The Dumplin' Dumbash Page

On Paul's Conversion

Though not directed to me, Dumplin's comments on Paul's conversion were so stupid that a reader nominated them for a Platinum Screwball Award. I can see why.

Let's take it a step at a time. Mr. G starts with the common objection that I'm being unfair by expecting God to show up in real life, as though I'm making demands of God. Notice, however, that I am not doing any such thing. I am not telling God how or when He ought to show up, and I'm certainly not insisting that He go out of His way to coddle me personally. All I'm doing is proceeding from the principle that the truth is consistent with itself, and noting that, when we look at the real world, we don't actually see God showing up in real life the way He is described as showing up in the Bible stories.

Yep. This is yet another case where Dumplin' claims not to be saying what he clearly is saying, because he knows he got caught with his pants down acting like a spoiled child. He wants God to "show up in real life" like in Bible stories. That means he thinks that HE is as special as people in those stories, that he warrants what God gave them. Thus he IS "telling God how or when He ought to show up" -- to him, Dumplin', during his lifetime. Thus he IS insisting that God coddle him personally -- he wants special treatment. Who the hell is he to demand it? How is he special? He isn't. News flash: Counting all the Bible stories, God has "shown up" as Dumplin' petulantly demands less than a few dozen times and to less than a few thousand people. So what makes Dumplin' more special than the billions of people over time who have never had God "show up" that way? Nothing. He's just a pissant little whiner with an inflated case of narcissism who needs to grow up and learn to accept Romans 1 (or the cosmological and design arguments).

Dumplin' then proceeds to reel out alleged "problems" with Paul's 500 witnesses:

Number one, he didn't give us any names, so it would be difficult to ask any of them whether or not Paul was telling the truth.

Please. As if indeed Paul had listed names, Dumplin' would have accepted it. I can see him now: Paul names "Justus, Mike, and Rod" and Dumplin' says, "But we don't know who they are or whether we can trust them, blah blah blah." He'd have an excuse ready. What it boils down to is that the origins of Christianity are inexplicable without the witness the 500 and others would have provided -- and the people in Corinth would certainly know who many (if not all) of these people were.

But this is even funnier:

But the bigger problem is that Jesus taught a non-literal view of reality, so even if they did consider it "true" that they had "seen" a risen Savior, you need to ask what kind of truth we're dealing with here. Is it the kind of "truth" Christians refer to when they believe they have truly been born again, or that Jesus is truly there wherever two or more are gathered in his name, or that Jesus truly washes you in his blood when you confess your sins? None of these truths would be what we would call literal, real world truths, yet all of them are regarded as genuine truth by Christians. So even if Christians did think it was "true" that Jesus rose from the dead, this would not tell us whether or not he actually, literally lived again after dying.

WHAT! Please, again! Using this kind of excuse, you could render the history of England's role in WW2 "non-literal" just because you caught Winston Churchill using a metaphor. Dumplin' is oblivious to the demands of genre, and by those demands, there's no justification for de-literalizing Paul's words. They are not expressed as parable or analogy. This is the lazy method of exegesis by someone who can't think of a better argument. (He likes it so much, in fact, he repeats it twice.)

As for whether anyone checked with the other members of Paul's caravan, how do you know nobody did, or that the others in the caravan would have supported Paul's testimony? Does it not strike you as strange that none of Paul's fellow travelers seems to have become a Christian along with Paul, or to have accompanied him and stood with him to offer a backup testimony?

Duh, no. For one thing, Acts makes it quite clear that those with Paul did not see anything, and if they heard anything, it was only an indistinct voice. They would have had no content with which to contextualize their experience.

That said, we have no idea what became of them, and Dumplin' errs again to make an issue of this:

If the caravan members had supported Paul's remarkable testimony, Christians would surely have added these testimonies to their own records. This apparent silence from the rest of the caravan is thus harder to reconcile with the idea that they supported Paul's witness.

Oops. Missed something, Dumbash: Their testimonies would indeed have likely been added, but not necessarily in writing. In a primarily illiterate society, their testimony would have been delivered orally -- assuming they saw or heard anything worth reporting, which Acts indicates they did not.

Dumbash closes with comparisons to Mormonism, the Branch Davidians, etc. The reader knows by now the simple-mindedness of such comparisons.

Too bad Dumplin' doesn't.