The "No Unique Advantages" Faith

Explaining Disagreement

There is an article we often link to at http://www.geocities.com/sgraessle/folder1/incomp.htm to describe critics, which speaks of those who are incompetent and unaware of it, and whose misplaced self-confidence makes them mistakenly think they are more competent than they are. Such an [sic] one is our Trilemma critic.

Turkel revealingly opens his response to me with an (apparently oft-repeated) attempt to reassure himself that his opponent's confidence must be misplaced. His mental model of our disagreement is apparently that my "incompetence" in assessing the relevant historical and sociological evidence leads me to a conclusion that anyone with the relevant "competence" could objectively recognize as mistaken. This mental model is of course simplistic wishful thinking.

A more accurate model of our disagreement is to be found in the literature about self-deception and disagreement among agents that are allegedly rational and truth-seeking:

Are Disagreements Not About Information?:
[P]ersistent disagreements on matters of fact seem ubiquitous, such as in academia, politics, and speculative trade. Such disagreements persist, even though two or more sides seem well aware of the disagreement. On the other hand, we have theory suggesting that rational agents cannot agree to disagree in this manner. Bayesians with common priors cannot so disagree (Aumann, 1976; Sebenius & Geanakoplos, 1983; McKelvey & Page, 1986; Neilsen, Brandenburger, Geanakoplos, McKelvey, & Page, 1990), even approximately (Monderer & Samet, 1989; Neeman, 1996a; Sonsino, 1995). To resolve this conflict, we might posit that people do not actually disagree as much as they seem, or that people are so irrational that it is feasible and profitable for them to disagree less than they do. A third resolution, however, is to posit that existing theoretical results are fragile, and do not hold up under more reasonable and feasible concepts of rationality.

Disagreement as Self-Deception About Meta-Rationality:
Honest truth-seeking agents should not agree to disagree. This result is robust to many perturbations. Such agents are "meta-rational" when they act as if they realize this result. The ubiquity of disagreement, however, suggests that very few people, academics included, are very meta-rational. Instead, we seem self-deceived in thinking ourselves to be smarter and more meta-rational than others. Since alerting us to this fact does not much change our behavior, we must not really want to know the truth.

Christianity's Probability

The continued belief of the core disciples after Jesus' death was indeed unlikely, but (unfortunately for Turkel's thesis) it was by no means so unlikely as to necessitate a supernatural explanation.  The consensus of secular peer-reviewed historical scholarship comes nowhere near to endorsing Turkel's conclusion, and Turkel does not spend so much as a single word trying to explain why.

Turkel's Double-Think

Christian apologists rightly tend not to claim vindication by the alleged miracles among post-Pentecost events; those events are cited merely as evidence for the miracles leading up to Pentecost. However, the post-Pentecost events can more economically be explained if a few key people (e.g. Mary Magdalene, Peter, later Paul) had feverishly convinced themselves and others that the crucifixion had not ended Jesus' ministry but rather validated it. ("He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen" Acts 10:40-41.)

The True Miracle of Christianity

A truly "miraculous" revelation-based faith would be one that arose identically but independently in different places. Or one that spread even though it had a primary doctrine that it should be kept secret. Or one that became popular in spite of teaching that there is no hope of a (pleasant) afterlife. Or one that had a holy text saying no text should be considered holy. There's simply nothing miraculous about a set of mistaken beliefs not automatically going extinct in a generation's time.

Turkel's Fear of My Arguments

Curious as to who it is? He has remained unnamed for rhetorical purposes

 In the ancient world refusing to name one's opponent was a way of showing contempt for their [sic] arguments

(but not the opponent himself, necessarily) by depriving them [sic] of their [sic] "name" authority.

Interested in knowing who it is anyway? Write me at jphold@earthlink.net and I'll tell you where to find him. I'm curious to see just how many people are interested.

Our critic is no one in particular, other than one with a high opinion of his own abilities to speak proficiently on any topic of his choosing. Such is our age of individualism, in which anyone feels themselves competent to comment on any subject merely by virtue of having teeth and a tongue.

Had such as our critic been known to Thomas Jefferson, the First Amendment's free speech amendment might well have suffered a series of exception clauses.

Now our critic has seen fit to address what may be regarded as our premier article, The Impossible Faith, and he does so in a fashion not unlike his previous one,

in which he throws anachronisms, undocumented assertions, and vague generalizations into the air, and dismisses as absurd anything that does not fit his 21st century paradigms, even as scholars as familiar with the ancient world as he might be with peanuts and popcorn bespeak the very opposite.

Turkel's Unmet Burden of Proof

H: the same evidence could have differing persuasiveness to different audiences, and that a religion will survive merely as long as some audience finds it believable

T: (which is the very point at issue: we need to explain with specifics why these things would be persuasive, to whom, and how they overcame the rampant stigma we enumerate from the ancient world

Factor 1: Dishonor Through Martyrdom

H: Christianity had no choice in the mode of Jesus' death. It would be absurd to claim that martyrdom is not a powerful propellant for religions.

T:  it doesn't explain even a bit how it propelled this "martyrdom" in a direction which honored a crucified man, who suffered the greatest disgrace imaginable in a society that regarded honor as being of primary importance. It doesn't explain why anyone would believe such a man was vindicated by God;

it doesn't explain why the martyrdom didn't "propel" in a direction amenable to the society at large (i.e., "Jesus? Never mind him. Here's the message we have.")

H: Also, the notion of sacrifice -- even human sacrifice -- to appease Yahweh was central to the Jewish society from which Christianity arose.

T: dying in a crucifixion removed all possibiliity[sic] of this "notion" being applicable, unless there was some evidence of vindication.

Only a certified and undeniable witness to the Resurrection of Christ could have overcome the serious, shameful stigma of a crucified man

T: Announcing a crucified god would be akin to the Southern Baptist Convention announcing that they endorsed pedophilia!

H: It's laughable to compare a sacrificial martyrdom to a deliberate crime against innocent children.

T: We're not told why it is laughable

H: Christianity offered elegant monotheism

T: so did Platonism and Judaism,

and it also offered a repulsive Trinitarianism that offended Jewish sensibilities and made the pagans want to heckle to the max with the idea that a deity could descend to earth in flesh

our critic is also oblivious to his anachronizing, as he applies a modern perception of monotheism as elegant, when there is no evidence that the ancients as a whole regarded monotheism as more or less elegant than any other variation

universal enrollment [so did the mystery religions, and Judaism, via "God-fearer" status

freedom from elaborate Jewish dietary and circumcision rules [so did every non-Judaic religion

instant no-effort salvation from eternal damnation [as opposed to minimal-effort mystery religions that offered salvation, too

and (especially after the destruction of Jerusalem) an alternative to dashed hopes of an earthly kingdom [so did the mystery religions

Frankly, none of these "advantages" were unique

pairing all this with a man crucified and all the rest would be read, without vindicating evidence, as, "Oh, sure! They're offering all of this to cover up the bad stuff. No thanks!"

H: For a new sect to displace all the Mediterranean's non-Abrahamic religions as completely as Christianity eventually did, it pretty much had to be monotheistic, so it's not surprising that Christianity's founder came from the world's most durable monotheistic tradition.

T: I've read it five times now, and I still don't see how this answers the matter of stereotyping and prejudices against Jews in the Roman Empire.

T: this is partly attributable to Judaism not being much of a missionary religion

H: "Not much"? Judaism is essentially not a missionary religion; you are either are or are not a descendant of Abraham, and that determines whether you are considered "chosen"

T: Actually if true this would only assist our point, but it is false: Jewish proselytes and "God-fearers" were known in the Roman Empire.

Factor 2: Galilean Nativity

H: Such a nativity may of course not have been sufficient to convince all Jews, but it surely was necessary to convince most of those who were convinced. What Jew would have believed in a Messiah who was not claimed to have fulfilled the Messianic prophecies?

T: Surely? By what reckoning?

Our critic has no data on persons convinced in spite of such limitations, and against the data presented;

as it appears, this is no more than the skeptical-chauvanist [sic], begged-question view that there must have been some suckers who believed it, because here we are!

a claimed Bethlehem birth would not have been enough to overcome the deep and ingrained stereotypes represented by hailing from Nazareth in Galilee.

T: Assigning Jesus the work of a carpenter was the wrong thing to do.

H: Holding here suggests no alternative. If Jesus had been a cleric, he would have ended up just starting yet another faction within Judaism. If Jesus had been a political leader, his non-divinity would have been even more evident. If Jesus had been wealthy, it would have been less likely for him to achieve martyrdom. On the other hand, Christianity could not have succeeded at all were Jesus a woman, or if he were working outside of a monotheistic context. But he wasn't.

T: I don't see an actual answer either; the point was, carpentry trades were considered vulgar and base; being a cleric was not base, nor being a political leader, nor wealthy. It's hard to tell what our critic is trying to prove with this "answer"

but he certainly isn't reducing the stigma of Jesus being a carpenter.

(We'll return to that bit about being a woman, and outside a monotheistic context, at the end with some similar objections.)

the Jewish God wasn't recognized by Jews as someone who would produce a human progeny

 the pagans that knew Judaism knew the Jewish God to not be portrayed like Zeus either.

whatever claims were made, they apparently didn't work, as the scandalous reports of Jesus' illegitimacy "haunted" the Christian scene from Celsus to the rabbis.

Capernaum (never mind Sepphoris?) was rather larger than Nazareth; it would have been a better "hometown" than Nazareth, albeit not as good as Sepphoris.

Factor 3: Resurrection Physicality

I am saying that [a physical resurrection] was not necessary and in light of both evidential and social factors placed a tremendous burden on Christianity that it could easily have avoided with a simpler story, had it not been genuine.

It's also not explained why "a physical resurrection would have been more convincing to the most gullible." How?

It would have disgusted the pagans (who thought the material body was garbage to be discarded at death)

and bewildered the Jews (who expected a final resurrection of all men, but not the resurrection of a single person before the end of the age).

Factor 4: Novelty

H: That established religions have certain advantages over new ones is not a good argument that new religions must be true if they become established.

T: Uh, actually, in the ancient world, as we clearly explained, this was a good argument; if your religion had no lineage, it was religio non grata. Merely saying "nuh uh" isn't an answer.

H: And yet Jesus affirmed even 'the smallest letter' [Mt 5:18] of the Old Testament.

T: this doesn't erase in the least the innovative aspects of Christianity (it sure would not impress the pagans,

H:  the gospels traced Jesus' lineage directly to Adam.

T: Uh, yeah, the Jews traced the lineage of ALL men back to Adam -- everyone from the basest thief to the highest-placed politician. And the point is?

What had been handed down was 'presumed valid and normative. [..] We refer here to practice, not merely physical lineage.

T: The idea of sanctification, of an ultimate cleansing and perfecting of the world and each person, stood in opposition to the view that the past was the best of times, and things have gotten worse since then.

H: Christianity's 'ultimately' optimistic eschatology in no way diminishes either its belief that things have indeed 'gotten worse since' Eden, or its prophecies of increasing turmoil and tribulation before the end times.

T: Uhhh. Yeah...and how does this answer my point, again?

How things started is not at issue at all

the optimistic eschatology didn't coincide with Roman perceptions that reality was on its way to hell in a handcart, and there wasn't anything turning it back. To claim to be able to "reverse the decay" would have been seen as supremely arrogant

H: The bottom line here is that if Christianity were completely novel, it would have been much less likely to win converts, and if it were more Jewish, it would have become just another sect of Judaism.

T: Our critic [..] seems to be framing this as a "gray area" proposition where parts could be novel, but if other parts were not novel, that would mitigate this factor. It doesn't. Any newness at all struck the gong.

I myself am starting to wonder, and am starting to think that he hired someone of lesser intellect to compose this refutation, which has been of decidedly lower par than the Trilemma engagement.

Factor 5: Behavioral Prescriptions

it's not clear what this "granting permission to 'render unto Caesar'" is and what the Jews lacked in this respect. Rendered what to Caesar and how?

H: Christianity offered to pagans a release from polytheistic superstition that for its time was so tough-minded that Romans compared it to atheism.

