More on the Bible (part the 3rd)

 

Let’s take a break from the matter of the New Testament and shift gears to consider the rampant twaddle presented in the Old Testament. 

Take, for example, the Flood of Noah; a worldwide flood, genocide of the entire human species, and a grand pas de deux for all the animals, two by two into an immense barge.  

 

What utter nonsense!

 

The tale of Noah’s flood has been completely eviscerated by geology, paleontology, endocrinology, zoology, meteorology and archeology. Moreover, although legends of local floods exist in other cultures, no other civilization in the world recounts a world-wide flood that drowned the tallest mountains and killed entire populations of people and animals. China didn’t notice a flood. Rome didn’t notice a flood. Egypt didn’t either. Neither did Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, Ancient Persia, Greece or any other culture, large or small.  It seems that one or more of these ancient civilizations would surely have noticed all the drowned bodies and devastation.

 

For a full evisceration of the Noachian flood myth, check out Aron Ra’s video series debunking the Flood tale using meteorology, geology, paleontology, dendrochronology, zoology anthropology, archeology and mythology. If you want a more concise, less scholarly debunking, reference Bill Nye’s video that deals with the problems of a 500-foot wooden boat.

 

What must be said is that the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh recounts a Sumerian myth of a great flood, which in the mythological time of Gilgamesh was, even then, termed an ancient story of the Sumerian god, Ea, who, in its anger, flooded the earth and instructed a righteous man, Utnapishtim – the Sumerian version of Noah – to build an enormous boat to ride out the flood. Additionally, the sending out of three birds and the ‘just-so story’ appearance of the rainbow also antedate and ‘pre-echo’ the Biblical account. This is further evidence of the syncretization of Babylonian and Sumerian myths by the Hebrews. (By the way, Ishtar (or Inanna aka; Eoster/Easter) was the goddess who created the rainbow in the Sumerian tale.)

 

The tale of the Exodus and the enslavement of the Hebrews, while centerpiece of Jewish cultural identity is absolute bunk, devoid of historicity. Worse; the entire elements of mythos of the Hebrew people - the feast of Passover for example - are founded on fictional, unhistorical nonsense. There is no account of the story of the Exodus from the Egyptian side, at all. Meticulous record keepers, the Egyptian scribes never recorded a million-strong population of slaves from Judea, nor the vast Exodus of said slaves, nor the plagues which YHWH sent to punish the hardened heart of ‘Pharaoh’. 

 

Moreover, there is no archeological evidence that the cultures of the Israelites and the Egyptians ever co-existed except in conclaves of the Jewish diaspora in such places as Alexandria. If millions of Hebrews had spent any length of time as slaves in Egypt there would have been the invariable linguist, lexicographic borrowings in the two languages. However, there are none. There would also have been some archeological evidence of Hebrew habitation and slave enclaves but there are none. None!

 

In addition, the population of male Hebrew slaves (in the Biblical fiction) is estimated at being roughly 2,000,000. The entire population of dynastic Egypt at the time was barely twice that. It would seem that if nearly a third of the population of a nation took a hike, there would have been an historic record made of the event. Moreover, there would most assuredly be record or evidence of the various plagues which preceded the ‘Exodus’ for which no archeological evidence exists. 

 

‘Let my people go.’ Indeed!

 

Not to pile on the Hebrews, but amid this grand, heroic story of delivery from bondage is the genocide of innocents commemorated by the Passover. One of the ten plagues that YHWH sent to punish the Egyptians was the slaughter of the first-born. God and the Angel of Death apparently couldn’t tell the Jews from the Egyptians so, YHWH instructed the Israelites to daub lamb’s blood on the lintels and side posts of their doorways as a sign that the Angel should pass over their abode and spare the little darlings of YHWH. Why would an ‘all-powerful, omniscient’ god not know who his ‘Chosen People’ were without the gore slathered on doorways?

Just asking…

As written in Exodus 12:23: For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you.

