Putting the Dark, in the Dark Ages

[timoneill]

Jun 17, 2011 8:44:30 GMT wraggy said:

Jun 17, 2011 6:02:33 GMT timoneill said:

Looks like the "Stupidest Thing on the Internet" strikes again:

debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/02/plato-and-augustine-are-to-blame.html

I get a mention in the comments, only to be dismissed as a peddler of Christian apologetics. And Richard "Artie Ziff" is invoked, naturally.

Reputation of you as Attack Dog of Orthodox Apologetics great is Padawan.

So it seems. Everyone will be delighted to learn that John Loftus is editing a new anthology called Christianity is Not Great. It will include a chapter entitled "The Dark Ages" penned by ... Richard Carrier.

I bet we all can't wait for that objective piece of groundbreaking analysis. I wonder what it will say ...

[endrefodstad]

I imagine that will do wonders for Carrier's academic credibility.

[humphreyclarke]

So the historical chapters in 'Christianity is not great' are:

The Dark Ages, by Richard Carrier.
Institutional Violence: The Crusades and the Inquisition, by David Eller.
The Witch Hunts, by John W. Loftus.
Colonization and the Wholesale Destruction of Indigenous People Groups, by David Eller
The Indian Holocaust, by Hector Avalos.
Christianity and the Rise of American Democracy, by Richard Carrier.
The Treatment of Slaves, by Hector Avalos.
The Treatment of Women, by Annie Laurie Gaylor.
The Treatment of Animals, by John W. Loftus.

Anyone know whether the last anthology sold many copies ? I assume it did OK otherwise they wouldn't be bothering with another one (unless this is a Lulu job)

[merkavah12]

Jun 17, 2011 17:00:46 GMT humphreyclarke said:

So the historical chapters in 'Christianity is not great' are:

The Dark Ages, by Richard Carrier.
Institutional Violence: The Crusades and the Inquisition, by David Eller.
The Witch Hunts, by John W. Loftus.
Colonization and the Wholesale Destruction of Indigenous People Groups, by David Eller
The Indian Holocaust, by Hector Avalos.
Christianity and the Rise of American Democracy, by Richard Carrier.
The Treatment of Slaves, by Hector Avalos.
The Treatment of Women, by Annie Laurie Gaylor.
The Treatment of Animals, by John W. Loftus.

Anyone know whether the last anthology sold many copies ? I assume it did OK otherwise they wouldn't be bothering with another one (unless this is a Lulu job)

I'd bet dollars to daffodils that it is nothing more than a Lulu joint.

[joel]

It's probably Prometheus. They published The Christian Delusion, and he has another anthology called The End of Christianity coming out from them soon. So they must be making at least a little profit.

The only chapter I've read all the way through in The Christian Delusion was Avalos's on Hitler and Christianity, and it was pretty sleazy. It's one thing to say that historic Christian anti-semitism made it easier for people to accept the Nazi version, but Avalos goes way beyond this. He essentially says that Hitler got all his ideas directly from Luther and of course argues that Hitler was a Christian (citing Richard Carrier as a source).

[timoneill]

I'm having an e-mail exchange with Loftus over Carrier on the Dark Ages. I quite like John. At least he rejects Mytherism and agrees with me that it's a pseudo historical cul de sac. I seem to be having a harder time convincing him that ol' Artie Ziff is waffling when it comes to Medieval attitudes to science though. It seems John is feeding my e-mails to Carrier. Yesterday I summed up my latest e-mail to him by describing Carrier thus:

"He's like the Patron Saint of what I call "the Dumb Atheism". It's like New Atheism, only it works by saying anything vaguely plausible-sounding, however wrong, so long as it's anti-religion. Then your totally uncritical audience of fellow Dumb Atheists applaud and anyone who dares to criticise or disagree can be dismissed as "apologists". Even if they are atheists like me. Or like R. Joseph Hoffmann.

A growing number of non-dumb atheists are getting wise to Carrier's schtick. You might want to be a bit more discerning John."

He replied this morning by saying that he wouldn't say precisely what Carrier said about my e-mails (I can just imagine - snooty condescension, delivered in a nerdy nasal whine) but pointed me to that Carrier classic, "Flynn's Pile of Boners".

My response:

"I read that at the time. It's classic Carrier - much of it is correct. Most of it, in fact. But it's the slippery little bits he uses to grease his points of bias that you have to watch for. For example, on one hand he says (correctly) that Christianity didn't kill Greco-Roman "science" (he means natural philosophy, but he likes to use the modern word to make it seem the Greco-Roman version was closer to the modern one than it actually was). He says that Christian Medieval Europe simply "wasn't interested" in reviving it or preserving what was left of it when it died out due to other causes. Yet elsewhere he talks about how some Medieval thinkers benefited from "the revival of ancient learning" in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.But hang on a second - if there was a "revival of ancient learning" in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, at the height of Medieval Christendom, what happened to Medieval Christianity not being "interested" in reviving Greco-Roman wonderfulness? Who was doing this Twelfth and Thirteenth Century reviving? Buddhists? Shintos?

Ah, but Tricky Dicky has a way of skipping around the fact that what we have here (at precisely the point where western Europe had sufficiently recovered from the economic and political fallout of the collapse of the Roman Empire) is exactly the revival by Christian scholars that he said Christianity "wasn't interested" in. Two ways, in fact. Firstly, he declares that the Christians who did this were somehow aberrant. Secondly, he declares that this happened in something called "the early Renaissance", which apparently began as early as 1200 AD. He then castigates Medievalists for not recognising this fact. This is despite the fact that this period of "the early Renaissance" is an ad hoc invention of one Richard Carrier and isn't recognised or used by any actual historians of these centuries because he just ... made it up. And he did so because ... well, because otherwise he'd have to admit that there was a revival of Greco-Roman learning in the Middle Ages, that the Christian scholars who achieved it were not somehow aberrant but were following a tradition of scholarship that went all the back through Boethius to Clement of Alexandria or even Justin Martyr and that they were very "interested", it's just that it's a bit hard to undertake such a revival when you're fighting off waves of invaders for several centuries and generally cleaning up the mess that the Roman Empire made when it spectacularly imploded.

But you'd have to have a detailed knowledge of the history of Medieval thought, of the Twelfth Century Revival, of the conflict within Patristic Christianity over the value of pagan learning and the "Gold of the Egyptians" argument that won out in that debate to realise the sleight of hand he's pulling off. It's hard to know if Tricky Dicky has any of that knowledge. He doesn't seem to. But those who read his stuff certainly won't get an inkling of any of it, thanks to his ideologically driven sophistry. Not that his uncritical fawning atheists of the "I don't know nothing but if it's anti-Christian IT'S TRUE!" brainless variety care. They just want to believe.

Slippery as an eel is our Tricky Dicky. Or as slippery as a performing seal in front of an adoring but rather dumb audience. Slippery, anyway.

Perhaps all this needs a blog post of my own. ;>"

[himself]

Surely, Mr. O Neill, and I tried to tell him so at the time he wrote that. Alas, every time I mentioned as professional historian who ran counter to his POV, he had to announce that he was so much smarter than the historian. He also seemed disinclined to distinguish ancient and modern usages in terms, such as "curiosity" condemned by Augustine, which in context (and in Latin) is better translated as "nosiness" and which Augustine explicitly contrasted with "scholarship."