Ch. 4: Background Knowledge (Christianity) (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

[youkrst]

I could no more be anti theist than you Flann could be anti atheist, let us not confuse our ists with our isms, and let us not confuse our isms with the specific ideas that comprise them

For me I couldn't really be an anti theist as theists are human and I am human too, so in a way to be anti theist is to be anti myself.

The only thing I can really be anti toward is an idea, and even then it depends entirely on the specific idea in view.

If someone says here is my theism, I believe the order of nature speaks of a mystery and I call that mystery God, furthermore I believe that God is the one in the bible, but I hold this as a position of faith and I don't think anyone is going to hell if they see things differently, this is simply a religious way that I find works for me.

Well I would find it not particularly objectionable even though I might think them wrong.

If however someone says here is my theism, my holy book is literally true and if you don't believe in my way you are a sinner and you are going to hell. You are under the influence of a fallen angel a malevolent spiritual being, and until you repent and accept Jesus as your lord and saviour you are just a puppet of the devil.

Well this person is a loony.

But in both cases I am not anti theist

its the ideas that I can be anti not the people who hold them, the minute someone says atheist love is just as good as Christian love, atheist love is just as good as Muslim love, love is love it doesn't have a brand name well I am inclined to warm to such a person.

But when the implication is that I am somehow missing out because I don't embrace a particular faith literally I feel I must resist that idea.

Because it is offensive to my reason and my sense of the value of all people whether they have a religion or not.

So I can't really see how someone can reasonably be anti theist

I can see how they might be frustrated at some religious ideas, I can see how they might think a particular doctrine is hideous. But that is entirely different from being anti theist, that is just hating harmful or unreasonable ideas.

Bad thinking is bad thinking, makes no difference who does it, it's still bad thinking.

[DWill]

I'd just say that it's a fine line to walk between hating the idea yet not hating the person having it. We may think we're capable of making this separation, but I have some doubts whether our brains are equipped to do it. If we think that an idea that we abhor pervades a person, emotionally we must hate the person; person and idea become merged and that person becomes an enemy. It may be appropriate to hate someone, in extreme instances such as Nazism.

To avoid this trap, I think we should be careful about labeling ideas as the enemy.

[DB Roy]

He and his fact-checkers still did err here. Schizotypal is used only in combination with Personality Disorder, as your source said.

Sorry for the pedantry. I think Carrier should have used Bipolar here.

You can take that up with Carrier. I couldn't care less. The people that started Christianity were sick in the head--I don't care if they were bi-polar or crackheads--that admission is good enough for me.

[DB Roy]

And, by the way, I disagree with you 110%. The following is a good summation of early Christian leadership:

DSM-5[edit]
In the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, schizotypal personality disorder is defined as a "pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts." At least five of the following symptoms must be present: ideas of reference, strange beliefs or magical thinking, abnormal perceptual experiences, strange thinking and speech, paranoia, inappropriate or constricted affect, strange behavior or appearance, lack of close friends, and excessive social anxiety that does not abate and stems from paranoia rather than negative judgments about self. These symptoms must not occur only during the course of a disorder with similar symptoms (such as schizophrenia or autism spectrum disorder).[19]

They weren't crazy. But they may as well have been.

[DWill]

We don't have a way to prove this, DB Roy. I'll just say that someone considered to be Schizotypal isn't a candidate to get others to line up behind him in order to start a movement. With Schizotypal you get Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Whether we approve of these Christians or not, by any evidence the ones who created and sustained the movement didn't form a cluster of mentally ill people.

[DB Roy]

We don't have a way to prove this, DB Roy. I'll just say that someone considered to be Schizotypal isn't a candidate to get others to line up behind him in order to start a movement.

Bullocks. It happens all the time. Some people have a great need to follow someone whether that person wants to be followed or not. Some people are fascinated by certain things. It's called "enthrallment." Such people become easily sucked in. In a society such as what existed in the ancient world where the crazy was also the divine, I can see how a person with an enthrallment disorder can fall under the spell of someone with a schizotypal disorder. And the schizotypal personality might just accept that kind of adulation:

Horrified by the absence of a clearly bounded, cohesive, coherent, reliable, and self-regulating self – the mentally abnormal person resorts to one of the following solutions, all of which involve reliance upon fake or invented personality elements:

a. The Narcissistic Solution – The substitution of the True Self with a False Self. The narcissistic solution is the subject of this book. The Schizotypal Personality Disorder largely belongs here because of its emphasised fantastic and magical thinking. The Borderline Personality Disorder is a case of a failed narcissistic solution. In BPD, the patient is aware (at least unconsciously) that the solution that he adopted is "not working". This is the source of his anxiety (something is fuzzily wrong, or a foreboding sense, a premonition is present), of his fear of abandonment (by the solution). This generates his identity disturbance, his affective instability, suicidal ideation and suicidal action, chronic feelings of emptiness, rage attacks, and transient (stress related) paranoid ideation.

http://samvak.tripod.com/8.html

Jesus could fall under that classification. Telling people not to consider him divine or a Christ and yet always putting himself in the situation where the subject naturally arises--even asking people who they think he is (identity disturbance), willing to die on the cross and put himself in the situation to make it happen (suicidal ideation and suicidal action), throwing the moneylenders out of the temple (rage attack), paranoid ideation ("he that is not with me is against me" --Matthew 12:30).

With Schizotypal you get Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Whether we approve of these Christians or not, by any evidence the ones who created and sustained the movement didn't form a cluster of mentally ill people.

Ted Kaczynski was not schizotypal; he was a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic and diagnosed this way multiple times. Schizotypal and schizophrenic are not the same thing. One of a personality disorder and the other is psychosis. The former knows or at least can be made aware of his false reality while the latter is completely lost to it:

Shortly after Mr. Kaczynski's arrest while still housed in Montana, Dale war-son, Ph.D., administered a battery of psychological tests to Mr. Kaczynski. No report of his findings is available, but the rest results were interpreted and expanded upon by two other defense experts, Ruben Gur, Ph.D., and Karen Froming, Ph.D. On 06,1-1-5/96 and 06/16/96, Mr. Kaczynski was interviewed by Raquel Gur, M.D., Ph.D., and neuropsychological testing was conducted by Ruben Gur- It was Dr. Raquel Gur's impression that Mr. Kaczynski met the diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, and Dr. Ruben Gur's impression that the testing was not inconsistent with this. After sharing their opinions with Mr. Kaczynski, he refused to talk with them further and expressed his wish for his defense attorney to avoid further use of their services or bringing their findings to light.

Dr. Froming also interviewed Mr. Kaczynski in February 1997 and complete additional neuropsychological testing. She also reviewed previous testing done after he entered Harvard. Phone interview revealed that Mr. Kaczynski also had been administered the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) during that period, but it had never been scored. She scored it and indicated that the themes he presented throughout the test consisted of people being dominated by others, that his responses showed no personal interactions through any of the cards, and showed a complete absence of affiliation. She opined that Mr. Kaczynski was suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia. She indicated that Mr. Kaczynski refused to talk with her further after she shared her opinion with him.

David Foster, M.D., evaluated Mr. Kaczynski in late 1997 and opined that Mr. Kaczynski had an aversion to evaluation by psychiatrists and he suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia. Mr. Kaczynski refused to talk with him further after he shared his opinions and was absent over the Christmas holiday period.

The declaration of Xavier Amador, Ph.D., was also reviewed. Although he did not see Mr. Kaczynski, he opined that he suffered from Schizophrenia and claimed Mr. Kaczynski's reluctance to submit to psychiatric evaluations and treatment were a hallmark of Schizophrenia.
http://paulcooijmans.com/psychology/unabombreport2.html

This does not fit the early Christian leaders. They were loony but not like that. Schizotypal would describe them far more adequately especially when it comes to magical thinking. You take Stephen seeing the risen Christ in the air and no one else does. What can we conclude?

1. Stephen, while not psychotic, has issues. This has a high prior probability simply anybody who sees something bizarre that no one else can see is ALWAYS diagnosed with some kind of mental problem.
2. The writer made it up. This too has a high prior probability simply because we have an enormous amount of fiction that describes incredible things as being real.
3. Stephen really did see the risen Christ who did not want to be visible to anyone else. Very, very low prior probability and I don't have to explain why except to say it just doesn't happen.

So there you go. Which item to do you find most satisfactory?

[Robert Tulip]

The early Christians read their scriptures allegorically and not as literal history as far as the higher mysteries are concerned.

Yes, this is a key point, about how interpretation of text is subject to evolutionary drift under strong selective pressure. Assumptions about meaning that were prevalent in the early church could have been lost completely under the weight of later ideology. This applies especially to the problem of literalism.

It is essential to consider how far religious thinkers in the ancient world mixed up fact and fantasy. A fantasy is always more impressive when packaged as fact, but over time the packaging can come to be imagined as the content where that meets social incentives.

Their principles were encoded as a historical tale and sold that way to the lower initiates of the cult but the higher initiates knew better.

In regard to this observation of cultic structure, there is much in common between early Christianity and Freemasonry with its degrees of initiation. This is a topic that is subject to strong suppression by the church, such that Christianity has been hollowed out, an empty shell with its original content lost. Masonic traditions have also changed over time, but study of their origins in pagan ritual indicate strong structural links with religion. The higher initiates in the early church understood the allegorical nature of religious language, as this is the only explanation for why there is such strong solar and cosmic imagery in Christianity.

As the 3rd century Church Father, Origen, put it: the gospels were literally false but allegorically true. Origen stated that "the spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in a material falsehood.” He said that “simpletons” would be better off to believe literally even though the literal reading is false because they wouldn’t comprehend anything higher.

This principle of the noble lie from Plato is playing with fire. It is seductive for an institution to put out a ‘simplified’ or distorted version of its ideas because the common illiterate masses cannot understand and are not interested in less sensational and more complex teaching. When people believe the lie though, the spiritual truth is overwhelmed by the material falsehood. That is what happened to Origen’s own ideas. The ability of the original initiates to maintain control was broken by the mass appeal of the fantasy.

Eusebius agreed with this line of reasoning wholeheartedly.

I would like to see some quotes from Eusebius about his ‘pious fraud’ theories.

But this kind of reasoning goes back at least as far as Plato who also endorsed it. In fact, Eusebius quoted Plato from Laws in support of it. The same argument is advanced in Republic.

And Plato imagined that he could play philosopher king to the tyrant Dionysus of Syracuse, and was rapidly exposed as politically naïve.

Clement of Alexandria agree with the words of Plato in that the common people cannot handle the truth and must be told falsehoods in which the truths are veiled in allegory, myth and riddle.

Clement had some sympathy for Gnostic ideas and like his pupil Origen was later condemned as a heretic despite being among the principle early advocates for literal faith, for example explicitly denouncing the Gnostic view that the disciples were allegory for the zodiac.

Augustine, some centuries later, condemned this view but defended when it came to the bible meaning that he actually supported it.

Yes, Augustine is a hypocrite, but this is typical for apologists who say whatever is convenient. Augustine promoted literal faith but in his discussion of the seven days of creation in Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegoric ... f_creation said “things may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters.”

[DWill]

We don't have a way to prove this, DB Roy. I'll just say that someone considered to be Schizotypal isn't a candidate to get others to line up behind him in order to start a movement.