 

Once more, the jealous, vengeful tribal god of the Hebrews was a homicidal maniac whose go-to mode was genocide. Of course, any intelligent reader of this tale would be beset with questions such as:

WTF? So, did every Jewish family in Egypt each kill a lamb or did they communally use the same lamb for a number of families? Question: How did the Jews have lambs? Weren't they slaves; destitute, miserable, abused, you know…enslaved? Moreover, they had houses with lintels and door posts to slather the blood on? Furthermore, did the Hebrew slaves live among the common Egyptians? Only that might account for the sanguinary markers on doorframes. If that was the case, and the Hebrews lived in common neighborhoods with Egyptians, wouldn’t the Israelites have had the freedom to simply bugger off back to Judea in the night any time they chose? 

Again, making sense of utter nonsense is nonsensical, but…

 

Come right down to it, how is it that an all-powerful entity would or could be stymied by Pharaoh at all? Why did he/it allow the illusory enslavement to begin with? Why bother sending plagues or even dealing with the purported bondage at all. A simple snap of the almighty fingers should have done it, right? Couldn’t YHWH simply have teleported the enslaved Hebrews? (Captain Kirk could!) Was god having a laugh? Taking a piss? After all, YHWH is supposed to be the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, creator of the universe, yet he/it couldn’t deliver ‘his/its’ Chosen People out of Egypt with a wave of a magic, invisible appendage? Christian apologists will surely have writhing, obfuscating answers to these mundane considerations.

 

I don’t.

 

To delve further, the Biblical Exodus was a non-trivial event without any record of any kind apart from the narration offered by the Bible. As it’s told in the Bible, YHWH, picks Moses to lead the Israelites out of bondage – bondage, it must be stressed, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. The Exodus is, frankly, another major, grisly fairy tale of the Bible that has absolutely no validity at all since there is no Egyptian record of enslavement of the Israelites, the existence of Moses or the destruction of Pharaoh’s army by drowning in the Red Sea. Such a monumental series of events would most assuredly have been recorded by the Egyptian scribes, renown for record-keeping. 

What stays? What goes? The Bible (part the 2nd)

 

 

Who or what determined which books would be included in the New Testament? A good question but without any clear answer; here are a few to consider:

 

Eusebius of Caesarea, (born c. 260–265 CE) also known as Eusebius Pamphilus, was a Greek historian of Christianity, an exegete (a textual interpreter, especially of scripture), and a Christian polemicist, known primarily for being favored by Emperor Constantine I and for being associated with Arianism, a major heresy of the early Church. His writings are said to include a rough compilation of early scriptures, a eulogy for Constantine the Great, and a mash–up of Biblical place names and a lexicography referred to as the ‘Onomasticon’.

 

Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter letter of 367 CE to the churches in Egypt under his jurisdiction, gave a list of the books that would become the twenty-seven-book New Testament canon, and he used the word "canonized" (Greek: κανονιζόμενα or kanonizomena) in regard to them.

Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp in the 4^th Century CE are all claimed by some scholars to be ones who listed the scriptures appropriate to be included in the ‘official’ New Testament.

 

The first council that accepted the present canon of the New Testament may have been the Synod of Hippo Regius in North Africa, 393 CE - a brief summary of the acts was read at and accepted by the Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419. Pope Innocent I ratified the same canon in 405 CE…

 

Or…

It is as probable that it was a Council in Rome in 382 under Pope Damasus I which gave the same list first.

 

But… don’t touch that dial! There’s more!

 

The Muratorian Canon is believed by some scholars to be the earliest compilation of canonical texts resembling the New Testament. It was not until the 5th century that all the different Christian churches came to a basic agreement on Biblical canon. That’s right; 500 years after the ‘fact’ and after many diverse interpretations by many different Christian churches.

 

Imagine the log of the voyages of Columbus only being formalized and complied in the 20^thCentury or the good news regarding the Magna Carta only becoming ‘official’ in the 18^thcentury. In light of that demi-millennial delay, the Constitution of the United States wouldn’t be recognized until sometime late in 2276! Now consider, that the stories of the Bible predated not only literacy but Gutenberg’s printing press!

 

Richard Dawkins, amongst a host of scholars who deride the Bible, liken it to a game of ‘Chinese Whispers’ which went on over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years by an illiterate, migratory people of the Bronze Age. Textual experts such as Bart Erhman, who studied the Biblical texts as a ‘believing’ Christian before declaring himself an agnostic, cites that the oldest extant texts of the Bible were transcribed in Ancient Greek, ancient Aramaic and ancient Hebrew. 

