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Apparently, Loftus finally got an expert to write something for his blog entry. Now the atheists think that because fifteen minutes have passed with no response from Triablogue, they’ve won. Since atheists cannot connect any logical dots and need everything spelled out for them, this post has become necessary. It is also necessary to practically re-quote everything Steve wrote in his original post, but since atheists don’t follow links…

First, what was Steve’s argument regarding Sargon?

1.Evan disregards the intertextual parallels between Noah and Moses: both are placed in an “ark” (tebah) waterproofed with bitumen.

2.”While certainly a folklore theme, the practice of placing a child in the river may have been a widely practiced form of abandonment, similar to the more modern practice of leaving a child on the doorstep of a house,” T. Longman, Fictional Akkadian Autobiography, 56.

3.Apropos (2), both Egypt and Mesopotamia were riverine civilizations.

4.Papyrus was a natural, Egyptian building material for rafts (cf. Isa 18:1-2). Wood was costly.

5.Evan confuses the date of Sargon with the date of the legend.

“Although set in the life of King Sargon of Akkad (2371-2316BC), the surviving fragments of the tale are Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian in date (7C-6C BC)…A further problem for those wishing to find a correlation between the Sargon legend and the Moses birth story is, as noted above, that the earliest surviving copies of the Sargon text date from Neo-Assyrian or later times. This factor, along with others, suggests that the legend may have been recorded by (or for) the late 8C Assyrian king, Sargon II, who took the name of his great Akkadian forebear and identified himself with that monarch. This possibility diminishes the case for the Sargon legend influencing Exodus because if we allow that J or E (usually dated to the 10C and 8C respective) is the source behind Exodus 2:1-10, and follow the traditional dating for these sources, both would predate the reign of Sargon II (721-705),” J. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt, 136-37.

And that’s predicated on the late dating scheme of the Documentary Hypothesis. If we accept Mosaic authorship, the account antedates the legend of Sargon by many centuries.

6.”Exodus 2:3 contains the central elements of the Moses birth narrative that are so commonly compared with the Sargon legend. Yet we see [138-39] that this verse contains no less than six words used in Egypt during the New Kingdom…How is the presence of Egyptian terms in the narrative to be explained, especially if the motif was borrowed from Mesopotamia? This significant concentration of Egyptian terms militates against the Mesopotamian connection…Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a scribe during the late Judaean monarchy or the exilic period (or later) would have been familiar with these Egyptian terms,” Hoffmeier, ibid., 140.

So the core of the argument is:

1. There are parallelisms between Exodus and Genesis.

2. The commonality of placing infants in rivers is a more likely reason for the parallelism than having it copied from Sargon even if we discount 1.

3. The date of Sargon is after the date of Exodus given the J or E dating schemes (and Steve quotes Hoffmeier in support of this).

4. Exodus contains language that is consistent with New Kingdom Egyptian rather than Mesopotamian (which would be more likely if it were copied from Sargon).

Of these four main points, only point 3 has been attacked. Notice the importance in the argument: it’s not Steve’s first or second point. Even if Sargon was dated before Exodus, both points 1 and 2 would still stand. So all the work the atheists are engaged in is futile in the first place because even if they succeed in discounting 3, they’ve not proven their case.

I pointed this out to Evan repeatedly. The very first sentence (and the second one as well for continuity) of my first comment to him on Sargon was:

It’s obvious Evan still hasn’t gotten past the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because something happens after another thing doesn’t imply that the second thing was based on the first thing or cause by the first thing.

Then, when Evan tried to keep the discussion sidetracked on the dating of Sargon and Exodus, I said:

No, that’s not at all what the argument being advanced is. Firstly, you’re still stuck in your post hoc mode. You really need to pay attention to what we’re actually saying if you want to make a relevant comment.

1) The practice of abandoning unwanted babies in rivers predates both Exodus and Sargon, regardless of what dates you assign to either of them.

2) Therefore, the actual practice of putting children in baskets on the river is a much more likely source for having the same event in two different stories than having one story copied from another, especially given how Sargon getting put in a river is the ONLY link you’ve claimed between the legend of Sargon and Moses.

3) If the actual practice was going on, it would not be unlikely at all for both Sargon and Moses to have actually been put into a river at some point.

As you ought to be able to see from the above, this is true regardless of the dates assigned to the various texts.

All the italics were in the original, mind you. Evan should have been paying attention.

Once again, Evan tried to sidetrack from the issue, and I responded in my next comment:

You’re still bound to your post hoc fallacy. You’re still stuck thinking that because both talk about the same event then one had to be copied from the other.

Since you haven’t paid any attention yet, I will repeat myself. The reason they both talk about the same event is because the event was fairly common in those times.

Again: THE REASON THEY BOTH TALK ABOUT THE SAME EVENT IS BECAUSE THE EVENT WAS FAIRLY COMMON IN THOSE TIMES.

Will you PLEASE read that this time? Will you please get off your post hoc fallacy and interact with what’s been said? Is that too much to ask?

Italics and bold were in the original. Evan did not read it and he did not interact with it.

So as you can see, my argument was consistently that Evan was committing a post hoc fallacy. Which is why I found it really funny that Loftus’s expert Avalos included me in his response.

The dating of Exodus and Sargon is irrelevant to my main argument. It’s only a tangential aspect that would provide more evidence, but the absence of which is not damaging to my position. So even if we grant Avalos’s claim that Exodus was written after Sargon this would not prove literary dependency.

Now if atheists really think that Evan’s getting the “upper hand” in the debate because he’s not answering something I’ve repeated multiple times, because he continually sidetracks, and because he thinks the date of Sargon and Exodus are the key aspect, then atheists are bigger fools than even I take them for.

But be that as it may, I can counter Avalos with the quotes Steve already provided from Hoffmeier. Now we have two experts disagreeing over a point that was not the main focus of Steve’s argument, and over a point that I’ve consistently pointed out is irrelevant to the main argument.

If that’s an atheist victory, God help ‘em in a defeat!

According to legend, Roger Bannister was the first human being to run a mile in under four minutes. But if we think about this for even half a second, we realize it’s a completely absurd story. Look at the average person. They weigh roughly three hundred pounds and couldn’t run fast enough to catch a bag of Doritos falling off their dresser. Even in my more athletic days (back when I swam a mile without stopping, for instance) I never ran a mile faster than about ten minutes…and we’re supposed to believe that someone ran it in under four? In fact, I live in Colorado Springs which has the US Olympic Training Center, and I’ve never seen anyone run a mile in under four minutes. Several of my coworkers run religiously (they hold to the myth, you see), and I’ve never seen them run a mile under four minutes. Surely, if it were true that Roger Bannister did it, it wouldn’t be so hard for the average person to accomplish.

So how do we explain this? Well, we grew up reading comic books about Superman. And Roger Bannister is nothing more than a myth of Superman. See, Superman could run faster than a speeding bullet (and he could, therefore, run a mile in under four minutes). Because people looked up to Superman and longed to be like Superman, we created the myth of Roger Bannister. To make it more exotic, we pretended he was born in England (all good 20th Century myths require an Englishman. James Bond. Any questions? Didn’t think so.)

So what about the supposed evidence? Well, it’s all hearsay. None of us were there. Yes, the event supposedly occurred in front of thousands of witnesses, but none of them had stopwatches. And really, all you needed was to pay off the one person with a stopwatch who set the “official” time. Now tell me, isn’t it more likely that that one guy was paid off to lie than it is to think that Roger Bannister could actually run a mile in under a minute? And look at how the legend profligates to this day, with many athletes claiming to be able to do it themselves. (And we’ve seen how athletes lie when it suits them: ex. O.J. Simpson. Again, I rest my case.) Even if I was there and saw Bannister run the mile in under four minutes it wouldn’t prove he actually did. I would take the more likely truth that my stopwatch was flawed.

After all, the myth of Roger Bannister causes us to hope Superman is real. Those who believe in Bannister, frankly, could believe in anything. That’s what makes them so scary.

One thing that occurs with every author to some extent is the repetition of our favorite words and phrases. This is especially common in first drafts, and when it comes to my blog entries I’m sure there’s a lot of instances of them due to how almost all of my blog posts are first drafts! In any case, when editing a book, it is necessary that you go through and get rid of as many repetitions as possible.

To use me as an example, when doing first drafts I over use the words “realized” and “suddenly.” I know these are words I over use, so when I edit I look for them and kill them off as soon as I find them. The goal is to have as few repetitions in a text as possible to make it easier to read.

Now I should explain that I am not refering to characters names and such; rather, this deals mainly with verbs and adverbs. If you are repeating the same action, you have a problem.

Knowing this made it really ironic as I just finished re-reading Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. (Child was a former book editor, mind you.) This book was their first collaboration, and in general I enjoyed it a great deal, although they have definitely improved through time. One thing stopped me though.

On page 433 we read: “Gingerly, he moved to the pipe and began crawling in the darkness.” We then have three sentences, and the fourth is: “Gingerly, he brought his foot outward and downward.” Two paragraphs later, we read: “One at a time, people emerged and spread out against the wall, feeling their way gingerly, collapsing in exhaustion.” (Mind you, that sentence only begins on page 433, the repetition of the word “gingerly” doesn’t actually occur until page 434.

This is problematic not only because of the repetitions, but also because of the fact that it’s repeated adverbs. (Adverbs are the anti-Christ when it comes to publishing texts.) We can also add to it the fact that “ing” words lack the same emphasis as other verbs. But couldn’t at least one of the “gingerly”’s be replaced with “tentatively”? Perhaps another with “hesitantly”? It’s not that difficult to get alternate words in there….

Needless to say, Child and Preston have made far more money that I have selling books. So the “rules” are about as relevant as the guidelines in Pirates of the Caribean….as long as you’re a former book editor with your foot already in the door!

The Dorktard of the Day award has to go to this lady who came up with a great way to kill a mouse in her trailer.

Use a .44.

Me, I’m thinking that’s a little overkill. The bullets are almost as big as the mouse.

Apparently, God thought it was too…because this lady ended up dropping her gun and shooting herself in the knee instead.

But that’s not all!

The bullet passed through her knee and struck the keychain hanging on the belt of the guy who was with her, grazed his groin area, and came to rest in his coin-pocket.

That’s a pretty impressive shot. And, naturally, the mouse was unscathed.

This didn’t happen in Florida; sadly, Dave Barry did NOT make it up.

One thing that’s nice is since completing my last draft of The 13th Prime I’ve gone back into Writer Mode. While I have been too busy with work to do much actual writing, I’ve got several plots for several different works simmering and nearing completion. This includes an idea that would be my most ambitious one yet, but which I won’t talk about in great detail (isn’t that nice of me!).

It’s definitely nice to be hitting this going into my vacation instead of going into another stretch of more overtime… :-)

Yup, it’s the week before my vacation, and that means that the hours are dragging. Oh well, only four more days to go now. I don’t have any major plans, although I’d like to get a bit more writing done and I’ll probably start to do some heavy editing on Ghost Shadows now that The 13th Prime is basically complete with edits. We shall see how it all turns out (I’ll probably just spend all my time playing Guitar Hero instead…).

My first thought reading this article is that there are very few people in America today who know what the First Amendment is. Ignore all the other rights that the First Amendment protects (you know, like that pesky religious stuff), it still says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. So if your Internet Domain Provider imposes rules, guess what? They ain’t Congress!

The second thought that the article hit me with was the fact that our culture is so fixated on “the next big thing” that they pretty much ignore everything and flock toward “the big stuff.” You have superstars everywhere, and if you’re not a superstar you’re no one. So if you get kicked off MySpace, in the words of the article: “in a lot of ways you don’t exist.” Yeah, I’m not making that quote up. If you get immaterially booted from an immaterial forum you no longer exist. Descartes might have something to say about that, but since when do we care about dead Frenchmen?

Anyway, it is somewhat symptomatic and it’s not just the internet. I’m a writer, and just go into your local bookstore. What do you see? You see “the bigs” up front. Shelf after shelf of the same ten authors. Then, waaaaaaaaay in the back, you find a shelf dedicated to the other fifteen trillion books that have been written. So it’s not just the net, it’s the herd mentality of our culture. You just get a critical mass and go with it. Everyone follows because thinking for yourself is too difficult.

(Now those who are in the know already know what this post is doing. It’s going after the disenfranchised voice, which has its own critical mass. Yes, diabolical wonders never cease. What would we do without marketers to sell us all the crap we don’t want at prices we can’t afford just so we can keep up with the Joneses?)

Anyway, there is a solution for it all. You can simply buy my books and I’ll go away. Learn to distrust popular appeal. Oh wait. That is popular appeal.

We’re all doomed. Somehow I’m sure Bush is to blame.

Although this does beg the question….

What do the British do on July 4?

So I’m filling out a Transfer Request sheet at work and it hits me. This is incredibly stupid.

Yup, a new redesigned form that’s apparently built for dorktards. There’s a checklist (you know, for people who forget to put their socks on before their shoes). One of the boxes says this:

Transfer Request Form (the one you’re writing on right now)

Now, I’m not the smartest person on Earth (I’m the sixth smartest), but seriously, think about this for a second. Why do we need a checkbox for the form we’re filling out? Does not the fact that we are filling out the form mean that we are (what’s the phrase I’m seeking here? Oh yeah!) FILLING OUT THE FORM??? What am I going to do, give all the transfer information on a clay tablet? Send some freaking pigeons? Light a signal fire? I mean, hello!

It’s insulting enough to common sense to make me want to malliciously fill in the line that says “Date of Request” with the word “Today” just to spite them. After all, that’s about how stupid the people who designed this form must think those of us who fill out the form are.

RAWR!!!!

On the other hand, it reminds me of Public Transit, which only goes to show…I am a prophet without trying.

I just finished with another draft of The 13th Prime. I’m hoping it’ll be ready to shop out in another month or so. We shall see what happens, but I will say that on the whole I think this is my favorite story. Whether I’ve told the story right or not is still debateable, but of the concepts I’ve had before this has definitely been the most exciting for me :-)