Is Easter Pagan?
Is Easter Pagan?

Is Easter Pagan?

Comments 10 comments

Every year fundamentalist Christians, New Agers, neo-pagans and many atheists loudly agree that Easter was not originally a Christian feast and was a pagan fertility festival stolen by Christianity. Unfortunately, despite what endless memes and pop history articles claim, this idea is complete nonsense. So is the claim that Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny are also originally pagan. It is rather ironic that a set of false historical claims about the origin of Easter and its customs are propagated…

Read More Read More

Miracles
Jesus Mythicism 8: Jesus, History and Miracles

Jesus Mythicism 8: Jesus, History and Miracles

Comments 57 comments

There is a common line of argument among the more naïve believers in Jesus Mythicism that goes “the stories of Jesus are full of miracles and other non-historical elements. So if any of them are not historical, why not all of them?” This all-or-nothing thinking is based on the idea that if any part of these accounts can be concluded to be not historical, this means the rest of them are as well: “it’s all made up”. But even in…

Read More Read More

Lambert
Interview – Derek Lambert on Jesus Mythicism

Interview – Derek Lambert on Jesus Mythicism

Comments 12 comments

My latest guest is Derek Lambert, the presenter of the excellent Mythvision video channel and podcast. Derek has been kind enough to have me on his channel several times over the last two years to discuss atheist bad history in general and Jesus Mythicism in particular. But today we are going to hear from Derek about his very interesting personal journey regarding his thoughts and conclusions about the historical Jesus. As he’ll detail for us, Derek began as a fundamentalist…

Read More Read More

Golden Orrery
The Crappy Golden Orrery Award 2021

The Crappy Golden Orrery Award 2021

Comments 6 comments

To finish 2021, here is my annual year in review survey of History for Atheists. But I also detail the nominees for the Crappy Golden Orrery Award for the most egregious, boneheaded and/or stupid bad history by an atheist for 2021 and announce the winner of this year’s award. Happy New Year to all.

Constantine
Constantine and the Bible

Constantine and the Bible

Comments 24 comments

The historical myths surrounding the emperor Constantine, his conversion to Christianity and the claim he created the Bible at the Council of Nicaea are persistent and continue to be propagated in popular culture, despite being total nonsense. Unfortunately, leading atheists also perpetuate these silly ideas, with everyone from Richard Dawkins to Joe Rogan insisting that Constantine was not really a Christian, that he pretended to convert for political reasons and that it was he who set the canon of the…

Read More Read More

Halloween
Is Halloween Pagan?

Is Halloween Pagan?

Comments 152 comments

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

Ted McCormick
Interview: Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment

Interview: Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment

Comments 23 comments

My latest guest on the History for Atheists video channel is Associate Professor Ted McCormick. Ted is a specialist in intellectual history and the history of science at Concordia University in Canada. He examines the intersections between science, technology, economy and empire in the early modern era. Recently, he has taken an interest in how the concept of “the Enlightenment” has been taken up as something of an ideological cause by some popular writers. In particular he has critiqued the…

Read More Read More

Renaissance
The Great Myths 13: The Renaissance Myth

The Great Myths 13: The Renaissance Myth

Comments 82 comments

Many of my fellow atheists operate with a simplistic children’s picture book view of the past. This is one where the glories of Greece and Rome are destroyed and suppressed by the Medieval Church, but civilisation is saved by the geniuses of the Renaissance, whose revival of ancient thought, critical analysis and radical new thinking establishes most of what we value today. This conception of the Renaissance as a dramatic and revolutionary break with the medieval world is actually Modernity’s…

Read More Read More

Interview: Thony Christie on the Galileo Affair

Interview: Thony Christie on the Galileo Affair

Comments 14 comments

This is a long-awaited addition to the History for Atheists video channel – my long and detailed interview with historian of science, Thony Christie. Thony is an independent scholar based in Germany who also the author of the superb Renaissance Mathematicus blog. His knowledge of the history of Early Modern science is vast and so he is the perfect person to give us a detailed overview of what happened and, more importantly, what did not happen in the dispute between Galileo and…

Read More Read More

Hitler
Hitler: Atheist, Pagan or Christian?

Hitler: Atheist, Pagan or Christian?

Comments 160 comments

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