T: I'd like to hear more about this factoid, which is contrary to our point, it seems, that it was Judaism and Christianity that were comparable to atheism, from the Roman view. [..] I'd like some direct, source-cited evidence for that "tough-minded" part. [..] Right now I'm beginning to wonder if our critic is just making this stuff up as he goes along.

it doesn't seem that the Romans/pagans, beyond a few intellectuals and Bacchans perhaps, regarded their polytheism as superstitious

H: Christianity's cosmopolitanism and orientation toward the meek made it well-positioned to spread beyond its origins among the Jews.

T: There's another fascinating factoid; what was so "cosmo" about Christianity, please, from a Jewish or Roman perspective?

As for being meek, I think our critic needs another social lesson [Handbook of Biblical Social Values, 130-1]: "meekness" as defined in the NT means humility coupled with gentleness, by one who can readily obtain and use force

H: there are far more poor and meek potential converts than there are rich ones.

T: Darn, there's that "meek" again, what does it mean?

And how do we explain that Christianity had more than its expected share of wealthy converts, then (end matter)?

And our critic forgets the proviso thereafter: "...but not if they couldn't spend that shared dough on their favorite vice-distraction (not all of which were known to be 'self-harming' and therefore offered an ulterior motivation for giving them up."

H: The explanation is obvious: Yahweh-fearers were rare because the Yahweh meme, finding itself in danger of extinction, had been forced to restrict its target market to one small "chosen people".

T: The, er, "Yahweh meme"...and our critic wonders why we can't take him seriously.

If I came out speaking of a "skeptical meme" that "finds itself in danger" and so is "forced" to "restrict itself" to a "target market" of one small "chosen people" (naturalists/scientists) I doubt if I would give a moment of credence.

When skeptics start hauling up this "meme" explanation, which is the equivalent to the ultra-fundamentalist "Satan moved my car keys to bug me" paradigm, we can be pretty sure that they have no actual answers and are struggling to validate their case by any means possible, no matter how ridiculous.

Factor 6: Ancient Intolerance

H: On the contrary: "The Romans commonly granted the local gods of the conquered territory the same honors as the earlier gods who had been regarded as peculiar to the Roman state. In many instances the newly acquired deities were formally invited to take up their abode in new sanctuaries at Rome. Moreover, the growth of the city attracted foreigners, who were allowed to continue the worship of their own gods." [http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Roman+Mythology]

T: this appeal to an online encyclopedia, which is another of those sources great from sixth-grade reports on penguins and chlorophyll.

My reference to Romans as "grossly intolerant" refers to their personal views (not views of the Roman state, viz. religions)

The Jews, and later the Christians, in contrast were exclusivists who insisted that Yahweh was still top dog even though Rome had beat the pants off of the Jews.

H: That Christianity and Judaism were exclusivist indeed was a crucial reason why they weren't assimilated and eventually abandoned as all the Roman pagan religions were.

T: it doesn't affect in the least the crucial "formative" and early years

Exclusivism in the context of a Roman world enamored of tolerance was a reason for no one to join it

(without vindicating evidence)

explain how non-exclusivism contributed to the demise of Roman pagan religions.

H: Indeed, and this is why Christianity ultimately had so much more success among gentiles.

T: Tell us, please: how we know there was more success, pro rata, among Gentiles

Factor 7: Falsifiable Historical Claims

H: If one's 'new and wild claims' are false, then it obviously helps to include whatever extraneous truths one can.

T: Is our critic conceding that the NT contains many "extraneous truths"?

Indeed, is he willing to grant such claims as we signified -- appearances before officials? Burial in Joseph's tomb?

H: Turkel confuses Acts 11 with Acts 12

T: [don't you love how skeptics think pointing out typographical errors validates their case?]

H: in which Luke makes the somewhat vague claim that after failing to 'give praise to God', Herod was 'immediately' 'struck down' by an 'angel of the Lord' and 'was eaten by worms and died'.

T: [vague? how?]

T: I refer to the "eaten by worms" part! Had this been false it would have been a claim of dishonor upon Herod, amounting to slander!

H: Turkel forgets that Luke/Acts does not identify its author, and that Luke was often away on missions anyway.

T: Oh, yes, it's that old "no author mentioned" game yet again, and our critic is still not able to refute our material on Gospel authorship.

Had Luke reported falsely [and here I would say, not just on Herod, but on any one of the numerous things he reports that involved highly-accessible and visible public figures], Christianity would have been dismissed as a fraud and would not have 'caught on' as a religion.

H: If claim #1 is trivially true, then it does not follow that the resurrection is more probable than if claim #1 were omitted altogether.

T: That is not the point. The point is that i[f] claim #1 is NOT trivially true, then it incites doubt as to whether the Resurrection is possible or probable AT ALL. Our critic is carelessly reading the argument in reverse and standing it on its head.

On the various phenomena surrounding the Crucifixion, appeal to made to the usual fallacious arguments about Seneca and Pliny not mentioning it (see here, as well as here, which is not in any way damaged by anything referenced by our critic.

On Seneca and Pliny, Turkel's excuse for them never mentioning the Good Friday darkness is that they weren't trying to be thorough and wouldn't have credited the report anyway. Turkel's feeble excuses can't change the fact that the darkness is never once mentioned outside of Christian rhetoric -- precisely as a naturalistic thesis would predict.

Despite Turkel's formulation about "the usual fallacious arguments", he in fact identifies no fallacies in them and offers no refutation. The skeptical arguments are indeed "usual" precisely because they are unrefuted. All that Turkel can do is concoct an excuse for the historical evidence, and hope nobody notices that the evidence is better explained without miracles than with.

Only Josephus' lack of mention might have any significance,

but it does not at all counter our point that these were events that were public and would have been visible (if true) to millions of witnesses. Arguing that it is NOT mentioned by certain writers does not erase the problem that it was mentioned by writers whose claims were highly open to refutation, in spite of who else said anything or nothing about it.

The gospels were written decades after the alleged miracles in questions, and it's in fact unreasonable to expect that every gospel-hearer in Palestine, even the most gullible, would have been motivated or able to skeptically fact-check the gospel accounts of comets and eclipses and earthquakes.

Also, note that in the missions in Acts and in all of the NT epistles to the remote churches, the evangelists manage never to mention these astronomical and geological miracles -- the only gospel claims that remote audiences could hope to independently verify.

T: people falling out of a house speaking in tongues at Pentecost (another "millions attend" event)

H: only 60,000 to 125,000 pilgrims would have visited Jerusalem for Passover, so it's just ludicrous to talk about 'attendant crowds numbering in the millions' -- especially in the context of Pentecost.

T: That festival number comes from Jeremias' work in 1966, and is made contrary to claims by Josephus that Passover pilgrims numbered, in one instance, 2,700,000. We have seen very little work done to justify reducing these figures, other than "gosh, it couldn't be that big," which is no reason at all, and our critic is merely copying others uncritically. E. P. Sanders, a more modern writer, was willing to grant 300,000-500,000.

T: our critic responds to the points about "healings of illnesses and dysfunctions, even reversals of death, in highly public places" by referral to his previously inadequate treatment of the miracles in the Trilemma piece, which we have now put to bed in more detail here.

[O]ur critic shows how little he pays attention, yet again: [..] The ride into Jerusalem was a blatant fulfillment of Zech. 9, a well-known Messianic prophecy, and what anyone "believed" about it is beside the point in this context. The point is that is was a visible and highly "obnoxious" attempt to draw attention, whether legitimate or not -- it was yet another of the very strong, highly disprovable claims of history [..]

If you are trying to promote false claims, you do not advertise related claims on the TV news in ways that invite investigation and scrutiny.

H: That many non-gullible people recognize such disproof does not mean that a false religion like Christianity or Mormonism cannot grow by converting the gullible.

T: This does not answer any of our points; it merely assumes, yet again, that there must have been people gullible enough, because well, here we are! As we have already said: Skeptics will need to find a better excuse than, "They was just stupid"!

Turkel makes no argument whatsoever that there could not have been enough gullible people for Christianity to arise. I do not "merely assume" that there were enough gullible people; it's a reasonable inference based on an understanding of the history of humanity's ignorance and misbeliefs, particularly in the ancient Near East. Turkel is making the positive claim that, in spite of that history, the rise of Christianity cannot be explained by gullibility.  Well, I just asserted that explanation. What is his argument to the contrary? None -- he merely argues by assertion that there could not have been enough gullible people. Turkel is trying to prove that his one religion is true, but is unwilling to demonstrate that it could not have been born of the very gullibility that is evidenced by all of the other dozens of religions that he says are false. (This helps confirm a growing suspicion that Turkel's style of stonewalling and obfuscating apologetics is not intended to persuade the open-minded, but rather to buttress the shaky faith of people who are already believers for non-rational reasons.)

They need to erase the effects of these factors (and they will not be able to) by some explanation other than stupidity and gullibility, for these are factors which substantially transcend any possibility that "jus' bein' stupid" or gullible was enough to result in belief.

Factor 8: Martyrdom and Persecution

H: the only resurrection witnesses who the New Testament names (John 21:18,19, Acts 12:2) as martyrs, but there is no evidence that recanting their alleged belief in physical resurrection could have saved them. Indeed, there is no direct evidence that Peter and James even believed in a physical resurrection at all.

T: Well, we still have not solved that problem of there being no other kind of resurrection to believe in;

2. Its only cite of Peter only strengthens (thanks!) my case: "He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit" [1 Pet 3:18]. Turkel says that the second verb here was used elsewhere to describe resurrection, but he cites only two verses, one of which [1 Cor 15] skeptics argue is clearly in the context of a spiritual resurrection. Turkel's reasoning is circular, and he does not try to claim that the verb isn't used elsewhere in contexts other than physical resurrection. More importantly, Turkel ignores Peter's "in the body" qualification -- if "made alive" means that Jesus' corpse was reanimated, then the "in the body" qualification serves no purpose.

3. Turkel ignores my point that "there is no evidence that recanting their alleged belief in physical resurrection could have saved them".

4. The gospels themselves give precedent for the idea of a dead person being “raised from the dead” [Mk 16:14] by inhabiting the body of some other person currently living. When some [Mk 6:14, Mk 8:28, Mt 16:14, Lk 9:19] -- including Herod [Mk 6:16, Mt 14:2] -- thought  that John the Baptist had been "raised from the dead", at least a few of these people would have known that Jesus' body had (like the Easter gardener's) been animate before the Baptist's death. There is no record that anyone ever considered checking the Baptist's body (the grave of which was known his disciples [Mk 6:29, Mt 14:13]), and there is no record that anyone wondered why Jesus' neck did not show signs of John's earlier beheading.

and at any rate, we're talking about more than just resurrection witnesses but believing the Resurrection and Christianity at all in light of multiplied social factors, which is the focus of the point at hand.

H: Many false religions (such as Mormonism) have thrived despite persecution, no doubt partly because persecution can easily make believers even more cohesive and zealous.

T: Since he only chose Mormonism, we note in reply that we specifically made a comparison with Mormonism in one of the accompanying essays, which was not commented upon by our critic at all -- the analogy is not relevant, as we show.

Joseph Smith was Mormonism's martyr par excellence, but far from the only one, and persecution was inflicted upon the Saints in every place they ventured. Mormons were shot at, killed, beaten, and hounded from place to place. Officials called for their removal or extermination. Armies pursued them even to Utah. Their homes were burned and their innocents murdered.

What is at issue is not intangibles like eternal punishment and reward, but the very tangible claim of the Resurrection and of God acting in history through Jesus and his Apostles, and thus, the failure to "desolidify" the Resurrection also causes our critic's reply to fail.

Factor 9: Divine Physicality

T:  Earl Doherty [writes] "To believe that ordinary Jews were willing to bestow on any human man, no matter how impressive, all the titles of divinity and full identification with the ancient God of Abraham is simply inconceivable."

H: It was indeed unlikely that all Jews would consider a human like Jesus to be divine, and most Jews of course did not. But it is eminently 'conceivable' that some fraction of Jews and Gentiles would believe the gospels.

T: It is not in the least conceivable, and merely asserting that it is conceivable does not make it so!

Factor 10: Group Orientation

H: The inclusiveness of Paul's Christianity would indeed have prevented it from completely converting any single ethnic or religious group, but this inclusiveness was quite well-suited for a missionary religion trying to establish itself throughout the Roman Empire.

T: What! Our critic skips over entirely the very key point: "Malina and Neyrey note that in the ancient world, people took their major identity from the various groups to which they belonged. Whatever group(s) they were embedded in determined their idenitity [sic]. Changes in persons (such as Paul's conversion) were abnormal. Each person had certain role expectations they were expected to fulfill." We are showing, here and in what followed, that "inclusiveness" was the very offense that made Christianity impossible to swallow!  This does not answer the argument; it merely restates the matter as though the ancient world was itself like the modern one, and open to social inclusivism!

H: Turkel is mistaken if he thinks there are no practical benefits in having a hope of eternal reward, a sense of identity, an excuse for self-righteousness, a deliverance from doubts, an exemption from critical thinking, etc.

T: as for those things: as we noted, the mystery religions [also] provided eternal reward and deliverance from doubts;  their "ingroup" [also] provided a sense of identity

without any of the social shortcomings we have listed.

T: We are talking here about material (i.e.,. tangible) benefits; this is what the reference to "practical terms" is made with, and the things listed do not at all alleviate slavery or poverty.

And we challenge our critic to show that any putative ancient convert sought out Christainity [sic], or any faith, looking for an "excuse for self-righteousness" [the ancients, as collectivists, were little concerned with "self-" anything!] or "exemption from critical thinking"!

This is merely a prejudicial and snide skeptical remark aimed from the barrel of our critic's personal complaints against modern Christians!)

Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel--not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. [..] For it is written:  "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;  the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? [..] Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom [..] Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; [..] But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise [1 Cor 1]

I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. [..] message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power. [..] This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment [1 Cor 2]

If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. [1 Cor 3]

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. [Col 2:8]

H: Turkel is oblivious to the possibility that the dogmas and rituals and cohesiveness of the Christian community could be a perfectly adequate substitute for what he admits was for Jews a workable "defense mechanism" against the scorn of others.

T: A substitute, yes -- obviously! Adequate? That's that ananchronist speaking again! The central importance of kinship in this society meant that family and family connections were paramount! Being cut off from your family was a high price to pay, even as you entered a new community -- a price that would never be paid without confirmation that it was worth being paid in the first place!  Our critic does not answer the argument

but merely frames the matter once again in modern, individualistic terms as though loss of family ties were something that could be easily and readily accepted!

The issue here is not need for a group identity, but losing the most familiar and by far most valuable group identity.

H: Turkel here is simply confused by the tension between designing a religious sect for maximal conversion of some pre-existing group, and designing a cult to cherry-pick the disaffected and marginalized from a broad range of groups.

T: And what is this supposed to mean?!? There is no "cherry-picking" of "the disaffected and marginalized" in view;

the point is that conversion meant you would become disaffected and marginalized, when you were not before, or more so than you were before! You would be perfectly acceptable in this society if you recognized and stayed in your place. Christianity shattered the boundaries, blurred the distinctions, and said that your identity was of no importance at all in terms of salvation in Christ.

This is now the second time our critic has turned one of our arguments upside-down and misconstrued it!

T: Moreover, a person like Jesus could not have kept a ministry going unless those around him supported him. A merely human Jesus could not have met this demand and must have provided convincing proofs of his power and authority to maintain a following

H: Merely human religious leaders attract and keep followers all the time, and there is no reason why a human Jesus would have necessarily been an exception.

T: That's it! Yet another "nuh uh" and a completely unsubstantiated, generalized answer.

To even come close we need to find such religious leaders in a collectivist society -- then make a detailed comparison in terms of demand for belief ratio. As it is our critic can do no better than try to apply positive "spin" yet again:

• nobody in a "group-oriented" culture could have had sincere but false beliefs;
• anyone with any followers could not have been delusional, because the "group orientation" of "society" would "dictate" that people act rationally and skeptically enough not to be his followers;
• any skeptical debunking of miracle claims would be generally known and accepted via "social networks" and would have been preserved in the historical record, despite the comparative lack of literacy and paucity of writings;
• anyone who embraces a "fictive kinship group" of fellow believers cannot be accused of disdaining his actual biological family;
• anyone who was estranged from his biological family could never have been accepted in any larger "fictive kinship group";
• Jesus' repeated retreats and evasions were not actually such because there was for a fugitive "nowhere to hide" anywhere in ancient society due to a "group-oriented control factor" which allowed "ancient people to control one another's behavior by watching and spreading word" of it.

It's also interesting to note that even the gospels admit that these "convincing proofs" were often not very convincing: Mt 11:20, Lk 10:13, Jn 6:66, 10:32, 12:37, 15:24.

H: Jesus' combination of charisma, appealing teachings, faith-healing, and exploitation of Jewish mythology can easily be seen as a non-divine explanation for why he attracted converts and why they in turn were able to recruit successive cohorts of converts.

T: Charisma? What charisma? Where is this to be found?

Appealing teachings? Which ones, and how "appealing" in comparison to the radical and offensive teachings?

"Faith-healing"? Only if the healings actually worked, and we have been through that mill before with our critic failing to make the grade (see link above).

"Exploitation of Jewish mythology...?" May we have some specifics, or is this merely "hot air" to impress the skeptical masses? Let's have some examples of such exploitation,

and an explanation as to how this "exploitation" could have garnered converts in ways that subsumed the negative aspects we have listed.

H: Believers in apocalyptic cults often remain faithful even in the face of undeniable failures (e.g. of apocalyptic prophecy). This of course applies directly to Christianity, since (as I demonstrate in our Trilemma debate) Jesus' clear Olivet prophecy [Mk 13:26-30] of an imminent return went blatantly unfulfilled.

T: Our critic demonstrated nothing whatsoever on the Olivet Discourse in the Trilemma debate; his answers to our material on that subject amounted to little more than variations on the comment, "That's ludicrous!"

none of Holding's obfuscations can make it plausible that some preaching in Rome and the destruction of the Temple makes the Olivet prophecy true.

The the city of Rome is not the same thing as the "whole world", and being in "heaven" is not the same thing as "appear[ing] in the sky" and being "see[n as] coming on the clouds of the sky". The prophesied things plainly didn't happen during "this generation", and the prophecy is plainly false.

Factor 11: Female Witnesses

Here our critic entirely dodges the question of women being regarded as unreliable witnesses,

Since Christianity was aimed at the marginalized and disaffected (at first among Jews, then universally after Jesus' humiliating failure), it's not too surprising that women are more prominent in the gospels than cultural norms would otherwise have suggested.

Turkel waves away Paul's omission of women witnesses in 1 Cor 15, saying the passage is about "the church's leadership".  Turkel's excuse is specious, since Paul cites an appearance (unmentioned in the gospels or Acts) "to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time", but omits the crucial witness Mary Magdalene. In contrast to these 500 anonymous "leaders", Mary Magdalene was (as I've written elsewhere)

a longtime disciple [Lk 8:2] "out of whom [Jesus] had driven seven demons" [Mk 16:9, Lk 8:2] and who (unlike any apostle) attended both the crucifixion and entombment. She was the first to visit the tomb on Easter [Mt 28:1, Jn 20:1], and the possibility of removal [Jn 20:2,14,15] was not unimaginable to her. She weepingly lingered [Jn 20:11] after the apostles left the empty tomb, and thereupon was the first [Mk 16:9, Mt 28:9, Jn 20:14] to claim seeing an appearance.  Her claim was initially "not believe[d] [by the apostles] because [the women's] words seemed to them like idle tales" [Lk 24:11]. After the apostles start having the visions too, she is expunged from Paul's list [1 Cor 15] of appearances, and indeed not mentioned again in all of Acts or anywhere else in the New Testament. (In the apocryphal Gospel of Mary, Peter tells her "we know that the Savior loved you more than any other woman. Tell us the words of the Savior that you know but which we haven't heard." She answers "I saw the Lord in a vision" and relates the conversation she had with him.)

and diverts attention instead to the issue of alleged disagreement among Gospel accounts

The gospel myths were not even concocted competently enough to agree on whether the women saw Jesus (yes in Matthew, no in Luke), so it's not surprising that those traditions fail to give these witnesses an optimally credible resume in terms of gender.  It's amusing that Turkel picks this one little subtlety as a gospel weakness overcome by Christianity, and yet ignores much more serious inconsistencies [..]
Turkel could ostensibly strengthen his argument by asking why a religion would handicap itself with such glaring inconsistencies.  He wisely chooses not to, because it would then be obvious that Christianity's success was built on the gullibility of its particular converts, and not on its ability to overcome the doubts of the average skeptic.

(which was brought up in the Trilemma debate, and to which we gave link-answers which he did nothing about other than call them names, for he has no answer to them otherwise) and alleged errors (such as the eschatology issue noted above). We have in fact dealt with all of these issues, as our critic well knows, and he has not an answer in reply, and therefore has a great deal of nerve telling his readers that we "wisely" choose not to deal with them!

2. Turkel completely misses the point here, which is not that he thinks (wrongly) that he can answer the infamous inconsistencies.  The point is rather that these prima facie inconsistencies would have been a bigger disadvantage for the gospel stories to overcome than the peripheral issue of the gender of a few minor Easter witnesses. Turkel pretends to exhaustively enumerate the disadvantages Christianity overcame, but the gospel stories' inconsistencies are glaringly absent from his list. Turkel senses that a comprehensive catalog of the evidentiary weakness of Christianity would stop belief in it like a brick wall, and so he instead he discusses a list of minor speedbumps.

Factor 12: Galilean Evangelists

T: Only Paul may have avoided this ["bumpkin"] stigma among the apostolic band

H: Paul is the reason why Christianity is a global religion instead of a Jewish sect.

T: That's actually a vast overstatement.

T: Paul did not found the three largest churches (Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem) and only founded a few of the smaller ones,

Factor 13: Group Oriented Fact-Checking

T: and he nevertheless had to depend on the witness of "bumpkins" for practically all of his information about the historical Jesus, as well as confess his ties to a 97% bumpkin-owned-and-operated movement. His advantage on this count was far from enough to explain global growth, much less any growth at all in the Roman Empire, without vindicating evidence.

Sure enough: Paul would not get the response, "A bumpkin! Beat it!" The reply to Paul would be, "Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad." (Acts 26:24)

• In Samaria, Phillip relied on miracles to win the crowds over from Simon the Sorcerer and his competing miracles. [Acts 8]
• In the one instance in Acts [10:37-41] where a missionary (Peter) vaguely and rhetorically told listeners (in Caesarea) that they "know what has happened throughout Judea", he immediately apologizes that the resurrected Jesus "was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen".
• On Cyprus, Paul cites no "social network", but rather his miraculous blinding of the sorcerer [Acts 13:11-12].
• In Antioch, Paul admits [13:27] the people of Jerusalem "did not recognize Jesus", and seeks to excuse the ignorance of Turkel's "social networks" by making [13:31] the qualification that "for many days [the resurrected Jesus] was seen by those who had traveled with him from Galilee to Jerusalem".
• When Paul healed a congenitally lame man in Lystra (Asia Minor), the "social network" took it not as "vindicating evidence" for the gospel stories, but rather as evidence that Paul and Barnabas were Zeus and Hermes [Acts 14:11]. Indeed, Paul was thereupon promptly stoned when the crowd was "won over" by adverse reports from Turkel's "social network" in the form of Jews "from Antioch and Iconium" [Acts 14:19].
• In Berea (Greece), Paul's audience checks his story not against "social networks" but merely [17:11] "examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true."
• In Athens the "social networks" should have had excellent knowledge of the Resurrection, since "all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)" [17:21].  Yet when Paul told them God "has given proof [..] to all men by raising [Jesus] from the dead", neither Paul nor his listeners made any reference to "vindicating evidence" provided by "social networks". (Paul, by the way, in his speech in Athens, the cradle of Western rationality, refers to Jesus not by name or divine title but merely as "the man [God] has appointed".)
• In Achaia (Greece), the missionary Apollos "vigorously refuted the Jews in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ." [18:28]
• In Ephesus, some disciples of Jesus had not even been informed by any "social networks" of even the most basic Christian doctrines: "No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." [19:2].
• Festus describes [25:19] the case of Paul as being "about a dead man named Jesus who Paul claimed was alive", and says [25:24] he consulted with the Jews in Jerusalem. However, Festus seems not to have heard from the "social networks" that Paul's claim was true, and Paul apparently did not dare invoke any such "social network" testimony to substantiate his claim.
  
• Before Agrippa, Paul recounts his persecutions and subsequent missions, adding [26:26] "I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner". However, even though Agrippa recognizes [26:28] that Paul is trying to convert him, Paul does not cite any "vindicating evidence" of the Resurrection, but instead admits [26:8] that his listeners "consider it incredible that God raises the dead".
• On Malta, Paul was again mistaken [28:6] for a god by the superstitious locals, for whom Paul allegedly performed healing miracles, apparently without ever citing any "vindicating evidence" from "social networks".
• The Jews in Rome had not heard of Paul and had heard [28:22] instead "that people everywhere are talking against this sect." In reply Paul cited no evidence from "social networks" but rather "tried to convince them about Jesus from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets." [28:23]

T: Christianity held none of the power cards. It was not endorsed by the "power structure" of the day, neither Roman nor Jewish. It could have been crushed merely by authority if necessary. Why wasn't it?

H: Religions die from within, not from without. Religions are easy to suppress, but almost impossible to exterminate.

T: This is yet another vague social factoid from our critic, who has no wherewithal to provide the necessary sociological analysis and so can offer nothing but this vague generalization,

T:  with no specifics showing that (especially within this context) it would have been "impossible to exterminate" Christianity (or force it to conform).

T: I do wish I could get as much credence with statements like, "Skeptics are all running from God," or, "Skeptics have guilt complexes," or, "Skepticism appeals to those who rebel against authority."

T: In a society where nothing escaped notice, there was indeed every reason to suppose that people hearing the Gospel message would check against the facts

H: There is little evidence that much checking against the facts ever took place, or that any such checking didn't always produce disconfirmation of the gospel accounts.

T: Once again our critic delivers a rounding chorus of "nuh uhs" entirely ignoring the highly relevant social data about the constant vigilance of a group-oriented culture.  The group-oriented vigilance provides all the evidence that is needed that the facts were checked, that the persons presenting the message were checked, and that this did not produce disconfirmation. Our critic is oblivious to the relevance of the social data which he chooses not to address, for it is beyond his means and ability to address, and destroys his counter-argument.

Malina and Neyrey note that "in group-oriented cultures such as the ancient Mediterranean, we must remember that people continually mind each other's business."  [..] Neighbors exerted "constant vigilance" [quote unsourced] over others [..]

Pilch and Malina [115] add that strangers were viewed in the ancient world as posing a threat to the community, because "they are potentially anything one cares to imagine...Hence, they must be checked over both as to how they might fit in and as to whether they will subscribe to the community's norms." Missionaries would find their virtues tested at every new stopping point!

"[T]he Pharisees seems [sic] to mind Jesus' business all the time," [183]

Philo notes that there were "thousands" who kept their eyes on others in their zeal to ensure that others did not subvert the Jewish ancestral institutions -- Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 379

The empty tomb would be checked. Matthew's story of resurrected saints would be checked out. Lazarus would be sought out for questioning.

Thus Turkel's "highly relevant social data" contains not a single NT instance of fact-checking a remote supernatural claim, and not a single quote from a scholar saying such fact-checking would have been expected. By contrast, I've above cited fifteen different NT instances in which such fact-checking is glaringly absent, and I've pointed out that the NT's single recorded instance of such fact-checking actually supports my thesis. Despite all this, Turkel exclaims (in italics) that he has "all the evidence that is needed". Turkel's hand-waving about "social data" has now clearly degenerated into pathetic self-parody.

There is no "mistake" of "assuming" that "if anyone could have had good reason not to believe the gospels, then nobody would have been gullible enough to believe them" -- it does not even get to the level where there would have been enough vagueness of doubt to the point where anyone the least bit gullible would have been affected!

Again: Just begging the question by saying, "They obviously must have been that stupid and gullible, because here we are," is not an answer, but is merely skeptical chauvanism [sic].

I of course have never said the ancients were "stupid" or any less intelligent than we moderns, but the desperate Turkel cannot answer my actual arguments, and so he repeatedly and feebly attributes this strawman to me.

Turkel makes no argument whatsoever that there could not have been enough gullible people for Christianity to arise. I do not "merely assume" that there were enough gullible people; it's a reasonable inference based on an understanding of the history of humanity's ignorance and misbeliefs, particularly in the ancient Near East. Turkel is making the positive claim that, in spite of that history, the rise of Christianity cannot be explained by gullibility.  Well, I just asserted that explanation. What is his argument to the contrary? None -- he merely argues by assertion that there could not have been enough gullible people. Turkel is trying to prove that his one religion is true, but is unwilling to demonstrate that it could not have been born of the very gullibility that is evidenced by all of the other dozens of religions that he says are false. (This helps confirm a growing suspicion that Turkel's style of stonewalling and obfuscating apologetics is not intended to persuade the open-minded, but rather to buttress the shaky faith of people who are already believers for non-rational reasons.)

H: [Holding] also mistakenly assumes that everyone within the reach of the gospel message would have had similar access to independent evidence about the gospel events. In fact, Christianity was generally more successful the farther one got (in space and time) from the Easter events.

T: There is no mistake in assumption here, either.

Early converts and potential converts did have the same level of access to the evidence as anyone else could practically have, [1] the same ability to track down and question witnesses, [2] to check things like the empty tomb, Matthew's saints, and Lazarus. Jewish pilgrims (whether we say hundreds of thousands, or millions) travelled [sic] regularly to Jerusalem for festivals and had [3] the means and the time to confirm (or if they desired, disconfirm) the truth claims. Wealthy Gentile converts (again, as noted in end matter, who represented [4] an unusual number of the converts, out of proportion with the rest of the society) had [5] the means and the motive to get the access and pursue the issues, or to send someone to do so. Nor in fact did everyone need to have such access -- only enough credible witnesses with the means and the motives to make the check.

In fact, the evidence of converts from the Roman middle/upper class indicates that these key early converts were people who set out to disprove the faith, out of normal social concern for control of deviant groups -- and failed.

H: Humans routinely hold beliefs -- especially religious ones -- that their neighbors think are unjustified.

T: This is yet another non-answer, as we are not dealing merely with "humans" but with humans in an agonistic culture who controlled deviant behavior via social censure. Our critic is again describing a modern condition as though it applied in the ancient world, and as though the neighbors were like those in America today who would perhaps mock a bit, but who would still invite the weirdo over for a BBQ as long as he wasn't doing something illegal.

H: If three out of four gospels did not report the widespread secret-removal story, how many other counter-explanations were in circulation that four out of four gospels omitted?

T: One may as well take the omission to mean that at the time Matthew wrote, the counter-explanation was dying for lack of evidence, and when and where Luke and Mark and John wrote, it had been thoroughly discredited and was no longer held seriously enough to rebut.

Factor 14: Jesus' Fallibility

T: [Scholars of all persuasions have long recognized the "criteria of embarrassment" as a marker for authentic words of Jesus. Places where Jesus claims to be ignorant (not knowing the day or hour of his return; not knowing who touched him in the crowd) or shows weakness are taken as honest recollections and authentic (even where miracles stories often are not!).]

H: Is [Holding]'s astonishment here feigned, or does he really not grasp the difference in believability between a man being reported as not omniscient and a man being reported as causing miracles?

T: There's that non-answer paradigm again.

T: I'm not making any comparison here between levels of believability; I am highlighting what would be seen as an obvious, honking big inconsistency: If Jesus were deity incarnate, he shouldn't be ignorant of anything; [..]

Our critic is confused about what we are actually arguing again,

and not surprisingly, collapses into an apoplexy of begged questions in which it is suposedly [sic] problematic that the Gospels confirm what he regards (with no proof beyond argument by outrage) as embarrassing beliefs in the events of the OT ("...El/Yahweh: his pedestrian works, parochial concerns, petty decisions, and primitive policies," and I suppose many other things beginning with P.)

In other words, it's the same prejudicial commentary our critic could not defend in the Trilemma series, and which we refuted, with him refusing to provide any answer other than to claim victory even as he lay senseless on the canvas.

Factor 15: Miscellaneous Dishonor

Despite the many new details, our critic merely dismisses this as a "rehash" of Factor 1, which at any rate he has still failed to overcme [sic].

Factor 16: "Miscellaneous Contrarium"

We provided a nice long list here, and our critic deals with none of these points in detail, only muttering the non-answer, "...these contraria are just variations on the theme that the Jesus movement was different from Judaism."

"Every Possible Disadvantage"

T: Christianity, as we can see, had every possible disadvantage as a faith

H: Obviously false. There are many possible disadvantages that Christianity lacked.

T: Then our critic engages a game of trying to list off possible greater "disadvantages" -- which doesn't circumvent our argument in the least!

H: It could have been founded by a woman, slave, or child.

T:  None of whom would have gotten even an initial hearing! It's absurd to demand disadvantage to this level!

H: It could have been founded independently of any religion (viz., Judaism) that its founder claimed already worshipped the right god(s).

T: Since, as we have shown, it had enough breaks with Judaism as conceived in any event,

 it essentially had this disadvantage!

H: It could have been founded in a culture that already had a monotheistic belief in some other god.

T: It's far from clear why this would be a greater disadvantage; there seems to be a begged premise here!

H: It could have been founded in a time or place in which literacy was low enough that no gospels were written.

T: Literacy WAS as low as it could practically get in any culture with writing;

but it would make no difference, for completely oral cultures have ways to transmit data that are just as accurate.

H: It could have been founded in an age in which durably-recorded journalism preserved contemporary accounts of skeptics.

T: This was such an age, thank you, added in with the social control factor 13 above,

and this at any rate begs the question that anyone would have been able to make such an account in the first place.

H: It could have been founded outside of a cosmopolitan empire that enabled its message to spread widely.

T: It is hard to see how the Empire being "cosmo" would have made any difference. When it got down to it, the main mode of travel over land was the same as it was anywhere else: two feet!

H: It could have been founded in an age in which a scientific understanding of physics enabled skeptical examination of its alleged miracle evidence.

T: This is the same begged question as the one just above!

H: It could have taught a doctrine of personal destiny less appealing than salvation by faith alone to a life of eternal happiness.

T: Obviously; it could also have taught, and it could have been true, that anyone who said the name of Jesus would have been felled by a ten-ton boulder appearing over their head,

but again, we have already shown, and our critic has failed to respond effectively, that the Christian doctrine of personal destiny and salvation WAS unappealing in its context, and was not enough to overcome the other stigmas.

In short, while it is possible of course to come up with what we perceive to be even greater disadvantages

(i.e., the Apostles could have miraculously appeared to be wearing clown noses and KICK ME signs), there is a limit before it gets ridiculous

Conclusion

T: what Christianity had to offer would not appeal to the ignorant -- or else would be balanced out by the many things that would have made the ignorant suspicious and mistrustful.

H: [Holding] here 'backpedals furiously' from his ludicrous claim that Christianity 'would not appeal to the ignorant'.

T: he is accusing me of backpedalling [sic] from an initial statement that he has just now responded to! How can I "backpedal" prior to a secondary reply?!?

H: Christianity in fact taught [1 Cor 1:20] that human wisdom is mere folly

T: consult what we have here and here -- our critic makes the same egregious hermenutical [sic] error as Delos McKown did on this verse.

T:  [enough early witnesses (as in, the 500!) with solid and indisputable testimony (no "vision of Jesus in the sky" but a tangible certainly of a physically resurrected body)]

H: [In fact, there is no reliably first-hand testimony to the physical resurrection of Jesus...]

T: In closing, our critic replies to the point about the data supporting the need for the likes of the 500 witnesses with the non-answer that the reports are second-hand or the product of delusion (which does not defeat the point at issue, which is that to overcome all the social stigmas, the witnesses had to be more substantive than that to be believed)

and the same old arguments[1] about Gospel anonymity and development which he hauled up before, which we refuted [2] in our previous Trilemma encounter and which he has not improved upon [3]. As we predicted, when our critic gets out of the realm of places where he can readily throw out explanations like "delusion" or other non-tangibles [4], he is lost and without hope [5]. We fully expect a reply to this response, and a series of replies to follow, which will undoubtedly end the same way [6]: With our critic claiming victory even as he runs for the hills with his backside aflame [7].