A big difference between the USA and Western Europe, is that the USA is obsessed by god (or at least used to be, until Obama became president… Hopefully helped by Obama’s obvious indifference to God, Christianism collapsed in the US…) Or, in other words, the US was obsessed by the cult of superficial irrationality. Just like Europe used to be in the Middle Ages, at least, officially speaking. According to the 16th Century writer and thinker Rabelais, the obsession with Christianism was all a lie, top down; peasants did not believe in the official obsession with god. That’s why his books on Gargantua and company ignored Christianism. Much older French literature such as the Fabliaux show scathing contempt and even hate for professional Christians who are represented as base and greedy to the point of lethal dysfunctionality.
A researcher applied Bayesian analysis to what we know of the writings on Jesus, and relating to various alleged witnesses at the time. The probability that Jesus was a real person was found to be as low as .08%. Oops.
Jesus Killed Philosophers, Now Philosophers Kill Jesus. Any Question?
Consider above a photograph of the statue of the philosopher Etienne Dolet, place Maubert. Dolet was executed for operating a free press, He was 37 years old. The monument celebrating Dolet and thus the free press, was torn down by Hitlerian fascists during the Nazi occupation of World War Two: Nazis hated the enemies of Jesus’ god. Wake up, people, and now a practical question: when do we replace Dolet’s memorial? Or does the non-reinstituting of Dolet mean that the present powers, the global elite, agree with the Nazis that free media do not guarantee the free lunches they are addicted to?
On 20 October 1942, the archbishop and the Great Inquisitor sentenced him to die for being « mauvais, scandaleux, schismatique, hérétique, fauteur et défenseur des hérétiques et erreurs, et pernicieux à la religion chrétienne ». Dolet, for being a “scandalous defender or errors and being an enemy of the Christian religion” was tortured, strangled, and burned alive. In 2007 the Socialist Mayor of Paris, keen to bolster the elite and superstition, far from reversing the Vichy regime, his Catholics and Nazis, christened the place in the honor of a Pope (Jean-Paul II)… an insult across the centuries…
Geneva keeps on celebrating Calvin, a French bigot and religious fanatic whose greatest claim to fame should be that he had burned alive and very slowly (over a few hours), Michel Servetus, who discovered pulmonary blood circulation… Servetus’ book also got burned throughout Europe (a few books secretly survived) and the publishers were hounded (when not also burned). That was in 1553 CE, a full century before the Anglo-Saxon generally given credit for discovering blood circulation…
Bayes’ and Laplace style “inverse probability” does not replace what I would call “inverse axiomatics”. If the probability of the existence of the goulougoulou is just .08%, it may as well be zero. And the axioms ought to be changed: believing in Jesus, son of god (not dog, let me point out), is as likely as believing in the Hummingbird God of the Aztecs.
All right, more people got killed in the name of Jesus than were devoured in the name of the Humming Bird God, so Jesus is a more serious problem, all the more as Abraham crazies are still around, whereas the Humming Bird crazies are so finished, they don’t even have a website.
***
NO JESUS PERSON IN HISTORY, BEFORE MYTH WAS BORN:
That Jesus did not exist is completely obvious to anyone who, as I did, read all the Roman literature (that was the reward for learning Latin). The Roman texts are clear: the first Christian, historically speaking, Saint Paul, wrote around 66 CE, that “Jesus was all and only in my head.” [Paraphrasing.] And so on.
Prominent Jews who did not agree with Roman rule, to the point of deadly strife, were prominently tried and executed. All, but for Jesus… And Saint Paul!
(The case of Saint Paul was that the Jews wanted him executed, as blasphemer, and the Romans were trying to save him, as a prosecutor, and Roman citizen. Brought back to Rome, from Jerusalem, he wrote there, from prison, about Jesus in his head; then, he was made to disappear, probably to save him from the nasty rabis.)
In Europe, nearly nobody believes in the Jesus-Abraham stuff. Not anymore. Even out of the six million Muslims of relatively recent immigration in France, a small fraction of the two million who are somewhat superficially Muslim, really believe in the Abrahamist mythology.
Jesus himself, Jesus the myth, that is, was a first class terrorist: he made clear all the Old Testament was true, as far as he was concerned. And the only positive thing one can clearly say about Bible god, is that his terror was strong. (On the love side, god-the-dad was rather weak. God the dad was not just about whips and chains, but outright extermination in the flames… As reminded to us in the Qur’an and Hadith…)
***
JESUS SET EUROPE AFLAME:
Why no more belief in Europe? Well, take the central case of France and consider the history of religious strife there: first one million Cathars got exterminated, and the south of France taken over by the north (under Philippe-Auguste, and a crazed Pope). In a single crusade.
That was just a warm-up.
Then the Jews got kicked out. And again, under Saint Louis, and again, under whomever tyrant was in need of cash again.
By the fifteenth century, the Protestants were hunted in the Alps, by mentally deranged Jesus lovers, and Louis XI had to send the military to remind fanatical Catholics that French Protestants were free to exert their cult.
Louis XI was rather a Catholic fanatic, he banned Buridan’s works (this is why people believe Copernic, yet to be born, invented the heliocentric system!). But, as king, Louis XI had to respect the law, and the law of France was fundamentally secular (coming, as it did, from the Salian Law, and the secular part of Roman law).
In the sixteenth century, Francois I, advanced in many ways, under the influence of the fanatically Catholic Sorbonne, burned, alive, three philosophers, for insulting Jesus (or something like that).
The sixteenth century ends with seven religious wars in quick succession, secret intervention of Spanish Catholic fascism in France affairs an episode that was part of the Gran Armada attack on England, and the war in the Netherlands). The emperor of Spain and the Holly Roman German Empire, sent an armada to kill down to the last baby of those French colonists in the Carolinas: all too many were Protestants, so they had to be eradicated.
The horrors of the religions wars which wrecked Europe for more than 5 centuries, and then merged into “nationalist” struggles are indescribable. They were similar, but went beyond what is now done in Syria (where ten year old children were recently made to execute prisoners).
In the following century, Louis XIV threw the Protestants out of France, weakening France and creating the germs of war, for centuries to come.
The revolution of 1789 reinstated Jews and Protestants, and cracked down on the Catholic church. So the French intellectual tradition, say, at 90% has become very anti-Christian in general, and especially anti-Catholic.
Thus French philosophers have looked without mercy at what Christianism brought. The verdict? Not much.
***
JESUS AND HIS DAD GAVE AMERICA TO THE USA, BLESS THEM:
In the USA, it’s different: Christianism, and its Bible was the backbone which justified the holocaust of the Natives. The Bible is indeed full of notions such as “elected people”, “promised land”, “heathens”, and entire population to massacre, just because God said so (and if you don’t obey god, god will torture your son, as god did to the disobedient King David).
The Bible was also the fundamental cement of American ideology. Thus the American establishment views any attack against the religions of Abraham as attacks against its very foundations.
If the Bible goes, and Baseball, and American football, there would be nothing left. What would happen then? Would Americans start to think and debate like the French, and be prone to revolutions?
***
WHY EUROPE DESPISE GOD, A FEW MORE DETAILS:
Étienne Dolet was a personal friend of Rabelais. As Rabelais was giving a lecture in anatomy (he was a medical science professor), Dolet intervened during a questions and answers session, with some smart remarks, that’s how they met.
Dolet was burned, alive, at the age of 37.
But his story does not stop there.
From 1660 to 1750, no less than eight hundred sixty-nine (869) authors, printers, librarians, and merchants of pictures were thrown to the Bastille, hanged, or, and, burned, because they published works contradicting good behavior, religion, or the King.
The irony, which is of course, the explanation and motivation, is that the world famous despot, “Sun King” Louis XIV was a certified thief, tyrant, mass murderer, criminal against humanity, and religious persecutor.
