Henke 2022df
The Force and Star Wars: Lundahl (2022m) Omits Important Issues from Henke (2022b)
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022
In Henke (2022b), I stated:
“In Henke (2022a), I proposed four hypotheses to explain Genesis 3 with its Talking Snake story:
1. The Talking Snake existed and the account in Genesis 3 was accurately passed down by Adam to Moses. Moses then wrote it down in Genesis. There would have been no human eyewitnesses for most of the events in Genesis 1-2:14. If Genesis 1-2:14 is history, God would have to have given the information in these verses as visions.
2. Moses saw Genesis 1-3 and perhaps most or even all of everything else in Genesis through visions given by God. There didn’t need to be a continuous human transmission of information from Adam to Moses. Visions from God would not be open to errors unlike written or oral transmissions from Adam to Moses.
3. The Talking Snake of Genesis 3 was part of a made-up campfire story, a parable or based on a pagan myth that eventually was taken as fact by the ancient Israelites, like how President Reagan and his fans mistook fictional stories from World War 2 as real. William Tell (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-search-of-william-tell-2198511/ ) and a number of Roman Catholic saints (https://listverse.com/2014/05/17/10-beloved-saints-with-fictitious-biographies/ ) are probably also myths. Of course, in the United States, pro-abortionists regularly use fictional TV shows to convince Americans that abortion is a good thing. Even though they are fiction, many people believe the propaganda. Right now, a lot of Russians are believing the fictional propaganda their government is inventing about Ukraine. People also often pick and choose parts of fictional stories that they want to believe and ignore the rest, such as individuals believing in the existence of “The Force” from the Star Wars movies, while recognizing that the rest of the movies are fiction. A lot of people are gullible and believe fictions are real.
4. “Prophets” or others claimed to have visions from God about events that supposedly happened thousands of years earlier. These visions were delusions or outright lies, but a lot of people came to believe them. Joseph Smith also did this and Kat Kerr continues with this nonsense in the US.” [my emphasis]
Henke (2022a) was posted on March 1, 2022 and Henke (2022b) is from May 15, 2022.
Rather than responding to the bolded section about Star Wars in the above quotations from Henke (2022a) and (2022b), Lundahl (2022m) chooses to respond to what I had earlier said about Christopher Columbus, the Force, and Star Wars in an email to him on February 18, 2022, 1:29 AM (Paris time) [February 17, 2022, 7:29 PM US Eastern Time in my email file]. Lundahl (2022m) also includes a quotation from his email reply to me on February 18, 2022 at 1:37 PM (Paris time) [February 18, 2022, 7:37 AM US Eastern Time in my email file]:
“Now, the Force was already discussed in our correspondence:
Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : Continued Correspondence with Kevin : XV - XXVIII
In mail XV, Kevin R. Henke to me, 2/18/2022 at 1:29 AM (Paris time), he said:
‘There are millions of Americans that actually believe that Columbus proved that the Earth was round and that he landed in what is now the United States. There are people that believe that "The Force" exists. They knew nothing about Eastern religions until they saw Star Wars.’
Let's take both statements in turn. And, as I did it back in mail XVI, Me to Kevin R. Henke, 2/18/2022 at 1:37 PM (Paris time), here:
‘There are millions of Americans that actually believe that Columbus proved that the Earth was round and that he landed in what is now the United States.’
Which is not about non-events, just a distorted account of actual events.
He and Magellan did prove you could sail around the Earth, against people who predicted that too far West storms would make that impossible, or that they could not sail all the way from Spain to Japan on provisions a caravell could take along and didn't know there was a landmass in between. And he did come to the Americas, there is just a confusion between the Americas and the US which is colloquially named "America".
‘There are people that believe that "The Force" exists. They knew nothing about Eastern religions until they saw Star Wars.’
They don't take Luke Skywalker's childhood on Tatooine as history, which is a case in my point. There is a vast difference between changing outlook due to a work of fiction and believing the work of fiction as history.
It seems, Henke can't see that a point has been already answered. He's content to repeat, rather than try to show despite my answer how popular beliefs about Columbus or in the Force still prove his point despite my answers.”
Henke (2022dg) and Henke (2022dm) discuss the commonly believed errors involving Christopher Columbus and their implications for Bible stories.
Concerning Stars Wars and the Force, Lundahl (2022m) is leaving out some additional and important discussions that we had on those topics. In Lundahl (2022c) Mr. Lundahl stated:
“The question at hand was, do people - as in communities - take things they know to be fictions for real historic memories? Normally not. The yes for Reagan's WW-II story is highly hedged, both as to who came to believe a thing, and as to outstanding significance of the thing believed. But the "yes" for Star Wars is on your own admission in fact a ‘no’.”
It seems, that Mr. Lundahl in Lundahl (2022m) can’t see that his point has already been answered in Henke (2022b), in particular, his claim that people “…. don't take Luke Skywalker's childhood on Tatooine as history, which is a case in my point”. That is, Lundahl (2022m) blatantly ignores what I further said about this topic in Henke (2022b):
“Now, I agree with Lundahl (2022c) that we must take the worldviews of the writers and producers of fiction seriously, whether it’s Star Wars or The Handmaiden’s Tale. Although people generally will not believe that Luke Skywalker or Tatooine exist, there are those that accept the worldview promoted by Star Wars and think that the Force is real. That’s the point I was trying to make in Henke (2022a) and my earlier emails. People often look for morals, lessons learned and elements of truth in even fictional stories. They pick out the ideas that they like from fictional stories. However, if the fictional stories happened to be more propaganda than entertainment, the results can be quite disastrous.” [my emphasis]
So, why is Lundahl (2022m) bringing up these February 17-18 emails instead of what I later said in Henke (2022b) and especially in the above paragraph where I respond to Lundahl (2022c)? I think a lot of the problem is that he breaks up my essays into sentences and sentence fragments and then goes through them line by line making rash and flippant comments instead of reading all of my essay in its entirety, thinking about what I said in total and then making a thoughtful overall response.
Now, the critical point that Mr. Lundahl in Lundahl (2022m) is failing to recognize is what I originally said in Henke (2022a) and is again quoted in Henke (2022b):
“People also often pick and choose parts of fictional stories that they want to believe and ignore the rest, such as individuals believing in the existence of “The Force” from the Star Wars movies, while recognizing that the rest of the movies are fiction.”
We can now see how Hypothesis #3 could explain Genesis 3. According to Hypothesis #3, the ancient Israelites took Genesis 3 from a larger work of fiction and decided to believe it. Now #3 is only a hypothesis because we have no good evidence on when and how Genesis 3 was written. Although Hypothesis #3 is no more likely than Hypothesis #4, either of these hypotheses are far more probable than the idea promoted by Hypotheses #1 and #2, where a Talking Snake actually existed, caused our ancestors to eat some forbidden magic fruit, and that is why stars in distant galaxies supernovae and everything eventually dies.