“Aron Ra” Gets Everything Wrong

“Aron Ra” Gets Everything Wrong

Unfortunately the New Atheist activist who calls himself “Aron Ra” is all too typical of this kind of polemicist – he does not let his profound ignorance of history stop him from pontificating about it. In a recent debate he put this on full display, with a remarkable burst of pseudo historical gibberish proclaimed with supreme confidence and smug self-assurance. Yet virtually everything he said was wrong.

L. Aron Nelson, the anti-theism activist who calls himself “Aron Ra”, has a YouTube channel and a blog he writes with his wife called  “Reason Advocates”, both of which focus substantially on battling Creationism and other forms of fundamentalist nonsense. On matters scientific, Nelson seems pretty solid. When he turns to history, however, the results are truly woeful. As I have detailed in my critique of his garbled ideas about the historical Jesus, his understanding of New Testament studies and their historical contexts are most charitably described as both “minimal” and “confused”. But in April 2019 he took on Christian apologist Tyler Vela in a debate entitled “Has Christianity Historically Been in Conflict with Science?” and the centrepiece of his opening statement was a sustained piece of mangled nonsense presented as “history”.

It is a remarkable example of what happens when someone with little to no grasp of the relevant material has read some stuff that he likes from fellow historically illiterate polemicists and decides to present it as fact. It is worth quoting in full before I take it apart. It begins at the 13.12 minute timestamp in the video above, though I have excluded a long account of Old Testament cosmology from 13.29 to 14.13 minutes, so as to focus on his claims about history:

Within the spherical bubble of the firmament is a flat circle according to Isaiah 40:22 in which St. Augustine described as a disc suspended in the concavity of the heavens which the Bible describes as the expanse within that giant crystal dome [of] the firmament  …. Augustine said that it was mere conjecture that there might be “antipodes” – meaning men who walked with their feet opposite ours –  and the other side is [the] two-sided coin that he imagined our world to be according to Scripture. He said there was no reason to believe the fable that people lived on the other side of the world.

But he said that six hundred years after Eratosthenes had already found that the world was round and gauged its circumference. So had Aristarchus other ancient Grecian scientists like Pythagoras; and Anaximander (?) and Aristotle had each followed different lines of evidence to the same conclusion. Yet even a couple centuries after St. Augustine, St. Procopius of Caesarea also expressed belief in a disc-world that the scriptures depict. He said if there be men on the other side of the earth Christ must have gone there and suffered a second time to save them and therefore there must have been as necessary preliminaries to his coming a duplicate Adam, Eve, serpent and deluge. So Procopius also imagined a two-sided coin, with our world on one side and a coin with our world on one side and a mirror image on the flip side.

A few more centuries later the Christian monk and famous artist Hieronymus Bosch was still painting the earth as a flat disc within a transparent crystal ball even when Columbus was sailing to the new world proving the scriptural depiction wrong again. So Christianity was still promoting belief in a flat earth eighteen hundred years after science had already repeatedly shown that the earth is a sphere.

But if you want even better examples of Christianity historically conflicting with science there are many. In the early 1500s Copernicus proposed the idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe as the Bible implied. The church condemned his theory as heretical, holding to the literal interpretation that the Sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the centre of the world. Copernicus had already died in the same year that his theory was published before the church could catch him and kill him for contradicting them, but later that same century a Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno proposed another heretical hypothesis called “cosmic pluralism” – the idea that the stars were suns like our own, albeit much further away and that they might have their own planets and perhaps even life on them. So the church burned him at the stake.

And somehow this didn’t stop his contemporary Galileo, the father of modern science, from further promoting heliocentrism with his astronomical observations. The church tried him for heresy too and forced him to recant – they forced him to lie about what he could show to be true and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Consider the Holy Inquisition words of judgement against Galileo in 1616:

 “The first proposition that the Sun is the centre and does not revolve about the earth is foolish, absurd, false in theology and heretical because it [is] expressly contrary to Holy Scripture. And the second proposition that the earth is not the centre but revolves about the Sun, is absurd, false in philosophy and, from a theological point of view at least opposed to the truth faith.”

 There’s no such thing as a true faith. Faith is convincing yourself of things that are not evidently true and then refusing to admit when you’re wrong. So, the Catholic Church stuck to this ruling until 1992. That’s 376 years of Christianity being increasingly conflicted with science on many different fronts.

Wow. Where to begin?

Medieval spherical earth - Aron Ra

Augustine was a Flat Earther?

The first historical claim Nelson makes is that “St. Augustine described [the earth] as a disc suspended in the concavity of the heavens”. This claim is startling to anyone who has actually read Augustine’s works, given that it is completely contradicted by what Augustine actually says about the shape of the earth. He was careful to warn Christians against making stupid claims about cosmology based purely on interpretations of the Bible and in contradiction of accepted natural philosophy:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an unbeliever to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

(De genesi ad litteram, I.19)

Here Augustine seems to be referring to the followers of the Antiochene school who upheld the fringe view of Diodore of Tarsus that the earth and sky had a kind of “tabernacle” shape, based largely on their reading of scriptures. Diodore seems to have inspired similar beliefs in John Chrysostom and, most famously, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who are among the few genuine flat earthers in the early Christian tradition. These Patristics were in the minority even in their own time and, contrary to the “medieval flat earth” myth Nelson is propagating in the video above, had no lasting influence in their Greek-speaking sphere and were totally unknown in the Latin west.

Augustine, on the other hand, followed Basil of Caesarea and his own spiritual mentor Ambrose in arguing that a spherical earth and the accepted cosmology of the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the world were entirely compatible with Christian exegesis. In places Augustine seems to speak about the sphericity of the earth as hypothetical, but in others he shows he himself understands it to be a sphere. For example:

[D]uring the time when it is night with us the presence of light is illuminating those parts of the world past which the sun is returning from its setting to its rising, and … thus during the entire twenty-four hours, while it circles through its whole round, there is always day-time somewhere, night-time somewhere else.

(De genesi ad litteram, I.10.21)

And from elsewhere in the same work:

Although water still covered all the earth, there was nothing to prevent the massive watery sphere from having day on one side by the presence of light, and on the other side, night by the absence of light. Thus, in the evening, darkness would pass to that side from which light would be turning to the other.

(De genesi ad litteram, XXX.33)

This only makes sense if Augustine is describing a spherical, geostatic earth of the kind detailed by Aristotle in On the Heavens and maintained by most (though, it should be noted, not all) ancient pagan scholars in the Greek tradition.

So Augustine did accept that the earth was a sphere and was well aware of the arguments that supported this idea. This is why it is startling for anyone familiar with his works to hear Nelson claim Augustine “described [it] as a disc suspended in the concavity of the heavens”. Have all scholars of the history of cosmology somehow missed this description by Augustine? Just in case this had happened, I went searching for any such passage in Augustine’s corpus or for any description of the earth as “a disc”. I found nothing.

What seems to have confused Nelson is Augustine’s comments on the Antipodes – the idea that there are land masses on the other side of the earth and that they are inhabited. This is why in the video he goes on to say:

Augustine said that it was mere conjecture that there might be “antipodes” – meaning men who walked with their feet opposite ours –  and the other side is [the] two-sided coin that he imagined our world to be according to Scripture. He said there was no reason to believe the fable that people lived on the other side of the world.

He is referring to this passage from Augustine’s De civitatae dei:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part which is beneath must also be inhabited.

But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man

(De civitatae dei, XVI.9)

But here Augustine is not talking about any “disc” – the reference to “the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us” should be enough indication that he is discussing whether inhabited continents exist on the other side of a spherical earth. His points are (i) the sphericity of the earth does not necessarily indicate that there are land masses on the other side and (ii) the Bible says any such land masses would have to be inhabited by descendants of Adam (“that one first man”) and that would imply an ocean voyage so far that it is “absurd”. Here Augustine is taking a position in a debate that had a long and mostly pre-Christian pedigree in the Greek tradition.

Aron Ra

The Oikoumene and the Antipodes

Early Greek ideas about the size and shape of the world expanded greatly in the fourth century BC, when the conquests of Alexander the Great to the east and the voyages of Pytheas of Massalia to the west and north meant the Greco-Roman world had a broader understanding of the Oikoumene – the known and inhabited world. This was seen as a generally rectangular mass made up of the three continents – Europe, Africa and Asia. In this conception, Africa was a much smaller and narrower region than the modern continent and was not thought to extend beyond the equator and was considered to be bounded to the south by an ocean. The idea that the earth was a sphere may have been around as early as c. 500 BC and it is thought the Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides established the idea of the five zones of the earth – including two temperate zones which were inhabitable and then the two tropical zones on either side of the equator, which were largely uninhabitable due to the heat of the sun there. While there were Greek schools of thought which stuck with a flat earth cosmology, especially the Epicurians, this conception of the earth was accepted by most of the schools of thought – Stoic, Platonic and Aristotelian – that influenced the early Christian thinkers and their medieval successors. It consisted of the Oikoumene taking up only part of the northern hemisphere’s temperate zone, with the arctic and the tropic zones largely uninhabited and the equator impassibly hot.

Aron Ra

Eratosthenes famously used geometry to establish his calculation of the circumference of the earth at 252,000 Greek stadi , which (depending on the length of the stadion he was using) was reasonably accurate. He also estimated that the Oikoumene was around 74,000 stadi from west to east and only 38,000 stadi from north to south. This meant the whole “inhabited world”, which was effectively the “known world”, took up only a portion of the northern temperate zone: about 30% of the estimated latitude of the northern hemisphere and 59% of its estimated longitude.

This not only struck some of Eratosthenes’ successors as relatively small when the size of the globe overall was considered, but it also offended the Greek sense of symmetry. The whole thing looked rather lopsided.

Crates of Mallos, head of the Library of Pergamon, is said to have created a world globe based in part on Eratosthenes’ work, but also on his reading of Homer, which was regarded by the Greeks with a reverence a little like that of the Bible to Christians later. He surmised that there had to be another continent south of the equator to “balance” the mass of the Oikoumene in the north and he based this in part on a Homeric reference. Writing later, Strabo reports that Crates explained Homer’s line – “The Ethiopians who dwell sundered in twain, the farthermost of men” – and argued that on each side of an equatorial ocean there lived the Ethiopians, their skin darkened by their proximity to the tropics, divided by the ocean: one group in the Northern Hemisphere, the other group in the Southern, without any interchange between them.

Crates referred to this southern, balancing mass as the land of the Antoecians. He similarly posited that there should be another balancing land mass in the northern hemisphere, west of the Oikoumene, which he called the land of the Perioecians and a fourth, in the southern hemisphere, which he called the land of the Antipodeans, since their feet were in the opposite direction to the people of the Oikoumene (Antipodeans is plural of ἀντίπους (antipous), “with feet opposite (ours)”).

Aron Ra
Crates’ Globe

Not all of Crates’ conjectural continents caught on, but the idea of a balancing Antipodes, occupying a position opposite the known Oikoumene remained a hypothetical and a subject of debate. Many accepted its existence, including Pliny the Elder, whose works on natural philosophy were highly influential in the Middle Ages.

The whole idea remained conjecture, however, because everyone agreed on one thing: regardless of whether any Antipodes existed, they would be totally unreachable. This was because the equator was considered most likely to be too hot to cross and, even if it was not, the distances involved were well beyond the maritime technology of the ancient world. The Roman poet Marcus Manilius writes of these unreachable hypothetical continents in his astrological poem Astronomica (c. 30-40 AD):

Another part of the world lies under the waters, inaccessible to us,

There there are unknown races of men, and unvisited realms,

Drawing a shared light from a single sun.

(Astronomica, I.373-5)

As strange as it may seem to us, both the assumption of the great heat of the equatorial torrid zone and the fact that ancient ships could only make very short oceanic voyages (from the Gulf of Aden to the west coast of India was about their limit) meant that these hypothetical Antipodean lands remained just that – only a theory.

So this is the context of the Augustine passage to which Nelson refers – a context that he clearly knows nothing of. As a learned man of his time, Augustine is writing in the traditions of his culture and so is aware of the possibility of antipodean continents on the other side of the globe. But he rejects the idea that, if they exist, they may be inhabited because (i) the vast distances involved, (ii) the possibly impassible torrid zone between the Oikoumene and any such places and (iii) the fact that Scripture tells him that man arose in a part of the Oikoumene and so could not have spread to these hypothetical and unreachable places. That third premise may seem strange to us, but using esteemed ancient texts in reasoning of this kind was normal in Augustine’s world and would have been no more strange than Crates hypothesising whole continents from a single line in Homer.

This means Nelson, in his ignorance, gets the whole interpretation of Augustine and, similarly, Procopius of Caesarea completely and hopelessly wrong. Neither of these ancient writers is talking about any “disc world” – they know the world to be a globe. They are simply taking part in a long and ongoing intellectual debate about these hypothetical continents and stating, using reasoning known and respected at the time, that ancient and venerated texts show these lands, if they exist, would be uninhabited.

The problem here is not that Nelson is profoundly ignorant of the context of the writings he is trying to interpret. After all, most people do not have a deep knowledge of obscure debates in ancient cosmology and geography. No, the problem is that, despite his ignorance, he takes it upon himself to stand up in public and bloviate, at great length and with great self-assurance, expounding on points that are hopelessly and hilariously wrong. He does this because his erroneous ideas are shared by others who share both his ignorance and the bigotry it is based on and these wrong ideas are ready to hand in the smug, dumbed-down echo chamber of online atheist activism. Subjecting them to critical scrutiny and doing some real research to check them (and learn they are wrong) are what a real rationalist would do. But Nelson is just a bigot, a lazy researcher and, as a result, a pompous fool.

His foolishness means, in the onrush of his overconfident preaching, he cannot even get the most basic facts right. So he goes on to make a scornful reference to “the Christian monk and famous artist Hieronymus Bosch” depicting a flat earth in his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510 AD). The idea that Bosch was a “Christian monk” fits Nelson’s narrative of the ignorance of the Church, though I imagine it would have come as a surprise to Bosch’s wife, Aleyt Goyaerts van den Meerveen. Bosch was not a monk and not a clergyman of any kind. He was an artisan and artist (and, as his wife would have been able to assure you, married). He was also devoutly religious and a member of the “Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady”, which was a pious confraternity of laymen (not clergy, let alone monks) of a kind that sprang up around Europe in this period. Perhaps that is why Nelson made the blunder of thinking he was a “Christian monk” – see above about Nelson being a poor researcher.

Aron Ra

More importantly, Nelson’s claim that Bosch’s stylised depiction of the earth as a flat plane within a sphere on the outer panels of his Earthly Delights diptych means that he believed the earth was flat and that this was still believed in the 1490s is completely absurd. Bosch was an artist. His depiction on the outer panels is meant to be a visual and thematic prelude to the three-part depiction of the creation of the world in the painting inside, not an exercise in geography and cartographic projection. As I have detailed here before ( see “The Great Myths 1: The Medieval Flat Earth“), the Church never taught that the earth was flat and idea that anyone believed this in Bosch’s day is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is Nelson’s reference to how in this time “Columbus was sailing to the new world, proving the scriptural depiction wrong”. Firstly, no-one believed the earth was flat in this period or any previous century of the medieval period. Secondly, Columbus sailing west to the Americas did not prove it was not flat anyway – that would take a circumnavigation, not just a voyage west and back again. Yet again, Nelson simply has no idea what he is talking about.

Aron Ra

Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo, Of Course

No recitation of the litany that is the dusty old “Conflict Thesis” can be complete without an invocation of Nicolas Copernicus and Giordano Bruno as evidence the Church impeded science. So, right on cue, Nelson wheels out the usual myths:

“In the early 1500s Copernicus proposed the idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe as the Bible implied. The church condemned his theory as heretical, holding to the literal interpretation that the Sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the centre of the world.”

This implies that the reason the Church did this was because its default mode was rejection of anything that contradicted a literal interpretation of the Bible as “heretical”. In fact, the Catholic Church, like the Orthodox traditions and many of the larger Protestant churches, does not and did not hold to Biblical literalism – that is a very modern, largely evangelical Protestant and originally American idea. Biblical texts can be interpreted literally, according to Catholic exegesis, but that is only one way they can be read and it is not always the best or even the appropriate way to do so. After all, “[Jesus] came down to Capernaum” (Luke 4:31) is clearly meant to be read literally, but even the most literalist of holy rolling evangelicals would not read Jesus talking about God as a chicken (Luke 13:34) that way.

The Church in Copernicus’ time could easily have accommodated Copernicus’ cosmology, but stayed with the more literal interpretations of certain scriptures because Copernicus’ hypothesis was not proven, and had serious scientific problems and contradicted about 1500 years worth of accepted and rationally based Greek physics and astronomy. But – contra Nelson – the Church actually did give Copernicus a fair hearing. In fact, the initial reaction to his thesis from churchmen was one of great interest, not condemnation. Nelson goes on:

“Copernicus had already died in the same year that his theory was published before the church could catch him and kill him for contradicting them”

And here we have another hoary old myth. I have debunked this one in detail here – see “The Great Myths 6: Copernicus’ Deathbed Publication“. Suffice it to say that there was a whole century between the first circulation of Copernicus’ thesis in 1514 and the eventual rejection of it as “heresy” as part of the complex Galileo Affair beginning in 1616. In that century the reaction of churchmen ranged from rejection of the thesis on scientific grounds to active support and interest, including sponsorship of Copernicus’ work by Bishop Tiedemann Giese of Culm, active interest and enthusiasm from Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg and a lecture on the topic in the Vatican gardens in 1533 before a highly interested and appreciative Pope Clement VII, along with Cardinal Franciotto Orsini, Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, the Bishop of Viterbo Giampietro Grassi and the papal physician Matteo Corte. The claim that the Church would have caught and killed Copernicus if they had known about his theory and that he only escaped their clutches by dying soon after his book’s final publication in 1543 is utter nonsense and is proof, yet again, that Nelson has not the faintest idea what he is blustering about.

But not content with peddling this myth, Nelson moves straight on to another one:

” later that same century a Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno proposed another heretical hypothesis called “cosmic pluralism” – the idea that the stars were suns like our own, albeit much further away and that they might have their own planets and perhaps even life on them. So the church burned him at the stake.”

Again, this is such a hoary myth that I have already given it a detailed debunking here – see “The Great Myths 3: Giordano Bruno was a Martyr for Science“. In summary, Bruno was a mystic and magician and the Early Modern equivalent of a New Age crackpot, not a scientist. He did not adopt the idea of the plurality of worlds out of any scientific reasoning – the whole idea was well beyond the science of the day anyway. He did so because it fitted his weird grab-bag of mystical ideas, including planets with souls, magic, a garbled and erroneous version of Egyptian religion and some crackpot “sacred geometry”. Nelson is wrong, as usual, that the idea of “cosmic pluralism” was something Bruno “proposed” – it was actually something he adopted from someone else. And that someone else was the man he called “the Divine Cusanus”: Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who was not only a cardinal and member of the Curia but was also a Papal Legate and second only to the pope in the Catholic hierarchy. So, not exactly a heretic.

Bruno’s use of this idea almost certainly was one of the reasons he was burned as a heretic, along with things like denying Transubstantiation, the divinity of Jesus or virginity of Mary (all because these things did not fit his mystical personal theology, not because of anything scientific). Given that it had been proposed by Nicholas of Cusa and supported and expanded on by respected theologians like William of Vorilong, there was nothing inherently heretical about the plurality of worlds, though it had fallen out of theological favour by Bruno’s time. The issue was how Bruno used this concept in his melange of kooky mystical ideas. To hold this up as an example of the Church impeding science is totally ridiculous.

Aron Ra

But we cannot have a ham-fisted defence of the old Conflict Thesis without a mangling of the Galileo Affair:

“And somehow this didn’t stop his contemporary Galileo, the father of modern science, from further promoting heliocentrism with his astronomical observations. The church tried him for heresy too and forced him to recant – they forced him to lie about what he could show to be true and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.”

The burning of the mystical kook Bruno for his collection of weird religious and metaphysical speculations did not “stop” Galileo because Galileo did not regard Bruno as doing anything remotely like the work of actual scientists like himself. He once criticised one of Kepler’s ideas by comparing it to Bruno’s style of argument. This was not a compliment – it was the equivalent of a modern physicist comparing a colleague to Deepak Chopra. Kepler shared Galileo’s low opinion of Bruno, calling him a “monster” for his weird religious ideas. Yet Nelson seems to think that Bruno should be regarded as being in the same category as Galileo. Then he perpetuates the nineteenth century idea that Galileo was “the father of science”. This appellation is a pet hate of my friend Thony Christie, who blogs on the history of science at The Renaissance Mathematicus and has written a number of articles there showing why most of the claims for Galileo being somehow unique or “first” as the basis for this title of “the father of science” are flat out wrong. Probably the best of these is his nicely curmudgeonly article “Extracting the Stopper“. Enjoy.

The Church certainly did try Galileo for heresy, but only after Galileo entangled himself in some complex politics by deciding to branch out into theology and Biblical interpretation and then by embarrassing the Pope – neither of which were wise things to do in the welter of the Counter Reformation. Prior to these gaffes the Church was well aware of Galileo’s heliocentrism and simply did not care. Four years before he came to the attention of the Inquisition, Galileo published his Letters on Sunspots (Istoria e Dimostrazioni intorno alle Macchie Solari – 1612). All published work in Early Modern Europe had to pass some form of official scrutiny and censorship and in Rome this was overseen by the Inquisition. Galileo’s work included detailed discussion of cosmology and made it crystal clear that he championed Copernicus’ model. The Inquisition did not care one bit, and the booklet was published without any comment or correction regarding those passages. Yet again, Nelson simply does not have a sufficient grasp of the context to comment with any level of understanding.

The claim that “they forced him to lie about what he could show to be true” is also absolute garbage. On the contrary, the crux of the issue was that Galileo could not show heliocentrism was true, and everyone involved knew it. In both of his trials, in 1616 and 1633, his problem was that the theory he championed still had major scientific objections to it and it would not be until several decades after his death that these were considered sufficiently resolved for the scientific consensus to swing around to heliocentrism. Though it was not the flawed and tangled model of Copernicus that Galileo argued which was accepted, but a version of Kepler’s model, which Galileo vigorously rejected. As surveys of the scholarship of the time by Jim Westman (1980) and Pietro Daniel Omodeo (2014) show clearly, only around 10 to 12 scholars in the whole of Europe accepted the Copernican model on the eve of Galileo’s trial – the Church had the overwhelming consensus of science on its side, Galileo was the lonely outlier who had to admit he could not demonstrate what he claimed. Nelson gets it all wrong, yet again.

This is why he cannot even understand the judgement of the Inquisition that he quotes in such high dudgeon. The reason that judgement says the propositions are “absurd” and “false in philosophy” is it is noting these ideas are contrary to the scientific consensus I just mentioned. “Philosophy” here means “natural philosophy” – i.e. what was later to be called “science”. As anyone who has actually bothered to study the Galileo Affair knows, the judgement is saying that his ideas are scientifically wrong (“false in philosophy”) AND, therefore, “formally heretical”. The Inquisition, headed in 1616 by Cardinal Bellarmine, upheld the traditional reading of certain Biblical texts because the science said they should do so. As Bellarmine had explained in a widely circulated letter just a year earlier, if heliocentrism could be demonstrated then “one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than what is demonstrated is false”. But, he observed with dry understatement, “I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown to me” (“Letter to Foscarini” 1615). Galileo’s problem was that in his time there was no such demonstration and both he and Bellarmine knew it. And so the consensus that his preferred model was “absurd in philosophy/[science]” remained. In 1616 and in 1632 the Church had consulted the best science of the time and it had science on its side.

It should also be noted that the “words of judgement against Galileo” that Nelson fulminates over do not exist in any document from 1616. They come from a distorted paraphrase of the judgement found in the “RationalWiki” article on Galileo and elsewhere online but ultimately found in Andrew Dickson White’s notoriously unreliable book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), one of the founding texts of the “Conflict Thesis” myth. Once again, Nelson shows himself to be an incompetent and lazy researcher with a great talent for getting things wrong. For the actual judgement see The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, ed. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, University of California Press, 1989, p. 146).

Aron Ra

“Aron Ra” is the Problem

Given the mangling of history in everything else he says, it should come as no surprise that his final flourish on this topic contains yet another myth. Nelson sneers that “the Catholic Church stuck to this ruling until 1992”. This is nonsense. There is no doubt that the tangle of personalities and politics that led to the condemnation of Galileo and of heliocentrism meant that the Church was lumbered with a ruling on a matter of science that was outdated within a century. While the Tychonian geoheliocentric model seemed to fit the data best in Galileo’s time and into the mid century, by the end of the seventeenth century a combination of Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion and Newton’s new physics meant the consensus swung toward Keplerian heliocentrism and then stayed there. This was awkward for the Catholic Church, which reacted by a series of quiet reversals. Galileo’s works and “uncorrected” copies of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum after the Inquisition’s ruling against Galileo in 1616. But when the scientific consensus changed the Church began a long process of backpedalling.

The “corrections” to Copernicus were minor and their addition – in the form of notes to be pasted into the text or its margins – was never policed and does not seem to have been done much outside of Italy. The ban on Galileo’s works had more effect, but it was lifted in 1718 when permission was given for an edition of his works, minus the offending 1632 work the Dialogue. In 1758 the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism was removed from the Index of prohibited books, although the specific ban on uncensored versions of the Dialogue and Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus remained. Then in 1835 these works too were quietly dropped from the Index. Incidentally, this was three years before Friedrich Bessel successfully observed stellar parallax; finally dispatching the last (though already long dead) objection to the earth’s annual orbit of the sun. The Church had quietly dropped its objections to Galileo long before 1992.

So what is Nelson referring to? In 1979 Pope John Paul II commissioned the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to look again at the Galileo Affair. It gave its report to the Pope in 1992 (things move slowly in the Vatican) and the pope gave a complex and actually quite learned speech on the occasion, reflecting on the reasons for the Inquisition’s rulings, Galileo’s forays into theology and the historical relationship between science and theology. It was a good speech and no historians of science would find much in it to disagree with. But it went over the heads of many of the journalists who reported on it, so they boiled it down to headlines like “After 350 Years, Vatican Says Galileo Was Right: It Moves” (New York Times, Oct 31, 1992) or “Vatican admits Galileo was Right”(New Scientist, 7 Nov 1992).

The idea that the Church took a whole “376 years” to admit it was wrong about heliocentrism might make for a nice headline and a good sneering flourish for Nelson, but it is hardly an accurate depiction of history. And this is precisely the problem. Nelson does not actually care about history, he just wants to use his poorly researched and mostly misunderstood mangled cherry picking of it for rhetorical effect. This is why he is such a lazy researcher, relying on bungled online rehashing of nineteenth century myths and confused nonsense by fellow polemicists. He does not feel the need to check things that feel right, because they conform to his prejudices. As Nathan Johnstone notes in The New Atheism, Myth, and History, he is, like other New Atheists, not an explorer of history but a hunter-gatherer of pseudo history. Whatever suits his polemical purpose will do.

I make no apologies for coming down hard on crappy pseudo history like this. Nelson may be a well-meaning fool, but he is a fool nonetheless. There is no excuse for peddling the lazy nonsense he spouts about history, and even less excuse for doing it with such blithe pomposity while claiming to be a rationalist. Nelson’s YouTube channel has over 218,000 subscribers. He has 31,000 Twitter followers. And many of these people are naive enough to take what he blurts as gospel. Here is a sample of some of the admiring comments on the video above:

“I don’t know how that Christian dude even had the audacity to present his argument after that opening segment by Aron. Holy shit Aron has refined his art to a deadly razor sharp sword.” (Judicial78)

” ARON RA WINS!! FLAWLESS VICTORY!” (KelvinG)

” This was over upon the completion of Aron’s opening statement.” (David N)

” AronRa won after his opening statement. ” (O.T.)

And so on. The Christian debating Nelson actually did a very competent job of debunking pretty much all of the claims discussed above, but when it came time for Nelson to reply, he just shrugged that off as though nothing had happened. It is as though he is not just ignorant, but happy to be wilfully ignorant. The commenters above also seem to have simply watched Nelson’s opening statement and, having heard things that fitted their prejudices, swallowed it whole. No scepticism. No fact checking. No critical analysis. So much for “rationalism”.

So the issue is not just that L. Aron Nelson/”Aron Ra” is terrible at history and believes many stupid and erroneous things. It is not even that he is a lazy researcher and poor thinker who does not bother to check things that he finds appealing. It is that he peddles this gibberish to an equally uncritical audience of thousands and they lap it up like the worst kind of fundamentalist fanatics. “Aron Ra” is the problem of New Atheist bad history, embodied.

Update – August 24 2019:

Some commenters and correspondents wondered if Nelson would respond to this critique. It seems he has, after a fashion. In response to someone who linked to this article on Facebook, he replied:

Amazing. The first sentence tries to imply that I am somehow not “right on both points” (though I made more than two points), but does so without bothering to argue how I am wrong. Then he tries to maintain his thesis that Christianity did hinder science despite his examples being wrong, which dodges the question of what examples would support his “point”. Finally, he seems to think that if he just asserts his point stands, my detailed critiques of the only arguments he uses to support it represent “a failed criticism”.

Earlier in the exchange on Facebook he admitted he had not actually read my critique, though later he seems to have at least skimmed it because he claims this:

“[T]he best [O’Neill’s] got is that although Bosch is often described as belonging to some monastic order, he wasn’t technically a monk, and Augustine may have known that earth was proven to be round although his writing seems uncertain about that.”

This is nonsense. Bosch is “described as belonging to some monastic order” precisely nowhere and he was not a monk, “technically” or otherwise because he simply was … not a monk. Nelson does not seem to know what a monk is and, more importantly, does not seem to want to understand. I also do not say ” Augustine may have known that earth was proven to be round” – I show clearly that he did. And these two points in a detailed 6700 word critique are hardly “the best [I’ve] got”.

He thinks he can bluster his way out of his errors and that if he swaggers and bloviates enough it will look as though he has defended his case. This person represents the kind of boneheaded fanaticism I constantly find among this kind of polemicist.

Update – July 16 2020:

“Aron Ra” was recently confronted by my article above on Twitter and forced to respond. He tried to maintain his claim that he only made two errors and only one of them was relevant, so he did not “get everything wrong”. I noted all the other errors he made and so he was forced to reply, which he did a week later on the “League of Reason” forum, in a piece called “One or Two Things is Not EVERYTHING”. This response was a self-indulgent exercise in dodging, distraction, subject-changing, whining, tone policing, sophistry and hilarious pomposity. And more proof of his ignorance of history. I have replied to it in detail – “Aron Ra” Responds … Badly. It seems this is a person who cannot back down even when confronted with clear evidence he is wrong.

191 thoughts on ““Aron Ra” Gets Everything Wrong

  1. Fascinating post. It seems to me atheism is very good at critiquing religion however it still remains a largely minority view and a small social movement because it doesn’t offer anything better than religion and it fails to establish the social connections religion can.

    People like Aron Ra make atheism look stupid though and that takes away the one thing atheism claims to offer; rationality.

    28
    54
    1. atheism is very good at critiquing religion however it still remains a largely minority view and a small social movement because it doesn’t offer anything better than religion

      Atheism isn’t meant to be a social movement. It’s just a position on a theological question. New Atheism, however, tries to be a social movement, but is not coherent enough to actually achieve this.

      85
      5
      1. Perfect response. I am an atheist. I never felt the need to meet on the weekend to discuss my non theism. I have always found this attempt to turn atheism into some sort of sort of social movement as strange and down right religious.

        43
        5
        1. Personally I think it a total waste of effort. If I have to choose between an atheist alt-right nut and a christian who shares my social and political views I don’t have to think twice to choose the latter.

          43
          10
          1. @TOFB: I did not write THE but AN.
            One example of an atheist alt-right nut is Paul Cliteur, the political mentor of Thierry Baudet.
            Saying that someone is a Democrat says nothing.
            Such a short comment, so much wrong.

          2. I’ve seen Aron Ra show up in progressive atheist spaces I frequent, and he’s generally buddies with people like P. Z. Myers, so that tells us pretty definitely where his sympathies lie. I think FrankB was making a general comment about caring more about someone’s politics than their religion (which I also do).

            1
            1
    2. “It seems to me atheism is very good at critiquing religion”
      Some atheists. Others, as Aron Ra (and I’d add the four horsemen too) not at all. Aron Ra is said to be good at criticizing creacrap.

      “still remains a largely minority view”
      The majority in several European countries is non-religious. Interestingly attempts to organize specifically atheist movements here are very unsuccessfull.

      27
      6
      1. Even those European countries do not tend to have any large gatherings of the faithless to discuss why they are faithless. And even among those non religious some have shown in surveys that they still have some spiritual views. Large scale organized atheism simply doesn’t happen because among atheists there are so many other social paths to pursue in any secular society.

        13
        1
        1. Well in sweden we have the loud and sometimes quite annoying atheist organisation “Humanisterna” which really could use a little history lesson from Tim. For example they literally stated that everything in swedish history prior to the “Glorious” 20th century was “A dark age which we are better of without”.

          20
          1
          1. Tim’s an condescending idiot! Why would you think anybody needs a lesson from him? Aron Ra is no longer Nelson yet this idiot showed his jealousy by continuing to refer to ‘Aron Ra’ as Nelson… I too have changed my name and if someone called me by my former name I would be offended and I would have to slap them upside the head, if they continued to do it after I warned them… If you disagree with someone that’s one thing, with the big condescending out of the only thing I can come up with is jealousy… I read this guy’s article and I’m no scholar by any means but I found issues with his claims but I’m not going to go call him booby boo just because I disagree with him…

            12
            15
          2. ” Aron Ra is no longer Nelson yet this idiot showed his jealousy by continuing to refer to ‘Aron Ra’ as Nelson”

            This again? As I’ve explained several times now, when I wrote this article I had no idea the guy had actually changed his name to “Aron Ra” because I didn’t think a grown adult would do something so silly. I now refer to him as “Aron Ra”, with the quotation marks. Much as you have just done. And what on earth would I be “jealous” of this very strange man for?

            “I too have changed my name and if someone called me by my former name I would be offended”

            If you, unlike “Aron Ra”, had a good reason to change your name, I’d use your new name. But if you did so just to be silly, like “Aron Ra”, I would regard you with the same mildly amused scorn I regard him.

            “I read this guy’s article and I’m no scholar by any means but I found issues with his claims but I’m not going to go call him booby boo just because I disagree with him”

            Says the guy who just called me an “idiot”. And you “found issues” with my arguments above? Okay. How about you be the first ever “Aron Ra” fan who manages to get past the fact I find his silly name to be silly and actually address these supposed “issues” you think you’ve found. Let’s see what you’ve got, other than a hissy fit.

            20
            7
          3. “I’m no scholar by any means but ….”
            you still feel qualified to write

            “I found issues with his claims”
            Hooray. Creationists find issues with the claims of evolutionary biologists. Anti-vaccers with medicine. Etc. etc.

            “but I’m not going to go call him booby boo just because I disagree with him to dismiss ”
            Science is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with claims. It’s a matter of accepting or rejecting well-tested methods. Hence it doesn’t matter whether ToN is condescending or not. What matters is whether the methods he uses to arrive at his conclusions are reliable.
            They are. Just like the methods of darwinists, globalists and climate alarmists.
            You don’t even try to present a method. Everything you write can be shrugged off.

            8
            1
      2. To be fair: 4 horsemen atheism/new atheism is good at taking apart Liberal religion rather well. An apologist friend of mine once asked C Hitchens why he was being more respectful to him than most theists he debated with, the response “You actually believe it”. New Atheism doesn’t tend to challenge either fundamentalists (who don’t care) or Christians that know what we believe. I do believe that Tim’s analyses do present a challenge to theism in some cases, and I’m enjoying reading his blog.

        3
        1
        1. “good at taking apart Liberal religion rather well.”
          Don’t think so. But a good and as the consequence extensive critique of Dawkins’ quackphilosophical The God Delusion would be way too much off topic. Instead of the Big Four I rather recommend Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science.

          “New Atheism doesn’t tend to challenge either fundamentalists”
          This is simply incorrect. Perhaps the biggest, but far from the only defect of The God Delusion is equating christinaity with literalism, despite claiming not to do so.
          And that’s all I’m going to say about it on this page.

          6
          2
    3. “social movement”
      I know that Tim has already pointed out that atheism isn’t any social movement and how New Atheists try the impossible of making it such.

      But I’d like to say that this is something I’ve personally found stupid and loathsome. When I was a teenager in the 90’s; I knew plenty of other atheists (I grew up in a not very religious country) and they had the same completely divergent political and social views as anyone else.
      I find it ironically amusing how the new atheists try and paint the church as a force for immorality given that I knew some atheists who justified their own proclaimed immorality (often tied in with classic liberalism) by pointing out how stupid they though the concept of morality is (which they associated mostly with religion). I also knew many lifelong atheists who weren’t too keen on legalised abortion and for the completely irreligious reason of considerations of the psychological effects abortions have on the women who decide to go through with them. And I could name plenty more social and political opinions held by other atheists I knew that the new atheists would struggle to tolerate.

      Likewise I knew plenty of practicing Christians who held strong political and social views that the new atheists would embrace such as socialism, tolerance, acceptance and even (gasp) humanism.

      This entire new atheist attempt to shoehorn a social movement into atheism into a social movement is inherently absurd, weak and has failed as it was doomed to.

      25
      2
        1. A good deal of it can be seen as a reaction to the rise in political influence of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, particularly after 9-11. Yes, there should be a reaction — those phenomena need some strong pushback, and we’re not out of the woods yet. The New Atheist argument is that it’s not enough to address specific harmful forms of religion; the whole tree of faith is rotten root and branch, being based on faulty epistemic standards. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that atheism as an intellectual movement frequently falls into the same fallacies it derides in religion.

          18
    4. The numbers of atheism are actually growing. Although we are still waiting for any proof of a god and any teachings of the bible, because of so much contradiction within it.

      3
      4
    5. Atheism does not have to offer you something to substitute a fantasy. Just live and die in this World and be happy.

      6
      5
    6. “This again? As I’ve explained several times now, when I wrote this article I had no idea the guy had actually changed his name to “Aron Ra””

      So you’re allowed to make mistakes, but everyone else is deliberately fabricating?

      Interesting. Sounds to me like “you get everything wrong”

      1. So you’re allowed to make mistakes

        Like thinking this silly “Aron Ra” name was just an online handle because I didn’t think a grown adult would actually legally change his name to something so silly? Yes.

        but everyone else is deliberately fabricating?

        Pardon? What are you talking about? Who is the “everyone else” in that question?

        Interesting. Sounds to me like “you get everything wrong”

        I have no idea what you’re trying to say.

        1
        1
    7. This entire page is a joke; just from the first paragraph alone, you can tell whoever wrote this trash is just upset because Aron is actually educating people out of their man made religions.

      Atheism is based in reality. The existence of any supreme, perfectly moral creator is a fairytale with absolutely no possibility of being true.

      2
      8
      1. Many of the people who comment here are atheists. Are you sure your not some stealth fundamentalist trying to make atheists look stupid? Because if that is your plan it sure is working.

        “absolutely no possibility of being true”

        I have been an atheist for awhile and I will concede it possible a deity exists. There is nothing self contradictory in the idea that the ultimate cause of all existence is an all powerful consciousness. I am not really convinced of such a view but even I can acknowledge it is logically possible.

        Many things are logically possible after all.

        Talk about giving atheists a bad name.

        Are you sure your not on some stealth fundamentalists on a mission to make atheists look stupid?

    8. I dunno if having someone on the internet disingenuously make minor nitpicks actually made Aron “look stupid”

      What looks stupid is claiming Augustine’s use of the word “round” meant “sphere” when discs are also round

    9. Did you know that believing the world was round was once a minority view? I was a Christian for 30 plus years and now I’m an atheist. In my own experience, I am freed of the dogma, the hypocrisy, and the judge mental attitude that Christians think they don’t have. Atheism doesn’t actually offer anything though. You say you believe in god and I say I do not believe in god. That’s literally it. I don’t believe in god. It’s not a belief, but a disbelief. If I were to say, “I believe there is no god.” Then I would have to provide evidence for that. Atheism isn’t anything more than not being convinced that a god exists. I find it funny that you don’t like Aaron Ra and very funny that you think he makes atheism look stupid. He’s super intelligent and KNOWS what he is talking about. Lastly, you said that atheism doesn’t offer social connection. First off, yes there are lots of communities with the commonality of atheism and secondly, again, atheism is just the disbelief in a god and doesn’t claim to be anything but. So if one is an atheist and can’t find social connection, they aren’t searching. That’s a personality issue and not a disbelief in god issue.

      1
      3
      1. He’s super intelligent and KNOWS what he is talking about.

        He does NOT know what he’s talking about when it comes to history and so should stick to subjects where he has any actual competence. He’s also been corrected on his historical errors many times over more than 20 years and he just ignored these corrections and kept repeating his crap. So that makes it very hard to agree with your “super intelligent” characterisation. People who are actually “super intelligent” do some fact checking before opening their mouths. They also take correction from people who are better informed if they make a mistake. Your “super intelligent” hero did neither. That’s dumb.

        6
        2
      2. Eric Did you know that believing the world was round was once a minority view?

        Kris Maybe 3000 years ago

        Eric-” You say you believe in god and I say I do not believe in god.”

        Kris I am an atheist brilliance. Two posts of mine on this article clearly state

        Eric -” I find it funny that you don’t like Aaron Ra and very funny that you think he makes atheism look stupid. ”

        Kris- I never said one thing about disliking Aron Ra as a person. I do dislike his appalling ignorance of history, and his refusal to accept corrections. That behavior and the behavior of his followers does make atheism look stupid. Should all that make atheism look smart?

        Eric ” He’s super intelligent and KNOWS what he is talking about.”

        Kris. You can simply read the article by Tim O’Neill and see that he doesn’t know what he is talking about when it comes to history. Intelligent people also accept corrections of their errors. He doesn’t do that.

        Eric “Lastly, you said that atheism doesn’t offer social connection. First off, yes there are lots of communities with the commonality of atheism and secondly, again, atheism is just the disbelief in a god and doesn’t claim to be anything but. ”

        Kris. Atheists are around 2 percent of the population in the US. Seems like not too many communities to me. I would venture there are more churches in a large Southern County than there are Freethought Societies within the US. Lastly, why are you protesting my claim atheism does not offer social connections when by your own admission it doesn’t claim to be anything beyond a disbelief in god.

        Aron Ra fanboys are not the brightest brights as your comment shows. Oh well no one claimed atheism was a cure for ignorance.

        2
        1
      3. Apparently Aron Ra is the current atheist messias. Many atheists (and I am a 7 on the scale of Dawkins myself) begin already to drool when just reading his name.

    10. There is a reason atheism coalesced into a “semi movement”, not very cohesive, fighting religion:

      – creationism.

      Because creationists, will do their best to discredit most of science, if possible even ban it from schools and instead promote a CHRISTIAN curriculum on public schools.

      Where religion does not tries to impose it’s views over science, there is less atheism opposition, if at all.

  2. Great post, I wouldn’t have been so harsh myself, but I’ve seen Aron be just as harsh to people who get their facts wrong on evolution, so he should expect the same. You are right he does get numerous historical facts wrong. When I debated him in June I bought him the book, “Galileo goes to Jail and other myths,” hoping he would take it and read it and start to get some of his facts right. But after it was offered to him during the debate and a second time after he still left without it. Unfortunately, he has become the very thing he swore to destroy and now teaching things that are blatantly false.

    70
    6
    1. Ummm…Inspiring Philosophy, you are the same person who says that Jesus “existed” centuries before hidden amongst OT passages in the form of an “Angel of a Lord”. Doesn’t this sound similar to how Richard Carrier will argue, through his contorted interpretations, that Jesus existed as an angelic figure as the works of Philo mention?

      Not to mention, your reconciliation of gLuke’s and gMatthew’s nativity story is ridiculous and not even Tim supports your argument.

      “But while their many inventive contrivances are all riddled with historical problems, the one fact that they all fall apart on is this: the Romans didn’t administer client kingdoms. That was actually the whole point of having client kings: they did the work for you and you just skimmed off a substantial cut of the taxes they collected. So the whole idea of Quirinius, in any capacity, administering a census in Herod’s kingdom is absurd and is contrary to all evidence of how these things worked. ” – Tim.

      “It makes no sense that Quirinius would have been administering some earlier census and it makes no sense that the 6 AD census would spark a revolt if there had been one just a few years earlier. So however you cut it, the GLuke story is set in 6 AD and the gMatt one is set before the death of Herod in 4 BC. These two stories simply can’t be reconciled.” – Tim

      You’re rather hypocritical on your point. You are correct that AronRa is very bad at history and makes a lot of errors, yet, after I have taken a look at your apologetic channel, you’ve made just as many errors and bad historical conclusions. The two above are just a very small handful of many errors you’ve made. It’s unfortunate that people like AronRa have their errors pointed while you remain unscathed.

      10
      8
      1. “It’s unfortunate that people like AronRa have their errors pointed while you remain unscathed.”

        If that last comment is somehow saying I critique atheists who mangle history (like “Aron Ra”) while not doing the same for people like Michael, this is nonsense. I don’t criticise the bad history of Christian apologists here, but that’s because this blog is devoted to atheist bad history. But I criticise Christian bad history elsewhere. You can find my detailed critiques of a prominent Christian apologist’s attempts at harmonising the gospel infancy narratives with history and with each other here and here, for example. You can find my critiques of other apologist arguments on the supposed “Resurrection” here or on the alleged “prophecies” Jesus supposedly fulfilled here. I can give you plenty more examples.

        14
        4
        1. “while not doing the same”
          Even if you didn’t it’s just a variation of the Tu Quoque fallacy. Anyhow, there are quite a few others who have criticized apologetics of especially the Resurrection. While yours is more detailed than almost all others I already was familiar with it on a general level.
          “You’re not criticizing …..” is just a silly cop out of those who refuse to reconsider their beloved conclusions.

  3. Good grief. Aron Ra showed up on talk.origins around 2000, I think, spouting this RCC-taught-flat-earth crap, and I thought the regulars convinced him otherwise at the time (albeit after a pretty snarky debate). Apparently not, or else he’s regressed.

    28
    6
  4. “everyone agreed on one thing: regardless of whether any Antipodes existed, they would be totally unreachable.”
    Which is very unfortunate, given that the Carthagians knew better since the Periplus of Hanno the Navigator, who sailed around Africa in approximately 500 BCE. It’s especially unfortunate that Augustinus of Hippo apparently wasn’t familiar with this text.

    “most people do not have a deep knowledge of obscure debates in ancient cosmology and geography.”
    Neither have I, but still I’m interested in the question what the scholars of Antiquity did know and could know – especially lost knowledge like this Periplus or the ideas of Aristarchos of Samos. There is not exactly a shortage of reliable information on internet. Had Aron Ra shared some of this curiosity he would have understood that “Augustinus of Hippo was a Flat Earther” deserves at least the same skepticism he displays at other topics. The good news is that hardly a Dutch(wo)man or Belgian will take somebody seriously who calls Jheronimus Bosch a monk.

    “The ban on Galileo’s works had more effect”
    Still very little. His Discorsi from 1638 was published in Leiden, The Netherlands and hence as easily accessible as any other scientific text. The RCC had lost much, if not all of its power in many European countries. I’m never sure if I should laugh or vomit when New Atheists present the Galileo trials as an example of the RCC’s abusal of power. I’m as willing to chastise the RCC as any atheist, but what you don’t own you can’t abuse, except in the imagination of atheist pseudoskeptics. See for instance The World by Rene Descartes, which also defended heliocentrism.

    18
    2
    1. just found this blog

      As one who believes the gospels to true and have studied the canon process mostly thru Dan Wallace

      after listening to many of Aron Ra’s YouTube vids i personally find him appalling

      want to continue here
      wahiawa Hawaii

      4
      4
        1. Another example of how bad Aaron is a history is this he claimed the Inquisition is killed more people than any other institution and I pointed out the Inquisition only killed about to 5000 people

      1. If you find his videos/him so appalling why have you listened to so many of them? I can think of many more pleasant ways to waste my time, while I think “believe the Gospels to be true” a meaningless statement.
        I’m really curious, because I don’t get it.

        5
        1
  5. I actually saw this video when it was freshly uploaded, watched it up to a point (because it became unwatchable for me after a period of time) and directly confronted Nelson about his claim that Giordano Bruno was executed for promoting science. And I pointing out that when it came to Galileo’s trial; there was no precedent for the court to refer to which means that the two men were not tried for the same charges.

    Nelson replied with the following laughable webpage
    (also on one of Tim’s prior articles):
    http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/brunolinks.html
    And then ran away from further discourse (as though he’d already settled it).
    I then copped attempted insults and abusing from about 8-9 of his fanboys (and I wound them up back). Of course they all immediately assumed that I’m some Christian fundamentalist (even though I’ve never even been any Christian full stop).

    But then the video was taken down and then reuploaded because the sound quality wasn’t good enough.
    I then confronted Nelson again and told him how the conflict thesis is long discredited. Nelson just then said “Oh I don’t promote the conflict thesis”.
    He really has no clue what he even believes and promotes…

    21
    3
  6. Even those European countries do not tend to have any large gatherings of the faithless to discuss why they are faithless. And even among those non religious some have shown in surveys that they still have some spiritual views. Large scale organized atheism simply doesn’t happen because among atheists there are so many other social paths to pursue in any secular society.

    10
    1
    1. Yes I can confirm that I have never heard of any atheist assemblies outside of North America, I’ve never considered doing any such thing with other atheists I’ve known (which is most people) and the entire thought of it looks to me like some futile and not well thought out attempt to make a religion of atheism.

      7
      3
      1. It does take a special person to say the least who wants to get together with like minded people just to trash religion. Seriously they cannot find anything more fun to do.

        I don’t mind trashing it but I don’t see a need to seek people just to do that with.

        5
        4
        1. Even seeking out other people on the stipulation that they also be irreligious seems absurd to me. Surely it’s better to seek out others who have the same interests and see if you share chemistry? Why does what religion someone practices in their personal lives have to even be relevant?

          But I suppose that I speak from the position of someone from somewhere where irreligiosity is nothing whatsoever unusual. It might be different if I was in some miserable backward hole in North America where almost everyone’s a practicing Christian and where the church plays a central role in social activity. In such a situation it might be difficult to find any social activity not blighted with some communal self-reassuring god-bothering.
          But I also suspect that many of these people in North America who engage in these Atheist assemblies (and openly let their atheism define them, including adopting that dopey stylised A symbol) have an axe to grind against Christianity and/or can’t get this sort of Christian routine of going to church that was so drummed into their existence out of their systems.

          9
          5
          1. I live in the heart of the Bible Belt South and I can assure you if one puts half an effort into it they can ignore religion. If you are truly being bothered by religion even here you are seeking it out.

            15
            6
      2. The mandate of atheism per se has always seemed to me to be rather narrow. For example, there are people with oppressively religious upbringings who are trying to find their way out, figure out how to understand their lives and find some basis for morality, and maybe dealing with religious family along the way, for whom a specifically atheist support group is helpful. My local CFI group runs a Living Without Religion group for that very purpose.

        But beyond that, movement atheism tends to spread out into advocacy for political and social secularism, and scientific skepticism/rationalism, at which point other labels would seem more appropriate. (And as we’ve seen, being particularly anti-religion seems in practice to vitiate the rationalist ethic).

        On the other hand, there is probably some value in a society like the USA, where religion (preferably Christianity, and Jews if they’re well-behaved) is taken as a default, to putting the “atheist” label out there, loud and proud, just to make the point that we don’t need God, we’re perfectly happy, thank you very much.

        10
        3
      3. In The Netherlands there is De Vrije Gedachte (The Free Thought); at the moment about 500 members. There is also the Atheist Secular Party, which is so marginal that it doesn’t even have a Dutch Wikipedia lemma.

        1. It’s fascinating how people believe that in the bible belt you can just as well ignore religion in the same moment where political Christianity is actively and successfully sabotaging abortion rights in the United States. I’m sure plenty of Alabama women are making such a fuss because polluted by anti Christian new atheist propaganda, and not because people who claim to represent Christianity (And are endorsed in the effort by the majority of churches as well as the Catholic church) want to force their values on everyone else’s lives.

          11
          12
          1. This side discussion seems to be going too far off topic. Back to the subject matter of the article above please.

            9
            7
  7. I once suggested to a New Atheist that Galileo proposed circular planetary orbits and that we therefore do not live in a Galilean universe. I was treated to a a table showing the percentage difference between the circular and elliptical orbits of each planet (including planets that had not not been discovered in Galileo’s lifetime) and the claim that Kepler’s First Law was not very important because the percentages were not very great.

    18
    1. The your correspondent was woefully ignorant of the history of “Copernican” Revolution (which really, if we must have poster boys to label it with, should be the Copernican-Keplerian-Newtonian Revolution, with no doubt a few others clamoring for space on the marquee). Astronomy at the time was all *about* precise measurement of positions, and it was elliptical orbits which helped put Newton onto his Big Idea.

      11
  8. Good post, but I have to take issue with you calling him “Mr. Nelson” a la Kent Hovind. I’m pretty sure Aron Ra legally changed his name to his currently moniker, so when you call him “Mr. Nelson” and suggest he goes by a false name, it comes across as a rather petty ad hominem attack.

    11
    10
    1. “I’m pretty sure Aron Ra legally changed his name”

      That’s nice. He can legally change his name to whatever silly thing he likes, that doesn’t mean I have to use it. He’s free to do what he likes and so am I.
      I’ve had a weird exchange with several people on Twitter about this which boiled down to:

      Them: “You have to use his silly name!”
      Me: “No.”
      Them: “That’s disrespectful to him!”
      Me: “Yes.”

      I don’t respect the silly, pretentious man with his silly, pretentious fake name and I am under no obligation to indulge his silly pretensions. Of course, if you want to – knock yourself out.

      P.S. And I never called him “Mr.” Nelson. ;>

      30
      15
        1. I fail to see why I can’t both (i) correct this guy’s many stupid errors and (ii) not take his silly name seriously. If all I did was chuckle at his silly name then we’d be settling for “complaining and sniping at each other”. But I actually don’t make much of his silly name at all. Why you’re making a big deal over something so trivial I have no idea.

          30
          6
          1. If this chap is so fervently ‘atheist ‘ , why does he want to be called by the name of a prominent Egyptian sun God?
            ( I’d also like to know why he appears to be wearing someone else’s trousers, but that’s just my disrespectful nature…..)

            14
            6
      1. I have seen a few of your (Tim’s) responses to “His name is Aron Ra. Why do you call him Nelson?” One of them was:
        “If you, unlike “Aron Ra”, had a good reason to change your name, I’d use your new name.”

        I fail to see why it should be up to a person to determine whether others have, or had, a good reason, and what would or wouldn’t qualify as a good reason. I guarantee not everyone would agree what a good reason is. As an example: to some, being transgender is not a good reason. I can personally attest to this. Why can’t we just call people what they want to be called?? I think that skepticism and rationality should go hand-in-hand with compassion.

        3
        1
        1. I fail to see why it should be up to a person to determine whether others have, or had, a good reason, and what would or wouldn’t qualify as a good reason.

          Sorry, but the only person who can determine if I think it’s a good enough reason for ME to call them by their new name is … ME. He can decided to himself “Clownfish McFucknuckle” if he likes, but his dumb desire to have a stupid new name is not a good enough reason for ME to choose to use it. Sorry.

          to some, being transgender is not a good reason

          Which is pretty sad. But the fact remains that we can’t force them to use a trans-person’s new name. And to equate Aron McFucknuckle’s reason for wanting his silly new name with that of trans people is utterly absurd.

          I think that skepticism and rationality should go hand-in-hand with compassion.

          I can assure you that I feel very sad for Aron that he is such a fucknuckle.

          3
          1
          1. “ Sorry, but the only person who can determine if I think it’s a good enough reason for ME to call them by their new name is … ME. …”

            —Absolutely agree. Just because I am happy to call anyone what they wish to be called doesn’t mean anyone else has to. Free speech means no one can compel you to do the same. While I may not agree with you, I support your decision.

            “… And to equate Aron McFucknuckle’s reason for wanting his silly new name with that of trans people is utterly absurd.“

            —A trans person does has a different reason than McFucknuckle. I wasn’t trying to equate the two; they aren’t on equal footing. I was just trying to find an analogous situation to see where you take a hard stand.

            “ I can assure you that I feel very sad for Aron that he is such a fucknuckle.”

            —That was a statement I was unprepared for and it legitimately made me laugh.

            I have seen a plethora of posts from people on this thread who have a go at you for not using his preferred name. I imagine seeing them gets old pretty quickly. I have no intention to impose my beliefs about names onto you. I was just curious about where the line is for you. Thank you very much for your response. I can imagine how frustrating it is answering the same questions.

            1
            1
          2. I’m afraid that your very obvious hatred of Aron Ra obviously goes way beyond a disagreement on some historical facts. You seem to be affronted at his atheism more than anything else. When any citizen changes his name as allowed for under the law then that becomes her/his legal name, no matter how petty you want to be about it. You are literally irrelevant under the law, in respect to his name change and I can’t take you seriously when you decide to use petty ad hominem attacks.

            1
            1
          3. Why would I be “affronted at his atheism” if I’m an atheist myself? I’m affronted at his bungling of history and his refusal to admit his many errors.
            And yes, it’s his legal name. That doesn’t mean I have to not find it silly.

            1
            1
    1. For me, Aron Ra is a “guilty pleasure” of a sorts. He is entertaining for sure, and his bashing of religion kinda fun to listen to, but he tends to cut a lot of corners while doing it. I usually spot when he goes off the rails, but sadly many (especially his fans) do not… 😀

      8
      5
  9. Have you seen Aron Ra’s recent debate with a Christian apologist youtuber named InspiringPhilosophy, on “Is Christianity Dangerous”, he spouted some of the WORST history and sociology I have ever seen online so far…

    You should see what I had to write in response in the comment section of the video:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQBFY1z_RvI&t=665s

    For example, Aron Ra brought up the classical Spanish Inquisition, failing to ignore that about 3-5,000 people died in this tragic historical event (between 1492 and the early 1800s). For a comparison: in communist Mongolia, there was mass executions of Buddhist Lamas. About 18,000 victims of mass executions were Buddhist Lamas, out of a total death count of about 30-33,000 for the Mongolian Great Terror (with many of rest being just ordinary Buddhist laity). And this was in a Mongolian population of about 700,000-800,000 people within a short decade (1930s).

    And of course, Aron Ra has to mention the pseudo-historical “Hitler being a Christian and acting out a genocidal Christian agenda!” among much other awful pseudohistory he spouted…

    27
    5
    1. The Spanish Inquisition had its own Index, an index in which Copernico, Galileo and Newton’s works were never included. Copernicus, a Polish canon, in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, taught, against the geocentrism of Aristotle and Ptolemy, that it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun. Most of the European universities rejected Copernicus’ work. Especially hostile towards the new astronomical discoveries were Protestants such as Luther, Melanchton and Calvin. Melanchton, Luther’s personal friend said the following regarding Copernicus: “Many are those who consider it worthy to do what that Prussian star finder (sic), which sets Earth in motion and leaves the Sun motionless. Truly the rulers , if they are wise, they should stop the unleashing of the spirits. ” Luther assured that heliocentrism was heretical, because, according to the Bible, Joshua commanded the sun to stop, not the Earth. Calvin wondered: Who would dare to place Copernicus’s authority above that of the Holy Spirit? In 1551 Kaspar Peucer, son-in-law of Melanchton and professor like him of the Protestant University of Wittemberg, requested that the teaching of heliocentric theory be prohibited. It was formally condemned at the Universities of Zurich (1553), Rostock (1573) and Tübingen (1582). On the contrary, Spain was an exception: the University of Salamanca in the Statutes of 1561 established that in the Astronomy chair one could read Copernicus. In 1594, that reading was declared mandatory.

    2. The Dominican friar Domingo de Soto was the first to establish in 1551 that a body in free fall undergoes a uniformly accelerated acceleration and its conception of mass (internal resistance) is extremely advanced. Apparently, Galileo met Domingo’s work through a student of the second, Francisco de Toledo, whom he met in Rome in 1587. It is alleged that in 1836 recognizing freedom of printing still put obstacles to the free teaching of geology. But the truth is that there was neither then nor before any repression of geological discoveries: it will be a “victim” of the inquisition who proves it. Mateo Orfila, a Spanish scientist and chemist, tells us that in his youth (1805) he had won a public contest on Geology at the University of Valencia; someone denounced to the Inquisition the ideas about the geological antiquity of the world exposed by him, for which he was interrogated by the inquisitor Nicolás Lasso. It is Orfila himself who tells us his experience: «I found myself in front of a priest in his fifties, with a good plan and a majestic appearance, in noble and distinguished ways. I soon realized that his knowledge and spirit placed him in the front row of the Enlightenment men. Yesterday afternoon he told me you had great success that I applaud, all the more so since I appreciate the studious youth and try to stimulate it with all the means at my disposal. Who are you Where do you come from? What you wanna do? Suddenly, his friendly words vanished the fear I had and inhibited me in a conversation that could have unpleasant consequences for me. I replied respectfully, trying to prove that I was not intimidated. He asked me: Is it true that in the session last night, when asked, did you glimpse, following the physical and geological knowledge that you have learned in French books, that the world is older than has been believed so far, and that at the same time you let us show that your opinions about the creation of so many wonders are not completely orthodox? Tell me the truth. My answer was clear, so he was satisfied. Then he got up and invited me into his beautiful library, pointing out, among other books, the complete works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius and other modern authors. Finally he told me: Leave, young man; calmly continue your studies and do not forget from now that the Inquisition of our country is not as spiteful as it is said, nor does it care so much in pursuing as people say. Testimony collected by José Luis Martínez Sanz in A necessary comparison in the Europe of the Modern Age: the Inquisition of the Church and the justice of the King. Consulted in Arbil magazine: http://www.arbil.org/117inqu.htm 23 Although a decree of 1558 threatened the prohibited book smugglers with capital punishment, this royal pragmatic was never applied. (Henry Kamen, the Spanish Inquisition. 6. The impact on literature and science, p.107). Other countries such as England and France were not as tolerant as Spain, in the latter country the possession of prohibited books was punishable by the condemnation of galleys in perpetuity.

      9
      1
      1. Very interesting about the Spainish Scientific tradition , I will attempt to find out more about it.

        However, I fell I should point out that there was no history of persecution for scientific or intellectual opinions in England after the Reformation. The authorities in England were only interested in preventing political dissent fostered and supported by Catholic nations, which often led directly to attempts to assassinate the monarch and indeed the Government. You could be executed for trying to overthrow the state because of your religious beliefs, but not for arguing against the Flood.

        Scientific and intellectual positions might lead to social difficulties for their proponents ( though I can’t think of any prominent examples) but were not criminalised, and certainly never lead to anyone being sentenced to the galleys ( in fact , we never had galley slaves in the British Navy, preferring wind power). Many scientific enquiries and advances came from or were supported , financially and socially, by the highest levels of civil society. ( Harvey was a royal physician, Newton received support from the Duke of Manchester.) The Royal Society was instituted to foster just such enquiries .

        6
        1
        1. “However, I fell I should point out that there was no history of persecution for scientific or intellectual opinions in England after the Reformation.”

          I think I lot of British Catholics and “Non-Conformists” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might disagree with you, so long as among “intellectual opinions” you count “belonging to the wrong church”.

          “You could be executed for trying to overthrow the state because of your religious beliefs, but not for arguing against the Flood.”

          So those “priest holes” in the great houses of Catholic nobility were there purely for decorative purposes? Plenty of Catholics were persecuted despite not actively “trying to overthrow the state”. Plenty of Non-Conformists as well – lots them emigrated to the Americas and it wasn’t for the nice climate.

          “Scientific and intellectual positions might lead to social difficulties for their proponents ( though I can’t think of any prominent examples) but were not criminalised”

          Were they criminalised in Spain? How about Italy? Religious positions and beliefs could get you arrested and persecuted in Spain and Italy – just as they could in Britain. So … your point would be … ?

          11
        2. “we never had galley slaves in the British Navy, preferring wind power”

          I know that this is going off topic but I find this a very obtuse comment.

          Do you somehow imagine that having sailing ships powered exclusively by the wind was something uniquely British? The pioneers of European “wind power” weren’t British at all but Baltic and Iberian. Galley slaves were inherently a feature of ships powered with oars, and from the medieval period that meant that those sorts of ships were used only by nations whose seaboards were along more stable bodies of water (and rarely beyond those bodies of water) such as those in the Mediterranean and not by those nations with an exclusively Atlantic seaboard such as those in the British isles.

          And in any case: The Royal Navy practiced “press-ganging” until the conclusion of the war of 1812 and which is still technically legally possible. This was essentially a form of forced labour, little better than Slavery. And which was often deliberately practiced in locations of suspect loyalty to the English/BritishCrown such as Cornwall.

        3. If England in the 17th Century were such a haven of intellectual freedom I wonder why Thomas Hobbes published De Cive in Amsterdam, like Galilei a few years before in Leiden. Because Oliver Cromwell was such a nice, tolerant guy? Not that the Dutch Republic was that free a country. Look up Hugo de Groot (Grotius), the brothers Koerbagh and of course Spinoza. This is one of the ironic aspects of new atheism: an easy case can be made for religion-caused oppression. All you need is internet and Wikipedia is a decent start. Still new atheists systematically pick the wrong examples; one reason is their silly dogma that religion always conflicts with science.

  10. They sound all so fun to have around. It seems in the end though that most people have better things to do with their free time then to get together to specifically moan about religion. I have no problem trashing religion myself but I don’t see the need to find fellows to trash it with.

    5
    6
  11. It’s amusing how many comments on here go like: ‘why would they waste their time trashing religion? Don’t they have anything better to do?’
    Spending your own time trashing who wastes his time trashing religion is not wasting your time, though.

    8
    20
    1. Yes a lot of us think it is ironic that a bunch of so called “freethinking” atheists get together at specific dates to discuss religion for hours on end…. you know like a church.

      Yes a lot of us think it is ironic that a bunch of so called “freethinking” atheists have organized themselves into groups with appointed leaders who create a doctrine in order for them to preach…. you know like a church.

      Heck some of their leaders, such as Dan Barker even write songs about atheism… you know kinda like a church hymn.

      Those of us who come around this blog enjoy good history , seek to learn and are less than amused at how some atheists are distorting history for ideological reasons. If you cannot see the difference between seeking to correct bad history and the cultish behavior of some atheists well I would not be surprised but I cannot help you.

      28
      9
      1. Your (And other’s) comments on this article aren’t about ‘bad history’. Not at all. Todau you literally came on O’Neill’s blog in order to join other enlightened souls in thrashing these bad online new atheists for how silly they are in wasting their times that way. I just happen to be able to see the irony 😉

        10
        23
        1. “join other enlightened souls”
          Who don’t gather at specific dates at specific places to celebrate their unbelief.
          Who don’t need appointed leaders (personally I don’t get along too well with ToN very much; I just recognize that he’s a pro and knows what he’s talking about while people like Bob Seidensticker and Aron Ra way too often don’t).
          Who don’t sing silly songs with atheist propaganda lyrics.

          It seems that your sense of irony needs some fine-tuning, because you took over some stupid and cheap creationist rhetorics: “if you are so sure it’s dead wrong, why do you keep on talking about it? In groups?”

          17
          6
          1. Yeah, you don’t find ‘leaders’and don’t meet outside the internet. You also don’t sing songs. For some reason that’s supposed to make your spending a great deal of your time trashing them in circlejerk with so many anti-antitheists so much smarter than what they do. To me, that just lazier. Again: you can disagree with the premises of their movement, but if they believe them then they have the same reason and right to organise as they wish as any other social movement. It still doesn’t make a religion out of them. Ask your O’Neill.

            9
            16
          2. I agree that any social movement can go off the rails–historically ignorant New Atheists like L. Aron Nelson not excluded. Nevertheless, the saner clubs of freethinkers fulfill two legitimate psychological and social needs. First, people groping their way out of extremist fundamentalist Christian & Islamic sects often need support groups for their own healing. Second, my native country is going off the rails thanks to the Radical Christian Right, so it is perfectly appropriate for bloggers to post rebuttals of fundamentalist Christianity on the Internet. I recoil from radical get-in-your-face atheism like the Street Epistemology of Professor Peter Boghossian, but I heartily approve posting rebuttals of Christianity and Islam on the Internet that people can read or not as they see fit–take it or leave it.

          3. @Jacopo: “For some reason”
            The reason is a combination of annoyance and fun.

            “so much smarter than what they do.”
            Unfortunately I’ve to decline this compliment. The stupidities of Aron Ra and co don’t make me smart.

            “To me, that just lazier.”
            So what?

            “but if they believe them then they have the same reason and right to organise as they wish as any other social movement.”
            Something I never denied. What you forget is that I’ve exactly the same reason and right to criticize them, especially if they betray what they propagate: science (which in my view includes history) and reason.

            “It still doesn’t make a religion out of them.”
            And that right also includes pointing out how much they have in common with what they criticize.
            So I’m afraid this last comment of yours is rather pointless.

            @ChrisS: I never claimed anything different. I’ve one extra point though. Many unbelievers, including me, criticize “normal” christians for being lacklustre towards say creationists. It’s hypocritical if the saner clubs of unbelievers (religious people can be freethinkers too, while by now I strongly doubt if we should call Aron Ra one) give new atheists a free pass. It took for instance PZ Meyers a while, but at least he managed to open his eyes for the bigot aspects of the attempt to turn new atheism into a social movement.

            3
            2
  12. It seems as though your rebuttals were based primarily on speculation?!? You take an excerpt from St. Augustine and make an assumption about what he was saying about the shape of the earth when for all you know, he could have been saying the exact opposite which would be directly in line with what Aron Ra was saying.

    I’m not sure if this is a secular website or a Christian one under dishonest guise of a secular website but in any case you should do better.

    6
    39
    1. “It seems as though your rebuttals were based primarily on speculation?!?”

      Ummm, no. They are based on the evidence I presented and an understanding of its context, which I explained. No “speculation” required.

      “You take an excerpt from St. Augustine and make an assumption about what he was saying about the shape of the earth when for all you know, he could have been saying the exact opposite which would be directly in line with what Aron Ra was saying.”

      I present two quotes from Augustine, neither of which make any sense unless he is talking about a spherical earth. So no, he could not “have been saying the exact opposite”. There is no way those passages make any sense unless he is assuming the earth is a sphere.

      “I’m not sure if this is a secular website or a Christian one under dishonest guise of a secular website “

      I’m an atheist. Why on earth would you think it was a Christian site? Because I’m debunking myths used by ignorant atheists? Sorry, but wrong is wrong.

      “you should do better.”

      I think I’m doing fine, thanks all the same.

      49
      4
  13. So of the dozens of things you can’t prove, he gets a date wrong and for some reason you have the moral high ground?
    No, this is quite mining at its most childish. That Aron guy won the debate you mentioned and by the look of it quite easily.

    And proving this Aron guy right, you are clearly not athiest. Yet you deny like a good apologist, so Aron was right about people like you all along. To deny means your income, so stop spreading your lies to further your bank balance. This makes you a true low life, I’m sure Hovind had you over for dinner.

    Apologists mistakes – over a dozen
    This guys mistakes – 1

    The only way this could have a positive light is by your blatant attempt to discredit someone through mis quoting and quote mining.
    If your theory is he got something wrong so don’t trust him, the hole youre digging yourself has no bottom. Aron even admits with sufficient evidence he would convert, so why aren’t you grown up enough mentally to admit the same?
    This was a rubbish article written by a moron, the writing is terrible and you have no ground to argue from.
    As someone that studies history, alot more than you (obviously) or Aron,
    I’ve never read the accounts of the hundreds of people that saw the dead walk the streets. If that didn’t make it into the history books then I’m afraid nothing you say about history matters to me when youre parroting incorrect information.
    But reading your article proves you’re a liar and a con man (artist by no stretch of the imagination) and you’ve proven it here. The comments seem to reflect what i say too lol.

    10
    48
    1. “So of the dozens of things you can’t prove, he gets a date wrong and for some reason you have the moral high ground?”

      Pardon? What are these “dozens of things [I] can’t prove”? And I’m not sure what date you’re referring to, but anyone can see that this Aron guy gets a lot more than some date wrong.

      “No, this is quite mining at its most childish.”

      How is quoting every word he says about history in his opening remarks “quote mining”? That’s the opposite of quote mining. Do you understand what that term means?

      “That Aron guy won the debate you mentioned and by the look of it quite easily.”

      He can’t have “won the debate” since basically every single thing he claimed about history was wrong.

      “And proving this Aron guy right, you are clearly not athiest.”

      “Clearly” Based on what? I am an atheist and have been so since my late teens. That’s 30+ years.

      “Yet you deny like a good apologist, so Aron was right about people like you all along. To deny means your income, so stop spreading your lies to further your bank balance. This makes you a true low life, I’m sure Hovind had you over for dinner.”

      I can assure you this blog is a hobby and my fairly healthy bank balance doesn’t depend on it in any way. The only thing I “deny” is bad history peddled by people who don’t do their homework. And I barely know who “Hovind” is.

      “The only way this could have a positive light is by your blatant attempt to discredit someone through mis quoting and quote mining.”

      Where are the examples of this “mis quoting and quote mining”?

      “If your theory is he got something wrong so don’t trust him”

      Again, he did not get one thing wrong – every single thing he said about history in that video was nonsense. As I detail, with full quotes from him.

      “This was a rubbish article written by a moron, the writing is terrible and you have no ground to argue from.”

      Gosh. Thanks for that devastating and detailed critique.

      “As someone that studies history, alot more than you (obviously) or Aron, I’ve never read the accounts of the hundreds of people that saw the dead walk the streets.”

      Neither have I. Because they don’t exist and that didn’t happen. What has that got to do with me?

      “But reading your article proves you’re a liar and a con man (artist by no stretch of the imagination) and you’ve proven it here. The comments seem to reflect what i say too lol.”

      Wow. I think we are seeing the calibre of follower this Aron guy attracts.

      44
      5
        1. Yes, I know. That’s why I said “I barely know who Hovind is”. I’m aware of the name and know he’s stupid and duplicitous even for a Creationist. But since I lost interest in trying to reason with Creationists long ago, I have no knowledge of him beyond that. So the claim in the crazy spiel above that I’ve had dinner with him is … well, crazy.

          21
          1
      1. Damn, Tim,
        After reading another well-written and cogently argued article, we get this garbage from “Ben” and not only is it entirely devoid of any substance but he goes onto attack you. I think you’re hitting these folks where it hurts. I find it hilarious that he insinuates strongly that you’re not an atheist but a religious apologist.

        However, this has me curious about something: I strongly suspect that the Bible teaches a flat-Earth cosmology but not being a biblical scholar, it’s not something I am confident that I could prove. Do you believe that it teaches as flat-Earth?

        1. I think it is pretty clear that the Middle Eastern cosmology the Old Testament writers reflect was based on a flat earth conception. This is hardly unusual – the Chinese still worked from a flat earth cosmology well into the Early Modern Period and it took Europeans to get them to understand the reality of a spherical earth. It’s not like a round earth is intuitive or that flat earth cosmologies can’t work. They worked in China and most other non-European cultures for thousands of years.

          17
    2. “you are clearly not athiest”
      This is the new atheist version of “all atheists deep down in their heart know that there is a god”. New atheists look more and more like fundagelicals every day. Slowly but surely they are becoming what they dislike so much.

      18
      1
      1. Accusations towards me of really being a Christian (and thus lying about being atheist) from these total imbeciles when I point out to them how flawed Jesus mythicism arguments are and the low credibility of its advocates (like Richard Carrier) are never ending. The basic fact the academic consensus I accept instead is incompatible with Christian belief anyway just never registers in their irrational/simple minds.

        18
    3. “you are clearly not athiest. Yet you deny like a good apologist, so Aron was right about people like you all along. To deny means your income, so stop spreading your lies to further your bank balance. This makes you a true low life, I’m sure Hovind had you over for dinner.”

      (laughs and shakes head)
      Here we go. “Oh we can’t possibly be wrong about anything and if you tell us so you’re a liar in some grand conspiracy”.
      Let me guess: You were raised a Christian fundamentalist? No apology offered; you’re still just as bad as some weak and irrational Christian fundamentalist because you still think irrationally like one.

      20
    4. And here we have in a nutshell everything that is wrong with so much of online atheism: the knee-jerk reaction to criticism of someone’s hero, the listing of names of standard fallacies together with obvious ignorance of what they actually are, the bizarre accusations that the critic is a covert operative for the other side, or that they’re in it for the money (how would that even work? This blog isn’t monetized, as far as I can see).

      This is not rationalism; it’s pure unreflective tribalism (which, ironically, is one of religion’s major faults). Ben, you flunk Critical Thinking 101. Go back and repeat kindergarten.

      29
      1. Over the years I’ve noticed there is a particular type of person who responds like our friend “Ben” above – by simply spewing out references to fallacies and bad debating tactics, but without showing how these things are relevant to the person they are attacking. It’s like these terms are magical incantations, and if you pronounce them you are, somehow, “refuting” the other person. “Ben” doesn’t seem to even understand what these terms mean, but he just sprays them in my direction in imitation of people who can actually debate. It’s rather sad really. It brings us back to a point I have to keep making – one of New Atheism’s worst effects is making dumb people think they are smart simply because they no longer believe in God.

        33
  14. Furthermore, organising as a social movement, whatever that implies in terms of hierarchy, preaching and even (gasp!) Writing songs doesn’t make new atheism a new religion, nor it does turn them in what they hate about religion. All your amusement on the subject is pretty silly. Religion (crrtainly the religions new atheists care to counter) requires a belief in supernatural to begin with.

    Concerning why that want to organise as a social movement, new atheists do have a legitimate beef with the influence religion has on their society and wish to organise against it. Religious people do also push for their ideals to be embraced by society. Its not that you ‘have better things to do’ (you clearly have a lot of time to spend online while shitting on other peoples’ preferences and choices); you are so utterly upset that new atheists do what religious people do daily just because you don’t share the new atheist view that religion is harmful (incidentally, if you understood the reasons for which new atheism developed when and where it did, you wouldn’t be here pretending to be surprised it doesn’t exist in heavily progressive countries just so you can mock them).
    I do have quite a few problems with new atheism: in particular how they shifted right in their silly ‘progressives ruined the world with their PC culture’ claim, but then you and the new atheists are on the same side on *that*.

    11
    13
  15. I do think it’s rather insanely rude to refer to him as Nelson and by his birth name when he has actually changed it. If we just going off things that are wrong and stopping there nobody could even get past your opening sentences. You expect us to believe your words in history when you won’t even do basic research about the person you’re speaking about…?

    8
    9
    1. Anyone who did that would be looking for pathetic excuses not to read a detailed critique of their hero by focusing on something trivial. And yes, it’s (slightly) rude. I have no respect for this silly man and his silly name is a very minor part of why. The fact that his defenders keep focusing on the fact that I have been (slightly) rude shows they really have nothing else they can cling to.

      21
      3
    2. It’s always fun when someone predicts the silly behaviour of fanboys [“It is that he peddles this gibberish to an equally uncritical audience of thousands and they lap it up like the worst kind of fundamentalist fanatics.”] and then they are determined to live down to expectations.

      Clearly, reading right to the end is not something Mr ‘Ra’ inculcates in his acolytes.

      14
    3. Excellent idea! I’ll stop taking any American seriously who isn’t well mannered and respectful enough to call the great Italian astronomer Galilei and instead uses his forename.
      [/sarcasm]

      8
      2
    1. Maybe they have been deeply traumatised by Evangelical Fundamentalism, whether through bad experience within it; or else, by the turmoil of “getting it out of their system”; or by both.

      If a belief is strongly & deeply held, and is more than merely intellectual assent, and has become part of the personality; and (for whatever reasons) is jettisoned, there is more to getting “de-converted” than merely (so to speak) “repenting from” it, & being “converted to” something else – there is also the process of getting entirely unused to it. Whether this involves “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”, or not.

      It would be very unfair if reasonable, honest, fair-minded atheists were to be classed with whichever atheists are not too bothered about facts and fairness and valid reasoning. Sometimes, the people whom one does not wish to hear, are the very people whom one needs to hear.

      (It could be that those of who are some sort of Christian give a wholly misleading impression when we speak of belief, by failing to emphasise that Christian belief is much more than merely intellectual assent – it involves the whole person, intellect, affections, will, everything.)

      Back to the advertised programme.

  16. Science, as an object of censorship, was not of much interest to the inquisitors, with the exception of heliocentrism, after the Galileo process of 1633. During the 16th century, heliocentrism enjoyed wide tolerance in Spain. The introduction of the Copernicus study in the statutes of the University of Salamanca, was due to Juan de Aguilera professor of astrology in Salamanca from 1550 to 1560. The teaching of heliocentrism was approved by Bishop Diego de Covarrubias and confirmed by Philip II on 15 October 1561. It is true that the condemnation of Copernicanism in 1633 by the Roman Inquisition was binding on the Catholic orb but the Spanish Inquisition never included Galileo’s books in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the decrees of the Holy Office were also not published in France . If it is true that after the condemnation of 1633 there were more precautions with heliocentrism. Jorge Juan, for example, when publishing his Astronomical Observations in 1748 he had problems with inquisitorial censorship but Mayans’ friendly intercession resolved the matter. As a retaliation, Jorge Juan, in the second edition of Observations … (1773) made a fiery defense of Copernicus and Newton’s discoveries. On the other hand, we should not exaggerate the effects of the condemnation of Galileo: Gassendi, friend of Galileo, wrote in 1643: “I do not think that decision is an article of faith; for neither the cardinals have declared it that way, nor have their decrees been promulgated to the whole Church, nor has it received them as such. ” And the Jesuit Riccioli, in 1651: “As in this matter, neither the Sovereign Pontiff nor any Council approved by him have defined anything, it is far from faith that the Sun moves and that the Earth remains motionless, at least under this decree “(Almagestum Novum 1, 52). Finally, Caramuel, (the Spanish Leibniz), mathematician, scientist, monk and bishop (1651), in the moral treatise he wrote says: “What would happen if the wise demonstrated tomorrow that Copernicus’ theory is true ? “, and he replies:” In that case, the cardinals would allow us to interpret Joshua’s words in a metaphorical sense. ” When in 1741 evidence of the Earth movement was available, Pope Benedict XIV authorized the publication of the complete works of Galileo, and in 1757 the works favorable to heliocentrism were authorized again, by a decree of the Congregation of the Index, which remove these works from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. “

    14
  17. I am absolutely ok with correcting people’s incorrect statements. However I have to ask why did you refer to him as Nelson when you clearly know he changed his name ? You just seem to go a little far in personally attacking him versus his ideas.. and that I find beneath you. I have to wonder if you ever tried to get in touch with him to inform him of his mistakes prior to writing this ? He doesn’t seem unreasonable and might have appreciated the information and correction rather than a smug personal attack. Just my two cents..

    4
    10
    1. However I have to ask why did you refer to him as Nelson when you clearly know he changed his name ?

      I didn’t know he had changed his name legally. I assumed it was one of those (slightly ridiculous) online names that a lot of YouTubers etc use, like “ShoeOnHead” or “Thunderf00t”. It never occurred to me that a grown adult would be so silly as to change their name to a silly novelty name based on a bad pun. But people never cease to surprise me.

      You just seem to go a little far in personally attacking him versus his ideas.

      Nonsense. I barely say anything about him personally, apart from noting that he is not just ignorant of this stuff, but is wilfully ignorant. And that makes him foolish.

      I have to wonder if you ever tried to get in touch with him to inform him of his mistakes prior to writing this ? He doesn’t seem unreasonable

      I have had encountered this guy on Twitter and found him quite impervious to correction – and not “reasonable” at all. But if you don’t believe me, watch the whole video I’ve embedded in my article. Tyler Vela actually does a solid job of debunking his claims, using much the same information I do, though not to the same level of detail. Aron’s reaction? He just brushes it off as though nothing happened. At one point he even says “I don’t know what you think I’ve got wrong”, as though Vela had not just spent about 25 minutes detailing exactly what he got wrong. The guy is totally pigheaded.

      I am more than happy to give people a chance. Look back at my article on PZ Myers and “Jesus Agnosticism” and you’ll see that I acknowledge his open mindedness and give him credit for at least trying to understand where he may have gone wrong. But this “Aron Ra” guy is a not open to correction. As someone here has noted already, people on talk.origins schooled him on his medieval flat earth blunders back in 2000, yet here he is almost 20 years later spouting the same nonsense. If you have patience for that level of boneheadedness, good for you. I don’t.

      27
      3
  18. Another thing:

    But he said that six hundred years after Eratosthenes had already found that the world was round and gauged its circumference. So had Aristarchus other ancient Grecian scientists like Pythagoras; and Anaximander and Aristotle had each followed different lines of evidence to the same conclusion.

    Woah woah woah, to the best of my knowledge Anaximander believed the earth was a vertical cylinder, with humans dwelling on the ‘flat’ top surface. Or was that Anaximenes.

    1. No, that was Anaximander. But Aron speaks fairly quickly and his diction is not always the most clear, so I had to make a guess as to who he was referring to at that point.

  19. Given how much New Atheists lambast the role of religion in history, I’d like to recommend an absolutely amazing book I just came across and began reading: Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1: Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press 2016). For anyone unsure about whether it’s worth it to get the book, one of the chapters are available online and they could take a look to see for themselves:

    https://www.academia.edu/24860856/_Christianity_and_the_Roots_of_Human_Dignity_in_Late_Antiquity_in_Christianity_and_Freedom_Volume_I_Historical_Perspectives_eds._T._Shah_A._Hertzke_Cambridge_2016_123-48

    11
    15
  20. Aron Ra is just a philistine who spews out narratives that appeal to his audience of video game Hollywood schlock consuming “free thinkers.” New Atheism has long had a problem of drawing in such an audience, which hasn’t been helped by how key figures in the movement conduct themselves. He does not engage with his opponent Tim O’Neil seriously since he like others of his ilk has a notable lack of interest to disrespect for the humanities . Which is rather noticeable in Anglo-derived countries (they are not “useful”).

    Aron Ra, like others in his clubhouse, clings to Grand Historical Narratives with heroes to triumph and villains to be exterminated for there to be Heaven on Earth. John Gray has written plenty on this, noting that they appropriated views and narratives well rooted in “Christian Europe” (namely, belief in a line of history from one start to one determined endpoint).

    13
    1. I would supply a more nuanced interpretation of L. Aron Nelson. I have read his book on creationism versus evolution, and he comes across as highly intelligent AND highly undisciplined. I did find a lot of useful leads refuting the claims of creationists and intelligent designists, but I found misspellings and amateur prose by the ton. I suspect he obtained most of his information on the inquisitions and crusades and witch-hunts from antiquated 19th century sources like Charles Mackay and Andrew Dickson White, rather than reading more recent scholarly works from David C. Lindberg, Toby E. Huff, and Jared Diamond. (Having read these books myself, I was prepared to profit a lot from Nathan Johnstone’s book–although it cost me an arm and a leg!) Aron Ra could be a real asset to freethinkers if he would just grow up and do his homework.

      1. “Aron Ra could be a real asset to freethinkers if he would just grow up and do his homework”

        Ironically, he appears to regularly do his homework when it comes to the natural sciences, especially biology and his own field of paleontology, but he’s also shown himself willing and able to consult geologists, meteorologists, physicists and the like when he felt he was going outside his area of expertise (see for example: his YouTube playlist debunking Noah’s Flood).

        But when it comes to history (and perhaps other related fields in the social sciences and the humanities, I wouldn’t know) he appears to fail to apply the same rigorous standard and do his due diligence.

        I don’t know if it is ideological bias, confirmation bias, complete lack of understanding of how history as a field of study works (which I don’t know either, that’s why I come to this site, to learn. I’m not a historian, in case it wasn’t clear), or perhaps the wrongheaded but not uncommon idea among STEM people that history is not a real science and it’s all “just a matter of opinion” anyway, so in order to debate history one shouldn’t try to investigate what actually happened or at least stick to scholarly consensus (after all, I bet most of those scholars are a bunch of Christians who will twist any inconvenient fact to defend their faith anyway, right? /sarcasm) but rather find whatever narrative is floating around in academia that fits my prejudices, even if it is only supported by crackpots like Richard Carrier, and try to argue that. You know.. like a sophist.
        (Ironically, this is what New Atheist “skeptics” accuse — not wrongly — Creationists and other religious apologists of doing).

        I think Aron Ra is a very smart scientist, certainly a smart paleontologist, and from what I’ve observed over the years, a genuinely good person. I was hoping to never see him featured on this blog (especially since he rarely talks about history, unless it involves US politics).

        Alas, I find myself disappointed. Aron Ra embarrassed himself here, and became the monster he purportedly sought to fight.

        @Tim O’Neill: If you’re reading this, do you know (or at least, have a working theory) why Aron Ra, and other New Atheists like him, fail so spectacularly when it comes to history when they have no problem dealing with complex subjects in other areas of knowledge like paleontology, biology, physics, etc?

        I apologize if the comment is off-topic (I believe it isn’t, but I’m not sure)

        12
        1. “do you know (or at least, have a working theory) why Aron Ra, and other New Atheists like him, fail so spectacularly when it comes to history”

          I think what you say above is pretty close to the mark: they don’t seem to understand how history is studied, they think it’s all just opinion anyway and they have a high school level grasp of some general ideas about it which tend to fit their anti-religious narrative and so they go with that opinion over any others. It’s a combination of ignorance, confirmation bias and the Dunning Kruger Effect.

          18
          1
        2. “I don’t know if …..”
          It seems to me that all those reasons are connected. History always has been used to forward political agendas (in the broadest meaning). What annoys me is that self-declared skeptical rationalists do this without blinking an eye.
          Btw this is one of the reasons (see elsewhere on this page) I don’t care much about (de)conversions. They don’t automatically make people more or less rational and skeptical.

        3. If you came to this site to learn how history works, then you came to the wrong site, Tim Oneil is just a pompous condescending fraud. So if you want to learn about history, pass your way, this fool is even wronger than Aron Ra.

          16
          1. Thanks for letting us know. If I ever come across anything on this site by someone called “Tim Oneil”, I’ll keep your warning in mind.

            17
  21. I listened to your discussion with Cameron Bertuzzi and Michael Jones. It is interesting that the Epicureans largely thought the earth was flat (especially since the Epicureans were some of the earliest ‘critics’ of religion)

    However, I am somewhat doubtful as to whether or not this influenced the flat-earthism of early Christian thinkers such as Chrysostom, as opposed to hyper-literal interpretation of the ‘cosmic-temple’ theology, especially since they were on conservative side.

    1. I didn’t say the Epicurean cosmology influenced the Patristic flat earther minority, because I don’t think it did. Not directly, anyway. I simply noted that not all pagan schools of thought accepted a spherical earth.

      10
      1
        1. It’s a pretty weak and rather defensive piece and one that kicks off with an example of the “Tu quoque fallacy” – Hannam is supposedly a “Catholic apologist” so we can dismiss his assessment of the cosmology of Lucretius and the Epicureans. Except that assessment is shared by plenty of people who don’t seem to be Catholic apologists. See the entry on “Epicurus” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example. Or John Burnet’s assessment in Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, pp.290-91. I could give dozens of other examples of people who interpret Epicurus and/or Lucretius as Hannam does.

          That said, even Hannam admits that his interpretation is just that – an interpretation. Nowhere in the (small) Epicurean corpus we have is there an explicit statement on the shape of the earth. Frederik A. Bakker makes a detailed case against the interpretation Hannam favours in his Epicurean Meteorology: Sources, Method, Scope and Organization (Brill: 2016) and from what I have read of it (I don’t have full access to the whole work), he does a better job than the article you link to. The latter’s arguments are fairly weak. Bakker’s book is recent, so whether it overturns the consensus that the Epicureans were flat earthers remains to be seen. In the meantime, that is a well-established interpretation.

          13
  22. I like Aron, and I enjoy watching him tear creationist frauds to pieces in debates. (Seriously, watch Aron’s debate against Kent Hovind on the Nonsequitur Show last year. He ate Hovind alive.)

    When Aron posts video on history or philosophy, though, I always suffer a strong cringe reaction within a few minutes and have to switch off. He’s a smart and articulate man, but his knowledge of history and mythology is poor, and his arguments are terrible.

    (And Aron, if you happen to read this – no, I’m not Steve McRae posting under an alias).

    13
    2
  23. Thank you Tim, for another excellent blog post!

    If nothing else, this serves as another example of the inadequacy of the debate-format when it comes to dealing with these sorts of things. The simplistic fairy-tale version of history will almost always have more rhetorical force, and any attempt at introducing nuance or subtlety will often sound to an uninformed audience like irrelevant hair-splitting or an attempt to “muddy the waters”.

    I guess it’s not surprising then that new atheists seem to favor the debate format. It allows them to look “smart” without requiring much of any actual work beyond pandering to the preconceived notions of their audience. So much of their supposed “rationality” is obviously nothing more than a pose, an identity they affix to themselves rather than a process or a method. It seems that since they already *know* they are “rational” they feel no need to actually investigate their own opinions and assumptions.

    I’m still slightly embarrassed about my teenage new atheist phase (even though I remain a non-believer) and it’s sad to see grown-ass adults persisting in the same silly attitude.

    14
  24. Out of interest because I didnt watch the video (I no longer waste time listening to patent nonsense), I wondered if the responder in the debate negated anything he said, or did he just stick to his own script?

    1. As I mention in my critique above:

      “The Christian debating Nelson actually did a very competent job of debunking pretty much all of the claims discussed above, but when it came time for Nelson to reply, he just shrugged that off as though nothing had happened. It is as though he is not just ignorant, but happy to be wilfully ignorant.”

      1. Punching myself in the balls for two hours straight sounds less painful than listening to this debate, but I trust Tim’s assessment that Hovind won. That a dishonest charlatan like Kent Hovind got the better of Aron in this debate doesn’t reflect well on Ra’s effort to understand the complexities of this topic, and that’s putting it mildly.

        3
        1
        1. If you mean the debate in the video I embedded at the beginning of my article, Hovind wasn’t involved and so did not win anything. Nelson/”Aron Ra” was debating Tyler Vela, who is a Christian apologist but not an idiot and fraud like Hovind.

          14
          1. Thanks for the correction Tim. Embarrassing myself by saying something positive about Hovind is a fitting punishment for such a silly mistake.

            12
  25. Tim: This article is fantastic. As an evangelical Christian, I am always deeply conflicted when I read History for Atheists. On the one hand, I would be thrilled if you became a Christian. On the other hand, you do such a great service by correcting such egregious errors regarding history, propagated by the so-called New Atheists. The ad hominem charges leveled against you by your atheist critics, that you are a closet Christian, are simply hilarious. I learn something new every time I read your work, and you have really encouraged me to have a better appreciation for historical scholarship. Keep up the great work. It is like a breath of fresh air, reading your posts.

    10
    1
      1. @Tim O’Neill
        “Been there, done that. No thanks.”
        …well is just that we (New Christians, lol ) lack leaders and teachers of your caliber !
        Honestly , just look on YT/FB/etc , is crazy …

        Anyway, Christian or not, we have here a God sent ( I couldn’t resist :p) true History class!
        And as long as Reason triumphs, it doesn’t matter if it is pro-Christian or not!
        Reason above all else !

        3
        1
    1. “I would be thrilled if you became a Christian”
      In contrast I wouldn’t care much if you deconverted, for all kinds of reasons.

      7
      4
      1. Well, I wouldn’t mind if he ceased being an evangelical, which I regard as a pernicious form of religion. But more moderate Christianity, or generic theism, I have no strong objection to beyond thinking it false.

        10
        1. Steve Watson

          Good ppl are good ppl regardless of their affiliations. A truly good person belonging to a “pernicious” group will probably not be pernicious. If we quit groups because others thouggt they wrre pernicious no one would beling to any group.
          Fortunately being able to hold really dumb ideas is everyone’s right. It sez so in the Bible! Yehaaaaa!

          1
          3
        2. Professor Dawkins has a lot of good information to share about evolutionary biology, but he errs in denouncing mainline “liberal” Christians as a slippery slope to crass Fundamentalism. We freethinkers need to team up with educated non-Fundamentalist Jews and Christians to fight the well-funded Christian Lysenkoists who censor biological science in the public schools.

          1. …. Which is funny, since fundamentalists denounce liberalism as the slippery slope to apostasy (which I find more likely, since that’s how it went for me). Dawkins has written some wonderful books making science accessible to the public, but tends to say very silly things outside of that.

  26. Technically it would not take a complete circumnavigation for Colombus to prove that the Earth was round. He would just have to reach India going west 😉

  27. So much wrong….
    1. He doesn’t “call himself Aron Ra”, he legally changed his name to Aron Ra.
    2. On Augustine being a flat earther: You ommited the parts when he desribes how night and day work in which his model would only work on a flat earth.
    “But if that primordial light had been poured round the mass of the earth on all sides to cover it all, whether it was stationary (geocentric globe) or circling round (heliocentric globe), there would have been no part in which it could let night into follow it, because it would not itself have withdrawn from anywhere to make room for it. Or, was it just made on the one side of the earth, so that as it circled round it would allow night from the side to circle round too in its wake? Since water, you see, was still covering the whole earth, there was nothing to stop the mass of this watery globe from causing day on one side from the presence of light, and night on the other from the absence of light, which would follow round to the first side at the time of evening, while the light sank down to the other side.”

    3. On the church and Galieo. From what I understand from your article you think that it’s ok that Pope John Paul II had to issue a whole investigation into the Church censuring Galieo, instead of admiting they were wrong from the start? I get it he wanted to make sure he appologised for everything, but it took over 300 years for someone to acctually come to the conclusion that what they did to Galieo was wrong.

    1
    10
    1. “So much wrong….”

      Gosh.

      “He doesn’t “call himself Aron Ra”, he legally changed his name to Aron Ra.”

      You’re right – I got that wrong. At the time I didn’t think a grown adult would be so pretentious and idiotic as to not only refer to himself by such a silly name, but also legally change his name to it and actually insist others call him by it. I’ve since learned that he is, indeed, that much of a wanker.

      “On Augustine being a flat earther: You ommited the parts when he desribes how night and day work in which his model would only work on a flat earth.”

      That is not Augustine describing “how night and day work”. Try actually reading that in context and see if you can understand what Augustine is actually saying. And nothing in what he says implies a flat earth.

      “From what I understand from your article you think that it’s ok that Pope John Paul II had to issue a whole investigation into the Church censuring Galieo, instead of admiting they were wrong from the start?”

      They knew that the Inquisition had been wrong – that was not what the investigation was about. The inquiry was an examination of the whole affair in the context of the theology and science of the time to see what it could tell modern Catholics about what the mistakes made were and how science and religion should relate to each other.

      “I get it he wanted to make sure he appologised for everything, but it took over 300 years for someone to acctually come to the conclusion that what they did to Galieo was wrong.”

      That was not the objective and it is also not what happened.

      As you said: “so much wrong”. You seem very confused.

      12
      1
  28. [quote]You’re right – I got that wrong. At the time I didn’t think a grown adult would be so pretentious and idiotic as to not only refer to himself by such a silly name, but also legally change his name to it and actually insist others call him by it. I’ve since learned that he is, indeed, that much of a wanker.[/quote]

    And here we have a grown man calling someone a wanker over picking a name for himself. Look in the mirror.
    Also what surprises me is that you had to do some research to find his birth name, during which you would find out that Aron Ra is as he goes by now. Yet you chose to go with outdated info… you kidna look like Hovind.

    I’ll give that mister Ra does exaggerate on the whole “it was scorned as heresy from the start” but his point stands it was eventually labelled as such. The point of their debate was “Was faith in conflict with science?”. so are you telling me that the church burning books of science cause HERESY!!!!1!! wasn’t a show of conflict?

    1
    11
    1. “And here we have a grown man calling someone a wanker over picking a name for himself.”

      Any sensible adult would consider this wanker a wanker for picking a ridiculous name for himself and insisting others use it. The fact you can’t see that tells us a great deal.

      “Also what surprises me is that you had to do some research to find his birth name, during which you would find out that Aron Ra is as he goes by now. “

      I quickly found his original name in the very first search I made on him. So I didn’t look into the microscopically insignificant topic of his silly name beyond that. It’s interesting that his butthurt defenders make such a massive deal over this silly topic of the silly wanker’s silly name.

      “I’ll give that mister Ra does exaggerate on the whole “it was scorned as heresy from the start” but his point stands “

      What “point”? What was supposedly “scorned as heresy from the start”? And he does not simply “exaggerate” – he gets everything he claims completely wrong.

      “are you telling me that the church burning books of science cause HERESY!!!!1!! wasn’t a show of conflict?”

