This is Appalling!

Today I learned that a sequel to "Full House," the inexplicably popular sitcom which ran on ABC from 1987 to 1995, starring, among others, Bob Saget, who between starring in, directing and producing the show earned about half a billion dollars, and had a second run of fame after the show when word got around that Saget, star of "Full House," an unbelievably corny purveyor of conservative "family values," also happens to be a stand-up comedian whose act is very unusually dirty -- it's not particularly good, unfortunately. But it really is exceptionally offensive -- Today I learned that "Full House" has a sequel called "Fuller House" which has been on Netflix for several seasons now, and that Candace Cameron Bure, 

a main cast member in both series, who apparently is one of those Republican celebrities who is publicly known as a Christian because they publicly make a big deal of how they're Christians, has caused an uproar among Republican Christians who closely follow the lives of famous Republican Christians, because she put a picture of herself and her husband on Instagram in which her husband is touching her breast, and not just incidentally-accidentally brushing up against it or anything either, but blatantly grabbing it in a manner which many Christians have found to be un-Christian, and they've both got big smiles on their faces too, and Bure has responded to the uproar by saying that sex is something which God has given to people for us to enjoy. Even if they're Republican Christians. I believe at first she said she was sorry for upsetting people, and then later she said, You know what? I'm not sorry I upset you!

And I thought to myself: this is appalling! They've actually made a SEQUEL to "Full House"?! People actually hadn't had ENOUGH of "Full House"?!

Ammianus

Ammianus Marcellinus, ca 330-395, was a Roman soldier and historian. The 31 books of his Res Gestae originally covered Roman history in the period from AD 96 to 378. The first 13 books have been lost. Books 14-31 cover the period from 353 to 378. Some have speculated that originally there were an additional 5 books, 32-36.

Most of the surviving part of Ammianus' history describes Rome's armies defending the Empire's borders in great battles from Gaul to Persia. The passages describing the city of Rome portray it mostly as decadent and declining. The last surviving book, book 31, describes the Huns (before the birth of Attila) besieging Constantinople -- unsuccessfully. But with hindsight, the tone of the entire history is quite ominous. I cannot honestly say how much this is due to my knowing, as Ammianus did not know, that the city of Roman, and the western half of the Empire, was within a century of collapsing.

Ammianus saw himself as continuing the work of Tacitus, who wrote a history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, AD 14, to the death of the Emperor Domition in 96. Tacitus had seen himself as continuing the work of Livy, who wrote a history from the legendary beginnings of Rome until the time of Augustus. However, great portions of the work of all three authors have disappeared, so that we can no longer read this history of Rome in one continual sweep, from the end of the Trojan war until near the end of the Western Empire, as it was intended to be read. That could be done for probably only a couple of centuries, as it seems that it was in the late sixth century AD that large parts of these histories, along with much of the rest of Classical Latin literature, began to disappear, whether from the destruction of wars, or from indifference on the part of readers, or the decisions of scribes to copy this text and therefore not that one, or from the disdain of Christians for "pagan" accounts of history, or what have you.

Today, the text of Ammianus derives from the fragments of a 9th-century manuscript, M, another 9th-century manuscript, V, which has been shown to have been copied from M, and 14 manuscripts of the 15th century, all of which have been shown to be copies of V.

Few if any readers would place Ammianus in the same class as Livy and Tacitus as a writer. Livy and Tacitus are justly celebrated as great prose stylists. Latin was not Ammianus' first language, and it is therefore not surprising that his work is rarely praised on purely stylistic grounds. As a recorder of historical events, however, some have held him in very high esteem. For example, Edward Gibbon, who in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when he reaches the point in his own narrative where Amminaus' history ends, says of him:

"It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary."

Not everyone would agree with Gibbon that Ammianus is unusually unprejudiced, and, let's not dance around the issue, atheists tend to praise him more highly than Christians. Ammianus was not a Christian; seems to have put little stock into religion of any kind; served in the army under the Emperor Julian, who was the only non-Christian Emperor after Constantine the Great and has often been seen as a great monster by Christians and a great hero by atheists; has mostly high praise for Julian, but criticizes what he sees as the fanaticism in Julian's promotion of "pagan" (that is: traditional Roman polytheistic) religion. In short: however prejudiced Ammianus may have been, let's not pretend that the evaluation of Ammianus has been without religious prejudice. I won't pretend that I haven't been drawn to Ammianus to a great degree because of his non-Christian standpoint.

11 of the remaining 18 books of Ammianus' history are devoted to the exploits of the non-Christian Emperor Julian. Julian is often referred to, often sarcastically, as Ammaianus' hero. I think it's fair to say that Ammianus sees Julian as a hero, although I don't think that the sarcasm is necessary -- or effective, either, if you're trying to look like a serious critic of Ammianus and his view of history. As far as whether Gibbon was correct when he characterized Ammianus as unusually unprejudiced -- I think that would be much easier to judge if we could read the missing 13 books of his history, which cover the period between Ad 96 and 353. If Julian were praised in those 13 books, during the discussion of events centuries before his own birth, then I would find the accusations of prejudice more credible.

Overcoming Bad Mental Habits

Western civilization: 2000 years ago, although the mass of people were in some senses less free than they are today -- for example, as many as 15% of the people in the Roman Empire, and as many as 40% of the population of Italy, were slaves -- still, most of them, even the slaves, were somewhat freer than we are today to speculate about religious matters.

That freedom of discussion began to go away as Christianity began to take over in the 4th century, and by the end of the 5th century, like the Roman Empire's territory in the West, it was almost completely gone.

Western civilization had adopted a very bad idea: that there was only one true religion and that no-one was allowed to have any other opinions about it. We in the Western world began to shake off this intolerance of discussion of religious things in the 17th century, and we're still shaking it off.

As Christianity has faded, capitalism has grown. As there was with Christianity before, there is very little tolerance for people (socialists) who say that capitalism is a bad idea. There is constant discussion about what kind of capitalism is best, much as the Western universities were once dominated by discussions of what kind of Christianity was best, but to say that capitalism itself is something which must be overcome is still today a lot like saying several centuries ago that Christianity itself was nonsense: it's bad for a career in business or politics.

Now I want to make it as clear as I can that I did not just say that capitalism is a religion. I said that I saw a similarity in the development of the two and their places in Western society in two different eras. But they're not the same thing.

If I point out that a cat and a dog both have fur, I am not saying that a cat is a dog or that a dog is a cat. That would be ridiculous.

But a lot of Christian theologians have said that capitalism is a religion. Other people have said it too, but it seems to be very common among the theologians to say that this or that thing which is not a religion, is a religion. Karl Barth said that everyone has a religion and that therefore everyone is a theologian of some sort.

Theologians are constantly saying completely nonsensical things like that. It seems to me that they have to say all sorts of nonsensical things in order to sustain religious belief, or, more precisely, in order to impede clear thought about religion.

