sotto voce

Google is not character sensitive. Please let me know which of those results have the specified capitalisation.

mountainman

I am guided by the following ....

"...an historian can be guilty of forging evidence or of knowingly used forged evidence in order to support his own historical discourse. One is never simple-minded enough about the condemnation of forgeries. Pious frauds are frauds, for which one must show no piety - and no pity."

- On Pagans, Jews and Christians, Arnaldo Momigliano, 1987

From this I see that if there were forgeries (in this instance by an historian), then the historian denounces and condemns them as fraudulent activity.


I see the role of the historian as more than that ....

But I have good reason to distrust any historian who has nothing new to say or who produces novelties, either in facts or in interpretations, which I discover to be unreliable. Historians are supposed to be discoverers of truths. No doubt they must turn their research into some sort of story before being called historians. But their stories must be true stories. [...] History is no epic, history is no novel, history is no propaganda because in these literary genres control of the evidence is optional, not compulsory.

~ Arnaldo Momigliano, The rhetoric of history, Comparative Criticism, p. 260

sotto voce

But does your reply have anything to do with the post it addressed?

sotto voce

Sorry, that should be:

Google is not case sensitive.

mountainman

The reply emphasizes that the historian should both report and denounce forgeries as fraud.

Their is no moral legitimacy in pious forgery. Everyone should be aware of that from the start. Hence the citations from AM, upon whom I rely for a number of positions. And yes, I already know that it is possible to hire defence attorneys to defend any crime.

But this brings us back to the OP and what may be perceived by some as the moral legitimacy of either Constantine's or Muhammad's war. The emergence of planet Earth's two major monotheistic religions and the holy writs thereof appear on the wings of these wars that happened over a millenium ago. Canonization followed in each case, by the regime which was successful in fighting to retain the newly established orthodoxy.

Propaganda is often used in war in order to subvert the conquered nations, and to rule them, from the top down via the technology of written literature, especially the codex in late antiquity, as recent manuscript finds have found.

As far as the historian is concerned, to what extent are the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran not merely relics of war-time propaganda from their respective barbaric epochs?

mountainman

I should have written "Christian and Islamic monotheistic dogmas" but the last two words were infected with the capitalisation twitch associated with the first two words.

sotto voce

Oh, that infection. The 'Christian thread' infection.

sotto voce

Islam and papism. Actually, papism is polytheist. The thing they really have in common is that Jesus didn't actually die.

Islam says that he didn't die at all. Curiously, Allah forgot to tell everyone for 600 years, and then took 25 years to get the truth recorded, in camera, though the dictation got lost, somehow. If that's major among humans, humans cannot be too significant.

Papalism says that Jesus is still dying, and will never actually die, while there are fat people's mouths to feed. That's why it's 'major'.

In other words, both Islam and papalism said, "There is no Christ, and we will shove some cold steel into you to prove it beyond doubt." The same intent applies today, though of course democracy and the law limits the effects.

Doug Shaver

No. It had to do with something sotto said in the post to which I was responding.

mountainman

There was nothing like a long sharp sword to get people to stand in line in the belief queue. The monopoly of "religious privileges" seems to be just a spin-off racket that flowed out of the respecive wars.


It's quite shocking. But then again, it must be a comfort for them not to have to face the cold hard facts of such wars.



True. Perhaps .... "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls"?