2020 – The Year in Review
With a tumultuous year now over, I have been doing my annual review of the statistics for History for Atheists and thought I would post some of them here, with a few comments.
This site is now entering its sixth year of operation and is still attracting plenty of readers and commenters. I also have a large number of topics I still need to tackle and new examples of anti-theist bad history continue to arise, so I suspect I will be continuing operations here for a while to come. Thanks to everyone who has waded through my posts, promoted them to others and taken part in the discussions here.
In 2020 I posted 12 articles, including this one, so I managed to keep up my average of one post a month. Given the length of many of my articles, that was sometimes a struggle, but I think one worth the effort. This year’s longest article was Jesus Mythicism 6: Paul’s Davidic Jesus in Romans 1:3, at 11,272 words, with the average post length this year being 6,636 words. The site received 96,573 visitors over the year, which is about the same as last year.
The article that got the most traffic this year was the first posted in 2020: my review of Tom Holland’s excellent and provocative book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Tom has been a good friend of this site over the years and it was great to see his book and his other enterprises achieve success in 2020. I would also recommend his amusing and interesting podcast, The Rest is History, where Tom and modern historian Dominic Sandbrook chat about history and its relation to today’s events and manage to slip in as many references to cricket and 1980s New Romantic bands as they can.
The second most read article was one that I have been intending to write for several years – The Great Myths 9 – Hypatia of Alexandria. The mythic versions of Hypatia’s story will most likely always be with us, since most people prefer romantic fables to actual history, but I hope my detailed article will be a resource for those who want to get the real story.
At number three this year we have another in my Great Myths series: The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning. In this case I was able to use a sustained burst of pseudo historical gibberish from A.C. Grayling to tackle another perennial cluster of myths that is all too prevalent among anti-theistic polemicists and the general public at large. The latter have an excuse for getting this topic wrong, but supposedly rational intellectuals like Grayling do not.
The atheist activist who calls himself “Aron Ra” finally got around to responding to my 2019 criticisms of his various claims about the history of science and the result was an even more embarrassing mess for this serial offender against accurate historical analysis. So my reply – Aron Ra Responds … Badly – comes in at number four for the year.
And arch-atheist Richard Dawkins’ clumsy and lazy bumbling around various historical topics in his latest book inspired one of the shorter of my articles for 2020, but Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children was the fifth most popular of my pieces this year.
Other articles from previous years tend to attract continued steady traffic, with my one on Christmas, Mithras and Paganism still attracting plenty of hits, closely followed by my extended piece on the Great Library of Alexandria and my debunking of the “pagan Easter” nonsense. Those three articles are among my most popular of all time. My review of Tom Holland’s book attracted the most comments from readers (149) but the Dawkins critique came in second with 94 so far.
Again, many thanks to all my readers and supporters this year. Thanks also to Derek Lambert at MythVision, Davidian from Answers in Reason and Chesh from Cheshire Viq for inviting me on their various video channels this year to discuss history. Thanks also to my fellow bloggers and writers fighting against the tide of bad history, including Spencer Alexander McDaniel from Tales of Times Forgotten, all the amusing pedants at /r/badhistory and the indefatigable Thony Christie at Renaissance Mathematicus. Thony has recently completed his massive 52 part series, “The Emergence of Modern Astronomy: A Complex Mosaic”, which details among other things how heliocentrism actually emerged and debunks a lot of simplistic anti-theist talking points on that subject in the process. He is now seeking a publisher for this completed work and hopefully we will see it in book form one day soon.
In 2021 I will be tackling a number of other big topics, including Soviet Atheism and persecution and the popular claim that religion has has brought about more wars and deaths than any other cause. There are still a few topics to cover in my Jesus Myth series, though that one is likely to come to an end fairly soon. Thanks to you all and good luck in 2021.
33 thoughts on “2020 – The Year in Review”
Thanks for all the great blog posts Tim! Been invaluable to me personally and to others who I’ve introduced to your blog.
Cautiously excited for your article about atheism in the Soviet Union. There tends to be A LOT of historical misinformation peddled by Western sources about the USSR as a result of the Cold War, but I have no doubt you’ll give the topic a fair shake.
Thanks for all the fascinating and informative reading the year, Tim. And also thank you (in a backhand sort of way) for making me get rather depressed about the state of organized atheism. Actually, I can’t really blame that on you — I already had plenty of reason to be depressed by the Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins fanbois, not to mention the Jordan Peterson cultists.
It’s probably because I’m Dutch, but organized atheism never made sense to me. The choice between a religious person with largely the same ideals and values as me at one hand and a semi-fascist atheist (I’ve met at least one in person – compared to him Sam Harris is a moderate) at the other is a no-brainer to me.
The bottom line is that atheism doesn’t make someone automatically intellectually and/or morally superior.
But again, I’m Dutch. In The Netherlands you can find believers in all political parties. So you could say this country has no need for organized atheism.
It has never made much sense to me in Canada either but I suspect that this is because the crazier religious nutters are rare and despised by our general populations. In the USA, there are serious attempts to declare the theory of evolution false, and some very nasty legislation based on extreme right-wing Christian Fundamentalist “biblical” interpretations.
We just do not have that. In the USA everone knows what church the President attends. Here it was about 5–10 years after he retired that I discovered that one of our PM.’s was a practicing Catholic. One well-known and long serving minister had to die before I noticed that he was Jewish.
Well, we’re not entirely immune here — there are Bible Belts in parts of Alberta, BC and rural Maritimes. Alberta allows fundy Christian schools on the public dime, which teach creationism and that Gays Are Baaad. And of course, Ontario really should abolish the Catholic school system and fold the assets into the public one. But these are *secularist* issues, not *atheist* per se. Some people get those confused.
True, and I had forgotten about the Alberta schools.
Still, I just do not think we come close to the USA though Doug Ford managed to win the Tory leadership in Ontario partly due to some right-wing social cons/religious nut-cases.
The ONT RC school boards are a silly anachronism but do not seem to be particularly proselytizing and politically are untouchable.
As noted, context is all. A teenager growing up in the American rural Bible Belt (or a suburban megachurch) who starts to doubt his faith may think there’s something wrong with him — until he finds others like him. Asserting a negative can therefore paradoxically become a positive identity, and dissent from a culturally dominant assumption inevitably becomes a political act.
But “mere atheism” (to borrow from C. S. Lewis) not sustainable — it’s too thin a concept, and those who make it their primary identity get to be tiresome after a while. One gets the feeling that some of the perpetual religion-bashers are just doing it because it makes them feel smart.
Now the New Atheists did have one arguably valid point: it’s not enough to fight specific harms done by religion (theocracy, faith healers, grifters in the pulpit, anti-science, anti-woman, anti-LGBT, etc.); the whole enterprise is epistemically rotten at the root, and that is what enables all the rest. So, Religion must be torn down and replaced with Reason. But I think we’ve seen that this has not worked out in practice; it suffers from the same flaw as a fundamentalist’s faith in the Bible: even if the putative epistemic source (whether Reason, or the Bible) were reliable, we can only access it through human cognition, which is subject to no end of biases and distortions, and the end result is frequently just to confirm what the inquirer already wanted to believe.
Thus, the motivation for this blog.
“the popular claim that religion has has brought about more wars and deaths than any other cause”
I am really looking forward to this one.
Best wishes for 2021.
“I will be continuing operations here for a while to come.”
Some people may think: “why bother, it’s about stuff that’s been dead and buried since a very long time.” However I think atheist quack-history is part of a much larger and broader phenomenon; Donald the Clown who claims that he can’t have lost the American elections is another example. It’s the popularity of “alternative facts”. Exactly last year with it’s pandemy has showed how dangerous that can be.
A few years ago I began to notice the similarities of jesusmythology with creationism. I suspect all promotors of “alternative facts” have a lot in common. But I’m not aware of broad, systematic research on this question.
So keep up the good work.
There is a sort of old trope that only right-wing (usually white) Christians can be conspiracy theorists, believers in bad science and promoters of pseudohistory. Anyone who has spent enough time on the internet or in certain social circles knows that that simply isn’t the case… depending upon the topic, your leftist, agnostic, person of color may be firmly in kookville as well. Far easier to point out the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the timber in your own, to keep with the biblical theme. Happy New Year!
I can tell you about the conspirationism in Italy. Here the nuts who believes in the more delirant conspiracy theories are, for the most part, both antireligion and anti-science. To give an example, once i saw a comment of a guy saying something like ‘We are in a new Dark Age : we passed from ipse dixit to science dixit’. And here there is no political division between the conspirationist : every political party is working with the Vatican (always in the first place in the villain list), the European Union aka the Fourth Reich, the Nato etc to extablish the nwo or something. I think that conspiration is like a form of hyperskepiticism : from the rejection of what the church says (well, ok) to the rejection to what the newspapers and the scientists say (eg, the safety of vaccines). For them, the words ‘the experts say’ and ‘official (version of a fact)’ are obvious indicators of a big lie. Of course, people cannot live without believing in something, it’s in human nature, thus the conspiracy theories. Now with the Covid there is something that can be called ‘denialism’, but the two major right wing parties don’t promote any conspiracy theory. The majority of people here is fed up with the lockdown because the businesses are failing or are compelled to fire some of the workers: so some people say that Covid does not exist, or is just a kind of flu, or is a real threat but the lockdown is exaggerated and is destroying our economy. But the latter is not conspirationism i think. I know little of the Us, but there the majority of conspirationist, i get, are right wing Evangelical Christians. But Europe and the Us are like to separate worlds, so i’m not surprised.
Congrats on the new year. Looking forward to the new material!
I have been greatly enjoying the articles and look forward to more.
To echo “Christian C”s comment atheism in the Soviet Union sounds very interesting.
Best wishes for the new year.
I’ve enjoyed the blog series and look forward to new ones coming out. The one on Theism and war will be of particular interest.
I appreciate the time, energy and thought that goes into these. Chapeau.
Tim,
This is by far the best blog in the secular world that I know of and I read it with zeal. I very much appreciate the hard work and diligence that goes into every post and every response. I gladly share your posts with any “New Atheist” that I encounter who spews the same nonsense that you tirelessly debunk here. Please keep up the good work!
Thank you for your excellent blog. It`s a great inspiration and very educative. Keep up the good work. New Year greetings from Denmark.
Tim, I’ve discovered your blog only this year (i mean, last year), and it has become one of my favorite about the debunking of myths. The quality of your articles is very, very high, and erudite. In a few articles the debunking could have been more solid. For example, in the article about the supposed medieval cat massacres, you could’ve talked about the mere impossibility to exterminate enough cats without an incredible organization and modern technology (you could have cited the Predator Free 2050 program in New Zeland); or that the hugely influencial Valencian maritime laws required the patron of a vessel to provide for some guardian-cats to protect the merchandise from damage by rats during the voyage (he would have been fined otherwise)… i’m nitpicking, but some of the most skeptical fundatheists (skeptical to anything that challenges their a priori dogma, i mean) want a lot of counter-evidence to change their minds. I look forward to your article on religion and war/violence, because many, many people believe religion the cause of all wars in history (i often year the claim that the Seven Year’s War was a war of religion…??). I hope you touch the topic of XX century dictators’ religious views… Once I read a brief article by Dawkins where he sustained that Hitler and co. were fervent christian, Stalin was a fervent christian, Pol Pot, Mao, Choibalsan and the Kims were fervent Buddhists etc… And no true atheist can commit violence. Hope you consider to address this serious claims. However, i’ll be delighted to read any new articles of yours. Happy new year.
You are. The key point of that article is that the thing claimed never happened. Whether it was also infeasible is kind of beside that rather key point.
I’ve already covered the claim that Hitler was a Christian in my article on the Vatican and the Nazis – The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”? I’ll touch on the absurd idea that Stalin was either a Christian or somehow can be counted as one in my upcoming article on Soviet atheism.
Hi Tim,
I’m sorry if you understood the first part of my previous comment as a criticism. It was actually a criticism against some of the most dogmatic fundatheists out there that require huge amount of counter-evidences (maybe this term is misappropriate, but my English is far from good), to change their mind. What surprises me all the time is their absurd use of ‘the burden of proof is on you’. You claim God exist, it’s up to you to prove it. And that’s right, because the claim that God exists is an affermative, assertive claim. But when it comes to other things (like badhistory, that you address in your blog), they suddenly forget how logic works. It’s up to you to prove that a huge, organized cat massacre did NOT occur. It’s up to you to prove that chastity belts were NOT used in the Middle Ages. It’s up to you to prove that Easter does NOT have anything to do with Ishtar (btw, i learned of this ludicrous claim on your blog; in Italian Easter is called Pasqua, and in the vast majority of european languages is a variant of Pascha… ignorance is limitless). I know that some people are too fanatical to change their minds, and will continue to think that Bruno was the first to imagine exoplanets and extraterrestrial life, and an infinite universe, even if you slap their face with a copy of the De Docta Ignorantia by Cusano (who was not the only one, actually), so you’ll rightly think that, beyond some limits, any effort to make them doubt their cartoonish vision of history would be useless and a waste of time. But, for example, that guy with whom you talked on the Mythvision podcast, was a former mythicist and you with your reasoning made him convinced that the historicity of Jesus is more likely than his invention out of thin air. I believe that many of those who listened to the interview were also convinced. I think that any kind of dogmatic, fundamentalist way of thinking is very unhealthy. Even if this blog talks only about history, i truly believe that some one who has this type of thinking and approaches this blog, and is convinced that some myths in which he blindely believed were wrong, could get out of his dogmatism (even about other issues) and adopt a healthier, true rationality. That helps even in real life, of course. Anyway, you’re right that that was a minor nitpicking and your articles are lengthy and erudite enough for anyone who is endowed with a brain to understand that X myth, well, is a myth. I don’t come here just to have a confirm of what i already know; i truly learn lots of new things in each one of articles, and they are so beautifully written, it’s a pleasure to read them all.
I’d be really interested in the Soviet Atheism post. I’m old enough to have grown up at the tail end of the USSR, and I’m still right here in Estonia. And when it comes to the official atheism of the USSR, the main thing that comes to mind is that if would-be new atheists think that when you get rid of religion then all the irrationality, bigotry, backwardness and dogmaticism usually associated with religion would go away, then, as the whippersnappers today say, lol no.
(Also there’s the question as to what extent the USSR was atheist in practice. Sure, they went to quite some length to root it out, with pretty straightforward murder and demolishing of churches, but in the end religion is not a bunch of buildings or clothes or ritual implements. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the orthodox church bounced back in a major way.)
They went in for “pretty straightforward murder and demolishing of churches” but they weren’t necessarily “atheist in practice” because the church ultimately survived this anyway?
Tim, thanks for continuing to write through the shittiest year in living memory. HFA has been a bright spot throughout 2020. Your promotion of Spencer’s work deserves special praise; hopefully your audience is giving Tales Of Time Forgotten a deserved boost in traffic.
To the rest of the HFA audience; it’s been great learning alongside you all this year and having (relevant!) discussions.
Here’s hoping 2021 is better for us all!
Tim, it goes against most cognitive biases to criticize one’s own side. That’s what makes this site so impressive. Thank you for your work.
I look forward to reading more of your postings in the coming year. Refreshing to read someone who really does “follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”
I have enjoyed your blog for a long time. I first found you when you had the blog Amarium Magnum . That said, I don’t think this should count as one of your 12 articles this year😀
True, that was cheating a little.
Hey Tim,
Have you ever thought about refuting the idea that Muhammad never existed this year on your blog? The idea was originally formulated by Robert Spencer in his 2012 book “Did Muhammad Exist?” which is a spiritual companion to Richard Carrier’s book. And although Spencer is a Christian, I’ve seen more and more atheists using his line of reasoning. It seems very unlikely to me because it appears there is 10x more evidence for Muhammad’s life than Jesus’ life. And if you don’t want to, do you know any people who have done objections to this idea that I can read?
I try to avoid writing on topics I haven’t read on extensively over the years. I know a little about early Islamic history, but not enough to assess that thesis, let alone debunk it. So, probably not. Many of the people I criticise here make claims about history based on some very light and uncritical general reading, so that’s something I try very hard to avoid myself.
Alright. Sounds fair enough.
Hello, Tim!
I wonder what do you think about this:
https://youtu.be/HTIqb0lty5w
I’ve responded to the Galileo claims here: https://twitter.com/TimONeill007/status/1355575312298328065
I have yet to watch the whole video though, so may respond in more detail with an article here once I’ve done so.
Here’s to hoping for 2021!