No, that's more of an off topic question than an important question. I never said there was evidence that Jews didn't lie about their escape from Egypt. I never said evidence for the Great Crime was handled differently than evidence for the holocaust. I said people don't hold the holocaust to the same standards as other historical events.
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And yet, cannot produce a single instance where this has happened. Sorry if you have now decided that this is unimportant, but that still leaves us the question of why *you* made the claim to begin with.
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I gave the example of Michael Shermer's appearance on the Phil Donohue where he defended the holocaust against David Cole and Bradley Smith. Shermer said that David Cole had some unanswered questions for which it would be good to have answers but then reminded us that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. That was juxtaposed with Michael Shermer appearance on Penn and Teller's B.S. in the episode debunking the Bible as a historical source. When Penn Gillette and Michael told us that there is no evidence outside of what is written in the Bible for the story of Exodus, a professor advocating the truth of the Biblical account reminded us that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
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And you pretend that questions about specific details about the Holocaust and no evidence whatever for the Exodus are the same.
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Michael Shermer promptly shuts that down by saying we can't use that form of reasoning in science.
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No, he doesn't.
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Same man. Same medium. Same maxim. With the holocaust, it's good. With the not holocaust, it isn't.
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No, with a huge body of evidence that leaves certain specific detail unanswered, it's history. With no evidence at all, it's mythology.
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Several of you then provided further evidence that what I said about a double standard was true by pointing out that the holocaust and Exodus are two different historical events or that Shermer was talking about the micro level vs the blanket level or some other such nonesense.
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Why is the distinction between the bodies of evidence 'nonsense'?
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You want more examples of Shermer's holocaust double standards? Look at his book, "Why People Believe Weird Things." Michael Shermer has some doubts about the authenticity of the stories about a UFO crash landing at Rosewell and the movie "Alien Autopsy" which purports to show actual footage filmed of scientists dissecting the bodies of aliens recovered from the crash site.
When giving us reasons why we should doubt the Roswell story, Shermer said:
"3. Given the number of people who were apparently involved in the
discovery, isolation, transfer, handling, filming, autopsying, preservation, and burial of the bodies, there would have had to be a massive cover-up. How could the government have concealed from the public such a spectacular event? How do you keep all these people from talking?" (p. 92)
So, gathering a few alien bodies and the wreckage of their flying saucer that crash landed in a desolate corner of the southwestern United States outback and was witnessed by a handful of people would be impossible to keep secret but an operation that lasted at least two years and required moving millions of people scattered over an entire continent to a few remote locations in the Polish outback and killing them would not?
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Once again, a fatally flawed analogy, unless you are positing either that those bodies and that wreckage did exist and were covered up, or that Holocaust has been kept secret.
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How many people were directly involved with the Roswell crash? Maybe a hundred? How many people were directly involved with the extermination of the Jews? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And the conspiracy of silence was so effective that none of the people involved revealed the true nature and scope of the project until some intrepid war crimes investigators blew the lid off the operation AFTER it had ceased operation and began questioning them about it?
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No, there was evidence prior to operations ceasing. It just wasn't believed.
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So when we're talking about Roswell, a massive United States government coverup would be impossible but when we're talking about gas chambers and exterminating Jews, a massive German government coverup is perfectly plausible.
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No, we're talking about either Roswell being real and covered up, or the Holocaust being fake and entirely made up.
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I know. I know. This isn't an example of applying a double standard to different historical events because the historical events are different. You can't compare something as trivial as finding solid evidence of life on another planet with the near successful attempt on the life of Dog's chosen children and, thus, on Dog Himself? Whatever.
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No, it's applying the *same* standard to different bodies of evidence, with a profoundly ignorant understanding what it means when a Jew says they are Chosen.
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From the same book, when talking about the discrepancies between eyewitness accounts of the gas chambers, Shermer accurately summarizes what anti-Deniers say by mischaracterizing and dismissing what negationists find problematic.
"Deniers point out that Broad's total of four minutes for the process is at
odds with the statements of others, such as Commandant Hoess, who claim it was more like twenty minutes. Because of such discrepancies, deniers dismiss the account entirely. A dozen different accounts give a dozen different figures for time of death by gassing, so deniers believe no one was gassed at all. Does this make sense? Of course not." (p 230)
No. Of course not! It's looney tunes! Nobody expects all eyewitness testimony to line up perfectly. In fact, if it did, we would need to be suspicious because people are expected to perceive the same things differently. When we're talking about gas chambers.
When we're talking about the film Alien Autopsy, however, the discrepancy between eyewitness accounts becomes more problematic.
"7. The alien in the film has six fingers and toes, yet the "original eyewitness accounts" recorded in 1947 reported aliens with four fingers and toes. Are we facing problems with the eyewitness accounts, problems with the film, problems with both, or two species of aliens?" (p 93)
Or are we facing a person who has nothing more than his own personal incredulty to disbelieve the truth of the Roswell incident and is pretending to be unaware that minor discrepancies in eyewitness testimony is to be expected and even bats**t crazy eyewitness testimony is reliable as long as you can corroborate the not-so-nutty stuff with the not-so-nutty stuff another bats**t crazy eyewitness says?
Or maybe just somebody who isn't quite as critical of holocaustic evidence compared to evidence of everything else?
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Or maybe people on the one hand specifically mentioning an item requiring no particular skill other than counting (how many?) vs. people clear that they are offering estimates on something a person without a time piece or specific training cannot differentiate (how long?) vs another person who is relaying third hand estimates on something a person without a time piece or specific training cannot differentiate.
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I don't mean to bag on Shermer because I do like the guy. He's a bit of a media whore but you don't get to be a well-known Skeptic or anything else without some ability at self-promotion. But somebody who likes debunking all the wierd ideas in the world AND holocaust deniers is going to have a problem remaining consistent.
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Only to those how are ideologically blinded to the fact that "huge amounts of evidence converging on a broad view with certain specific and unimportant details unanswered" and "no evidence whatever other than a single source whose authorship is unknown, and is unreliable in other respects" are vastly different, and that difference is only "nonsense" when such a person is fully aware of the difference but needs to claim otherwise.
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You can see it here on JREF when you read the 9/11 debunking forums. Some of you guys posting here also post over there. Over there, you actually show signs of intelligent life and skepticism. In
one response of TSR's to, I guess, a twoofer, we read "Proof of what? Do we know where that physical proof was gathered, and under what circumstances? What about chain of custody? I could offer physical proof that water is wet, but is that relevant?"
You want to know where the physical proof was gathered? under what circumstances? "Chain of custody?!?!" You're asking somebody about the chain of custody? Are you saying I can demand an accounting of the chain of custody for any physical evidence you present as evidence for the holocaust?
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Yes, you could.
Same standard as anything else.
The difference being that it could be supplied in the case of the Holocaust, but not in the case of, say, Dusty's "dust" or Gage's "nanotherm*te".
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I'm going away from my desk for a few hours. When I return I expect to see several of you demanding that I prove that UFOs are real or accuse me of believing the truthers or anything else you can muster to misinterpret what I have said.
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And like so many of your expectations, based on nothing but your need that it be so, and unsupported by reality.
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