Monday, July 13, 2009

Insulted By Jon Curry

Yesterday, I mentioned a discussion about the resurrection of Christ at the Stand To Reason blog. Since then, Jon Curry has entered the discussion and is behaving as he usually does. I don't know whether the relevant posts at the Stand To Reason blog will remain up for long, but here's my response to Jon, in case our posts get deleted there:

Readers should know that Jon Curry was banned from two forums I've moderated in the past, including Triablogue two years ago. Since then, he's been posting personal criticisms of me on his blog, in which he complains that I personally criticize people too often. The same sort of "insults" he complains about are found in his own posts.

Readers may also want to know that Jon denies the existence of Jesus and rejects the traditional authorship attribution of every book of the New Testament. When he was at Triablogue, before being banned, he left dozens of threads without interacting with people's responses to him. He frequently got basic facts about church history wrong, often placing people or events in the wrong century and relying on Wikipedia as one of his primary sources. Any interested reader can consult the Triablogue archives and find many examples of his behavior.

That behavior includes Jon's references to Christians as "having reading comprehension problems", "clueless", "wicked", etc. See here for some examples.

Concerning my posts here, he writes:

"I'd like to comment on one of Jason's arguments, though I haven't read this entire exchange. The frequent personal attacks jumped out at me as I skimmed this, but also Jason's response to your point about your grandfather living a busy life at the age of 125. The point, Jason, is that we believe it to be wrong not because we know he's making it up but because we know people don't live to be 125 and if they did they wouldn't be partying at the Playboy mansion. You would contend that we know it didn't happen because we believe he's making it up, but in fact it's more like the opposite. We know he's making it up because it doesn't happen."

If Jon had read my responses, instead of just "skimming" the thread, he'd know that I addressed Joe's analogy from both perspectives. I addressed what we know about Joe's intention in giving us the analogy, and I addressed the problems with the analogy apart from that knowledge. I went on to address the problems with Joe's second analogy, which was supernatural rather than natural. In other words, Jon admits that he's only "skimmed" this discussion, and he goes on to misrepresent what I've said.

He writes:

"We know of nobody rising from the dead by either natural or super natural means, so we dismiss that as well."

Earlier, in this thread, I repeatedly addressed the issue of historical precedent. Jon doesn't interact with anything I said on the subject. Apparently, he missed everything I said about this issue when he "skimmed" the discussion. Or he chose to ignore what I said.

But it's "insulting" for me to point that out.

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