Yet other political nuttery OnlySky gets wrong

 I've repeatedly called out the Self-Besotted Philosopher, Jonathan M.S. Pearce, for his errors at the semi-Gnu Atheist site.

Now, time to further turn my guns on M.L. Clark.

I saw NAFO Fella and warmonger Nadin Brzezinski touting being on CounterSocial as well as Mastodon instead of Twitter. So, I googled, not having heard of it before. Saw this piece by Clark.

Problem? Yes, starting here:

The Jester, a prominent US hacker with a military background, made the choice to block six countries with high rates of cyber attack from the site: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Pakistan.

First, banning entire populations of those countries based on their governments' actions is not very secular humanist. Second? Doesn't the US do cyberhacks? Doesn't Israel? The flash-drive hack called Stuxnet says hell yes.

Lord, Liar, or Lunatic — and mythicist!

C.S. Lewis once infamously posited the false trilemma that Jesus must either be who he said, the Lord, or else a liar or lunatic. Critical scholars have of course countered with a fourth L of legendary accretions. (That's not to say that such accretions aren't at times outright lies by the authors of New Testament books. Nor is it to say that maybe the historical Jesus himself wasn't one, or a bit meshuggah at times.)

Anyway, I recently — due to someone I once "followed" on Disqus and for whom Disqus still gives me notifications even though I no longer follow him (social media click-baitery) stopped at the site of Jonathan M.S. Pearce on Patheos.

Under discussion was a guest post about Jesus mythicism.

The mythicists, of course, would change "Legendary accretions" simply to "Legend."

That said, the light bulb came on soon enough to recognize that Lewis' original trilemma, and their own fourth L, applies to many of them.

Lord — lording it over respondents and thinking they're always right.
Liar — busted some straight-up lies, as I did not too long ago at Godless in Dixie.
Lunatic — not literally, but, some of them are crazy in a everyday sense.
Legend — in their own mind, yes.

The Lord part? Many of them (not saying most, but am saying many) refuse to accept critical scholarship, whether its biblical criticism, archaeology or more.

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The outright liar is related in one case. He claimed Nazareth didn't exist in the time of Jesus. I presented a 2009 archaeological study that said "yes it did." He then claimed the Israeli Antiquities Authority pulled back somewhat from the author's statements.

First, that's not the same as rejecting the findings. Second, new archaeological study, from 2015 and ongoing to the degree it can, has found new evidence that says yes it did exist then. His response? Handwaving and talking about Helena. (He then pulled out Jesus ben Pandera, with his one mythicist website claiming he lived circa 100 BCE. Wrong. That's conflating the idea that the HJ may have been based on a Jesus crucified by Alexander Jannaeus with the ben Pandera of the Toledoth Yeshu.) More here on the actual existence of first-century Nazareth. Tis true that we cannot date to more precisely in the first century, but that alone undercuts mythicists.

(Pictured at right: A house in Nazareth dated to the first century CE and believed by some Christians to be the house of Jesus' childhood.)

Update, Dec. 20, 2020: And, Pearce himself is looking ever more like a mythicist fellow traveler at a minimum. From a new post, I quote.

Rene Salm’s thesis in The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus, according to archaeological analysis, and not until at least 70 CE.

This is simply not true. One cannot generally date archaeological evidence of habitation to that precise of a time. I'm sure Pearce's quoted author would say something like "but the Judean revolt." And I would respond: Rome did not put every village in Galilee and Judea to fire and the sword. Oh, and I'll take Ken Dark, author of the second linked piece three paragraphs above, over Rene Salm any time. James McGrath, whom I will also take over Salm, offers indirect further evidence for the existence of Nazareth at the time of Jesus.

I want to quote McGrath, as it's another line that to some degree is applicable to mythicists in general:

For those who may have bought into the “Nazareth never existed” nonsense, I encourage you to reflect on the fact that you have listened to the archaeological equivalent of young-earth creationists. They might well be genuinely skeptical in other areas, but in this one they’ve bought into a conspiracy theory, and one that simply does not fit the evidence we’ve long had, much less the evidence that has come to light more recently.

Sorry, but it's true.

Dark also notes elsewhere how soon after Jesus' death Christians were to put labels on some sites as being part of Jesus' history. They still may not be accurate, but the earliest of the labelings could reflect an oral history going back further than the first written sources and so, at a minimum, should NOT be rejected out of hand. 

Pearce says he's "not sold on mythicism" (my emphasis) but he certainly doesn't reject it, claiming he finds Salm's work "interesting though." It must be noted that Salm is not an academic, or even close. Shades of Joe Atwill, he's a music teacher!!! If anything, he's anti-academic vis-a-vis biblical scholarship. You may not be "sold" on mythicism, Jonathan ... but you're close to duck-quacking.

(Update, June 12: Pierce says now he leans away from mythicism, and actually, see below as for what the term is about, cites things like the scandal of particularity to boost a historical Jesus claim.)

Finally, there's the scandal of particularity, perhaps strongest in John, where Nathaniel sneers in John 1:45, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" and John 7 having the rhetorical question about the Messiah not coming from Galilee. Per Pearce's post in question at his comment, I agree with him than Matthew 2 mangles "netzer." BUT ... Matthew is doing pesher on the Tanakh via the Septuagint. (The author of the Gospel was almost certainly a Greek-speaker.) And, perhaps, this is his attempt to explain away where Jesus is from with hand-waving, or to deliberate conflate different Hebrew words into a bad pun or three, shades of the Yahwist. The wrongness, deliberate mangling, or whatever, is no proof that Nazareth didn't exist. None.

The most likely story, given he had one known Zealot (anachronistic to a degree) and one possible Sicarian disciple is that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth, and that this was indeed an embarrassment. As gospelers reached the second and third generations, they not only invented a birth for him in Bethlehem, but also invented a Davidic family tree which most likely is totally untrue in both Matthew and Luke.

===

Back to the original.

A second outright liar? This person, "pofarmer," not just to me but to others, posits "academic essentialism." In other words, because Bart Ehrman did his undergrad at a Bible college, he can never be really trusted. My response is that because Joe Stalin went to an Orthodox seminary, then he must have remained a secret Xn all of his life. I posted that in response to him, then in the mains. I called him out a second time in mains, and when he wouldn't respond, blocked him.

Lunatics? Well, not lunacy, but psychological projection — beyond the fact that many mythicists, as Gnu Atheists, are the atheist equivalent of Christian fundamentalists, is real.

Legends in their own mind? Yes.

So, the block function on Disqus got a workout. Both liars and two lunatics? Gone.

I have long thought that many Gnu Atheists feel they "Have to" disprove the existence of a historical Jesus to disprove the belief system of Christianity, and that simply doesn't logically follow. I don't have to disprove the existence of Siddhartha Gautama re Buddhism, or, although he wasn't divinized, Muhammad on Islam.

Otherwise, I'm sympathetic to a high degree of legendary accretions, perhaps more than a, say, Bart Ehrman. (He has other issues, such as misinterpretation of the We passages in Acts.)

But, I also know the history of Jesus mythicism, and that its first go-round happened at the same time as the first search for the historical Jesus and a first push for Buddha mythicism.

That said, I wonder if with Gnus, part of it is also the angle that Camus posited in "The Rebel." They feel they have to fight against this Jesus, and the "best" way to "win" this fight is allegedly prove he didn't exist.

That said, although it was a guest post, and I'm not sure of Pearce's own stand on mythicism, any philosophizing type (I think he's got a master's at least in the field) who claims to be "presenting a wealth of evidence in support of a deterministic worldview" is himself a liar. I posted something politely to that effect in the main thread and got no response.

The academic shortcomings of Jesus denialists

First, folks, that's what the likes of Robert M. Price, Joseph Atwill, Richard Carrier and Acharya (D.M. Murdock) are called here. Not "mythicists." I've moved Robert Eisenman into that camp too. (Wiki links on the above.)

Note to readers: I initially posted this on my main blog a couple of years ago. Since I discuss critical religion and philosophy issues here, and often even more than over there, I realized I needed a copy here. I have lightly updated it from that original and from a couple of follow-up posts.

The original version of post-Enlightenment Jesus mythicism really took off in late-Victorian Britain, around the same time as Theosophy and the Society for Psychical Research took off.

First, it wasn't just Jesus mythicism; Buddha mythicism and Zoroaster mythicism were also in the air. (Wiki's article fails to mention that, sadly.)

Why?

In my opinion, it was an attempt to "spiritualize" all three religions at precisely the same time Theosophy and psychic beliefs were in the rise. Especially given that Theosophy was connected to both Buddhism and Christianity, this makes some sort of sense.

Hinduism wouldn't be eligible for spiritualizing. The British who had the Raj in India, with stereotyping their "wogs" and seeing the all-too-anthropomorphic gods of Hinduism, would have said ixnay on that.

And Judaism? Well, the "genteel" anti-Semitism of late Victorian England would put the kibosh on that.

That said, it was an idea with a positive goal, was Jesus mythicism. This is not to exclude that late-Victorian mythicism wouldn't have been guided by academic tools such as myth-and-ritual school of comparative religion or comparative mythology.

Today? It seems to be little more than an evangelistic vehicle for Gnu Atheism and as such, worth about as much.

Let's look at the leading intellectual lights as of the late 2010s.

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Price (His homepage, and for others)?

First, as this rant on Facebook, an anti-Obama screed, shows, academic skills in Biblical criticism certainly don't translate across borders. (Note: Price normally posts to Facebook as "public," not "friends" or "friends of friends," therefore, I am not revealing any private confidences.)

Since then, per the screen capture of a recent Facebook post by him, he's gone far, far beyond that. In case you can't read the print in his avatar, it says, "Never apologize for being white."

A mix of that and commenting on a Facebook site about "American White History Month" (and not even the first such site!) would indicate that, if not a full-out racist, Price is at least that genteel, pseudo-scientific creature, the racialist.

(Update: Price is an official fan/liker of Ted Cruz on Facebook, showing how far in the right-wing tank he is politically.

A leading atheist and Jesus denialist, in addition to being an apparent racialist is also a fanboy of Christian Reconstructionist, and Prez candidate, Ted Cruz. Isn't that like a closeted gay Republican politician voting for anti-gay legislation?) 

It's all part of what I call Christianism as a parallel to Islamism, or what Wiki labels Christian atheism.

He used to teach at a seminary named for a leader of the African-American wing of the New Thought movement. This is a school accredited only by an organization that accredits diploma mills. Think of a black version of Unity (from which Johnnie Colemon graduated, in fact), and that's where he teaches. At a minimum, doubly ironic for teaching at a metaphysics-dripping seminary, and a black one to boot. At a maximum, doubly hypocritical. (That said, I wonder if the folks at Johnnie Colemon know about all aspects of his personality.)

Oops, it's now "used to teach," IIRC. I think the Seminary moved and Price chose not to. Anyway, he now teaches at the Center for Inquiry's CFI Institute, which is online-only. I believe that it offers courses, but no degrees, and also does not appear to exist any longer as a separate CFI entity, but is rather rolled up within the Dawkins Foundation. Nuff ced.

As for my non-"credentialism" comments about Price?

