Mr. Lundahl Has No Idea on How I Use the Media
Kevin R. Henke
November 10, 2022
In Henke (2022b), I argued that people often lie, misinterpret and make up stories, and these are factors that undermine Mr. Lundahl’s “first known audience” scheme, which he uses in an attempt to separate history from fiction. In response, Lundahl (2022k) made the following comments:
“Let's go through Henke's principled objections to my theorem, "if the earliest known audience took it as history, it is a historic, not a fictional text" - here:
1. People lie and make up stories.
Those are two different things. A liar also makes up his story on some level, changing real for made up, where that is strategic for a purpose, but a poet makes up all of his story.
I think this is in fact the key principle Henke should ponder before answering any more. So much of his argument depends, so far, on equating Spiderman with Book of Mormon and with Russian reports on who it was who liberated Prague and how after most of WW-II was over.”
In Henke (2022bj), I gave the following response to Lundahl (2022k):
“Yes, poets often write total fiction and the author of Spiderman admits that it’s fiction. However, both Mr. Lundahl and I would agree that the Book of Mormon, Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are meant to be factual and not fiction and not poetry. The question then becomes, are they actually factual or just a lot of lies? To avoid being deceived by such lies, we need good evidence. The Mormons have no good evidence for the book of Mormon, Mr. Lundahl has none for Genesis 3, and Russian news reports are also highly untrustworthy.
It’s also important to recognize that liars in the religious and political realms may not simply take a real account and partially change it into something deceptive. They may totally make up a story so that there’s no truth in it whatsoever. As examples, I see no kernel of truth whatsoever in the Book of Mormon or in the Scientology Xenu story.
Mr. Lundahl also overlooks another critical point here. People often lie and make up stories for a variety of reasons. In the political and religious realms, money and/or power are often primary reasons for why politicians and religious leaders lie. In other cases, politicians may lie in an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution. In Henke (2022b), I further stated:
“The most common reasons for why ‘prophets’ invent false stories are for power and/or money. I think Kat Kerr invents stories to get attention and contributions. Joseph Smith Jr. used Mormonism to gain wealth and power, including the power to fornicate with whomever he wanted. No doubt, the ancient Israelite priests found the Pentateuch useful in gaining a lot of power and tithes and offerings that would otherwise have gone to the temples of Baal and other competing religions. The ancient Israelite priests were especially able to gain wealth and power when they had the support of Hezekiah and other powerful kings backing up their religion with force. As I explained in Henke (2022a), unlike the Talking Snake, we have external evidence that King Hezekiah actually existed.”
I think that Mr. Lundahl seriously underestimates how much disinformation is out there and how many millions of people often accept these falsehoods as fact. Interestingly, Lewis (1960, p. 159) makes an interesting statement that is generally correct:
“Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings, and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the world.”
One could quibble about the percentage of spoken and written material that turns out to be false. Nevertheless, Lewis (1960) is qualitatively correct here. The internet, newspapers, magazines, and the Bible are full of false information. So, lies are widespread and serious problems. The only way to combat lies is to be initially skeptical of every claim and to immediately demand evidence when the claim is first presented (Henke 2022dv; Henke 2022eu). This is where peer-reviewed science publications may help to provide reliable evidence and separate fact from fiction. Peer-reviewed science journals are certainly not inerrant, but when multiple peer-reviewed articles obtain the same results using different procedures, these results are generally more trustworthy than anything given by TV preachers or the Bible.” [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]
In my last seven essays, I responded to Mr. Lundahl’s (2022v) comments on some of the unbolded sections in the above quotation from Henke (2022bj). Lundahl (2022v) then responds to the bolded sentence from Lewis (1960, p. 159) in the above quotation:
“One of the four is not like the other ... a hearsay that does not go back to a liar, to an exaggeration or to a misunderstanding and to which the one promoting is not adding such is not in and of itself counterfactual.
Now, to return to the case of newspapers, I seriously doubt that Mr. Henke starts out with scepticism about each and every story until it is corroborated. I very much think journalists did that job for him. And that he thinks so too.
Does this make me anything like a very gullible person when it comes to modern journalism? No, I am one of the persons who actually challenged a story on hearing (or reading) it.
After Utøya, Norwegian police had presented Mr. Breivik as a "Fundamentalist Christian" - same day as I heard it, I pointed out two links proving he was anything but, he had been excluded from the Norwegian freemasonry, the Johanneslosjen of Oslo, the day following the attack that killed 77. He has also later been reported as having stated he was not a Theist in the philosophical sense, he believed Evolution, he wanted Norwegian Lutheran Christianity (which is very far from Fundie in its mainstream) simply as a piece of Norwegian culture, as accidentally being the mold in which Norwegian morality and manners were cast.”
Mr. Lundahl can quibble over how to define and classify various types of disinformation. The point is, disinformation is common in the literature, and the Bible is certainly not exempt from it (Babinski 2010; Carrier 2014; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001; Tobin 2010; Price 2017). This is why skepticism is so very important when encountering any claim (Henke 2022dv).
Mr. Lundahl has no idea on how I use my news sources. Again, if two or more media that I use consistently report and show a video of a Russian missile striking a school in Ukraine, indicate that U.S. unemployment is going down and state other non-technical and not-out-of-the-ordinary news that is not related to science and history, I tend to accept the claims. However, again, I don’t rely on journalists that are not scientists and historians to report science and history news to me. I rely on the peer-reviewed science and history journals and books. I see a difference between ordinary and technical news. While Mr. Lundahl has relied on Wikipedia and other unreliable sources in this debate, I have repeatedly cited peer-reviewed journals and books. This is a key difference between us on how we handle and accept information, and how we distinguish what is factual from what is plausible and from what are lies disguising themselves as history and science.
I’m glad that Mr. Lundahl was skeptical of what the Norwegian police supposedly said about mass murderer Anders Breivik. I can see why Mr. Lundahl would not want Breivik associated with any type of Christianity. However, Mr. Lundahl needs to also be skeptical of claims in books, articles, websites, and other sources that he might want to agree with, like the Bible or the pope or the Church Fathers. An important part of skepticism is being able to tell yourself and your allies that all of us are wrong about a given claim.
References:
Babinski, E. 2010. “The Cosmology of the Bible” in J.W. Loftus (ed.) The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails: Prometheus Books: Amherst, NY, USA, pp. 109-147.
Carrier, R. 2014. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press: Sheffield, UK, 696pp.
Finkelstein, I. and N.A. Silberman. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts: The Free Press: New York, USA, 385pp.
Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.
Price, R.M. 2017. Holy Fable: Volume I: The Old Testament Undistorted by Faith: Mindvendor Press, Coppell, TX, USA, 334pp
Tobin, P. 2010. “The Bible and Modern Scholarship” in J.W. Loftus (ed.) The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails: Prometheus Books: Amherst, NY, USA, pp. 148-180.