Saturday, February 18, 2012
Crazy is Crazy
Religious believers who are moderate to progressive politically and "moderate" religiously, who claim to be advancing a middle way between fundamentalism and what they claim is the equally-extremist pole of "fundamentalist" atheism, are very reluctant to openly criticize crazy stuff like this when it isn't accompanied by an overt right-wing political agenda -- indeed, they often even publish and otherwise support crazy religious rantings. They refuse to acknowledge how very close this sort of thing is to the right-wing stuff and how both come directly from their own Holy Books. They refuse to acknowledge their responsibility for the crazy religious thinking they condemn when it's right-wing, and smile at it, perhaps an embarrassed smile, perhaps not even always that, when, as apparently in this case, they judge it to be not right-wing, and therefore harmless. Crazy is crazy. Religious moderates need to see their role in fostering religious extremism.
Friday, February 10, 2012
5 0 Blitz, I Played White
1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 d5
3. Nxe5 dxe4
4. Bc4 Be6
5. Bxe6 fxe6
6. Qh5+ g6
7. Nxg6 Nh6
8. Nxh8+ Nf7
9. Qxf7#
2. Nf3 d5
3. Nxe5 dxe4
4. Bc4 Be6
5. Bxe6 fxe6
6. Qh5+ g6
7. Nxg6 Nh6
8. Nxh8+ Nf7
9. Qxf7#
Monday, February 6, 2012
Debating Whether the Exodus Happened
A: The story of Moses and Pharaoh is fictional. You might as well debate the historicity of The Lord of the Rings.
ME: Talking to a religious believer lately, you correctly pointed out that the burden of proof lies upon him who makes a positive statement. And yet here you yourself make a positive statement for which evidence is lacking. We don't know how much of the story of Exodus might be true.
Concerning the numbers of Israelites described in the OT as comprising the Exodus, since so many point to that as evidence that the story is fictional: 600,000 men, plus women, children, non-Israelites and livestock. It amazes me that people get so hung up on this number. It would seem that that many people wandering in the desert for 40 years probably would've left some evidence which archaeologists or other scholars, searching for so long, would've come across by now. But often people of other cultures in other eras had nothing resembling our accuracy when counting large numbers of people or other objects. (Cf Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol i,
pp 336-341, for a good discussion of how Medieval Europeans tended to use large numbers.) Combine an inexactness in counting to begin with, with the centuries of oral transmission which may have occurred before the story of the Exodus took fixed form, (now THIS would be an example of a game of Elephant) and it's easy to imagine that a migration of 60,000 families, or 6,000, or much fewer still, could've provided the basis for the OT stories.
B: How about six families? Would that be enought to save the story? Maybe God killed every firstborn Egyptian kids and drowned all those soldiesr for the sake of six families.
ME: You can have that argument with someone who believes in God. For me, all theological discussions were over a long time ago. They don't interest me. The same way that what I was talking about, how the story of Exodus actually came to be, doesn't seem to interest you. It's an historical interest for me. In the same way, I'm curious about where the story of the Iliad came from. Both stories come from that era of upheaval in the second half of the second millenium BC which started with a sharp decline of old empires around the eastern Mediterranean, and ended with the emergence of some newly-literate cultures such as those of the Greeks and the Jews. I would reject the flat statement: "the Iliad is fictional," for the same reason I rejected A's statement above.
B: How about the whole damn story is just so much BS made up hundreds of years after the fact by a group of people that had begun to solidify around one religion and needed a myth of where they came from?
ME: Again: I'm not saying the Exodus story is historical. I'm not saying it's fictional. I'm disagreeing with anyone who claims to know, one way or another, how the story arose.
B: Just because a story may have some element of truth in it does not mean that, on a whole, it is not fictional.
ME: Again, I'm interested in finding out which elements might have an historical basis.
A: What's lacking is any evidence it is true. However, we do know the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt. Since there were no people to free there was no need for someone to free them. The Moses depicted in Exodus did not exist.
ME: We don't know that none of them were. That is to say: we don't whether there actually were a people that long ago which could properly be called Israelites -- although the Merneptah stele makes it seem likely that there were -- and if there were we don't know whether some of them were enslaved in Egypt. As to Moses, if you mean that either every detail in Exodus about Moses is true, or Moses didn't exist, well, that's absurd.
A: If anything, the Exodus story is possibly a garbled account of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt by Ahmose at the beginning of the New Kingdom.
ME: Is the Hyksos-Exodus hypothosis actually supported by any prominent people other than Simcha Jacobovici -- who, of course, is prominent for things like not actually being an archaeologist but pretending to be one on TV, and preferring the Jerusalem antiquities market to legitimate archaeological digs, and denouncing archaeologists en masse -- and vice versa, such as when he claimed that a bunch of archaeologists and epigraphers supported his views on what he -- and very few scholars -- call the Jesus family tomb, prompting them to take the extraordinary step of signing an open letter saying that they all disagreed with him?
C: There is no evidence of a significant number of Israelites being held in bondage in Egypt. There is no evidence of any of the event described in Exodus. Therefore, we have no option but to reject any claim that it's a historical account and it can be safely assumed that it's fiction.
ME: That's a perfect example of a premature "therefore." We have other options. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the entire Sinai peninsula actually hasn't been gone over with a fine-toothed archaeological comb just yet. There's no reason to conclude that there never was an Exodus. It's simply premature. Let me underscore once again, in case it wasn't already obvious from my previous remarks, that I think that if there was an Exodus it would have been much smaller than 600,000 families, and also that it may have consisted of some of the ancestors of the Israelites at a time before there actually were Israelites, and that if it did happen it probably constituted a minority of the Israelites -- or of their ancestors, as the case may be -- and that the majority probably were from the less powerful classes in Canaan.
D: Archaeologists have been looking for evidence of the Exodus for decades, nigh on a hundred years. Nothing's been found. In fact the evidence for the early Israelites points to a local origin.
ME: I know. Mostly likely, many or most Israelites were originally lower-class Canaanites or slaves of Canaanites who, when the Canaanite elite went into decline, took over the region which would eventually form the core of Israel. However, it seems possible to me that in addition to that indigenous core there was another group, maybe Canaanite, maybe not, which was part of the founding of Israel, who had been slaves in Egypt. That story came from somewhere.
D: Origin myths are tricky things. If you look at the "Historia Britonum" for example, it claims that the Brits were descended from Trojans (via Italy) fleeing the fall of that city. When you look at Irish myth in "The Book of Invasions" Greece, Spain, even Egypt etc get a mention. yet apart from Spain there seems no real link of the Irish to any of these places, and even that seems more a coincidence than a remembered truth. The point is that it need not necessarily be true that an origin myth is a reflection of a one time literal truth, not only do stories change over time but real places can become metaphors for something and somewhere else and stories merge together to create something completely new with the actual historical truths "edited out" (or not) over time. It gets even more messy when differing oral versions are frozen into a written form by people with their own biases. Not saying it can't be true, just that after all that archaeology I'd have thought something would have turned up by now if it were. Unless Zawi's sitting on the evidence that is.
ME: A lot of people claim to be descended from the Trojans. Check out whether the stories of Trojan ancestry can be traced back farther in time than the people's first contact with the works of Homer or one of the myriad neo-Homeric authors. Of course Exodus need not necessarily be true. Who's saying that it definitely has an historical core? All I've been saying here is that I think it's premature to rule out any historical basis. The lack of archaeological attestation of the Exodus would indeed be suspicious if it consisted of 600,000 families wandering for 40 years. If 3,000 families crossed the desert in 3 months, and it FELT like 40 years because it was so uncomfortable, and several centuries of oral tradition inflated the numbers before the story took a fixed written form, then it's an entirely different matter, and it's unreasonable to assume that some archaeological trace of the crossing MUST have turned up by now. I'm not claiming that Exodus is as accurate in all its numbers and little details as, say, Robert A Caro.
I'm very skeptical -- to put mildly -- of British claims of descent from the Trojans, as you seem to be, and like me, you probably wouldn't put much stock in the legends which have some of the 12 Apostles journeying all the way the British Isles, which if true would make the British church about as old as that of Rome or Jerusalem. But let's look at some other myths, the Nibelungenlied and the chanson de Roland. In the case of the former it's quite likely that several of the characters originated as actual leaders of Germanic tribespeople and Huns, and in the case of the latter there's no doubt at all that there was a Charlemagne. The historical interest of the chanson de Roland is greatly mitigated by the amount of historical accounts of Charlemagne written in and soon after his reign. Much less historical writing from late-Classical and Dark Age Europe has survived, and the historical interest of the Nibelungenlied is correspondingly greater. Now imagine that, other than those two poems, there were NO known written accounts of Attila and Charlemagne, just as currently the Pentateuch is the only known account of Moses. How much sense would it make to just say "they're fictional" and dismiss them as having no historical worth?
ME: Talking to a religious believer lately, you correctly pointed out that the burden of proof lies upon him who makes a positive statement. And yet here you yourself make a positive statement for which evidence is lacking. We don't know how much of the story of Exodus might be true.
Concerning the numbers of Israelites described in the OT as comprising the Exodus, since so many point to that as evidence that the story is fictional: 600,000 men, plus women, children, non-Israelites and livestock. It amazes me that people get so hung up on this number. It would seem that that many people wandering in the desert for 40 years probably would've left some evidence which archaeologists or other scholars, searching for so long, would've come across by now. But often people of other cultures in other eras had nothing resembling our accuracy when counting large numbers of people or other objects. (Cf Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol i,
pp 336-341, for a good discussion of how Medieval Europeans tended to use large numbers.) Combine an inexactness in counting to begin with, with the centuries of oral transmission which may have occurred before the story of the Exodus took fixed form, (now THIS would be an example of a game of Elephant) and it's easy to imagine that a migration of 60,000 families, or 6,000, or much fewer still, could've provided the basis for the OT stories.B: How about six families? Would that be enought to save the story? Maybe God killed every firstborn Egyptian kids and drowned all those soldiesr for the sake of six families.
ME: You can have that argument with someone who believes in God. For me, all theological discussions were over a long time ago. They don't interest me. The same way that what I was talking about, how the story of Exodus actually came to be, doesn't seem to interest you. It's an historical interest for me. In the same way, I'm curious about where the story of the Iliad came from. Both stories come from that era of upheaval in the second half of the second millenium BC which started with a sharp decline of old empires around the eastern Mediterranean, and ended with the emergence of some newly-literate cultures such as those of the Greeks and the Jews. I would reject the flat statement: "the Iliad is fictional," for the same reason I rejected A's statement above.
B: How about the whole damn story is just so much BS made up hundreds of years after the fact by a group of people that had begun to solidify around one religion and needed a myth of where they came from?
ME: Again: I'm not saying the Exodus story is historical. I'm not saying it's fictional. I'm disagreeing with anyone who claims to know, one way or another, how the story arose.
B: Just because a story may have some element of truth in it does not mean that, on a whole, it is not fictional.
ME: Again, I'm interested in finding out which elements might have an historical basis.
A: What's lacking is any evidence it is true. However, we do know the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt. Since there were no people to free there was no need for someone to free them. The Moses depicted in Exodus did not exist.
ME: We don't know that none of them were. That is to say: we don't whether there actually were a people that long ago which could properly be called Israelites -- although the Merneptah stele makes it seem likely that there were -- and if there were we don't know whether some of them were enslaved in Egypt. As to Moses, if you mean that either every detail in Exodus about Moses is true, or Moses didn't exist, well, that's absurd.
A: If anything, the Exodus story is possibly a garbled account of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt by Ahmose at the beginning of the New Kingdom.
ME: Is the Hyksos-Exodus hypothosis actually supported by any prominent people other than Simcha Jacobovici -- who, of course, is prominent for things like not actually being an archaeologist but pretending to be one on TV, and preferring the Jerusalem antiquities market to legitimate archaeological digs, and denouncing archaeologists en masse -- and vice versa, such as when he claimed that a bunch of archaeologists and epigraphers supported his views on what he -- and very few scholars -- call the Jesus family tomb, prompting them to take the extraordinary step of signing an open letter saying that they all disagreed with him?
