Israel-Palestine Conflict
In writing the cover story, “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil” (FI, April/May 2024), Sam Harris offered a slanted glimpse of reality. For him, militant Islam is problem number one, and he has harsh words for the many people with a different interpretation of reality. He says “fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are.” He believes “All university administrators, Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of Palestine don’t understand what actually happened on October 7.” He point-blank says “many of those college kids at Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world.” Then again, I bet many of those college kids know who Rachel Corrie was—the young American woman crushed to death while trying to block the destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza strip by an Israeli bulldozer twenty-one years ago.
The bright line Harris desires between good and evil won’t materialize because he’s obscured it with the clouds of a manufactured past. Are the jihadists simply irrational zealots seeking a free pass to the front of the line on the road to paradise? Looking back, jihadist activity was minimal globally prior to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
It always helps to put things into perspective to solve a problem. However, as far as Harris is concerned, “Historical context is a distraction.” Well, if you look at a map of the east Mediterranean in 1947, you won’t find the country Israel. If you look at a map of the same region today, the country Palestine doesn’t exist. The American media ignores this, and everyone needs to ask why. Orthodox Jews argue the Old Testament is their deed to the country Palestine, but if you actually read the biblical story of Exodus, when that fictional character Moses leads the Israelis to the promised land, he tells them he can’t go with them but that the promised land was there, just across the river Jordan. At that point, all they had to do was wade to the other side and gradually kill everybody who already lived there (Exodus 23:20–23).
The Old Testament authors plagiarized their creation myths from the Sumerians/Babylonians, Egyptians, and others, then wrote themselves in as the chosen people above the rest of humanity. The modern-day parasitic prosperity gospel was created by the original biblical priests. They’d request unblemished meat for burnt offerings to their all-mighty god so they could cook and eat those prime cuts of meat themselves. The Old Testament offers the world greed, racism, sexism, and slavery. Yahweh teaches jealousy, hatred, fear of change, and impatience are virtues. Love thy neighbor unless he’s from a different tribe, at which point you may have to kill him and his mother. Be spiritually obedient as you seek personal material wealth. Set yourself outside and above nature so you’ll maintain dominion over your alienation. Beware false profits. Hallelujah!
If only Israel would return some land back to the Palestinians and put an end to the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, this war could be stopped today, and if any hostages are still left alive, they would be free! Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist Jews who control Israel are suffering from a superiority complex. I suggest the path to defuse militant Islam globally is to work to dismantle militant Christianity here in America and around the globe. We should set the example for the rest of the world and explain why all organized religion is a dead-end street.
Mark Farris
Monroe, Michigan
As a longtime secular humanist, I can completely agree with Sam Harris’s argument in FI’s April/May 2024 issue on the great social harm of religions, having experienced the same in Catholicism, but I had to respond to the egregious comments in his essay.
He goes on at length about the doctrines in the Qur’an justifying violence, yet you will find similar justifications in the Bible and the Torah.
It seems very one-sided to accuse jihadists of being this terrorist organization (which it certainly is) without acknowledging Jewish participation in similar tactics. Of the 40,005 killed and 92,401 wounded (as of August 15, 2024) in Gaza, 70 percent are women and children. There have been 13,800 children killed (approximately seventy-five a day) and 12,000 injured. Many of these could be considered the result of terrorism wherein civilians are killed indiscriminately. CNN reported in December 2023 that 500 craters from hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs have been documented in Gaza. These had been dropped on apartment buildings and in crowded refugee centers. It appears aid workers and trucks have been targeted, and 289 aid workers have been killed as of this writing.
Coupled with using starvation and lack of essential medical supplies, water, fuel, etc., by refusing to allow hundreds of relief trucks into Gaza, has led the UN Court of Justice to declare Israel’s actions “plausible genocide.”
I was struck by his comment: “only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish for their right of return.” Can Harris not understand that in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and removed from their land and country? Seventy-six years later there has been no compensation for that massive theft and illegal act. Instead, those same people have lived under apartheid for decades. Can he understand that this might be why people feel there is a right of return? Can he understand that some might feel Israel has no right to exist on stolen property? Is the Jewish “right of return,” which allows Jews to go to Palestine and occupy property but not Palestinians, not also a “fetish”?