Capitalism is not a religion. Neither is socialism, or golf. But because we in the Western world have become so inundated with theological nonsense and so used to it, many of us fall for absurd notions such as that a way of doing business or a sport can be a religion.

Clear thinking about religion tells us that, although it may have been very useful in the past, and may still serve many functions today, its major premises about supernatural creators and guardians and eternal reward and punishment and so forth, are all unsound.

Similarly, and once again I am by no means saying that capitalism is a religion, clear thinking about capitalism tells us that it has many shortcomings among its basic premises, and that we can do better. Capitalism is dog-eat-dog. It rewards sociopathological behavior. It is deeply, inherently unfair.

It is not particularly unusual for me to say that I am an atheist. It's becoming more and more common for people to just come right out and say that they're atheists. And we're not all extremely pugnacious and unpleasant about being atheists, the way that the New Atheists are. We're getting closer and closing to the level of religious tolerance which existed in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, when it was taken for granted that anyone was free to say want they wanted about religion and to believe and practice as they wished, and it was considered quite rude to denigrate anyone else's religion and insist that one's own was the only correct one.

They may be very many people today who believe that it would be best if society were organized so that everyone contributed to the well-being of all according to their abilities, and was cared for by all according to their needs. That's socialism. Capitalism and socialism are incompatible. Almost all of us are part-capitalist and part-socialist: part-capitalist because we have to be in order to survive within the capitalist system which dominates the world today; and part socialist, because we're decent human beings. There are very few people who are purely capitalistic all the time. They are awful, disgusting people like Donald Trump and the AIDS medication douchebag. But they are following the rules of capitalism very strictly: buy lo, sell high, put off payment as long as possible, don't let your effect on others even enter into your thoughts -- and because they've followed these rules so consistently, they're very rich. Very rich, loathesome sociopaths. The AIDS medication douchebag was always smirking in court and during interviews because he knew he was following the rules of capitalism. What's clear neither to him nor to most of the people nauseated by his behavior and smirk is that following the rules of capitalism all the time makes you a disgusting person.

Not all investors are the same, of course. Not all extremely wealthy people are the same. Not all capitalists are capitalists all of the time. Different billionaires get their billions in very different way, and do very, very different things with their billions. If Bernie Sanders grasps that, he's trying very hard to make it seem as if he doesn't. Prejudice is forming opinions about someone based on their membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals -- even if that group is the group of billionaires. Some billionaires are socialists to a very great degree, whether Bernie can grasp that or not, and whether the part-socialist billionaires realize it themselves or not.

"Antisocial" means both that you're against socialism and that you're an unpleasant person. "Social" means the same thing in both cases, and also in the case of the term "sociopath." Exactly the same. If you're an investor and you take actions which will tend to extend the life of the petroleum industry and hinder the growth of green energy, because you calculate that it will make you more money, you're a sociopath -- and a perfectly good capitalist. Watch the money shows on TV: the effect which investments will have on others never enters into the conversation unless someone has made a calculation that "green stocks" will make more money than others. On the money show this is all completely out in the open. Nobody's even the slightest bit embarrassed about ruining things for other people. The effect on other people is 100% beside the capitalist point of why they're there.

Capitalism = getting more and more money for yourself. Socialism = making the world a nicer place: cleaner air and water, fewer starving people, etc.

And none of that is exactly rocket science, but very few people are willing to face what they're able to understand about socialism and capitalism, the same way that very few people were able to face the fact that the stories in the New Testament made absolutely no sense, and that is was absurd to base all of society on them, although that, too, was quite plain to see, if one would but look.

Old And New Theological Nonsense

The people who wrote the Old and New Testaments and the Koran all thought that God was a being who looked like a man, who lived in the sky and watched us, and so did almost all practicing Jews, Christians and Muslims until a couple of centuries ago. Those Christians and Muslims, plus those of the practicing Jews who believed in life after death (never a unanimous belief among Jews) believed that Heaven was up in the sky where God lived, and that Hell was deep underground. They believed that angels and demons, who looked somewhat like people except that they had wings and the angels had halos and demons had horns, were flying around us all the time, the angels having come down from the sky and the demons up from deep underground. They believed that Satan, an angel who used to live in the sky with God and the other angels, had been thrown out of Heaven and now operated from Hell, deep underground.

All of those paintings and sculptures made over thousands of years' time of God and angels and demons and Satan and Heaven and Hell -- they weren't symbolic presentations of principles of physics which weren't elaborated until long after they were painted or carved -- they were realistic depictions of what people believed literally existed. People claimed to have seen God and/or Jesus and/or angels, and these people weren't thought to be liars or hallucinating or over-imaginative -- and they damned well weren't thought to have been speaking in parables either. What they said was taken literally and they were thought to be blessed.

The many people accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition and Protestant witch-trials, most of them women, were usually thought to have literally had sex with horned flying demons, as part of Satan's master-plan to conquer the world with evil.

Now, a few people still believe in all of the above. When "progressive" theologians say that those people are misunderstanding things which were never meant to have been taken literally, they're full of shit. It's as simple as that. When they say that the bible and Koran weren't meant by their authors to be taken literally, they're full of shit. When they say that God is physics or love or some kind of principle of idea, they're saying something completely different than the Bible and Koran authors. They've had the good sense to reject the literal existence of all of those supernatural things in the Bible and in all of those religious pictures, but if they remain practicing Jews or Christians or Muslims, then they hardly ever have the intellectual honesty to admit that they believe in things which are completely different than the things in their holy books. They've switched from the nonsense of preaching the literal belief in all of those things to the nonsense of preaching that those things weren't literally believed in for the great majority of the history of they claim are their religions. It's maddeningly seldom that a contemporary theologian will talk sense about the theology of past eras.

I Gather That Christianity Is Not A Religion

After thousands of years' worth of general agreement that "religion" means what it means, all of a sudden people are telling us that Christianity is not a religion, that Buddhism is not a religion, that they're spiritual but not religious, that they're followers of Christ but not Christians. (I didn't make that last one up, there's at least one very silly rock group saying that. I forgot the name of the group. I haven't heard them, just read about them. I can't remember whether they're considered Christian rock -- by some. Not by themselves of course, because they're followers of Christ, not Christians.)

I think this sudden denial of the meaning of the word "religion" is related to the recent absurd assertion -- unfortunately, not nearly absurd enough to get theologians fired even from the world's most prestigious universities -- that Biblical literalism is no more than 200 years old.

It's as plain as can be that before the study of science and history began to give us more accurate ideas of things, Christians and practicing Jews believed that the world was 6000 years old. Including the most highly-educated Christians and practicing Jews. They believed that Moses led 600,000 families out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea, and the Christians, at least, although not all of the Jews, believed that Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that angels and demons were all around us all the time -- not metaphorical angels and demons but real ones. The real un-metaphorical torture and killing of the Inquisition -- unfortunately, even claiming that the Inquisition never killed anyone has not been enough to get academics fired from history departments, let alone theology departments -- had very often to do with this belief in the literal existence of those demons. And let's not let Protestants off the hook here. Those 20 people in Salem in the 1690's weren't executed over differences in interpretation of mythological tropes.

And all of the universities in Western Europe and the Americas were very firmly in control of Christian authorities until a few centuries ago. What happened about 200 years ago is almost the exact opposite of this very popular assertion among today's theologians: Biblical literalism didn't appear for the first time. Rather, it started to fade from its dominance as the default intellectual position in the West.

Both the Christians who deny that they're religious and the ones who say that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, that all of it is parables, not just the parables but all of it, are sort of half-smart about religion. They sort of half-suspect that religion is not the font of all wisdom which it has always claimed to be. (They may well deny that religious leaders ever made such a claim.) But they can't bear to consciously admit it, they are too heavily invested in religion, it would simply be too painful and/or too damned inconvenient, and so instead of a rational perception of religion for what it is and a description of it which makes any damn sense at all, we have this mass tendency to deny that religion is what it is, and this massive falsification of the history of religion.

This is one reason why it's important to study history. And really studying history means mastering the languages which people wrote and spoke in other times and places. So that you can check for yourself, and let people know when theologians, and even some historians, are trying to hand them a crock. This is what Gibbon did, and Bury, and Runciman, and this is why all 3 of them have been attacked to this day by apologists, many of them posing as historians.

Decline Of Religion

"Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel was Jewish, and the only religion I feel qualified to speak about is Christianity. It was always irrelevant, dull, oppressive and insipid. It is declining now because it has been refuted. And/or because after 1000 years of torturing and killing everyone who disagreed with them, Christian leaders gradually have been forced to accept more open discussion of these things. Without the torturing and killing, would Christianity ever have spread so far to begin with? In other words: did people EVER really accept it, or did they act as if they accepted it, because -- torture and burning alive? We'll never know. Because torture and burning alive as punishment for questioning orthodoxy don't encourage people to go on record with their real opinions.

That is far from a brilliant insight on my part, it's quite simple and evident. And yet it's one of the simple and plain aspects of the history of Western civilization which still is rather rarely acknowledged. Whether the Christian authorities stopped torturing and killing simply because they lost the authority to do so, or because they actually became more tolerant and merciful on their own, they still very energetically push a lot of nonsense. Where they have stopped actively combating the natural sciences, they now often turn to combating those of us who are struggling to make some sort of sense of history. Heschel is Jewish, but his statement quoted at the beginning of this post could have come from any of a number of Christian theologians and theologically-inclined historians of Western civilization who energetically, full-time, propagate nonsense about the subjects they ostensibly teach. Religion became oppressive? It has been 200 years since the Inquisition tortured and killed anyone. Clearly, religion is less oppressive in Western society today than it was in the Middle Ages. Few things could be so clear. But a lot of people who are supposed to be teaching about the Middle Ages are doing all they can to make them less clear.

Apologetics makes historical writing worse. Some scholars who in previous ages would have concentrated on non-stop invention of nonsense about "spiritual realms" -- that is, worlds of make-believe -- now concentrate full-time on shamelessly distorting those earlier eras, on making them seem less crazy and horrid than they were. They'll say that the beauty of Medieval cathedrals reflects an extraordinary level of piety and religious fervor in the time they were built. I agree with them that the Cathedrals are beautiful, but I say that they reflect a time in the dominions of Catholicism when the Church was far and away the biggest patron of the arts, and for very many artists the only patron who could ever pay them. Cathedrals are magnificent because when they were built, they were the only opportunity for most artists to express themselves. Art in Medieval Europe for most people equaled Catholic art, not because everyone was a fervent Catholic but because Catholic art was the only art that was allowed. Art must have been an especial comfort in that dull, oppressive, insipid time.

Christianity

What if Jesus actually said the exact opposite of some things people say he said? What if he said, "If someone hits you, don't just turn the other cheek!" or "If someone steals you cloak, don't just hand them your cloak too!" or "The meek never inherit anything. Stand up for yourself!" ?

Those statements make much more sense than what everybody says Jesus said.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not customizing my own version of Jesus, the way that almost all Christians have because it's impossible to live like Jesus in the New Testament, turning the other cheek and giving stuff to people who've robbed you and going with meekness as a strategy toward building wealth. I'm an atheist, not a Christian. I'm just saying that some aspects of Christianity are especially divorced from reality even compared to other religions, and that this basic, built-in unreality is a very serious problem. After thousands of years of pretending to follow a code of living which no-one follows and which no-one should follow...

Well, it's a problem. A mental problem. For which I have no brilliant solution right now, sorry. I really wish I had some brilliant suggestion about what to DO about this. But I don't. I just imagine that it might be good if some of us would occasionally face the unreality of supposedly living under this code which no one follows because no one can or should follow it because it's a dream world, as unreal as can be.

Just ponder this now and then, if you're so inclined. Thank you.

"That's Not What I Mean When I Say 'God'."

Traditionally, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God has been an entity who looks like a man with a grey or white beard, lives in the sky and intervenes personally in the lives of people. The Greek god Zeus bears a lot of resemblances to the Abrahamic capital-G God. There's just one letter's difference between "Zeus" and "Deus," Greek for "God."

Today, most Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in a God who differs to a lesser or greater degree from the bearded man in the sky. Sometimes to such a great degree that, instead of "God," they could call it something else, like "physics" or "love" or "gravity."

So why do they still call it "God"? (Lucretius was posing the very same question to pagans almost 2100 years ago.) Nietzsche may have found the answer: he declared, in his book Der Antichrist, in the 52nd chapter:

"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist." ("Religious belief means not wanting to know what is true.")

They don't seem to want to know that not very long ago at all, when members of their religions said "God," they meant an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, and not physics or love or gravity. They seem to want to pretend that the bearded man in the sky was always a symbol, of -- something. Something other than an actual omnipotent bearded man who lived in the sky.

It's difficult to talk sense with people who don't want to make sense.

Nothing I've said in this post is a secret, or hard to understand. But many people, maybe most people on Earth, don't want to understand anything of the sort. Some of these people who don't want to understand such things, things which only become clearer and clearer with the passage of time, are intelligent enough that they have to study theology full-time just to keep themselves confused.

The Religious Situation

Back in the 20th century there was a particularly silly conversation going on among some literary critics and associated buffoons, asking when and if anyone was ever going to write The Great American Novel. Philip Roth made appropriate fun of this pretentious silliness by calling the novel he published in 1973 The Great American Novel.

One of the reasons it was silly was because many great American novels had already been written. But if you insisted on calling one of them THE Great American Novel, well that was also no problem: Herman Melville published it in 1851, and America's literary critics, those monumental wastes, trashed it. It's called Moby Dick. It stands comparison with War and Peace and Don Quixote and Tom Jones and Ulysses and any other Greatest Novel Of All Time you got. Moby Dick is the stuff.

