Housekeeping Notes

So I was planning on having a post up at 8 o'clock on Monday morning, but my weekend ended up being not at all what I was intending it to be.  Shit happens, I guess.

Either way, I figure I should toss some housekeeping notes and a bit of a preview up.

I mentioned that I wanted to look at Christian apologetics and I was thinking of using Lee Strobel's The Case for the Resurrection pamphlet.  Turns out that it's so very compelling a read that he re-converted me to Christianity in under 24 pages, so I'm going to be re-engineering that series to let all the atheists know exactly how hot the Hell they'll be burning in will be.

Wait...no.  That doesn't sound right at all.

Oh, right, that's what happened: I originally downloaded the sample, which was, like, 12 pages long, most of which was the table of contents.  Then when I decided the sample was useful for my purposes I paid a buck ninety-nine for the whole thing.  At that point I discovered that it's not so much a "book" or a "pamphlet" as "an 84 page advertisement for The Case for Christ Study Bible, edited by Lee Strobel, published by Zondervan, and available from Barnes & Noble for the low price of $22.42 new or $16.99 as a Nook book.  For those who are wondering, this particular mendacity was not at all obvious from a perusal of the sample.  I didn't do a full count, but forty to fifty pages of the book are just reprints of a couple chapters of Luke with the footnotes from The Case for Christ Study Bible, interspersed with a couple of personal testimony-ish stories.

So I ended up giving Lee Strobel and Zondervan another buck ninety-nine, this time for my second choice, Finding the Real Jesus.  I thought it was a good option since Strobel managed to basically Godwin himself (and Jesus!) over the course of the sample.  As it turns out, Finding the Real Jesus is a treasure trove of poorly done research, question begging, and overall stupidity.  It shall be a pleasure to deconstruct.  Unfortunately, I need a little lead time to make sure I have my responses lined up.

But, seriously, it's 80-some pages of awful, self-refuting argumentation.  Totally worth the two bucks.  Turns out that Lee Strobel is adorable when he thinks he's being an objective investigative reporter talking to people who think they're objective historians.  He's a real-life Cameron "Call Me Buck" Williams, that one.

That means you shouldn't be expecting to see anything on that this week, unless it comes in on Friday.  But I should be doing part 2 of my deconstruction of MovieBob's take on The Simpsons, part 3 of my Perspective and Apologetics series (in which I take it in an unexpected direction...), and my retrospective 2011 in music.  Because 2011 was an excellent year for music.

Also, keep looking for Hitler Alternatives to help with your internet-related argumentation.  I'm planning on keeping that one going, since it's fairly easy to do.  For the record, I've decided that Lee Strobel is worse than Idi Amin, but not quite as bad as Saddam Hussein.

Comments

[Adrenalin Tim]

I can't speak for B&N, but Amazon will let you "return" an e-book within something like 72 hours. May be able to get your $2 back.

[Geds]

I think I'm past that window. I'm going to try to do something with the stupid waste of time and money, anyway, since his notes (at least, the one's I've looked at) are hilariously bad.

[The Everlasting Dave]

Lookin' forward to it. And assuming that your 2012 redoubling of effort was done for the sake of entertaining your sole unemployed, basement-dwelling reader, I've gotta say you're doing a bang-up job so far.