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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26346 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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This womanly sarcastic sneering you do is really offputting and unpleasant to read, I wish you'd stop doing it. Just say what you're saying.

Aw, you think I'm womanly! Never been so complimented before, should I blush modestly and avert my maiden eyes?

He's right, IMO. I can't make out what you're trying to say in between all the sneering.

Is it sneering? I'm laughing at the simplified notions on show, and it's not just Ehrmann: no of course Jesus wasn't resurrected from the dead, the dead stay dead. No we don't accept miracles in this house. The disciples claimed He was risen, that they saw Him? Well of course that was all just hallucinations (if we're charitable enough not to call them deliberate liars). They were grieving and upset, their mental balance wasn't stable. Strong feelings about the deceased have an effect on humans. They felt that the memory of Jesus was so strong and meaningful to them, that the best way they could express it was in crude terms of "still alive" and over the centuries that got turned into a belief about literal resurrection. But we are smart modern educated people and we know better.

If we're liberal Christians, we call this the Resurrection Experience and use it as a community building tool, which is the important part here after all: we all are part of a community which agrees on the entire laundry list of liberal to progressive causes, and old-fashioned crude Biblical literalism is not on the menu.

I have more respect for people who say "It's all crap and I don't believe any of it", even for those who go "The disciples were lying because they were trying to keep their cult going, so a dead and risen god figure was all part of that". I don't respect "I'm a Christian but..." where the "but" means "I dump all the beliefs of centuries in favour of warm fuzzy secular liberalism".

The baby-talk is deliberate, because that's how the liberals holding these views regard the literalist believers: too dumb to understand complicated thoughts and philosophies.

FWIW she is right about Ehrman. He is a protestant atheist whose project is making Jesus the one of Thomas Jefferson, a nice guy who believed in liberalism, was not narcissistic enough to actually believe in being special (since magic is clearly not real), whose real teachings were all the agreeable things and none of the disagreeable things to modern audiences.

Ehrman argues that Jesus of Nazareth "certainly" existed historically, and has summarized the claim in popular form "he did exist, whether we like it or not".[29] His position on Christology is historical rather than confessional. In summarizing How Jesus Became God, NPR recorded his judgment that "Jesus himself didn't call himself God and didn't consider himself God".[30] He has also written that Jesus did not teach postmortem reward and punishment as popularly conceived.[31] In a 2020 essay he argued that Jesus proclaimed resurrection and the coming kingdom rather than eternal torment.[

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