Recent content by NoHolyCows

You’ve got Michael’s stance right: he’s not pushing divine authorship and he keeps repeating “divine inspiration hasn’t been disproven.” The dispute isn’t about disproving his faith claim; it’s about how Paul uses an origin claim in Galatians. Paul doesn’t keep “revelation” private—he deploys...

Micheal, Here are the three non-evasive commitments that decide this: Yes or no: when Paul says his message is “not from man… not taught by man… but through revelation,” is that clause used in the letter to defeat rival, man-taught warrants? If yes, you concede the origin claim is used as...

Micheal, Here is the exact, unavoidable version of the analogy you keep sidestepping. Imagine a heartfelt company-wide email from a founder to a team she loves: “This directive is not from HR but from the Board; anyone who teaches the contrary policy is removed.” The tone is affectionate and...

Calling the analogy “terrible” is not an answer; it just avoids the test. You say to treat Galatians as a “love letter.” Fine. Make the analogy exactly that and watch that nothing changes. A founder writes the team she loves and says, “This policy is not from HR; it comes directly from the...

Calling the analogy “ridiculous” isn’t an argument; it’s a dodge. Genre labels don’t defeat observable functions. A document can be a “love letter” and still perform public, polemical work. What fixes function are the operations the text actually carries out. Galatians names rival emissaries...

Nothing in my method “ignores” emotion. Emotion is itself publicly checkable when it leaves marks in a text: vocatives (“O foolish Galatians”), heightened register, denunciations, urgency. I register those features explicitly. What I do not do is replace observable operations with speculation...

Micheal, A company-wide email goes out: “This policy is not from HR; it is from the Board. Any manager who teaches otherwise is out of line.” The email also gives reasons (costs, safety) and the tone is heated. That single document plainly does three public things at once: it names rivals...

What you call “purposefully ignorant” is simply the only defensible way to make public claims: restrict yourself to what the artifact actually does and require discriminators that different hypotheses would handle differently. I’m not ignoring anything; I’m refusing to invent inner states to...

No, Michael. Restricting claims to what can be publicly checked in the document is not “ignoring the person,” it is refusing to invent psychological content we cannot access. That’s methodological discipline, not ignorance. I acknowledged the obvious emotion in Galatians; I simply won’t treat a...

No, Michael. I acknowledged the emotion explicitly—“O foolish Galatians…,” the rebukes, the urgency—and I treated it correctly: as tone. Tone and function are different questions. Classifying function is done on publicly observable operations in the text, not on reconstructing Paul’s inner...

I have taken the emotive register into account; Galatians contains obvious emotion (“O foolish Galatians…”, sharp rebukes, urgency). That observation does not undercut the classification of polemical function, because function is identified by what the text does, not by why the author felt that...

Bare assertion is not an argument. The question is whether the text exhibits operations that define polemic. Galatians names rivals, refutes them, directs the audience against them, and deploys “not of man … through revelation” against “man-taught” emissaries. Those are publicly checkable...

No, it’s a direct summary of your repeated move. You concede the text exhibits the operations that define a polemic—named rivals, refutation, directives to the audience, and the “not of man…through revelation” contrast with “man-taught” emissaries—then you claim polemical actuality cannot be...

You’ve conflated two different claims and then treated their blur as a refutation. My “must” is not a metaphysical necessity; it is the standing norm of public adjudication: if a premise is used as a reason in a public argument, that premise requires its own public warrant. That rule is...

A “full-account” is not a feeling; it’s an explanation that makes the observed features more likely than rival explanations. To count as a full account here, the emotive hypothesis would have to predict and explain the concrete operations the letter exhibits—identifying opponents, contrasting...