The Evidence for the History of Jesus

Did a man named Jesus from Nazareth exist in Judea around 2000 years ago proclaiming to be some
kind of prophet? Of course this is a controversial question because of the massive implications for one of the world’s major religions.

I do find it interesting to explore a basic factual question that is embedded in an intense ideological issue. It is a good way to explore what I think are the more interesting questions – the power of motivated reasoning, and how do we know anything historical.

I will also state that, even though this is not an atheist blog, I make no secret of the fact that I am an agnostic/atheist. I don’t think the historicity question has significant implications for atheism because it is entirely possible that the person Jesus existed but that Christian mythology is still just that, mythology. There were many prophets walking around the Middle East at that time. That one of them spawned a following that survives to this day is not surprising.

Two recent popular articles take opposite sides in this debate. The first is written by Dr Simon Gathercole in The Guardian, arguing that there is compelling evidence for Jesus. The second is written by Valerie Tarico in Raw Story and takes the position that the evidence for Jesus is weak. There has obviously been a lot written about this topic by many people, but these recent articles are decent summaries.

Which side has the stronger case?

Read more here:
NeuroLogica Blog » The Evidence for the History of Jesus

Students despise Obama policies...when credited to Trump

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How about Free Advice?

By Jeremy Meister

Senator Bernie Sanders is calling for free college education for all.

Why hasn't any politician proposed this before?

Oh wait, they have.  Karl Marx wanted free education for all.  He was going to teach the little idiots the joys of high taxes, big government, excessive regulations, and a powerful state to create a new utopia on Earth.

Bernie Sanders is totally different, though.  He's going to teach the little idiots the joys of high taxes, big government, excessive regulations, and a powerful state to end global warming and racism.

Naturally, this idea will win all kinds of support from colleges and universities.  For administrators and professors, this means more raises, more benefits, and more paid vacations.  The students at these schools will be able to avoid out-of-control school costs being forced on them by their administrators and professors wanting more raises, more benefits, and more paid vacations.

(Shouldn't the "poor working men" Socialists at our colleges and universities actually be poor?  Or is that too much to ask?  But I digress.)

Administrators, professors, and students need to be reminded that the world owes them nothing simply because they exist.  Even if there is a right to education, there is no right to higher education and everything that would entail.

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Blog: How about Free Advice?

Heston Reads From Crichton's Jurassic Park.

Six Seconds

by Lt. Gen. John Kelly

Two years ago when I was the Commander of all U.S. and Iraqi forces, in fact, the 22nd of April 2008, two Marine infantry battalions, 1/9 “The Walking Dead,” and 2/8 were switching out in Ramadi. One battalion in the closing days of their deployment going home very soon, the other just starting its seven-month combat tour.

Two Marines, Corporal Jonathan Yale and Lance Corporal Jordan Haerter, 22 and 20 years old respectively, one from each battalion, were assuming the watch together at the entrance gate of an outpost that contained a makeshift barracks housing 50 Marines.

The same broken down ramshackle building was also home to 100 Iraqi police, also my men and our allies in the fight against the terrorists in Ramadi, a city until recently the most dangerous city on earth and owned by Al Qaeda. Yale was a dirt poor mixed-race kid from Virginia with a wife and daughter, and a mother and sister who lived with him and he supported as well. He did this on a yearly salary of less than $23,000. Haerter, on the other hand, was a middle class white kid from Long Island.

They were from two completely different worlds. Had they not joined the Marines they would never have met each other, or understood that multiple America’s exist simultaneously depending on one’s race, education level, economic status, and where you might have been born. But they were Marines, combat Marines, forged in the same crucible of Marine training, and because of this bond they were brothers as close, or closer, than if they were born of the same woman.

The mission orders they received from the sergeant squad leader I am sure went something like: “Okay you two clowns, stand this post and let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.” “You clear?” I am also sure Yale and Haerter then rolled their eyes and said in unison something like: “Yes Sergeant,” with just enough attitude that made the point without saying the words, “No kidding sweetheart, we know what we’re doing.” They then relieved two other Marines on watch and took up their post at the entry control point of Joint Security Station Nasser, in the Sophia section of Ramadi, al Anbar, Iraq.

