November 18, 2008

Homer? Or Some Other Guy With the Same Name?

Michael Scherer pointing out Mike Huckabee's failure to get some biblical detail right inspired this, and I can't just leave it in a comment thread that nobody is gonna read. Better to put it here for people to not read, I figure.

This stuff really makes  me laugh. Getting the details of things that aren't true, or real, but have been written down, right.

It was like reading the piece in the WSJ over the weekend about the Professor of Islam  in Germany who was questioning the existence of an actual guy named Mohamed. Some other academic  noted that the evidence for an actual guy named Jesus was a heckuva lot more tenuous, so the Mohamed thing was looking pretty good to him.

"Low bar,"  I said to myself. And it doesn't matter, really, because there are any number of details, like God coming down and dictating the thing to him that are obviously not true. There are so many details attributed to the figure that are clearly false that it doesn't really matter if the guy was a guy or is a composite of  several guys, or whether there is some guy who one could generally say was the guy to whom (thanks Ben,  playing KO quoting Churchill, caught that trailing preposition) they attribute all this not true stuff.

And then I mentioned this to someone else, and SHE said "Low bar on the Jesus thing? What about the God evidence? Goodness knows there isn't any of that.  Not to mention a fair amount to the contrary."

3 comments:

Todd and in Charge said...

I couldn't agree more. I also found funny Michael's claim to have pulled the "correcting" factoid from his handy Gideon's Bible, as opposed to The Google or, more likely, an email he received.

Paul Dirks said...

As has been documented extensively, there is a self-reinforcment mechanism surrounding the notion of faith. As soon as belief in something against evidence is seen as desirable, reality itself need no longer apply.

It's disturbingly effective.

Jay Ackroyd (@jayackroyd) said...

Yeah, Todd, he didn't haul out the Greek, did he?