I read Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus as soon as it came out. He was pretty humble about his findings and was looking forward to others critiquing his work. After years of complete failures of anyone to mount a decent argument, he’s done with that. He’s calling anyone who has negatively reviewed his work a liar, or at best lazy.
He has a point. It’s how religion has survived the modern era. When the Jesus stories were first written, it was normal to have virgin births and to call once-living people gods. Emperors who were successful did it all the time. When the prophecies of those gods failed to materialize, it was not hard to rewrite history, or come up with a reason, usually blaming witches or those who didn’t pray hard enough.
Then we made science. But for that, you need to go to school and read. So they made school hard to access and illiteracy normal. Then we overcame that. So, they wrote longer books that have references and made their own peer review boards so those books looked just like scholarship. If you checked their references, sometimes you could see it was entirely bogus, or it said something in a translation of a translation that was still in a 500-year-old version of your language, so even if it didn’t seem to say what you thought the “scholar” said it said, you might think it was your lack of skills, not that they were lying to you. Or, it said what they said, unless you read the entire paragraph or a preceding page, then you’d realize it said the opposite, so if you don’t do that, then you are the lazy one.
These same tactics are used by people like Allen Greenspan, normalizing the “free competitive markets” that then caused the 2008 financial meltdown. I wrote about what an idiot he was in the 1990s, but voices like mine aren’t considered when making policy. I need about 80 million others who are willing to speak up. It would be awesome if that was normal.
It truly is and the Catholic Church, for the longest time had what was called “forbidden books”, which was the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas (my favourite), and more. So the Church also kept people from questioning and checking.
True, but the Church wasn’t kind to most scientists. Some were even killed, if I remember right. Dark Ages was really bad.
Of course, if it could survive it, they wouldn’t be taking books out of libraries and banning them. Which takes us into White Jesus. Do you really think DeSantis et al would be taking African American Studies out of schools if he didn’t think the imposition of the White Man’s religion on slave would survive his Dominionists beliefs?
I bought a shirt with Levar Burton’s face on it, in support of the “Read Banned Books”. Not only that, maybe they aren’t in libraries, but they aren’t gone for good. I have some books they’ve banned and I’m sure others may have some I don’t have. These books aren’t gone forever. At least not yet. Unless the Dominionists get control of U.S. government and make a law that it’s illegal to possess banned books, invade homes to search for banned books, and then start arresting anyone who has them, religion has not won.
No I don’t. I even wore a shirt that suggested it and I still have a job. I really don’t think I’ll get fired for it the Levar one either. My boss believes in better living through chemistry. He’s a pharmacist and I’m one of his many techs. So there is that.