Anonymous wrote:
I will address your points, one by one, because it is important for DCUMers to see the fallacy of your arguments and how you twist and writhe to get out of tight corners:
You said, "It is worth noting that Dr Moore never formally converted to Islam. I guess there are some things even Al-Saud can't buy.."
First of all, once again, I repeat -- whether a person converts or not is not indicative of the truth or falsity of Islam. Recall our discussion about Dr. Jerald Dirks (the ordained Deacon, graduate of Harvard Divinity School) who researched original manuscripts and learned that concepts such as divinity and trinity were add ons to the faith due to geo-political strife during the time, that Jesus himself never taught this. Just as he saw those documents so must have many other seminarians. Not all convert, however, even though they, too, saw evidence that seem to suggest significant parts of Christianity were indeed doctored. As I said before, it takes a special kind of fortitude to convert upon learning the truth because they may suffer backlash from converting. Here, in this situation with Dr. Moore, he clearly and unequivocally acknowledged the miraculous nature of the Quran, as far as identifying important aspects of fetal development, at a time when even the microscope wasn't invented and no one else, not Hippocrates, Galen, the Chinese, or the Romans wrote about. That is sufficient to prove that in his expert opinion, the Quran was accurate. This implies the verses were divinely inspired and science simply validated it. Dr. Moore doesn't need to convert to Islam because he already validated it with science.
Besides, when I provided the example of Dr. Dirks, you said one person's conversion was irrelevant and not indicative of the truth of Islam. I find it amusing that you now use lack of Dr. Moore's conversion as evidence of the same point.
Here, sweetie. You clearly missed the discussion of Dr. Dirks and his Ebionites on the other thread, so I'll repost it here. (That, or this is yet another of your transparent attempts to "spin" a discussion that embarrassed you into a "win" that never was.)
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First off, there's a lot of debate about who the Ebionites were, and what we mean when we say "Ebionite". Appparently at one point all Judeo-Christians (i.e, still practicing Mosaic law) were referred to as "Ebionites." Also, there is a lot of "legend" (not my own word, see the Jewish source that follows) about individual Ebionite leaders and their groups (
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5411-ebionites).
We do NOT have an original Ebionite gospel, despite Muslim OP's claims that we do. Many believe the Ebionites used a modified version of the Gospel of Matthew (
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05242c.htm, also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=gospel+of+ebionites&go=Go), with some obvious differences about Christ's divinity. Some groups of Ebionites may have had almost gnostic beliefs (i.e., they may have shared the gnostic idea of the "demi-urge"), but there appears to have been a lot of variation. The Ebionites probably continued to observe Mosaic law and things like circumcision. But again, we will never know for sure, because the original Ebionite manuscripts have vanished.
There were apparently some contemporaneous accounts of various Ebionite groups, but all of these have been lost, with the exception of the fragment from Epiphanius, who may or may not have understood the Ebionites. Again, you can read this fragment here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=gospel+of+ebionites&go=Go. The references in Epiphanius to Ebionites arguing the point at which Jesus became divine (at birth vs. at baptism) are interesting for this debate on the Trinity, because this is the only fragment we still have today, and it doesn't actually challenge Christ's divinity.
I went to Dirk's website to see what exactly he says. There's nothing there about the Trinity, just how to contact him for speeches. (
http://www.jeralddirksanddebradirks.com/)
Per his website, Dirks has been a practicing psychologist for the last 20 years. He is not, and never has been a Harvard Divinity School professor as OP claimed in her post of 09/11/2014 10:42 on the 2nd or 3rd page of thread. However, Dirks has taught at some Muslim middle schools. So I'm not sure about representing him as an eminent theologian. I definitely wouldn't put him in the same category as that home-churcher Muslim PP likes to cite as representative of all Christianity (this is the guy who says himself that he dropped out of two different universities because they told him not to take the Old Testament literally, but OP linked to this home churcher as supposed proof that all Christians should take the Old Testament literally). Also, it seems suggestive that none of the many online sites about the Ebionites even mention Dirks, although most of these sites (some of which I've linked to above) are very careful to cite multiple sources. You wouldn't necessarily expect the Christian websites to mention Dirks, but the Jewish sites or Wikipedia sources on the Ebionites might do so if he were a respected authority.
All of this suggests that Dirks' views on the Ebionites have yet to make him a widely-cited authority in this field. (How's that for an understatement?)
FWIW. Dirk's website makes it easy to contact him (for speaking gigs), so I'm not sure what OP is waiting for.