Don Camp's Encounter With A Legendary Biblical Scholar

 

I have been spending a bit of time at Debunking Christianity - John Loftus' blog, and I remember a few years ago, when I was an and off reader of the blog that there was a fellow in the combox called "Don Camp". I remember Loftus even wrote an article on him once, so having now started this blog I had the idea to maybe cover him or whatever came of him. I was helpfully directed to a list of posts written about him and apparently it's much bigger than I thought. So, I was going to work through them and maybe come up with something, but I have decided to drop all that when I discovered that the legendary Hector Avalos, one of the most honest and in my view strongest Biblical scholars wrote an entire post responding to him. In my view, if you've earned a PhD that should spare you from ever having to engage Don Camp in a lengthy post, but since it happened, I will redirect y'all there. You can read the whole post here.

Enjoy!

The Major Problem With a Religious Nutjob

I engaged in several interesting mini-conversations over at John Loftus' blog "Debunking Christianity". While talking there about why religious people keep insisting that atheism is a religion, I had an interesting exchange where I shared my thoughts on what is the major problem with religious nutjobs. I will quote myself responding to a regular contributor at DC called Daniel:

"Daniel, there is zero chance that you could explain that to someone like Kent Hovind. I document religious nutjobs and still spend an unhealthy amount following these personalities (some of whom I call religious nutjobs). The main problem is that they never update their arguments or reasons in light of criticism. For example, I am doing a series on Matt Powell, a Kent Hovind protege, who is a relatively young guy (younger millenial or older Gen Z), and he still uses the same tired arguments that Hovind made in the 80s. This is the heart of the problem. If I corrected you on a historic or scientific fact, you might not entirely change your view, but you would update your view based on a correction, counter-argument etc. The people I call "religious nutjobs" do not. So, even though Ken Ham and Kent Hovind have every piece of evidence from philosophy of science to biology refuting them, they will still claim that evolution is just a religion, and not even correct that minor detail."