Just where is this “existential threat to Israel” we hear so much about that is so dire it requires the destruction of an entire land and the murder and maiming of so many of its people? Is it Hamas who in decades has been impotent to launch any kind of military attack on Israel and just found one ad hoc clumsy opportunity due to Israeli carelessness to do so? Strengthening Israel borders, which I’m sure has been done, would prevent any future successful attacks. The “defense of Israel” is nothing but a transparent slogan to justify the capricious, collective punishment of a whole people in the most capricious way possible. There is talk in high government circles and others of resettling Gaza with Jews, raising the real possibility of an ethnic cleansing taking place.
Do many or most Palestinians hate the Israelis? Probably. Given what has happened in the past decades and past months I would say yes, and it would be perfectly understandable. You don’t watch your loved ones get blown apart and your children maimed or starved and love your enemy. Israel, with its horrific war, has bred a whole new army of radicalized Palestinians thirsting for revenge for their slaughtered loved ones. They may eliminate Hamas but will face another enemy.
Harris’s “Bright Line between Good and Evil” has a dark shadow over it.
Hugh Giblin
Durham, North Carolina
On the Origins of the Gospels
I enjoyed Daniel Thomas Moran’s article “The Wholly Human Holy Book” (FI, June/July 2024) on the resounding lack of evidence in support of biblical assertions, particularly those contained in the four gospels. But the evidence is even weaker than the article contends.
Moran states that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life and sayings were “allegedly recorded by four of his intimates, men who were very likely illiterate fishermen with no apparent level of sophistication beyond success at catching fish.” However, it is virtually certain that the gospel writers—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were not intimates of Jesus and probably never met him. Here’s why:
1. Jesus and his associates, most (if not all) of whom were illiterate, spoke Aramaic and lived in a Roman-occupied territory. The oldest available versions of the Gospels were written in a relatively sophisticated style of Greek.
2. The original sources of the Gospels remain unknown. The book of Mark is generally accepted as the earliest of the four, despite Matthew appearing ahead of it in the New Testament. Mark was probably written around 65 to 70 CE (roughly thirty-five to forty years after Jesus died), and Matthew and Luke were written fifteen to twenty years later. John, the most recent of the four, was written around 90 to 100 CE. It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of these guys palled around with Jesus.
Most biblical scholars believe that Mark relied on one or more earlier sources for his narrative, although no such materials have been found. Matthew and Luke, in turn, appear to have drawn heavily from Mark’s writings, although they too may have consulted some manner of outside source(s). The book of John differs greatly from the other three gospels in style and substance and clearly relied on sources not available to the earlier writers (and/or a particularly vivid imagination).
Accordingly, the basis for the gospel narratives remains unknown, and there is no verifiable evidence to support their veracity. It is abundantly clear that the Gospels, along with the other books of the Bible, are works of mythology. The really great mystery (at least to me) is how any sane person can believe they have a basis in reality.
Dan Davis
Roseville, California
Godwashing in Politics
Re: “Godwashing in Politics,” FI, August/September 2024. Thomas Mates correctly observes that our Constitution’s Framers disdained the “great unwashed majority” and that most states “joined the union with property requirements on their books for voting.” But the Framers were more than elitists who believed themselves “enlightened and respectable” and who disrespected common people because they suffered from “ignorant hotheadedness.” The Framers’ disdain for the masses—and for democratic forms of government—was grounded in their concept of liberty, which Mates does not seem to understand.
To the Framers, liberty was the right to own private property free from government or private interference. Property ownership enabled citizens to engage in public debate and make rational decisions for the public good, free from external influences and pressures. By contrast, the non-propertied—i.e., indentured servants, slaves, women, and poor White men—were all subject to the demands of their masters (or husbands), who, like feudal lords, could control their subjects, especially at the polls.
Yes, as Mates notes, the Framers had little “faith” in the masses. But their lack of faith was based on fear—fear that the majority might suppress the rights of the (wealthy) minority. After the War of Independence, property rights had been threatened by poor farmers, who demanded relief from post-war debts and foreclosures, and who—as in the case of Shays Rebellion—took up arms to enforce their demands. By passing debt relief measures, colonial legislatures had also threatened the wealthy’s property rights. As Harvard historian Michal Klarman has documented, the Constitution itself was designed to counter those who, in Madson’s words, “sighed for a more equal distribution of property.” Yes, as Mates notes, compared to 1787, more Americans can vote today. But it is no accident that today, SCOTUS—unelected and unaccountable—has the “final say” over American laws. We are a republic, not a democracy, governed by plutocrats.
In this historical context, the role of religion was not, as Mates states, to generally control the masses, no longer “controlled by [their] fear of a domineering king.” Rather, as Thomas Piketty has shown in his Capital and Ideology, religion has always been—and still is—an advocate for the sanctity of property rights. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse’s One Nation under God details how religion served this role in America (my summary of that book is in the October/November 2022 FREE INQUIRY); in 1787, famous preachers such as John Witherspoon railed against “rebels” with “socialist” leanings.
Most bizarre is that Mates seems to endorse the Framers’ anti-democratic sentiment! He complains that during “farcical” primary contests, “citizens are nominating demagogues and grifters who are governing poorly, leading to more desperation.” Perhaps this statement might apply to Republicans’ nomination of Donald Trump, but it hardly applies to American “citizens” as a whole. (Would Mates prefer that candidates be chosen in the smoke filled back rooms of convention halls, as they were prior to 1968?) In fact, for someone who preaches that Americans must “avoid categorization,” would Mates please identify the “demagogues and grifters” Americans nominate, as well as those Leftists who—in his sweeping stereotype—are “afraid to converse … over-rely on rights, cherry pick, sloganize and say things that aren’t true”? Would the editors also please explain why they even allowed the second half of this defamatory rant to be published?
Mark Kolsen
Chicago, Illinois
Color-Blind Society
It’s troubling to see factual denialism and fallacy flinging in an editorial in the principal journal for critical thought.
Robyn Blumner’s statement in “Secular Humanism and the Color-Blind Society,” FI, August/September2024, that “in today’s American people can largely succeed irrespective of their race” is willfully ignorant denialism. Cherry picking Nigerian immigrant success and citing polling of perceptions does not change the objective fact of persistent and systemic White racism in America. To pick just one example, from detention, arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and parole, Black Americans face worse results than White Americans. See e.g., https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/for-the-record-unjust-burden-racial-disparities.pdf. More generally, I appreciate Nicole Scott’s conclusion in “Secular Humanism on Racism in America” in the same edition of FREE INQUIRY: “We can’t ignore the fact that our society in America is far from color-blind despite how many hurdles we have overcome already.”
Blumner also wholly endorses the fallacy that there can be no solution to past discrimination because that would discriminate against the beneficiaries of that discrimination, which would be discrimination, which is wrong. Never mind that the U.S. Supreme Court, author Coleman Hughes, and most of the public believe in this fallacy. It’s still a contradiction. It’s still a fallacy. And it’s still an excuse to look the other way.
While non-racists agree that a color-blind meritocracy is the goal, we can make no progress in achieving it if we blindly assume that we are already there and so need do nothing to get there.
A. Hewitt Rose III
Bethesda, Maryland
Some recent writings by CFI leadership have raised my eyebrows and furrowed my brow.
Our president, Robyn Blumner, has published an editorial in the latest issue of FREE INQUIRY about living in a color-blind, racism-free world. The new editor of FREE INQUIRY, Ronald Lindsay, has lately published a book titled Against the New Politics of Identity and an article in the February/March 2023 issue of FREE INQUIRY arguing for conservatism. He was, until recently, listed as a member of the Board of Advisors for Atheists for Liberty, a libertarian advocacy group. Both talk about racism and “identity” politics. I won’t repeat or try to summarize all of what they say—you can read their words directly—but some of their ideas are worrisome, at least to me.