It begins with a page concerning the word "whale" in English and the words for whales in several other languages; then a dozen pages of quotes concerning whales taken from the a variety of sources arranged chronologically from Genesis up to Melville's time; then comes Chapter 1, whose first paragraph contains these three sentences:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

When I first read Moby Dick I had already been very pleasantly surprised by the literary whaling voyage undertaken before Chapter 1, but when I read the above passage, Melville had me. I knew that he was one of my guys and that I was one of his. It came as no surprise to me when, some time after my first reading of Moby Dick, and then of his novel The Confidence Man and his story "Bartleby the Scrivener," I learned that Melville had been an atheist. Of course he had. The thing about needing the strong moral principle in order not to spectacularly lose his composure and manners had already told me that he was like me.

I came here today to talk to you about the people who make you want to step into the street and lose all control of the angry part of yourself: Christian theologians. I got a book today: The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich, translated from Die religioese Lage der Gegenwart by H Richard Niebuhr.

I have this book because I am weak, in insufficient control of my bookworm tendencies, and because it was free, one of the books being given away at the local library. I knew better than to even pick up a book by Paul Tillich. And when I read on the back cover of this Living Age Books edition, Published by Meridian Books, Fifth printing July 1960, that Nietzsche was one of the book's subjects, I knew even better.

But I'm weak. And so, on the first page of Niebuhr's introduction to his translation of Tillich's book, I read this:

"It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes. Tillich is more interested in the religious values of secularism, of modern movements in art, science, education, and politics than in tracing tendencies within the churches or even in theology."

"The religious values of secularism." Cato the Younger falls on his sword, Ishmael (the narrator of Moby Dick) gets on a ship, some poor guy who doesn't know what to do walks out onto a crowded Manhattan street and actually does start knocking people's hats from their heads, or something even less socially acceptable, because he simply can't take it any more, until they drag him screaming to Bellevue -- Melville and I write about it. Maybe I'll take a hint from Roth and write a book and call it The Religious Situation. Or The Moral Landscape.

Stupid New Atheist Memes

First of all, that's a picture of Epicurus, not Lucretius. Secondly, Lucretius never said anything so ridiculous. (And neither did Epicurus.)

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant? No, unfortunately, not always. On the contrary, there have been many religious wars waged by people convinced that their own religion is either the best one, or the only true one.

And everybody knows that. Politicians using all religions? No, they very often pick just one, or two, and inflame the hatred of the ignorant for other ones. Everybody knows that too.

And as far as philosophers are concerned, as ridiculous as it may sound to the ridiculous person who made that ridiculous meme, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and most of the rest of the most famous philosophers in the Western world have been religious, and most of the rest have been able to see the major differences between different religions. And one of the most ridiculous of the world-famous Western philosophers, Seneca, who actually did say something which was altered to be more ridiculous and become the text of the meme above -- was an atheist.

The atheist Nietzsche -- yes, he was an atheist. Theologians who try to tell you differently just haven't read his work very carefully at all -- wrote at great length about the differences between various religions. He was strongly opposed to Christianity. Although he didn't recommend another religion in its place, he did describe other religions as being at the very least significantly less bad than Christianity. A great deal of the book Der Antichrist consists of Nietzsche comparing Christianity to other religions. All of his books contain praise of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, which was for the most part not atheist, but pagan.

Nietzsche was thoroughly capable of seeing worth in various aspects and by-products of religions, plural, without ever becoming a theist, mono- or poly-. The person who made that meme at the beginning of this post, and the lunkhead atheists who are so eagerly spreading it and similar memes and busily misrepresenting Lucretius' work and making up inauthentic quotes, are obviously not at that level yet.

Yesterday I saw a meme with the caption "Atheist Church" and a picture of a library. (Not even a particularly large library.) I replied that what should have been there was a picture of a comic book store. No, not all atheists are comic book fanboys. I myself have not read any comic books since before I was full-grown, and even then I tended to prefer grownup books. Not all atheists are comic book fanatics, but the ones who post memes with inauthentic quotes, the ones who say that all religions are the same, the ones who say "Hey look, the Pope's wearin a dress! Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck." and "Believers are stupid, and we atheists are smart, hyuck hyuck hyuck!" do seem, for the most part, to have spent more time in comic book stores than in libraries.

And if they had spent more time exploring actual churches, besides the store-front snake-handling places their inbred parents dragged them to when they were kids, and mosques and synagogues and other places of worship, then they'd know that many of those places of worship are among the most beautiful things yet created by humans. If they knew that, well, probably some of them would re-convert. But maybe a few others would begin to see that things aren't always so black-and-white and cut-and-dried as their favorite memes with inauthentic quotes and pictures of the wrong guy would have it. If they left their parents' basements more often and walked around outside in a city or two now and then with their eyes open, they might learn more than by staying in their stupid online atheist bubbles with their heads up their asses.

If You Insist That Christianity Is Directly Descended From Mithraism --

-- you resemble a fundamentalist in not seeming interested in learning about the actual history of the two religions. The fundamentalist will say that all resemblance comes from Mithraists copying Christians. You say the opposite. And both you and the fundy are clearly grinding axes. Excuse me, but some of us would rather study history.

It's not clear which of the two religions is older. It's not clear that either directly borrowed anything at all from the other.

And anyway, it seems to me that an actual atheist wouldn't favor any religions, on account of being... you know -- an atheist. (Yes, I am accusing New Atheists of atheisting improperly.)

If you know me, you know that I'm all about the primary sources. Read modern historians if you want to, but check their work: look at the materials from which they formed their writing, and see for yourself whether you would come to similar conclusions. And yaaay, Maarten Jozef Vermaseren collected the small amount of evidence of Mithraism still existing in the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae.

"When Did Christians Turn Judgmental?" Are You Kidding Me?

I don't know who exactly is responsible for this dopey meme: 2 rainbow-colored hands are held together to make a heart shape, and the caption reads:

"WHEN DID USING YOUR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST OTHER BECOME A CHRISTIAN VALUE? CHOOSE LOVE."

But to answer the question: it started pretty early. It was already underway when Paul wrote his earliest New Testament texts, around AD 50. It's hard to know exactly when it began. To say that the earliest history of Christianity is hazy is a huge understatement. I haven't stopped investigating it, and I'm still not at sure about details such as whether or not Jesus actually existed, or whether Paul or someone else invented him.

*Sigh*. Yes, there are also non-judgmental Christians. Maybe there have been non-judgmental Christians for as long as there have been Christians. Maybe Jesus really existed and maybe Matthew 7:1 is an accurate quote from him. ("Judge not, that ye be not judged.") But there were also the other kind all along, starting very early.

Are some people somewhere on Earth actually so sheltered that they don't know about judgmental Christians? Maybe in the middle of China somewhere, out in the boonies. Maybe. But there seem to be people with selective perception everywhere you turn. Especially when it comes to religion. People who do mean things, or nice things, or what have you, are not the REAL Christians, or Muslims, or what have you, depending upon what variation of the No True Scotsman fallacy you are committing and which religion you are boosting or attacking.

Maybe the old advise never to discuss sex, politics or religion in public wasn't meant so much to protect sensitive people from being offended, but to protect intelligent people from being disgusted.

Andres Serrano And "Piss Christ"

I have all sorts of mixed feelings about Serrano and "Piss Christ," his photograph which in 1987 was the pretext for Jesse Helms to raise a fuss, because Serrano had gotten some Federal grant money. On the one hand I resent Serrano because he got more grant money than I ever did just by putting a crucifix in a jar, pissing in the jar and taking a snapshot; on the other hand I see his point about referring to the original meaning of the crucifix and how that meaning has been lost: here's Serrano in a 2014 Huffington Post interview, talking about "Piss Christ" and the public reaction to it:

"The only message is that I'm a Christian artist making a religious work of art based on my relationship with Christ and The Church. The crucifix is a symbol that has lost its true meaning; the horror of what occurred. It represents the crucifixion of a man who was tortured, humiliated and left to die on a cross for several hours. In that time, Christ not only bled to dead, he probably saw all his bodily functions and fluids come out of him. So if "Piss Christ" upsets people, maybe this is so because it is bringing the symbol closer to its original meaning."

I get that. And that -- the concept of using bodily fluids to remind people what the crucifix actually means -- is about all that I find anything close to exciting about "Piss Christ." (And like most people who've ever heard of Serrano, I'm sure, this is the only art of his I've seen pictures of or read descriptions of.)

On the 3rd hand I'm an atheist who's very tired of Christianity, and in the very next words in Serrano's answer in that interview, he provides an example of one sort of the Christian things I'm tired of:

"There was a time prior to the 17th century when the only important art, the only art that mattered, was religious art. After that, there were very few contemporary art pieces that were considered both art and religious, and "Piss Christ" is one of them."

*sigh* *thumb and forefinger to bridge of nose* Andres, in Western civilization, there was a long, long time before the 17th century when Christian art was pretty much the only sort of art which artists were allowed to make, and definitely the only sort of art for which most artists could hope to get paid. It's sort of ironic when a 20th- and 21st century artist such as you, who sticks his neck out for freedom of artistic expression, speaks longingly of bygone eras in which there was so very little such freedom, when Christians did their very best to destroy all of the art of some non-Christian cultures, art which often enough was sacred to those cultures, when anyone who either pissed on a crucifix or took a photograph of anything would be first tortured and then burned alive as a witch.

Who knows what great non-Christian art Western artists might have made between the 5th and 17th centuries if they'd simply been allowed to? So, phooey on your good old days of Christianity, Andres!

And there are still other hands.

So, is "Piss Christ" good art? It raised Jesse Helm's already-too-high blood pressure. Therefore: good art. (Also: surely, the publicity from Helm's criticism surely did more for Serrano's career than any other single act, including the big fat government grant which outraged Helms and which I resent.)

But no, honestly: not so great. I've never wanted to have a print of it on my wall. I've never stared fascinated at a picture of Serrano's one world-famous picture. I get the mild conceptual stimulation referred to above, and that's about all that the photograph has ever done for me.

But still, I'm pro-art, and even the worst art is better than the best of other things to which people devote their entire lives, like fracking or junk mail or the GOP.

To me "Piss Christ" is neither the best nor the worst art, to me it's meh art, which means I'll stand up for Serrano if he's being attacked by right-wing politicians, but otherwise, yawn.

Bias Toward Assuming That Jesus Existed

Clearly, in our culture the topic of Jesus is not handled the way that other topics are. In a culture which has been built around Jesus for 1600 years (ca AD 400 being the time in which public expressions of non-Christian worldview started to be severely curtailed), it should come as no surprise that the discussion of the historical Jesus does not resemble that of the historical Achilles or Arthur.

So, while I'm not telling you anything new when I say that Jesus has a unique place in our culture, I think it might be helpful to try to constantly keep this uniqueness in mind when we're talking about Jesus' historicity or lack of it. Habits of thought and speech which have accumulated over the course of thousands of years, and reinforced by deviations from acceptable expression being punished by torture and death, are not going to be shed so easily. Indeed, I doubt that it's yet possible even to be conscious of the extent of those habits.

And in addition to the effect that Christianity has had on our entire civilization, there is the added fact that for most of the past 1600 years, the Christian clergy held a a very tight monopoly on our educational institutions. For a large portion of the Middles Ages in Western Europe it was rather rare that someone who wasn't a member of the clergy could read. See how many Medieval works of history or science or philosophy you can find, let alone theology proper, which don't begin with a mention of Jesus. Investigate the relationships between the leaders of universities and the Catholic Inquisitions and Protestant witch hunts. This tight hold has relaxed somewhat, but we still don't find it odd -- if and when we pause to think about it at all, that is -- that very many of our leading universities in the US are run by churches, or how often private grammar and high schools run by religious institutions are still thought of as the best ones. In the Middle Ages Christian theology was called the Queen of the sciences, and theologians were the heads of the universities. Today theologians are only sometimes the presidents and chancellors of universities. But the line between Biblical scholars and theologians is still either very blurry or non-existent at most American universities.

What I'm saying is: OF COURSE there remains a great bias in favor of the assumption that Jesus existed and against any examination of that assumption. Of course the study of Jesus is dominated by a last-ditch defense of powers and authorities which used to come close to those of monarchs in many cases, and which exceeded those of monarchs in many others, besides those instances in which the local Prince and the local Bishop were one and the same. Of course many alliances between secular political power and Christian power and academic power remain, some plain to see and others decently shielded from the light of day. And of course tradition will be much more powerful in faculties of theology and Biblical studies than in some other faculties.

Where I came in was: the topic of Jesus is discussed differently than other topics. It receives many times more attention than the topic of whether Odysseus really existed. Or Paris and Helen. No one bats an eyes if you ask whether there really was a Helen. It's not a traumatic subject to anyone these days, with the possible exception of a few dozen especially-passionate Classical scholars. People react completely differently to the topic of Jesus. Of course they do. They very often lose their composure and, temporarily, a bit of their minds, whether in a pro- or anti-Christian way.

And I do think that there's a sort of traditionalist last stand going on in the very places which should be in charge of doing away with it: the places where academics specialize in the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity and Jesus. I'd be lying if I told you that the reaction of the experts to doubts about Jesus' existence didn't seem different to me, not only from contemporary academia in general, but also the reactions of the very same Biblical scholars when the topic is anything else. Anything else at all: Abraham's existence, Moses' existence, David's existence, John the Baptist's existence, Jesus' actual words, his actual deeds -- every single imaginable topic except for the topic of Jesus' actual existence. Bring that up, and a lot of them go kind of nuts. And almost all the rest go completely nuts.

Early Christianity: How Much Do We Really Know?

There's the question of the historical Jesus, enthusiastically discussed by more and ever more laymen, and left undiscussed by Biblical scholars and Christian theologians scholars who still almost unanimously insist that the matter has been thoroughly investigated (When? Where?) and that it's certain Jesus existed, and Shut up!

Then there's the entire excitement surrounding Constantine the Great, the inaccuracies about him which are so popular: It's still so often said that he made Christianity Rome's official religion -- he did not. It's said that he (often: he and the Pope) wrote or re-wrote or edited the New Testament at the Council of Nicea. Nope: the Pope wasn't there; the Pope and Constantine had many more reasons to be enemies than to be allies; nobody altered the Bible or discussed what should or shouldn't be in it at Nicea; and there's no evidence that Constantine gave a rat's ass one way or the other about what was in it.

Here's a question which might deserve much more study than it has generally received so far: would Constantine have involved himself with Christianity at all if his mother, the empress Helena, had not been a Christian? I put it to you: which seems more plausible: that a Roman Emperor who, all who have studied his life agree, was a particularly savvy politician, that this Emperor gave some support to Christianity because, at a crucial battle in his struggle to solidify his control of the Empire, he saw a cross in the sky along with words telling him that with this sign he would conquer -- or that he gave some support to Christianity because his mother was a Christian and had a lot of influence on him?

The story of the cross and the words in the sky, and a lot of other nonsense, comes from Eusebius, who unfortunately is our most important single surviving source of the history of Christianity up until Constantine in general, and of biographical information about Constantine in particular. I say unfortunately because Eusebius' pants were on fire. I say unfortunately because the truth was not in him.

Some apologists and conservative historians will attack me for doubting the veracity of Eusebius, but that's okay. I'm in very, very good company: Edward Gibbon's multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire



has been praised as a groundbreaking work of genius, still unsurpassed in many ways two and a half centuries after its first publication -- because that's exactly what it is. It has also been vehemently condemned from the time it first appeared uo until the present day -- because Gibbon was clearly (although not quite explicitly) an atheist, and because he dared to question the accuracy of the historical accounts given by people like Eusebius.

A century after Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, another historian of great genius, enjoying the greater freedom of expression given to us all by courageous pioneers of freethinking like Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire, found no reason to hide his great annoyance with Eusebius, who had so thoroughly hidden and blurred the history which he, Burckhardt, was working so hard to find. Burckhardt came right out and called Eusebius a liar. and of course, the same people who disliked Gibbon also attacked Burckhardt, for the same reasons.

But lo and behold great wonders, O ye nations: as time passes, Gibbon and Burckhardt look more and more reasonable, as Eusebius, whose veracity was even attacked by other Christian historians as early as the 5th century, looks more and more like a teller of tall tales and less and less like the historian he called himself, and for which he was mostly taken from his time to Gibbon's.

And this man, Eusebius, is pretty much the founder of Christian historicism, the foundation upon which much of the history written over the course of the next millenium in Christendom, was based. Gibbon and Burckhardt and anyone else who cared about investigating history properly were quite right to be annoyed. Such a shaky foundation has produced a lot of spectacularly shaky results, and continues to do so today, although, as I said, Eusebius' falsehoods are finally beginning to be exposed and undone.

So I would say, to those who dislike Christianity and its continued omnipresence and power: don't blame Constantine above all others. If it hadn't been for his mother, he might never have given any support to Christianity. He might have continued Diocletian's persecution of it, and you and I might never have heard of Christianity. But far more, blame Eusebius, who took Constantine's support of Christianity and said that it was a conversion to Christianity, although Constantine never withdrew his support for the pagan religions. Blame Eusebius for intensifying the Christian disregard for reality and reason. Blame Eusebius for spreading the idea that Christianity had conquered Rome, decades before it actually did. Reality and reason and historical accuracy were defeated first, and then the Empire followed.

Most Documentary TV Shows On Ancient Topics (Biblical Studies And Early Christianty, Mostly) Really, Really Suck

A recent program about the fragments of the True Cross did a fairly good job of presenting the viewer with a story about the activities of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and a devout Christian, who according to that story pretty much invented what we now know as Christian veneration of relics. The program tells us that Helena went to Jerusalem, found a piece of wood and declared that it was the Cross on which Jesus was put to death, cut it up into little pieces and distributed these pieces to churches all across the Roman Empire. This is the traditional story about how Helena began the belief that all of those pieces of wood in churches are pieces of True Cross. There are very good reasons to doubt whether Helena ever interested herself in relics at all. If these reasons were presented during this program, I must have blinked or zoned out at the time.

The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.

The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?

Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.

Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.

I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.

Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.

And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.

Compassion

Is it a good thing?

Before you stop reading and start shouting that I'm an evil bastard and/or a Republican for even asking such a question, let's acknowledge that "compassion," like "love," is one of those terms which we need to examine more closely, because it can mean more than one thing. If we leave such terms unexamined, we leave some confusion unaddressed.

Tracing the term back to its Latin roots, "to have compassion with" someone means "to suffer with" them. The Latin "passio" means suffering, and "com" or "cum" is a Latin word with various meanings, often used as a prefix, often mean "with" or "along with."

All decent people want to alleviate the suffering of their fellow humans whenever they can. Nietzsche was a thoroughly decent person and he wanted this as much as any decent person.



He was often misunderstood on this point -- and Machiavelli too -- both by rotten uncaring people who thought he was one of them, and by decent caring people who thought he was one of those rotten people, because he dared to examine what compassion really is. Actually, in German the situation is a bit clearer, because instead of using a form of a Latin or Greek term, Germans use a modern German compound word to refer to compassion: "Mitleiden," which means "Withsuffering," "suffering-with." In English, "compassion" can also refer to the readiness to actually do something about the suffering of others, without necessarily feeling bad because someone else feels bad.

A person has been injured and lies bleeding in the street. Bystander A comes by and weeps and wails for the suffering of the injured person, and does nothing else. Bystander B, who is in a particularly cheerful mood, comes by, immediately calls an ambulance, and until the ambulance comes does what he can to keep the wound clean and slow the bleeding. And B stays particularly cheerful the whole time.

Who's been comapssionate, A or B? Like I say, it depends how you define "compassion." If you define it to mean suffering along with those who are suffering, then A has been compassionate. If you define it to mean doing something to help others, then B is the compassionate one.

I'm afraid that we often define compassion in the sense of Bystander A: suffering with others, participating in their suffering. I find that to be actually worse than useless: it increases the amount of suffering in the world. Bystander B reduces the amount of suffering in 2 ways: by helping, and by not suffering himself.

The Christian martyrs -- the real ones, that is, and not the ones whose suffering existed only in myth --



-- were compassionate with the real or mythical sufferings of the real or mythical Christ, and eager to share in that suffering. Galileo preferred to lie his way out of torture to give himself the opportunity to continue his work in science during the house arrest in which he spent the final years of his life. The martyrs were like Bystander A: eager to suffer. Galileo was like Bystander B: full of the desire to be useful.

Good and evil are relative terms. Nietzsche wrote about that a lot and even put it in the title of one of his books. I do not have have the same opinions as everyone else about what is good. I think that Bystander B and Galileo were good, because they were good for something.

As a young monk, before he proceeded into open rebellion and started the Lutheran Reformation, Martin Luther went to Rome and was outraged by -- Michelangelo. He was outraged by churches adorning themselves in gorgeous art. Back in Germany he was outraged by the sale of indulgences. Germans were paying lots of money to have official documents from the Catholic Church certifying that their souls had been saved. Back in Rome the money paid for all that gorgeous art. Apparently not a lot of Italians or French people could be induced to pay money for such things. Did Luther denounce his fellow Germans for being such schmucks? No, he denounced the Catholic Church and ushered in centuries worth of incredibly gory religious wars. Not because people in Germany were too superstitious, as many a Lutheran apologist might have you believe, but because in Rome people were feeling too good and living too well.

Even today a lot of Protestants are bitterly angry about the very same Renaissance art in the Vatican. And a lot of atheists are bitterly angry about it too. They -- both the angry Protestants and the angry atheists -- talk about selling off all that art for the good of the poor. As if poor people can't appreciate art.

No, I don't think that art is the enemy of the poor. I think those angry Protestants and atheists -- and let's not leave out the few angry Catholics who're with them. Among 1 billion Catholic there've got to be a few who are that crazy -- are Bystander A, more interesting in increasing suffering than lessening it.

Don't go after art if you really want to help the poor (I'm not talking to the angry people I've described in the preceeding 2 paragraphs, they're not listening to me anyway, they're much too busy hating each other and me and quite possibly you too, I'm talking to those of you who are relatively sane). Go after tax breaks for billionaires. Support raising minimum wages. Help publicize sweatshops and slave labor and shut down those who grow richer off of human misery. You can do all that and love art at the same time, in fact you can do all that and make great art at the same time -- in fact, if you're not yet very familiar with art and the lives of artists, you might be amazed at how many great artists do exactly all of that sort of thing all at the same time.

You don't have to be miserable in order to be good.

What I Like (Art) And Dislike (Theology) About Religions (Plural)

Generally speaking, I dislike the religions least with which I am least familiar. I'm not saying there are no differences between religions, because there certainly are, but the more I learn about a religion, the more depressingly obvious its similarities with other religions become. The religion I disrespect the least at the moment is Sikhism. I know almost nothing about it. Almost everything I do know about it comes from one TV show hosted by Anthony Bourdain and another one hosted by Michael Palin, in which they take part in a festival held at Sikhism's Golden Palace. Looked pretty cool on TV.

I can often enjoy religious art if there isn't anybody in my face pushing theological nonsense on me. (And for the bazillionth time, you Buddhists: Buddhism is a religion, your nonsense is religious, and please keep it outta my face! Thank you, namaste!) I love Byzantine mosaics. If you're ever in Venice, you should step inside St Mark's, and if you're ever in Ravenna you should step inside St Vitale's, and look at the mosaics. Probably you'll love the mosaics, cause probably you're not dead inside. I guarantee that going to those churches and looking at the mosaics will not be a waste of your time, because probably you'll love the mosaics, which are made of glass, not stone, and are lit from sunlight shining through them. If you don't like either the 12th-century mosaics in St Mark's or the 6th-century mosaics in St Vitale's, if you really are that dead inside, then you'll know that you don't like any mosaics anywhere and never will, and you'll never have to waste one more moment of your life looking at or thinking about mosaics.

You're welcome. It's a pleasure and an honor for me to educate the public like this. And it will be even more of an honor and privilege, and I will be able to do it even more effectively, if you can imagine such a thing -- I know right?! -- when I win the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, so, c'mon now, talk me up! Let's do this! Thank you.

I am somewhat familiar with ancient Greek and Roman literature, which constantly makes reference to the Graeco-Roman pagan religion, but I don't know if I can honestly say that I'm familiar with that religion. Ancient Greek and Latin are inaccurately referred to as dead languages, because many people still read and even write them. They're not dead, and they're not going to die soon. Besides those fluent in those languages, millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions, are familiar enough with stories from Classical Greek and Latin that they could name half a dozen Graeco-Roman deities off the top of their heads. Hollywood keeps making blockbuster movies based on those ancient stories. You know why? Because they're great stories, that's why!



Still, I think it's fair to say that Graeco-Roman pagan religion is dead. We still have stories from that religion all around us. What we do not have is active adherents of that religion telling us in all seriousness that we must practice that religion for our own good. I don't know how seriously that religion was taken by most Greeks and Romans before Christianity killed it. Certainly, some people took it all very seriously and literally. But I suspect that even in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, many people didn't take it seriously, and that as time went by it was taken less and less seriously, and that this made it much easier to enjoy. Yes, animals were sacrificed to numerous Graeco-Roman deities, including many deceased and living Roman Emperors, right up until the time when the Christians forbad it, and tore down the temples where the sacrifices were many and the deities praised. But how many of the people attending these pagan festivities took it all literally, and for how many of them was it primarily a good time and a chance to meet people?

We can say at the very least that the pagans allowed people to say that they thought there was nothing at all supernatural going on and that nothing in religion could be taken literally by any serious person. People said and wrote such things and weren't punished for it. When the Christians took over people were killed for casting doubt on Christian teachings, doubts which often were to do with very minor differences in doctrine and didn't come anywhere close to open atheism -- and they continued to be killed for such dissent until the early 19th century. This killing for religious dissent was one of the things Napoleon wanted to erase from Europe, and actually did erase. Napoleon wasn't anything like the thoroughly, shallowly egotistical monster which traditional monarchist propaganda somehow still very often succeeds in portraying him to have been.

Before Christianity took over, there surely were a few pagan zealots who could be as tiresome as the zealots of any other religion. And in long-remote times (and occasionally not as remote as the Greeks and Romans themselves liked to believe, see Frazer's Golden Bough),



say, earlier than 500 BC in Rome and 700 BC in Greece, the zealous believers and priests had wielded gruesome power and it was all very, very serious indeed. But by 400 BC some Greek philosophers were openly doubting the existence of any and all supernatural things, and by AD 0 Greeks and Romans were joking about such things, and if anybody was upset enough to want to kill such mockers, they certainly didn't have the power to do so. Mocking Rome's political authority was a different matter altogether, of course, but religion, all religion, religion per se and any and all belief in the supernatural, could be openly doubted without Rome feeling that it besmirched her political authority. Supposedly the Emperor Vespasian joked as he was dying in AD 79, "“Vae, puto deus fio” ("Uh-oh, I think I'm becoming a god.") The point is not whether or not Vespasian actually said something like that, and also not whether any Popes ever said similarly blasphemous things -- I suspect that a few of them have -- but that an anecdote indicating that an Emperor who was worshiped as a deity had thought that religion was nonsense became public in the ancient Graeco-Roman world without anyone at all appearing to have gone all to pieces upon hearing it, whereas a similar anecdote about an irreligious Pope would have caused quite an uproar indeed.

To me, this seems to indicate that the ancient Romans took religion much less seriously, and to me, that's close to saying that very many of them didn't believe in religion or the supernatural at all. Of course, here as always and everywhere, we can only guess what others truly believe. We can only infer from their actions and statements as to their beliefs.

How New Atheists Can Make Even Someone Like Reza Aslan Look Bright By Comparison

You heard me, pardner: there's a feud a goin' on between Reza Aslan and the New Atheists, and I must take Aslan's side.

A lot of people, probably most of them Christians, heard about that awful woman who reads the diatribes posing as news on Fox News ask Aslan how he as a non-Christian could dare to write a book about Jesus, and naturally took Aslan's side. Maybe some of them first actually read something by Aslan after that interview and said, Hm, this guy isn't much of a writer, but still, between him and that lady on Fox, I'm totally on his side.

In a not dissimilar way, I and some other atheists have seen the Harris-vs-Aslan shitstorm gathering force, and been terribly unimpressed by Aslan, but still side with him immediately and unconditionally on topics of religion if it's a choice between him and Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.

Aslan has become famous with a supposedly nonfictional book about Jesus which is just as fictional as most supposedly nonfictional books about Jesus are. Like the authors of most of these books, Aslan has created a Jesus in his own image, or in the image of what he flatters himself to be. There's so little we actually know about Jesus that whoever writes an entire book about him, or even a book which long sections about him, has to make stuff up. Some of us, like me and Kazantzakis and Gore Vidal, have been honest enough with ourselves and the world to call these books what they are: novels. (And Kazantzakis' novel about Jesus, for one, is effin brilliant. Basically, he told the story of the Gospel of Judas decades before the Gospel of Judas was discovered.)



Aslan is no Kazantzakis and no Ehrman, but he's making a decent effort. Sam Harris is making a spectacle of himself. Aslan said that there is no relationship between religious texts and the lives of religious believers, and that was very silly, of course, but instead of acknowledging that of course he couldn't literally have meant that, the New Atheists have seized upon it and gone on an on and on about how ridiculous Aslan's statement is.

As opposed to making the slightest effort to understand what Aslan meant, which is that there are a wide variety of interpretations of the Koran, and a wide variety of beliefs and political positions among Muslims. Exactly the same way that they obsess on the few verses from the Koran or the Bible which cast Islam or Judaism or Christianity in the worst possible light, and ignore the rest of those books. (Let me take the opportunity to once again call BULLSHIT on the vast majority of New Atheists who claim to've read the Koran and Bible cover-to-cover.) Or the way that some of them reacted to Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist? by going on and on about some drawing of a bird in the Vatican and how that drawing supposedly exposed Ehrman as a fraud. That was bizarre, the way they went on about that drawing. I wish I could say it was atypical.

Aslan is attempting to point out the diversity in the actual lives of the actual more than one billion Muslims in the world, over the din of the New Atheists saying Oh there's some horrible stuff here in the Koran, Oh we've got to watch out for these Muslims, Oh, be very, very afraid -- a din which of course fits in very nicely with the islamophobic rhetoric of people like the aforementioned Fox News correspondent who asked Aslan how he got the nerve to write about Jesus without even being a Christian.

Of course Aslan pointed it out in a very unfortunate and clumsy way when he said that there is NO connection between the lives of believers and the texts of the holy books of those believers. Still, his point was against prejudice -- against assigning characteristic to Muslims because they are Muslims instead of looking closer and regarding them as the individual human beings they are. And that is a point which urgently needs to be made in our society which still suffers from so much prejudice against and fear of Muslims. Between Aslan's attempt to counter this prejudice and fear, and the New Atheists stirring it up, there's no question that any and every intelligent atheist must side with Aslan. In spite of the frequent facepalms over the clumsy way Aslan expresses himself, the message he expresses is far the wiser one. Stemming the tide of violence is far more urgent than whether or not someone believes in God. Identifying with and supporting Muslims fighting against extremism and Christians countering prejudice and fear is far more important than critiquing ancient texts.

And once again, New Atheists, if you're going to critique those texts, read the whole texts first. That's a bare minimum to have a chance not to look like fanatical fools. Don't keep telling me you already have -- like I keep telling you: I don't believe you. Show me you have, by saying something intelligent about the entire Koran or the entire Bible.

The Malleus Maleficarum And The Malaysian 777

So on the one hand I finally found a copy in the original Latin of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 2 volume set edited by Christopher S Mackay, Copyright 2006, paperback edition with corrections Copyright 2011. Iss a Ding. See link below. Translations into English are a dime a dozen, but I think this may actually be the first edition in the original Latin since 1669. So I'm reading Mackay's introduction to this splendid edition, about how people were tried and tortured and burned in the Middle Ages for being heretics, and how witches, a sub-set of the set of heretics, were thought to have been ensnared by demons who lived in the air above the Earth who guided them in the ways of evil -- which was defined as everything which was not considered pious Christianity -- and had sex with them, and how women were thought to be particularly susceptible to being seduced by demons and becoming witches and how "heresy" is Greek for "choice" (Yikes!) and a person might well be condemned as a heretic for choosing to interpret a Bible verse in ways unpleasing to his friendly local Inquisitor, and how a sect, another term from the Greek, before Christianity was simply a philosophical school and nobody got killed for belonging to them, but in 1480's when the Malleus Maleficarum was published, about a century into what is now called the "witchcraft delusion," which would continue for another 2 centuries, during which tens or hundreds of thousands of people would be tortured, condemned and burnt as witches, most of them women -- in the 1480's the leader of a sect was generally considered to be Satan himself. Less than 60 years after the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, Copernicus would published his book demonstrating that the Earth was not the center of the universe, his book which his friends persuaded him not to publish until near the end of his life, because they were afraid that he would be accused of working with Satan, and tortured and burned to death. And then about 85 years after that came the little unpleasantness between Galileo and the Inquisition, which apologetics are strenuously attempting to make it seem as if it has been misunderstood and overblown, and in between was Giordano Bruno...

And on the other hand I run into someone talking about how science supposedly "blinds" us to "deeper wisdoms" to found in place like, Oh, yes, the Bible.

And then on the 3rd hand I see headlines about how people are closing in on the crash site of that Malaysian 777 which recently vanished. How are they closing in? By praying about it? Yeah, that must be it. Science would be no help to the people searching. It would only blind them, surely. How can modern man be so arrogant as to think that he knows better than God how to search for traces of the victims of a catastrophe?

And why o why won't people see that the very idea of this supposed conflict between religion and science doesn't go back any earlier than the time when people in Christendom were first allowed to make the ridiculous assertion that the conflict existed, without risking imprisonment, torture and death by fire? What IS it with these people?!