Are they mean-spirited? Or, logically, am I committing the classic fallacy of an ad hominem?

I think not.

Rather, I think that an academic who's also a racialist, when we know that no such thing as "race" scientifically exists, despite racialists' attempts to gussie it up in pseudo-scientific dross, has left the door open to his critical thinking skills in general being questioned.

Ditto for the fact that the place where he teaches is a diploma mill. Yes, luck can be involved with whether one lands an academic position or not. But, it's not necessarily the only factor. Price could teach at a credentialed community college, for example.

Add to it that Price believed a cock-and-bull story about an ancient Priapus statue indicates he could be a "movement atheist," an activist, even if not a Gnu, per my observation a few paragraphs above.

Update: Maybe Price's teaching at a New Thought seminary isn't by accident? Given that, per Wiki, he calls himself a "Christian atheist," let's just be honest and call him a New Ager. If atheism in a broader sense means "no metaphysical beliefs of any sort," then Gnu Atheists have latched on to him for strange reasons. Certainly for uncritical and unskeptical ones.

So, he must be simpatico with teaching at Johnnie Colemon on ideas, while, I guess, wishing he were teaching all Caucasians. The school surely knows about his professional stances, but apparently not his personal ones.

Beyond that, his review of Eisenman's "The New Testament Code" undercuts any previous modicum of actual scholarly insight I had given to him. I mean, his Semitic language scholarship to claim that the Hebrew version of "Caliph" is behind the full nomenclature of James son of Alphaeus and Simon bar-Cleophas is a howler, no two ways about it. Here is a possible refutation on Alphaeus. And the Hebrew חֵלֶף actually means "spare part" or "replacement." That took me all of two minutes. On Cleophas? Quite possibly a place name.

For Price (and for Carrier, below), if you don't actually know Hebrew, stop cherry-picking for off-the-wall interpretations of Hebrew names when much more likely ones are at hand.

Price also seems to entertain the possibility that Cthulhu is real, or such is the impression I have occasionally gotten.

James McGrath claims Price is also a climate change denialist. Link off his piece is busted, but shock me.

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That leads me to D.M. Murdock, aka Acharya.

She was an original peddler of this nonsense; I say it via Gnu Atheist thought leader P.Z. Myers favorably touting it. She has no bachelor's level degree in religion, let alone a graduate degree. As Murdock's Wiki page notes, she is 10 times more credulous a peddler of bad puns than was the Yahwist section author of the Torah.

The fact that she was not just a mythicist, but a New Agey type of one, who other Gnus like P.Z. wouldn't have even touched if she weren't also a mythicist? Shows how crappy both Gnu Atheism and Jesus denialism are.

Her listing of her academic background on her website seems precisely done to cover actual thinness. Take being a "trench master" on an archaeology dig. Nice, yes, but, unless at a major new dig, it's more grunt work than intellectual work. (As a kid, I watched my dad assist as a certified amateur archaeologist at a couple of Anazasi digs, so this observation isn't out of life.) Plus, note that this work is all at classical sites. No Biblical archaeology from you!

And, the wrongness about the Priapus statue is only the tip of the iceberg. Here's a laundry list of other howlers of hers.

Some denialists like to bash her, but Price and Eisenman are among those who give her touts on her website.

And, it's also not mean-spirited to call a cock-and-bull story a cock-and-bull story.

Murdock died in 2015, and ironically, on Jesus Day/Mithras Day, Dec. 25, 2015, given that she claimed Christianity was based on Egyptian solar myth and such. Her death from cancer reflects the tenuousness of the U.S. health care system, from what I've read about her passing. At the same time, from what I've parsed together, it reflects the fact that she, too, had no full-time position or job, and no regular, steady, income stream, because mythicism of the Denialist Four Horseman is so outside academia that nobody claiming to be an academic mythicist can actually get a regular job teaching it.

Ironically, for someone claiming to be rigorously academic, she went down the alternative treatments road for her cancer, too. And, then tried to blame medicine ("conventional medicine" is simply called "medicine" at my site, folks) for her liver failure rather than accepting a rapid metastasis of her breast cancer.

The first of those two links illustrates what I said in the paragraph above that about the health care system here, as far as costs she was facing. That said, this:

I immediately started what turns out to be a ketogenic, anti-cancer diet, supplemented with known cancer-fighting substances as curcumin and many others, including mushrooms and ginger, 

Is pure nonsense.

No wonder she got defensive:

Do NOT let anyone go about writing stupid blogs saying that “alternative medicine” killed me. That would be yet more inaccurate propaganda.

It maybe didn't hasten your death, but it didn't slow it down, of that I'm sure. So, if medicine could have done better, and you bypassed it in favor of pseudomedicine that, given the ripoff levels in some of it, may have cost more, it DID help kill you.

Madam, you would have been better off coming to the point of "acceptance," much sooner, then finding a doctor ready to prescribe you a morphine overdose. 

What's also funny is that many sites mourning her are NOT "freethought" or "Gnu Atheist" sites. They're New Agers to the max. It's funny, but it's totally unsurprising, since in addition to not being a critical thinker in general, I never got the indication she was an atheist of any sort. In fact, had she lived a century earlier, she probably would have touted Theosophy.

Weirdly, both Price and Eisenmann also touted her. As for Price, this links to my impressions about him thinking Cthulhu is real. As for Eisenmann (see below) it just further undermines his credibility in general.

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Carrier? He's proof positive of Mark Twain's bon mot about "lies, damn lies and statistics." Claiming that Bayesian probability and statistics allows him to estimate the most likely historicity odds of Jesus as 0.008 percent is horse hockey. And, yes, he really makes that claim; click the link. There's simply not enough information from history of 2,000 years ago to have anywhere near that degree of precision, above all else. It's horse hockey for other reasons, too. Overall, it's clear that Carrier is "cooking" his Bayesian books to claim such pseudo-precise "precision."