The assertion is made that we should pretend and act as if we now live in a color-blind world: “bring them [people] together by making racial distinctions as irrelevant as humanly possible—which is what color blindness means. It does not mean we are blind to skin color. It means we do our best to treat people equally without regard to it.” That might be fine, fair, and ethical if everyone were starting out from the same place with equal wealth, equal resources, equal social statuses, and equal histories. It is a future world we would all like to live in and may someday. But all races are not starting out from the same place today, and to pretend they are and not take into consideration the history and the impacts of generations of past racism is unjust, unfair, wrong, and naive.
Both authors criticize and try to discredit the use of race identity as a criterion in hiring, school acceptance, or even choosing the vendor of your food; they say we should never favor or disfavor one race over another in distributing scarce resources or evaluating our choices. They complain that it is now Whites who are being harmed by favoritism being shown to non-White groups in school admissions, job applications, etc. I must say, it is rich to hear members of a group who have benefited from race-based privileges and White identity politics since 1619 (limiting ourselves to just U.S. history) now complaining about such racist practices and saying No, this must stop! They say such discrimination is unfair, unjust, and must be stopped immediately. For 400 years, White privilege and racism has been visited on non-Whites in abominable ways through enslavement, Jim Crow laws, lynchings and unspoken tortures, and theft of rights, wealth, and dignity. What hypocrisy it is to now say that such treatment, because it is being applied to them instead of by them, is wrong and must not be allowed to persist.
Maybe in the future, color-blindness and absence of racial discrimination in power and opportunity will be the norm. We should work for that, but we have only recently started down that road. To make the claim that we are already there and should behave as if we are is tone deaf and a demonstration of White privilege blindness. It is so “White privilegy” to say that racism has been conquered or diminished to a point that we can act as if we are already living in that society. All this hand wringing because racism and racial discrimination is now being used against Whites instead of for them as has been the norm for so long. Apparently, what was good for the goose is not now good for the gander.
Consider this story. Suppose, for years, you and your neighbors have been victims of a mysterious thief stealing stuff from your homes. Suddenly, one day it is revealed that the thief is in fact one of your neighbors! Confronted by the neighbors, this thief-neighbor confesses and promises to stop his stealing forever and wants to shake hands and go back inside his house like everything is fine now. What say you? Do you agree? No! You want your stuff back! Moreover, you want him to pay for what he took and sold, used, or ate, and you want him to be punished for his thieving. That would be fair and just. Analogously, privileged Whites think that because racism is nearly over and thanks to new laws and social practice, anti-Black racial discrimination exists in only minor ways today and that we can pretend that we live in a world where we can all be treated on merit alone (the thief has stopped stealing) and that the practice of race-based distinction needs to be ended—especially now that it is hurting them!
It is naive at best to say, “in today’s America people can largely succeed irrespective of their race.” I have found that as a White male raised in a privilege-rich racist culture that it is a great advantage to understand this issue and recover from my privilege-blind whiteness, to have some Black friends. Not the Clarence Thomas types, not just colleagues or acquaintances, but real friends—decades long Black friends—who will tell me in kindness and love when I make a blind-white error in understanding their reality. Black friends who will trust me and in whom I trust to ask difficult questions. As usual, knowing people is a good way to solve people problems. From a historical position of privilege, it is almost impossible to see all the ways privilege inflicts wounds on the unprivileged.
Though individuals we are, we happily and beneficially live in society where sometimes we forego our individual desires and rights for the benefit of our shared civil society in the interest of justice and fairness—another Humanist Affirmation.
A color-blind, racism-free world is a future goal to which humanists rightly strive. But for now, we are in a period of corrective and reparative justice. A period where the thieves are on probation and need to make retribution to the victims of their crimes. After 400 years of being robbed by Whites of their goods, labor, lives, humanity, and potential, it is only fair and just that the criminals acknowledge the enormous value of what they stole and atone for their crimes and that the victims receive a modicum of recompense and favoritism for their losses—at least until that sought for future state is achieved.
CFI’s turn toward conservatism, libertarianism, anti-woke, and anti-social-justice positions is worrisome to me. It reflects a devastating lack of understanding of what has been taken. Worse, it clings to the ill-gotten gains. Is that really what a humanist should want?
Steven Lowe
Washington, D.C.
