Another Example

Recently resisting the temptation of getting into it with some online idiot atheists over the bullshit of the phony expertise of the professional atheist Richard Carrier, I was reminded that one of his critics said what he did was a revival of the long discredited mythological theories of the late Victorian - "expert" James George Fraser in his masterwork, The Golden Bough. The Carrier fan boys were arguing the non-existence of Jesus, an important myth and fervent wish in current atheism which is immune to scholarly or academic refutation.

I was trying to remember which of my school English composition textbooks listed The Golden Bough as a standard reference work, along with much better and reliable works, Webster's Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Familar Quotations. By the time that had happened in the 1960s, Fraser's work was, in fact, taken as everything from bogus to seroiusly outdated. I think it was the one we were given in eighth-grade but I couldn't swear to it.

In looking into it the past couple of days I was interested to find out that a lot of what Fraser claimed was clearly based on his anti-Christian motives, his desire to make Christianity seem weird to discredit it and that that was, actually, suspected of that as early as the 1890s. He was heavily criticized even during his active career by others in the same field though, despite that and despite what becomes clear as his motive in claiming what he did, his books were published and were made into standard reference works by the choice of the academics who wanted to use them that way. I suspect a lot of the pop-scholarship bullshit, especially that of the neo-atheists are based in bogus scholarship which was, in fact, ideologically motivated in the direction it took and the choices made in its construction. And a lot of that acceptance was made knowing the deficiencies that were exposed by the critics, many of them having at least the same level of credibility as the one the experts chose to anoint with the authority of a "standard reference".

Richard Carrier's motives are clear, he doesn't really care about the truth of what he's claiming, all he wants to do is peddle his ideology for his own fame and profit. He's really no different from that old liar I wrote about earlier this week, James Randi. I do think there is a real difference in reliability between people who believe in sin and that it is a sin to tell a lie and those who don't believe in sin. With them, it's all a matter of what they can get away with and in the general culture of atheist materialism, the answer is, if they like what you're saying, you'll probably never have to pay any price for saying it. Or at least not much of one. Randi's atheist fan boys never left him, no matter how he was exposed as a liar, a cheat, a eugenicist or as a guy who engaged in, at least, phone sex with underage minors. I'd expect that if there are people arguing about these things in the future, crap that the forgotten Randi peddled will still be being brought up. Common received wisdom is often only common and received. 

 

I am, by the way, entirely skeptical of all of anthropology, my skepticism climbing enormously when it's claimed to be science.  It's not.  Its methods and practices produce something more honestly called "lore" and if they admitted to that it would be far safer and far more unobjectionable, or it would be if they cut the bigotry, racism and other malignant motives from it which are, in most cases, ubiquitous in that literature.