Regular readers here know I love bagging on "History for Atheists" blogger O'Neill, especially his handwaving lies about how Catholic in general, and papal in particular, antisemitism didn't exist in post-Renaissance times, despite David Kertzer repeatedly showing him wrong. (O'Neill, last time I checked his site, had never read a single book by Kertzer and only mentioned his name once or twice.)
Well, I decided to look at some of his Goodreads reviews and bag on him more.
Bart Ehrman's "The Triumph of Christianity"? He calls it five stars, ignoring the many errors, many of them out of historical ignorance, that actually make it two stars.
"The Bright Ages"? O'Neill thinks that this one-star dreck, with various amounts of strawmanning, cherry-picking, lies by omission and historical inaccuracies, is worth four stars. I've long considered O'Neill to belong to the "Catholicist" subset of Samuel Huntington type cultural Christianism, and I think that's why he rates this dreck that high.
And, due to a response to me elsewhere? On Twitter, he thinks Kertzer "has an agenda." On one other Tweet, he comes close to dipping his toes in something that isn't anti-Zionism but ...
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His wrongness isn't limited to theology and religion, though. He gives the David Graeber/David Wengrow "The Dawn of Everything" five stars, when, from the title itself onward, it's only two.
2 comments:
First, as noted at the end, I gave Graeber TWO stars myself. But, for partially different reasons than you.
Second, the main focus of the piece is about Tim O'Neill, not David Graeber. Want to talk more about O'Neill? Fine. About Graeber? Move along.
Third, your Nevermore Media piece is a conspiracy theory piece. Any further comments going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes won't get posted.
Fourth, ditto on spades on Item 3 on your Rolf-Hefti COVID conspiracy thinking piece.
Dear Anony-nuts? You've been published just to be deleted. I know the difference between an actual conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. I've written about it, including noting that pushing of conspiracy theories is a new Gnosticism, with all the cultic implications that has. Bye, and nobody else like you will be posted even to just be deleted. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2019/11/conspiracy-or-conspiracy-theory.html
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