Ken Humphreys and the Holocaust Deniers: Update

One of our longtime contacts made an interesting point I thought worthy of looking into and sharing today.

Some time ago, over on the Forge blog, I made much of the fact that Ken Humphreys, author of the Jesus Never Existed website, made use of the work of a known Holocaust denier. I’ll reprint that post here in full, since this needs more attention.

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Christ-mythers seldom impress me with their honesty or decency, but it isn’t often I have an extreme case like this one.

Earlier this week on the Ticker blog I noted that Christian Lindtner, who is a source for several people who try to find parallels between Jesus and Buddha, is also a Holocaust denier. A reader also discovered the same about Lars Adelskogh, who is also used as a source for this.

Now you can imagine what Skeptics would make of this if I ever used a source that held to such an obnoxious (to say nothing of counter-consensus!) view. Holocaust denial is one of the most offensive stances to take in our world today and there have been people disgraced for far lesser views. Brooks Trubee would be fighting with John Loftus in a lights-out death match for the chance to be the first to deliver that scoop. But when you’re a Christ-myther, apparently you get a free pass on such things and morals and checking are completely out the window.

Ken Humphreys, a leading Christ-myther online with whom I once had an online radio debate (Justin Brierley's Unbelievable), makes use of both Lindtner and Adelskogh as sources for his copycat page on Jesus and Buddha. I asked Tekton Research Assistant Punkish to inquire with him as to whether he was aware of their Holocaust denial stance, and what he thought of it. Humphreys' response is both illuminating and disgusting at the same time. We were given permission to reprint it here:

Prof. Lindtner's opinions on matters not germane to the origins of Christianity are neither here not there. Are you, perhaps, suggesting that he has ceased to be an expert in ancient languages and Buddhist scripture? Now that would be worrying!

Neither here nor there? It looks like someone needs to take a swimming break from the cesspool!

No, it is not “neither here nor there” at all. True, it does not taint Lindtner’s knowledge of ancient languages or texts (though from all I have read of the works of credible Buddhist scholars like Richard Saloman, Lindtner isn’t as much an expert on that as he pretends to be either!). It does, however, raise serious questions with respect to how credibly he reports and interprets the facts about those languages and texts -- and when the subject is a matter of some obscurity to those who read the works (eg, Sanskrit, and Buddhist scriptures), credibility is an exceptionally important factor in whether or not a source can be trusted. Humphreys does not know anything about Sanskrit. Nor do I. Nor do nearly all of our readers. We are therefore obliged to take (or not take) the likes of Lindtner at their word when it comes to what they say about these subjects, and when such a person shows questionable judgment, as is required for someone who denies the Holocaust, we have two options if we wish to be responsible brokers of information:

1) Verify the data and arguments from more credible sources. (Though as noted, when I have tried to do this, Lindtner has failed conspicuously in various ways!)
2) If we can't verify, don't use the source in arguments and don't use their arguments.

It’s not a simple matter of “he’s biased, so you can’t trust him” (a common canard which I have been accused of myself), but rather, that the position(s) held are so counter-consensus, so contrary to the evidence, and -- here, most critical of all -- so rooted in an offensive ideology, that any sane person would check them out before using or defending these sources. It is clear that Humphreys and others who use these “scholars” as sources either can’t see this, or are so badly on the defensive when it comes to their own adherence to a fringe thesis that they don’t want to.

Indeed, it is more germane than even this. The root of Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism. So, in fact, is Lindtner’s mission to force a match between Jesus and Buddha. One of the lesser known aspects of the Nazi program was Hitler’s attempts to validate Aryan supremacy by sending teams of archaeologists all over the world, including into Tibet, to find evidence for this thesis. Someone who tries to deny the essential Jewish origins and background of Christianity, and instead tries to find origins on Buddhism, fits hand in glove with this anti-Semitic tendency. (The swastika, note, was a Buddhist symbol well before the Nazis corrupted it.) Those who use Lindtner and his ilk as sources are thereby participating fully in his campaign of anti-Semitism and enabling it.

Humphreys further stated:

The study of JC is complex enough without having to vet and approve the political or philosophical position of every contributor. You may think me naive but I chose to believe facts are facts and logic is logic.

Naïve? That’s an understatement. Humphreys is not only naïve for using these works; he’s also sorrowful, reprehensible, and irresponsible. The stances held by Lindtner should immediately raise in the minds of any decent human being the question of whether indeed his “facts” can be trusted and whether his “logic” is sound (though even if Lindtner were as pure as the driven snow, applying those terms to his work would be comical). If indeed “facts” and “logic” are what is at stake, then surely Humphreys can find some other qualified scholar in the field who makes the same assessments but doesn’t hold to a patently offensive ideology that so coarsely devalues the lives of six million Jewish victims of Hitler’s hatred. (The obvious problem for Humphreys, of course, is that no qualified scholar does hold such absurd positions or make such absurd arguments.)

From here on, this will become one of Tekton’s crusades. We will hunt down and highlight those like Humphreys who make use of these despicable scholars and their work, until they remove those references from their material – or else until they kick the bucket.

Of course, if they don’t, that’s fine too – because in the end, it will become all the more apparent to observers that such persons have little interest in truth, and even less interest in honesty and decency.

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My contact deepened the subject further with an interesting point. These days, the book version of Humphreys’ theories is put out by an outfit called Iconoclast Press. But the original publisher was a place called “Historical Review Press.” In fact you can still buy that edition on Amazon. 

And what else did HRP publish besides Humphreys’ book?

I’ll give you some titles.

The True History of the Holocaust: Did Six Million Really Die?

The Origins of Christianity (by Revilo P. Oliver)

The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry

How much more, we wonder, would it take for Humphreys to be ashamed of himself? He apparently chose HRP as his original publisher, and I rather doubt he did so having no idea what their reputation was, or what else they published.

Is there any chance that atheists will police their own ranks a bit here?

Calling "Men of Faith" to Account

Recently I had a scheduled engagement on a podcast show that I had to shift because of planning problems. In the week prior to that, though, I had some emails from a Christian who expressed concern because the host had certain Catholic leanings.

I told the emailer that if he wanted to make a case to me, vague accusation was not enough; he had to prove his point, and also prove that there was a real problem with the doctrines the host accepted. Cordially, the writer replied asking if I would be willing to check out some material written by some “men of faith” on the subject.

Oh boy.

After this long I know well enough that “men of faith” tends to mean, “some loudmouth with inadequate credentials and a holier than thou attitude.” And I was right: The writer recommended works by Dave Hunt, John MacArthur, and James White.

My doings with White, and why I don’t consider him particularly reliable (compared to serious scholars, that is), are well known to most readers, and I will not reiterate them here. One thing I will add is that there is more I have learned lately about White’s inability to re-examine his prior conclusions which make me even less inclined to trust him.

It isn’t good to speak ill of the dead, so I’ll just say about Hunt for now that while Seduction of Christianity was okay, things went downhill from there, especially with reference to his end times material.

As for MacArthur…readers will have seen in a prior entry here that I am far from enamored with his scholarship. I now have even less reason to be. More on that after some background.

I’ll announce something for the first time publicly here. Of late I have been “hired on” to put together a rebuttal to a rather execrable YouTube series called The FUEL Project: Know Your Enemy. It is ostensibly Christian, but promotes a lot of that paranoid New World Order/Catholic Church is the Antichrist nonsense, the latter of which is informed by the even more execrable book The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop. This book from the 19^th century is the Christian version of Acharya S’ Christ Conspiracy, and contains just as much bad scholarship per page. FUEL's series consists, frankly, of one error after another, as the creator apparently did little more than copy and paste from conspiracy websites without checking their claims, in many cases I have found simply doing so word for word (without always crediting the source, either -- which is plagiarism). More on that project another time.

Thanks to my work on that project, at any rate, the email writer’s note got me thinking. I knew MacArthur had written some screeds against Catholicism before, and now I wondered if he had ever recommended The Two Babylons.  Well, he has. Below is the text of an interview (link below) with MacArthur for his Grace to You program, where a caller (also named John) dialed in.

JOHN: Hi, my name is John. I have this book on Babylon Mystery Religion by Ralph Woodrow and I just wanted to ask you what you thought of it and is Christmas derived from paganism and is the cross derived from paganism?

JOHN MACARTHUR: Well, I'm not sure, who published, what's the publisher of that book, John?

JOHN: He published it himself.

JOHN MACARTHUR: Okay. Basic principle: Be careful of books that are published by the guy who wrote them (laughter).

JOHN: Uh-huh.

JOHN MACARTHUR: You just have to be discerning. Usually, when a man publishes his own material, it is either because no one else will publish it or because it is...it is too volatile or argumentative or there's no audience for it or it's not right or something. Now, basically speaking, I believe that he's right on many of those issues. Much of modern Christendom is a result of paganism. There's no question about that.

After giving a list of supposed examples, MacArthur closes:

But, yes, there's no question about the fact that the systems of Babylon have been superimposed upon Christianity. There's no question about that so, insofar as he brings that issue. There's another book that's very helpful called The Two Babylons Hyslop, H-Y-S-L-O-P. Also, a very, very helpful book.

This interview result is hilarious for a few reasons, not the least of which is that MacArthur doesn’t even spell Hislop’s name right. A second amusement is the irony in the caller’s original question about Woodrow. Woodrow did indeed write such a book, which was essentially a précis using Hislop as a major source. But he later wrote a contrary book in which he disavowed his findings in Babylon Mystery Religion, having found that Hislop’s book was historically unreliable. Woodrow also wrote an article for the Christian Research Journal on the same subject. 

The third hilarity is the irony of MacArthur saying we have to be “discerning” when he ends up recommending garbage like The Two Babylons.

I’d like to say that MacArthur isn’t doing this anymore; this interview did apparently take place back in the 70s or so. But indications are he hasn’t learned. As late as 2001, in his book The God Who Loves, there is a footnote recommending The Two Babylons, saying it offers “abundant historical evidence that the Babylonian religion founded by Nimrod is the basis for virtually all subsequent false religious systems.” One can readily see him asking, as he did of Calvin and Spurgeon, “Who can improve on Hislop?”

I can only hope MacArthur has learned in his lesson about Hislop in the past dozen years. He probably hasn’t. But whether he has or not, it’s high time so-called “men of faith” were held to account for this sort of incompetence. If I had my way, MacArthur would have been stripped of his pastoral credentials and his media outlets back when he first recommended Hislop’s Slop, and would not have been allowed to get them back until he had 1) apologized in the same venues for recommending it and 2) taken remedial courses in church history. He then would have been barred from writing books on any serious subject for the duration, unless they had been fully vetted by a board of credentialed scholars. His recommend of Hislop shows that he can’t be trusted to do it on his own…and we can say the same of far too many “men of faith” publishing their nonsense today. (I already referred to one other such example in an earlier entry here: Erwin Lutzer’s horrible book on Adolf Hitler. I’m now working on an e-book on that subject, which is needed to counter a lot of the nonsense – apologetics and otherwise – that has been issued on that subject in the past.)

It’s a fair complaint that we need to get our own house in order before we straighten the furniture in others’ houses. Tekton’s always had an inclination to do that. It’ll just be a little more obvious in the next few years.

Link

Book Snap: N. T. Wright's "Evil and the Justice of God"

Today we hand the reins to Nick Peters for a review of this book, which is more his kind of thing. 

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            Upfront, I will admit I have a huge bias to N.T. Wright. I just consider the work that he has done to be incredible and if I have a chance to listen to him speak, I take it. I was naturally thrilled when I was given the chance to get one of his books for a review and give a critique.

            Wright’s book “Evil and the Justice of God” is about God’s answer to evil from a biblical perspective. It is quite a different tone from a work such as Bart Ehrman’s “God’s Problem”, to which my review can be found here. Ehrman reads the Bible and thinks it doesn’t answer the question. Wright instead thinks the whole purpose of the Bible is to answer the question.

            What makes the difference is how the Bible is being read. Wright comes from a position of seeking to understand the whole of Scripture, do in-depth background study, and not just go with what the tradition viewpoint is. Ehrman, as we know, comes from a highly fundamentalist and individualistic position.

            It’s not a shock that Wright makes the better case then. Wright early on states the problem and that everyone must deal with it. We ask as Christians at times, or get asked “If the world is created by such a good God, why is there evil?” Wright says we can ask it in reverse for the atheist. “Even if you’re an atheist, you face the problem the other way around: is this world a sick joke, which contains some things that make us think it’s a wonderful place and other things which make us think it’s an awful place, or what?” (p. 19)

            This was the question of Chesterton as well. How do you explain the problem of pleasure? God could have created a world that was in black and white. He didn’t. God could have created food without flavor. He didn’t. God could have made it that we had to reproduce, but He did not have to make the sexual act so enjoyable. He did. How is this to be explained? If Christians must explain evil, and we should have an answer for evil, let us have the atheist explain good. (Of course, we could just as well ask them to explain any absolutes like that)

            Wright also deals with the myth of progress. He sees no way we can say that we are really progressing in morality when we have had numerous wars, including two world wars, Auschwitz, and other events. (p. 23) It is easy to talk about progress if there is no distinctive goal and progress just means the place you have reached when you reach it. (My speaking of Chesterton again.)