Ref: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

 

Spoiler! The Book of Revelations almost wasn’t included in the compilation of the Bible because it makes no sense and seems the ravings of a man-man. By some wags, the book was the aftermath of the author, (John the Revelator) consuming magic mushrooms on the island of Patmos.

 

To recap: It was not until the 5th century that all the different, approved, regional Christian churches came to a basic agreement on Biblical canon. Even then, the designation of ‘canon’ was not church-wide but was only regional in its mandate. The Syrian church had a canon of 22 books; the church in Ethiopia settled on 31 books. The books that eventually were considered canon in each region reflect the times in which they were embraced as much as the times in which the events they portray were purported to have happened. They also reflect the distinct tenets embraced by each regional church.

 

For 400 years or more, the Bible didn’t actually exist in any compiled, approved ‘canonized’ form. Paul had his version; some of which he wrote himself. The Gnostic had theirs. Each of the heretical sects had their own versions. Each community of Christians, (in Asia Minor, Africa, the Levant, Greece, Rome, etc.) had texts which they referred to as the ‘Word of God’. 

 

Confused? Get used to it. This whole hot mess is a muddle and a dog’s breakfast of confusion, obfuscation, deflection and obscure tradition taken by fiat as fact. By the way, there was no official, church-wide declaration on the canonical New Testament until the Council of Trent held between 1545 and 1563 in response to the Protestant Reformation. The pronouncement of the official canon was, even then, binding only for the Roman Catholic Church.

 

Did you catch that? It wasn’t until the 16^th fricking century that there was an ‘official’ New Testament!

 

Here’s a thought; if god came to earth in human form to reveal a special message to humanity, why didn’t he bother to write anything down? Or invent video tape? Or the printing press? 

Why - as Sir Andrew Lloyd-Weber asks in ‘Jesus Christ, Superstar’ - would this incarnate god go to ancient Palestine, a back-water at best, to reveal his/its message to illiterates, rather than appear in Rome or Athens, Luxor, Alexandria, Babylon or Byzantium and share his/its holy word with educated, literate people? What a grand load of bollocks! How can anyone of any intelligence accept the rot that makes for the basis of the incoherent Biblical narrative?

This is all silly speculation, of course; especially if one has concluded (even conditionally) that there is no such god as the one in the Wholly Bobble. As a reminder: It makes no sense to try to make sense of nonsense. Likewise, it is senseless to expect sense from those who have abandoned good sense, no matter how intelligent or educated or erudite they are.

World’s Greatest Con-man

Saul of Tarsus was running a con. 

 

He took the dying and rising god and the mystery cult idea and marketed it. The con of the Jewish dying and rising god had nearly run its course among Jews. 

(Perhaps a man coming back from the dead was a bit rich even for 1^st century Jews.) Saul himself had been instrumental in quashing the new Jewish sect. BTW. This may have introduced him to the idea of expanding the con of the new Jewish sect based on the supposed teachings of Jesus.

 

Seeing an opportunity, Saul/Paul invented his ‘Road to Damascus’ revelation (much as Joe Smith invented the Angel Maroni and Mohammed invented a visit from Gabriel, the archangel.) 

 

Paul then expanded the fundamentals of the new Jesus sect (and the Pharisaic sect) by tossing aside the Jewish laws (e.g. circumcision, dietary restrictions, etc.) which had discouraged non-Jews from joining the new sect/cult. Saul/Paul – as a Pharisee - had to put aside the demand of adherence to Judaic law for new ‘con-verts’.

 

By doing so, Saul was able to woo Gentiles (pagans) into the con. With the expanded market (Galatians, Romans, Corinthians, etc), he was able to bilk more folks; getting them to finance his extensive travel, his food, his lodgings, his clothing, etc. for not only himself, but for his assistant and their wives/partners. The promise was easy; eternal life heaven after you died. All it took was ‘blind faith’ and contributing to Paul’s ‘mission’.

 

The pay-off (i.e. eternal life) may or may not happen but that didn’t matter. That was a can one could kick endlessly down the road. What mattered was Saul/Paul getting a thick slice of the pie that he’d seen the Sanhedrin and the Sadducees gobbling down. 

 

Palestine, at the time the Pharisaic sect originated, was heavily influenced by Greek culture and religion. For many Jews, this was an abomination against the one God of the Temple, YHWH. Pharisees resisted this Greek-inspired culture in Palestine. One might consider the influence of the Greek mystery cults of dying and rising gods in the Levant (Osiris, Bacchus/Dionysius, etc). 

 

Saul/Paul was a Pharisee and had been charged with crushing the new sect. Here’s what Pharisees bought into.

 

(From https://study.com/learn/lesson/pharisees-sadducees.html - :~:text=Sadducees were generally from the,be classified as middle class.)

 

Josephus wrote that Pharisees began as a sect devoted to strict observance of the ''Will of God'' as delineated in the Laws of Moses

 

In order to conduct this strict observance, Pharisees devised a set of behavior prescriptions to follow, conveyed generationally in an oral tradition.

 

Pharisees became fastidious in defining what behaviors were acceptable under the Laws of Moses, attempting to define away any ambiguity.

 

By defining the acceptable practice in every possible situation, Pharisees believed that the Will of God would be followed.

 

Pharisees avoided people who did not follow their purity practices.

 

In governing their actions, Pharisees added these oral tradition behavior prescriptions to the written Law of Moses, the five books of the Torah.

 

In about 200 BCE, these oral rules and regulations became written as the Mishnah, the core of the Talmud, the sacred texts of Judaism.

 

The dead would be resurrected at the end of time.

 

Note that last one; sounds like the promise of Christianity? If there was no Jesus of Nazareth, then this bit of speculation is as viable as anything postulated by Christian apologist. How did the Christian/Jewish sect proliferate? By Paul’s proselytizing the myths of the Jesus tales. That is well-established and accepted; Christianity was Paul’s baby. Paul took the proverbial ball and took it across the goal-line by making the new sect/cult open to pagans who didn’t want to cut up their dicks, eat unleavened bread and shun shellfish and the wearing of garments of mixed fabrics.

 

Boom et Voila! 

 

Could it be that ‘Saul the Conman of Tarsus’ is an over exaggeration for effect? Most assuredly. Could it be that Saul/Paul was an actual ‘Believer’ of the professed teachings of Jesus of Nazareth? Again, most assuredly. 

 

Does a conman who takes his own con on Faith mean that the con-game is less of a con-game and the con-man is any less of a con-man for promoting a falsehood? 

 

Are the leaders of the Heaven’s Gate cult any less culpable for the deaths of the cult’s members if the leaders actually ‘Believed’ the lie?

 

Call it a cult or a con; it amounts to the same thing.

The Bible (part the 1st)

The Wholly Bobble

(say it aloud...)

“The Bible is rubbish.” John W Loftus, author; ‘Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity’

 

“It’s (Mark’s Gospel’s) all just one, big, made-up story, a parable of parables, which if taken literally will ensure your damnation, and only if understood symbolically can you be saved.”
Richard Carrier, Ph.D., ‘Jesus From Outer Space; 2020

 

‘God is not the author of confusion.’ Paul (1 Corinthians 14:33) 

 

‘…can you think of a single book that has caused more confusion than the Bible?’ Dan Barker (OXFORD UNION SOCIETY)

 

“Moses, Aaron 'n Abraham; They're all a waste of time…” 

Frank Zappa, ‘The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing’, 

 

My position on the Bible is that it is one of the worst written tellings of myth ever put to paper. It's distorted, ignorant, and nonsensical and is without a cogent back-story of any substance. 

 

The back-story is crucial to a decent myth; what JRR Tolkien called the 'distant horizons' of the tale. The Biblical 'accounts' can't be taken any more seriously than one does the Marvel Universe and certainly less seriously than Tolkien's own Legendarium. 

 

The Bible is a hodge-podge of non-sequiturs stupidity scattered amongst heinous, atrocious acts of murder, pillage, rape and destruction and flavored with goofy contradictory 'morals' based on subservience and total devotion to an ill-defined, jealous and wrathful god. 

 

If it must be assumed by Believers that the human writers of the Bible were guided by god, then it must be contended that god is an idiot. For an all-knowing supreme intelligence, 'god' didn't seem to understand his own story and couldn't relate it for properly or in an appropriate era wherein the story could be verified and substantiated.

