If only we had as much time as they do maybe we'd go into their sabotage attempts.  Maybe the pleasant and well loved Jane Everhart would make a comment about their harassing late night phone calls to her at some point.  Oh wait... she lives a positive and proactive life as well.  Drats, at least they kept our bad boy image in tact. 

I think you did a great job with the limited amount of time you had to speak.  A lot of people discussing the same topic have a hard time making it seem interesting, but you made it seem easy.  Good work!

Sounds like a job well done!

All the best with your future projects.

Dragon slayer,  brother warrior Rook .... with "gawed" on our side    Kicking ass. Read his caring written words .... zero bull shit .... and more to come , long live Rook ....

=^_^= Well done, Rook!

Way to go Rook! I would like to get a copy of the materials you handed out 

Did your dad really attend? What did he think?

Would you have thought a few years ago that you would be doing these lectures?

Will you be going on a book tour soon!?

-Renee

MOD EDIT: There were only two comments by people who were there who did not like it.  The others on the board did not attend but rather are some of the same haters who called Jane Everhart at 3am to try to sabotage the event.  Roy is not a scholar he's an architect and the other person there did not bother to ask me any questions during the Q&A.  I recall, actually, that Roy was sleeping during my presentation...he was the only one.  This tells me that he is not the authority to speak about how my presentation went.  But thanks for showing how much of a complete tool you are, 50 cent.

    Way to go and the honesty of the reviews is a nice touch.

    btw who is that Jane Everhart and why is she so insultingly condesending?  Or did you realize she was telling theists you were actually harmless to their imaginary friend.

As written above

The real reviews

As usual, the RRS only presents one side of the story. Here are some reviews from attendees who were not as impressed.

Ummmm so those are the REAL reviews? Admit it, you label it that way because they don't show Rook in a positive light. As a Rook and RRS hater, you are more likely to read the bad ones and grin in delight. The ones posted here and the ones on the site you posted are ALL reviews, get it straight.

As with any review, you are going to have those that support and those that knock down. If I were Rook I would show everyone the great reviews too. Guess what? I already saw the ones you posted do you know why? Because I knew that with a handful of good reviews come a handful of bad and I wanted to see both so as soon as I read this post I did a google search(a very long google search) as I am sure everyone else in these forums will because we are a curious, investigative group of people.

The complaints were from other atheists who are sick and tired of Rook's labeling himself as an expert.

I intend to bring up this mess at AAI. Jane's response to valid criticisms regarding Rook were unprofessional and an embarrassment to all atheists, to say the very least. She accused other atheists of being "part of a Vatican conspiracy" and of being child molesters.

See entire, sickening conversation here.

Don't mind if I slap my 36 inch long internet penis on the table...

THESE ARE "THE REAL COMMENTS" (stomping around room like child) FROM SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY SHOWS UP AT THESE THINGS IN REAL LIFE...

• Pre-Meetup comments below
• Posted Aug 9, 2008 3:40 PM Jane Everhart
  • Assistant Organizer
  Rook's answer to Wrathpig is, "There are plenty of guys who get credentialed in religion or theology degrees and then go teach religious crap to unsuspecting kids." You don't need a Ph.D. to speak the truth, Wrathpig!
• Posted Aug 9, 2008 3:35 PM Jane Everhart
  • Assistant Organizer
  Never underestimate the wrath of a rabid religionist (Is it really Wrathpig?)They hate it that there's a bunch of young people in Philly who haven't fallen for the supernatural claptrap and are in fact, turning other young people away from pie-in-the-sky when you die. I've heard that there are "missionaries" appointed by various fundamentalist evangelical groups whose mission is to use technology to follow around guys like Rook on the net and discredit them.
• Posted Aug 9, 2008 3:23 PM Jane Everhart
  • Assistant Organizer
  Rook tells me that this guy William Rathpig belongs to a Christian group that has been following him and the other Rational Responders around on the blogosphere trying to discredit them. In fact, they've had death threats that they think come from this group. To me, this shows that Rook and the Rational Responders have been effective in fighting the religionists. Three cheers for Rook and reason!
• Posted Aug 8, 2008 5:38 PM Jane Everhart
  • Assistant Organizer
  We feel lucky to get Rook Hawkins, one of Atheism's Bad Boys (say fundamentalists) and with Brian Sapient, founder of the Rational Response Squad and the Blasphemy Challenge. What's even more surprising is that Rook has translated the New Testament from the Greek. Go figure. Maybe Bad Boys are really good when They're Bad?

