13/02: Berg, Doherty, Warraq, Carrier
… and the raving zealots of YouTube.
Apologies; I’ve been quiet, I know. Busy few weeks, what can ya do.
What little time I’ve had outside work, kids, so on has gone into a bit of reading on the birth of religions, of all things… those God Who Wasn’t There people and their ‘blasphemy project’ got me back to thinking (old habit of mine) about the weight of evidence for the various conjectures surrounding the birth of Christianity, Islam, so on… mythicist versus historicist views, y’know. For Jesus and Mohammed, select from: semi-self-deluded con-man/apocalyptic prophet… conniving caravan raider… the iron age’s Peter Popoff… Medina’s Joseph Smith… an annoyingly goody goody plagiarised retread of Osiris… a great way for later oligarchies to keep their huddled masses huddled… or mix and match as is reasonable, as all of these aren’t entirely mutually exclusive.
I tend to draw few hard conclusions reading such stuff, tend to see that as unreasonable, given the quality of the evidence. Whether there was a historical figure behind either legend is unclear… I’d say it’s maybe slightly more likely for Mohammed, slightly less for Jesus, very far from certain for both, unlikely ever to be entirely settled to the more reasonable researchers’ satisfaction, any time soon. How heavily the original stories have been edited, embroidered, mythologized over time is clear enough in both cases to make this almost moot, anyway. We can get as far as saying: i) there may have been a historical figure serving as a spark in the tinder in either case or neither, and ii) even if there were, there’s so much added as mythology that it’s very difficult to say anything confidently about either figure; what has survived probably tells us much more about those who did the writing than the figures they claimed to write about, but then, that’s worth knowing, too.
The bizarre part: this is my world, the water I swim in, much of the time, the air I breathe. I live comfortably enough with ambiguity, uncertainty surrounding such questions. Historical curiosities, anyway… what’s more interesting is the process, the evolution of religious systems, how they develop, hone and collect their techniques for collecting and keeping followers…
And then, breathing that air, I step into the hurly burly that swirls around the guy I linked to yesterday, kicked off YouTube thanks to the machinations of a buncha pissed off Moslems, harangued as well by wild-eyed and entirely too certain Christian fanatics, outraged he’d said a few choice words about their superstitions, too…
Jarring, more than a bit. The funniest bit, tho’ darkly comic, is that wild certainty: my god and my prophet must exist, and I must be certain… and never mind that the ‘argument’ I can muster amounts to circles and spirals in rhetoric admitting nothing faintly resembling evidence, logic… A warm fire burns within me, brother, and tho’ it may, in fact, merely be the burrito I had for breakfast, I shall choose to interpret it as the presence of a magical man in the sky, and to hell with all the suspicious contradictions and revisions ye nasty, persnickety atheists find amongst ancient scraps of papyrus…
Anyway. Later, all. More reading to do. And kids to drop off, etc. etc.
Apologies; I’ve been quiet, I know. Busy few weeks, what can ya do.
What little time I’ve had outside work, kids, so on has gone into a bit of reading on the birth of religions, of all things… those God Who Wasn’t There people and their ‘blasphemy project’ got me back to thinking (old habit of mine) about the weight of evidence for the various conjectures surrounding the birth of Christianity, Islam, so on… mythicist versus historicist views, y’know. For Jesus and Mohammed, select from: semi-self-deluded con-man/apocalyptic prophet… conniving caravan raider… the iron age’s Peter Popoff… Medina’s Joseph Smith… an annoyingly goody goody plagiarised retread of Osiris… a great way for later oligarchies to keep their huddled masses huddled… or mix and match as is reasonable, as all of these aren’t entirely mutually exclusive.
I tend to draw few hard conclusions reading such stuff, tend to see that as unreasonable, given the quality of the evidence. Whether there was a historical figure behind either legend is unclear… I’d say it’s maybe slightly more likely for Mohammed, slightly less for Jesus, very far from certain for both, unlikely ever to be entirely settled to the more reasonable researchers’ satisfaction, any time soon. How heavily the original stories have been edited, embroidered, mythologized over time is clear enough in both cases to make this almost moot, anyway. We can get as far as saying: i) there may have been a historical figure serving as a spark in the tinder in either case or neither, and ii) even if there were, there’s so much added as mythology that it’s very difficult to say anything confidently about either figure; what has survived probably tells us much more about those who did the writing than the figures they claimed to write about, but then, that’s worth knowing, too.
The bizarre part: this is my world, the water I swim in, much of the time, the air I breathe. I live comfortably enough with ambiguity, uncertainty surrounding such questions. Historical curiosities, anyway… what’s more interesting is the process, the evolution of religious systems, how they develop, hone and collect their techniques for collecting and keeping followers…
And then, breathing that air, I step into the hurly burly that swirls around the guy I linked to yesterday, kicked off YouTube thanks to the machinations of a buncha pissed off Moslems, harangued as well by wild-eyed and entirely too certain Christian fanatics, outraged he’d said a few choice words about their superstitions, too…
Jarring, more than a bit. The funniest bit, tho’ darkly comic, is that wild certainty: my god and my prophet must exist, and I must be certain… and never mind that the ‘argument’ I can muster amounts to circles and spirals in rhetoric admitting nothing faintly resembling evidence, logic… A warm fire burns within me, brother, and tho’ it may, in fact, merely be the burrito I had for breakfast, I shall choose to interpret it as the presence of a magical man in the sky, and to hell with all the suspicious contradictions and revisions ye nasty, persnickety atheists find amongst ancient scraps of papyrus…
Anyway. Later, all. More reading to do. And kids to drop off, etc. etc.
