Henke 2022da

Tyrants Controlling the Media and Writing “History” Allow Lies to Spread and Become Widely Believed

Kevin R. Henke

September 15, 2022

In Henke (2022b), I state:

“Concerning my high standards for verifying the existence of a supernatural event or being, Lundahl (2022a) replies:

“Will you ‘lower it’ confronted with the fact that your ‘standard’ is not consistent with how we have historical knowledge?”

Of course not. Others might be willing to lower their standards for studying the past so that Mr. Lundahl can label likely fairy tales as “history”, but I won’t and neither should anyone else that studies past events. I will not lower my standards at all to comply with what he views as being “consistent” with historical knowledge, when he readily mixes angels, demons and other groundless claims with reality to explain both the past and present. Lundahl (2022a-g) is engaging in mythmaking and speculation, and not appropriate historical investigations. I am consistent in my very conservative interpretations of both human and geological history, and I see no evidence whatsoever to inject the supernatural into either of them.

Any literate individual can write and make up anything. This is exactly why Mormon apologists are so desperate to verify the Book of Mormon with archeology. They know very well that Joseph Smith Jr. or others could have made up the Book of Mormon. They recognize that they need external evidence to confirm that the Book of Mormon is history. Well, the same problem exists for Genesis and Exodus. It could have been made up by a “prophet” as I discuss in Section 5.0.”

In a reply to the above bolded sentence from Henke (2022b), Lundahl (2022m) makes the following comment:

“OK, make up what really happened in the Texas shooting, and make the world believe Salvador Ramos killed no one and mildly scared 21 people, and see if you can make a community - not just an isolated individual depending too much on your word - believe that.”

Yes, anyone can write and make up anything. However, thanks to the internet, other modern technologies, and a lot of skeptical and unregulated journalists in the USA, it’s doubtful that anyone would be able to get away with such blatant lies about the Texas tragedy in the USA. Yet, Lundahl (2022m) totally fails to realize that lies and propaganda can rapidly develop and spread under other common circumstances both in ancient Israel and even today in many parts of the world. If their totalitarian governments wanted to, blatant lies about the Texas shooting could widely spread and be believed by over a billion people in China, as well as by millions in Russia. So, in some parts of the world now and certainly in the past, a powerful and influential individual could write just about anything and get away with it. Because the state controls the internet and the media in Russia, Putin apparently is having very little difficulty convincing the majority of Russians that the Ukrainian “NAZIs” and not the Russian military are responsible for raping and slaughtering thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Putin could not just successfully hide or distort one tragedy involving 21 victims from his people, but hundreds of incidences across Ukraine involving thousands of victims. As I discussed in Henke (2022cc), millions of people believe Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election. According to Hypotheses #3 and #4 of Henke (2022b) on the Talking Snake story, people came to believe that Genesis 3 was history because powerful priests with the backing of Hezekiah or earlier Israelite kings wanted them to believe this story was real. They wrote the Old Testament and they controlled what went into it. The victors write “history” and sometimes their “history” contains very little actual history. So, if powerful political and religious leaders can control the narrative, it’s very possible for lies to spread and be believed by millions or even over a billion people. We see another perfect example of how one or two individuals made up stories about St. Philomena and their lies and delusions soon deceived many in the Vatican and millions of people throughout the 19^th and 20^th century Roman Catholic Church (Henke 2022es).