Enjoy! And please do feel free to post this rebuttal wherever you wish.
Skeptic Mangles ZEITGEIST (and Religious History)
A Commentary
by Acharya S aka D.M. Murdock
It is a curious fact that writers who toss around the words "sloppy," "garbled" and "nonsense" are often guilty of these very things themselves. Case in point is the critical review of the first part of the internet movie "ZEITGEIST" by Skeptic magazine book editor Tim Callahan (Eskeptic, 2/25/09). Callahan proclaims "ZEITGEIST Part 1"--for which I was a source and last-minute consultant on the official version--to be "sloppy" and "garbled," and he proceeds to give his opinion as to its supposed errors. First of all, his declaration that much of the material in ZG is "plainly and simply bogus" is false. Callahan has evidently not even studied the sources meticulously cited on the ZG website to see from where this material comes. Instead, he gives the impression that the movie's creator, Peter Joseph, simply "made it up." Secondly, ZG is a simple summary of the thesis that Jesus is a rehash of the popular sun gods of the Roman Empire and beyond. The 25-minute segment was not meant to serve as a thorough scholarly analysis, so Callahan's talk about "greater scholarship" and "spurious scholarship" constitutes a mere snooty red herring.
For the rest, please see:
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/skeptic-zeitgeist.html
5 comments:
"Callahan has evidently not even studied the sources meticulously cited on the ZG website to see from where this material comes."
Wow. I mean WOW! What great grammar and syntax.
No commas needed. Fanatastic!
I mean that. You are a goddess.
I just read the whole article.
Date me, please.
Speaking with you would be such a delight!
Yeah, I'd have to say that Acharya seems to have mopped the floor with this Callahan cat.
I think Zeitgeist sparked a fear in this fellow, and his only way to deal with it was shoot it down. The unknown can be a scary place...if you let it be.
peace all!
Is the same Tim Callahan (read all the way thru)
Tim Callahan is an award winning newspaper journalist and a former author with Harper & Row. His books have been featured in articles by the New York Times, Associated Press and USA Today.
He won awards from the South Carolina Press Association for beat reporting (courts) in 2006 and education, news and sports writing in 2007. He won two statewide journalism awards from the Pennsylvania Press Association, and was a Washington, D.C., correspondent for Christianity Today. He has a master's degree in journalism with an emphasis in religion writing from Regent University. He attended Denver Seminary.
A member of the Authors Guild, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and Religion Newswriters Association, he is a reporter in South Carolina.
A former college and semiprofessional baseball player, who appeared in Sports Illustrated and coached for MLB in Ireland, Callahan is still playing baseball as a hobby, and reading two novels a week to learn the ropes.
Author's update:
I am working on co-authoring a novel with a renowned Christian scholar on media hypocrisy. It will entertain as well as teach journalism ethics and apologetics (how to combine reason and faith in witnessing).
I have also published a book, The God of the Passion, which will be reprinted as Jesus is the Higher Power, an apologetic for church members and 12-Steppers.
If either of these books sound interesting to you, please e-mail me for publishing updates, indicating in the subject line which book you are interested in knowing more about.
At this point in time, this web site's main goal is to let people know who this Tim Callahan is. Unfortunately for me, there is another Tim Callahan, an author who writes religious books, that I have been mistaken for in publishing circles. Another Tim Callahan is also a Christian novelist.
Now you know who I am.
Thanks, reader. Without you, I am not a writer.
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