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Progress on D.M. Murdock's The Christ Conspiracy

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Zwaarddijk

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As quite a bit of time now has passed since last there was a thread on this, I figure it might be good time for an update.
I post this here so that any fans of Murdock's can defend her claims if they find that I am overstating the case against her work. Meanwhile, I also invite non-fans of hers to scrutinize my work as critically as possible, in order that unjustified criticism be removed or corrected. As I have been banned from Murdock's forum on trumped-up charges of sockpuppetry, I cannot post this criticism directly at her over there. As I know some of her fans are active on this forum, I figure I may as well invite them to defend her.

So, what have I recently found in my in-depth review of The Christ Conspiracy?
  • lots of weasel words
  • representing outdated research on languages as though it was current and authoritative
  • misrepresenting a small minority theory in historical linguistics as though it "seeks to trace language to India around 12,000 years ago".
  • even more false etymologies
  • bad logic
And that's just in one third of the chapter I currently am reviewing.

A more general problem that appears throughout her work is that most sources end on unverifiable links. Murdock boasts of the number of references her works have, but these references tend to be no better than references-to-references-to-references-to-assertions. Oftentimes, nowhere along the line will you find any fact that can actually be checked - no mention of which particular Egyptian tomb's walls the depiction of the relevant fish trap was to be found at or even a work giving a picture of it; her restatement of what her sources say often makes fact-checking difficult, as she leaves out important details such as which particular language or region or culture the claim applies to ("a language of British Columbia" when the source specifically says Haida - the native American languages of British Columbia number more than two dozen, "goddess-worshipping cultures" holding the number 666 sacred - which cultures were these? Am I to dig through every goddess-worshipping culture until I find not a single one did so?)

Her sources do not reliably understand their own sources - Carpenter misunderstood CFP von Martius, Barbara Walker barely understands any of her sources, Jochmans quote-mines Biruni, Churchward either fails to understand or misrepresents Codex Chimalpopoca, but Murdock also gets a lot of things about it wrong, Murdock herself fails to understand Merlin Stone (upcoming post) or alternatively is not too clear on the difference between Levitical marriage practices and Levirate marriage (a thing that makes her argument seem all the more convincing) (but as mentioned, that is for a post that'll probably appear this weekend), Murdock reads things into the bible that definitely is not in it (Jacob's ladder having 72 angels on it), etc. There is a lot of this stuff.

There is a fair share of references that point to the wrong work; in case of Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets and Women's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, this is an understandable mistake, but one that happens quite often. There is, however, several instances where a reference is to an "entirely wrong book", where it turns out there probably is no connection between the correct book and the one the reference accidentally points to. There is no way I am going to search through all books it might be in in order to trace down increasingly unreliable sources.

The most awesome quote as far as unreliable sourcing goes in TCC even refers to Naacal texts as evidence; for those who are unaware of this, the Naacal's are a 19th century theosophist invention, basically exiles from a sunken Atlantis of the Pacific, a civilization supposed to have flourished 50 000 years ago. Yes, apparently Murdock's sources have access to texts from them! That is just how awesome sources she has.

Ultimately, despite her great number of sources, very many claims that would require sources in order to be even remotely credible lack them, whereas trivial and uncontested claims often are given sources. This does not help the critical scholar, and indicates to me that Murdock does not understand the function of references - viz. to give an accounting for why one thinks one's claims are credible, and a method for the critical scholar to verify whether the claims add up or not.

Murdock should also cut out the middle-men in her sourcing, as currently, verifying claims tends to end up a wild goose chase, where after having located four relatively obscure books each pointing to the next one, the fifth is nowhere to be found. At that point, frustration tends to get overwhelming.
 
I just saw your website:

http://somerationalism.blogspot.com/

Amazing! I have never seen a book review that may be longer than the original book. Did you do this just for personal enhancement, or do you think it will make a difference for anyone? Murdock's fans seem to belong to a cult, and no presentation of the soundest argument would seem to nudge their opinions. On the contrary, they are like Christian apologists, and they thrive on debate.
 
I started this - I figured it would be pretty short - to answer a question by a friend on rationalskepticism, viz. "is Acharya S reliable". I figured ten posts would do, and then I could go on with the next book, and then I could start writing about other pseudoscientific issues and bad scholarship in general - a topic that I find interesting.

The project grew quite a bit due to a number of reasons. First among these is Murdock's favorite answer to any criticism: she (and her fans) regularly accuses critics of not having read or understood her work. By meticulously documenting that I in fact have read her work, and that this, indeed is what she is saying, I hope to preemptively counteract that criticism - once I am done, I hope that apologetic lie is put to rest forever. This behavior of theirs took on a downright pathetic level with Ropert Tulip of this forum, who essentially fully stripped a claim of meaning in order to save her claim from being wrong.

Many of the problems are not trivial to explain. I.e. historical linguistics is not something that can be summarized in a short post. Similar problems occur when exposing a multitude of fallacies in her work. This too contributes to length.

Further, Murdock's fans' rabid response - including the moderator of her forum calling me a sociopath - made me very determined to carry this out.

Finally, since the posts are somewhat meant to be stand-alone, some stuff will be repeated, thus contributing to the length of the blog by now.
 
I think a lot of good can come out of this. About a year ago, James McGrath came up with the idea of an "Index to Mythicist Claims" wiki site. He set up the website, but it has not yet been developed. See here:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/explor...the-positive-case-for-a-historical-jesus.html
http://historicaljesus.wikia.com/wiki/TalkHistoricity:_An_Index_of_Mythicist_Claims_Wiki

It is inspired by the anti-creationist "Index to Creationist Claims," which is a very good resource. Somebody even turned it into an Android app.

I got started on the very same idea about three years, and it likewise fell be the wayside. But, maybe we can jumpstart McGrath's project back into action.
 
Congrats for your heroic efforts, Zwaarddijk. Acharya S's work is remarkably full of errors. I must say that I found Krishna ~ "Christna" to be a particularly absurd howler.
 
A bit of a thread necromancy, I admit, but I have posted a conclusion to the review of The Christ Conspiracy.

http://somerationalism.blogspot.fi/2014/11/conclusions-christ-conspiracy.html

Feedback, especially criticism is welcome. (I am aware there's some issues with my phrasing at some places, and every now and then I edit posts that suffer from that, but even such criticism is welcome. Mainly, what interests me is criticism that points to possible mistaken understandings of Murdock's claims or mistaken facts on my part.)
 
Zwaarddijk, thanx for going through all that trouble. It's interesting that Acharya S relies so much on games of "Telephone". That's what happens when people refer to each other's works, and that's why it's good to try to get as close as possible to the primary sources. I remember once tracking down Francesco Sizzi's Dianoia Astronomica online -- a freebie scan was available on Google Play. I did that so I could read his astrological argument against Jupiter's moons. I found it on page 16. It was in Latin, so I could sort of half-read bits of it, but it was enough to recognize his astrological argument about how the seven planets correspond to the seven openings in the head.
 
I read your stuff on linguistics, like Studies in Pseudoscience: On Goropism and Etymology.

From goropism - Wiktionary, the term got its origin in this way: "Johannes Goropius Becanus proposed such a theory, in which Brabantic, a Dutch dialect, was the language spoken in Paradise."

From  Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519 - 1572),
Goropius theorized that Antwerpian Brabantic, spoken in the region between the Scheldt and Meuse Rivers, was the original language spoken in Paradise. Goropius believed that the most ancient language on Earth would be the simplest language, and that the simplest language would contain mostly short words. Since the number of short words is higher in Brabantic than it is in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Goropius reasoned that it was the older language.

A corollary of this theory was that all languages derived ultimately from Brabantic. The Latin word for “oak,” quercus, Goropius derived from werd-cou (“keeps out cold”); the Hebrew name “Noah” he derived from nood (“need”). Goropius also believed that Adam and Eve were Brabantic names (from Hath-Dam, or “dam against hate"; and Eu-Vat, “barrel from which people originated,” or from Eet-Vat, “oath-barrel,” respectively). Another corollary was the placement of the Garden of Eden itself in the Brabant region. In the book known as Hieroglyphica, Goropius also proved to his own satisfaction that Egyptian hieroglyphics represented Brabantic.
Click to expand...
Zwaarddijk, I gather from your discussion of Acharya S's works that this is the sort of linguistics she does.
 
lpetrich said:
I read your stuff on linguistics, like Studies in Pseudoscience: On Goropism and Etymology.

From goropism - Wiktionary, the term got its origin in this way: "Johannes Goropius Becanus proposed such a theory, in which Brabantic, a Dutch dialect, was the language spoken in Paradise."

From  Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519 - 1572),
Goropius theorized that Antwerpian Brabantic, spoken in the region between the Scheldt and Meuse Rivers, was the original language spoken in Paradise. Goropius believed that the most ancient language on Earth would be the simplest language, and that the simplest language would contain mostly short words. Since the number of short words is higher in Brabantic than it is in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Goropius reasoned that it was the older language.

A corollary of this theory was that all languages derived ultimately from Brabantic. The Latin word for “oak,” quercus, Goropius derived from werd-cou (“keeps out cold”); the Hebrew name “Noah” he derived from nood (“need”). Goropius also believed that Adam and Eve were Brabantic names (from Hath-Dam, or “dam against hate"; and Eu-Vat, “barrel from which people originated,” or from Eet-Vat, “oath-barrel,” respectively). Another corollary was the placement of the Garden of Eden itself in the Brabant region. In the book known as Hieroglyphica, Goropius also proved to his own satisfaction that Egyptian hieroglyphics represented Brabantic.
Click to expand...
Zwaarddijk, I gather from your discussion of Acharya S's works that this is the sort of linguistics she does.
Click to expand...

Yes. Her objective is not the same as that of Goropius (that is, to show that some specific language is the ancestor of all languages of the world, although she skates damn close to that in her claiming that Chaldean might be proto-Nostratic), but her methodology is no improvement on his. The easiest examples to pinpoint are Sol-om-on as two words for sun + "aum", or Israel as Isis-Ra-El.
 
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