Stephen Greenblatt and New Atheism

It took me a while, but I finally noticed the link between a recent source of aggravation, Stephen Greenblatt

and his profoundly misinformative and hugely popular book The Swerve,



and that earlier source of annoyance, those avid consumers and champions of misinformation, the New Atheists.

I had separated myself from the New Atheists. It was amazingly easy to do: I simply stopped seeking them out, and, to my amazement and immense relief, I rarely came across any of them any more. There was a whole big wonderful world out there which was almost entirely free of them. Almost.

New Atheists are atheists who believe that religion is the source of most or actually all of the world's problems, and who constantly talk and write about religion in this vein while being very careful never to learn anything about it. The classic example is Richard Dawkins, who is constantly going on and on about how Islam is the greatest threat to the world, and has never read the Koran and never will and is freakin' proud of it. New Atheists are constantly discussing a fictitious story about early Christianity and the creation of the Bible, while being very careful never to read more than a dozen or so verses of the Bible specially selected for their awfulness, or to learn anything about the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity and the Bible first arose. They live in an echo chamber, only "learning" about the ancient Mediterranean world from each other, distrusting any and all actual experts.

I don't know whether Stephen Greenblatt is a New Atheist or has even heard of New Atheism, but how could New Atheists not love Stephen Greenblatt and his book The Swerve, which is so full of inaccurately hostile denunciations of Christianity?

I don't mind denunciations of Christianity -- I've written a few myself -- but I greatly prefer those which are factually accurate. Like this one, a positively furious book-length denunciation of Christianty which cuts much deeper than any New Atheists have dreamed of doing, although it is much less clumsily broad than their attacks: Der Antichrist,



written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had been appointed a full professor of Classics at the University of Basel at the astonishingly young age of 24. He was very well-versed in the literature of the ancient world in which Christianity and the Bible arose. At age 44, writing Der Antichrist, Nietzsche referred often to the New Testament in the original ancient Greek, although he found the Greek New Testament to be very badly-written, and reading it to be a very unpleasant experience. Nietzsche never was interested in taking the easy path, or so his writings make it seem. He was a scrupulous author, concerned, to a very unusual degree, that the things he wrote made sense. He wanted to make sure that his book about Christianity contained no inaccurately hostile denunciations, only accurate ones.

Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist in 1888, an extraordinarily productive year for him as a writer. (Was he hurrying because he felt the end of his sanity approaching?) This one book was written between the 3rd and the 30th of September, and then he went right on to other things, until the 3rd day of January, 1889, when he went suddenly, thoroughly and permanently insane, perhaps from the effects of a decades-old case of syphilis overpowering his brain at last. Or perhaps he went mad from exasperation at so many people who spoke and wrote on the topics he cared about, without bothering to be well-informed. Like the many people who've been glad to discuss Nietzsche with me, who've never read anything Nietzsche wrote. (What on Earth did they suppose they were discussing?) Like Greenblatt and the New Atheists, so eager to discuss things like Medieval monasteries and atheist philosophy, and so determined not to learn about them. What do they actually imagine they're talking about?

And what should I do about it? Simply avoiding New Atheism certainly has been comfortable. But maybe, ultimately, as thoroughly atheist as I am, I can't be completely comfortable just sitting back and watching religious forms of stupidity be replaced by equally stupid atheist ones. Maybe, as sweetly tempting as it is, I'm just not as Epicurean as that.

Gee, I hope this doesn't drive me completely and permanently mad.

How To Keep New Atheists From Annoying You

A few years ago I wrote on this blog that I had become so annoyed by New Atheists that I was considering converting to a religion, converting insincerely, just to spite them. And I meant it, I was considering it. But some time after that I found a very effective way to deal with the annoyance New Atheists caused me: I stopped hanging out with them. It is much easier than I had imagined to almost completely avoid them. Nowadays, every now and then a New Atheist will cross my path, but I don't engage with him -- almost always a him -- and pretty soon he's gone again.

Turns out they're not everywhere. Not even close. What a relief!

I have a lot less admiration for Bill Maher and Ricky Gervaise and Stephen Fry than I used to, because of their New Atheist tendencies. The last time I saw Fry on screen was in an Internet video of him debating with some churchman or theologian, who asked him to imagine that Heaven was real and that he had died and found himself at the Pearly Gates: what was the first thing he'd do? Fry immediately said that he'd ask God why He allowed suffering, launching into a very bitter and detailed description of some of the more horrible examples of suffering. And I thought to myself: Really! You find out, against your belief of what is possible, that Paradise is real and exists forever and ever, and the first thing you will do is complain. At that instant, I was completely done. The last ember of my patience for this kind of thing was ground out. I saw no reason at all to prefer Fry over the British churchman or theologian glowering angrily at him as he went on angrily about suffering and Why didn't God stop it. I just saw two angry, unreasonable old men, bitterly arguing about non-existent things, wasting their time and the viewer's time. It was as if I had come all the way down to the bottom of the slide which started at the top when I first heard there was this group called New Atheists, and was so excited, assuming that they were like me.



I have better things to do.

At least Fry and Gervaise still act, and Bill still often talks about things other than religion on his show.

And I still know of no atheist movement to which I can belong. But maybe that's not so bad. I'm not so annoyed at religion any more. I'm still an atheist, but now I have had extensive, exhaustive, thorough proof that atheism does not prove, at all, that a person is Bright. If you believe in God, that means that you and I disagree about one thing. We might agree about thousands of other things. Experiencing New Atheists up close day-in and day-out for years has left me much less bothered by religion, and much less inclined to make moderate believers responsible for the atrocities of the extremists. The moderates and I are both against the atrocities. I don't have to be a dick about less substantial things. Any more.

Before I met the New Atheists, I thought that there was a lot to say against religion. I'm not completely sure about that anymore. Seems like the New Atheists say five minutes' worth of stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There might be much more to say against religion. It's just that none of the New Atheists seems at all likely ever to stumble over any of it.

There is definitely quite a lot to say about religion, simply because it encompasses great portions of the lives of billions of people over thousands of years all over the world. I can have all sorts of rewarding discussions with people about religion. I can discuss religion for a long time with someone without having a clue whether they believe in anything supernatural or not. But if it's been a long and rewarding discussion, I know that the person I've been talking to is neither a fanatical fundamentalist nor a New Atheist.

Mein Beileid, Deutschland: Auch Ihr Habt Jetzt New Atheists

Ich sehe einen Link nach der Jungen Welt: Leute wollen Lutherstrassen umbennen, weil Luther war ein Juden- und Frauenhasser.

Jein: war er. Ich bin gar kein Fan von Luther.

Aber wieviele Strassennamen muesste man aendern wenn Judenhass und Frauenhass als Grund dazu ausreichte? Wieviele beruehmten europaeischen Maenner der letzten 2000 Jahren waren NICHT sexistisch und antisemitisch?

Ja, es ist gut, wenn man sich an die haesslichen Seiten Luthers erinnert. Und Juden- und Frauenhass war nur zwei von gar vielen haesslichen Seiten von diesem duenkelhaften, kruden spaetmittelaelterlichen Monch, dem das Christentum seiner Zeit gar nicht christlich genug war. Waere noch besser, wenn man, zb, sich auch erinnern wuerde, wie weitverbreitet solches wie Judenhass und Frauenhass zu Luthers Zeit waren. (Obwohl der damalige Vatikan, gegen den Luther wetterte und wuetete, mE sehr viel weniger haesslich als Luther war. Dieser Vatikan unter Leo X und anderen Paepsten war einer der Hauptmotoren der Renaissance.)

Aha: ich habe auf dem Link geklickt: Atheisten ­fordern[...] Auch ich bin ein Atheist. Gar viele von uns sind Atheisten. Aber Gott sei dank (regt Euch ab, es ist bloss eine Redensart) sind nicht alle von uns solche Atheisten von Beruf, die sich so sehr ueber Geschichtliches aufregen und dabei so herzlich wenig Geschichte kennen. Pfui Teufel! (Redensart!) Hier in den US wollen sie die Zehn Gebote aus oeffentlichen Raeumen bannen, und sie verlangen, dass Islam "seine Reformation endlich haben." Dort in D, wo es unmoeglich ist, so wenig ueber die Reformation zu wissen als dass mein einen islamischen Luther herbeiwuenschen koennte, wollen sie Lutherstrassen wegschaffen. Nutzlose Narren hier wie dort.

Schopenhauer, Twain, Nietzsche, Russell und Sartre, um einige zu nennen, waren Atheisten, aber sie waren auch vieles mehr.

Schopenhauer war leider sexistisch und antisemitisch, aber er war auch vieles mehr. Nietzsche uebernahm Schopenhauers Sexismus, ueberwand aber seinen Antisemitismus, und tat noch vieles mehr. Aber diese Grauzonen in Menschen erkennen und diskutieren, das viele Trotzdem und Sovielalsauch in auch den Besten unter uns, solche Subtilitaet war nicht nach Luthers Geschmack, und sie ist gar nicht eine Eigenschaft der Atheisten, die jetzt verlangen, dass Lutherstrassen umbenannt werden, weil keinen sinnvolleren Gebrauch ihrer Zeit ihnen einfaellt.

13th-Century Translations Of The Bible

On the first day of July, 2011, I published a post quoting a dispute I had with a couple of other people over some 13th-century translation of the Bible about which they claimed to know. I googled 13th-century bible translations and found some interesting things, but nothing having to do with 13th-century translations of the Bible. I googled "13th-century bible translations" and got 0 hits. 0 also for "13th-century translations of the bible."

Without quotation marks around the search terms, search results occur with references to the Cathars, and to their demands, in opposition to the Catholic Church, for vernacular translations of the Bible -- the opposite of what the idiots in the 2011 Wrong Monkey post claimed to know about, translations made by the Catholic Church. Maybe that's what the idiots had in mind. As I said, I've found references to demands made by the Cathars for translations of the Bible. I'm still looking for actual translations of Biblical texts made during the 13th century.

Someone claimed on Wikipedia that King Dinis of Portugal (1261-1325) translated a part of Genesis into Portugese, a translation which since has been lost.

On Wikipedia. I haven't so far been able to find any mention of this anywhere else.

Here we go: 13th-century Spanish translations: La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, a Spanish account of travels in the Holy Land, appeared early in the 13th century and contained Biblical passages in the vernacular. And was suppressed by the Council of Tarragona in 1234. And then a complete Castilian Bible appeared under the reign of the renowned scholar and patron of scholars, Alfonso X, King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1252 to 1284.

I could be wrong, but I don't think this is what the idiots were thinking of back in 2011. I think it was more like this: some New Atheists overheard something somewhere about King James having some Bible verses altered in the King James Bible to suit his political ends. Without first bothering to learn which verses these were or how or why they were altered, they took this assertion of politic-religious mendacity and ran with it, put it through their New Atheist echo chambers and games of Elephant, and by the time these particular idiots met me, they thought they had learned about Bible translations (into what language or languages?) made by the Catholic Church (by whom in the Catholic Church?) to suit the Church's agenda (in what way?), and without even posing any of the question in parentheses there, let alone answering them, they thought that they had blown the lid off of an historical scandal.

Something like that. This is what many New Atheists do, which they think is studying history. The way they tend to react to people who actually know something about the historical topic they think they're discussing, is illustrated by they the way they behave toward me in the Wrong Monkey post from 2011 linked above. I for one am not getting paid nearly enough to put up with that sort of treatment. Why would actual historians want to hang around for it, when some of us actually appreciate what they do? I wonder how Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson get treated when they try to talk to Bill Maher about vaccines.

It's stupidity. Stupidity isn't merely ignorance, it's the dogged determination to remain ignorant.

New Atheism: Because Thinking Is Hard

75 years ago, the most prominent exponents of atheism were Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. Today it's Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Then, English-speaking atheists watched No Exit and read The Stranger, or at least pretended to have read it; today, New Atheists repeat Hitchens' would-be bonmot "religion poisons everything" and think of ways to insult religious believers with Facebook memes, and pay for billboards which are basically identical to those memes.

I suppose it's risky to actually try to understand people with whom one disagrees. What if one eventually understands so well that one no longer disagrees and becomes one of them? Why look at good things which some religious people do in the name of religion, when it could make things look more complicated than the memes showing clergy who are thieves and child molesters, and congregations who are blind, fearful, obedient, fleeced sheep? Yes, there are some clergy and some congregations who are like that. But others are somewhat different. Some New Atheists definitely do not want to talk about religious believers who do not fit their favorite stereotype, whether it's Christian congregations who actually use most of the collection-plate money for charity work instead of Super Fly lifestyles for the clergy; or Muslims who actually are peaceful and opposed to terrorism; or Muslims who do not advocate subservient roles for women, and actually don't torture, misfigure or kill women who are assertive; or whatever doesn't fit their pet stereotypes.

I agree with the New Atheists that belief in God or multiple gods is mistaken. I agree that this belief can have many negative effects. But I also think that New Atheism is having many negative effects. I don't think we're going to overcome religion by sneering at it. I don't think "We're all atheists -- I just believe in one less God than you do." is brilliant; on the contrary, everytime I see it on a sign someone's holding at a rally or on a billboard or a meme I just go: Uhhhhhhh, (That was a sound of disgust) that again? I really cannot imagine a Christian or a Muslim finding it clever, much less convincing. And of course Hindus and other polytheists are liable to feel both disgusted and slighted, treated as if they don't exist or don't matter.

How many minds are actually being changed by simpleminded garbage like that, or like holding up a sign next to someone holding up a sign with a religious message saying "FUCK THIS GUY", or a meme showing a collection plate and a caption comparing Christianity to a family of children paying their abusive father not to punish them, or the popular message "YOU KNOW IT'S NOT TRUE", etc? It all seems to me like a lot of people agreeing with each other and slapping each other on the back.

Eh. Maybe that's what they need, if they come from abusive fundamentalist backgrounds and have never before felt safe expressing disbelief, and never before met others who don't believe. Maybe they have a lot of hurt to get out of their systems, and need a place where they're allowed to vent.

See what I did there? I made an attempt to understand people whom I loathe for the constant stream of nonsense they produce. Because if we never understand them, how are we ever going to have any clue about how to interact with them in any way which is at all productive?

And, on the off-chance that someone is reading this who was one of those atheists who badly needed to know that there were others, who needed to escape from an abusive religious home; but now agrees with some of my critique of the New Atheist scene, which is beginning to annoy him or her, and wants to get a bit deeper -- welcome. There are a few others like us: atheists disenchanted with the New Atheists. I don't know whether we yet have a name, which we can use to distinguish ourselves from the New Atheists, to make it clear that we're not with them, that we realize "religion poisons everything" is a bit of an oversimplification, etc. I have suggested the name Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

The New Atheist Approach To Anthropology

This (an actual quote from a real-life person) is what passes for a theory of the origin of religion in the New Atheist echo chamber this month:

"that fine line, or moment (period maybe) in history where we went from hunter-gatherers to settled civilized people, seems to me that certain people took advantage by creating stories etc to put themselves in positions of power. that's the answer, these people cut themselves off from what went before, they invented something and now they won't let go"

Oh. Okay. So now we know. (Good thing YOU didn't invent anything.)

We Don't Know Nearly Enough To Make Any Rational Assertion Beginning: "Religion Has always Been [...]"

It seems to be a currently popular New Atheist talking point that religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses. But it's nonsense. We don't even know how old religion is -- it appears to be more than 30,000 years old, judging from artifacts which have been found. How much older than that? Nobody knows. (Some say that recently-found 70,000-year-old artifacts show the presence of religion, but that's controversial.) And you know that for that entire time it's been systematic manipulation? I don't think so. Writing which has been discovered so far goes back less than 6000 years. When we think about human behavior before that, to a very great extent we are poking around in the dark and guessing -- much the same way that we are only guessing when we try to understand what may be going on the minds of other species.

How old is religion? We don't know. When it began, was human society organized into anything which could be called elites and masses? Sing it with me, children: we don't know.

"Religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses." That sounds as if religion has always been controlled by elites who themselves don't believe in it. As if it has always been a con, a lie. That fits in very well with the New Atheist black-and-white, atheism-good, religion-bad dichotomy. But is it justified in any way by the actual history and prehistory of religion? No doubt, there has been a very cozy relationship between religious authority and political power for a very long time. No doubt today much of this relationship is maintained in a cynical way by powerful elites. Some neoconservatives, not all of them, are atheists who think that religion, while not for them, is good for the masses, or at least good for keeping the masses in line. But the thing is, we're very far from being able to prove that all of the elites who say that they have religious beliefs are insincere. The fact that a religion is very beneficial for someone does not prevent that person from believing in it. Robert Musil thought that the very opposite was true, and it's not an entirely daffy thought.

As far back as ancient Rome we have records of people having said cynically that religions in which they themselves clearly did not believe were good for controlling the masses. But not any longer ago than that. As far back as back as ancient Greece there is evidence that a few people were atheists, but not any longer ago than that, and it was not more than a handful of ancient Greeks.

We can't make the mistake of assuming that there were always people like us. We have to reckon with the possibility than religion may be much, much older than atheism. We can reasonably conjecture that religion is more than 30,000 years old, and ask how much older it might be. We can reasonably conjecture that atheism is more than 2500 years old, and guess about how much older it might be. But there's a real possibility that for tens of thousands of years, maybe for hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years, ALL of our ancestors believed in gods.

Cities began to develop thousands of years ago -- how many thousands? And all the people said: We don't know. And all the people said: We don't know. But in the remains of the oldest cities we've found, 10 or 12 thousand years old, a big honkin' temple always seems to have been in the middle of town, suggesting that priests and kings were one and the same category. But it doesn't follow from that that the priest/kings were manipulating people, or that they didn't believe in the religions which they preached. That's a premature conclusion, the evidence for it is entirely lacking. And as I mentioned above, religion seems to be much, much older than city life. We don't know very much at all about how human -- or humanoid -- or primate societies may have been organized when religion first arose, inasmuch as we entirely lack such crucial pieces of the puzzle as when religion arose, to name just one.

"Religion Is A Sand-Castle, And A Tidal Wave Of Reason Is About To Wash It Away!"

Another parallel to the fundies: the fundies say that Jesus is coming back really soon, any minute now, and the New Atheists say that Reason will wash religion away really soon, any minute now.

If the New Atheists read more than scientific journals, comic books, the occasional sci-fi or fantasy novel and each other, they might have come across some of the atheist philosophers and historians from one or two centuries ago who sounded exactly like the 21st-century New Atheist over-optimism quoted in the title of this blog post. The Age of Reason could also have been called The Age of the Premature Belief in the Coming Final Victory of Reason.

I believe that if humanity survives long enough, religion will eventually fade away. If we're not killed off in the meantime by an asteroid or by our own nuclear weapons, or by ironically actual tidal waves, strengthened by the climate change we're causing, or by some disease, or one of the many other things which could quite suddenly render this discussion moot. But not only has religion proven much more tenacious than those historians and philosophers from the late 18th to the early 20th century thought: in addition, atheism in its current form has some problems.

Probably the most serious of those problems right now is that the most prominent leaders of the atheist movement are ignorant obnoxious pricks. Arguably, they are slowing the progress of atheism down more than they are aiding it, because they're so repulsive. They're inducing some atheists to deny that they're atheists and call themselves something like skeptics instead, lest someone should assume that they're with THEM. That's not a hallmark of the best possible leadership. Sam Harris, in addition to many, many other glaring shortcomings, believes in spirituality, which in my opinion raises serious doubts about whether he is really an atheist at all. He and Dawkins and Hitch and Myers and other leading New Atheists are atrociously ignorant Islamophobes. Dawkins, who simply cannot shut up about Islam and how horrible and dangerous it is, has never read the Koran and announces proudly that he never intends to, reminiscent of the Ayatollah Khomenei putting a price on Salman Rushdie's head for writing a book which the Ayatollah did not read. Dawkins has recently referred to Christianity as a valuable bulwark against the menace of radical Islam, which for me raises questions about his credibility as an atheist just as Harris' nonsense about spirituality does.

Harris claims that Islam is currently going through its "Medieval" phase, which shows you that he can count to 14: the beginnings of Islam are 1400 years ago, and 1400 years AD Christendom was in its Middle Ages (or at least some of it still was). It also makes one wonder, not only how the tremendous flowering of Islamic science, philosophy and art during the actual Christian Middle Ages fits into Harris' chronology, in which Islamic culture's progress is to mirror Christendom's, but 600 years later, but also whether Harris gave any thought at all to the fact that most of the oldest cities on Earth, Eridu, Ur, Babylon, Memphis, Thebes, are in the most central regions of Islam.

But you can't give much serious consideration to that which you never learned to begin with, can you?

A really remarkable, truly striking example of New Atheism's negligence of the study of history is the widespread New Atheist ignorance of both the history of religion and the history of atheism. Remarkable and striking because, if you're going to have an atheist movement which isn't absurd, the leaders of that movement should be among the leading experts on that history. Otherwise, what is the movement actually about? Batman and Spidey may be pretty cool, I wouldn't know, but they're no substitute for Thucydides and Livy and Gibbon and Voltaire and Marx and Burckhardt and Nietzsche.

By no means should the leaders of an atheist movement be as ignorant of science as Dawkins, Harris, Hitch, Myers and New Atheists generally are of history and philosophy. Looking at the New Atheists, the gulf between the sciences and the humanities seems as huge and strong as ever on the part of the scientists, but fortunately, the people who used to be known as humanists have been much better at filling it. Perhaps Bronowski should've been scolding both scientists and the people who used to be known as humanists about it, and not just the people who used to be known as humanists. (You see, before the New Atheists appropriated the word, a humanist was a specialist in the humanities. Made sense, didn't it? Ah, all the amazing things you can learn by studying history!)

Are Atheists Smarter Than Believers?

I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that question seriously, it was just an attention-grabbing headline designed to suck you in.

If I were susceptible to becoming a believer, two things that could push me over the edge are St Mark's in Venice

and "I'll Take You There," the single by the Staples Singers, released in 1972, short version, 3 minutes 15 seconds. I've been singing that one a lot lately. It's not like it's hard to memorize the lyrics:

I know a place (I'll take you there)
Ain't nobody cryin' (I'll take you there)
Ain't nobody worried (I'll take you there)
Ain't no smilin' faces (Lyin' to the races)

That's it. The rest is strictly improv. For example, just now when I was singing it, in the part where on the single Mavis is telling various band members to "come ON!" I was improvising something like this: (I was imagining backup singers singing "I'll take you there," and I was singing the rest.)


Oh, oh, oh, oh (I'll take you there)
Oh I feel something! (I'll take you there)
Could it be the Holy Spirit that I feel?! (I'll take you there)
Oh I don't know! (I'll take you there)
But I feel SOMEthing! (I'll take you there)

Now, apologies to Mavis and the other believers out there, but I didn't mean that. I sang the part about the Holy Spirit because that's a church-y thing to say, and it's a very church-y song. I didn't mean any disrespect when I sang that, I didn't sing it dripping with sarcasm.

When I sang "I feel something!" that was 100% sincere. Music gives me powerful emotions. Art, like those mosaics in St Mark's, gives me powerful emotions. And when I was 11 years old and "I'll Take You There" was a brand-new record and a wonderful thing coming out of our counter-top radio at home, and the people around me were telling me that those emotions were the Holy Spirit, that's what I believed. But not any more. But I still let go and let myself have the powerful emotions. It feels very healthy. But I don't believe there's a God. I think this is humans doing all of this, with some help from other species about which many of us humans are still insufficiently appreciative.

These days, rather than asking if atheists are smarter than believers, I keep reminding myself that not all atheists can possibly be as dumb as the ones posting links about studies saying that we're smarter than believers.

Who keeps insisting that they're smart? That's right:

Fredos. People who are tired of everybody saying that they're stupid. It's actually very sad, I shouldn't make fun of them so much.

(What?! That's crazy talk. Make fun of them is what I DO. And I usually confine my specific remarks to Fredos who have way too much power, who have somehow been mistaken for geniuses. Onward.)

Generally speaking, the atheists who insist that they're smart and they want respect seem to have less appreciation for the religious things which give powerful emotions to many of us, believers and atheists alike. They seem to have much less appreciation for religion, period. "Religion poisons everything," they insist. (That's right, I just called Christopher Hitchens stupid.)

I insist that "I'll Take You There" is anything but poison. And anyone who can't hear that it is religious music has missed out on a lot of great gospel music. All of that also applies to Pharrell's "Happy." It's no coincidence that you see so many church choirs in music videos. Even nasty non-believers like the Rolling Stones can feel those powerful emotions, even at the very same instant that they're mocking religious belief (“I Just Want to See His Face”).

Atheists who have no appreciation for religious music or art, who have nothing, nothing but venomous contempt for anything and everything to do with religion, are tiresome, to put it quite mildly. And to them I'm secretly a Christian. Ahhhrggh. Morons. Whaddyagonnado.

"Since [group I dislike] [do this, which makes me dislike them], I guess I should reciprocate."

1) Not all of that group do that thing.

----- 1a) In fact, most of that group dislike it when that aggravating minority does that thing, making them all look bad in some people's eye. (Such as yours.)

----------1aI) You said that in a FB group specifically designed to overcome animosity between us and that group.

--------------- 1aIA) There are plenty of other FB groups, lots and lots of them, tons of them, where you can rag all day on that group and get high-fived and get plenty of likes, because verbal aggression against that group is what all those other FB groups are for, it's what they're about.

2) If it's bad when they do it and makes people dislike them, what's going to make it great and make you popular when you do it (outside of the groups, mentioned in 1aIA), specifically set up for that kind of thing)?

----- 2a) All they're doing is talking. (Ya big pussy.)

---------- 2aI) Do you find it necessary to respond to every stupid thing anybody ever says about you, or just with these guys?

----- 2b) You and people like you keep claiming we're better than they are. Is this how you prove it -- by stooping to the worst behavior of the worst of them?

---------- 2bI) Are you actually envious because you feel like they can get away with some bad behavior you can't get away with? (Wow, you really have some ambitious dreams for your life, don't you?)

3) I hate you, you idiot!

----- 3a) I don't expect you ever to understand why I hate you (being an idiot, and all). But if you're actually curious, there are dozens of other posts on this blog besides this post labelled "stupid atheists."

----- 3b) I like lots of people in the other group a lot more than I'll ever like you. There a lot of other criteria which a re much more important to me than which one of these two groups someone belongs to.

---------- 3bI) Which one of the two groups someone was in seemed a lot more important before I actually met a lot of the people in our group. Frankly, most of you have been a horrible disappointment.

--------------- 3bIA) But I'm sure that a lot of people in our group simply never mention that they're in our group, because they're embarrassed by you and those like you.

4) I hope you have a nice day. (See? See what I did there, Chuckles? It didn't kill me. It didn't cost me a thing but a moment and a kind thought, you moron!)

Should I Just Stop Responding To People Who Assume I'm A Theist?

It would save me a lot of time and energy. I mean a lot. A LOT. And it would reward those who pay more attention and who wait to decide whether a person is a theist or not until that person gives some sign about whether he or she is a theist or not -- or it would punish those more attentive people, depending on whether you consider my attention to be a reward or a punishment.

A Facebook group I'm currently in has far more actual communication on religious topics between atheists and believers than any other group I've seen. I don't think it's a coincidence that the leader of this group is a Christian who spends far more time criticizing Christians than non-Christians. It's clear that he cares about Christianity and recognizes the benefits for a group of self-criticism. Recognizing such benefits isn't rocket science, and they weren't discovered yesterday, but that recognition does seem to be entirely lacking from many religious and atheist groups.

The recognition of the downside of monotonous repetition seems to be lacking too. Have you noticed how atheists who say things like "atheists do not have a common belief system, sacred scripture or atheist Pope. This means atheists often disagree on many issues and ideas" tend to repeat a lot of the same talking points word for word -- for example: "atheists do not have a common belief system, sacred scripture or atheist Pope. This means atheists often disagree on many issues and ideas" ?

These people I'm talking about, who assume I'm a theist, they do so whenever I criticize any atheists or have positive things to say about any believers or any aspects of any religion. They do so in ostensible reaction to posts or comments in which I've gone to the trouble to say

"I'm an atheist."

Today it happened when someone responded to a blog post in which I had said

in the title of the post

that I was an atheist.

So maybe the reasonable thing to do is ignore them. Attempting to communicate with them seems to be pointless. I do put a certain amount of care and attention into my writing, perhaps it's not too much to ask for a certain amount of care and attention from my readers.

Perhaps you consider repeating talking points word for word to be communication. It sort of reminds me of some of the duller things that happen in churches, synagogues, mosques and other temples.

Postscript To 'Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation'

Over and over, New Atheists with whom I disagree about anything assume that I am a Christian. It's a standard reflex with them: NEW ATHEIST: When the Council of Nicea convened in AD 346 -- ME: Actually, they met in 325. NA: Look, pal, your precious God isn't going to come to your rescue here! Not in this discussion!

Don't I know it! It happened again today: someone supposedly responding to my blog post Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation referred to "your mythical deity."

He also mentioned the one line in the Treaty of Tripoli which another reader quoted 2 days ago in a comment here on the blog:

"The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

Talk about cherry-picking. Going on 240 years of history of hundreds of millions of people, and one line in a treaty addressed to the Ottoman Empire is the best they can do when challenged by the suggestion that the famous American separation of church and state is lip-service occasionally paid to a principle, as opposed to an honest reflection of the way things are actually done here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It's not so surprising that two New Atheists separately mentioned a line from a treaty about which presumably neither of them knows anything else, a treaty very rarely discussed by anyone in the US outside of academic journals and graduate courses in US history. When you've got so very few straws to cling to defend a talking point, you've got to make sure that those straws are widely known.

What would the alternative be? Why, they'd have to abandon some preconceived ideas, and re-think some things! And we know they're not going to do that! No more than they're actually going to read the entire Declaration of Independence or Gettysburg Address from beginning to end.

The New Atheists' favorite American statesman when they insist that church and state really are separated in the US is Thomas Jefferson. Yes, Thomas Jefferson spoke out quite boldly against religion -- in some of his private letters to John Adams. What a firebrand! Jefferson is the most popular choice among New Atheists to replace Jesus. Jefferson himself sort of did this when he -- secretly, again -- cut out the parts of the Bible which offended him, creating the "Jefferson Bible," highly revered among New Atheists. Makes sense that they would love a book with many passages cut out. Makes sense that they would lionize this staunch opponent of slavery -- publicly. Occasionally. Depending upon his audience -- who never freed one of his hundreds of slaves during his lifetime, and in his will freed 5 of them, 2 of his children by Sally Hemings and 3 further members of the Hemings family, leaving the Jefferson family free to sell the other 130 to help defray the enormous debts he also bequeathed to them. I agree with the New Atheists: Jefferson is a fitting symbol for them.

(Besides the 2 of his children with Hemings freed in Jefferson's will, 2 others escaped during his lifetime. Unlike all the other slaves who escaped from Jefferson, no effort was made to re-capture these 2. What a great Dad, huh? What a statesman!)

Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation

I despise the New Atheists because they're ignorant, irrational, uneducated -- stupid, in a word -- and claim to stand for enlightenment and education. I had been an atheist for about 30 years before encountering the New Atheists, and during that time I had assumed, as New Atheists seem to do, that shedding religious belief equaled a gain in intelligence. But the New Atheists demonstrate that it can be a lateral move rather than an advance.

The evidence keeps wearing down my objection to referring to the New Atheists as "fundamentalist atheists." They really are our counterpart to the believers' fundamentalists, the loud, crude, stupid wing of the group of atheists seeing everything through the prism of religion, claiming to speak for the whole group, making us all look bad.

You want to see an fight among idiots? Get some fundamentalist Christians and some New Atheists together and ask them whether or not Amurrka is a Christian nation. Then sit back and marvel at this truly rare display of stupidity. Note how each side simply ignores every bit of the historical record which does not fit into the one-sided case they try to make. If one takes the entirety of the history of English-speaking people in the Western hemisphere (and, seriously, good luck finding a Christian fundamentalist or a New Atheist who isn't monolinguistic), and removes every part of the record which either side either blithely ignores or blatantly falsifies, one is left with just about nothing.

On the one side, one of the earliest English settlements in Amurrka, representing one of the most influential religious threads in Amurrka down to the present, were the Pilgrims. On the other side, the people who led the Revolution against Britain and wrote the Constitution included several somewhat unconventional thinkers, one of whom, Benjamin Franklin, was occasionally so bold as to say things publicly or wrote things for public publication which seemed to contradict other statements of his, that he was a Christian, unlike all of the other leaders of the Revolution. (Tom Paine was an atheist -- and also an idiot, so of course he's well-beloved by the New Atheists -- but he was also an Englishman, not an Amurrkan, and though he roused segments of the Amurrkan populace with his written screeds, he never participated in the founding of the US. Most of the founders found looked at Paine with some horror, finding him to be a ruffian, no sort of gentleman, and so certainly not one of them, and found their horror justified by Paine's participation in the French Revolution, which most of the leaders of Amurrka thought went far too far.) This group of leaders of the Revolution, although, has also been very influential. It's a great oversimplification, but a useful one, to say that the Pilgrims are still struggling with the founders for control of the country. It's an oversimplification, but it's still much better than simply ignoring either the Pilgrims and Puritanism, or the founder, when asking what Amurrka is.

Here's a very striking example of the New Atheist ability to ignore plain facts, from the Rational Wiki article "The United States as a Christian nation":

"[...]the majority of Americans were, and many still are, Christians[...]"

That sounds as if they're saying that there once was a time, somewhere in the past, when most Americans were Christians, but no more. Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth, about 70% of the US population are Christians who belong to churches. Then there are 15% who are religiously unaffiliated. 3% of the total are atheists, 4% agnostics, and most of the rest are those religious people who call themselves "spiritual but not religious," -- you want to see a 3-way argument between real Bozos? Put religious fundamentalists, New Atheists and SBNR's in a room -- and most SBNR's are Christians who haven't been to church in a while. Which means that about 3/4 of the American population is Christian.

It's true that the first money issued by the US didn't have the words "IN GOD WE TRUST" on it. It's also true that there were no great riots over President Lincoln's decision to put those words on the money, or in the 1950's when the US adopted it as our official motto. The US has a National Cathedral and a National Prayer Breakfast. 2 US Senators are unaffiliated, 1 is Buddhist, 9 Jewish and that leaves 88 Christians.

And of course all of the US Presidents so far have been Christians. If you want to hear some arguments that Lincoln wasn't religious, you're going to have to find a New Atheist, because nobody else is going to go for something as ahistorical and just plain ridiculous as that. And not even all New Atheists try to claim Lincoln as one of their own: some, for example, have heard that, as I mentioned above, it was Lincoln who put "IN GOD WE TRUST" on the money.

Some other New Atheists have stopped claiming that Lincoln was Jewish, and have learned that some first names from the Old Testament were more popular among Amurrkan Christians in the 19th century than they are today. It's not as though absolutely none of them ever learn anything about history. It's close, but some of them occasionally do.

And speaking of inconvenient facts which a few New Atheists may eventually learn: the separation of church and state in the US Constitution was not motivated by atheism, as some New Atheists want to believe. It was not even motivated by Theism or Deism, public or secret. It was primarily motivated by the wish on the part of non-Anglican Christians that the Anglican (also known as Episcopalian) Church not be the official state church of the US as it is of the UK. Anglicans such as Thomas Jefferson went along.

Of course the US is a Christian nation. I don't like this fact, but I don't think that sticking my head in the sand is an effective way to react to unpleasant facts.

The Only Answer, And The Truth

"The only answer is true hair gel." "The only answer is true vegan diets." "The only answer is true Islam." "The only answer is true Christianity." "The only answer is true pilates." "The only answer is true atheism." "The only answer is true hemp -- not weed, not the stuff potheads smoke, but hemp, the kind George Washington make rope out of. It's a miracle plant and only it can save the planet." "The only answer is true switchgrass." "The only answer is true love." "The only answer is true heart change." "The only answer is a true heart transplant." "The only answer is true pacifism." "The only answer is true equality." "The only answer is true education." "The only answer is true two way communication." "The only answer is True Detective." "The only answer is true survivalist stockpiling diversity." "The only answer is true sexuality." "The only answer is true chastity." "The only answer is true Parmigiano Reggiano -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true peanut butter -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true heroin -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true high-powered hollow-point ammunition -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true change in Washington." "The only answer is true marital fidelity." "The only answer is true commitment to polygamy." "The only answer is true innovation." "The only answer is true preservation of tradition." "The only answer is true yoga -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket."

Perhaps you've begun to suspect that I don't actually believe that there is only one true answer.

But you're wrong.

I

am the only true answer! I must become extremely rich and famous, extremely soon -- for the good of the entire planet! Surely you can see that! Some might claim that I'm being greedy and selfish, but no, when you think about it, it's actually quite a noble sacrifice on my part. It's civic-mindedness by a conscientious citizen of Earth. It sort of brings tears to your eyes.

And time's a wastin'. I'm still not sure exactly how the nomination procedure for the Nobel Prize in Literature works, but I read something somewhere about each country sending names of candidates to the Nobel committee in February, which is right around the corner, and I still haven't been published in the New Yorker once!

The word must go forth at last! From billboards, bumperstickers, TV and Internet and print ads, on T-shirts and on the seats of snug sweatpants won by especially attractive people. The topic must trend, it must be on all lips and in all minds:

The only true answer is The Wrong Monkey!

Richard Dawkins Claims He's 'Not Allowed' To Criticize Islam

Which of course is absurd. He hasn't been imprisoned or fined yet for his comments on Islam, his books containing comments on Islam continue to sell by the cargo ship-load, he continues to be invited onto popular TV and radio shows where he continues to be encouraged to speak his mind.

Perhaps what's actually bothering him is that little pissants like me ARE allowed to comment on what he says, ARE allowed to point out that he continues to write and speak about Islam as if all Muslims were extremists, ARE allowed to point out the opposition of most of the world's Muslims to extremism, ARE allowed to point out that most of the soldiers fighting ISIL have been Muslims sent by majority-Muslim countries, etc.

We're allowed to point out the achievements in art, literature, philosophy and whatever else, which have been made over the course of the past 1500 years by some of the billions of people who've happened to have been Muslims. We're free to point out passages from the Koran which we think are nice. We can continue to mock Dawkins for still not having read the Koran, obsessed with Islam as he seems to be.

Maybe it really sticks in Dawkins' craw that a little autistic nobody and general failure in life such as myself is allowed to publicly speculate that maybe what is up Richard's bum is not Islam at all, but... What? More dark-skinned people on the streets and in the classrooms and faculty lounges of Oxford and Cambridge and Canterbury and London than he likes?

I'm only speculating. I'm allowed to do so. And Dawkins' rants about Islam can't be explained by rational thought on his part. The explanation must lie elsewhere.

*sigh* He was so good at biology.

Enough With This Bullshit About How Atheists Have Never Hurt Anyone

Someone or some group who calls him- or herself or call themselves The Witty Liberal sez or say:

"Muslim terrorists are killing people. Christian terrorists are killing people. Atheist terrorists are posting science articles online."

No. Not so witty. Not after I've read pretty much the same joke 10,000 times and had years to think it over. Dawkins and Harris don't kill people, they just spew hatred, fear and ignorance and support Western governments who kill people for them. Dawkins has written hardly a thing about science since 2004, which is a real shame since he used to be quite good at writing about science.

And the kind of malarkey Harris is writing and trying to pass off as science, talking about how ethics and morality can be scientifically determined, ought to alarm anyone at all sophisticated in his or her understanding of either science or ethics who sees Harris selling millions of books.

The Western democracies remain in contention for the title of world-champion killers, and Dawkins and Harris and Myers say, and Hitch said, that they're not doing enough. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the war since 2003. Since 2001 tens of thousands of Afghani civilians have been killed and tens of thousands more wounded.

In some atheist groups, many of the comments about Muslims are pretty much indistinguishable from comments made by white supremacists. Comments which say that Muslims -- or, interchangeably, Arabs, despite Harris' absurd assertions about how Islamophobia doesn't exist and if it did there wouldn't be anything racist about it since Islam isn't a race -- are donkey-fuckers and pedophiles, comments which claim that the majority of Muslims support terrorism.

And again, as I've said often already in this blog: most of the people who have been fighting and dying against the terrorist threat which currently tends to frighten Westerners the most, ISIL -- most of them are Muslims.

An Attempt To Explain How Horribly Disappointed I've Been By Many Of The Atheists I've Met And Heard About

Not all of them. And I'm sure that some of the atheists I've met, or read, or seen on TV, I don't know they're atheists, because they don't talk about being atheists all day long every day. This is also not including the atheists who don't admit that they're atheists, and call themselves something else which means exactly the same thing, like non-believers or skeptics. Presumably because they're embarrassed by the yokels who are the subjects of this post, and would rather not be associated with them.

I'm an atheist. However, my impression is that everybody has their mental weak spots -- certainly including me. If all I know about person A is that he or she believes in the rapture and all I know about person B is that he or she doesn't trust anyone who believes in the rapture, I tend to think that B is very likely a judgmental douchebag and I probably won't like them, and chances are I might get along with A just fine.

And I'm sorry that A still hasn't recovered from the trauma of his or her fundamentalist Christian or conservative Catholic upbringing. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.

Just now when I googled "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" to make sure I quoted and spelled it correctly, I came across "tout comprendre c'est rien pardonner," speaking of judgmental douchebags.

And yes, I certainly am a judgmental douchebag myself, but I'm aware of it.

Where was I? Ah yes -- stupid, obnoxious, smug, knuckle-dragging atheists who think that they're smart because they're atheists. Not to mention a few atheists who are actually quite bright in some areas -- Richard Dawkins, for example -- but who still turn on the stupid full-blast when the subject is religion.

It's their one-category mentality which is the major cause of their disappointing nature, I think, and which has lead some to call them "fundamentalist atheists." Just as obnoxious fundies -- and not all fundamentalist believers are of this obnoxious type -- divide the world up into the saved and the evil, New Atheists divide the world up into the atheists and the stupid. In order to maintain such simplistic, black-and-white impressions of humanity, both of these groups of obnoxious twits have to ignore a lot of the things which most of us see, because they're everywhere: the fundies have to ignore the believers who are horrible people and the atheists who are wonderful and kind and good, and the New Atheists have to ignore the stupid atheists and the brilliant believers. Perhaps the need to maintain these simplistic illusions is the major reason why both groups are so remarkably weak in the knowledge of history.

There simply is so much more to people than whether or not they believe in God. If you narrow it down to that and judge people just according to that, you miss the great majority of remarkable things about most people. And it makes you very unpleasant, whether you're a believer or an atheist. Who was Bertrand Russell's best friend? TS Eliot, who was not merely Christian, but extremely Christian. (Come to think of it, that's naturally a point in Eliot's favor as well. Although there's no denying that he wrote well now and then, I've come to have a horror of Eliot because of some of the tendencies which seem to have been associated with his traditionalist religious belief.)

Sam Harris' Statements Are Not as Accurate as One Might Wish

Mostly I should just try to ignore Sam Harris. But some things demand a response. And today a moronic fan of Harris shoved this under my nose: Harris wrote on his blog, recording what he said to Ben Afflack in their notorious dust-up last year:

What do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Koran on tonight’s show? There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when ISIS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands—all in the name of Islam—the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag.

Terry Jones and PZ Myers each made a great big show of desecrating Korans and they're both still alive, neither one has had to go into hiding.

And the response to ISIL has included military action by more than 60 countries. The United Nations is holding them responsible for war crimes. Amnesty International has accused them of ethnic cleansing "on an historic scale."

And liberals aren't complaining about this response. Those naive liberals Harris and Maher keep complaining about, who are standing by and watching ISIL's atrocities and doing nothing -- those liberals exist only in the minds of nuts like Harris. They don't exist in the real world.

And, as I've pointed out repeatedly on this blog, most of the people who are fighting and dying in the war against ISIL are Muslims.

Michael Ruse and I (we're atheists) would like people to know that atheist doesn't necessarily mean New Atheist.

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.

You Can't Talk To Some People -- Or At least You Shouldn't

When you've become convinced that someone isn't listening, and that talking to them would be a waste of your time, what remains? Talking about them.

There are two people here who, I'm convinced, wouldn't listen to me if I tried to get through to them. The first quotes one of the more far-fetched passages in the Bible and seems to have no doubt that it's 100% true -- because it's in the Bible.

The second, who seems to have the opposite problem, replies to the first:

"Why is it that not one independent historical source ever mentions any of these things happening? Possibly because they didn't happen, and once again the wholly babble is a lie? Hmmm."

Oh, it makes me angry, how stupid this "the Bible is a lie" talking point is! All the more stupid because the people parroting it think of themselves as the voice of reason, as rationality incarnate. A collection of over 60 texts, with dozens of authors, is not "an" anything, it is more than one thing. It shows you how these two idiots are the flip side of one another, this all-or-nothing approach to the Bible. To the one it's absolutely all true, to the other it's absolutely all "a lie."

Who talks that way about a book by one author, let alone a compilation of works by many different authors?

In this case, the Bible verses quoted as Gospel truth are actually from one of the Gospels and have to do with one of the less-believable details of the Biblical account of Jesus' life, and the New Atheist was dutifully responding with the party line: "No historical sources mention Jesus."

So why is this, hmm? Could it be that Jesus never existed?

Yes, hmm? it could be that Jesus never existed. But one of the long list of things which these smug hmm? -ers don't want to hear is that very few non-New-Testament sources say anything at all about Judea and Galilee between 6 BC and AD 40, and one of those sources, Josephus, does mention Jesus, and not just in the discredited Testamonium Flavianum that they're always talking about because it's been discredited, but in a second passage as well.

They don't want to hear it. They don't want to have an intelligent conversation about 1st-century Judea and Galilee, they wouldn't recognize such a conversation if it slapped them in the face.