 

A word of note: Isn’t it curious that the god of the Bible waited hundreds of thousands of years, (millennia!) through countless empires (e.g. Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, etc.) until the Hebrews appeared before revealing his ‘Holy Word’? Isn’t it odd that ‘god’ didn’t give instruction to those proto-humans who came before homo sapiens? And isn’t it odd that ‘god’ didn’t give instructions to the ‘brainiacs’ of the Greeks or the Romans or the Babylonians or India or China? More mysterious ways? Talk about ‘ineffable’, eh?

 

Isn’t it odd that an all-knowing, all-powerful god would deem to reveal his/its plan, nature and laws in oral tradition and thence in texts written in obscure and dying languages only to be copied, altered, edited, amended and interpolated throughout the centuries and would not protected his/its ‘holy word’ from the ravages of time, war, political unrest and religious fanaticism so that only a few scraps, at best, might survive? 

(Not of course - to be clear - that such an entity as ‘god’ ever existed and not that any of the text on the surviving scraps were ‘inspired’ by such an entity.)

 

Discussed in this section will the ‘errancy’ of the Bible and the fact that little can or should be taken from the Bible as fact. There are facts contained within the canonical books of the Bible, of course. The Bobble has been called ‘historic fiction’ in that there are bits of authenticated historic elements woven into the Bible stories. There was a place called Jerusalem, for instance, but the stories, themselves, written within the ‘Bobble’ are guff and blather.

 

Let’s begin with the general nature of the texts we refer to as the Bible. To start with, the Bible was written for the most part, anonymously. It is only from Church tradition that names such as Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul are attributed to books of the Bible. Next, each sect of Jewish faith (there were many, by the way…) had their own versions of the what Christians call the Old Testament’. Jewish scholars, it should be noted, didn’t determine a canon until the 2^nd century CE. 

 

The Christians had a multitude of various sects, as well; each of which had their own version of the ‘New Testament’ as well as the Old. Entire texts referenced by Paul, Irenaeus and Clement do not now exist. Justin Martyr documented a whole slew of such texts which disappeared from the Jewish Bible but which he swore were extant in his own version of the Scriptures. Origen Adamantius of Alexandria, an early Christian scholar, ascetic, and theologian, later commented on this sort of thing – the varieties of utilized and accepted Scriptures - being commonplace. As will be stated later in this section, the books of Christian Bible weren’t determined or ‘canonized’ until about 500 CE! In other words, there was no canonical Bible until centuries after the end of the Jesus narrative. Citing the inerrancy of the Bible is akin to writing a message on Jello, then sending it through the mail and citing what comes back to you in the morning post as inerrant.

 

The following is a transcription of a discussion between Richard Carrier, (PhD. in ancient history from Columbia University) and Seth Andrews, former Christian preacher, author and broadcaster. In conversation, Carrier touches upon some of the vagaries and variety of the letters of Saul/Paul and the books of the New Testament. If such a lack of standard was assigned to journalism, one would place little credence in the reporting.

 

Dr. Carrier: The Gospels we have – the canonical Gospels - were probably written between 70 and about 120 or 130 AD. We can’t really get any more precise than that.

All the other Gospels copy from Mark, in one way or another. Even the Gospel of John occasionally uses material from Mark – just not verbatim. 

 

Seth Andrews: “Can we verify the author of any single book at any time?”

 

Carrier: “In the New Testament, certainly there are seven letters written by Paul that most scholars believe were actually written by Paul and were written in the 50s AD. Beyond that we’re not really sure. The other epistles, some of them were forgeries we’re pretty sure, the others that we’re not sure were forgeries, we don’t know whether the name attached to them is the name of the author, or not, or the name that was invented for it. And even if it’s the name of the author, we don’t know which person that is. For example, there’s an epistle from James in the ‘NT’ but it doesn’t explain which James that is, so we don’t actually know which one we’re talking about there, and similarly with other authors.”

 

“The Gospels don’t say who they were written by at all. The only Gospel that even mentions a witness or having a source, for example, or even mentions a specific source as a person is the Gospel of John, and that person is the so-called ‘Beloved Disciple’ - which John doesn’t even explicitly name – and the authors of John (and that’s plural: authors) say that ‘we got our information from this guy’, right? So, they don’t even name him explicitly, but this ‘guy’, they’re talking about is a character that appears nowhere in the story in any of the other Gospels, he’s been inserted into the story of the previous Gospels by the authors of ‘John’, so he seems to be an invented character; it’s an invented source.” 

 

“There’s an author by the name of Alan Cameron who wrote a book on Greek mythography. And he doesn’t talk about this case in particular but he talks about other examples where in Greek mythography, it was very popular to invent sources; even naming them. So, this is a common thing in mythology; to invent the source and say ‘Hey! I got this information from this guy. And he was really there!’ and y’know, that kind of thing…”

 

“So, we know that this was a trend, so I don’t think we can even trust that. But even that – and again, John does not (garbled) name this guy – and I think when you analyze the text who they mean is ‘Lazarus’, who is an invented character for reasons that I’ve talk about in other venues before. He was invented by John to argue against the fictional Lazarus that Jesus talks about in Luke.”

 

“And so, here we have really the Gospel of John is written by a couple of… a plurality of authors, who don’t identify who they are, who say that they’re reading some other book that we don’t have, by this other disciple, who they don’t name except to suggest that he’s Lazarus, who is a fictional character.

So, that gives an idea…”

 

“The book of Luke and Acts (as one unit) …We have two versions of that. One of which is almost 20% longer than the other, so, they have different material in them.”

 

Here’s a bit more of the bollocks that is taken as ‘god’s holy word’: The Nephilim are known in the Bible as great warriors and biblical giants; the hybrid sons of fallen angels! (see Ezekiel 32:27 and Numbers 13:33). Genesis 6:1–4 tells the readers that the Nephilim (which means ‘fallen ones’) were the product of copulation between the divine, angelic beings (i.e. sons of god) and human women (i.e. the daughters of Adam). One will too often find photographs of the skeletal remains of giants found in remote locations which are offered by Believers as ‘proof’ that giants existed and thus ‘prove’ that the Nephilim were real and thence the Bible is a source of ‘Truth’! 

 

Say what? Divine beings? The sons of god? Hold the phone! Wasn’t Jesus the one, true son of god? Another bit of mystery from the mysterious ways of god? How ineffable! 

What balderdash!

 

Other balderdash such as the Creation Myth, the Garden of Eden, the Noachian flood, the Exodus and so on has been refuted time and again by archeologists, biologists, cosmologists and secular scholars. All to little avail as concerns True Believers. (sigh)

The Banana-man, Ray Comfort, on The Atheist Experience

Wanna know why I've harped on the equivocation presented by 'Believers' using words like 'faith' and 'belief'? Watch this extended interchange between Ray Comfort, the Banana-man Christian apologist, Russell Glasser and Matt Dillahunty. It's a tap dance worthy of the Nicholas Brothers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyzF8SMQOxU&list=RDCMUCprs0DXUS-refN1i8FkQkdg&index=15

Word Tics & Meta-language

 I know I'd said that I'd proceed to addressing the nonsense of the Bible. However, I decided to follow up the 'Believer's Lexicon' with this section on common, repeated comments by amateur apologists which I have termed 'Word Tics & Meta-language. Knowing these may help in discussions with 'Believers'. 

The following are included because whenever speaking to another, one must be aware of what I’ll call ‘word tics’ and what is, perhaps, more properly termed, ‘meta-language’; that is phrases or words that are repeated in the discourse to keep the conversation going. 

 

Let’s refer to a hypothetical conversation between two people; ‘speaker 1’ and ‘speaker 2’. As speaker 1 utters a thought, speaker 2 will respond verbally without elaborating or expanding the thought offered by ‘speaker 1’. This is what is meant by ‘meta-language’; it is the process by which a conversation is maintained and advanced. ‘Meta-language’ refers to the words and phrases by which ‘speaker 2’ indicates to ‘speaker 1’ that ‘speaker 2’ is listening and engaged in the conversation. An example is the phrase ‘uh-huh’; which imparts no additional information but signals ‘speaker 1’ that ‘speaker 2’ has understood (or at least heard what was said.) It also signals that ‘speaker 2’ is willing to continue the conversation.

