Mental regression!

In his most recent statement, Gaedhal says the following:

I mentioned Thucydides, because, as Otto English points out in Fake History a distinction is drawn—although largely artificially—between Herodotus and Thucydides.

In my view, the Old Testament takes a Herodotian method. In Genesis, there are three competing and contradictory accounts regarding who pimped his wife to whom. Did Abraham pimp his wife to Pharaoh, or Abimelech or was it his son, Isaac?

Two competing and contradictory accounts of the creation and the flood are given. Two contradictory versions of the binding of Isaac, the Flood, and the Joseph story are poorly woven together and given.

In the main, Herodotus would recount everything he heard, whereas, in the main, Thucydides would critique his sources, and only give the version of events that he found most probable. In the main, Thucydides was willing to throw unreliable stories into the waste-paper basket.

However, as English points out: Herodotus often acts in a Thucydidean way, and Thucydides often acts in a Herodotian way.

Thucydides was an excellent Ancient Historian… however, even the best ancient historian is woefully bad when compared to modern standards. One could not publish Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War as a scholarly monograph and have it pass peer review.

I also agree with Pine Creek Doug that if God is the ultimate author of the Gospels, then we should hold him to the same standards that we would hold a modern PhD historian to. We should be able to publish the four gospels as scholarly monographs and have them pass peer review. We are not able to do this. Thus, God is a poorer historian than any modern human historian who can pass peer review. Do not lower your standards for God!

The first thing that is scraped away by Thucydides’ razor into the waste-paper can is accounts of miracles.

As I said before: Christianity was never in date. The Bible is Herodotian in what it relates, and not Thucydidean. Thucydides essentially discovered how to do modern history in the 400s BCE. One of the things that the Christian Dark Ages reversed was Thucydidean historiography. A continent that had known Thucydides, thanks to Christianity, was soon swamped with Herodotian martyr tales, i.e. unevidenced religious fantasies.

I was listening to Book 1 of History of the Peloponnesian War, last night, by Thucydides. Homer says that an impossible number of Achaeans—essentially the entire population of Ancient Achaia—went off to fight in Troy. Thucydides therefore rejects Homer’s legendary number of Achaean fighters. Similarly, in the Pentateuch, an impossible number of Israelites—essentially the entire population of Ancient Egypt—left Egypt during the Exodus.

If Europe had still been in a Thucydidean mindset, then the stupid Jewish fairytale that is the Exodus would never have been accepted by this continent’s people. Lamentably, it has really only been in relatively modern times that Thucydidean criticism has been applied to the Bible. Spinoza, Valla, Thomas Paine et al. got the ball rolling. However, the Thucydidean ball should never have been stopped. What stopped it? Christianity.

This is why I am of the opinion that the Conflict Thesis—‘systematised academic knowledge’ (i.e. ‘science’ sensu lato) and revealed religion are diametrically opposed to one another—is correct, and also that the Dark Ages were real.

In ancient times, Homer was no less divine than Moses. Indeed, like Jesus Christ, in some legends Homer was born of a virgin. And yet Thucydides contradicted this divine oracle. Lamentably, nobody contradicted Moses until the Renaissance.

The staggering regression that the white man suffered with the imposition of Christianity in the Middle Ages reminds me of what I was saying this year about the friend I knew when I was a teenager and, after decades of not treating him, found him in a state of psychosis: a regression like treating an eighteen-month-old infant! (cf. my series on malignant narcissism: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6).

A sage from ancient India might say something similar if he had been long enough to see Rome before and after the imposition of Christianity by Constantine. What Gaedhal says seems to me very true, and we could even illustrate it with the subject that is my forte: the analysis of my family.

Unlike Protestantism, in Catholicism the Church of Rome claims to have proof of divine intervention through miracles. Psychically, I grew up under my father’s sky where the miracles of the Virgin of Lourdes—the French virgin of the 19th-century Tort family—were taken as absolute fact. The same can be said of my late father’s claims about the 20th-century miracles attributed to the Virgin of Fatima in Portugal. Although after two years of my life studying the Shroud of Turin I ended up sceptical of the supernatural hypothesis, my father continued to believe up to the present century that this Catholic relic proved the resurrection of Jesus. (I studied the literature on the shroud from 1988 to 1990 because I was still struggling with parental introjects—cf. my autobiography.)

When at Easter some of the American white nationalist sites post entries commemorating the day, they have no idea that believing this Jewish fairytale is as dramatic a psychogenic regression as that of the friend whom I knew sane and, after a few decades, I found him with a psychic structure reminiscent of that of a small infant.