            To give an example of today, Wright says on p. 24-25 that “We all know that sexual licentiousness creates massive unhappiness in families and individual live, but we live in the twenty-first century, don’t we, and we don’t want to say that adultery is wrong. (We should perhaps note that only two generations ago many communities regarded adultery the way they now regard pedophilia, which is worrying on both counts.)”

            The only taboo in fact today is to say that anything is taboo. We let everything go its own way and then wonder why there are so many problems in the world. Evil has simply been reduced often to “That which we do not like.” It is not the case that we have a reason why God should not have judged the Canaanites. We but only need to say “We don’t like it” and already our opinion is justified.

            Why should we be given this level of accuracy in judgment? Wright looks at our world where we are afraid to say something is right and wrong and says “We live in a world where politicians, media pundits, economists and even, alas, some late-blooming liberal theologians speak as if humankind is basically all right, the world is basically all right, and there’s nothing that we should make a fuss about.” (p. 25)

            Such a view is not even capable of accepting disagreement with its central dogma on a small scale. (Christians standing up for true marriage.) It is incapable of dealing with real actions of evil, such as 9-11, or seeing how the world is not all right, such as in the case of Hurricane Katrina. 

            What do we need to do? We need to think deeply about good and evil. If subjectivity reigns, then it will be some opinions have power by virtue of the people who have them and not the reasons for them. Even if our opinions are right, we need to know why. As Wright says “Lashing out at something you simply know by intuition is wrong may be better than tolerating it. But it is hardly the way to build a stable society.” (p. 27)

            Readers of Tektonics are well aware of the problem of individualism. While Wright does not write on that, he does give a statement that shows an end result of this along with what has been said. He states that “Claiming the status of victim has become the new multicultural sport, as people scramble for the moral high ground in which they can emerge as pure and clean, and everybody else is to blame.” (p. 29)

            Part of maturity is accepting your own responsibility. Of course, there are times when someone else is to blame for the suffering of another, but just because you are a target somewhere does not mean that you are a victim. This kind of mindset has allowed too many people to get emotional sympathy from a culture that makes moral decisions based on emotions.

            So now let’s get to Wright’s view of the problem. Readers of his work will be familiar with him going back to Genesis to show where the problem takes place and the start of the solution is Abraham. Wright has no patience with our system that goes “Creation, fall, redemption, resurrection.” Wright says that after fall, we should put “Israel.” (That is not in this book, but it is in his other writings and the sentiment is there.)

            This means that God called Abraham to form the nation of Israel and Israel was to make things right. Yet Israel herself proved to be part of the problem, in passages such as Exodus 32, a passage rabbis would later look on with shame. Israel often proved to be even more wicked than the pagan nations that were around her. Yet Israel has done two services for the world definitely.

            The first is the handing down of the Old Testament so we could know about the problem. The second, is the birthing of the Messiah, who is the solution of the problem. Jesus is the true Israel who succeeds where Israel, and every other human being has failed, in dealing with evil.

            Jesus’s life shows what it will be like when God is in charge. The gospels matter. As Wright has said in numerous podcasts, when we look at the Nicene Creed we read “Born under the Virgin Mary. Crucified under Pontius Pilate,” we can then look and see the gospel writers in the background saying “Hold on there! We spent a lot of time on that stuff in the middle!” Wright says this not to fault the creeds. He loves them. He says this to show us that we need to fill in those gaps.

            By the cross and the resurrection, Jesus has dealt with the problem. He has set the world aright by His sacrifice and faithful service to YHWH. Now Jesus is enthroned as the king of this world and has given us the charge in the Great Commission that we are to go forth and make disciples of all nations. The solution to the problem of evil is to have God be all in all again just as in the beginning, and to rescue people from their exile from God.

            Christians are then to live lives thinking about the resurrection and about the future state, which for Wright is not a blissful pie in the sky eternity, but rather God reigning on this Earth and making this Earth right. We are to live with the knowledge of the future and have that knowledge come and impact our present.

            This will also come down to forgiveness. Wright stresses that we need forgiveness for each other and for ourselves, and this is to be done without minimizing the evil that has taken place. We are people who are teachers of grace and we must live with that grace. To not recognize forgiveness for others and for ourselves is to not live in a Christian manner.

            If there is a criticism I have of this book, I think it is that Wright sometimes steps out of his area of expertise. There are times when he comments on economic policy and I do not think he is accurate in what he is saying. This would be the only real problem I have as on a biblical level, it is hard to disagree with Wright.

            Despite that concern, I highly recommend this work of Wright, which should be no shock. When it comes to evil, Ehrman is wrong. The Bible does show how the problem has been dealt with, is being dealt with, and will be dealt with. Ehrman is wrong and Wright is right.

Can We Choose Our Beliefs?

Lately on YT and TWeb I've been dealing with a fundy atheist. Andrew Smith, who argues that humans can't "choose" their beliefs, and he uses this as an excuse for why God's punishments are unjust. I asked Nick Peters to take a TNT bomb to this idea, so he'll be the guest poster today.

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Can we choose our beliefs?

Andrew Smith says, no, we can’t. He says we can make choices, but we can’t choose to believe something.

Supposing this was true, it would be interesting to see what difference it would make to the truth of Christianity. It could be that Jesus rose from the dead and those who believe in it are those who have to believe in it, kind of an ultra-Calvinist viewpoint.

Of course, Smith is right if he means that we can’t just change our beliefs willy-nilly. I can’t just suddenly believe that I have $1,000,000 in my banking account, as much as I’d like that to be true. He is right that to change our beliefs, our beliefs should be challenged by new claims that have sufficient evidence.

Let’s look at a statement he makes.

“If in order to change your beliefs it is required that new information comes to you and convinces you that your beliefs are false, that is not choice.”

Yes. It is a requirement that you have new information come to your mind that convinces you, but the seeking out of new information is a choice. It is a choice when I go to the library to get books and it is a choice what books I get. I can get books that are in line with my beliefs, which is fine to do at times, or I can choose books that disagree with what I believe.

When I do the latter, I can also seek to choose what kind of mindset I will approach them from. I can choose to approach them assuming I am always right, to which nothing will be convincing because it does not agree with me, or I could take the approach that I am someone who is to be humble and learn from others and realize I could be wrong, in which case I could be more convinced.

If an argument is rational, contains no logical fallacies, and is based on sound evidence, then I am obligated to believe in it. Of course, that could mean I want some time to mull over the argument and examine the premises and such, but if in the end I find nothing wrong with the argument, then I believe it. The reality for most of us is that we’ve all had times like this. Many of us have eliminated beliefs from our system that we once deeply cherished simply because of new evidence.

Smith goes on to say

“You do not get to choose what convinces you and what doesn't, otherwise you could convince yourself of anything.”

But this doesn’t follow. This assumes that all arguments are equally convincing. Consider the classic syllogism.

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Socrates is mortal.

The only way someone could really doubt this is to question that all men are mortal. We have strong evidence of this though in that all men thus far have died, aside from biblically Enoch and Elijah. If that was a problem, let’s go to another one.

All cats are felines.

Mittens is a cat.

Mittens is a feline.

This should be convincing to anyone. Now let’s make another syllogism.

All birds can fly.

Rover is a dog.

Therefore, fundy atheists are dumb.

Now this conclusion is certainly true, although fundy atheists will disagree with it, but it is a bad argument. Not even the most conservative Christian would find it convincing. Thus, to say you can convince yourself of anything would imply that there is an equal argument to believe anything. If that is the case though, there is just as good an argument to convince yourself that you can choose your beliefs as there is that you can’t choose them. (By the way, why is Smith trying to give us an argument to choose the belief that we can’t choose our beliefs?)

“And, since your beliefs are entirely contingent upon what you find convincing, you do not choose them.”

This is true, but irrelevant. We can be convinced of things we don’t want to be convinced of. It happens regularly. People become convinced that a loved one has died when they see them lying in the casket. Is it because these people want to be convinced their loved one is dead? No. It is because they face evidence that they cannot refute. Most of us have had times of denial where we’ve had irrefutable evidence for a position and tried to emotionally push it away. It doesn’t last long.

We conclude that Smith’s case is not well thought-out and is simply a way to try to avoid having blame for the position that he holds with regards to Christianity. Yet even if his position was true, it would not refute the Christian faith at all. Perhaps the problem could really lie with Smith himself?