C: There is no evidence of a significant number of Israelites being held in bondage in Egypt. There is no evidence of any of the event described in Exodus. Therefore, we have no option but to reject any claim that it's a historical account and it can be safely assumed that it's fiction.
ME: That's a perfect example of a premature "therefore." We have other options. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the entire Sinai peninsula actually hasn't been gone over with a fine-toothed archaeological comb just yet. There's no reason to conclude that there never was an Exodus. It's simply premature. Let me underscore once again, in case it wasn't already obvious from my previous remarks, that I think that if there was an Exodus it would have been much smaller than 600,000 families, and also that it may have consisted of some of the ancestors of the Israelites at a time before there actually were Israelites, and that if it did happen it probably constituted a minority of the Israelites -- or of their ancestors, as the case may be -- and that the majority probably were from the less powerful classes in Canaan.
D: Archaeologists have been looking for evidence of the Exodus for decades, nigh on a hundred years. Nothing's been found. In fact the evidence for the early Israelites points to a local origin.
ME: I know. Mostly likely, many or most Israelites were originally lower-class Canaanites or slaves of Canaanites who, when the Canaanite elite went into decline, took over the region which would eventually form the core of Israel. However, it seems possible to me that in addition to that indigenous core there was another group, maybe Canaanite, maybe not, which was part of the founding of Israel, who had been slaves in Egypt. That story came from somewhere.
D: Origin myths are tricky things. If you look at the "Historia Britonum" for example, it claims that the Brits were descended from Trojans (via Italy) fleeing the fall of that city. When you look at Irish myth in "The Book of Invasions" Greece, Spain, even Egypt etc get a mention. yet apart from Spain there seems no real link of the Irish to any of these places, and even that seems more a coincidence than a remembered truth. The point is that it need not necessarily be true that an origin myth is a reflection of a one time literal truth, not only do stories change over time but real places can become metaphors for something and somewhere else and stories merge together to create something completely new with the actual historical truths "edited out" (or not) over time. It gets even more messy when differing oral versions are frozen into a written form by people with their own biases. Not saying it can't be true, just that after all that archaeology I'd have thought something would have turned up by now if it were. Unless Zawi's sitting on the evidence that is.
ME: A lot of people claim to be descended from the Trojans. Check out whether the stories of Trojan ancestry can be traced back farther in time than the people's first contact with the works of Homer or one of the myriad neo-Homeric authors. Of course Exodus need not necessarily be true. Who's saying that it definitely has an historical core? All I've been saying here is that I think it's premature to rule out any historical basis. The lack of archaeological attestation of the Exodus would indeed be suspicious if it consisted of 600,000 families wandering for 40 years. If 3,000 families crossed the desert in 3 months, and it FELT like 40 years because it was so uncomfortable, and several centuries of oral tradition inflated the numbers before the story took a fixed written form, then it's an entirely different matter, and it's unreasonable to assume that some archaeological trace of the crossing MUST have turned up by now. I'm not claiming that Exodus is as accurate in all its numbers and little details as, say, Robert A Caro.
I'm very skeptical -- to put mildly -- of British claims of descent from the Trojans, as you seem to be, and like me, you probably wouldn't put much stock in the legends which have some of the 12 Apostles journeying all the way the British Isles, which if true would make the British church about as old as that of Rome or Jerusalem. But let's look at some other myths, the Nibelungenlied and the chanson de Roland. In the case of the former it's quite likely that several of the characters originated as actual leaders of Germanic tribespeople and Huns, and in the case of the latter there's no doubt at all that there was a Charlemagne. The historical interest of the chanson de Roland is greatly mitigated by the amount of historical accounts of Charlemagne written in and soon after his reign. Much less historical writing from late-Classical and Dark Age Europe has survived, and the historical interest of the Nibelungenlied is correspondingly greater. Now imagine that, other than those two poems, there were NO known written accounts of Attila and Charlemagne, just as currently the Pentateuch is the only known account of Moses. How much sense would it make to just say "they're fictional" and dismiss them as having no historical worth?
Sunday, February 5, 2012
If I'm Actually Good For Something --
-- if I serve a purpose, it may be in helping people to un-learn some cliches. There's an old cliche that says that cliches are cliches because they're true. Like many cliches, that sounds good without necessarily making any sense.
The market for cliches is quite crowded; alongside many old and famous glorious-sounding ones, some of which may possibly make some sense some of the time, new pithy phrases constantly crowd in, striving to establish themselves and become cliches. The better ones sound so good that often they persuade us to completely stop thinking about the topics they cover. Lately I've heard quite a few magnificent-sounded phrases of the formula: What defines a person is not A but B. If you come across the right terms for A and B you can come up with phrases which will bring massive amounts of perfectly-useful thinking to a screeching halt all at once. This is where I came in.
Does it make any sense to try to define a human being? Assuming it made sense, could it be done? I'm inclined to say no. Now obviously, the way human society runs at the moment, aspects of people's performance, behavior, rights, responsibilities and so forth are constantly being evaluated by educational, legal and other institutions. In that sense we're constantly defining one another, and no, unfortunately, I don't have any brilliant scheme to suddenly improve upon all of that. Those sorts of definitions, evaluations, judgements are not what I'm talking about. I'm referring to the attempt to sum up a person, or his or her "character." (Whatever the Hell that is.)
It seems we're often encouraged to define ourselves, judging from all of these would-be cliches asserting that what defines you is what you do when no-one else can see, or words to that effect. Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with these phrasemakers that it's good when people do good for its own sake and not only for reward, and they and I would probably agree almost all of the time about what sorts of things we're trying to encourage: honesty, courage, generosity, trust, kindness, regard for non-human animals species, reducing one's carbon footprint, fighting for freedom of expression and freedom to protest tyranny, etc, etc. Right on. I'm down with all of that.
But not with this business of "defining" a person. And not only oneself: go to a bookstore, browse the biography section and see how many times, on the covers of the books, you see the phrase "the definitive biography" or words to that effect.
So what's my problem? I think people are more complex than that. You're evaluated all the time by institutions in the course of our society functioning the way it does, do you really need to add an overall self-definition to all of that? Why do you need such stress? Couldn't you give yourself a break and try to enjoy and/or accomplish something instead? A "definitive" biography? Really? This famous powerful person whose life touched the lives of so many others for good or ill or sometimes both, you're going to define his or her entire life in one volume, three other biographers of the same person couldn't come up with three or more entire interesting areas you completely neglected? I don't think so!
And that's okay! It's fine! I'm bringing good news here, not bad. It's not that our definitions are weaker or more mistaken than we thought, or that I've spotted anything wrong with the noble craft of biography, but that we are more complex and full of possibilities than we routinely give ourselves and each other credit for. Every moment actually is full of various possibilities and choices, and we ignore and trample that rich complexity when we purport to define, to definitively capture in the few words of catch phrase, or even the few tens of thousands or tens of millions of words in a biography, something as complex as an entire human being.
The market for cliches is quite crowded; alongside many old and famous glorious-sounding ones, some of which may possibly make some sense some of the time, new pithy phrases constantly crowd in, striving to establish themselves and become cliches. The better ones sound so good that often they persuade us to completely stop thinking about the topics they cover. Lately I've heard quite a few magnificent-sounded phrases of the formula: What defines a person is not A but B. If you come across the right terms for A and B you can come up with phrases which will bring massive amounts of perfectly-useful thinking to a screeching halt all at once. This is where I came in.
Does it make any sense to try to define a human being? Assuming it made sense, could it be done? I'm inclined to say no. Now obviously, the way human society runs at the moment, aspects of people's performance, behavior, rights, responsibilities and so forth are constantly being evaluated by educational, legal and other institutions. In that sense we're constantly defining one another, and no, unfortunately, I don't have any brilliant scheme to suddenly improve upon all of that. Those sorts of definitions, evaluations, judgements are not what I'm talking about. I'm referring to the attempt to sum up a person, or his or her "character." (Whatever the Hell that is.)
It seems we're often encouraged to define ourselves, judging from all of these would-be cliches asserting that what defines you is what you do when no-one else can see, or words to that effect. Don't get me wrong, I agree 100% with these phrasemakers that it's good when people do good for its own sake and not only for reward, and they and I would probably agree almost all of the time about what sorts of things we're trying to encourage: honesty, courage, generosity, trust, kindness, regard for non-human animals species, reducing one's carbon footprint, fighting for freedom of expression and freedom to protest tyranny, etc, etc. Right on. I'm down with all of that.
But not with this business of "defining" a person. And not only oneself: go to a bookstore, browse the biography section and see how many times, on the covers of the books, you see the phrase "the definitive biography" or words to that effect.
So what's my problem? I think people are more complex than that. You're evaluated all the time by institutions in the course of our society functioning the way it does, do you really need to add an overall self-definition to all of that? Why do you need such stress? Couldn't you give yourself a break and try to enjoy and/or accomplish something instead? A "definitive" biography? Really? This famous powerful person whose life touched the lives of so many others for good or ill or sometimes both, you're going to define his or her entire life in one volume, three other biographers of the same person couldn't come up with three or more entire interesting areas you completely neglected? I don't think so!
And that's okay! It's fine! I'm bringing good news here, not bad. It's not that our definitions are weaker or more mistaken than we thought, or that I've spotted anything wrong with the noble craft of biography, but that we are more complex and full of possibilities than we routinely give ourselves and each other credit for. Every moment actually is full of various possibilities and choices, and we ignore and trample that rich complexity when we purport to define, to definitively capture in the few words of catch phrase, or even the few tens of thousands or tens of millions of words in a biography, something as complex as an entire human being.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
"Is the History Channel Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"
I thought that up. Me. If Comedy Central starts a series with that title I want my props. Although of course I in turn must give South Park props for inspiring me.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
An Unexpected Gain
It happens often that we try strenuously to do one thing, and fail, but without realizing it we have begun to succeed at something else.
There is no evidence that Constantine the Great
ever so much as thought of altering a word of the Bible --but of course there are powerful minds among us who will never be slowed down by such puny considerations as evidence. They have arrived at such conclusions as that the Bible as we know it is a product of the council of Nicea in AD 325 -- yes, sometimes they get the date of Nicea right -- and that its present form was decided there by Constantine, or by Constantine and Pope Sylvester,
nevermind that Sylvester wasn't at Nicea, there you go with your "facts" and evidence again, they have arrived at such conclusions, and, mighty minds that they are, if I disagree with them they leap with startling speed to further conclusions such as that I am a Christian, perhaps because they assume that anyone who disagrees with them about anything is a Christian, perhaps because they have heard some of the things I assert said by Catholics and they assume that everything every Catholic says is a lie, who can say? who can keep up with such minds?
I have tried and failed to bring evidence into my discussions with these folks, failed miserably to interest them in such things as the primary sources for Nicea
and manuscripts of Bible passages copies before and after Nicea
and the total lack of evidence for their theories contained in such documents but again, evidence schmevidence.
Okay, so it really looks like I can't talk to some people about the development of the text of the Bible, but without realizing it I had already begun to investigate the development of some paranoid conspiracy theories involving Constantine and the Catholic Church. Yes, it is a bit of an anachronism to speak of a Catholic Church existing distinct from an Orthodox Church as early as Constantine, and yes, it is more than somewhat ridiculous to assume that, if such a distinction had existed, Constantine would have favored the Church in far-off Rome to the one based in the new capital he had founded and named after himself. The absurdities are many and delicious here. Does the theory of Constantine and Sylvester as Biblical authors and/or editors have anything to do with the Donation of Constantine?
Perhaps vast numbers of Catholics and now anti-Catholics are still busily drawing conclusions based on not knowing that the Donation is a forgery. Or maybe it's just these anti-Catholic paranoid moronic conspiracy theorists.
How many people think Charlemagne was the guy from the Song of Roland,
of superhuman size and strength with extremely long flowing white hair and beard? How many think he was French? How many think the Franks were French right from the beginning, since before Merovich? How many think Charlemagne and King Arthur were pals and the King Philip murdered the Templars for the Grail and that Jesus was an ancestor of the Merovingians who of course were all as French as could be and that Leonardo was a Templar and that that was why he was buds with the King of France and that the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, was originally written in French by Constantine and Pope Sylvester, two Frenchman, alors! and only later translated into Hebrew and Greek?
Maybe these people have horrible paranoid fears of Frenchmen and see them everywhere. Maybe they saw me exercising my very limited skills in French once and that's why they think I've only been pretending for years to be an outspoken atheist, all the better to ensnare them with my horrible French Catholic treachery.
I've actually gained a little bit of sympathy for these kooks. It's fun leaping pell-mell from one conclusion to the next, even if I do have a little bit of evidence on my side.
There is no evidence that Constantine the Great
ever so much as thought of altering a word of the Bible --but of course there are powerful minds among us who will never be slowed down by such puny considerations as evidence. They have arrived at such conclusions as that the Bible as we know it is a product of the council of Nicea in AD 325 -- yes, sometimes they get the date of Nicea right -- and that its present form was decided there by Constantine, or by Constantine and Pope Sylvester,nevermind that Sylvester wasn't at Nicea, there you go with your "facts" and evidence again, they have arrived at such conclusions, and, mighty minds that they are, if I disagree with them they leap with startling speed to further conclusions such as that I am a Christian, perhaps because they assume that anyone who disagrees with them about anything is a Christian, perhaps because they have heard some of the things I assert said by Catholics and they assume that everything every Catholic says is a lie, who can say? who can keep up with such minds?I have tried and failed to bring evidence into my discussions with these folks, failed miserably to interest them in such things as the primary sources for Nicea
and manuscripts of Bible passages copies before and after Niceaand the total lack of evidence for their theories contained in such documents but again, evidence schmevidence.Okay, so it really looks like I can't talk to some people about the development of the text of the Bible, but without realizing it I had already begun to investigate the development of some paranoid conspiracy theories involving Constantine and the Catholic Church. Yes, it is a bit of an anachronism to speak of a Catholic Church existing distinct from an Orthodox Church as early as Constantine, and yes, it is more than somewhat ridiculous to assume that, if such a distinction had existed, Constantine would have favored the Church in far-off Rome to the one based in the new capital he had founded and named after himself. The absurdities are many and delicious here. Does the theory of Constantine and Sylvester as Biblical authors and/or editors have anything to do with the Donation of Constantine?
Perhaps vast numbers of Catholics and now anti-Catholics are still busily drawing conclusions based on not knowing that the Donation is a forgery. Or maybe it's just these anti-Catholic paranoid moronic conspiracy theorists.How many people think Charlemagne was the guy from the Song of Roland,
of superhuman size and strength with extremely long flowing white hair and beard? How many think he was French? How many think the Franks were French right from the beginning, since before Merovich? How many think Charlemagne and King Arthur were pals and the King Philip murdered the Templars for the Grail and that Jesus was an ancestor of the Merovingians who of course were all as French as could be and that Leonardo was a Templar and that that was why he was buds with the King of France and that the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, was originally written in French by Constantine and Pope Sylvester, two Frenchman, alors! and only later translated into Hebrew and Greek?Maybe these people have horrible paranoid fears of Frenchmen and see them everywhere. Maybe they saw me exercising my very limited skills in French once and that's why they think I've only been pretending for years to be an outspoken atheist, all the better to ensnare them with my horrible French Catholic treachery.
I've actually gained a little bit of sympathy for these kooks. It's fun leaping pell-mell from one conclusion to the next, even if I do have a little bit of evidence on my side.
Monday, January 23, 2012
"I wouldn't trust the average conservative pundit to be able to point out the sun on a clear day."
I wrote that. Me. I just thought I better hurry up and post it on my blog before others start stealing it.
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