      What books of science were burned “cause [sic] of heresy”? And the theological conflict between Galileo and the Inquisition does not, in fact, show any wider conflict between religion and science. The point people like you don’t seem to grasp is that the Church checked the science very carefully and found that they had the overwhelming scientific consensus on their side. Then they looked at the theological implications of Galileo’s scientifically rejected theory. You clearly don’t understand what happened at all.

      19
      5
  29. To be fair to this guy, Neil Degrasse Tyson promoted Bruno on his reboot of Cosmos as a great scientist who was burned for his theories. These “rational” types always call their stances anti-religion but it always turns into anti-christian and it makes them blind.

    10
    1. ” Neil Degrasse Tyson promoted Bruno on his reboot of Cosmos as a great scientist who was burned for his theories.”

      People who want to stand up in public and lecture people about (supposed) history need to do better research than watching Neil Degrasse Tyson. Who is, himself, notoriously bad at history.

      14
    2. These “rational” types always point out that creationist law professor Philip Johnson has no expertise on biology and hence evolution. But they want us to accept the authority of a physicist on historical matters.

      1. Or, as we’ll see in my next article, the “authority” of a piano tuner from Oregon on Roman Era archaeology.

        12
  30. There is a lot we can learn from Aron Ra.
    The #1 being: How to be ignorant.
    Number 2: How to close your ears from critique
    Number 3: Enough charism helps getting an audience, even if you’re completely wrong.

    6
    2
  31. I debated Airhead Ra a few times particularly on his ignorant comment “the ten commandments are bullshit” and I noticed the same things you did, not only is he a basic idiot, but his followers fall to their tearful knees in sick devotion to this werewol-I mean man.
    Dawkins also has a brain dead evolution video in which everything he says is assumption and conjecture and it is accepted as genius. Let a creationist try that.
    It does not take long for me to see the holes in these people’s theories and as you say, it can take a loooooooooong time commenting on the errors.

    2
    9
    1. “whats up with all hate for Aron Ra?”

      He makes claims about history and gets them all wrong because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

      “He’s not an airhead.”

      No, just a pompous fool who needs to learn to stick to what he knows.

      9
      2
  32. Don’t think you need a degree in history to prove the Bible is a fake. A simple read of Genesis can do that.

    1
    7
  33. Truthfully I stopped reading when disrespect came in, anyone that has to state their case with insults is not worth listening to or reading, which I would now dismiss as a dribbling rant.

    3
    4
    1. What “insults” were these, exactly? As for “disrespect” – respect is earned. “Aron” has been repeatedly shown that the nonsense he peddles on the topics in that video is all wrong. People on talk.origins showed him that his claims on the church teaching the earth was flat were wrong back in 2000. That’s 20 years ago. Yet he has persisted in repeating this garbage and doing so with vast pomposity and assurance, as though he was the one revealing truth to the uneducated. That makes him not worthy of “respect”. We wouldn’t “respect” a Christian apologist who persisted in peddling nonsense after being repeatedly corrected and we should not “respect” this person either.

      12
      1
      1. Ah,I see why you decided to reign in the sardonic wit on your videos Tim. Alas, while the interviews are great the video lectures can be somewhat dry now.

        But the purpose is to educate, not entertain – I guess I’ll have to hope for the comments sections in particular for the occasional witty fix.

        1. Thanks for the feedback. Most people find my sardonic side off-putting, so I have toned it down in my videos. I’m trying to convince people, not turn them away.

  34. Well, if Aron washes up as an atheist speaker, he can always get a job as a male fashion model for GQ magazine.
    Or maybe not.

    1
    1
  35. The personal attacks on Aron are sad to see…typical; Christianity says it teaches ‘love thy neighbour’ yet it shows none…
    This is why religion and especially Christianity is declining…I am Dutch and the Dutch are slowly waking up…the last 5 years we have surpassed the 50% of atheism in our population…
    None. R.cat. Prot Isl. Oth.
    2012 46,2 25,6 17,2 4,5. 6,5
    2013 46,2 26,4 16,8 4,7. 5,9
    2014 47,5 25,4 16,5 4,7 5,9
    2015 48,2 25,3 15,4 4,6 6,5
    2016 49,7 24,1 15,6 5,1 5,5
    2017 50,7 23,6 15,0 5,1. 5,6
    2018 51,8 22,1 16,0 4,9 5,3
    2019 54,1 20,1 14,8 5,0 5,9

    The reason for that is written all over in the comment-section on this page…keep on ridicule and insult science and scientist without any proven arguments…it really helps our atheist and
    agnostic case…
    Funny thing is as an outsider…when I am watching American crime shows there is almost always a connection to the Christian cult…this is exactly why the bible belt is also the meth,murder and other crime belt..purely cause of the “who cares, only god can judge me” mentality…
    Be a responsable human and choose to take responsibility for your own actions instead of writing it down to ‘a higher power made me do this’…or… ‘god send me this way’…
    I know it is hard to hear and understand but,you have only one life and it is now… here…on earth…enjoy it and make it worth while…
    America has a long way to go but it will also pass the 50% of atheists one day…
    So therefore… I welcome every Christian who mocks science and scientists, cause as we discover more and more of natural science and the Universe,Christians and especially creationists like Kent Hovind are placing themselves more and more in the corner of ‘insanity by facts’…

    …”The meaning of life is to give life a meaning…nothing more,nothing less “…

    Change is coming…still…
    With friendly regards…
    Jacques Groenen…

    1. No-one here is ridiculing or insulting “Aron Ra” for anything to do with science or because he’s a scientist. And most people here aren’t even Christians. He’s being mocked – rightly – for being an ignorant pompous fool who keeps making statements about history which are wrong and which have been shown to him to be wrong. Yet he clings to them out of arrogance, stubbornness and blind faith. He deserves mockery for this stupid and wilfully ignorant behaviour. If you want to criticise Christianity, go find a Christian forum. This is a history site. And if you want to be a fanboy to that fool “Aron Ra”, go do it somewhere else.

      1. Ah…excuse me… I thought this was one of these creationist sites that criticises everything any atheist claim to know by science…by teaching Atheists “a lesson in history”…cause I saw to much unfounded personal insults in the comments…haha…maybe I should have read another article here before I got all upset…
        Excuse me Tim… I have looked you up and I was wrong and to quick to judge…now I feel quite stupid…haha…
        Again sorry….
        Jacques…
        Now I have looked beyond the reach of my nose…some great articles…

        1. Thumbs up from me, but still a few remarks. One of the worst ways to combat creacrappers is to produce fake facts. Creacrappers are not representative for christianity, even when they make that claim themselves. In the USA most christians are OK with evolution theory too. Like New Atheists creacrappers just excel at making noise – I think you know the Dutch verb about empty barrels. Make sure yours are filled.

          1. Yes I know the verb…and I did not use fake facts they are from the dutch central bureau of statistics…which is highly accurate
            Christianity isn’t in decline since the sixties but in the sixties more and more people dare to say they were atheist not fearing repercussions, so they were not new they were mostly already there… on top of that I didn’t say declining NOW because of personal attacks on atheists…

            I also do know what a “Godwin” is…and yours is one of the most ridiculous I have ever read…as far as I know bormann killed in the name of fascism not atheism…
            maybe you should take lesson of my mistake by learning how to apologise when you say something stupid…but it is off topic Aron is not ridiculed here for being an atheist but for being a bad historian…I have no problems with that at all…for I have noticed a few mistakes he made myself…

            Thanks for the thumb though…
            It is not hard to admit I’m wrong…
            You might try it…..

          2. The combination

            “Christianity says …..”
            “one of these creationist sites”
            strongly suggests that you equate the two and that’s a fake fact. Your idea that the term fake fact referred to the numbers provided by CNB is also a fake fact.

            “as far as I know bormann killed in the name of fascism not atheism…”
            Yet another fake fact produced by you, because you’re so eager to attack strawmen: I’m actually indifferent on the question whether Bormann killed in the name of this or that. What I wrote is that Bormann was an atheist and that I prefer christian resistance heroes like Titus Brandsma and Tante Riek. Nothing more, nothing less.
            Finally this

            “You might try it”
            implies that I never admitted in my life that I was wrong, which is another fake fact.
            Hard to unlearn bad habits, isn’t it?

            This is my last response to you in this little subthread.

    2. “The personal attacks on Aron are sad to see…typical; Christianity says it teaches ‘love thy neighbour’ yet it shows none…”

      Seriously ?!!
      Tim O’Neill is an ATHEIST !!!
      Hi is (rightfully) bashing the ignorance of Aron Ra.
      Yet you accuse O’Neill of being an hypocrite Christian not “loving his neighbor” ?

      facepalming myself into face reconstruction surgery !

      greetings from you southern neighbor: Belgium.

      2
      1
    3. “Christianity says it teaches ‘love thy neighbour’ yet it shows none…”
      Stupid. Christianity doesn’t show anything. Christians do. And quite a few christians have shown more love than quite a few atheists. Christians Tante Riek and Titus Brandsma were resistance heroes. I don’t know about you, but I prefer their love to what atheist Martin Bormann showed.

      “I welcome every Christian who mocks science and scientists”
      You provide an excellent example of the tribalism that’s also typical for christianfundies. You’re blind for the atheists who reject science and scientists – like Aron Ra on history. Or climate change deniers. Or antivaxxers. Make me happy and claim that none of them are atheists.

      “This is why religion and especially Christianity is declining”
      Nonsense. In The Netherlands and other European countries christianity has been in steady decline since 1965, while in many countries it hasn’t. Thanks for confirming that several Dutch atheists care as little about inconvenient facts as the average creationist.
      Just in case: I’m a Dutch and staunch unbeliever. Since decades.

  36. Christianity certainly is not declining where i live
    all the super mega churches are Christian and its the 20-30 crowd new hope grew 1000 every year

    yes i fact check arron ra he is off with science also

    1
    3
  37. Even though Aron is wrong about history, he does have good points about other issues and seems knowledgable in evolution and fossils. He has been on paleontology teams finding fossils. I think this article is unfair in seemingly dismissing him entirely and clearly disliking him. Making him and those who agree with him on various topics seem stupid is…..stupid. I would doubt anyones ability to reason if they believe Aron is wrong about everything, and by some replies it seems many people are overly polarized and bias towards him. Read for yourself. Egoists are common in atheism though, as much as any religion (Aron included, though he seems like a kind person). I wish I could just get facts without ego stroking and condescending. It is not doing anything positive for atheism.

    1. he does have good points about other issues and seems knowledgable in evolution and fossils. He has been on paleontology teams finding fossils. I think this article is unfair in seemingly dismissing him entirely and clearly disliking him.

      From the very second sentence in the article above:

      “On matters scientific, Nelson seems pretty solid. When he turns to history, however, the results are truly woeful.”

      So I make it perfectly clear that on “evolution and fossils” he’s fine and that my criticisms are about when he strays onto history. A subject about which he clearly not only knows nothing, but about which he peddles myths and nonsense.

      I would doubt anyones ability to reason if they believe Aron is wrong about everything,

      The title is clearly referring to him getting everything he said in the video I link to wrong. Not that he is wrong all the time on all topics. I could not be more clear that I was referring specifically to his errors in that video and his bungling of history generally. Anyone who reads my article can see what I’m saying.

  38. Well i have read the transcripts of AR of probably a hundred videos most of then are short under 20 min. But they are very repedative. Heavy table pounding on evolution is true and creationists know nothing. But he gives away the farm on just how it works. I do like AR in a lot of ways but he is a preacher of misinformation..

    2
    1
  39. You calling him ‘Nelson’ has a very Kent Hovind feel to it. He does exactly the same thing to insult Aron. Saying that you did it because you thought it was ‘silly’ that he changed his name, is an arrogant cop-out. That and calling him a fool, are nothing but personal attacks.

    1
    3
    1. As I’ve explained to the last several fanboys who have made similar comments to yours, when I wrote this article I had no idea that “Aron Ra” was anything more than an online nickname he’d adopted. So no, that was not done to insult him. But yes, I do think it’s silly he changed his name. And yes, calling him a fool is not a compliment, but it’s not simply a “personal attack” either. Anyone who persists in repeating nonsense when they have been repeatedly shown it’s nonsense is a pompous and ridiculous fool. And deserves to have this pointed out loud and clear.

      10
      2
  40. Well he does not believe in a magician in the sky

    So he gets that right lol

    So he does not get “EVERYTHING” wrong

    ” Anyone who persists in repeating nonsense when they have been repeatedly shown it’s nonsense is a pompous and ridiculous fool”

    Like every Xian i have ever witnessed or spoken to

    1
    1
    1. So he does not get “EVERYTHING” wrong

      The “everything” in my title refers to “everything he says in his rant in that particular debate”. Not “everything he has ever said about anything at all”. Try reading things in context – it works better.

      Like every Xian i have ever witnessed or spoken to

      Well, like many of them sure. But isn’t “Aron” meant to be the rationalist who is better than that?

  41. “You’re right – I got that wrong. At the time I didn’t think a grown adult would be so pretentious and idiotic as to not only refer to himself by such a silly name, but also legally change his name to it and actually insist others call him by it. I’ve since learned that he is, indeed, that much of a wanker.”

    Well I find “Tim O’Neill” to be a silly name, so I will call you Mr. Child Wanker, from now on.
    Is called you Mr. Child Wanker disrespectful?
    Yes.
    Will I stop?
    No.

    2
    9
    1. Well I find “Tim O’Neill” to be a silly name, so I will call you Mr. Child Wanker, from now on.

      Do what you like. Though the difference is “Tim O’Neill” is the name I was born with, not a silly name I chose to give myself and change my birth name to legally. But thanks for demonstrating, yet again, that the fanboys of “Aron Ra” aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. And the fact that this whining about his silly name is all they have in response to my detailed critique of his ahistorical nonsense also speaks volumes.

      17
      1
  42. Show how bad Aaron is at research in fact I recommend reading a funny little booklet by Michael Jones of inspiring philosophies and to show how bad Aaron is at research here’s a short example Second, remember that Vox Day (7) went through “The Encyclopedia of Wars,” by Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips and found that of the 1,723 wars waged over the course of human history, only 124 were religious in nature (6.98%). Subtract Islam and the total number of wars attributed to religion is 3.23%. So mathematically, Aron is way off target here (and also lacking studies which demonstrate Christianity causes violence). AronRa is clearly oblivious to the evidence. How can Christianity be the bloodiest religion in history if in the absence of Christianity, wars were even bloodier, the body count even higher and the atrocities even more cold-blooded? The Mongol conquest of Europe, for instance, killed 34 million people. The communist regimes of the 20th century massacred more than 100,000,000 of their own citizens. (8)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *