Mr. Lundahl Needs to Do His Own Leg Work in the Libraries of Paris Rather than Just Criticizing an Article by Richard Cohen
Kevin R. Henke
November 23, 2022
Lundahl (2022x) extensively discusses my essay, Henke (2022bq): “Mr. Lundahl Still Fails to Respond to Secular Hypotheses #3 and #4, which Rationally Explain the Origin of the Talking Snake Myth of Genesis 3.” In my essay, I stated the following:
“Again, point #8 mentions secular Hypotheses #3 and #4 from Henke (2022a) and Henke (2022b), which explain the origin of the Talking Snake myth of Genesis 3. Lundahl (2022k) makes the following comments about point #8:
“I already refuted that claim, his hypotheses #3 and #4 basically involving a process where made up stories (comedy's like Menaechmi, novels like Apuleius' Golden Ass, comic books like Spiderman, fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings) for no reason at all get to be considered as historically transmitted arguably true stories.”
No. As I explained in Henke (2022b) and my other essays, Lundahl (2022c) and his other essays totally failed to refute Hypotheses #3 and #4. Also, in the above quotation from Lundahl (2022k) on point #8, Mr. Lundahl is totally confusing and improperly equating Hypothesis #4 with #3. In his paragraph, Lundahl (2022k) doesn’t realize that the two hypotheses have very different origins. As explained in Henke (2022a) and Henke (2022b), Hypothesis #3 states that the Talking Snake story arose because a group of people misinterpreted a campfire story or another work of fiction and thought that the story actually happened. On a smaller scale, this was also seen in one of President Reagan’s speeches, where he and his staff mistook a work of fiction about WWII as an actual event (Henke 2022a; 2022b). Fortunately, President Reagan’s mistake was quickly caught by fact checkers in the media before it could spread and become widely believed as an urban legend. In ancient times, fast checking and the rebuttal of misinterpretations was not so efficient. As I explain in Henke (2022a; 2022b; 2022ek), there have always been cases where large groups of people have misinterpreted works of fiction as something that actually happened.
While Hypothesis #3 involves people making accidental misinterpretations, in Hypothesis #4 people are deliberately deceived with propaganda and other lies by influential people. That is, in Hypothesis #4, powerful religious and/or political leaders deliberately deceive a large number of people through oral or written transmissions (Henke 2022a; 2022b; 2022es). Currently, this type of deception is being seen in how a majority of Russians believe the propaganda from Putin’s government on how Russia is supposedly “liberating” Ukraine from NAZIs. Also, see Henke (2022cc) for discussions on how tens of millions of Americans currently believe the lies that President Trump actually won the 2020 election. The fantasy involving St. Philomena is another prime example of how Hypothesis #4 can occur (Henke 2022es). A delusional 19th century nun invents a biography about an early saint and the 19th century Roman Catholic Church, as well as Mr. Lundahl and some other current conservative Catholics, blindly accept and believe that the lies are real.
Even if Mr. Lundahl eventually manages to dismiss Hypothesis #3 as a likely explanation for Genesis 3, he still has to dismiss Hypothesis #4, find acceptable evidence for his preferred Hypothesis #1 and then demonstrate that it’s more likely than Hypothesis #2. So far, he has not succeeded in any of his lofty goals. All of his talk about “first known audiences” is worthless rhetoric.” [my emphasis]
In my previous essay, Henke 2022Lj, I responded to Mr. Lundahl’s (2022x) comments on some of my statements in the above quotation from Henke (2022bq). Here, Mr. Lundahl in Lundahl (2022x) comments (in red) on the bolded sentence in the above quotation from Henke (2022bq) and to my link to an essay by Richard Cohen:
“Now, he kept returning to Reagan:
Hypothesis #3 in Henke (2022a) includes the following statement:
‘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.’
I looked up the source this time, a sweeping statement by a Cohen:
‘It was Reagan, you might remember, who told an annual meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society about a World War II B-17 commander who elected to stay with a wounded crewman rather than bail out of his stricken plane. "He took the boy's hand and said, 'Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together.' Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded."
Actually, Congressional Medal of Honor never awarded. There's some dispute about where Reagan got the story. Some said it was from the 1944 movie "A Wing and a Prayer" while others cited a Reader's Digest item. Whatever its source, Reagan's account was not true.’
If Richard Cohen doesn't know the source, how does he know the person involved? If he doesn't know the person involved, how does he know it was a fictitious character?
Readers' Digest actually contains lots of factual articles.
However, it just possibly could be that Richard Cohen was right. But WW-II itself is a fairly well established fact, right? So, we are dealing with a pseudo-event at the margin of real events. By the way, you have failed to provide sources for the fiction so one can check it is such.
Now, at the margins of what well established fact would Mr. Henke put Genesis 3?”
I actually remember that incident. Reagan or, more likely his writing staff, did misinterpret a work of fiction for reality and it became a big news item because some of Reagan’s critics were claiming that he was becoming senile and wasn’t always able to distinguish fiction from reality. It turns out that the story was in both a movie and a Reader’s Digest article. We don’t know which of these two sources that Reagan’s writing staff might have used and misinterpreted, but the point is that Hypothesis #3 in Henke (2022a) is true. Sometimes people misinterpret works of fiction as reality.
Although I typically use a number of sources in my research on a topic, I may only link to one or two of them as examples, like I did with Mr. Cohen’s article. Instead of just making accusations against Mr. Cohen, perhaps Mr. Lundahl should have asked me for more information or, even better, perhaps, Mr. Lundahl could have done some leg work on his own in one of the many libraries in Paris, France, and confirmed the story for himself. Considering how poorly Mr. Lundahl references and uses the literature (e.g., Henke 2022s, Henke 2022fq and Henke 2022gq), he has no authority to criticize how either Mr. Cohen or I reference our articles.
Again, we don’t know who wrote Genesis 3 or when. The evidence is long gone (e.g., Henke 2022kb). As I stated many times before, Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that Genesis 3 actually happened (Henke 2022Lb; Henke 2022ky). I don’t have to demonstrate that it did not because skepticism is automatically the default position for such stories (Henke 2022dv).