Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
I once posted links here on Eddie Izzard — and have just this evening discovered Lewis Black
on religion . . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWqtpqQjNug
and then on
Bush, Bible, Fossils, Evolution, and Reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0gAcbAGPH4&feature
Okay, I see internet stats that inform me 85% of readers of this blog are in the U.S.A. — so maybe 85% of you already know about Lewis Black videos.
But for the rest, enjoy!
Whenever someone says Josephus is evidence for Jesus, a misperception of the facts is at work. The fact is that people express opinions about the evidence we read in Josephus. It is someone’s opinion that what is found in Josephus can or should be interpreted as a reference to the historical Jesus. There is no clear evidence at all in Josephus — only passages that have recently been interpreted that way.
The claim that Josephus said anything at all about Jesus is a relatively new one to the field of “modern” (post enlightenment) historical enquiry. The “rational claim” used to be that, since the key passage (the “Testimonium Flavianum” in book 18 of Antiquities) was clearly doctored or contaminated with some obvious interpolation, it was worthless as evidence. Continue reading “What they used to say about Josephus as evidence for Jesus”
Why the Blood is on Our Hands by Ted Rall:
You’d think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.
How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d’état against every democratically elected president they ever had?
It’s an important question. An earthquake isn’t just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn’t kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.
Our Role in Haiti’s Plight by Peter Hallward:
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
Help Haiti: The Unforgiven Country Cries Out by Chris Floyd:
The relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster. As detailed below, Washington’s rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites.