Currently only Patreon and recurring PayPal patrons, and select vetted specialists, can post on my blog without their comments waiting in the moderation queue (all such patrons, please email me to find out how to secure this privilege if it isn’t already operating). All other comments go into moderation and must be approved before appearing.
Please note that I am quite busy and consequently only check the moderation queue every few days, sometimes longer (particularly if the comment load is high, taking much longer to sort through). Consequently comments in moderation may take a long time even for me to see them. Please have patience.
All comments in a moderation queue will eventually be approved and thus published that (a) are relevant to the article being commented on, (b) are reasonably civil, and (c) don’t abuse the privilege of being published here at all. For example, no trafficking in harassment, slander, or abject racism and the like. Comments that repeatedly ignore the material they claim to be responding to are also unlikely to survive review: I am not your publisher; if you want to publish long rambling essays that don’t honestly engage with anything on my site, find your own venue. Likewise, if a specific article has its own particular comments policy stated, any comments violating that will not be published there. Some repeat offenders who were warned have also been permanently banned and their comments will never be published. Heed warnings.
All civil and relevant comments submitted by any actual persons whose work, claims, or arguments are critiqued in the article they are commenting on will also be published (once I’m able to read and clear them, as per usual). Please so-identify yourself to claim that privilege. But be warned: pretending to be someone you are not will result in a permanent ban. As will repeatedly violating the rules above.
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Want to link to a comment on my blog? My current system doesn’t display the hyperlink tags for individual comments, and though you can view source to locate them and insert them yourselves, an easier method is to use the new “Copy Link to Highlight” feature (in Chrome and the new Safari; the feature may be expanding to other browsers): highlight the byline-dateline of a comment, or the sentence you want to start at or call attention to, and right-click that highlighted text, and select from the drop-down “Copy Link to Highlight” (or “Copy Link with Highlight”), and then paste that link wherever you need it; comments here allow you to paste it even within a standard HTML A-tag. For example, this text links to a comment on my blog that way. You would type that into a comment like this:
My comment boxes also accept BLOCKQUOTE tags if you want to offset quoted text. And EM tags for italics.
This page is continually updated to state present policy.
Just a quick question. I have not heard you speak about jesus as a solar god and how the winter solstice could represent the three day period where the “Sun” descends into Hades for three days. Christmas is linked to Winter Solstice celebrations of ancient Pagan cultures. While Christian mythology is interwoven with contemporary observances of this holiday time, its Pagan nature is still strong and apparent. Is this a a perspective with evidence and good methodology?
Not really a relevant question in this thread. But I did extensive postdoc research on this and found no credible evidence of it. The only connections to pagan influences that could actually be empirically established I outline in my published study, On the Historicity of Jesus. For examples of the problem see my recent article Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology for specific examples illustrating that point (see especially the section on “December 25”).
You can also look at my old article on Kersey Graves, which was a methodological warning I found proved out for even contemporary purveyors of this bogus theory when I completed a focused study on it. And that’s even counting things in that article I was wrong about—I would later find even I was misled on several facts, yet correcting those errors only makes the article’s point stronger. For example, when I wrote that I gullibly believed the claim about sun gods being born on December 25. When I completed my actual postdoc study, I found that was false.
Re: Great Cameo of France? Triumph of Joseph at the Court of the Pharaoh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7smTWI4g7kM
There is no point in just blindly linking to crank videos here.
Any further attempt to do this will be deleted per my comments policy.
Only post legitimate and pertinent facts here.
Quick technical question: I have found that I must continually refill my email, name, website, etc. for every comment. Do you have a FAQ site or are you managing this site through WordPress and I should look there for help? Thanks.
So, the comments field is run through a Divi theme on a WordPress platform. I do not like it. But changing it is a harrowing enterprise that always breaks the site so I have left it be. I may try to replace the comments system in future (there are countless plugins to try), but given past fails, I’m not encouraged.
Since the construct is a confluence of two interacting operating systems (the theme and the platform) there is no FAQ for it, per se, although I would think the engine being WordPress, then WordPress FAQs would apply, but I do not find them clear enough to be helpful on this point.
So you may try asking me what questions you have, and this will become the FAQ.
So…
I assume what you want is to get the auto-fill working.
So far as I understand it, there is only one way to do that: I have to select the option on the backend to show you a cookies option box on comments. I worry that will break something or fail. But let’s see.
I just now clicked it. In theory, now when you comment you should see that option box and can click it. It will then in future auto-fill by consulting your browser cookie. If you ever have to clear cookies, you’ll have to repeat the process to create a new cookie.
Please let me know if this works!
Oh that seems to have worked — thank you!
I also reinstalled Chrome and deleted cookies and enabled cross-site tracking but not sure if any of those things worked or it was just coincidental timing for what you did on the backend.
Well, I had not had that feature “on” until you promoted me to turn it on. So all that you should need is enabling cookies (and only for this web domain, if you micromanage your cookies).
Do confirm though that it autofills now, when you add a new comment anywhere on the site (maybe pick a random article to add a comment on); and that everything else operates as before. If yes, then your suggestion has improved the site. Thank you!
Yes I have confirmed it works well now with a couple of other comments. Next up is figuring out how to use html tags to format text and such…
Thanks again — glad I was of help to you!
Standard basic HTML works in comments here, so for example you can type A HREF=”” in angle brackets at the start of a desired text, and insert the URL between the quotation marks, and then put /A inside angle brackets at the end of the text you want the hyperlink to show for, and the text will be hyperlinked.
It’s also possible to hyperlink to a comment, but currently that requires technical expertise to extract the URL hashtag (if you view page “source” and find the comment, the “article” id tag of that comment will show the hashtag that is the hyperlink to that comment, when that hashtag is placed after the URL of the post the comment is on, for example this text hyperlinks to one of your comments).
Bold (B) and italics (I) tags also work, as you discovered. And BLOCKQUOTE tags will indent quotations. It’s also possible to run UL/OL LI tag sequences, but it’s tedious (and of course you have to know what you are doing).
In your book On The Historicity of Jesus you give your opinion of the odds of Jesus having existed as I believe something like 12000 to 1 against his having existed. You then opine that viewing the information most favorably to Jesus having existed as 3 to 1 against existence. I have read and listened to many of your books and presentations since then and you never mention your opinion of 12000 to 1 against. I would like you to explain why you don’t mention or justify your opinion of the odds. Is it because you have changed your mind or because scholars and others roundly criticized you or some other reason. I think you owe it to your “fans” to explain.
The book extensively “mentions and justifies” these odds. That is in fact what that entire peer review study is doing: it explains the empirical basis for every estimate of odds. So, maybe, like, read it first and then ask a more specific question?
Even if you mean, why do I think the range is between 1 in 12,000 and 1 in 3, that is also explained in the book (and in more detail as to methodology in Proving History, the previous peer reviewed study establishing the method of developing these odds-ranges in OHJ).
The point of an error margin is that we cannot know where the actual probability lies. It is as likely 1 in 3 as 1 in 12,000 or indeed as likely any other number in between. All we can say with confidence is that the odds “are not higher” than 1 in 3 and “are not lower” than 1 in 12,000. So the 1 in 3 odds are the odds that need to be discussed to audiences skeptical of the result.