Further bye-bye thoughts on OpenSky, re climate change

Per a group statement, it self-imploded.

Having snarked on them a last time recently, I thought I would take one last look, to see what it did, or did not, write about the climate crisis, being a bunch of neoliberal types, overall.

I wasn't snarkily disappointed.

ML Clark says the US won't get the election it deserves, and can't find one line of electrons to write about third parties, let alone third parties of the left, let alone Democrats' connivance with Republicans in keeping third parties off the ballot.

Earlier, she rightly bashes COP28 for a cop-out. She wrongly fails to mention "carbon tax" or "carbon tariff" as part of the solution.

Adam Lee has a good piece about minimalism in possessions, but without mentioning directly its ties to the climate crisis. And, that's offset by his piece from last fall being a sucker about Biden on the picket line.

Back to Clark, the main writer on this.

She earlier talks about the fifth US climate assessment. Several missing items here. First, "adjustments" to agriculture are nowhere near enough. Regenerative ag and feed to cut methane belches aren't enough. Eating less meat — a LOT less beef, and a fair amount less pork — are the ticket.

Lee then writes about the "Green New Deal" without telling you it's the Dems' fake Green New Deal, not the original Green Party one.

Weirdly, per Pew data that Ryan Burge misread or whatever, all these folks miss the biggie. NONE of them tie secularism specifically to how seriously people view the climate crisis, or even that they see it as a crisis at all. I wrote about that earlier this year.

"You had one objective .... " and you failed.

Beyond not really anchoring the climate crisis to secularism, to the degree anybody offers solutions, they're not that much.

Top blogging, first quarter of 2024

These are the most-viewed posts of mine within the past three months. That doesn't mean all of them are from the last three months. I'll indicate where not.

No. 10? More oopses at r/Academic Biblical, with the worst I documented being some nutter about "666."

No. 9? A two-paragraph brief from way back in 2007. "Patriots, gurus, scoundrels, martyrs" was, I think, the second post here to draw vigorous protests from "Addle Allone." I have one suspicion who that person is, but am not sold on it.

No. 8? Yes, Morton Smith is indeed the forger of Secret Mark. And, a 2023 book won't convince me otherwise.

No. 7? Some counterfactual/alt history about Caesar and the Ides of March.

No. 6? Trending from 2020 because I posted it at Reddit's r/classicalmusic, my saying at that time that I would take a pass on Fabio Luisi helming the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

No. 5? From last year, about fascism in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. (Since posting it, I have crossed swords on Twitter with the chief fascist nutter of the story, Corey Mahler. Unfortunately, I didn't screengrab and now I'm blocked. IIRC, it was him spouting false flag nuttery about the Crocus attack in Moscow.)

No. 4? I murdered Robert Sapolsky, figuratively speaking, over "Determined."

No. 3? From last fall, and getting new reading from posting at a biblical criticism group, obviously NOT the blocked-to-me r/academicbiblical, my piece on Josiah not being Josiah, proto-Deuteronomy and more.

No. 2? The second from 2007, "more proof the Buddha was no Buddha," and possibly the first piece of mine to draw that vigorous reaction from Addle Allone. Allone, maybe, but not alone in reacting to this. Oh, while we're there? Buddhism is still a religion.

No. 1? Andy Clark is all wet as a philosopher of consciousness.

When was the book of James written?

Some actually pretty good discussion here on its dating. The long comment by Moremon is good, though he appears to be plumping for at least the possibility of a relatively early date within a pseudepigraphal James by conflating Raymond Brown's dating schema and Dale Allison's.

Pytine's comment is also good, bringing Kloppenborg into the mix.

First? Yes, absolutely, it's pseudepigraphal. The absence of second-century church fathers quoting it, except a possible but not guaranteed reference by Irenaeus, plus even into the third, and a bit into the fourth, centuries, later fathers still raising an eyebrow about its authenticity, are markers.

Second? At the tail end of the first century, many New Testament scholars note that Paul went into eclipse. So, no author at that time would have good reason for trying to make "James" look Pauline. And, yes, despite the "show me your faith," etc., and early-Lutheran era Martin Luther's perplexment, it is Pauline in look.

But, get several years into the second century? Different story. Assuming a still relatively strong Ebionite movement before the Bar Kokhba revolt, with Paul surging back into prominence again, an author trying to make a "James" look Pauline would have incentive to write, just like an author trying to deal with church governance in a Jesus movement facing an ever-longer delay in the eschaton would have reason to write the Pastorals.

Liotorg raises the issue of, dating aside, whether James had more of an indirect oral dependence on the authentic Paulines, and the first set of pseudeipigraphs, Colossians and Ephesians, or whether there was even a literary dependence. He says it doesn't affect dating, but IMO, a written dependence would tend to push James' dating later, in that you need more time for more copies of an ancient manuscript to circulate more.

Per other commenters, Craig Evans and James Tabor are wrong in arguing for an early date. Of course, Tabor argues for a Jesus dynasty, which commenter Dramatic Ad ignores, which means he has motive to argue James wrote in the 50s.

 

I was going to snark again on OnlySky, but ...

Per a group statement, plus this, this, this and this ... it self-imploded.

As regular readers know, I snark semi-regularly on Reddit's AcademicBiblical subthread. I've done that here on occasion in the past for OnlySky, but not for their particular atheist takes on biblical criticism, or biblical issues in general, nearly as much as ...

Their conflation of Gnu Atheism with secular humanism and

Their proxy war warmongering on Ukraine. Multiple links on that below.

I had gone to the website, since I hadn't been in several months, to see the take on Israel-Gaza post Oct. 7, 2023, and instead, they're dead?

The first "this" is by cofounder Adam Lee. Confirming what I suspected, and refudiating Gnu Atheist claims that the rise (kind of stalled) of the "Nones" means a rise in atheism, with more refudiation here, the bucks weren't there to support it. (It's not just that full atheists aren't Nones. In one OnlySky piece from 2022, James Croft notes the withering and imploding of the Ethical Culture world, saying the St. Louis Ethical Society's 350 or so members are one-tenth of the whole of EC in the US.)

None of this stopped Lee again, earlier this year, from, at least by implication, conflating Nones and atheists. Nor, globally, did it stop Dale McGowan, in looking at China, from conflating secularism and atheism. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, surely, of atheistic and quite religious Theravada Buddhists. Yes, Buddhism is a religion, and a pre-emptive shut-up to claims otherwise. Ditto for Daoists and a fair chunk of neo-Confucianists. The reality, contra McGowan, is that terms like the Dao or Way, or T'ien or Heaven, is that they are metaphysical concepts in traditional Chinese thought, even if not deities.

The second, meh-ish, is by Captain Cassidy. She is religiously illiterate, IMO, having conflated Calvinism and Lutheranism.

The third? Jonathan MS Pearce. "The Self-Besotted Philosopher," I called him, to pun on his own moniker. A deep-fried proxy war warmonger over Russia-Ukraine. (Indeed, per a piece there, deep-fried enough to actually go to Kherson.) And, per this piece, also an Islamophobe and a Jesus mythicist, or at least a "fellow traveler."

The fourth? M.L. Clark, which finally gets me to the intended snarking.

As far as Israel-Gaza, M.L. Clark seems to have written about it far more than anybody else, and in pieces that probably needed editing for size or broken into multiple parts. This one, her best overall since Oct. 7, nonetheless never comments on the issue of many Jews conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And, while the Nakba is mentioned, details of it are not discussed, nor is pre-World War II British Palestine and other things.

Item No. 1, per Wiki's surprisingly generally very good page about the Nakba, MUST be established, and that is that it was started BEFORE any Arab League armies attacked Israel. Zionists, even if they don't directly say so, will hint, to the degree they admit that anything like a Nakba happened, that it was a response to being attacked.

Of course, about the same time late last fall, Clark used the issue of Israel-Gaza war crimes to attack Russia for war crimes while ignoring Ukrainian ones. She does mention Russian claims that Ukraine has committed war crimes but never steps beyond "Russian claims." That said, she appears to be at least a low-level proxy war warmonger, or did. And, as with the Nakba, there's no backstory. Of course not; that would undermine being a proxy war warmonger.

Elsewhere, she shows she's a one-trick pony. Talking about German state elections in Thuringia, she notes that the Alliance for Democracy failed to come out on top. Two-thirds of the way down, she finally mentions Russia-Ukraine war issues and their effect on domestic politics, but doesn't get into detail.

Clark may not be as much a warmonger as Pearce, but she is just as much a neoliberal. I suspect that goes for others.

As for comments on the group announcement page? Yeah, other people besides the above that I snarked on early on? Kind of not writing any more.

And, commenters call out Adam Lee (and by extension, other cofounders). MANY of them talk about the commenting system being crap and say they told Lee et al that from the start. Sounds like an arrogance problem on the part of the founders. Shock me. 

Also? One person calls them out for neoliberalism. Another snarks on the Democratic identification in another way. 

As I mentioned in the "conflation" link? Robert Price is an atheist, unless he believes in Cthulhu's existence. He also walks, talks and quacks like a racist. (H.P. Lovecraft himself was definitely one.) But, the point? While I say that you can't be a humanist, secular or otherwise, and be a racist, you certainly can be an atheist and racist. Or an atheist and other things. I've said it repeatedly and repeat it again, atheism is no guarantor of moral or intellectual superiority.

But, by conflating atheism and secular humanism, and even among non-racists, excluding conservatives or true leftists alike, they had a narrow focus.

Back to the Nones not being atheists. You also had a narrow target audience. Your expectations were probably too high in the start. As for a place like Skeptical Inquirer? It doesn't pitch secularism as its focus.

Related? It reaches out more beyond the USofA. OnlySky was pretty much a Merikkka-only project. Again, more non-Americans should have been recruited from the start.

So, you blew it!

Bye!

More "interesting" stuff at r/Academic Biblical

Pytine's comment and ex-Mormon's response are both "interesting," but I believe incorrect, especially no-Moremon.

First, Pytine.

The Cureton thesis on Ignatius is a minority view among scholars; Wiki has a decent summation of the issue. For more detail, see this link off a footnote there, that argues Ignatius had to have written post-140. It may not be a tiny minority view, but it's pretty darn small from what I read. That blows that idea out of the water, but with a 140s date, that as a terminus ad quem for the Gospels allows late dating of them. That said, there is another angle that might be possible. That is that the middle recension is original, but has interpolations, at least as we have it today; see Wiki's "authenticity."

The idea that Luke is dependent on the Gospel of Marcion, rather than him redacting Luke, I still find laughable. And, the Ockham's Razor claim by Pytine doesn't hold water. Rather, it's quite possible that, even though Luke went to Adam with his genealogy, vs Matthew to David, it was still too Jewish. Besides, there's Option 3, again per Wiki, that both derived independently from a common source document. In any case, the Lukan recension of Marcion holds less water when the Cureton idea on Ignatius is rejected.

No-Moremon? His buying the laughable theory, that still gets bruited, that Mark was writing in response to Caligula's proposed actions, is Not.Even.Wrong. Since Paul invented the Eucharist, how could Mark have written earlier? Crossley's theory is also laughable because it seems to be based on a Lukan-inspired take on the general historicity of a broad-ranging Council of Jerusalem.

No-Moremon then has a sub-comment to himself, but is brought up sharply by "Spike" on just what the "right hand of fellowship" in Acts probably actually meant. That said, Spike can be problematic and has been in the past; on this issue, citing THE R. Joseph Hoffman's take on the historical Jesus without noting RJ was once a mythicist, but abandoned that due to academic politics and more, is a lacuna. That said, RJ's hint that Judas Iscariot is really a cover for Judas the Galilean is interesting. But, the idea that Jesus was both a proto-Zealot and a member of the "fourth philosophy" is laughable.

For much more on the Marcionite vs Lukan priority, see this AB post. Per one commenter there, I agree, contra Pytine, and call it the "Gospel" of Marcion rather than seemingly privileging it by calling it the "Evangelicon."

Morton Smith: Still the forger of Secret Mark

At the Atlantic recently (workaround archive link avoids paywall) Ariel Sabar tackled anew this old question, known to biblical scholars like me (graduate theological degree, undergrad in classical languages): Did Morton Smith forge The Secret Gospel of Mark?

Tackled anew because of a 2023 book by Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau. Since titles can't be copyrighted, theirs is also "The Secret Gospel of Mark." They make the claim that the cover letter (remember, Smith never claimed to have found Secret Mark itself) was not by Clement of Alexandria, but also not a Morton Smith forgery, but rather, written in early Byzantine times by monks at Mar Saba to try to backdoor-justify same-sex monastic relationships.

There's no doubt that in what became the Orthodox world, as well as what became the Catholic world, such relationships existed, and if not common, were certainly not on the fringe, either.

But, would an invention of even a slice of a heresiac gospel have been the tool to do this? Doubtful. That's in part given that no such actual heresiac gospel appears to have existed. It's never mentioned by Eusebius, Ephiphanius in his Panarion compilation of heresies, etc.

Sabar, without mentioning all the relevant church father names, touches on the basics.

One thing he does not mention is epigraphy. At Biblical Archaeology Review, in 2009 renowned paleographer Agamemnon Tselikas discussed the "Clement" letter from that angle and essentially said that he can't prove Smith forged it, but he seems the most likely author. Ehrman and others have said somewhat the same.

And, lots of discussion, much of it semi-informed, at least, at the Early Writings site. (There's also some backbiting.) A lot of it discusses Tselkas' analysis. He says that Smith misread the Greek he had in his photos, and that it's actually "naked men with naked man," not "naked man with naked man." 

OTOH there? Although people call Tselkas the bomb of Greek paleographers today, what if he got this one wrong? Per another poster at Early Writings, almost all the accents in this photograph of Smith's actually are over consonants. So, that could be an accent over a final sigma after all.

Here is a semi-critical "fair transcription" of the Greek, with page-by-page English translation, and with text-critical footnotes in the Greek.

As far as why? Short of a smoking gun of a love letter, Sabar reviews all the evidence to document that Smith had a long-term gay lover. Atanas Todor Madjoucoff was actually bisexual, getting married and having kids. But, Smith's suicide revealed he'd willed almost all his estate to Madjoucoff. He had a personal photo of him that, presumably for reasons of emotional choke-up, Madjoucoff wouldn't accept.

But Smith had two reasons to forget the "Clement" letter and create its backstory. Actually, three, partially overlapping.

He was known as being not just skeptical but cynical about religious verities. He may have been an atheist, though I don't know if he has been confirmed as that or not.

The second and related? He'd been denied tenure at Brown. Other universities wouldn't hire him. When he got on at Columbia, it was in the department of ancient history. So spite would have been a motive, but driven by two reasons, not just one.

Sabar does not reference, per a screed by the one one-star reviewer of the 2023 book, three scholars who had trod this ground before him — and two of them before BAR in 2009 saying it thought the letter was genuine, paleography be damned. This review of Peter Jeffrey's book is big. (That said, per a couple of lesser reviews, as well as one other 5-star, Jeffrey's background as Benedictine oblate must be taken into account.) Jeffrey and Carlson are both discussed in detail at Early Writings.

Flip side? Also at Early Writings? Per Origin's take on the story of Jonathan loving David more than the love of any woman, was a homosexual slant to Christianity semi-common in pre-Nicene Alexandria? I don't think that's likely. First, we would have heard more about it, and ditto with the Smith/Landau thesis if it leaked outside the monastic world. In addition, the "Secret Alias" arguing for the gay Alexandrine Christianity, in reality is Stephen Huller, and he is an idiosyncratic Bible scholar indeed if he thinks Jesus not only did not claim to be the Messiah but instead claimed to be the herald for Herod Agrippa II as Messiah. No, really! Per a one-star review, it's worse! He apparently claims that Mark the gospeler IS Marcus Julius Agrippa, as in Herod Agrippa. Given that none of the gospels were originally identified by names of authors, this wasn't "the Gospel of Mark" at the start anyway.

As for people trying to defend Smith still? I remember reading Helmut Koester's defense long ago. Wrong. (And the "great fool" is rhetorical, especially since he also claimed that Secret Mark came before the canonical. Maybe you wanted to stake out an iconoclastic exegetical position. In reality, he knows that gospels in general have tended toward "expansion" the later they were written. Witness Matthew and Luke vs Mark. Witness the Protoevangelion. Etc., etc.) Didn't read Crossan's, but he was wrong too. BAR itself? Not.Even.Wrong.

There's one other thing that repeatedly gets mentioned. Yes, Mar Saba is "cloistered," and became more so after Smith published. But, Smith never made an effort to go back there to be able to get, or try to get, the actual manuscript so others could look at it.

But, even more, I think the Smith/Landau tertium quid idea is a dead duck. Most likely, Smith forged this letter. There's a bare bones shot it's legit. A cover letter of letters circa 600-700 CE? No.

New Atheism reaches new lows

 T.J. Coles, writing for Counterpunch and riffing on his new book, "The New Atheism Hoax," has the receipts.

The warmongering of original Gnu Chris Hitchens, in his slobbering over his alleged special care for the Middle East, and the trigger-happy Islamophobia of second-gen Gnu Slammin Sammy Harris, I already knew about. With both of them, and obviously with Harris, as with Gnu Richard Dawkins and his "Dear Muslima," Islamophobia is a big part of the issue. It's not just being anti-religious, or anti-theist as Camus put it in "The Rebel," it's Islamophobia in specific.

Apparently, Dan Dennett, seemingly the least belligerent of the original Gnus, has joined in since Oct. 7. At a minimum, by not calling out the Israeli genocide? "Silence gives assent," Dan. And Coles notes that Dawkins has signed a letter calling for "Israel's right to exist." That phrase has long been a dogwhistle.