Didn't look very sickening. 

Ento, are you wrathpig?

Says the guy presenting another side of the story on the RRS site and having his comment approved by RRS. 

(did you even notice that Rook quoted some negatives, he simply left out YOUR stalking?)

And the OTHER side to the story is... stop calling Jane Everhart at 3 am when she's asking you to stop just to talk smack on Rook.  Grow up.

Love this one... One of the negative commenters is from "Cedar Park, TX" has been a member since "August 12, 2008" and his introduction was "I joined to comment on the travesty that is Rook Hawkins speaking at NYCAtheists."  He didn't attend, but has plenty of shit leftover from lunch.

     Now that I know who Jane Everhart is can you tell me why she was insulting  and  condesending toward Rook?  I did not attend the conference, but still Jane Everhart sounds like she is trying to convince theists that Rook is not to be worried about after all he's "...nice young man who came with his daddy".   What did his father have to do with the confrence?

If it came out wrong, then it came out wrong, but I'm reasonably certain Jane was speaking in a positive light.  I think she was inferring that he has a good relationship with his father, that he's obviously proud of his son, and that says a little something positive about Rook as a person that might not be your typical idea of an atheist activist. 

Jane is a very integral part of running the NYC atheists for quite some time, and she's always been the first one to refute the naysayers of RRS in a fervent manner.  She believes in how we do things, understands our approach, and understands that there will be haters.  Further she recognizes that the haters validate our efforts.

I was just thinking today that maybe if there wasn't a knee jerk reaction to say or do anything to discredit someone who would say Jesus never existed, the position would be more widely accepted.  Rook seems to be suffering the same fate as others through history.  I wonder how many people throughout history just kept their mouth shut about the non existing Jesus for fear of having to deal with ad hominem attacks (reminds me a little of Darwin and his fears about writing on natural selection).  How many times do we need to fight over whether Rook is a "historian" a "professional" a "scholar" a "public historian?"  When will those people actually fight the issues he discusses rather than some menial issue that has nothing to do with his work? 

Funny that I received two bad reviews, one from a man (Roy) who was sleeping during the presentation and the other from somebody who did not ask me any questions directed at my thesis.  I'm not impressed by these poor reviews.  Overall, 40 people attended.  If I get two bad reviews, I'm not concerned.  Especially when, in the thick of it, Frankie boy Walton (AKA Timmy O'Neil) and Rathpig were coming to their defense as if somehow they attended.  I'm really not interested.

Based on what evidence?  There is no reason to assume probability is better for B than C.  If he feels we have evidence for a historical Jesus, and it is more probable, an argument would have been better than assuming what he does here:

I gave him an answer he didn't like.  I told him there is no clearly define period when this happened.  It is obvious to anybody who reads the noncanonical Gospels that they were being interpreted as fictions well into the fourth century.  How can we know?  Because there were still people writing new, fictional Gospels about Jesus' life.  We have so many attestations to new Gospels and Acts and epistles being written throughout antiquity that to claim these authors were not interpreting the canonical Gospels as fictions would be to hold ignorance of the process of composition in antiquity.  When I told him this, he was shocked to hear that Gospels were still being written about Jesus in the fourth century, as if he had never heard of the Nag Hammadi collection.

I know about as much as historical Jesus scholars know about Christianity in antiquity.  That there was no clear, decisive way to look at it.  There were thousands of Christianities all vying for power and authority over each other.  It would by like asking me "Hey, which hay-needle in this stack of hay-needles has a sharper end to it?"

Once more, this shows a clear demonstration that Bill was not paying attention.  I spent a lot of time discussing how we can be sure that allusions exist, as intentions by the author, including giving quotes from ancient authors, like Seneca, in the notes I handed out.  We know parallels are intentional because it was how ancient authors composed material, using models.  This is simply basic stuff every student of antiquity knows.  I spent time from slides 11-22 proving this to be the case.

Talk about a fallacy of false analogy!  Let's see...George Washington - contemporary attestation, enemy attestation, contemporary archaeological evidence with his face on it - Jesus...name is eponymous (like all Jewish fictional protagonists), no evidence for a historical existence.  I spent several slides on this issue.

Further, my point was not that allusions = nonhistoricity.  My point was the fact that the authors used allusions in every instance in the narrative.  They didn't stop to include a historical tradition - they created every tradition using allusion to models.  I not only showed this to be the case in the Gospels, but also in other ancient literature, including Virgil's Aeneid, Euripides' plays, and in Gilgamesh - are you going to suggest a historical tradition behind Odysseus, Romulus, and Enkidu as well?  What about Moses, Joshua, Abraham or Isaac?  Where do YOU as a reader of these ancient texts draw the line as to what is historical and what isn't?  Or did you forget already where I clearly demonstrated in my opening argument why scholarship has failed in presenting the historical Jesus by presenting Jesus through their own lens of interpretation?

So far all you have done is complained and not addressed a single issue that I discussed in my presentation or in the Q&A. 

Shocking.

Seriously.

There is nothing more pathetic, in my opinion, than nit-picking and complaining about this and that, and then having a whole slew of 17 year olds who live in their parents house who didn't attend the lecture acting as if they know something about life, history and my presentation.  That whole thread on the meetup site is nothing but a bunch of people (and Frankieboy Waltoon who isn't human by any standards) complaining about menial issues that are so irrelevant and unlearned that I don't have to concern myself with it.  There is nothing by any of my detractors with any substance on that entire board that concerns my lecture.  I'm surprised they could spell my name correctly.

This is the packet I handed out.  Most of the information is related to the slides (in other words, you have to see the slides to know what I am referring to):

SPOKEN BY THE PROPHETS

Rook Hawkins

(Don’t waste paper, take notes or jot down questions)

* HOW WERE THE GOSPELS COMPOSED?  Additional Citations from Antiquity on Education:

“When you meet encomiasts of Homer who tell us that this poet has been the educator of Hellas (hôv tên Hellada pepaideuken), and that for the conduct and refinement of human life he is worthy of our study and devotion, and that we should order our entire lives by the guidance of this poet,’” (Plato, Republic 10.606e)

“Listen and reflect. I think you know that the very best of us, when we hear Homer or some other of the makers of tragedy imitating one of the heroes who is in grief, and is delivering a long tirade in his lamentations or chanting and beating his breast, feel pleasure, and abandon ourselves and accompany the representation with sympathy and eagerness, and we praise as an excellent poet the one who most strongly affects us in this way.” (Plato, Republic 10.605c-d)

“The soul should accordingly be guided at the very moment when it is becoming able to guide itself.  A Boys study according to direction. Their fingers are held and guided by others so that they may follow the outlines of the letters; next, they are ordered to imitate a copy and base thereon a style of penmanship.  Similarly, the mind is helped if it is taught according to direction.” (Seneca, Epistles 94)

* SPOKEN BY THE PROPHETS; Citations from the Gospel authors which cue the reader:

From Mark: 6:15; 8:28; 7:6; 9:12-13; 11:17; 12:10, 24; 14:21. 

From Matthew: 1:22; 2:15-17; 3:3; 4:4-6; 7:15; 8:17; 12:17; 21:42; 22:29; 26:56

From Luke: 1:70-76; 2:36; 3:4; 4:17-24; 7:27; 9:7-9; 10:26-27; 19:46; 20:17; 24:27

From John: 2:17; 6:45; 7:38;-42 10:34; 12:14-16; 15:25; 19:22-28

A full list will be found in my book, which will be more comprehensive than this.

* (3) TABLES - THE MODELS FOR THE GOSPELS; Reproduced here from the slides:

*For more examples of the Romulus legend, see also: Cicero, Republic 2.10; Ovid, Fasti 2.491-512; Livy, From the Founding of the City, 1.16; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 2.63.3-4;

*SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

ON GENRE:

Michael E. Vines, The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Nove (2002)

Mary Ann Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel (2005)

Marianne Palmer Bonz, The Past as Legacy: Luke-Acts and Ancient Epic (2000) 

Roland Boer, Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies (2007)

Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000)

ON LITERARY CRITICISM AND INTERTEXTUALITY:

Jay Clayton, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (1991)

G. Aichele & G.A. Phillips, Intertextuality and the Bible (Semeia 69/70, 1995)

J. Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in Western Literary Tradition (1998)

Graham Allen, Intertextuality (2000)

ON ALLUSIONS IN THE BIBLE AND ANTIQUITY:

Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1973)

Thomas L. Thompson, Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition (2003)

Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth (2005)

Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: How Writers Create a Past (2000)

J. Gager, Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism (1989)

Virginia Knight, The Renewal of Epic: Responses to Homer in the Argonautica of Apollonius (1995)

ON ANCIENT AUTHORS AND CREATING HISTORY:

Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (1998)

Philip R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ (1995)

P. Cartledge, P. Garnsey, E. Gruen, Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History and Historiography (1997)

E. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (1998)

E. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (2004)

READ MORE:

            http://rookhawkins.wordpress.com

            http://www.rationalresponders.com/blog/rookhawkins

CONTACT: [email protected]         

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What bothers me the most that I specifically went out of my way to include "Read more" with links to my blogs.  Did the naysayers or nitpickers bother to see if I had already addressed the issues they brought up?  No.  This is such a representation of intellectual laziness on their part that it is appalling. 

Rook

Well...I *was* there. My wife & I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I will admit that there were some references that went over my head. Rook is obviously really well versed in this stuff...my knowledge of the Bible comes from the Internation Standard Version, and from vicious hate-filled catholic school teachers, which might explain why.

Rook, dude...hope you're not sweating any bad reviews...the people who are hating are the ones who are *suppose* to be hating...that is a theists nature...that is simply what they do.

From the perspective of someone who gives seminars himself, I thought you were lucid, composed, engaging...and your points all strung together nicely.

Nice job, sir.

I just finished reading your packet posted here, Rook. I found it quite easy to understand and follow even without the slide show presentation.

Thank you Rich.  I really appreciate that.  I am not sweating the haters.  I am just calling them out on their epic failure.

I'm really grateful you and your wife attended.  You two are great people. 

Thanks Kay!  I will probably post up my whole presentation with commentary in a few days as a treat for those who were not there.

With a lecture I gave this past Sunday, I must be doing something right.  I've never stirred up so much controversy.   Detractors have come out of the woodwork, tried to sabotage the lecture, and harassed the coordinator to stop me from giving it.  Blog posts went up about how the position I hold on the figure of Jesus' ahistoricity is ignorant and repulsive, that I am nothing but a High School graduate who believes in conspiracy theories, and that the NYC Atheists should be ridiculed for allowing me to speak at their meeting. 

But, amidst all of this, no issues were ever attacked, my position was never discredited, complaints were made instead of arguments and everyone spelled my name correctly.

Overall, despite everything, I feel pretty good.

It sounds the whiners are all dillholes from that asshat site (RnR)  that anyone who is a member of ought to have "asshat" branded on their forehead and be deported from Earth.

Any idea when the video will be posted?

Glad you asked.  The thing is we recorded the thing in a very dark room and needless to say the lighting sucked.  So tomorrow we're re-recording.  I plan to broadcast live through stickem at around noon-2:30 or so EST.

A group of kids living in their parents' basement, mooching off our hard-earned dollars (and their parents') apparently took the liberty to "correct" my slide 14.

This 'correction' is actually an adequate representation of an error I committed in this slide, at least as far as "their" representation of my slip-up with the Greek.  I simply did not check my notes before publishing them--instead I had transliterated (not "translated" as these kids suggest) them into English (or more properly, Latin) for a handout I gave to everyone on at the lecture and copy-pasted them into the slide, and once more transliterated them back into SPIonic.  I managed to transliterate the other Greek words on the page like grammatikos, philosophia, and athleteon; why I overlooked koine and gymnasion must be due to late nights and not being thorough.  Consequently, due to this lapse, gumnasion (nu not mu) and koinh (epsilon not eta) were latinized.  (By the way, they're not called "glyphs", they're called 'breathings' or 'breathing marks')  

Needless to say, it is certainly a good thing I was not giving a lecture on the importance of Greek vocabulary, or this might be very embarrassing!  Luckily for me though, one error is easily accounted for and I have no trouble admitting that a correction needs to be made and that is was completely due to my inadequate proofreading of the slide (the notes for the slide should be fine).  Indeed, based on the very fact that I was giving a lecture on ancient literature, the dubious claim of Jesus' historicity, and the problems of interpreting Gospels as containing historical memory, I can call this criticism petty on the part of my detractors.

However, their criticism of SPIonic is just like the rest of this "correction" -- It is downright petty.  SPIonic is the font SBL still uses as its font type for koine.  If it is good enough for SBL, the largest society of published academic material in Biblical studies, it is certainly acceptable for me.  (After all, I got SPIonic from the SBL site) By the way, kids, using wikipedia as a source belays your own ignorance.  I would suggest spending the money (or perhaps your parents money?) and picking up the LSJ 9th Ed.  Lay off the interwebs for the big-people research, k?

Additionally, it is interesting that this petty, useless, criticism is actually the best these dolts can muster.  Don't let the terrorists win folks. 

Rook, did you translate the bible from Greek? I think if you are honest about this, it will help you. I hope I am right.

Please note that I have offered 1000 times to help you with your writing and presentations, and sent you one of my favorite books, Man and His Gods. And you thanked me. That may sound odd, but perhaps others can read between the lines when it comes to saying "thank you."

Look forward to an article (written by me) in an atheist magazine about Jane Everhart's unacceptable behavior.  Rook, I hope you will chime in and agree that she owes quite a few people an apology.  

Here you would be pleasant by this is but a shield to blind me from the places where you have openly called me a fraud (I do not think you understand the words meaning as it does not apply).

I am always open and honest about everything as long as it does not put me or my loved ones in danger. 

First, no, I never said I translated the "bible" from the Greek.  What I said, and what is quoted from the transcript, is that I spent a few years translating the New Testament from the Greek.  I never said "the whole bible" or "the whole New Testament".  Only ignorant nimrods would ad hoc me about such a thing.  And the statement I made is true - I did spend about three years translating quite a bit of the New Testament.  What was translated?  The whole of the Gos. Mark, parts of John, Luke, Matthew and Romans, all of Galatians and 1 Corinthians and parts of 2 Corinthians, along with Hebrews.  It took me a long time because I had to learn a lot from scratch with no formal training, and I would say I am still learning.  The most difficult part of learning greek is understanding pronounciation which in itself is a challenge because the benefit of formal Greek classes is that a professor speaks the words to you.  When you learn on your own, you can only go by what is written, what you hear in lectures, and from understanding how breathing marks and other accents work in the Koine.  But it a challenge I have worked through and have come out much wiser because of it.

Second, I have several dozen articles online, many containing Greek (although most of it transliterated).  I find it humorous that one slide gets ridiculed as if I have only ever used it once in one slide.  These are the sly (but very ammusing!) tactics of those you now ally yourself with (and have become apart of).  But then again for all I know, you could have been a part of them all along. 

Third, this is nothing but a dodge to avoid the real issues at play. 

Yeah okay!  Susan are you completely mental?  She was being harassed!  Only people completely and utterly clueless would make such brash claims in light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  That isn't an attack, that's a damn observation.