As recently as 30 September 1865, the canton d’Uri’s Criminal Tribunal condemned “J.-J. Ryniker, typographe,” for having published a booklet offensive to god and Christian teaching, and the Catholic church and its chief, and against Holy Script (“brochure offensante envers Dieu et l’enseignement chrétien en général, ainsi qu’envers l’Eglise catholique et son chef, et envers l’Ecriture sainte), to be lashed twenty times by the cat with nine tails (“vingt coups de verges”), jail with water and bread on lternate days, perpetual banishment from the canton, and various other punishments.
In World War Two the unconstitutional regime of Marshall Petain, operating in collaboration with Adolf Hitler, demolished the statue of Dolet which throned over place Maubert in Paris, where he was martyrized.
Why?
Because Petain’s regime rested on fascism, and there is no better justification in the West for fascism, than the Christian god. This is what Constantine found out, and why he replaced the cult of Sol Invictus by Jesus.
Another factor in god’s ignominy was Nazism. First, the churches did nothing, but really absolutely nothing to stop the Nazis. Not only that, but the Vatican helped dozens of thousands of Nazis to escape to the Americas.
Worse: philosopher Hannah Arendt (Prussian, Jewish, Higher Class, German, and Heidegger’s lover), correctly accused the Jewish Councils (“Judenraten”) to have collaborated with Hitler, making a bad situation worse. She was right. But the crimes of god, of Abraham’s god, do not stop here.
Most Jews submitted to god’s will or Amor Fati (Abrahamism without god), instead of revolting against Adolf’s will.
God’s aura came out so diminished from his lack of guts when confronted to the total evil of Nazism, that some learned Jews in an extermination camp conducted a “trial of god”.
And thus Israel got founded on the secular socialism of the Kibbutz, not around the Torah.
So out with god, better get a dog.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: Dog, Etienne Dolet, fascism, god, God Obsession, Promised Land, USA
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
March 13, 2015 at 12:02 am |
While writing about the follow-up to the great fire of Rome, Tacitus mentions the followers of Cristus, and the way he writes he seems to think there was a Cristus. Unfortunately, the relevant volumes of the Annals are missing. Which leads to the question, how was this Bayesian analysis actually done? Also, as an aside, I consider Aristarchus to have “invented” the heliocentric theory, and at least he measured it. There were fairly substantial observational errors, but the methods were sensible, leaving aside the availability of good observational equipment.
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March 13, 2015 at 4:33 am |
Dear Ian:
Supposedly Tacitus wrote the Annals in 109 CE. That was 45 years after Saint Paul spent some time inventing Cristus in his golden prison in Rome (I say). According to me, Saint Paul was exfiltrated from Rome (for the same reason that he was brought to Rome in the first place, to escape execution in Jerusalem). So Saint Paul had very high contacts inside the Roman state (his exfiltration from Judea was already quite a risk for Rome. Four years after Saint Paul’s writing, the first Evangels are written by supposed “eyewitnesses” of Cristus (although Josephus was not in the know).
Many top Romans may also have felt Cristus was a better deal than those pesky Jews. Indeed, by 300 CE, Christianism had extended massively a Romanitas of sorts, well beyond the LIMES. (It is rumored that at least one emperor was a closet Christian by the Third Century).
We know, from various documents, that very high officials in Rome, were engaged in the Christian conspiracy, early on. The idea was not too bad, at first sight: it was to reintroduce the Republic, through the “Christian Republic”, a sort of sea monster that kept on reappearing until 1789… Although, as early as the Eight Century, the Venetian Republic blossomed under the wings of the Franks (Charlemagne no doubt saw himself as the new Augustus… Or more exactly, DAVID).
Last, no least: the Annals were discovered in various Abbeys, Monasteries, and Monte Cassino. It was long rumored that one of the ALL TOO CHRISTIAN discoverers forged most, or even all of them…
PA
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March 13, 2015 at 8:36 am |
Dear Patrice,
I was under the impression that only two partial copies of the Annals are known, and between them, they only cover about half of what should have been written. Having read them (translation only) I am reasonably confident that they are too detailed to be a forgery. Obviously he had no personal evidence for Cristus, but then again, he had no direct evidence for the antics of Tiberius. I was not arguing that this proves Cristus, but I rather fancy the 0.08% probability is a bit ridiculous.
As for Aristarchus, yes, we have no direct evidence of what he knew as none of his writings have persisted. On the other hand the reports of what he did make it fairly clear he had a good concept of the heliocentric theory, and it is unclear what he thought of inertia. Anyone who had thought about a sling or a chariot going around a corner should have had some idea about inertia, but the Greeks obviously had the wrong mechanics, not helped by Aristotle’s major blunder.
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March 13, 2015 at 6:59 am |
Buridan introduced inertia, which explained that the planets turned around ad infinitum. Another French scholar, 320 years later, would explain the attraction to the Sun by a 1/dd force he introduced.
Aristarchus’ work, at this point is not known. Only is known the fact he had answers to obvious objections.
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March 13, 2015 at 1:25 am |
Christianists and other Islamists are going to howl to high heavens. Making fun of Jesus, or denying its dreadful existence is still punishable by death in some backwards corners…
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March 13, 2015 at 4:39 am |
They can’t howl, if Muslims cut their heads off… BTW, indeed, some Islamists have executed some people both for celebrating Jesus too much… Or not enough. Does that make Islamists fair and balanced?
PA
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March 13, 2015 at 7:23 am |
Thank you Patrice for another juicy post! Your line: “But the crimes of god, of Abraham’s god, do not stop here.” How does an invisible god commit crimes? You might be referring to the crimes of people. Another good line: “That Jesus did not exist is completely obvious.” Can it be read as fiction? What would that yield? Maybe that you, Patrice, are pinned to your physical existence, like someone who isn’t me, to a cross of space time matter and energy or north south east and west… Guess what, you won’t get off that cross till you perish. We all have labels we don’t like, eh? Happy hunting.
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March 13, 2015 at 10:03 pm |
Sorry if I was hot in the other answer, but I am a mountain climber, and my closest friends died that way. So the advice to “climb” (which I still do), grates a raw nerve.
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March 13, 2015 at 7:29 am |
The jihad is properly fought where? Inside you. Many paths lead up the mountain. Climb.
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March 13, 2015 at 10:00 pm |
Indeed. I have even done a first ascent of a pillar of one of the world’s most famous mountains. It collapsed since. Not just the route, the entire pillar.
(I could have guessed it, as I was taken in the largest rock avalanche I have ever since, during the approach, and escaped miraculously.)
So thanks for the advice, but I was living accordingly probably before you were born. Maybe you should follow it yourself.
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March 13, 2015 at 10:09 pm |
Thank you for the sincere words. My tone was haughty and that’s unnecessary and rude. I always enjoy the posts of yours that I read, please forgive my slip. Cheers!
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March 13, 2015 at 9:12 am |
Dear Patrice, an excellent essay. Yet, to my oppinion human being can’t be just an individual, without faith in some fable. Without faith people lose purpose, and mainly they are helpless against evil rising out of some primitive belief, with capacity to join individuals into a group with united, sole purpose. Faith gives to people tool to give up their, immediate, individual, egoistic desires for the sake of common cause.
So what is the reaction the highly individualistic, secular Europe to the Jihad phenomena? Surprise from youngsters educated in Europe, leaving their comfortable, secure life, to join some people, driven by most dreadful fable of death, heroism and after life reward. And they are leaving in thousands, which means they are ten if not hundred thousands, who indentify themselves with them.
All those, who try to relate this phenomena to some social discrimination are completely out of focus. This people do not feel inferior against the main streem Europeans but in contrary, they feel superior to them, because they have faith and cause.
I agree with you that all this is insane, but it doesn’t help to say that. The answer should be to find an idea, idol, new God (dog ) that will channel these individuals towards more positive common goal than death and suicide.
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March 13, 2015 at 4:18 pm |
thanks Eugen, your appreciation is much appreciated. I have to run again (actually to drive my daughter to school, not exactly running, unfortunately…), so further feedback will have to wait.
We all have to use faith, because we all need meta-theories beyond what we know for sure. It is actually a theorem of mine in metalogic: to any logic corresponds a metalogic.
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March 13, 2015 at 3:08 pm |
ct: SciSal comment
Patrice,
sorry but your latest comment is again borderline in terms of tone, and it keeps addressing a topic that, frankly, has little to do with the main post. Talking about Bayesianism and Jesus is stretching it, going into the history and psychology of Christian belief has nothing to do with it.
cheers,
Massimo
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March 13, 2015 at 3:14 pm |
Dear Massimo:
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry about the tone. The term “gnu atheist” was used several times in the comments. I never met it before, and I made an Internet search to find what it was. I did not find it complimentary. However Nietzsche is the one who started to accuse (rightly as it turned out) to accuse Germans and Christians to be behaving like herd animals (he uses the term many times).
I did not start the Bayesian-Carrier attacks. It was said by other commenters that what Carrier did was an “absurd application of probability theory to antiquities” (Aravis). I went to see if that was true, and found it was not. So my comment was a direct answer to Socratesgadfly and Aravis.
The Carrier situation was not started by Carrier: other, previously, had used Bayesian analysis to prove the historicity of Jesus. Carrier reciprocated with his own Bayesian analysis, years later.
This debate contained an important point: good historians, implicitly or not, all make massive applications of Bayesian style analysis. It of course depends upon subjective interpretations to some extent, but it’s there.
Historians, physicists, also do something else, which is what I am attracting attention to. It is a sort of reverse axiomatics, related in spirit to Bayesian analysis.
It is indeed psychological. When Lorentz and Poincare’ suggested the LOCAL time theory (mis-attributed to Einstein later) their first argument was psychological: what evidence did one have of global, universal time? It is always like that, and a similar mistake was made at the root of the Multiverse, 110 years ago.
Something was assumed, because, psychologically, it was simplest, most reassuring.
Axioms used in any theory are always psychologically grounded (I had confrontations with some mathematician colleagues about this; I was not the one most upset).
Cheers
Patrice
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March 13, 2015 at 9:44 pm |
Could you write in more detail about the claim “Axioms used in any theory are always psychologically grounded”, I always wondered what is the source of axioms, and are they provable logically . I of course understand then they cease to be axioms.The same is truth about God. If you would prove its existence, he would ceased to fulfill it function of being an imaginary subject of faith.
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March 14, 2015 at 2:01 am |
The old problem about God is who created Her.
It has happened, a lot, that axioms became theorems. At this point axioms are entirely psychological. In math, mathematicians decide what the axioms will be: Are Grothendieck categories large enough, not really, etc…
Indeed the axioms are like god, for the same reason. I actually believe the basic axiom of number theory is based on non physical psychology… Hence false. Of course, axioms define Logos. If I decide: there exists a hummingbird god, that’s it. Hummingbird god is true in that logos.
All and any ideology is a logos, complete with axioms.
Nazi axioms could be all disproven. (But Nazis did not want to sit and listen, because they were looking for a pretext to satisfy their rage and great longing for extermination.)
The source of axioms is the theory itself, the arguments themselves. An argument sorts of work, but then one finds one needs another axiom. Listen to Laplace talking to bloody Napoleon: “I did not need this hypothesis.”
An example of this is infinitesimals. Leibnitz thought they ought to work. Newton was infuriated by them, and then bishop Berkeley demolished them. They looked non-sensical… Until one realized the usual construction of the usual integers depended upon one axiom, EXPLICIT in Archimedes’work. That took nearly 3 centuries.
Where does the need
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March 14, 2015 at 8:46 am |
Christianity has stood the test of time, this revisionist history will not hold up. Christianity is not subject to legal proof and that is why it is called a faith, A hopeful faith that we can be reunited with our loved ones including dogs, integrated into the body of Christ, who is a part of God, the son, the eternal generation. There is individual proof of God and Christ but all such proof are going to be esoteric, I think it is a analog of the uncertainty principle of physics but for spiritual things. I have my esoteric proofs and hopes which I will not tell here. I think that everybody does get the esoteric proof that they need or why should I be special. I actually do not believe in atheist, I do believe in pretentious people that are in denial of their true beliefs. I suppose it has occurred to some of these so called atheist that they can no more prove that they do not believe in God than others such as myself can prove that God exists. If they are not smart enough to confess with their mouths someday that God must have created this world, Garden of Eden of the Universe, then maybe they are truly cursed.
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March 14, 2015 at 3:17 pm |
Ah, nothing like a good Xtian fundamentalist rolling out… I have been deploring their absence.
The “truly cursed” believes that the knives of the Islamist State are sharper than Christian rhetoric. Funny that you and god are keeping in “esoteric proofs and hopes which I will not tell here” and “secrets”. Nothing neww under the sun: the Christians got that one from the Mithra religion, which was highly secretive in the Roman empire.
http://jdstone.org/cr/files/mithraschristianity.html
Anyway, Christianism is dying, even the Pope knows this (I read his interview of yesterday in Mexico). Just a matter of education. Like the tooth fairy, the homophillic (or homosexual, Nietzsche pointed out) fascination with the mythical son of god on his cross (instead of a dog one can’t even prove existed) is totally passe’.
Or then you believe Putin is the future (although he just had his 3rd child out of wedlock, so I see that he is pretty relaxed with the so-called ‘lord’ to… considering he is the lord, it makes sense…)
Good luck with the Jesus derangement syndrome, you will need it, and you have my empathy…
😉
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March 31, 2015 at 10:14 pm |
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May 21, 2017 at 11:00 pm |
[…] https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/god-here-dog-there/ […]
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August 9, 2020 at 2:45 am |
“ as early as 1836 in the Anacalypsis of Godfrey Higgins, who saw the mystery rites of Dionysus as at the root of the Christos myth. In his opinion Bacchus-Dionysus:
… was born of a virgin on the 25th of December; he performed great miracles for the good of mankind; particularly one in which he changed water into wine; he rode in a triumphal procession on an ass; he was put to death by the Titans, and rose again from the dead on the 25th of March: he was always called the Saviour. In his mysteries, he was shown to the people, as an infant is by the Christians at this day, on Christmas Day morning in Rome. “ from
http://andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Jesus.htm
A story with astronomical connotations and pagan baccanalia.
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August 13, 2020 at 3:15 am |
Thanks for this, Partha. Yes, Christianism was like Camelot Harris: saying whatever to get elected. Christianism was a collage of all previous absurdities (Mythra, etc.) Some think it all started under Vespasian and Josephus (which it did, chronologically)
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February 5, 2021 at 6:26 pm |
Kennedy Phiri asked a question .
According to the philosophy- The First-Cause Argument, or the Cosmological Argument, that is predicated on the assumption that every event must have a cause, and that cause in turn must have a cause, and on and on and on. Assuming there’s no end to this regression of causes, this succession of events would be infinite.
DOESN’T THIS IN ITSELF PROVIDE ADEQUATE GROUNDS OF PROOF OF GOD??
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February 5, 2021 at 6:27 pm |
No, it is proof of Dog!
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February 5, 2021 at 6:27 pm |
Author
Patrice Ayme you are absolutely a legend
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February 6, 2021 at 6:23 am |
Patrice Ayme please have something good to say instead sir
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February 6, 2021 at 6:24 am
Kennedy Phiri: Is Dog bad? Bad doggie?
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