2012-02-08

Neil Godfrey’s lousy defense of Christ-myth hypocrisy

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by Neil Godfrey

Cameron seemed so polite when making first contact with my blog that I thought, Hey, this is gonna be a nice reasonable guy. How can David Fitzgerald, author of Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All, be reasonable and still have issues with such a polite Cameron? Well, Cameron responded to my critique of his blog post and now I know why. Cameron’s politeness does not extend to any efforts to suss out personal acquaintanceship — written words, regardless of literal meanings, are interpreted and critiqued in whatever way will serve best the hostile anti-mythicist brigade. So I quote here Cameron’s remarks (indented and coloured) and I add my 2 bits as we go along.

Here is Cameron’s blog post titled “Neil Godfrey’s lousy defense of Christ-myth hypocrisy“, with my point by point responses.

If you’ve seen Expelled, you know the content of Neil Godfrey’s response to my last post. There’s allusion to a conspiracy and lots of self praise for standing up to the intellectual establishment for their unwillingness to consider mythicism. In sum, Godfrey falls neatly into the hypocrisy I accused the Christ-myth crowd of engaging in. As one reader on my blog put it, “It boils down to ‘were [sic] not hypocrites because we’re right while creationists are wrong and everyone who disagrees with us has an ulterior motive but our motives are pure.’”

Allusion to a conspiracy??? What, pray tell, does Cameron mean by this and where is his perceived allusion? I have been a long-time opponent of any sort of conspiracy theory resolution to any difference of opinion, so I would ask Cameron to refer to his evidence for my having alluded positively to something I have always opposed.

Self Praise for standing up to the intellectual establishment??? What what?? Where, again, do I praise myself for standing up to anything? I can highly respect people who are part of an establishment and who are paid by an establishment and who earn their reputation by acceptance of an establishment paradigm, but any odd bod or amateur who speaks his own opinion that happens coincidentally to not be expounded by ‘an establishment’ can hardly be faulted for “self praise for standing up to” any sort of establishment. Continue reading “Neil Godfrey’s lousy defense of Christ-myth hypocrisy”