Monday 23 January 2017

Response to Unblievable! debate this week on mystery religions

On this week's show of Unbelievable, Justin Brierley held a difficult debate between Richard Carrier vs David Marshall. Quite frankly, I don't think Brierley will be uniting these two again. Here was my response:

Having just finished listening to this episode, I have to agree with Carrier's summary of the apologist vs scholar. The flying sparks were quite frankly off-putting to the actual arguments being made (I am still unclear as to what the grounds are for peripheral or central features of mystery religions, although why not follow up Carrier's invitation to check out his book?)

I agree with Carrier that Marshall - from what I could make out in this debate - does not seem to have properly engaged and his personal history with Carrier seemed to favour what quite frankly seemed like embarrassing blunders (e.g. fables of Aesop). Remember, his book his based on Carrier's, he should know it really, really well. He really doesn't seem to. Sorry Marshall, you didn't sell it to me and I am in theory on your side. But presenting one side of the debate with too much emotion and not enough research I found embarrassing.

Thanks Justin for the usual excellent hosting in a difficult interview.

UPDATE: Got a reply from David Marshall!
How can you make such a claim about a 300 page book chock full of evidence, by listening to a few minutes of Carrier's on-air attacks? Sorry, but you are being gullible. Carrier simply fails to understand my argument, or what it is based upon. And I tried to be polite, but his notion of scholarship is badly defective. See point 6, in particular:
http://christthetao.blogspot.c...

Back to me: I am not going to get drawn into a debate with David Marshall on this, he's way too loose with his tongue and life is too short.

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