Tag: Acharya S

With great sadness we note the untimely passing of D.M. Murdock (a.k.a. Acharya S). She died on Christmas day, having succumbed to breast cancer. Over the years we’ve had our differences with Murdock’s ideas (and her followers) here on Vridar, but we always respected her energy and tenacity.

In the United States, unfortunately, illnesses like cancer can leave the living with large medical and burial bills. If you would like to help Acharya’s survivors, you can donate to a GiveForward fund set up in her name.

Requiescat in pace.

Updated about two hours after original posting. . .

Unlike Richard Carrier, I did not receive a request to sign a petition protesting Facebook’s decision to shut down permanently D.M. Murdock’s/Acharya S’s page. This is a shame in some ways, since I would have been willing to seriously consider joining in such an action. It’s a lesson in what can happen when you decide to publicly slander and treat as enemies those who attempt to make forthright, honest criticisms of your work. Had Murdock or several of her followers not so outrageously reacted against my eventual response to their requests to write what I thought of some of her arguments, she would have recognized another potential avenue for supporting her cause against Facebook now.

Having said that, I must also say that I do not agree with the public showing of the image of Nigerian girls being subjected to virginity tests. (Facebook’s terms of use ban any display of nudity.)

Murdock wanted the image shown to shock readers enough to be outraged and act in whatever way they could to doing their bit to having this practice stopped.

But I would beg Murdock and Carrier and others to stop and think:

Would they want such images being shown world-wide if the victims shown were their own daughters or sisters?

Does how we answer that question suggest something about our attitude towards anonymous Africans? Has anyone stopped to ask how any of the girls in the photograph might feel about having that experience posted around the world? Might anyone even think to try to identify and locate any of those girls and ask them for permission to show them undergoing that ordeal?

Is not publishing that photo only adding to the humiliation of the victims?

Another news story that has recently appeared is of a 16 year old girl who was gang raped, dropped unconscious in a sewer pit, and now confined to a wheel-chair. There is an image against the story of a black girl’s head with her face hidden by her hand. The same article says that the image is not of the girl in the story. It even says the name of the girl in the story, “Liz”, is not the real name of the victim.

I don’t believe anyone who knows the real victim would want any photos of her undergoing any of her humiliation (not that they would be likely to exist) being made public.

I can’t help but think that what we are seeing here with the demands that Murdock’s original image be shown (even with the offending sections being blurred out) is a case of dehumanization of Africans. The girls are anonymous, black, in Africa, therefore “we” feel free to use them for political causes without any consideration of their privacy, their personal individuality and right to be treated with dignity.

I am particularly surprised that Richard Carrier, who is so outspoken on women’s rights, seems to have not stopped to think through this one. The story of the rape I mentioned above is no less confronting for its absence of graphic images of the girl being raped or lying in the sewer pit. Humans are creative enough to find ways to outrage readers and motivate to action without violating the personal dignity of those who have suffered unspeakable humiliation enough.

And even Ophelia Benson has joined voices with Carrier on this one. Something somewhere was said about anthropology research. My understanding is that professional anthropologists are bound by ethics standards that forbid anything that violates the privacy and dignity of others.

Closing Murdock’s Facebook page permanently for this one breach, perhaps well-intentioned but also (I strongly believe) very misguided, is disproportionate.

By the way . . . .

Continue reading “On the Shutting Down of D.M. Murdock’s Facebook Account”

Recently anyone would think that I have come out and “attacked” and “abused” Acharya S / D. M. Murdock and others when all I have done is allow some discussion in which I insisted that the standard rules of evidence be foundational for conclusions and said that methods that do not follow such standard rules are unscientific.

I have over the years avoided addressing the works of Acharya S / D. M. Murdock for no reason other than that I have never spent much time reading any of them and have had no personal interest in her perspective on things. From time to time someone supporting her views has commented on this blog and I have never had a problem with that. (What I have objected to is when anyone repeatedly comments in a way that indicates they are regularly attempting to evangelize for some particular belief — mostly these are Christian fundamentalists or mystics of some sort. Once I realize what is going on I usually put a stop to their comments.)

D. M. Murdock herself has posted comments on this blog at least three times:

/2006/11/21/the-jesus-puzzle-did-christianity-begin-with-a-mythical-christ-early-doherty-canadian-humanists-1999-review/#comment-5037 — in response I purchased her book Fingerprints of Christ and have browsed through much of it a few times, but I have not seen anything in it to capture my interest enough to write about. I have no problems with its content. It is okay — nothing new from my perspective, I would not condemn it. There are many basic works on mythicism that have little interest for me mainly because I am so familiar with the sorts of things they say and I have moved on from such things. That’s not to say they would not be of interest to others, of course.

/2012/02/06/earliest-manuscript-of-the-gospel-of-mark-validates-earl-doherty/#comment-23189
and
/2012/06/18/did-they-really-think-like-this/#comment-30983

I have never banned Murdock’s comments. I have several times expressed my outrage over the abusive insults so many others have directed at Murdock/Acharya and have never indulged in such abuse against her myself. Tim has had the same approach — deploring the way many others have spoken of her with contempt. I have twice expressed my own discomfort with Richard Carrier’s insulting language directed not only at Acharya but others, too. I do not agree with his rationales for it and do not engage in his sort of personally insulting language here. I do not agree with some of Carrier’s efforts to shut down discussions through insult. It is important to provide rational and clear responses to irrational and muddled ideas.

I accepted Acharya’s Facebook invitation to be added as a Facebook friend — though I scarcely ever use Facebook at all for quite some time now. My blog posts, someone told me, are linked there, but that’s all. (She has since removed herself from that status.) I have recently a few times had occasion to speak critically of some of her approaches to things where I have felt it appropriate to do so — but that is not personal abuse.

I was recently prepared to engage Robert Tulip and others in discussion about astrotheology, and I was at some pains to reassure him that my initial scepticism had nothing to do with prejudice. For heaven’s sake, I have been through enough to not be embarrassed or prejudiced against about holding a minority viewpoint. But I have also been through enough to know just how easily I can be wrong about so much. So what is so very important to me is understanding how valid logic works, how we know what we do and how we justify the conclusions we draw from our information. I am never content to rely on secondary sources but always want to understand the primary material any knowledge is based upon before committing myself in discussions such as the ones I address here. I have mentioned in my biographical notes elsewhere the point at which I realized what it was going to mean to attempt as far as I could the path of intellectual honesty.

Now Murdock’s supporters are pointing to one period of my past life to paint me as an ongoing cultist in my thought patterns. They have obviously missed the rest of my biographical details in my “About Vridar” page and also in my recent post, “A Little Biographical Footnote“. It is because of lessons I have learned from my past experience in a cult that I can smell certain kinds of fallacious arguments a mile off.

So yes, method of argument is important to me. How we justify the conclusions we draw is important — more so or at least as important as the conclusions themselves.

I do not rely on secondary literature. I use secondary literature to gain access to new ways of understanding our sources, and that’s why my library and reading has become so vast. One book will often lead me to read half a dozen other books. And I will be studying the primary sources, too, and studies made about them. So when Murdock or others say a certain book is “the definitive” or “must read” answer to a question, I generally do not agree. I will read what others have to say about it — scholarly reviews — as well as read carefully what the author has to say, and I will usually find much more qualifications by the author than found among some over-enthusiastic readers.

So it is with disappointment that I find the following remarks now being spread about me on Acharya/Murdock’s discussion board: Continue reading “Falling out”