Click the 0.008 link. It will explain how Carrier tries to put numbers on his prior and consequent probabilities. I first saw this on another blog, a person who actually, though not a mythicist himself, took Carrier seriously.

Related? On his own website, at this link showing how to work with Bayesian probabilities, Carrier essentially admits to something like book-cooking. I quote:

You can use the following calculator to run any standard two-hypothesis Bayesian equation (up to a limit of 1 in 100 odds on any variable, and accurate to only two decimal places).

Now, within his first book, I'm sure he claims to have a more precise use of Bayesian stats, but ... that itself might be part of the book-cooking.

In short, Carrier's use of Bayesian statistics underscores the old bon mot about lies, damned lies and statistics.

Beyond that, Bayesian probabilities are, in general, more subjective than Carrier tries to portray. And, trying to present them as more objective than they are is another part of the book-cooking.

Carrier does have a Ph.D. in ancient history, so he's ahead of Murdock and at Price's academic level. However, in six years since obtaining that Ph.D., he has held no academic position, not even as an adjunct. His listing of such things as "instructor" at Partners for Secular Activism or "visiting lecturer" at Center for Inquiry Institute don't count, of course.

And, having an eight-page CV, like spinning one volume into two on Bayesian analysis of Jesus' historicity, is blathering up there with Murdoch, especially when it lists publications in non-peer review, non-technical journals. As for the amount of blathering? His surprises me not one whit, not considering the vomitorium of words he spills out at times at Freethought Blogs. And, he, like Murdoch, knows neither Hebrew, nor Aramaic, nor Syriac.

Beyond that, Carrier has what I can only call a willfully perverse methodology of interpreting Bible passages. Click this link for more. Along with a tendency to nit-pick, per Ehrman himself, to show that, if you're not 100 percent in agreement, you're an "enemy." How typically Gnu-ish.

And, it gets worse, as shown by an October 2017 debate. In short, he's an asshole and a putz who suffers from a high degree of Dunning-Kruger effect.

And, the "argument from silence," for which he is one of the strongest proponents, is logically fallacious, whether used for Jesus denialism, or to claim Jesus was a gay-lover because he doesn't say anything about homosexuality, or anything else.

Beyond that, Massimo Pigliucci, at Scientia Salon, has a new post, referencing an essay from a few years ago about the use of Bayesian probabilities in establishing the soundness of informal logical arguments.

Early in comments there, a British Gnu Atheist nutter (nice British term) trotted out the greatness of Carrier's work. I responded with this blog post, which lead to this discussion.

Coel, it matters not whether the 0.0008 is a low end, or a precise number in general. Per Aravis, that’s not how you do history — or any other of the humanities. Bayesian probabilities or anything else, you simply cannot be that precise with history. And, you know that.

Let’s put it this way. Carrier has a Ph.D. in ancient history. Whether I phrased as just 0.008 or per you:

“The probability that Jesus existed is somewhere between 1 in 12,500 [the 0.008%] and 1 in 3. In other words, less than 33% and most likely nearer to zero. We should conclude that Jesus probably did not exist”

But, instead, said that about, Anaximander, Pythagoras, or another of the pre-Socratics, or about Homer, he would laugh in my face, and so would you. I know Aravis or Massimo would.

But, because it’s about Jesus, Jesus denialism, and Gnu Atheism, such utter rot, to use a good old British term, is acceptable, eh?

Well, no, it’s not.

Then, Alex, another commenter at Massimo's piece, says:

Also, in what sense is Carrier not a Biblical scholar? He is said to have got a PhD in ancient history and writes about little else but Biblical scholarship and possible misinterpretations of old Aramaic words. Does it only count as Biblical scholarship if one is a believer?

First, while he may comment on misunderstanding of old Aramaic words, I see no information that he has any knowledge of Aramaic or Hebrew on his quite extensive CV, which speaks only about the Greco-Roman world in general. I would think that, if he actually knew Aramaic, as long as his CV is, he’d explicitly mention it.

Beyond that, I even did a Google search: “Does Richard Carrier know Aramaic?” And I can’t get any hits that will confirm that he does.

Assuming he does not, the fact that he would still think to comment on misunderstandings of old Aramaic words “goes to character,” your honor. And, that’s putting it politely.

But, places where he calls a Targum an “Aramaic translation of the Old Testament” show he’s no biblical scholar. 

Fuller quote, from his original blog site: “A Targum is an Aramaic translation (or paraphrase or interpretation) of the OT. So really, this is akin to a textual variant for this passage.” 

Targums, as actual scholars know, were far more than that. They were commentaries, exegesises and more.

It’s clear that not only does he not know Aramaic, but that he just doesn’t know the bible that well, especially the Tanakh or Christian Old Testament, especially when he’s engaged in quote-mining and gets caught.

Carrier, as far as I can tell, also does not know Hebrew. He claims to know five languages — as best as I can tell, these are English, French, German, Latin and classical Greek. Because he doesn't know Hebrew, and probably doesn't know details of the biblical koine Greek translations of the various books of the Tanakh, this leaves him unable to comment on text-critical issues of quotes of or references to, the Tanakh or Old Testament in the New Testament.

Beyond that, Alex, this?

He … writes about little else but Biblical scholarship and possible misinterpretations of old Aramaic words.

I’m not even sure what logical fallacy that should be named, but it’s definitely a fallacy.

There are people who write about nothing other than how the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare. Do you call these people “Shakespearean scholars”?

Since the time of this piece's original writing, four years have passed and Carrier has yet to have a regular academic position anywhere, not in his academic background of classics let alone biblical studies. He also drinks too much of Tim O'Neill's Kool-Aid. He strikes me as being overall the Brian Dunning of Jesus denialists.

Why do I call him that?

Well, this Chrestus app he's selling, which appears to be a play on Tacitus using Χρήστος for χριστός, comes off like Dunning's grifting.

(Update, Sept. 17, 2021: Carrier now claims that early Christians thought Jesus was a space alien, like Klaatu. No, really, down to the Klaatu riff.)

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Atwill has not even a bachelor's degree in theology, biblical studies or ancient history. (And he likely is engaged in some flim-flammery in claiming "Caesar's Messiah" was the best-selling book in religious history in the US in 2006.) And, the idea that Rome invented Jesus for Jewish crowd control is laughable to anybody who knows ancient history in general or the Roman Empire in particular. A PR blurb for his "Covert Messiah" shows that he's chock-full of motivated reasoning. The reality is that there are no "massive connections" or "parallels" between Josephus and the New Testament gospels.

He's also wrong on Flavian family history. He's so laughably wrong that Murdock calls him out, engaging in her own wrongness in doing so. (Her claim to distinguish between "Christians" and "ChrEstians" gets a Greek-language usage mistake by Tacitus, based on general ignorance of Judaism, elevated to canon. Epiphanius would love it, yet regret his missed that for his Panarion. Beyond that, per iotacism, Tacitus may have made no error anyway.) And, her claim that the four canonical gospels didn't exist until the middle of the 2nd century CE is also laughable. [NB: That's different from the idea that, say, John went through a second editorial hand after 150 CE.])

Finally, he's channeled this into some sort of grifting enterprise since I first wrote this blog post, if he's since written "Shakespeare's Secret Messiah."

===

The one person with seemingly a more impeccable academic background is Eisenman. But, he's gone beyond the point of credibility on his take on the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially his refusal to accept carbon dating evidence and other manners scientific. All he is proof for is that it's a good idea to wait until after one gets tenure to propose truly weird ideas. A decade or more ago, I wouldn't have lumped him in with the mythicists, but now I will, at least the narrower mythicists, and perhaps the full-blown denialists.

I have a "professional" M.Div. degree. It's a "terminal" degree in that, in most academic systems, I would have had to gotten a second master's before a Ph.D. But, I'll put it ahead of a Baptist Ph.D. on academic rigor, let alone one from a fundamentalist bible college.

My undergraduate degree was classical languages, and I read Hebrew there, too. I took a short course in Aramaic in seminary as well. That puts me ahead of all but Price (I think; maybe he never read Hebrew, either, and he never seems to claim it), and Eisenman. I've also taken both academic courses and independent study on historical-critical methodology, which applies to all ancient literature with a clear, diachronic development history, not just biblical literature. That puts me ahead of all but Price, Carrier and Eisenman, with Carrier either not learning much of it in his antiquities study or else deliberately ignoring it. And, it puts me well ahead of most denialists' fanboy flag-wavers.

Beyond that, most Jesus denialists, like most "denialists" in general, are to some degree, at least, conspiracy theorists, with the mindset that entails.

Mythicists in the broad sense G.R.S. Mead and G.A. Wells I separate from the Jesus denialists in one sense. Their general claim is that Jesus is a composite character, but has perhaps some historic personage behind him. They're also less conspiratorially minded than denialists. But, they too generally lack academic credentials.

That all said, many of the arguments of the denialists can be turned on their heads.

First, even with a brief period of evangelism, Judaism in the eastern Mediterranean was smaller than non-Jewish Hellenism by far. The argument from silence from 1st-2nd century CE pagans means little. There's other Jewish people and events they're also silent about. Did Rabbi Akiva also not exist?

Second, as noted, arguments about the critical development of Christian scriptures applies to the Homeric corpus and other things.

That's just some short notes, in the end, here. Other priniciples of Biblical criticism apply to some degree to study of antiquities in general, and some of the denialists' arguments besides that from science can be turned on their head.

So, while I don't totally agree with a Bart Ehrman, and would give more credence to the "soft mythicism" of the likes of Mead and Wells than he might, I'm definitely with him much more than I am his Gnu Atheist attackers like Carrier.

Speaking of, and regarding criticism of Ehrman as a critic of denialists? Anybody (per a social media comment I saw, surely reported elsewhere) who thinks Ehrman acts like a theist is showing their own bias, in my opinion, assuming that a liberal critical scholar who's also a theist and a Ken Ham have the same amount of credibility.

(Beyond that, theists can be credible outside of being theological academicians. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and cosmology come immediately to mind.)

As for this seemingly becoming a big issue? No, per a commenter on social media, I don't get why it is for Gnus, either.

Critical academic discussion of the New Testament will point out the same issues that deserve critical scrutiny, including the same theological and dogmatic conflicts between one gospel and another, a gospel vs. Paul's authentic letters, his authentic letters vs. pseudepigraphal ones, etc., whether there was a historic Jesus or not.

Since the different gospels, Paul, etc., have different Christologies, how they would be affected by mythicism would differ from gospel to gospel. But nowhere, do I think, would it greatly change their Christologies as determined by critical theology.

Since fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals already reject that theology anyway, Jesus denialism won't have any effect on them, because, even if the denialists seem to be nearer the truth than they seem right now, conservative Christians would reject them too.

Beyond that, any Gnu Atheists who claim Ehrman's lying in this because that's a Peter statue aren't reading well, and are also dumb enough and knee-jerk enough to believe the ravings of a loon renamed Acharya who tells worse puns to worse effect than the Yahwist-section writer in the Torah.

