Holland's Apostolic Blessing

[_Chap]

Do you have a good reason for your skepticism? The historical and philological reasons for questioning the authenticity of 2 peter are overwhelming to those who are familiar with the historical and philological issues.

I am not familiar with those issues, because this is the first I have heard of them. But I have had the referenced article open in another window since it was first offered, and intend on exploring it later.

When I see someone say that they reject them, I see someone saying that they don't know anything about the history or philology of these texts.

You are correct that I haven't explored them (yet).
But I haven't rejected them.

More importantly, after reviewing and considering them, I will not reject (or accept) them merely because a majority happens to do so.

Experience of hagoth7 on this board suggests that one should not hold one's breath waiting for him to say anything like "Yes, I see now why pretty well all critical professional scholars feel that 2 Peter is very unlikely to have been written by Peter the Apostle. It's not just a matter of style and content, but of things like nobody mentioning it until after around the middle of the second century AD, and so on. So I think the most likely hypothesis is, after all, that it is pseudepigraphical." Hagoth7 doesn't work like that, as his posts on other topics show - remember 'Cicero's secretary Tiro was a Nephite'? And the rest.

He is a representative of the newly evolved TBM super-bug poster, impervious to all the antibiotics of argument and evidence that used to exterminate the old-style apologists. I think this board is likely to suffer from a deep-seated hagoth7 infection for a long time to come. Since he evidently has a huge amount of time on this hands, and seems able to post round the clock (what time-zone is he in, I wonder?), I do hope that the infection does not prove fatal to the board.

[_Sethbag]

...2 Peter is widely believe to be pseudepegriphy. That is, whoever wrote it, it probably wasn't really Peter.

And Isaiah is widely believed to be written by more than one person.
As are other books.
And so on.

In response, let's just say that as a somewhat-independent thinker, I don't typically adopt beliefs just because they happen to be "widely believed".

This is what happens when you espouse a very literalistic religion. You're stuck with things like the Tower of Babel, Adam and Even a few thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden, talking snakes and asses, semi-submersibles tight like a dish bringing ancient post-Adamites to the Americas, the Book of Mormon, angels with flaming swords ordering a guy to go out and have sex with more women, the Book of Abraham descending from a grouping of Egyptian funerary texts, etc. Oh yeah, and every book of the Bible having been written by precisely whom they are named for. All of which are "widely believed" to be bogus.

Oh well, it's your life. If you want to spend it on the Mormon church, that's your prerogative. I have no problem with someone sticking with the church because it's their chosen tribe. If someone sticks with the church because they think it's actually true, I would love to see them learn the reality.

[_Symmachus]

He is a representative of the newly evolved TBM super-bug poster, impervious to all the antibiotics of argument and evidence that used to exterminate the old-style apologists.

I wish I had been around to engage some of those old-style apologists. I gotta give credit to Hagoth7 for braving the waters, but while I have a lot of respect for informed skepticism, it does get frustrating to meet ignorance-based skepticism that dresses itself up as independent thinking.

[_hagoth7]

He is a representative of the newly evolved TBM super-bug poster, impervious to all the antibiotics of argument and evidence that used to exterminate the old-style apologists.

I wish I had been around to engage some of those old-style apologists. I gotta give credit to Hagoth7 for braving the waters, but while I have a lot of respect for informed skepticism, it does get frustrating to meet ignorance-based skepticism that dresses itself up as independent thinking.

Symm...

As to skepticism...that is my stance on claims until I've investigated them to my satisfaction. Call that ignorance-based if you wish. Most any new investigation *initially* starts off in ignorance. If you are of the opinion I prefer to remain in ignorance, then we simply don't understand one another.

As to "dressing up" in independent thinking, what else would you propose an independent thinker to do? Simply accept your word on any matter? Or the word of 3,000,000 other people? While I respect your considerable intelligence, and that of others, I'll take my time forming my own opinions, thank you very much.

[_Chap]

He is a representative of the newly evolved TBM super-bug poster, impervious to all the antibiotics of argument and evidence that used to exterminate the old-style apologists.

I wish I had been around to engage some of those old-style apologists. I gotta give credit to Hagoth7 for braving the waters, but while I have a lot of respect for informed skepticism, it does get frustrating to meet ignorance-based skepticism that dresses itself up as independent thinking.

Symm...

As to skepticism...that is my stance on claims until I've investigated them to my satisfaction. Call that ignorance-based if you wish.

Well, by now Symmachus and myself have seen a great deal of your style of 'investigation' in cases like this. It seems, on the whole, to consist of searching determinedly until you find some pretext, however insignificant and marginal in the scale of judgement, for saying something like:

"Well, I can see why you might think that <proposition widely accepted by the great majority of acknowledged experts on the basis of undisputed and publicly available facts and repeatable analysis>. You have a right to your opinion. But I remain unpersuaded that the arguments on your side are really as conclusive as you seem to think. So I think there is good reason for me to continue believing that <e.g. the moon is made of green cheese>, and I choose to do so."

If you come back to this board and publicly state that you are convinced that, discounting religious faith as a basis for judgement, the evidence weights heavily in favor of 2 Peter being pseudepigraphical, and you are from now on going to conduct the discussion on that basis, I shall be pleasantly surprised. But we shall see.

[_Symmachus]

As to skepticism...that is my stance on claims until I've investigated them to my satisfaction. Call that ignorance-based if you wish. Most any new investigation *initially* starts off in ignorance. If you are of the opinion I prefer to remain in ignorance, then we simply don't understand one another.

As to "dressing up" in independent thinking, what else would you propose an independent thinker to do? Simply accept your word on any matter? Or the word of 3,000,000 other people? While I respect your considerable intelligence, and that of others, I'll take my time forming my own opinions, thank you very much.

Well, rejecting all forms of authority does not make you an "independent thinker," because it doesn't require any thinking at all to reject authority. It is not inherently an intellectual act, so then what sort of act is it? If you are aware that you don't know X and you admit that you don't know X, and that somebody else does know X, on what basis do you reject their knowledge of X? Seems to me your only basis is that you just don't want to believe what they might bes\ saying about X, which is lacking in skepticism in the worst possible way, because you are not skeptical of yourself, which is what all of us should be most skeptical of.

If you were just dispassionately abstaining from judgement, you wouldn't be asserting your views. You admit that you are uninformed on the matter, but you push your uninformed view anyway, which shows that you are more committed to your views than you are to knowledge.

If you were seriously to apply your skepticism and simultaneously maintain a sincere and dispassionate commitment to understanding, you'd probably never give your views on anything whatsoever beyond simple things on which you and you alone can be an expert: whether you are tired, whether you like the taste of something, what your favorite color is, etc. Even then you should be skeptical. That is why this concept of authority exists: it saves you time. The honest thing would be not to assert your views on 2 peter, or, if you were to assert them without appealing to any authority but yourself, to go learn the philological issues, which means learning Greek pretty well (which means in this case also learning paleography, papyrology, stylistics, text criticism, etc.). That could take several years of intense study, and inevitably you will run into problems, because how will you trust the textbooks on text criticism? You might as well just reinvent the whole damn field yourself, which means many life times that you don't have, and that just the text-critical part.

Or you could use your independent thinking to assess the relative competencies of claimed authorities based on what other claimed authorities say, which in fact you do all the time in your daily life anyway.

[_Tobin]

I disagree.

You overlook two of the core purposes of temples. Worship and instruction.

Complete what is oft referred to as temple "work", and one gets to focus on other elements of God's work. https://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/mose ... ang=eng#37

What are you talking about? The center of temple "work", worship and instruction is the endowment. Without dead people, Mormons can't go through again for that.

[_Maksutov]

Well, rejecting all forms of authority does not make you an "independent thinker," because it doesn't require any thinking at all to reject authority. It is not inherently an intellectual act, so then what sort of act is it? If you are aware that you don't know X and you admit that you don't know X, and that somebody else does know X, on what basis do you reject their knowledge of X? Seems to me your only basis is that you just don't want to believe what they might bes\ saying about X, which is lacking in skepticism in the worst possible way, because you are not skeptical of yourself, which is what all of us should be most skeptical of.

[_ludwigm]

- [#img] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0031/ ... 1255252680[/img]

- [#img] http://img1.indafoto.hu/10/1/57091_6715 ... 8d66_m.jpg[/img] -

And some NSFW:
- [#img] http://img1.indafoto.hu/10/1/57091_6715 ... c4dd_m.jpg[/img] -
Is it photoshop?
See:
- [#img] http://img2.indafoto.hu/10/1/57091_6715 ... d22d_m.jpg[/img] -

[_ludwigm]

And this is why my pictures are banned.


I show the reality with them.