A few minutes later a large blue truck turned down the alley way—perhaps 60-70 yards in length—and sped its way through the serpentine of concrete jersey walls. The truck stopped just short of where the two were posted and detonated, killing them both catastrophically. Twenty-four brick masonry houses were damaged or destroyed. A mosque 100 yards away collapsed. The truck’s engine came to rest two hundred yards away knocking most of a house down before it stopped.

Our explosive experts reckoned the blast was made of 2,000 pounds of explosives. Two died, and because these two young infantrymen didn’t have it in their DNA to run from danger, they saved 150 of their Iraqi and American brothers-in-arms.

When I read the situation report about the incident a few hours after it happened I called the regimental commander for details as something about this struck me as different. Marines dying or being seriously wounded is commonplace in combat. We expect Marines regardless of rank or MOS to stand their ground and do their duty, and even die in the process, if that is what the mission takes. But this just seemed different.

The regimental commander had just returned from the site and he agreed, but reported that there were no American witnesses to the event—just Iraqi police. I figured if there was any chance of finding out what actually happened and then to decorate the two Marines to acknowledge their bravery, I’d have to do it as a combat award that requires two eye-witnesses and we figured the bureaucrats back in Washington would never buy Iraqi statements. If it had any chance at all, it had to come under the signature of a general officer.

I traveled to Ramadi the next day and spoke individually to a half-dozen Iraqi police all of whom told the same story. The blue truck turned down into the alley and immediately sped up as it made its way through the serpentine. They all said, “We knew immediately what was going on as soon as the two Marines began firing.” The Iraqi police then related that some of them also fired, and then to a man, ran for safety just prior to the explosion.

All survived. Many were injured ... some seriously. One of the Iraqis elaborated and with tears welling up said, “They’d run like any normal man would to save his life.”

What he didn’t know until then, he said, and what he learned that very instant, was that Marines are not normal. Choking past the emotion he said, “Sir, in the name of God no sane man would have stood there and done what they did.”

“No sane man.”

 

“They saved us all.”

What we didn’t know at the time, and only learned a couple of days later after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged initially in the blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened exactly as the Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck entered the alley until it detonated.

You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting myself in their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few minutes before: “ ... let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.”

The two Marines had about five seconds left to live. It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open up. By this time the truck was half-way through the barriers and gaining speed the whole time. Here, the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were—some running right past the Marines. They had three seconds left to live.

For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines’ weapons firing non-stop...the truck’s windshield exploding into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the son-of-a-bitch who is trying to get past them to kill their brothers—American and Iraqi—bedded down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground. If they had been aware, they would have known they were safe ... because two Marines stood between them and a crazed suicide bomber.

The recording shows the truck careening to a stop immediately in front of the two Marines. In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons. They had only one second left to live.

The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God.

Six seconds.

Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty ... into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight—for you.

How Both Sides of the Pit Bull Debate Get It Wrong

The award-winning journalist and Oxford American editor Bronwen Dickey spent seven years Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon (out in paperback April 4), the most authoritative tome on one of our country’s most polarizing breeds. Though the impetus for the book was Dickey’s own stereotype-defying pit mix Nola, the author never fawns over the animals. Instead she takes a long, sober look at their history and warns against both deification and demonization. “You say the words ‘pit bull,’” she says, “and people lose their minds scrambling to one side or the other.”
researching and writing

Pit Bull dispels myths perpetuated by both sides. No, their jaws don’t lock — but they were never “nanny dogs,” and you should never leave one alone with a child, because you should never leave any breed of dog alone with a child. Cropped ears don’t mean a pittie’s a fighter (the opposite, in fact), and scars don’t out it as a “bait dog” — a helpless, chained dog purportedly used to test or rile up a fighter. “There’s no mention of bait dogs in the entire history of fighting literature,” Dickey says. “It wouldn’t serve any purpose.”

If a “pit bull” shows up at a shelter with scars or broken bones, people often assume it was a fighting or bait dog. But it’s far more likely the dog was hit by a car, harmed in an accident, or otherwise abused by its owners. These myths — some of which mean to elicit sympathy for pits — only serve to further link the dogs to combat, which is misleading and counterproductive.

Dickey consulted dozens of animal experts and pored over mountains of data before emerging with a conclusion as mundane as it is profound: Pit bulls are just dogs. All too often, they serve as a proxy for our own prejudices.

Read more:
How Both Sides of the Pit Bull Debate Get It Wrong -- Science of Us

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The Federal Income Tax Basically Implies that Government Owns You

Jeffrey Tucker 

The income tax is enshrined into law but it is an idea that stands in total contradiction to the driving force behind the American Revolution and the idea of freedom itself. We desperately need a serious national movement to get rid of it – not reform it, not replace it, not flatten it or refocus its sting from this group to that. It just needs to go.

The great essayist Frank Chodorov once described the income tax as the root of all evil. His target was not the tax itself, but the principle behind it. Since its implementation in 1913, he wrote, "The government says to the citizen: 'Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.”

He really does have a point. That's evil. When Congress ratified the 16th Amendment on Feb. 3, 1913, there was a sense in which all private income in the U.S. was nationalized. What was not taxed from then on was a favor granted unto us, and continues to be so.

This is implied in the text of the amendment itself: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

No Limits
Where are the limits? There weren't any. There was some discussion about putting a limit on the tax, but it seemed unnecessary. Only 1% of the income earners would end up paying about 1% to the government. Everyone else was initially untouched. Who really cares that the rich have to pay a bit more, right? They can afford it.

This perspective totally misunderstands the true nature of government, which always wants more money and more power and will stop at nothing to get both. The 16th Amendment was more than a modern additive to an antique document. It was a new philosophy of the fiscal life of the entire country.

Today, the ruling elite no longer bothers with things like amendments. But back in the day, it was different. The amendment was made necessary because of previous court decisions that stated what was once considered a bottom-line presumption of the free society: Government cannot tax personal property. What you make is your own. You get to keep the product of your labors. Government can tax sales, perhaps, or raise money through tariffs on goods coming in and out of the country. But your bank account is off-limits.

The amendment changed that idea. In the beginning, it applied to very few people. This was one reason it passed. It was pitched as a replacement tax, not a new money raiser. After all the havoc caused by the divisive tariffs of the 19th century, this sounded like a great deal to many people, particularly Southerners and Westerners fed up with paying such high prices for manufactured goods while seeing their trading relations with foreign consumers disrupted.

People who supported it – and they were not so much the left but the right-wing populists of the time – imagined that the tax would hit the robber baron class of industrialists in the North. And that it did. Their fortunes began to dwindle, and their confidence in their ability to amass and retain intergenerational fortunes began to wane.

Limit to Accumulation
We all know the stories of how the grandchildren of the Gilded Age tycoons squandered their family heritage in the 1920s and failed to carry on the tradition. Well, it is hardly surprising. The government put a timetable and limit on accumulation. Private families and individuals would no longer be permitted to exist except in subjugation to the taxing state. The kids left their private estates to live in the cities, put off marriage, stopped bothering with all that hearth and home stuff. Time horizons shortened, and the Jazz Age began.

Class warfare was part of the deal from the beginning. The income tax turned the social fabric of the country into a giant lifetime boat, with everyone arguing about who had to be thrown overboard so that others might live.

The demon in the beginning was the rich. That remained true until the 1930s, when FDR changed the deal. Suddenly, the income would be collected, but taxed in a different way. It would be taken from everyone, but a portion would be given back late in life as a permanent income stream. Thus was the payroll tax born. This tax today is far more significant than the income tax.

The class warfare unleashed all those years ago continues today. One side wants to tax the rich. The other side finds it appalling that the percentage of people who pay no income tax has risen from 30% to nearly 50%. Now we see the appalling spectacle of Republicans regarding this as a disgrace that must change. They have joined the political classes that seek advancement by hurting people.
The Payroll Tax

It's extremely strange that the payroll tax is rarely considered in this debate. The poor, the middle class and the rich are all being hammered by payroll taxes that fund failed programs that provide no security and few benefits at all.

It's impossible to take seriously the claims that the income tax doesn't harm wealth creation. When Congress wants to discourage something – smoking, imports, selling stocks or whatever – they know what to do: Tax it. Tax income, and on the margin, you discourage people from earning it.

Tax debates are always about "reform" – which always means a slight shift in who pays what, with an eye to raising ever more money for the government. A far better solution would be to forget the whole thing and return to the original idea of a free society: You get to keep what you earn or inherit. That means nothing short of abolishing the great mistake of 1913. 

Forget the flat tax. The only just solution is no tax on incomes ever.

But let's say that one day we actually become safe from the income tax collectors and something like blessed peace arrives. There is still another problem that emerged in 1913. Congress created the Federal Reserve, which eventually developed the power to create all the money that government would ever need, even without taxing.

For the practical running of the affairs of the state, the Fed is far worse than the income tax. It creates the more-insidious tax because it is so sneaky. In a strange way, it has made all the debates about taxation superfluous. Denying the government revenue does nothing to curb its appetites for our liberties and property. The Fed has managed to make it impossible to starve the beast.

Chodorov was correct about the evil of the income tax. Its passage signaled the beginning of a century of despotism. Our property is no longer safe. Our income is not our own. We are legally obligated to turn over whatever our masters say we owe them. You can fudge this point: None of this is compatible with the old liberal idea of freedom.

You doubt it? Listen to Thomas Jefferson from his inaugural address of 1801. What he said then remains true today:"…what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one more thing, fellow citizens a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."
--
Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

How Our Taxation System Screwed Everything Up

On April 15, 1865, President Lincoln died. He was shot the night before in Ford’s Theater.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank. It struck an iceberg the night before. Among the 1,514 lives lost were millionaires John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim and Isa Strauss, all of whom were vocal opponents of the Federal Reserve Act.

In 1954, April 15 became the deadline for filing income tax returns.

Originally, Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution prohibited a direct federal income tax on American citizens: “No capitation or other direct tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken.”

The federal government’s revenue was derived from excise taxes on specific items like salt, tea, tobacco, etc., and tariff taxes on imports. Prior to the Civil War, most tariff taxes were collected at Southern ports, like Charleston, South Carolina. Tariffs made foreign goods more expensive, motivating people to buy domestically produced goods, made mostly in Northern factories. The South had few factories, as its economy was based on agricultural crops, mostly cotton and rice, which unfortunately relied heavily on slave labor. Thus, the tariff taxes that helped the North, hurt the South.

During the Civil War, Republican President Abraham Lincoln passed an emergency “Revenue” income tax to help fund the Union. It was repealed in 1873.

The first non-emergency “peacetime” income tax was attempted in 1894, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Pollock v Farmers’ Loan.

Justice Stephen J. Field concurred: “The income tax law under consideration … is class legislation. Whenever a distinction is made in the burdens a law imposes or in the benefits it confers on any citizens by reason of their birth, or wealth, or religion, it is class legislation, and leads inevitably to oppression and abuses. …”

Read more:

How our taxation system screwed everything up

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When Muslims complain about ‘Islamophobia’

By Jay Michaels

 

She pops up like clockwork whenever there’s a townhall.   Wearing a hijab and a doleful expression, the Muslim woman asks plaintively what the candidate intends to do about “Islamophobia.”  She will mention that she’s one of over 3 million Muslims in the U.S., and may claim that she’s frightened to go out in public.

When the question came to Donald Trump during the debate, he conceded, “You’re right about Islamophobia, and that’s a shame.”  Then he pivoted, a little awkwardly, to the issue of Muslims not reporting what they’d seen in the home of the jihadist couple in San Bernardino, and went on to mention Orlando, Paris, and the World Trade Center.  He then attacked Obama and Clinton for not being able to say the word “radical Islamic terror.”

That’s a big improvement on what Hillary said, naturally, but there’s a better answer. 

It’s really up to Muslims.  If they’re concerned about Islamophobia, they need to call off the jihad.  They need to stop killing and persecuting non-Muslims.  It won’t be easy, because they’ve been doing it for 1500 years.  But that’s the solution.

Islam is a religion of conquest.  The jihad is a fundamental tenet of the faith.  Mohammed conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula, and the armies of his successors swept into the then-Christian Middle East, across North Africa, and through Spain.  After the killing, pillaging, raping, and arson, the fields of Egypt and Sicily, the granaries of Europe, were overrun by the flocks of the conquerors, Muslim pirates infested the Mediterranean, and the jizya, the Islamic tax, was imposed.  The European economy was devastated and the Dark Ages commenced.


Read more:
Blog: When Muslims complain about ‘Islamophobia’

10 Reasons the U.S. is Declining

Daniel Lattier

Is America in decline?

That’s the position of Drs. Hershey Friedman of the City University of New York and Sarah Hertz of Empire State College.

In their paper – “Is the United States Still the Best Country in the World? Think Again” – the authors argue that America’s ranking in the following 10 key areas show that its status as a world power is slipping.

1) Percentage of People Living Below the Poverty Line

            U.S. Rank: 35^th best out of 157 countries.

            Among those with a lower poverty rate: Taiwan, Lithuania, China, Vietnam.

2) Children Living in Poverty

            U.S. Rank: 34 out of 35 countries surveyed.

            Among those with a lower % of children living in poverty: Australia, Canada, Japan.

3) Income Inequality

            U.S. Rank: 4^th worst in the world.

            Only countries who are worse: Chile, Mexico, Turkey.  

4) Middle Class (defined as Median Wealth per Adult)

            U.S. Rank: 27^th (median wealth per U.S. adult = $38,786)

            Among those who best us: Australia, Canada, Qatar, and Taiwan.

5. Happiness

            U.S. Rank: 17^th out of 36 countries on the 2013 World Happiness Report.

            Among those who best us: Denmark, Israel, and Panama.

6. GDP Per Capita

            U.S. Rank: 14^th out of 228 countries.

            Among those who best us: Qatar, Singapore, and Switzerland.

7. Education (based on the international PISA test of 15 year-olds)

            U.S. Rank in Reading: 17^th

            U.S. Rank in Math: 26^th

            U.S. Rank in Science: 21^st

8. Health

            U.S. Rank 33 out of 145 countries.

            Among those who best us: Singapore, Spain, Greece, Cuba.

           

9. Prison Population

            U.S. Rank: 1^st out of 224 countries

            Note: 2,217,000 people are incarcerated in the U.S. In China, it’s 1,657,812 people. In Russia, 673,818 people.

10. Social Progress Index (social well-being based on 52 economic indicators such as literacy rates, access to clean water, personal safety, etc.)

            U.S. Rank: 16 out of 133 countries.

            Among those who best us: Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Austria.

             

The paper concludes:

“It is hoped that examination of the above statistics will make people aware of how much needs to be done if the United States wants to remain a world power. The first step, however, is to admit that change is needed. Americans are the most charitable people in the world so it should not be that difficult to convince them of the importance of providing jobs and livable wages to those that desire to be self-sufficient. To simply state that America is exceptional – there has been a growing debate between those that believe American is in decline (declinism) and those that feel American is special (exceptionalism) – and nothing needs to be done will ensure that we will become a second-rate power.”

Dan Lattier is the Vice President of Intellectual Takeout. He received his B.A. in Philosophy and Catholic Studies from the University of St. Thomas (MN), and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can find his academic work at Academia.edu.

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7 Facts That Shatter the Theories About Who Really Wrote the Bible - Atlanta Black Star

Torah inside of the former Glockengasse Synagogue in Cologne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Moses Did Not Write the Torah/Pentateuch

Jews and Christians widely believe that Moses wrote the first five books in the Bible. However, beginning with some medieval rabbis, doubts have been raised. Among the details that challenged the notion that Moses was the author are as follows:

• The Edomite kings listed in Genesis 36 did not live until after Moses was dead.
• Moses is referred to in the third person in several passages.
• There are places named that Moses could not have known (he never entered the Promised Land).
• The Hebrew of the text includes terms that were developed long after Moses’ death.
• Moses’ death is included in Deuteronomy.
• Camels are listed in Abraham’s retinue, but camels were domesticated around 1000, long after Abraham (1550 B.C.) and even Moses (1250 B.C.)..
• In Deuteronomy 34, the writer says, “There never arose another prophet in Israel like Moses.” It didn’t seem to make sense that Moses — or even God, in Moses’ time — would write such words.

Read the rest here:
7 Facts That Shatter the Theories About Who Really Wrote the Bible - Atlanta Black Star

North Korea is Crazy

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