Ronald Lindsay responds:
My friend Steve Lowe asserts that in an article in FREE INQUIRY and in my recent book, Against the New Politics of Identity, I argued “for conservatism.” He is incorrect.
My article was a response to an essay by FI columnist S. T. Joshi in which he claimed that freethinkers cannot be politically conservative. I argued that conservatives could be freethinkers. As a matter of logic, this does not convert me into a conservative. Consider: if a columnist contended that Muslims cannot support liberal democracy and I took issue with that claim, this would not make me a Muslim. Regarding my book: I devote one-third of that book to arguing against Christian nationalism and another third arguing that objective knowledge is possible and that one’s ability to obtain objective knowledge does not depend on one’s racial or ethnic identity. If Lowe believes those positions make one a “conservative,” well, then Lowe and I have widely divergent understandings of that term.
Robyn Blumner responds:
First, I want to thank the readers who privately wrote me to thank me for standing up for classical liberalism and Enlightenment values with this column. I appreciate your kind words, and I wholly understand why you would not want to go public to face the opprobrium that inevitably is unleashed these days anytime someone stands up for Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children one day will not be judged by the color of their skin.
Second, I want to be clear: I, the writers of the Humanist Manifesto who denounced “divisive parochial loyalties based on race,” and the 52 percent of Black Americans who reject race-based college admissions are supportive of a color-blind society because it is the best possible public policy to promote the success of Black Americans. Holding all people regardless of race to the same standards of merit and excellence honors Black accomplishment and respects individual achievement. And it does so far better than the condescension that flows from race-based affirmative action with its built-in assumption that some people simply can’t meet the same standards applied to others.
Steve Lowe, whom I know personally and for whom I have great regard, suggests that due to historic discrimination, Black Americans understandably cannot compete and need to have special societal benefits disbursed based on skin color. It doesn’t matter if a Black student applying for college admissions in 2024 has two lawyer parents or two doctor parents, they are deserving of lowered admissions standards and other race-based benefits because of what happened to other people who shared their racial heritage. Their actual lived economic circumstances are irrelevant, according to this logic, and they should get a boost over, say, a Vietnamese immigrant student who grew up desperately poor.
I simply cannot agree.
Lowe’s argument rests on the idea that all White people (and I guess Asian people?) are historically privileged and therefore should expect to be discriminated against based on their race as a way to rebalance the scales.
It should be remembered that most poor people in the United States today are White. In fact, there are thirteen million more poverty stricken White people in the United States than Black people. There is nothing privileged about that. And when poor and working-class White people hear elites pointing fingers and saying they are privileged because of their skin color, it is more than infuriating. It drives them into the arms of demagogues and right-wing political populists—to the detriment of everyone in this country. I truly can’t imagine a bigger self-inflicted political wound than that.
Lowe lumps all White people together, but he seems to forget the history of women’s struggles. Not a history at all of privilege but one of baked-in, stultifying discrimination.
Married women in the United States didn’t get the right to their own wages or to own property—it all went to their husbands—until states passed laws allowing it. And it took until around 1900 for all states to do so. Oh, they could work, they just didn’t have the right to the payment for that work. It belonged to the man.
Meanwhile the professions, university programs, and elected offices all but excluded women well into the twentieth century. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. And they couldn’t sit on juries in every state until 1973.
Let me say that again, it wasn’t until 1973 (!) that all states finally guaranteed women the legal right to sit on juries!
Women were economically constrained in other ways. Married women couldn’t get a credit card (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/when-could-women-get-credit-cards/) in their own names until 1974 when Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, meaning they could not access credit or bank loans or build a business.
The generations of women before me faced repressive and oppressive discrimination, relegated as they were to second-class citizenship and told socially, culturally, and legally that they weren’t capable. If they could get jobs at all, they didn’t get paid the same as men. In the main, they couldn’t start businesses or participate in politics.That thief Steve Lowe talks about was very busy.
Yet that endemic discrimination generation after generation after generation was not indelibly imprinted on the women to come. Once the unjust laws and limits were lifted, despite the fierce sexism that remained, economic and political opportunity for women had arrived.
My point is not to make past societal discrimination into a victimhood contest. It is merely to point out the United States imposed obscene limits on the economic prospects of many people based on immutable characteristics—African Americans and women especially—and thankfully we have come through that time. The landscape has changed immensely for the better for us all, for women, for openly gay people, for Black Americans, and for all racial and ethnic minorities.
As President Barack Obama told the Howard University graduating class of 2016 in celebrating the amazing progress that has been made: “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted, and black’ in America, you would choose right now.”A. Hewitt Rose III suggests that I was cherry-picking by highlighting the extraordinary academic and economic success of Nigerian immigrants to this country. But if Rose’s claim is true, that systemic discrimination against Black people in America is the overwhelming cause of outcome disparities, then there should not be a large group of Black people who do better on average than White Americans. And yet the experience of the Nigerian American community is solid evidence that being Black is not an unmitigated impediment to success. Something we should celebrate because it is only recently true.
At the end of the day, my column was a call for us to pull together as opposed to pull apart. We especially need to make common cause with America’s left-behind working class of all races. Immeasurable damage was wrought when the identitarian Left decided to make race-based advocacy, as opposed to class-based advocacy, its centerpiece agenda. That pivot opened up deep divisions among people who would otherwise have economic interests in common.Where we are as a country—boiling mad and profoundly divided—is directly due to that switch in focus.
It serves us all to stop pitting racial groups against one another, as the Humanist Manifesto so sagely urges in the name of the universalist principles of humanism. In doing so, I stand with the majority of Black Americans who reject such racial essentialism and alongside African American thinkers such as Coleman Hughes and John McWhorter, whom I recommend everyone read, as they make the case for why we should embrace a colorblind society—because it significantly benefits Black Americans to do so—far more brilliantly than I can.
Talking to Christians
In his “How to Talk to Christians” (FI, August/September 2024), Herb Silverman writes: “If we represent the universe as a twenty-four-hour day, then humans would appear only in the last two-and-half seconds” (“How to Talk to Christians,” FI, August/September 2004). He puts the universe at 13.8 billion years and humans at 200,000 years, which is 69,000 times shorter than the universe. Now a full day has 86,400 seconds, hence Silverman’s 2.5 seconds should actually be about half of that amount: 1.25 seconds. If one wants to talk to Christians, one should use correct numbers.
Jan Willem Nienhuys
Waalre, Netherlands
Herb Silverman’s presentation has numerous provocative thoughts that atheists/agnostics will find fruitful.
In addition, I would suggest ideas that challenge believers to look at actual results of their belief system. I generally respond to the question “Do you believe in God?” with a question of clarification. Do you mean an all-powerful omnipotent god? The response is “Of Course.” With that, I raise the issue of the 1,000,000-plus Americans killed by COVID-19. Certainly, 90 percent of those people plus millions of family members prayed asking God to heal them. If God is omnipotent, why didn’t God answer their prayers?
Further, if God genuinely loves his children, why is it that Christians’ die from diseases such as cancer, heart failure, mass gun shootings, etc., at the same rate as nonbelievers? Hmmm?
Have you ever heard of the 350 BCE Greek philosopher Epicurus? Consider what Epicurus said: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing to prevent evil, then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing, then why call him God?”
As Silverman points out, there have been or are literally thousands of gods in which people just like ourselves have believed. How is it that all have the same measure of benefits? This is essentially why former fervent believers such as me concluded these gods are pure and simple products of our imagination. Integrity requires we ask the same question as Epicurus: Why call him god?
