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Tag: Christopher Hitchens

The Great Myths 14: “The Inquisition” – Myths and History

The Great Myths 14: “The Inquisition” – Myths and History

Along with “the Witch Craze” and “the Crusades”, the violence and oppression of “the Inquisition” is part of a triumvirate of historical atrocities that is usually invoked by anti-theists as proof of the wickedness of Christianity in particular and religion in general. “Everyone knows” these things were evil, even though what most people know about each of these things is largely wrong. This is perhaps most the case with “the Inquisition”; given that there was never a single institution by…

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Review – Alec Ryrie “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt”

Review – Alec Ryrie “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt”

Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers – An Emotional History of Doubt (William Collins, 2019) 262 pp. We unbelievers are often mentioned in passing in histories of religion, but there are only a few works of history that focus on those of us who reject religion or who never held religious beliefs at all. This one is by a scholar who is a Christian, but one who strives to give a balanced and nuanced view of how various modern Western strains of unbelief…

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Constantine and the Bible

Constantine and the Bible

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…

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The Great Myths 12: Religious Wars and Violence

The Great Myths 12: Religious Wars and Violence

That religion is uniquely prone to violence is a truism anti-theistic atheists assume almost without question. The cliché that more people have died in wars over religion than any other cause is a unassailable dictum among atheist activists, and religious violence is a driving motivation for their zealotry. But, on closer inspection, this idea becomes increasingly incoherent and actually leads several New Atheists into some ethically paradoxical positions. The idea that religion is essentially and particularly violent is a founding…

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The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism

The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism

It is assumed in much anti-theistic polemic that the Bible has traditionally always been interpreted literally. A lot of criticism of believers is based on how irrational, impossible and anti-scientific such a reading of the Bible has to be and how the current literalism of many fundamentalist Christians simply reflects how the Bible has always been read, with non-literal interpretations simply a modern rear-guard attempt to reconcile the Bible with current understandings of the world. But this is not true….

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The Great Myths 10: Soviet Atheism

The Great Myths 10: Soviet Atheism

Christian apologists try to claim the Soviet regime was murderous because it was atheistic. To counter this, New Atheists have tried to argue atheism had nothing to do with any mass murder and oppression in the Soviet Union. Both arguments are wrong, but the New Atheist one involves contorted sophistry along with some quite remarkable distortion of historical facts. In March 2001 the Taliban regime in Afghanistan shocked the world by undertaking a weeks-long program of destruction to, literally, deface…

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History for Atheists on MythVision

History for Atheists on MythVision

Derek Lambert, the enthusiastic and open-minded host of the MythVision podcast and video channel, was kind enough to have me on as a guest. Derek is someone who has been both a Christian and then a Jesus Mythicist, but is now exploring ideas about the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity with a broad range of guests. It was a pleasure to speak with him and explore the problems with Jesus Mythicism in a fairly long and wide ranging…

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Review – Nathan Johnstone “The New Atheism: Myth and History”

Review – Nathan Johnstone “The New Atheism: Myth and History”

Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 309 pp. Since 2015 I have been arguing on this blog that many anti-theistic and anti-religious activists often abuse and distort history while making their case against religion. Too many New Atheists use outdated, naive, over-simplified or simply plain wrong ideas about history in their arguments and claim to be “rational” while doing so. Now historian Nathan Johnstone has written an excellent monograph…

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The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”?

The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”?

In God is Not Great the New Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens describes how March 2 1939 saw “the death of an anti-Nazi pope and the accession of a pro-Nazi one”. The claim that Pius XII was friendly with, or at least passively acquiescent to, the Nazi regime is an unquestioned dictum in New Atheist circles. This is despite the fact the claim Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” is a total distortion of history. Hitchens and “Hitler’s Pope” Christopher Hitchens was…

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An Islamic “Reformation”? – Pseudo History meets Politics

An Islamic “Reformation”? – Pseudo History meets Politics

New Atheists generally acknowledge that it was the 9/11 attacks that gave their anti-theistic movement its initial impetus. Not surprisingly, several of their leading lights, led by Dawkins, Harris and comedian Bill Maher, have become trenchant critics of Islam as a key example of the toxicity of unfettered religion. These critics therefore lionise the ex-Muslim atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and support her calls for an Islamic equivalent to the Protestant Reformation. But is this based on good history? Ayaan Hirsi…

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