This is interesting....

...and a first rate bit of historical detective work.

There is far too much pseudo-history in the world.

Atheists defame Catholic priest who led the way into rationality.

Hey, it's just a movie!

More schlocky history coming from Hollywood:

ROLAND EMMERICH’S film “Anonymous,” which opens next week, “presents a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.” That’s according to the lesson plans that Sony Pictures has been distributing to literature and history teachers in the hope of convincing students that Shakespeare was a fraud. A documentary by First Folio Pictures (of which Mr. Emmerich is president) will also be part of this campaign.


So much for “Hey, it’s just a movie!”


The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, dates from 1920, when J. Thomas Looney, an English writer who loathed democracy and modernity, argued that only a worldly nobleman could have created such works of genius; Shakespeare, a glover’s son and money-lender, could never have done so. Looney also showed that episodes in de Vere’s life closely matched events in the plays. His theory has since attracted impressive supporters, including Sigmund Freud, the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and his former colleague John Paul Stevens, and now Mr. Emmerich.

But promoters of de Vere’s cause have a lot of evidence to explain away, including testimony of contemporary writers, court records and much else that confirms that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. Meanwhile, not a shred of documentary evidence has ever been found that connects de Vere to any of the plays or poems. As for the argument that the plays rehearse the story of de Vere’s life: since the 1850s, when Shakespeare’s authorship was first questioned, the lives of 70 or so other candidates have also confidently been identified in them. Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.

“Anonymous” offers an ingenious way to circumvent such objections: there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship; the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case. In dramatizing this conspiracy, Mr. Emmerich has made a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on hard evidence. Indeed, Mr. Emmerich has treated fact-based arguments and the authorities who make them with suspicion. As he told an MTV interviewer last month when asked about the authorship question: “I think it’s not good to tell kids lies in school.”

The most troubling thing about “Anonymous” is not that it turns Shakespeare into an illiterate money-grubber. It’s not even that England’s virgin Queen Elizabeth is turned into a wantonly promiscuous woman who is revealed to be both the lover and mother of de Vere. Rather, it’s that in making the case for de Vere, the film turns great plays into propaganda.

More Scientific Shenanigans.

"Sybil" was nonsense.

Pseudoknowledge - Bible Edition.

Apparently, the "eye of the needle" doesn't refer to a gate in Jerusalem, Gehenna was not where trash was burned and the High Priest did not tie a rope around his ankle when he entered the Holy of Holies.

Darn.  Half my knowledge of the bible went out the window with those three alone.

Fight the Pseudo-knowledge!

Mark Shea fears that the constant din of anti-Christian agitprop making its way through Hollywood could be setting up a cultural climate to play out the worst prescriptions of the New Atheists:

Our Manufacturers of Culture, under the influence of powers and principalities, are slowly and surely preparing our culture to undertake a pogrom. Again and again, outright lies about Christians and their history get promulgated while we are told that it is “impeccable research” as, incredibly, the Da Vinci Code was described by one reviewer. Or, we get the ill-informed tracts by New Atheists that would embarrass any real atheist. But, above all, we begin to get the toxicity making its way into popular visual media like Agora.

The reason this matters is that visual media tend to bypass the critical intellect, and we live increasingly in a post-textual age. People get less and less of what they “know” about the world from reading books and processing arguments through critical faculties. Propaganda, prettily presented by the cinematographers art, can do wonders in transforming a culture. The image bypasses the rational faculties and people somehow find themselves agreeing around the water cooler that, as “everybody” knows, Christians are the enemies of learning who destroyed the Library at Alexandria.

Shea is referring to the movie "Agora" starring the beautiful Rachel Weisz.  It's a movie I ought to love, with its obscure history and panoramic recreation of Alexandria, but it is going to be chock-full of offensive and preachy pseudo-knowledge that I won't be able to stand it, particularly since that pseudo-knowledge will all be directed, once again, at slandering the name of my ancestors.

Here is a clip from "Agora" which shows the seductive way that the visual media insinuates itself into the mind:



So, after this, we will have a lot of insta-experts telling us all about Hypatia and how the Christians burned the Library of Alexandria, all of which will be wrong.  As Father Robert Baron explains:

Well, Hypatia was indeed a philosopher and she was indeed killed by a mob in 415, but practically everything else about the story that Gibbons and Sagan and Amenabar tell is false. For the complete de-bunking of the myth, take a look at David Hart Bentley's book Atheist Delusions, but allow me to share just a few details. The library of Alexandria was burnt to the ground, not by Christian mobs in the fifth century, but by Julius Caesar's troops, some forty years before Jesus was born. A temple to the god Serapis, called the Sarapeon, was built on the site of the ancient library (and there might have been some scrolls in it in the fifth century), and it was this building that was sacked by angry Christians in Hypatia's time, in response to pagan defilements of Christian houses of worship. Now mind you, I'm not excusing any of this for a moment. Whenever Christians respond to such attacks with violence, they are opposing themselves to the one who said, "love your enemies" and "turn the other cheek." But I am indeed insisting that the charge that Christians mindlessly and gleefully destroyed the greatest center of learning in the ancient world is a calumny.


More to it, Hypatia, sadly enough, found herself caught in the middle of a struggle between two powerful figures in Alexandria, namely, Orestes the civil authority and Cyril the bishop. She was most likely killed in retaliation for the murder of some of Cyril's supporters by agents of Orestes. Again, all of this is nasty stuff, and I'm not trying to exculpate anyone, but to pitch this largely political story as a battle between sweet reason and vicious religious superstition is misleading to say the very least. Finally, though the film portrays her largely as an astronomer (probably to compel comparisons with Galileo), Hypatia was best known as a neo-Platonist philosopher, a devotee of Plato and Plotinus. Not only were there Christians in Hypatia's classes, not only were Christian bishops among her circle of friends, but Christian theologians – Augustine, Ambrose, and Origen, just to name the most prominent – were enthusiastic advocates of neo-Platonism. Therefore, to portray her as the noble champion of reason over and against mouth-breathing Christian primitives is just ridiculous.

But none of this gets to the heart of why I object to Agora. In one of the most visually arresting scenes in the film, Amenabar brings his camera up to a very high point of vantage overlooking the Alexandria library while it is being ransacked by the Christian mob. From this perspective, the Christians look for all the world like scurrying cockroaches. In another memorable scene, the director shows a group of Christian thugs carting away the mangled corpses of Jews whom they have just put to death, and he composes the shot in such a way that the piled bodies vividly call to mind the bodies of the dead in photographs of Dachau and Auschwitz. The not so subtle implication of all of this is that Christians are dangerous types, threats to civilization, and that they should, like pests, be eliminated. I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenabar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians, and that precisely his manner of critique was used by some of the most vicious persecutors of Christianity in the last century. My very real fear is that the meanness, half-truths, and outright slanders in such books as Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion have begun to work their way into the popular culture.

We Christians have to resist – and keep setting the record straight.

Of course, when we do, we will be told that "it is only a story," and, besides, it has the feel of "truthiness."

Fighting Pseudoknowledge.

Mark Shea explains the niceties of Crimen Solicitationis:

Similarly, one of the latest memes to arise is the claim that Crimen Sollicitationis (a 1962 Vatican letter dealing with the crime of solicitation in the confessional) threatens victims of abuse with excommunication for denouncing or providing testimony against an abusive priest. Indeed, we are even informed that this still remains as official policy, all due (naturally) to the unbelievably evil machinations of Nazi Pope Ratzinger.


Fact: this is just not true. Last things first, Crimen Solicitationis was superceded by 2003 (due largely to the work of one Joseph Ratzinger), so the claim that it is “still official policy” is bunk. But far more important is the claim that it “automatically excommunicated” witnesses for reporting on or testifying to abuse. As Sean Murphy points out, this meme is the coinage of Christopher Hitchens’ brain, not a brain known for sane or accurate readings of any documents pertaining to religious belief. Hitchens, it will be recalled, is an almost preternaturally sloppy reader of religious documents. As David Hart notes about God is not Great:

On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).

Who better then, to turn to as your Sure and Certain Guide to the interpretation of an obscure Vatican document that many bishops were unaware even existed? Yet, mysteriously, Hitchens’ reading has become Received Wisdom for many people who now live in the strange delusion that they must have, at some point, read Crimen Sollicitationis , even though they could not cite five words from it if their lives depended on it. They seem to get this notion from Hitchens, who only cites about five words in order to buttress his claim that the sole purpose of the document was to tell victims, “If you talk, you will go to Hell.” Yet common sense should move us to ask, “Why are there 39 pages of detailed discussion about how to proceed with reporting abuse, inquiring into the merits of the case, and kicking pervy priests down the stairs if the standing policy was simply to muzzle witnesses from so much as reporting abuse?” If the sole purpose of the document was simply to prevent the reportage on crimes from ever happening and to muzzle witnesses under the threat of the fires of hell, it would appear that the other 39 pages of the document were rather superfluous.

Here’s the real scoop:

Crimen Sollicitationis did not threaten excommunication of people who revealed “child rape and torture” by priests. On the contrary: it imposed not only a duty to denounce such crimes (and the lesser offence of solicitation) to the bishop, but the automatic excommunication of anyone who knowingly failed to do so.13

Officials investigating or involved in proceedings pertaining to these “unspeakable crimes” were required to take an oath of perpetual secrecy, on pain of excommunication.14 This was the passage perverted by Mr. Hitchens’ selective quotation and extraordinary accusation. An oath of secrecy was also to be given to witnesses in the proceedings, but was not, it seems, to be backed by a threat of excommunication.15 Analogous oaths of secrecy and confidentiality are taken by secular professionals and officials. Confidentiality is usually maintained during secular investigations, and secular proceedings – Family Court hearings for example – sometimes proceed in secret.16

Once again, as with the Inquisition and the Church’s actions with regard to Cardinal Law, there is real room for criticism. The document does not address perverts who operate outside the confessional. This means two things.

First, that all the business about excommunication in the document has in view the protection of the Seal of the Confessional, not a universal policy applying to all crimes by all priests against all victims.

Second, the document thinks entirely in terms of ecclesial law and not in terms of civil law. That, I think, is its chief defect. For while a careful reading of paragraph 13 shows it does not “automatically excommunicate” witnesses against the pervert, it certainly does not encourage them to go to the cops either. It gives laypeople (and their pastors) every reason to think that pervert priests should be dealt with “in house” and not by civil authorities when they commit grave crimes against their flock. And while I suppose that in some remote theoretical sense a biblical rationale could be constructed for this approach based on St. Paul…

Check out the rest of Shea's post.

Pseudoknowledge.

That's the term that Mark Shea uses for things that have the quality of 'truthiness', such as siphons working by air pressure, Venus being hot because of the "Greenhouse Effect" and the murder of 46 million - i.e., the entire population of Europe - by the Dominicans during the Inquisition:

The 46 million (or 5 million) killed by Dominicans, or the Vatican, or Constantine’s Vatican if you are a Da Vinci Code true believer is a classic example of pseudoknowledge. One of those things you pick up somewhere and repeat with a knowing air that substitutes for actual familiarity with the subject you are expounding upon. If somebody questions whether you know what you are talking about, you don’t deal with the question of whether you know what you are talking about. You simply say, “So! You want to make excuses for the murder of innocent people by religious bigots!” in the same tone you use to say, “You left your soiled underwear on my coffee table.” For, of course, at the end of the day, it will remain the case that some number of people (46 million? Several thousand?) were put to death… well, not by the Inquisition exactly but certainly by the secular authorities working with the Inquisition. So the story is close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades and that’s all that matters. The idea is not so much accuracy as truthiness: the sense that you have righteously scored off bad guys. And if they are bad guys, then they don’t really deserve to be spoken of accurately, do they? They should have thought about that before they started killing off their millions, or however many it was. The point is: I am righteously angry and when I have righteousness on my side, I don’t need to know what I’m talking about so long as I land some good hard punches on the jaw of Evil.

Pseudoknowledge - it's everywhere, so let's get busy fighting it.