My guest today is Dr Philipp Nothaft. Philipp is a Fellow of All Souls Oxford and a historian specializing in astronomy, astrology and calendars in late antiquity, the Middle Ages and early modern Europe. He’s also the author of a key paper on the question of why Christmas falls on December 25th, which is our main topic today. It’s often claimed in pop history that Christians stole a pagan feast day and made it into Christmas, and this is a…
Read More Read More
It is traditional that the media be filled with pseudo historical nonsense about the pagan elements of Christmas at this time of year. But atheists who claim to be “working for a more rational world” really should be more careful than harried journalists when presenting the “real history” of the season. Unfortunately, they almost never are. As I have noted here before, the media loves giving dubious background stories on traditions and festivals. At Christmas, it fills column inches or…
Read More Read More
Well, it’s Yuletide and so tis the season to be merry, to buy presents, to queue for ages in airports and to eat too much. It’s also the season when New Atheists fill their social media feeds with smug memes like these: How do they know these things about Mithras and December 25th? Well, they read them in memes on other New Atheists’ Facebook feeds. Though the fact that this idea was given a boost by the delightfully droll…
Read More Read More
Catherine Nixey, Heresy – Jesus Christ and Other Sons of God (Picador, 2024) 365 pp. British journalist Catherine Nixey’s first foray into popular history, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017) received enthusiastic praise by many non-specialist reviewers and an even more rapturous reception by certain polemicists, who relished its fundamentally anti-Christian thesis. It was far less well-regarded by historians who are expert in the periods and topics it covers, who condemned it as biased,…
Read More Read More
Atheist activist and blogger PZ Myers has been on a journey regarding the likely existence of a historical Jesus and has been pretty honest about its stages. After a period of finding Jesus Mythicism at least compelling, if not wholly convincing, he has passed through a fairly thoughtful period of “Jesus agnosticism”, but now appears to accept the consensus position of almost all critical scholars: a historical Jesus most likely existed. This has not gone down well with some of…
Read More Read More
The idea that all the traditional holidays and festivals of the year are “pagan” in origin and were simply “stolen by the Church” is one that has permeated popular culture and is repeated without question in newspaper, magazine and online articles. It is perhaps not surprising that harried journalists and underpaid online content writers are uncritical about these claims, but it is more strange that prominent atheists are as well, given they are meant to be sceptics who check their…
Read More Read More
Many ideologues want the world’s most reviled man to belong to “the other side”. There are some Christians who claim Hitler was a pagan who led an “atheistic regime” or even that he was an atheist himself. On the other hand, many atheists claim he was a devout Catholic or at least some kind of Christian who was cosy with the churches. So what is true? Was Adolf Hitler an atheist, a neo-pagan occultist or a devout Christian? Or was…
Read More Read More
For the last five years I have written fairly regular articles here at History for Atheists, with the aim of providing substance and depth on topics that are, all too often, covered in a manner that is superficial and usually wrong. But not everyone reads 10,000 word articles, so I have launched this accompanying video channel to cover most of the same subjects. The channel includes video versions of the articles in my Great Myths series, as well as interviews with…
Read More Read More
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…
Read More Read More
Not only is the idea that Jesus came from Nazareth a common element in all four canonical gospels, it also seems to have been an awkward fact that did not fit well with the gospel writers’ claim he was the Messiah. This indicates it is likely his origin in this small village was a historical fact. Jesus Mythicists often deal with this by removing Nazareth from the story and some even claim all the archaeologists are wrong and Nazareth did…
Read More Read More