Lee Salisbury
Stillwater, Minnesota
Christ Myth Theory
Re: “Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists,” FI, August/September 2024. I note with interest that missing from the Further Reading list is anything by David Fitzgerald, perhaps the leading Christ myth theorist and the author of Jesus: Mything in Action and Nailed: Ten Christ Myths That Show That Jesus Never Existed, among others. Indeed, Bill Cooke never mentions David Fitzgerald by name or specifically debunks any of Fitzgerald’s many persuasive points that highlight the many inconsistencies and chronological distortions in the Bible. That’s not to detract anything from Cooke’s fine and engaging article that adds the additional wrinkle that Christ myth theorists advance antisemitism, which is something I have never thought of before. Admittedly, I have been swayed by Fitzgerald’s writings for some time and have been considering the possibility that more than one man named Yeshua ben Yosef resided in Ancient Judea and even that more than one of them were apocalyptic prophets who ran afoul of both the Jewish and Roman authorities. To me that would be as unusual as contemplating the possibility of more than one Jerry Cohen living today in Brooklyn and taking an active interest in politics who might get in trouble with both the Orthodox Jewish clergy and the Republican Party. That is not to detract from Cooke’s compelling case, and I would be most interested to see him square off with Fitzgerald in future pages of FREE INQUIRY.
Steven Rosenzweig
Brooklyn, New York
An odd coincidence, but I turned from reading Raphael Lataster’s essay “The Fourth Quest: A Critical Analysis of the Recent Literature on Jesus’ (a)Historicity” from 2014 to Bill Cooke’s ”Five Challenges to Christ Myth Theorists,” which was just published.
I have to say that Lataster covers most of the challenges with reference to Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014). And it seems odd that you are publishing this challenge ten years after it was comprehensively answered. Richard Carrier’s Bayesian method was controversial but has not been challenged in the intervening decade.
Lataster says of Carrier’s work: “The most significant aspect of Carrier’s book—as much of his source-criticism is already well-known—is that he seems to be the first to examine the issue of Jesus’ historicity, incorporating all the relevant background evidence, and including a direct (and effectively logically exhaustive) comparison of the plausible hypotheses.”
I used to be a member of the British Humanist Association, and I can’t find a pamphlet on their site titled “Who was Jesus?” It doesn’t sound like something they would print. I can assure Cooke that Jesus mythicism is widespread and popular. I am in the United Kingdom but know of mythicists in many parts of Europe.
In claim three: I’m not sure mythicists are as united as Cooke supposes. There are a lot of different positions even between Lataster’s agnosticism and Carrier’s probability-based mythicism. Occam’s razor is not a relevant device until all the background information is surveyed.
Claim four is difficult to square. That many theologians do not defend the more outrageous claims about a divine Christ is irrelevant to a discussion about whether there ever was a man whom Ignatius insisted to the Trailians was “truly born, and ate and drank.”
Point five is quite strange. The existence or not of Jesus isn’t necessary to confront anti-Semitism. The proposal of a celestial being called Jesus sits squarely within the context of Judaism.
The statement “all the things said about him are progressively more alien to what he actually believed” is part of the problem. The sources we have cannot show us that there even was a human Jesus, let alone “what he actually believed.”
As for sweeping away historical context, what context? The detailed examination of the evidence by Lataster and Carrier clearly shows there is no history to be swept.
Lataster finishes his essay: “It is up to historicists, however, to show that this theory is inherently implausible.” A careful analysis of Carrier’s work should reveal that he is not guilty of gerrymandering. He ends by provoking the mainstream scholars: “the ball is now in your court.” On the Historicity of Jesus is clearly and convincingly argued, extensively researched, solidly referenced, and essential reading for those open to questioning the historical Jesus and to those who want to learn how historical theorizing ought to be done.
I would strongly urge you to commission an article by Richard Carrier to rebut these points in detail. There is a trend to deny mythicism credibility based essentially on Christian apologetics that is flawed for all the usual reasons.
James Edwards
London, England, United Kingdom
In writing about the Jesus myth, Bill Cooke said it’s not a myth; Jesus is real. That is just not so. Here’s why.
Cooke said, “The Romans saw Yeshua ben Yosef (now known as Jesus Christ) as a rabble-rouser and put him to death.” This implies that Yeshua continues on, as a live being, after being crucified. This is impossible.
Cooke then says, “No significant humanist outside North America invests any serious time with the myth theory.” Could it be that they are in denial? That they know, but they don’t want to know, so they don’t know?
He then says, “It is quite unjustified to suppose that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.” No, it’s not. If one has no evidence to support an idea, then there is nothing supporting the idea; it is absent.
He goes on to say that “the myth theory of Jesus is, at best, a marginal footnote to Jesus scholarship.” Any scholar worthy of mention would not avoid this. All followers of many mythical beings believed that their god was born of a virgin or performed miracles or was resurrected or was holy. These beings include Horus (5,000 years ago), who was resurrected for three days; Mithra (3,200 years ago), who had twelve disciples; Krishna (2,900 years ago), who was called “son of god”; Dionysus (2,500 years ago), who turned water into wine and was called “holy child”; and Jesus Christ (2,000 years ago).
The Gospels, which simply copied those other ancient myths, are also mythical make believe.
Lee Simon
Flint Hill, Virginia
Bill Cooke’s article is ten years out of date. It cites nothing since 2013, which is odd because the entire field of study changed in 2014, when all five of Cooke’s complaints about mythicism were answered. In 2014, the theory was professionalized into a form that passed academic peer review. And in 2019, an independent peer-reviewed study corroborated that one. These studies are Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield-Phoenix, 2014) and Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019).
In these studies, problems with the consensus, and with secular theories of historicity, have been empirically addressed and undergone peer review; professional mythicism is now international. It is no more complex or ad hoc than any historicist model respected in the field. Its beneficial contributions to biblical studies have been articulated, and cosmic Christ theories have now been centered in their Jewish background.
This has resulted in a considerable increase in the acceptance of this approach in academia. I document over forty qualified scholars since agreeing it is to be taken seriously, roughly a third even agreeing the historicity of Jesus is doubtable (see “List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously” at richardcarrier.info/archives/21420). These scholars span the globe, refuting Cooke’s claim that this is only an American phenomenon. Lataster himself is Australian. James Crossley, who wrote the foreword to his study commending it, is British. Thomas Brodie, who wrote a memoir confessing his own doubts, is Irish. Other major scholars doubting, or agreeing it should be taken seriously, hail from Spain, Canada, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Argentina, Finland, Israel, and the Netherlands.
You might want to take more care against publishing such out-of-date submissions in future.
Richard Carrier, PhD
Via email
Bill Cooke responds:
Thank you to FREE INQUIRY for permitting this important controversy some airtime. It is important to get this right if we are to protect and promote the standing of humanist scholarship, the threat to which is apparent in these replies.
Lee Simon’s letter misses the point entirely. He begins, as mythicists so often do, by making the simple non sequitur that if one denies Jesus being a myth, then one must suppose the Christian account of him is real. He then goes on to make a series of irrelevant points against a claim I did not make.James Edwards is troubled by the British pamphlet that dismissed the myth theory. It’s not something he thinks likely, so again, right out of the mythicist playbook, he simply denies it exists and implies the dishonesty of one’s opponent. Listing one or two people around the world does not address the point I made about the popular support for the myth theory being overwhelmingly an American phenomenon. And citing one’s own work, as Richard Carrier does, doesn’t count as proof of the widespread acceptance of one’s doctrine.
Steven Rosenzweig berates me for not mentioning this or that person. That was not the point of the article, which was to highlight the effect the weaknesses and sterility of the mythicist approach has on discrediting the standing of humanist scholarship. However, I thank Rosenzweig who, alone among these critics, avoided ad hominem swipes.
Perhaps the most troubling gambit came from Richard Carrier, who appears not to recognize the incongruity of recommending a magazine titled FREE INQUIRY close avenues of inquiry he finds himself ill-equipped to reply to.
None of the correspondents have addressed my concern that the mythical Jesus theory is intellectually sterile, leading to no substantive new knowledge. Neither have they answered my point that the mythical theory is nothing more than a mirror image of the equally impoverished dogma of the literalists that everything said about Jesus is true. And beyond calling the claim “strange,” nobody has addressed the serious issue of the latent anti-Semitism implied by mythicist dogma. None of my five challenges have been met, leaving the myth theory as much of a danger to humanist scholarship as before.
Israel-Palestine Conflict In writing the cover story, “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil” (FI, April/May 2024), Sam Harris offered a slanted glimpse of reality. For him, militant Islam is problem number one, and he has harsh words for the many people with a different interpretation of reality. He says “fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews …