At 1006, a long, discursive ramble over many topics … but with certain core arguments along the way. First … a seemingly random set of screenshots, in no particular order:
Where to start?
a. Science is not exact … it can change the moment new evidence is authenticated by what most would agree are reasonable tests … provided that there was not suppression of parts of the evidence going on, e.g. with the lawfare on Trump, with the climate bollox, with the covid and spike “vaxx” issue … anywhere largesse and intimidation were involved and even the question Cui Bono requires us to ask who even decides that? What’s their own motivation?
b. Further to that … dogma is a horror in the hands of Councils of this or that, pointy-hatted, be-robed, Paisley type priests … not worth a tinker’s cuss in the light of “a” above. I was reading of the demise of Thomas Cromwell … yikes … when the King is so infirm in his gout-pained mind that he’d listen to Norfolk et al, especially on some obscure doctrinal point … Cromwell was a dead man walking thence onwards. Whom to trust? Honest scholars who admit their bias and try to do a Holmes, opening the mind to real evidence afap.
c. And so to my main point … the totality of evidence. The downside is that if you consider the totality of all that is available … there’s a lot of trolling in there as well, spurious guff inserted just to muddy the waters. Again … whose evidence is it in the first place and cui bono? I was looking back at the Meredith Kercher trials.
What lines were pursued in the Kercher investigations and court cases?
The police plus prosecution took the line of “totality of evidence” as the clincher. The defence, plus who was funding them, plus Berlusconi, the deep state, the US MSM and special interest groups, plus much of the more ignorant English speaking west in love with pretty Knox … took the line that you only need to establish doubt over even one aspect and the whole case, over all aspects, thus falls to the ground.
It’s not completely spurious, that line. In Nero Wolfe, he was unimpressed with one young lady, established she’d lied over one piece of evidence, and therefore concluded that she was thereafter “unreliable” at the very least.
I could mount a case against that though … she may have had a particular motive to lie on the one single point … protecting someone?
Where does that leave us? I think pursuing the totality … much more work than establishing “reasonable” doubt, yet both have a role. The cui bono aspect is crucial imho, every single time.
As for the dating of Jesus’s birth … not vital to be precise … there were different calendars for a start. There was Josephus, plus Tacitus on His existence at least as a local radical … again not conclusive … far more conclusive, as Robinson pointed out, was the rapid development of a Christology and attempts to suppress it, which were on the historical record. There was also evidence, by omission, of a suppression of AD70 in available records today. Small wonder, given the illumined cult in charge of western society.
So September 11th? Why not? It’s just not all that vital to me, as it cannot be 100% established when … and what’s it matter anyway precisely when it was? We know it was moved to December 25th to stiff the pagans.