Freethought Nation

Now why cannot some of these other "testosterone saturated scholars" have such a sense of humour?

Myopia is not expertise

Richard Carrier is going around depicting himself as the "king of the mythicists," so to speak, pompously judging who is a "bad mythicist" (me, of course) and who is a "good mythicist" (him, naturally). Hoffman calls him an "impetuous amateur" and "internet blogger." We know what Bart Ehrman thinks of him, and we also know that he has behaved badly for years now, repeatedly and disingenuously presenting himself as an expert on my work when he hasn't really read it, along with making all sorts of untoward and disrespectful personal jibes. And where he did become involved with my work, he erred badly by dealing with the wrong inscription and then feigning incomprehension of how the Egyptian nativity scenes could possibly have influenced the Christian nativity. We have shown repeatedly how the denial of multiple points of contact with Egypt is completely erroneous and myopic.

Adding to this egregious mistake, which he compounds by throwing further bilious and childish fits, Carrier would like to play Inquisitor and "burn" all copies of the one tool that has brought the mythicist case before more people than ever before: The first part of the first "Zeitgeist" film ("ZG1.1"). It is clear we are not dealing with the most visionary of individuals here. Indeed, Torquemada and Fahrenheit 451 immediately come to mind.

It is quite obvious that the bulk of humanity is not going to be interested in or capable of plowing through the massive body of mythicist literature dating back centuries in a variety of languages. Rather, as they do with everything else, people will demand an easy-to-comprehend transmission precisely as they will find in ZG1.1. This same method of transmission is used by Christians when they tell children's stories about the Bible. It is the same method used to teach children any complex concept. Maybe we should burn all these efforts too? Why the special venom for ZG1.1?

Many people can't handle more than the Cliff Notes or film version of a particular subject. Witness this new review at Amazon of my book The Christ Conspiracy:


So, after all these years of critics - most of whom never read the book - complaining about how "unscholarly" my book is, I receive three stars for my effort because it's TOO scholarly! A person in grad school and one with a Master's degree who are incapable of using a dictionary?

As we can see, there is demand not for complex theorems and mind-numbing pedantry but for accurate summaries and comprehensible and quick transmissions of information. That distillation is precisely what Christ Con does as concerns the mythicist case built up over the past number of centuries.

Carrier as top mythicist god - NOT

The bottom line is that Carrier does not represent the mythicist case - indeed, he does not seem to know its depths to any real extent. The mythicist case has been defined over the past several hundred years precisely by this enormous body of literature that has been largely ignored, apparently even by Carrier.

The most complete mythicist case vis-a-vis the comparative religion to date was made by Charles Dupuis in his multivolume Origine de tous les cultes or Origins of All Religious Worship. This series was published in the late 18th century. Since that time, many other people have added to this body of work, such that it requires a lifetime to study it all. I personally have been studying this body of literature since the late 1980s, and I began writing about it in the early 1990s, posting my article "Origins of Christianity" online in 1995. (An article, by the way, that Carrier linked to for years at his Infidels website. The article has since been revised.)

The mythicist literature has been written in Latin, French, German, Danish, Dutch, English and other languages, and draws upon sources from antiquity in a variety of languages. This broad mythicist case incorporates a tremendous amount of information from a widespread area, not a narrow strip of land (Israel) somehow hermetically sealed from the rest of reality along the east coast of the Mediterranean, even though it is a mere 200 miles as the crow flies from Alexandria, Egypt. (Carrier irrationally and unscientifically insists that the early Christian effort incorporates elements significantly or only from Jewish and Greek traditions, while throwing out any possible Egyptian influence prior to the third century or so. Of course, he has not deigned to read my book Christ in Egypt, while pretending to be an expert on my work.)

This large body of mythicist literature dating from the 17th century - some of it circulating before the time of Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751) - to the present represents a case I encapsulated in The Christ Conspiracy in as accurate detail as I could incorporate at the time. (Note I am revising my book, to correct a few inaccuracies and errors, as well as to add a mass of supporting evidence from primary sources and the works of credentialed modern authorities in relevant fields and a variety of languages.)

What I have depicted in Christ Con as concerns the overall thesis and how the Christ myth came about represents a summary of this huge amount of scholarship, which deals with practically every aspect of the mythicist case. Leaving out one or more of the pieces of this puzzle does not convey expertise of the subject matter. Nor is anyone who holds such a myopic view that does not factor in the totality of this mythicist literature to be considered the ultimate authority on the subject.

_________________
Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

Problems with Richard Carrier and Others

Richard Carrier is traveling around doing assorted lectures on Jesus, the Bible and mythicism, etc. The problem is that during the Q and A, if anybody mentions Acharya S or a few others Carrier doesn't like, he goes into his typical poisonous, talking-point propaganda tirade against them, doing a hand-waving dismissal of their work in toto, while never having actually read the books.

Carrier says he teaches an online course and if any of his students mention Freke & Gandy or Acharya S, for example, he gives them assignments to do research on it. If they fail in their quest to find what they're looking for, Carrier dismisses the work and calls it poor or sloppy scholarship, and accuses the author of lacking credibility or reliability without ever reading the work for himself. Carrier essentially does what Bart Ehrman did with his latest book Did Jesus Exist?, where he got caught having his students essentially do the research for him and several sloppy and egregious errors were made.

Carrier claims that these authors make his work much more difficult and calls them "bad mythicists." I find it quite arrogant that Carrier assumes the authority to decide for everyone who is or who is not a good or bad mythicist - even if he has never read their work. He simply takes quotes from these works from his students and criticizes it. (From what I've seen it's more like Carrier is a crappy teacher and his students are incompetent.)

The problem is that Carrier is inspiring too many others to do this same type of unprofessional, unscholarly, biased, disingenuous and poisonous criticism. What's even worse is that when it's pointed out to him that he made his own sloppy and egregious errors in his criticisms, he usually refuses to acknowledge the errors and even doubles-down to compound them further. He then continues to repeat the same smears. A prime example is this Luxor issue.

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 4771#p4771

A prime example of Carrier's influence inspiring others to be utterly intellectually dishonest is Rook Hawkins/Tom Verna, who wrote a blog smearing Acharya S and her book Suns of God, which Rook later admitted under pressure in the comments that he never read the book at all and based his entire critique on Acharya's advert page.

viewtopic.php?p=6521#p6521

Here's Rook/Tom's other trash tossed at Acharya.

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3583

In Carrier's own blogs he allows all sorts of vicious and malicious hate speech and smears against Acharya, so all Carrier's harping on and on about accuracy, reliability and credibility is tossed out the window when it comes to the work by Acharya S. Carrier does not care how evil and dishonest these malicious comments are so long as they're trashing Acharya S. Now, Carrier, as I stated previously, claims that these "bad mythicists" make it far more difficult for him. But, as the narcissist that he seems to be, he's shown absolutely no integrity whatsoever about how his influence condoning his intellectual dishonesty and all malicious smears could be negatively affecting the lives of others on a daily basis. Carrier says in his lectures that if you criticize Acharya S her fans will get irate - well, hell yeah, when you spread vicious rumors, smears and lies about people, they tend to get pissed. Those who've actually read Acharya's books are simply fed up with the biases, discrimination and misogyny. And the abuse heaped on her at HIS blog is atrocious - it's simply misogynistic, pure and simple. But he lets that utter hate speech stand, while whining about people defending her. I wonder what Columbia University would say about all of that? Would they take his Ph.D back? Is this the type of work Columbia would be proud of? I would certainly hope not. Perhaps they should be informed.

It is time for Richard Carrier to be held accountable for his smear campaign against mythicists like Acharya S. The fact is that Acharya and others actually DO have plenty to offer the case for mythicism and should not be held hostage to Richard Carrier's irrational prejudice against them. He doesn't have to like them, but he shouldn't be smearing them and teaching others to do the same while, again, NEVER HAVING EVEN READ THE BOOKS HE CRITICIZES! That is intellectual dishonesty. He goes on and on about how he dislikes them, yet he is utterly incapable of acknowledging that Acharya S may be right about anything at all.

From where I stand, Richard Carrier is jealous of the attention Acharya S gets.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1959

Zeitgeist Part 1 was viewed by 200 million people worldwide (as of 2009) in over 30 languages giving a basic introduction to the case for mythicism. The criticisms of that brief 25-minute movie have been quite thoroughly addressed. Here are just a few examples:

The New Zeitgeist Part 1 Sourcebook Transcript (2010)
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/zeitg ... cebook.pdf

Rebuttal to Dr. Chris Forbes concerning 'Zeitgeist, Part 1'
http://truthbeknown.com/chrisforbeszeitgeist.html

Zeitgeist Part 1 & the Supportive Evidence
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2997

Richard Carrier actually tells people not to read the books he doesn't like. He is caught here on video at one of his lectures telling the audience that he wishes Zeitgeist and all copies of it were burned!

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3381

Here is one of Acharya's responses to Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist?, where he makes sloppy errors falsely accusing her of making stuff up, while the source citation was right there all along.

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 719#p25719

Here we have an article posted by an American Atheist (AA) board member where it was later revealed that is was plagiarized or "borrowed" from Acharya's book Christ Conspiracy. When the AA was asked to provide the correct source, which was Acharya S, they chose to remove the article altogether, rather than attribute the proper source to Acharya S. So, the article was just fine while an AA board member's name took credit for it, but suddenly when they found out it came from Acharya, they couldn't take it down fast enough. I mean, for Christsakes, people, this is really sickening.

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... =19&t=3486

Or here we have atheist Matt Dillahunty from the "Atheist Experience" proudly proclaiming that he got Acharya S removed from the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER):

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... =19&t=3629

Or here we have Richard Dawkins inadvertently demonstrating his own utter ignorance on the subject of mythicism:

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 425#p21425

So, rather than Carrier cannibalizing or creating divisiveness with other mythicists due to his own biases against them and attempting to persuade others to do the same, we as freethinkers really need to stand up against such discrimination and be organizing and working together. Why should we support discrimination when we are the most discriminated against minority?

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=391

We did not come this far just to discriminate against our own. Acharya S has never done a damned thing to Richard Carrier or his #1 fanboy Rook/Tom, beyond responding exposing the sloppy and unprofessional errors in their rants against her. I'm reminded of Acharya's review of "Jesus: God, Man or Myth?" by Herb Cutner:


In other words:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair

Scholars who've actually read Acharya's books are quite supportive of her work. For example:



And many more

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3411

Oh, and let's not forget the intelligent observation by Atheist Universe author David Mills pinpointing why Acharya's been the subject of this unglued, irrational, unprofessional and bigoted load of discriminatory crap:


I personally think this goes double and triple for Richard Carrier and his ilk.

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

At this time, I’m going through Reading Egyptian Art by Dr. Richard H. Wilkinson, and on page 33, he says referring to “the woman nursing child” figure,

Quote
“ In Egyptian artworks this motif occurs with the same degree of variety of expression, yet the subjects are usually limited to the figures of the goddess Isis and her son Horus, - by extension of the myth – to Isis and the king as Horus. Thus the goddess Isis is represented as the mut-netcher or “mother of god” (a title which, with the advent of Christianity, was later transferred to the Virgin Mary) holding the infant Horus to her breast in countless Egyptian statues and amulets. The motif of the Egyptian king being nursed by a goddess is also an old one, and one which was commonly represented on the walls of the royal cult temples…The king may also be shown held by or nursing at the breast of his actual mother…Queen Ankhnesmeryre. Here, the queen clearly fulfills the role of the maternal goddess, a fusion that which may be found in a number of other representations; but in other instances the royal mother takes a more subsidiary part in the representation of the nursing of the king. This may seen in one of the scenes from Luxor Temple where Mutemwia, the mother of Amenhotep III, merely watches as the young king and his Ka are nursed by a number of goddesses after his birth. Variants of this type of scene are commonly found of the walls of the mammissi or “birth rooms” of later Egyptian temples, where episodes from the divinely initiated birth of the king where recorded up through the Roman period.”

Note that professor Wilkinson has stated that the Isis title of mut-metcher or mother of god was later christianized for the Virgin Mary. This Egyptologist also corroborates that these births were divinely initiated just like in the Christmas story I might add.

I’ve been in the process of independently check the evidence presented in Christ In Egypt, focusing on this particular subject. This is a nice piece confirming a part of what the book affirms, and the mammissi reality. Good job Acharya!!

Thank you for yet more confirmation. It seems pretty cut and dry to me.

Those who cannot fathom the connection and continue to insist otherwise are paddling upstream, against the flow of what appears to be reality.

_________________
Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

I was intrigued by this video of Richard Carrier giving his presentation at the 'American Atheists Convention 2013' in Austin, Texas discussing "Atheism Plus."

What got my attention starting at 4:30 was when Carrier starts talking about the 15 year old girl who's very religious mother bought her a secular book, for which this young girl was quite surprised and pleased. So, the girl, quite excited that her religious mum got her a secular book makes a post about it online only to be harassed by atheists making disturbing comments some even about raping the young girl. Rebecca Watson wrote a blog about it Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists.

But, while Carrier correctly points out how disturbing this all is, I'm reminded of Richard Carrier's own treatment of Acharya S/Murdock in his own blogs - there was an endless stream of malicious smears and misogynistic comments tossed at Acharya in his 'Luxor Thing' blog and other blogs, in which Carrier seemed perfectly fine with, as it was his blog and he alone made the decision to repeatedly put those posts through since he moderates his own blog. I just went to check and he has just recently removed all of those posts - wonder if anybody has screen shots? Perhaps Carrier found a conscience after all? Or, was Carrier just trying to hide the fact that he has been allowing the spread of malicious smears and misogynistic posts tossed at Acharya for many years now? People still aren't allowed to have an objective or intellectually honest discussion of her work over at Carrier's old forum IIDB/Freeratio because the well has been so severely poisoned by Carrier. So, his comments come off as quite hypocritical to me.

AACON 2013 Dr Richard Carrier speaks on Atheism... Plus What? - American Atheists

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

Let's enter the links in the Way Back Machine and see what we can find. Although even the archives might be later edited versions.

I haven't checked the Way Back but, I did just stumble across this blog and the malicious comments by 'life is like a pitbull with lipstick' and others who posted similar posts in Carrier's blog, if I remember correctly. Here's Acharya's response from post #22:


Also see, Religion and the Ph.D.: A Brief History

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube