Cities has sold over 200 million copies, and also contains many real locations and people. But it's fiction.

6. "It reads like it's meant to be history not fiction"

Subjective. I think it reads like myth blended with cultural context. Still, there is a whole thriving genre in fiction that reads like history, or descriptions of history. Tolkein was particularly good at inventing histories. Sometimes when something looks like a duck, it's actually just a decoy.

So there's 6 cases of your utterly flawed logic. Using this, there's no way to distinguish the bible from fiction - but you seem to think it works.

Got anything better?

(I'm not spending all week on this, if you're going to act all butthurt in your response, make it a short whinge)

David, you're fucking dishonest. You're a liar for jesus, and your grasp of logic is laughable. Ad hominem enough for you?