Shawn10538....Good to see that you still have no idea what an ad hominem is. Saying that "This movie was utter crap" after seeing Norbit: The Godawful Sequel is also not making an ad hominem argument. It's not even an argument; it's stating an opinion of how awful the movie is. I can't believe I have to explain this to you again....my original post expressed my reaction to the movie and was not written as an argument why it was so bad (get it?). It would've taken a rather long post to adequately show why it was factually erroneous, and frankly I don't always have the time for that. Hence I briefly gave my informed opinion and encouraged others to research the sources of Zeitgeist to discover for themselves why it was so bad. But that is not good enough....for some strange reason you presume that one cannot simply express an opinion (as opposed to making an argument), one must always spell out the "details of an issue" (as you put it in your last message).
Okay, fair enough. So I decided to do exactly that. I wrote for you a factual reply that addressed the "details of the issue" and it necessarily is lengthy because in order to adequately show why Zeitgeist is NOT based on fact, I have to 1) explain the basic methodological error of Zeitgeist (i.e. relying on secondary sources than primary sources), 2) look up the original secondary sources for the claims in Zeitgeist and show that they are unreliable and erroneous, which 3) involves some lengthy quoting of these sources and primary sources with which I compare them, and 4) I have to explain why the syntheses of these facts and non-facts in Zeitgeist and its (syncretistic) sources lack any sort of methodology and thus end up being artificial in the extreme. It takes quite a lot of time and space to lay out these arguments but I took the trouble to do so because that's what you wanted. You were not satisfied with me simply stating my opinion, you wanted me to show why. So I showed why.
But rather than discuss any of the content of my post, what do you do but make an ad hominem argument about me! You label me an "apologist" incapable of critical thinking because of emotional desperation caused by Zeitgeist: "She MUST prove the Zeitgeist wrong or else her whole world will collapse". What presumptous crap, you have no idea how far off-base you are, and I am incredulous that you take it upon yourself to attribute to me views and feelings completely alien to me. Anyone who has read my posts at length knows I don't like pseudoscience and pseudohistory (e.g. Zecharia Sitchin, creationism, quackery, sunken continents, you name it), because they make factually incorrect claims. I know from my knowledge of Egyptian religion that Zeitgeist completely bungles the "myth of Horus" and is filled with many other errors and I find it annoying that this poorly-researched video is what gets attention on the internet and not actual sober critical scholarship. That's what I basically said in my original post. It is a disdain for shoddy and misleading research that motivates me here, which is the same reason I post similar criticisms of the false and misleading claims of Zecharia Sitchin, Alexander Hislop, creationists, Tony Bushby, the WTB&TS, and whoever else repeats unfounded beliefs and claims (and/or is intellectually dishonest) without checking out the facts. Your comment makes about as much sense as saying that a person doing a detailed debunking of a creationist book like Life -- How Did it Get Here, by Evolution or Creation? must be feverishly digging for any scrap of evidence that would ease her or her cognitive dissonance, when the exact opposite is the fact -- the critic already knows that the book is filled with errors and misrepresentations of fact and endeavors to show how it gets its facts wrong. What makes your post especially stupid is that I have frequently posted on the mythological background of the Bible and the fictional nature of the gospels and other stories in the Bible -- heck even my last post went on at length about this. Yet you talk about me as if I were an apologist and somehow threatened by the "mythic Christ", in complete ignorance of my own views to that effect. What I don't like is building a case on canards when there is so much real data out there to talk about. Zeitgeist doesn't have to invent a fake myth of Horus when it could have just as easily talked about the REAL parallels between Horus, Dionysius, Bacchus, Adonis, Baal, Shoshyant, and other savior figures.
That's it. I've tried to explain it several times because you seem to be thick on this matter. In your last post, you said "essentially Leolaia is saying that while individual facts may be true, the synthesis of these facts and the conclusion reached are not correct". Oops, wrong answer. That tells me you really didn't read the post, what with its lengthy discussion about factual accuracy and the importance of using primary sources. It isn't hard to miss that my objection to Zeitgeist concerned its shoddy research and utter inaccuracy, not the view that Christianity drew on myths, which is of course a view I share as well. And as I explained at length, it is the synthesis that produces many of these factual errors. And then you make this "challenge":
I challenge Leolaia to make as thorough an argument FOR the Zeitgeist theory. Then I would know she is capable of self criticism, which is at the heart of critical thinking. As of yet, I have not seen a post from her that I would not put solidly in the category of apologist. This is the opposite of critical thought.
That is like asking someone to prove that the sun revolves around the earth, and conclude that he or she lacks critical thinking if she does not try to argue in favor of this view. The characterization of the Horus myth in Zeitgeist has nothing to recommend it. It's not true. I know this from my knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion. How can I argue in favor of a claim that I know is false? I might as well try to prove that the sun revolves around the earth.
Let me break it down really simple for you by means of an analogy. A student in high school turns in a research paper in English class that was shoddily researched (using mainly Wikipedia and some webpages that made things up about the subject), got many of the basic facts wrong, and was peppered with some rather bizarre speculations. The teacher recognizes the poorly-researched and erroneous character of the paper and grades it a D-. The student, getting the paper back, is outraged. He accuses the teacher of being emotionally against the conclusions of the paper, he says she must be threatened by what he presented, and he demands she regrades the paper as an A+ or else she lacks any objectivity whatsoever. The teacher insists that the paper deserves a D- because it was lazily researched and poorly written. The student says that the grade is undeserved because the teacher cannot just express her opinion of the quality of the paper by means of a grade -- that would just be an ad hominem attack on the paper. The teacher has no clue what the student is talking about, but then she goes over the paper with him in detail, showing example after example why the paper is terrible. But the student insists that the teacher is just making excuses, adding that the teacher's whole world would collapse if she sucked it up and gave him the A+ that the paper deserved.
Do you understand now?
I feel I have explained myself as well as I possibly could, and I feel it is pointless to have to explain it again, so I will consider our dialogue closed if you continue along the same lines. And please stop lying about me, you just make yourself look like an idiot to everybody else.