 

If used solely as discourse markers, meta-language are vital to conversation; ‘um’, ‘well’ & ‘right’ when used as ‘meta-language’ are innocent enough but if longer phrases – such as those given below - are used in a discussion, They are often used dishonestly. They are not simple ‘meta-language’ used to maintain conversation. They may well be used as a distraction, a deflection or as a stratagem to disarm an argument by faking agreement or eliciting an emotional response from an interlocutor. 

 

*Note that the utterances given below were in response to either direct questions or in response to a comment or counter-argument.

 

“I’m with you 100%...”… used when there is no clear agreement as a way to set ‘speaker 1’ on the back foot mentally.

I absolutely agree with you…” (see above)

“Exactly…” These are used so as to cause the other to falsely assume an agreement with the interlocutor and to de-claw or undermine the gist of the other’s argument.

 

“What I’m saying is”…

“I’m just saying…”

“What I’m trying to say is…”

‘All I’m saying is…’ 
‘I’m not sayin’…’

‘The point I’m trying to get at and I might be phrasing it poorly…”

’These are used frequently to evoke pity or elicit emotion from ‘speaker 1'; ‘poor me, I’m being misunderstood’.

 

 ‘I guess where I’m coming from…’

‘Y’see, that’s the whole thing with me…’a plea for mercy and sympathy; with a side-comment on the intelligence of the listener.

 

’That’s not what I’m saying…’; this is a delaying tactic causing ‘speaker 1’ to mentally replay the prior exchange in memory and review what was said in order to assess the possibility of error in understanding.

 

‘Right. Right. That’s what I’m saying, like…’ a dodge; said as if in agreement but actually prefacing a statement or assertion which contradicts or deflects the statement of the other…

 

Another common variation is: ‘Right, but…
‘I understand what you’re saying…’ ‘Right.’ ‘Right. Right…’

(especially when it’s obvious that speaker 2 doesn’t understand and hasn’t actually listened to the counter-argument at all but has been waiting for an opening in the discourse in order to continue espousing his position without considering the proffered refutation. 

 

‘But that’s the thing…’
‘But here’s the thing…’

‘See. Here’s the deal…’

‘Okay, okay, I do see where you’re coming from…’; meaning, again, that speaker 2 hasn’t been listening, but rather has been formulating a response without regard to what speaker 1 said. 

 

 ‘I guess what I mean is…’deflection and a means of introducing a new topic to muddy the waters.

 

‘I have facts/evidence…’ used to put off the pressure of the question. A Trojan Horse. Facts are rarely or never subsequently offered.

 

“You know how…?”; used to lead the opponent (empathy, sympathy, inferred agreement)

 

“You know…?” used to lead the opponent

 

‘I would just say…’ This bit of subterfuge is used to force the opponent to back off as an act of social ‘mercy’ so as to allow the speaker to pivot – change the goal posts. 

 

 Just let me say…’ a pleading for more discourse time to alter a previously stated position

 

 

‘The thing is…’
‘Here’s the thing…’

‘The question is…’

‘The point is this…’

‘The thing is…’

making a personal appeal for understanding – to avoid consideration of an argument…

 

‘To me, it makes sense..’ personal appeal to courtesy or cordiality in order to avoid argument and falsely infer support of the claim.

 

‘Wait! Wait!’

‘Hold on. Hold on!’

“Just hear me out…” pleading for understanding.

‘You’re missing my point.” ‘Poor me, being misunderstood.’

‘What do you mean? Could you say that again? - age-old dodge to force the other into restating an idea or question in order to give the opponent more time to formulate an answer or introduce a tangential argument. 

 ‘If you‘d just let me finish…’ a claim to victimhood

These discourse markers are used when speaker 2 seeks to pivot and change direction of his rhetoric – in effect back out of the corner he’s painted himself into.

 

“I think that you very clearly seemed to imply…”; followed by a straw-man restatement; very passive-aggressive.

 

‘I’ve got to believe.’ ‘I must believe.’ ‘I have to believe.’ These statements of assertion are meant to be defeaters to any argument which questions those of ‘Faith’. The proper response by 'speaker 1' would be the tried and true query made by all 3-year-olds: ‘Why’? Why must one believe? The answer is this; One doesn’t have to believe. That is the statement of independence and individuality that terrifies the ‘believer’.

 

‘I believe cuz I believe!’