Meanwhile, it it possible that mythicism in the broadest sense, that Jesus of the New Testament didn't exist as described, or close to that, but is build on a historic personage? I say yes, it's possible, while still assigning it a low probability. It would make Christian growth rates easier, among other things.

That said, none of the people above have increased that low probability, as I see it.

Gnu Athests are also guilty of "motivated reasoning"

Sam Harris' Immoral Landscape

Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape," much lauded by many reflexive, relatively unthinking New Atheists who have made him into a rock star of the movement, falls far short of its hype. In fact, I one-starred it on Amazon.

What's wrong? Harris is a Platonic idealist in drag. He also engages in scientism. Related to both of these, despite his having an undergraduate degree in philosophy, he really appears not to understand a lot of philosophical issues relevant to this book's subject. Or else, he doesn't care to.

Beyond that, his Islamophobia in the early part of this book seems to largely come straight from the neoconservative playbook. Possibly related to that, he creates straw men out of liberals all allegedly being moral relativists.

Sam Harris tries to draw a hard-and-fast dichotomy between science-based morals and ethics and religious-based morals and ethics in this book.

However, this is the real world, not a Platonic idea (Harris comes off as quasi-Platonic in more than one way in parts of this book), and so, it's not totally amenable to Harris' bifurcation.

Take abortion. Many religious people support at least some right to abortion, but noted atheist Nat Hentoff is 100 percent prolife. Ditto on end of life issues. And, if I looked a little bit, I could surely find atheists and agnostics with less enlightened views on gay rights than many religious people.

Now, as to the science part ... the idea that we can have a science-based morality? Harris offers little in the way of actual neuroscience studies on the brain processing moral issues.

We may well get oodles more such studies in the future, but that's not today. Harris also doesn't address the issues of what MRIs measure, how well this correlates with thought output, etc.

Likewise, he discusses little in the field of well-done evolutionary psychology (to distinguish it from Pop Evolutionary Psychology).

Beyond that, he simply ignores that the study of the human mind, whether from the POV of cognitive neuroscience or evolutionary psychology, is at best in the Early Bronze Age and is arguably, at least on the matter of morality and ethics, still in the Neolithic.

So, while science may at some point (far?) in the future offer us significant oversight on specific moral issues, it doesn't today because it can't. And, per the specific moral issues I listed above, it may never be able to.

Indeed, with reference to that, Harris' approach to science and morality smacks of a fair degree of scientism. And, I write this as an irreligious, skeptical naturalist.

That said, there's several other problems with this book. Read on at the jump for the details! I'm going to address several overview issues first, before making any page-by-page critique of the book.

First is the matter of Harris' Islamophobia. Since Islam is in general cited regularly for examples of immoral behavior and beliefs, we need to examine this.

First of all, it seems much of Harris' Islamophobia comes from the neoconservative political playbook. He favorably references an off-the-wall neocon writer, Bat Ye'Or, whose book on Islam's alleged takeover of Europe was one-starred by me.

Secondly, he's confusing a static historic snapshot of history with a moving picture. If we went by snapshots, 900 years ago, Christian Crusaders would have been the poster boys for immoral behavior. 750 years ago it would have been pagan/animist Mongols. 600 years ago, polytheistic Aztecs.

Finally, if we confine ourselves to today, the Hindu Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka killed 30,000 in their civil war, far more than al-Qaeda has killed.

Second, whence comes Harris' moral stance, ultimately? I believe he is not just a moral objectivist, albeit a consequentialist (a stance more often associated with moral relativism but compatible with objectivism too), but a moral absolutist -- specifically a Platonic Idealist moral absolutist. There's irony there in spades, since the early and middle Platonic dialogues were devoted to Socrates, deconstruction of other people's definitions of moral issues such as justice. (Of course, Socrates usually doesn't offer his own idealist definition back; such things arise only in later dialogues.)

Third, what of Harris' claims to be examining morality and its foundations from a scientific perspective?
First of all, he's not the first to do so. He didn't invent sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. (Let me be clear here -- much of what passes for science in alleged evolutionary psychology is actuallly the pseudoscience of Pop Evolutionary Psychology. However, unlike a P.Z. Myers, there is legitimate work being done in this field, albeit little and far between.) So, Harris isn't new in his effort and he's certainly not new in his hope.

That said, for someone who wants to be scientific, he seems often lacking. (No shock here; I saw the same problem way back in "The End of Faith." First, from an evolutionary standpoint, Harris doesn't address issues of individual vs. group selection. Now, I'm not as bullish on group selection as, say, David Sloan Wilson, but I do think it deserves more consideration than many evolutionary biologists give it. Second, Harris doesn't devote any scientific examination to cultural evolution. Admittedly, there's not a lot to really nail down ant this intersection of biology and sociology, but Harris doesn't even get into what is out there.

Beyond what I mention above, for someone with a graduate degree in neuroscience, he spends about ZERO time referencing actual neurological study of the brain. No V.S. Ramachandran here, folks! Not even close.

Fourth, Harris and philosophy, not just the "is-ought" issue, but certainly including that.

First of all, for people who have read previous works of his, and not embraced him as a bundle of light, his arrogance in dealing with the philosophical background should be of no surprise. But, it still needs quoting.

Page 197, footnote 1: "Many of my critics fault me for not engaging with the academic literature on moral philosophy. ... First ... I did not arrive at my position ... by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continual progress in the sciences of the mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of (academic terminology) directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. ... (T)he professional philosophers I've consulted seem to understand and support what I'm doing"
Let's unpack what's wrong with this quote.

1. Harris might actually have learned something by engaging with other moral philosophers either of today or the past. That would include wrestling more with Hume's is-ought; that would certainly include a provocative AND nontechnical book like Walter Kaufmann's "Beyond Guilt and Justice."
2. Is Harris saying he's either too dumb or too lazy to "translate" language of academia to a general audience? Or a too-arrogant mix of both? One of the best classical philosophers on moral issues was Hume, precisely because he wrote in a way for the general public (of a certain educational level) to understand.
3. Neuroscience is a "hard" science with plenty of its own technical language. That doesn't stop Harris from wanting to focus on advances in scientific discovery, albeit while, rather than discussing them in a nontechnical level, not discussing them at all. I smell a HUGE steaming pile of hypocrisy here.
4. In light of what I noted above about Socratic dialogues, Harris never discusses what happens when two big moral issues, like "fairness" and "compassion," collide. This is one of the brilliancies of Kaufmann's book mentioned above.

In light of all that, let's look at Hume's famous is-ought issues.

Hume discusses the problem in book III, part I, section I of his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739):

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

Hume calls for caution against such inferences in the absence of any explanation of how the ought-statements follow from the is-statements. But how exactly can an "ought" be derived from an "is"? The question, prompted by Hume's small paragraph, has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. This complete severing of "is" from "ought" has been given the graphic designation of Hume's Guillotine.

See Wikipedia for more on the "is-ought" issue.

Several issues here:
1. "Ought" is multivalent. Sometimes, most notably in ethics, it has an explicitly moral tone. Other times, far from that. For instance, in late 19th-century physics, scientists said the ether, the luminiferous ether, "ought" to weigh a certain amount, even though experiment rebelled against that.
2. In the case of ethics, to worry about "is-ought" is to approach the issue the wrong way. Rather, staying within Hume, one can ask what ethics can be naturalistically devised and supported. In this case (contra what Harris seems to say) we turn to evolutionary psychology **properly done** (and not Pop Ev Psych), as well as evolutionary biology of non-hominids. We can, through cultural anthropology, partially reinforce hominid ev psych findings. That then said, we would note that often, there is not one "right" ethical answer to some issues of ethics. We also should note, per someone like Walter Kaufmann, sometimes there is no right answer at all, or that a "right" answer may be culturally determined, or that a "right" answer for an individual may be the "wrong" answer for society. In this last case, no science gives us "the answer" as to whether individual needs or societal needs should prevail. And, for that matter, different religions may give us different answers, or the same religion may give us different answers at different times, as they do on other issues such as collective guilt.

Re a critic of my Amazon review, who invited me to look at a Harris post on Huffington Post.

Harris' "refutation" of his critics actually confirms much of what they say about him on the Islamophobia. Ditto on his .... gullibility, for want of other words, on the credibility of the psi folks.

As for his stance on Buddhism, it seems clear he's trying to have his cake and eat it, too, by purporting to be on a search for "the authentic Buddha," in essence. Shades of Albert Schweitzer!

That said, the review by John Horgan, which Harris loathes? I think Horgan goes too far in taking science to the moral woodshed, but, in a general way, he's right. To this day, Western scientists still have few problems with exploiting indigenous peoples, for example. One might fault Horgan for failing to distinguish science from individual scientists, but this is part of connecting Harris' stance to scientism, I think.

On the good side, though, he does some great petard-hoisting on Harris:

Some will complain that it is unfair to hold science accountable for the misdeeds of a minority. It is not only fair, it is essential, especially when scientists as prominent as Harris are talking about creating a universal, scientifically validated morality. Moreover, Harris blames Islam and Catholicism for the actions of suicide bombers and pedophilic priests, so why should science be exempt from this same treatment?

And more:

Harris asserts in Moral Landscape that ignorance and humility are inversely proportional to each other; whereas religious know-nothings are often arrogant, scientists tend to be humble, because they know enough to know their limitations. "Arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity," Harris states. Yet he is anything but humble in his opus. He castigates not only religious believers but even nonbelieving scientists and philosophers who don't share his hostility toward religion.

Finally, Horgan raises the same concerns about neuroscience I do:

Harris further shows his arrogance when he claims that neuroscience, his own field, is best positioned to help us achieve a universal morality. "The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs?

Indeed. But, that, too, is part of Harris' scientism. That said, P.Z. Myers and Vic Stenger, on their claims to have proved the nonexistence of god, show that Harris isn't alone among New Atheists in falling into the pit of scientism.

Too bad PZ Myers can't write an unbiased poll

In his parting shot about whether a convention called Skepticon should be about skepticism or atheism (such a convention could discuss, of course, how many atheists came to their state of disbelief via skeptical reasoning) he skews the works with a false-answer poll.

The only thing fully accurate is the "so-called" in the first sentence:

How much of a so-called skeptic convention can be about religion?

None 0% (0 votes)
No more than 25% 0% (0 votes)
No more than 50% 0% (0 votes)
Just so long as it isn't all of it 25% (3 votes)
All of it, why not? 75% (9 votes)

First, he implies that a skeptics' convention, according to some "straw man skeptical purists," can't discuss religion at all.

No, we so-called "purists" object instead to the unskeptical promotion of atheism, or the claim that only atheists are real skeptics, being promoted at a so-called skeptic convention, about which phrase you are right.

Then, with this:

There's only one choice that isn't arbitrary and incoherent and unjustifiable; I'd like to see the complainers confront the specific details of their position.

He of course implies that people who question him and other hyperatheists are "arbitrary and incoherent and unjustifiable."

Well, I'm not going to confront any "specific details" in a post on your blog; given the way rabid Pharyngulacs are, that would be like debating Ken Ham or his ilk at a fundamentalist college.

‘God is not dead; he never was alive in the first place’

And, with that quote, Richard Dawkins demolishes Karen Armstrong, and the title of her forthcoming book, “The Case for God.”

Armstrong dips back into the world of 2,000 years ago, a la Joseph Campbell, to talk about two ways of knowing, “mythos” and “logos.”

Well, myths aren’t another way of knowing truth. They may be another way of hiding from it, but that’s a different story.

As for today, and her claim that everybody but fundamentalists accepts evolution?

Yes, theistic evolutionists can weigh in all they want, but their theistic tinkerer is just an updated version of “the god of the gaps,” and, somewhere in their minds, if they’re reflective and honest, they know it.

That said, this review of the forthcoming “Creation” is likely typical in glossing over that bottom line, with the “no conflict between religion and evolution” statement.

Atheist visibility increases

Even to the point that Dallas’ own Metroplex Atheists gets profiled as part of National Journal’s cover story (PDF).

It’s part of a trend of such stories, as the New York Times also exemplifies.

Key to atheists, agnostics, antitheists and other secular humanists raising our activism profile is a new umbrella coalition of secular humanist groups, Secular Coalition of America.

As the National Journal story notes, it's the rise of New Atheists like Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dan Dennett contributing to this surge, not just in the U.S., but other English-speaking countries, too.

When theists settle a will with an antitheist

When my dad died four years ago, most of his cash money had already been moved into CDs on which we his kids, or grandkids, were the primary names and his the secondary. No problems at all.

And, there wasn’t too much fighting over most of Dad’s possessions.

That said, Dad also had a couple of insurance annuities that had not yet matured when he died. One did, late last year.

My No. 2 brother, who was/is Dad’s estate executor, thought it would be a good idea to send this money to charity.

OK so far.

To India. OK indeed. A developing nation.

To an orphanage and school. Sure.

A Lutheran one, from the denomination in which we all grew up.

Well, yes, dad had supported it himself for years, but.. he’s dead.

Find a secular Indian orphanage.

But, I think my sister is the only one of the four siblings who really “accepts” my antitheism. And, I didn’t want to make waves. The story of my life, oftentimes.

Chris Hedges calls strawman ‘New Atheists’

First, he apparently think Chris Hitchens’ political beliefs apply to all New Atheists, assuming that Salon is correct when it says he says they are:

Conspicuously allied with the neocons on the subject of America's role in world politics.

To be honest, Hitchens is the only New Atheist I’ve heard express ANY political opinion beyond worrying about the Bush Administration’s, or some states’, folding, spindling and mutilating of the First Amendment through faith-based programs getting government money, school boards and state boards of education trying to teach intelligent design, etc. Hedges says Harris, in his first book, talks about a nuclear first strike on the Arab world, but you don’t have to be a neocon to believe in that – which I don’t, anyway.

Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, who apparently doesn’t even draw Hedges’ eye, are about as apolitical, otherwise, as you can get.

As for claims that New Atheists are secular utopians, some may be, others certainly aren’t.

That said, I will agree that Harris is intellectually shallow, and Hitchens is a performer.

Again, though, “New Atheists” are a lot more than these two.

It’s hard to believe that “I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” with its shallow diatribes, was written by the author of “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”

But, Chris Hedges, that’s OK. We don’t believe in you as a serious writer anymore, either. Maybe you’re dying for a war addiction fix or something.

Scott Atran does a disservice to “new atheism”

Anthropologist Scott Atran, an atheist himself and author, most notably of In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, but a strong critic of the so-called “New Atheists,” even to the point of approaching talking about the “ineffability” of religious belief, was recently in an extended conversation with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris about their critics of the degree of harm religion causes.

The discussion also included side points on the validity, and degree of validity, of ideas of evolutionary group selection vs. individual selection.

Here’s my take on the whole thing, which is well worth a read.

The “new atheists” are right, in my opinion and empirical observation, that religion is harmful from the standpoint of groups, whether that be individual religious groups, faiths, sects, etc. other social groups, or the largest group of all, Homo sapiens. However, that then said, Atran is right that religion can be very valuable for the groups holding on to it.

That said, religion may well still have value for individuals. The psychological value of greater control that religion appears to give, greater control through its apparent, even if now known to not be real, explanatory value is still strong. But, its value minus its detriments is fading, especially in countries scientifically advanced not named the United States.

That said, the cohesiveness value of religion for groups still appears to offset those detriments in this country. But, as the United States exhausts its natural resources, faith-based stances from a fair amount of more literalist Christians on environmental issues, blank-check defense of Israel, and other items, will certainly grow more costly, especially to individuals within religious groups as individuals.

And, that said, while not dismissing David Sloan Wilson’s ideas on group selection, as many of the Dawkinses of the world do appear to do, and while noting that Darwin himself discussed group selection, ultimately, individual selection trumps group selection. Genes are passed on at the individual level.

So, Atran is somewhat right in an oblique way. Until individuals feel for their own selves the costs of religious belief, especially of a literalist or semi-literalist fashion, at the individual level, individuals won’t break out from the group benefits they get.

But, contra Atran, since at the group level, we have a conflict between in-group value and out-group cost for religion, Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., are absolutely right to expose the cost that religion imposes on outgroups.

In the U.S., the amount of tax deductions for religion would be one example. From President Bush on down to school superintendents, the increasing preference given to “faith-based” social organizations to perform government services, the cost religious groups impose on other groups, as well as individuals, across metagroup swaths of society is a big issue.

In other words, not as individuals within a particular group, but religious groups as “individuals” within metagroups, there is a huge, highly legitimate “free rider” issue.

In other words, let David Sloan Wilson talk about group selection with religion. He’s hoisting himself by his own petard.