Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
So far this category is a catch-all for all posts relating to Vridar greetings to readers, to Vridar notices of rules, technical issues, and so forth. Is this category — or the current range of posts it includes — justified? Should Guest Posts be a child of this category?
About time I catch up with this blog again. Not feeling on top of things health wise lately and have not even read the comments here the last few days. Hopefully back into full swing again soon. Maybe even another post later this evening. Or maybe not quite so soon.
Just to say Hi to readers, glad you stopped by whether to comment or just lurk, and wishing you well for the coming year.
If your comment does not immediately appear the reason is very likely that it has been caught up in moderation for some reason (probably an unfathomable one) — Apologies to those whose comments I have just discovered and released from there only now.
Here is a list of some of the posts I have read and starred for future reference over this past week or two.
From Valerie Tarico:
From Heather Hastie:
Repeated by Ophelia Benson, originally a comment by Dave Ricks:
From Steve Wiggins:
From Salon.com
I have not included here those relating to studies of early Christianity or the bible. Maybe in another post….
The reason I’ve been slow to complete a new post lately is mainly because I’m buried in so much new reading. The major reading project that has taken most of my time is attempting to get on top of the relationships between the various Old Testament and Second Temple books as they address, in particular, the Fourth Servant Song (Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12) and the Suffering Servant. The Suffering Servant — and his Messianic function — did have an impact on some Jewish sects before Christianity emerged on the scene. The difficulty is – and this is why I’ve been so involved in more reading than writing lately — that each book I read raises further citations that I am keen to track down and also read more fully.
Recently I read and wrote about Raglan’s hero classification scheme. That, and hearing that another scholar (another one who is primarily an ancient historian and not a theologian) had applied Propp’s work on folktales to the story of the Exodus, prompted me to read Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. I have nearly completed this now and have been wondering if and how it might apply to the Gospels. Reading this has meant I’ve had to pause my study of Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked that takes another perspective on the way mythology is put together. I don’t know yet how much of all of this I’ll find applicable to the Gospels but I’m interested in working on that project once I’ve got a handle on both Propp and Lévi-Strauss.
And I’m also reading several articles (some quite lengthy ones) that a few readers have asked me to take a look at and comment on.
So it’s been a time of learning more than writing lately. (But the act of organizing thoughts for writing, and double-checking things, is also when I learn the most thoroughly.)
My writing outlet has come in sporadic comments on the earlywritings.com forum and the occasional comments on other blogs. Continue reading “A Pause – and What’s Been Happening on This Side”
Greetings!
Here at Vridar we’ve changed our WordPress email subscription/notification plugin yet again.
If you have received an email and you wanted us to alert you when we publish new posts, then you don’t have to do anything. However, if you have received an email alert and you don’t want it, you’ll need to unsubscribe. (See the email for a link with instructions to stop receiving notifications.)
For anyone reading this post who subscribed in the last eight months, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to subscribe again if you want to receive email notifications when we publish new posts. We have no way of subscribing blog readers by proxy.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Thanks for reading Vridar!
–Tim Widowfield and Neil Godfrey
P.S. We have stopped using Subscribe2 and re-enabled JetPack Subscriptions. If anyone wants to know the gory details behind the change, ping Tim privately here: widowfield “at” gmail “dot” com
I’ve more or less “finally” completed the page WHO’s WHO: Mythicists and Mythicist
Newly added:
Of course the table showing the religious/philosophical background of each mythicist and mythicist agnostic or sympathizer is maintained.
I’m sure the page will be an ongoing editorial maintenance project.
After seeing the extent to which the list is growing I am beginning to understand the consternation among devout scholar-theologians that public confidence in their authority might be being increasingly undermined.
Any assistance by way of information of new names in any of the categories or updates on existing names will be greatly appreciated.
(The page will alway be found listed in the right-hand column of this blog.)
I have updated the Who’s Who of Mythicists page to include brief descriptions of the arguments of each mythicist author in the table.
I have added a new page in the side bar for ready reference: WHO’s WHO: Mythicists and Mythicist Agnostics
Do add comments where you can see a need for any corrections or additions. Or email: see the Contact Info page for details.
As we draw near to the anniversary of the death and resurrection of Vridar, a time of commemoration and solemn reflection, I’ve been thinking again about how easy it was for us to get shut down, simply on suspicion of a DMCA violation. We’re hardly unique, of course; these takedowns keep happening, and they’ll continue to occur, because the law holds the poster of the content (i.e., us) and the agency hosting the content (i.e., WordPress.com) equally responsible.
You may have read earlier this year how AIDS-deniers tried to censor Myles Power (a warrior against pseudoscience) by getting Google to take down some YouTube videos that debunk their false claims. As Techdirt put it, “This is censorship in its purist form, and it’s using the law to get away with it.” True, Google did eventually restore the videos, but this disturbing series of incidents shows how malicious people can use the law to their own advantage without any fear of repercussion. Cory Doctorow at boingboing wrote:
The DMCA’s takedown procedures have no real penalty for abuse, so it is the perfect tool for would-be censors. What’s more, the entertainment companies — who are great fans of free speech when defending their right to sell products without censorship, but are quite unwilling the share the First Amendment they love so dearly with the rest of us — are pushing to make censorship even easier, arguing that nothing should be posted on Youtube (or, presumably, any other online forum) unless it has been vetted by a copyright lawyer.
I used to bristle at the idea of lumping copyrights and patents into the larger category of “intellectual property,” but that ship has sailed. And in a larger sense the intellectual property that modern corporations jealously guard, as evidenced by the DMCA, which forces content providers to act first and ask questions later, is in fact real property of the purest kind. Specifically, I’m talking about possessions to which legal entities (i.e. people or corporations) claim exclusive title and which generate wealth.
Continue reading “On Intellectual Property and Other Random Thoughts”
Hi, everybody.
Recently we had some trouble with the WordPress JetPack plugin and outgoing emails. I’ve moved us over to a different plugin called Subscribe2. You may have noticed a slight change in the sidebar over on the right.
Issues:
Thanks for reading Vridar!
–Tim
This is a followup to my previous post, Casey’s Mythicist Myth Busted, where I set out Casey’s list of
the most influential mythicists who claim to be ‘scholars’ today (p. 10)
Casey’s list counted seventeen names. Of those seventeen we saw that six were not mythicists at all (e.g. Bart Ehrman) and one was deceased some years before Casey even began to write his draft for his book.
For easy reference I set out here in two tables the names of
Three possible conclusions to be drawn from these tables (updated 10th March):
I’m tongue-in-cheek, of course. But the tables do demonstrate that claims that mythicism is a symptom of psychological derangement among ex-fundamentalists is as ignorant and bigoted as stereotyping Jews with hook-noses and greedy.
Since Casey proposes what he calls the “striking fact” that . . .
the majority of people who write books claiming that Jesus did not exist, and who give their past history, are effectively former American fundamentalists, though not all are ethnically American (p. 2)
. . . I list the names according to their past religious affiliations using Casey’s own accounts as my primary source. (Casey’s point about “claiming to be ‘scholars'” is a bit of puerile churlishness that I ignore. Earl Doherty does not claim to be a professional scholar and other names are well known to have recognized academic credentials in related or other fields.)
I have added seven names to Casey’s list. Two of those have not published arguments that Jesus did not exist but they are of interest in this context because they have written (in print and/or online) radical hypotheses on the identity of Paul. The names of those whose methods of argument are controversial among mythicists and/or who appear to be promoting a belief system that approximates to a contemporary version of gnosticism (Freke and Gandy) or pantheism (Murdock) are in italics.
Let me know if I have overlooked any significant names. (HJ = Historical Jesus)
|
Fundamentalist Background |
Roman Catholic Background (Note N. American/Australian Catholicism is a notoriously liberal form of Catholicism) |
Liberal or No Church Background |
Unknown |
| Tom Harpur (very positive towards Christianity) | Earl Doherty | Richard Carrier [“Freethinking Methodist”] | George Albert Wells |
| Robert M. Price (very positive towards Christianity) | Thomas Brodie (Irish Catholic. Very positive towards Christianity) | Roger Viklund (Den Jesus som aldrig funnits = The Jesus Who Never Was) [Source: comment] | Peter Gandy |
| Frank R. Zindler | Roger Parvus (Paul) | Derek Murphy (Jesus Potter Harry Christ) [Episcopalian] |
Jay Raskin (The Evolution of Christs and Christianities) |
| David Fitzgerald (Nailed) | Joe Atwill (Source: Caesar’s Messiah) | Dorothy Murdock [liberal Congregationalist] |
Stephan Huller |
| Raphael Lataster* | René Salm (now Buddhist and atheist) | Timothy Freke [Source: ch.3 Mystery Experience] | |
| Francesco Carotta (very positive towards Christianity) | Herman Detering (Paul — also denies HJ) (very positive towards Christianity) | ||
| Raphael Lataster* | Sid Martin (Secret of the Savior: source online email) | ||
| Ken Humphreys (jesusneverexisted.com) [no church background] | |||
| Raphael Lataster* | |||
| R. G. Price [See comment below] |
Did you miss us?
Our recent downtime was self-inflicted. (I know Watts you’re thinking.) But anyhow, we’re on a new server in the Netherlands now, and so far everything seems to be working fine.
Dr Patrik Lindenfors, an associate professor at the Stockholm University, has asked me if I would be willing to help him by advertising his crowdfunded research project on this blog. I am honoured to do so and have just sent a donation to help out as well. He’s asking for public assistance because it’s outside his normal area of research.
His university website lists his areas of research and publications. He also has a personal webpage.
His Facebook page contains summaries of the new project.
The following is extracted from his webpage dedicated to explaining the project and the campaign for public assistance.
I propose to review potential placebo effects of religion and how these may explain why religious beliefs and practices are so common across human populations.
In my regular work I am a researcher of cultural evolution at Stockholm University. I have previously authored the books God Probably Doesn’t Exist, which has been translated into seven languages, and “Samarbete“, a popular science book in Swedish about the biological and cultural evolution of cooperation, currently being translated into English.
Now, I want to explore a proposal that has circulated in books and on-line discussions for a while – if there are any placebo effects of religion and whether these may be a partial explanation of the spread of religious beliefs and practices across human societies. . . . . .
You can read more and find out how to assist on the above links, in particular at the Divine Placebo webpage. Don’t delay though. He’s running out of time.
More from the site: Continue reading “Divine Placebo: A Request to Readers”