Bullocks. It happens all the time. Some people have a great need to follow someone whether that person wants to be followed or not. Some people are fascinated by certain things. It's called "enthrallment." Such people become easily sucked in. In a society such as what existed in the ancient world where the crazy was also the divine, I can see how a person with an enthrallment disorder can fall under the spell of someone with a schizotypal disorder. And the schizotypal personality might just accept that kind of adulation

Okay, well I really don't know exactly what Richard Carrier was trying to do with the mental illness angle, since I haven't read the book, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say, either. Is it that this religion was a product of the diseased brains of the small percentage of the population that had serious mental illness? I've never heard that said before. I'm pretty sure, though, that in the ancient world visions and magical happenings were not all that unusual, so for people to believe what was reported of them didn't take any type of "enthrallment disorder." Look at all the wild creations and beliefs that were out there. Are they all supposed to be the products of mental illness, or does that pertain only to Christian beliefs? The main point about Schizotypal people is that charisma and the ability to make others follow would be lacking. Nor is it true as a generalization that crazy people were revered as in touch with the divine. Exorcism was the remedy sought for a lot of it.

Horrified by the absence of a clearly bounded, cohesive, coherent, reliable, and self-regulating self – the mentally abnormal person resorts to one of the following solutions, all of which involve reliance upon fake or invented personality elements:

a. The Narcissistic Solution – The substitution of the True Self with a False Self. The narcissistic solution is the subject of this book. The Schizotypal Personality Disorder largely belongs here because of its emphasised fantastic and magical thinking. The Borderline Personality Disorder is a case of a failed narcissistic solution. In BPD, the patient is aware (at least unconsciously) that the solution that he adopted is "not working". This is the source of his anxiety (something is fuzzily wrong, or a foreboding sense, a premonition is present), of his fear of abandonment (by the solution). This generates his identity disturbance, his affective instability, suicidal ideation and suicidal action, chronic feelings of emptiness, rage attacks, and transient (stress related) paranoid ideation.

http://samvak.tripod.com/8.html

And this presentation of self is extremely unlikely to gain the person admirers. Rather, it puts him in continual conflict with everyone and isolates him.

Jesus could fall under that classification. Telling people not to consider him divine or a Christ and yet always putting himself in the situation where the subject naturally arises--even asking people who they think he is (identity disturbance), willing to die on the cross and put himself in the situation to make it happen (suicidal ideation and suicidal action), throwing the moneylenders out of the temple (rage attack), paranoid ideation ("he that is not with me is against me" --Matthew 12:30).

Of course Carrier could not agree with you since Jesus is a fiction, and this psychological profile would be a clever fictional device, though for what purpose I couldn't say.

With Schizotypal you get Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Whether we approve of these Christians or not, by any evidence the ones who created and sustained the movement didn't form a cluster of mentally ill people.

Ted Kaczynski was not schizotypal; he was a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic and diagnosed this way multiple times. Schizotypal and schizophrenic are not the same thing. One of a personality disorder and the other is psychosis. The former knows or at least can be made aware of his false reality while the latter is completely lost to it:

Shortly after Mr. Kaczynski's arrest while still housed in Montana, Dale war-son, Ph.D., administered a battery of psychological tests to Mr. Kaczynski. No report of his findings is available, but the rest results were interpreted and expanded upon by two other defense experts, Ruben Gur, Ph.D., and Karen Froming, Ph.D. On 06,1-1-5/96 and 06/16/96, Mr. Kaczynski was interviewed by Raquel Gur, M.D., Ph.D., and neuropsychological testing was conducted by Ruben Gur- It was Dr. Raquel Gur's impression that Mr. Kaczynski met the diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, and Dr. Ruben Gur's impression that the testing was not inconsistent with this. After sharing their opinions with Mr. Kaczynski, he refused to talk with them further and expressed his wish for his defense attorney to avoid further use of their services or bringing their findings to light.

Dr. Froming also interviewed Mr. Kaczynski in February 1997 and complete additional neuropsychological testing. She also reviewed previous testing done after he entered Harvard. Phone interview revealed that Mr. Kaczynski also had been administered the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) during that period, but it had never been scored. She scored it and indicated that the themes he presented throughout the test consisted of people being dominated by others, that his responses showed no personal interactions through any of the cards, and showed a complete absence of affiliation. She opined that Mr. Kaczynski was suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia. She indicated that Mr. Kaczynski refused to talk with her further after she shared her opinion with him.

David Foster, M.D., evaluated Mr. Kaczynski in late 1997 and opined that Mr. Kaczynski had an aversion to evaluation by psychiatrists and he suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia. Mr. Kaczynski refused to talk with him further after he shared his opinions and was absent over the Christmas holiday period.

The declaration of Xavier Amador, Ph.D., was also reviewed. Although he did not see Mr. Kaczynski, he opined that he suffered from Schizophrenia and claimed Mr. Kaczynski's reluctance to submit to psychiatric evaluations and treatment were a hallmark of Schizophrenia.
http://paulcooijmans.com/psychology/unabombreport2.html

This does not fit the early Christian leaders. They were loony but not like that. Schizotypal would describe them far more adequately especially when it comes to magical thinking. You take Stephen seeing the risen Christ in the air and no one else does. What can we conclude?

1. Stephen, while not psychotic, has issues. This has a high prior probability simply anybody who sees something bizarre that no one else can see is ALWAYS diagnosed with some kind of mental problem.
2. The writer made it up. This too has a high prior probability simply because we have an enormous amount of fiction that describes incredible things as being real.
3. Stephen really did see the risen Christ who did not want to be visible to anyone else. Very, very low prior probability and I don't have to explain why except to say it just doesn't happen.

So there you go. Which item to do you find most satisfactory?

We can also conclude that the writer reports what he heard from others and presents it as credible, which might be not unusual in the culture. That would be my preferred choice. I have to argue with no. one, because if he hallucinates, he is by definition having a psychotic event. We need to investigate further the social aspects of visionary experiences, the ways that a certain social milieu and established traditions can produce a high incidence of reports of these experiences. In other words, they do not need to be considered marks of abnormality. It's very likely, too, in my opinion, that exaggeration and false reports would be common, since there is so much positive gain to be had for the accepted visionary.

I can see now where Schizotypal PD might work in terms of its odd beliefs and perceptions. What I think isn't acknowledged is the rest of such a disorder, the way it isolates the person from the rest of society, and the person's own disconnection from others. That isn't going to cut it where evangelizing and proselytizing are concerned.

[DB Roy]

Okay, well I really don't know exactly what Richard Carrier was trying to do with the mental illness angle, since I haven't read the book, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say, either.

I can't speak for Carrier but for me, and probably him too, there has to be a way to explain all these visions and speaking in tongues and prophesying. This is certainly not how normal people act. So, were all these people lying? Certainly, some were but they can't all be lying. And even if some actually saw a true divine figure, for example, could ALL have seen one? No, not likely. In fact, we would have to say that these people would be very, very few in number. Were they all taking hallucinogens? While I believe many were, statistical probability tells us they ALL weren't taking them. So, what's left? Mental condition. Some people were prone to seeing things, doing things and believing things. Classifying them as schizotypal is probably not far off the mark.

In short, there MUST be an explanation. When we take into consideration that flaky folks were seen by others back then as being a bit closer to god than the rest of us, then it becomes a good line of work for such people to go into and so religion would attract such people.

[DB Roy]

This principle of the noble lie from Plato is playing with fire. It is seductive for an institution to put out a ‘simplified’ or distorted version of its ideas because the common illiterate masses cannot understand and are not interested in less sensational and more complex teaching. When people believe the lie though, the spiritual truth is overwhelmed by the material falsehood. That is what happened to Origen’s own ideas. The ability of the original initiates to maintain control was broken by the mass appeal of the fantasy.

It was helped along by a church that only wanted the low-level initiates, those they could control and take advantage of. They had no intention of ever letting them become equals.

"Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever."