The Crappy Golden Orrery Award 2023
Here is my annual year in review survey for History for Atheists in 2023. But I am happy to announce the return of the much loved Crappy Golden Orrery Award for the most egregious, boneheaded and/or stupid bad history by an atheist in 2023. A lack of suitable candidates meant it was not awarded last year, but 2023 saw some prime examples of terrible takes on history by anti-theists, with some stiff competition for this unprestigious prize. Tune in to see who takes it out this year.
(And for anyone who wants to know what actually happened at the Council of Nicaea, see The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicea and the Bible.)
39 thoughts on “The Crappy Golden Orrery Award 2023”
I believe there was an award similar to the Crappy Golden Orrery Award but for the most egregious, boneheaded and/or stupid bad history by a Christian, but it’s been awarded to David Barton (folk who follow American politics will know who that is) for life and, so, retired.
I honestly had no idea who that guy was until today. Do you have good examples of his bad history? For the record, I’m not disputing your point. Just genuinely curious
His pseudohistory revolves around his claim the USA was founded as a Christian nation, not a nation whose people were Christians, but a Christian nation in the sense that, say Israel is ‘the Jewish State’. That the US Constitution, which in a sense _is_ the USA, mentions God, Jesus or Christ not once and mentions religion only to rule it out as a qualification for office or a subject for Congress to make laws on, doesn’t sway him. He quote mines various founders and takes views of folk who’d wanted a religious establishment and lost the arguments over the Constitution as if they’d won. That’s off the top of my head, but it’s been a while since I delved into his oeuvre and that delving didn’t encourage more. Might as well read some Ken Ham. Hell, Ham is better as his ‘founding document, the Bible does, taken literally, support his creationism while America’s founding document, the Constitution, does not support Barton’s view.
This could be a new subject for this blog. I’ve encountered many, many American atheists responding to Christian arguments that the US is a “Christian Nation” by claiming the American founding fathers weren’t Christians at all (that they were “deists”), which of course is nonsense. Only Thomas Paine was an ardent deist, but it is debatable as to whether or not he can be included in the “founding father” category. They love quote mining Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but these claims do not hold up under scrutiny.
Another thing atheist activists love doing is denying the link between Christianity and the abolitionist movements, whereas Christians will deny that the Bible was used as a justification for slavery. Like the amateur ‘debate’ over Soviet atheism’s role in the anti-religious campaigns of 1922 -’41, both sides are wrong: Christianity served as both a justification for slavery and a motivating influence in the movement to abolish it. In several live debates the “skeptic” Michael Shermer tried dancing around the Christianity-abolitionist link with historically confused gibberish (he tried claiming the abolitionist movement was “secular” but couldn’t back this up).
I feel for the author of this blog who, like myself, isn’t a believer but finds himself in the awkward position of having to refute fellow unbelievers, who frequently accuse him of being a closet Christian. A lot of people seem to think that if you agree with them on religion or politics you have to agree with every idiotic claim that flies out of their mouth, and that if you don’t you must be batting for the other side. I actually envy them for being so passionate about something, and I’ve often wondered what it’s like to be so committed to an idea that you no longer care about the truth.
As a very outspoken atheist I have never been accused of being a closet christian, but yeah, this
“… you have to agree with every idiotic claim …”
I agree.
Of course the USA is a christian nation. So is my native The Netherlands. It’s impossible to erase centuries of history in a few years. However when American christians say something like
“The USA is a Christian Nation”
they often mean something like “The USA should be a theocracy”. So in this case I can understand atheist push back. That’s no justification for getting history wrong, though.
I am a believer and that motivates me to crush creationism where I run across it. Same with BS from folk with similar politics, especially lefties who would rather some rancid rightie win an election that someone who’s not quite left enough for their tastes, in the fond hope it will bring the revolution.
BTW, for FrankBuisman, the US is a nation of Christians which is not the same thing as a “Christian nation”. Calling it a “Christian nation” implies Christianity is inherent in thee nation itself. As an experiment in men (sadly) making their own government and thus nation. what is inherent in the nation there is what’s in the Constitution, state constitutions and laws. Just to nail it down, the US is _not_ a Christian nation in the sense that, say, Pakistan is an Islamic state or Iran is an Islamic state or as France had been a Catholic state before the Revolution.
Don’t see a reply option to your latest comment so I’ll just respond here.
Of course the US population was historically majority Christian, and that’s still the case to this day. But Americans who say the US is a “Christian Nation” are denying the secularity of the Constitution, and some even go so far as to claim the “separation of church and state” was intended to protect the churches from the state and not the other way around (the intention was actually to protect both churches from state influence and the state from religious influence: to “privatize” religion without taxing it so that it remains confined to the private sector). The atheists who respond to these arguments often go to the other extreme, arguing that the American founders were ‘deists’ and hostile to Christianity, which is also wrong on the facts. Deism gained some popularity during the Enlightenment, but modern rationalists often exaggerate its impact and ignore the fact that most Enlightenment thinkers were some type of Christian. “Freethinkers” like John Toland and outright atheists were often ridiculed by more mainstream philosophers (like Burke, who believed that traditional, organized religion played a central role in good governance).
As to creationism -as far as I’m aware it is mainly a certain type of American evangelical who has an issue with evolution. The Catholic Church supports the science and most American Catholics (the laity) take far more liberal positions on issues like abortion and marriage rights than other US denominations. The anti-science and reactionary sentiment in US evangelical culture likely has something to do with the strange and relatively new concept of strict biblical literalism. I don’t think there is any historical precedent for this type of theology prior to the 19th Century (at the earliest).
Though forgive me but I was under the impression that most Founding Fathers were indeed deist, with some of them being christian.
Exactly! The Cynical Historian in his video 10 ten American founding myths (https://youtu.be/IZqJEOjfcdo?si=lvQVOC6o61FkMOVv) (1:23 starting to end of myth 1 – Founding Fathers wanted “Jude’s-Christian” values) wonderfully pointed out that there is a massive difference in a Christian-majority nation and a ‘Christian nation.’ The former is a matter of history and demographics; the latter is a matter of dominion theology and exclusionism that the Founding Fathers decried as barbaric.
That was a fun listen. At the end, I barked out a laugh so loud it startled my cat and he’s as phlegmatic as a tortoise. It was hugely heightened by your weary and completely deadpan delivery, Tim.
I’m sure you’d love to be able to retire the Crappy Orrery and even the blog for lack of material, but while there is a need to shoot down bad history, I’m glad you are there to do it. I have learned a huge amount reading HfA.
Many thanks,
Mike
The crappy golden awards gee I’m disappointed I thought the stalinist would win again that guy is a bad history generator Jesus Christ you should read his book about how capitalism killed a billion people it is just classic bad history
Is he still out there?
You think he’s bad on the Middle ages oh God you haven’t seen nothing yet he’s worse on other topics especially American intervention that’s a staliness for you https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=80H1Ww6oOWI
Good lord; I am not a fan of essentializing historical discourse that relegates various states and polities with their own unique circumstances involving many various and complex factors and webs of events and effects to a single “ism.” Even if one was to go about doing this dubious kind of “calculus of horrors” as Tim O’Neill calls it, highest I could find in academia was close to 100 million, or close to the mythical 100 million espoused by the Black Book of Communism. That is some definite bad history TM.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2021.1875603
And I’m not exactly a fan of capitalism myself
Shame about Alice Roberts — I’ve rather enjoyed the episodes of “Digging for Britain” I’ve watched. But that guy who won: that’s getting into conspiracy theory territory.
But it’s a bit depressing, really. I recently had a few skirmishes with young-earth creationists, having forgotten how irritating they can be. It’s not just that they’re wrong about something (we all are, more often than we like to admit), it’s that they’re so stupidly obtuse about it, that when challenged they resort to such ignorant arguments, while casually dismissing genuine expertise on the subject. So it’s a bit depressing when one sees the same attitudes from skeptics.
Skeptics tend to be right on scientific issues, and are quick to defer to the appropriate experts — why, oh why, does history get such shoddy treatment? I note that an upcoming conference in Canada features, among others, Richard Carrier, Aron Ra, and David Fitzgerald (the last has graduated from Jesus Mythicism to asserting that Solomon, Buddha and Mohammed are also fictional).
As with creationists, it’s motivated reasoning. No one is immune and all have to be vigilant to spot it in themselves.
In the case of folk like Alice Roberts, the problem is they don’t realize that the Dunning-Kruger effect is subject matter sensitive and anyone can fall into the ‘low knowledge’ end of it where the subject is one they know nothing about. Roberts is motivated to believe bad history that serves here anti-religion purpose and her lack of history knowledge prevents her realizing how little she knows.
I note that Roberts’ expertise seems to be archaeology and anthropology. She is (I assume) competent on those subjects, but like so many smart people, doesn’t know when to declare herself out of her depth.
Her academic background appears to be in medicine and anatomy. She doesnt seem to be an expert in either archaeology or anthropology, though her PhD was concerning ancient disease .
Well, he’s a brave man. Some of those faiths don’t embrace the turn-the-other-cheek principle.
It isn’t just history -academic economics is also widely ignored by the general public and perceived as an illegitimate subject, despite the fact that it’s taught at and funded by every major university in the world. History and economics are two subjects in which everyone thinks they have study-free expertise by virtue of being alive. The fact that there’s a right and wrong way to reason in these disciplines doesn’t faze them in the slightest.
With the exception of some politicized areas (eg climate change and the American evangelical anxiety over evolution), the natural sciences usually don’t receive the same degree of skepticism, probably because they produce things like technology that people can see, touch and use. Most people exaggerate the certainty of scientific theories, or ignore the fact that science theories are constantly being updated, modified and sometimes falsified (geocentrism was once a legitimate theory, now it’s not). It seems that any subject that lacks the degree of precision you find in physics provides activists and polemicists with just enough wiggle room to cast doubt on it.
Hmm. A lot of people who have been through an education in academic economics are pretty sceptical of its dominant school’s claims at both microeconomic and macroeconomic level. I might mention Thomas Piketty, Adam Tooze, Kate Raworth, Samuel Bowles, Yanis Varoufakis…
Indeed. The dominant economics school has led to Gilded Age inequality, disillusion with politics and government and the rise of fascistic right wing populism. And, on top of that, they got the whole Great Recession and response wrong, though fortunately, at least in the US it didn’t stop all efforts at stimulus. Sorry fans of academic economics, but yer boys have a hell of a lot to answer for, like ‘shock therapy’ in various countries.
Um, this is well off topic for this blog, but your attack on “academic economics” is misguided in many ways. Widening income inequality in the US is largely the result of stingy domestic spending by the federal government (in the UK they called it “austerity”). If you read the academic literature you’ll learn that economists have been urging the US government for some time now to guarantee basic financial security to citizens, but American politicians (in both parties) and even many voters have some strange ideas about “individualism” and take a very neoliberal approach to welfare. The government has also failed to assist workers in adapting to technological change, and most Americans have a phobia about economic change and lobby the government to waste billions of dollars on quixotic efforts to bring back lost jobs and industries. Between academic economics and economic populism, it is populism that’s once again the bigger culprit. The issue you raise about “fascism” and “right wing populism” is the result of demagogues manipulating people’s economic anxiety (which is very real) and assigning blame to external forces like immigration (which is very fake).
But to bring this back on topic: your response is typical of academic deniers who think they have good moral or intellectual reasons to ignore an entire field. Historical Jesus deniers think the whole field is corrupt and controlled by biased Christians, and they poke holes in historical research because it’s not an exact science. People who attack economics do the same thing, claiming economists are bought and paid for by big corporations and that they’ve gotten it wrong before and can’t predict the future and so let’s just ignore them altogether and go with our gut. You sensing a pattern?
The problem is with the atheist community it’s their worship of scientism is their problem they only respect authority when it comes to science when it comes to philosophy history or any other humanities discipline they don’t respect it because they’re guilty of the fallacy known as special pleading authority only matters with science and everything else is just an opinion to them don’t know what an appeal to authority is it’s only a fallacy when you don’t appeal to a proper authority so when someone appeals to carrier they’re committing an appeal to authority because he’s not a proper authority on New testament scholarship it’s funny they love to throw this around when you point out the consensus says that Jesus existence but you got to love them they only believe in authority when it suits them but 1:30 goes against them it doesn’t maq
This is my first (well, technically second) time commenting on History for Atheists, but after having read a lot of these articles, it seems that this blog is addressing one of many aspects of populism in the Western world, where activists, usually with political motivations, are elevating popular opinion over evidence, reasoning and oftentimes truth. I’ve encountered the same erroneous thinking by Brexit activists, within the Trump phenomenon in the US, anti-immigrant and anti-globalization hysteria, and the idiotic “woke” obsession in university culture. The subject of this blog seems to be a side-battle in the larger populist war against higher education, which has splintered into all these little mini-battles where activists with niche interests peddle their propaganda. Distrust of mainstream institutions and authority figures (including academics) is pervasive in the West right now.
This is extremely dangerous and a direct threat to democracy itself. I would even go so far and say the subject of this blog is but one domino in a long line of dominos that ends with democracy.
It’s silly to prate of ‘the atheist community’ as if atheists are all in lockstep, a hivemind beholden to dogma. Our host here ought to be enough to disabuse you of that fond notion. Atheists come in all sorts. The characteristics you attribute to ‘the atheist community’ apply to any group that includes tens or hundreds of millions of people and are not peculiar to atheists, because I’ve sure observed plenty of that stuff among, oh, say, my fellow Christians. Vide creationism. Things like motivated reasoning are characteristics of human beings, not the province of only certain groups.
Hi Steve
Notice there are now all sorts of apologists referring to themselves as skeptics. I recall one who said something like he
took a skeptical approach which consisted in reading a bunch of apologists and agreeing with them. with the success of the likes of Strobel, they just cant help themselves.
Some small good news: Carrier is no longer on the programme.
Can you elaborate, steve?
You continue to be the best cantankerous (in the most positive sense) historian out there Tim. Keep up the good work!
Tim:
Just thought you should know. Richard Carrier is displeased with this
He is? Why?
Because he didn’t get the award!
Ah! I considered giving a nomination to his gormless acolyte, John Gleason/”the Godless Engineer” for his constant parroting of Carrier in a kind of play-acting whereby he pretends he (Gleason) actually knows anything about history. But that felt a bit boring.
Whenever I hear someone unironically cite Carrier, another fistful of my brain cells die. A single Godless Engineer video is roughly equivalent to a bullet through the head.
A few years ago when you (Tim) was in the old “non-Sequitur show” YouTube podcast debunking Jesus mythicism; I remember Gleason and his partner and many of their odd clique in the US Bible Belt trying to post childish comments in the chat.
Later on: His partner somehow became one of the people responsible for administering that podcast (and Steve McRae later described her as utterly incompetent). Call me a conspiracy theorist; but I always had the very strong impression that she had a lot to do with Kyle Curtis trying to take over the show from Steve. After all: She started hosting some utterly tedious shows of her own on that channel.
Sometimes when I see the erratic firing-off of idiotic statements by “new atheists” like this George Styles on social media; I have to wonder if they’re under the influence of narcotics or alcohol or something.
I’ve been noticing some of this stuff on Wikipedia as well. I was reading their “Italian Renaissance” article last night and it basically rehashes most of the myths Tim covers in his “Renaissance Myth” article (end of the Middle Ages, renewed interest in classical learning etc). There is a section at the end of the article titled “historiography” where they explain why this whole concept, as Jacob Burckhardt conceived it, is historically flawed, but these editors know very well that the average reader doesn’t make it to the end of the article. They’re supposed to summarize all key points in the lead but none of this information is in there.
And check out their article on “Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.” They write:
“Leonardo is also renowned in the fields of civil engineering, chemistry, geology, geometry, hydrodynamics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, optics, physics, pyrotechnics, and zoology.”
Renowned by whom? I’ve taken many classes in mathematics and science and don’t recall his name being mentioned once in any textbook. I took one class in art history where he was a topic, which gave me the impression that he’s most notable for his art and not “hydrodynamics.”
And also:
“As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing the parachute, the helicopter, an armored fighting vehicle, the use of concentrated solar power, the car and a gun.”
Car and helicopter?
You should investigate correcting the article.