First, I shut down the AandODirector twitter feed, as per my announcement yesterday. @Droakley1689 is my only feed. I started the other because of complaints about my posting personal tweets. Then I realized, “It has never crossed my mind to ask someone I follow in Twitter to stop posting personal stuff, so why am I worried about whiners?” So let me be clear: I will post personal stuff on my personal twitter feed. If you can’t handle that, you might not want to follow me. And if you complain, well, I know how to use the block feature, and will do it for your health and welfare! 🙂 Also, make sure you follow @AominOrg as well.
Secondly, I was recently sent this notification and found it fascinating. It was accompanied with the snide remark from Paul Williams, the apostate convert to Islam who pretends to be a great scholar and yet hides from serious challenges against his position, who said, “It is good that Muslim speakers are engaging with serious thinkers and not the usual fundamentalist suspects who have no academic credibility.” He has used that line against me repeatedly—except that I have debated Crossan twice, which sort of short-circuits his argument. In any case, I am truly left wondering—what will be the areas of disagreement? Dr. Ally has been promoting Dr. Crossan’s views for years. And given Shabir’s minority view of affirming the crucifixion, what are they going to disagree about except, I guess, that Jesus actually died? That would not seem to make for much of an evening of discussion. So, I predict an agreement fest, with the Muslims promoting it as a great vindication of the Qur’anic view. Of course, I wonder if the serious-minded Muslim will go, “Uh, wait…Dr. Crossan, nice fellow he is, doesn’t even believe in life after death or any of the beliefs attributed to Christians, so—how is this relevant to the real disagreement between Christians and Muslims?” We can hope so. But, I will say this—it will be a kindly discussion. Having engaged in nine debates total with these gentlemen, I know at the very least it will be pursued in a kindly fashion. But I remain confused as to its real reason.
