A Post on my Comment Policy

I deleted a comment, and I will probably be accused of censorship next time I run into the person who posted it, so this post serves only to preclude such accusations. I am not censoring any actual content of it. What I don't want to do, however, is to have my blog host texts that google will index and start posting the first line whenever my name is googled. The line goes like this:

"__________ is just another cyber-stalking lunatic posting his trash all over the place like a troll."

That is not exactly an honest description of me, and I think anyone can understand why I don't want seven of those comments to sit here. I'll give you the full comment here, just so whoever made it doesn't feel censored. I know who it is, and it's a person who's been hating on me since the beginning of this blog. In fact, I every now and then do look for this person online, find they're out doing their proselytizing shtick, and post some comment about just how full of flaws Murdock's books are.

__________ is just another cyber-stalking lunatic posting his trash all over the place like a troll. She already announced a 2nd edition for Christ Conspiracy long ago, which makes your malicious smear campaign of a blog irrelevant, obsolete and a complete waste of time so, grow up and get over it. You need to get a life very, very badly!!! http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=26 If you had ANY integrity or character at all you would remove your blog maliciously smearing, defaming and libeling a single female author with stage 4 cancer whose work you obviously know nothing about. You have zero relevant qualifications or credentials as you've admitted elsewhere. Besides, they did a great job at her forum exposing you and your BS tactics so, nothing more needs to be said. _________________'s Smear Campaign http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=26761#p26761 ; )

This comment was posted on several of my posts, even ones that have nothing to do with D.M. Murdock's work. Just shows you what kind of idiots are attracted to her work. I have tried engaging this person with arguments for years now, and it's always been exactly the same litany of how I'm evil, dumb, unqualified and various kinds of insane. I am quite sure this person is the moderator of Murdock's forum, one of the most unhinged persons I've had the bad luck of running into on internet. And in fact, that moderator is one of the few persons I genuinely hate. I have no personal animus towards Murdock herself.

Anyways, comments are permitted, as long as they actually contain any reasonable content. The example given above is borderline forbidden by that rule, since it contains nothing but ad hominem bullshit. However, due to my long-standing conflict with the person who posted it, and the constant misrepresentation that person stoops to, I've decided not to censor this post in its entirety, but just remove my name from it. As comments cannot be edited, this was the only remaining option.

The Christ Conspiracy: An Index of the Review, pt 2

Chapter 20:

Pt 1 Various shenanigans with regards to trying to show that Christianity is older than the mainstream assessment has it. Here we find Taylor describing the early church in terms that would need some backing up – but as usual, no evidence is given, just assertion. It is also worth noting that Murdock uses motifs from the NT as historical evidence in the most contorted fashion. Polycarp is quote-mined. Some quite vacuous statements about the Essenes are made, including unsourced speculation reported as fact, bad etymologies, as well as directly contradicting the previous chapter regarding the relationship of Essenism and Christianity.

Pt 2 Eusebius' Interpretatio Christiana: did Eusebius claim that the Therapeutan monks were Christian before Christianity? A most precious thing emerges: the quote-mined quote-mine! Does allegorical reading imply gnosticism?

Pt 3 Irrelevant twaddle based on the previous identification of Christianity with the Therapeutans (given that all evidence in favour of such an identification given thus far is mistaken). Murdock thinks 'therapeut' and 'doctor of the law' are etymologically connected. Murdock relies on Epiphanius' knowledge of Hebrew, which is more or less proven to be sub par. (Bad referencing practices, again.) Undue reliance on Higgins.

Pt 4 Murdock cites Geza Vermes, but gets Vermes's claim wrong. A somewhat misleading description of Jewish lending practices. Murdock focuses on the most anti-gentile intertestamental Jewish literature to paint an exaggeratedly hateful picture of Judaism.

Pt 5 Murdock's ignorance of the Talmud is coupled with her insistence on thinking that she knows something about it.

Chapter 23:

Pt 1 Some rather weak reasoning with regards to where western culture originated.

Pt 2 Murdock reports a quote-mine by Jochmans as a prima facie quote, in an attempt to make it seem like the Great Pyramid at some point has been covered by the sea. Some fairly bad arguments (Byblos being an Egyptian colony being presented as evidence for the Bible being an Egyptian book ...) Papyri allegedly five to ten thousand  years of age are alluded to. A claim with no support or evidence presented at all, regarding 'Logia Iesou'. Some quotes that essentially consist of nothing but a nested quote, along the line of Murdock quoting Jackson quoting Kuhn, making looking the original source up tedious and fucking well frustrating.

Pt 3 Misrepresentation of the Aryan Invasion Theory with regards to Indian archaeology and linguistics. Reliance on Hindu religious material for claims of really far back history (on the order of tens of thousand years ago). Not enough sources given to be able to assess the value of the presented claims. Murdock presents an argument that makes her claims regarding prehistory unfalsifiable. Value-judgments regarding rishi-culture and later brahmanic culture that rest on no ground whatsoever. Shitty historical linguistics: Murdock misrepresents the state of Indo-European linguistics as well as downright pulls the wool over our eyes with regards to the Nostratic theory. 

Pt 4 Mentions some Egyptian depiction of a fish trap as evidence of Sumerians being closely related to some North Europeans (but does not tell us anything about this depiction, so we cannot verify this claim). Conflates the Sumerians with Aryan invaders – something not even her source for this madcap claim actually does. Weird ideas about Semitic languages having gone into "permanent eclipse" are quoted. Iranians are mistaken for proto-Greeks and proto-Romans. Really weird arguments presented to show that the Hebrews were Indo-European (or at least a significant portion of them). Murdock mistakes 'levitical' and 'levirate' when reading her source (which got it right) and uses this conflation to present the idea that Levites were Indo-European (for the record, levirate and levitical are highly unrelated terms). Weird and unsourced claims about levirate marriages.

 Pt 5 Unsubstantiated ideas about Abraham's origin are restated. Some pretty bad etymologies presented, of which my favourite is Jessulmer as the origin of the name Jerusalem - which simply cannot hold, since Jessulmer is named for a medieval king. Also, false claims about words in Sanskrit. No references for claims about Jerusalem's origin in Egyptian religion, although pretty fat claims are made. A conspiracy theory regarding the Rosetta stone sneaks in. Some very out there claims about the origins of various British things, such as the word Britain and the druids. Finally, Murdock ascribes some credibility to notions that western culture has its origin on Ireland. A nationalistic creed that probably makes some irish people very happy, but c'mon, not an evidence-based claim in any sense whatsoever.

 Pt 6. Here, full-on delusionality is evident: Pygmies at the root of all culture! A lot of evidence alluded to, none actually given. Bad understanding of the theory of evolution. . 

Chapter 24:

Pt 1 Bad understanding of evolutionary theory. Bad logic.

Pt 2 Shoddy linguistics, shoddy referencing, shoddily unclear claims, chains of sources getting things more wrong during each step, reliance on religiously mislead 19th-century scholars who tried finding the lost tribes of Israel in the Americas, claims about the Chimalpopoca manuscript that are wrong. These fabrications are used to bolster the notion that the Biblical creation myth was present in the Americas. Lots of unsupported assertions.

Pt 3 Shoddy linguistics regarding languages of America and India.

Pt 4 Unreliable sources (James Churchward). Lots of assertions without any evidence. Bad linguistics. Appealing to previous bad linguistics as though it were evidence.

Pt 5 Pyramids. In this part, Murdock quotes UFOlogists and new age kooks. Murdock accepts the Ica stones as genuine. Murdock accepts exaggerated claims about the 'precision' of the Costa Rican stone spheres as accurate without thinking about the methodology of measuring such stones

Pt 6 Giants. Ancient Maps. Saturn having been a 'pole star'. Murdock relies on sources that think writing goes back 150 000 years. Murdock also seems to believe that the original religion of humanity must have been objectively good in some sense ­ - which is a weird idea.

Deception and Effort

Honest skepticism has a genuine problem. This problem has to do with the somewhat fleeting character of fairness. How do we grant a claim a fair hearing? Or more specifically, how much of a hearing do we have to grant for the hearing to have been fair?

Basically, the problem boils down to this: for every true claim, for every usefully accurate model, for every insightful understanding, there's hundreds of mistaken claims, models that obfuscate or mislead, and misunderstandings. If we were to grant each proposal the same amount of interest and attention, we would definitely be wasting our time.

This, essentially, is at the root of why 'falsifiability' is so important to science. If we were to nurture a method of looking for truth where non-falsifiable hypotheses were given a lot of attention, we would waste a lot of effort on things that are, to be blunt, very mistaken. Falsifiability permits us to direct our effort where it matters – towards improvement of our understanding of something.

This is why a critical approach to knowledge is the most important tool in the toolkit: it gives us a fighting chance to stave off wastefulness, and to focus on things that are potentially fruitful instead. A big ugly problem rears its head here, though: some people are so attached to their ideas that they will not look at them with a critical eye. Heck, for many of this kind of people, voicing any criticism of an idea is an attack on them as a person. These people simply do not want to play by the rules ­ - they want their ideas to be given a pass, to be excempt from vetting.

This is a kind of deceptive approach - although I don't think they themselves realize just how deceitful this is. They may very well believe they are correct, but by not letting others check whether they in fact are correct, they are trying to rig the process of finding truth, so that their idea will come out on top no matter how accurate it is.

Now, if we granted each idea an equal, thorough hearing, we'd be drowned in frustratingly useless work. We'd end up reading thousands of pages of worthless speculation, just in the hopes of finding even a nugget of vaguely truth-like essence. So, already when one has taken a good first look at the work of an author and found that their work doesn't impress at all due to bad research, bad logic (etc), it is quite justifiable to refuse to go on. At that point, one can be sure there are more fruitful venues elsewhere. There's too much work to be done in the world, to let the ideologically blind lead us down gardenpaths of bad evidence.

However, those who do not want to play by the rules (and who are so enamored with their own ideas) will not concede the point at this point. They'll just keep demanding to be taken seriously. The bulk of this blog, in fact, stands as testimony to the amount of work such bad scholarship leads us to: I've spent several hundred hours reading Murdock's sources, looking for them, cross-referencing stuff, tracing stuff, translating stuff, ... and her fans still think my criticism of her work is just an ad hominem rant.

In essence, the criticism of one particular book that I've presented on this blog is testimony to what superfluous work has to be done if we entertain the notion that pseudoscience has to be permitted a fair hearing. The amount of text I've written amounts to, roughly speaking, the length of a PhD thesis. The time and effort I have invested is considerable. The conclusion that The Christ Conspiracy is worthless is unavoidable and quite well substantiated – its conclusions are less waterproof than a sieve. Yet this work gets us nowhere – Murdock's fans still propagate her claims around the internet, and her claims are nice clickbait. Solid, scholarly work has no impact on the delusional fringe, and wasting effort on debunking it is essentially futile. This does not stop me, since I would get a bad conscience otherwise, but I fear that in these days of clickbait, reason and rationality will lose out to mass-appeal and controversy.

Fallacies II: General Word-related Fallacies

Fallacies: General Word-related Fallacies

as well as Fallacies with Similar Basic Flaws in Reasoning

There are many kinds of fallacies that fly by rather unnoticed, especially in online debates. The previous example is but one, and it is not even of a similar type of word-related fallacy that I am thinking of right now. Having consulted several lists of fallacies, it turns out only some of the semantic fallacies seem to have names - and even then, the scope they are given tends to be fairly restricted, even if the same kind of fallacy easily could be applied elsewhere as well.

Often, these fallacies are of a kind I would call naive prescriptive lexical Platonic realism. 

Example 1: The Jews are the members of a religion, hence the Jews cannot form an ethnicity too.

This assumes that the definitions of religion and ethnicity are

• mutually exclusive
• objectively right and true
• prescriptive, rather than descriptive

Mutually exclusive signifying that if something signifies a religion, it cannot also signify the members of an ethnicity and vice versa. Objectively right and true in that using even slightly different definitions somehow is objectionable - and some seem to think this objectionableness is objectively true, even - essentially stating that there is an absolute ethics that forbids using terms in a different way. Prescriptive, in that if something is a religion, it must conform - religion is strictly defined, and when we say something is a religion, all this baggage suddenly comes along and we can also therefore predict a lot of things about the subject - in this case, Judaism - once we know it is a religion.

Usually, the thing we can know about a religion - any religion, really, but Judaism will be the example I will use here - is that it is exactly like protestant Christianity. Viz. it has a scripture, which is its only source of doctrine and rules, which are obtained by a literal reading of that book. It has ceremonies and beliefs, and if you do not hold those beliefs, you are going to hell. If you hold the right beliefs, you go to heaven. The rabbi is the person who leads the service, and he serves as some kind of interface between God and the believer. He also has the right to officiate at weddings, and perform circumcisions and so on. 

All of those are basically wrong to different extents:

• Judaism does have scripture, but they are not the only source of doctrines and rules, and the rules are not obtained by literal readings of the text.
• The beliefs about the afterlife are not clearly spelled out, but it would seem almost all Jews reject the idea of an eternal hell, as well as the belief that condemnation depends on belief. Going to heaven is definitely not predicated on having the right belief.
• The rabbi is a scholar of Judaism, not a middleman. He is supposed to know the rules of Judaism well, and to be able to reach conclusions on new issues in Jewish law. It is tradition that each Jewish congregation should have a rabbi as its leader, but he does not have any specific role in the service (although some congregations may have traditions along the lines of 'the rabbi must never turn his back to the congregation during a service', essentially placing him the furthest back!). Any bar-mitzva Jewish man (and in conservative and reform Judaism women as well) who knows the liturgy can lead it. It is not unusual that the rabbi does not take that role. I gather in more liberal versions of Judaism, it is more common for a rabbi to officiate, but even then this is not mandatory.
• Jewish rabbis do officiate at weddings in some countries where secular law has given them that right (or, from a Jewish religious point of view, forced that responsibility on them by requiring that someone officiate at weddings in the first place). Jewish law does not require that, but instead requires witnesses and the signing of a wedding contract - the ketubah. Oftentimes, of course, the only persons available to check the validity of the ketubah per Jewish law is a rabbi, but if someone else of sufficient knowledge can verify it, that is ok. The verification, as far as I can tell, need not occur during the wedding itself but can be done earlier.

All of these are things I have seen people assume hold true for Judaism simply because Judaism is a religion. Apparently, people believe that the word religion only includes things which satisfy all the things I italicized above (or some other similar list of distinctive features).

Similarly, you run into some atheists who refuse to accept that Buddhism is a religion because it is not theistic, or it lacks this or that trait that protestant Christianity has.

To me, this seems a very naive view of what it means for something to be something. When a chef calls a fruit a berry, he is not disagreeing with the botanist, he is not making a statement along the lines that modern biology is wrong. He is classifying the various plant parts he runs into according to their use in cooking and such characteristics that he readily can discern.

A commonly raised objection to my stance here would be that words mean things, and superficially, it would seem my stance undermines this guarantee. I have two major responses to that criticism.

First, this is in fact typical of human language, and enables it to adapt to any number of new situations. We cannot a priori know which traits are important distinguishing lines, and a purely taxonomic approach will probably be useless - if the chef adhered to biological taxonomy, the fruit compote suddenly turns into a berry, drupe and aggregate fruit compote and the average green salad no longer contains vegetables, but tubers, leafs, false fruits (cucumber), ...
Clearly words have to have useful meanings as well; and for the chef, vegetable is a more useful category than most botanical meanings. I am not saying the botanist is wrong, I am saying his or her classification is useful in one context, not the other.

Further, the classificatory scheme used by the botanists and biologists in general rely on observations that are needlessly complex for most real-world situations. Developing some kind of artificial fertilizer might benefit from such observations - cooking probably does not.

Finally, words still mean things in my approach. In fact, it turns out my approach preserves, with greater fidelity, the meaning of words as they are attested in actual use. If we made a tool intended to efficiently fix a certain problem, and people found another use for it that was better, more useful, and so on, would we be right to refuse to accept the results of their use of it, to scorn them for finding a better application for it? This is what a prescriptive armchair prescriptivist approach essentially does.

Getting back to the main example I have been running with - viz. Jews - members of a religion or members of an ethnicity?- we can easily find a synthesis of these two statements. Judaism is indeed a religion, a religion that concerns itself a lot with a specific ethnicity. Non-members of this ethnicity can believe in the religion without joining the ethnicity, (but this is unusual). Non-members of the ethnicity who wish to join the ethnicity, can do so. In doing so, they become part of the community - and ethnicities tend to form communities. Ethnicity and religion both are somewhat fluid concepts, and both are relatively recent concepts as well. Judaism as a religion predates the current "formal" definition of what a religion is. The Jewish people, as an ethnicity, predates the current "formal" definition of what an ethnicity is.

Both religion and ethnicity are terms that have been made up to describe some phenomena we have experiences of - viz. some humans have cultural, linguistic, etc links that make them form a kind of group. Ethnicity, in addition, is somewhat fuzzy, one can simultaneously belong to several different ethnicities that overlap in various ways, not necessarily even hierarchically. I am simultaneously a member of the Swedish-speaking Finns, the Finns, the major Swedish ethnical sphere (but I am not a member of the Swedish-ethnicity in Sweden), Ostrobothnians, and maybe even some other group. I know Jewish people that are Jewish, Swedish-speaking Finns and Finns, and Jewish people that are Jews and Finns. I also know Jewish people who are Jewish and American. The fact that Jewish people can be members of other ethnicities does not preclude Jewish people from being members of a Jewish ethnicity as well - ethnicities are not necessarily mutually exclusive, except in some specific frameworks ­ - but if we demand that such a framework is adhered to, we are enforcing an interpretation of things, not trying to describe them objectively.

There we run into an important concept: frameworks. Whether a certain thing is an ethnicity or not may very well be different in the eyes of secular law, the opinions of individual members of the different ethnicities, etc. We need to know which framework is being assumed to know whether something is accurate and to know what knowledge we can derive from a statement made in that framework. If someone says Buddhism isn't a religion, we must know what kind of framework this statement is made in to be able to know what it says about Buddhism - on the other hand, the same applies when someone says Buddhism is a religion. Words still mean things, but context tells us what things they mean.

Too often "words mean things" is used to reach a conclusion that does not validly follow from what is known about a thing, and the examples I gave above with regards to conclusions about Judaism based on knowing one single factoid about Judaism should amply illustrate just how flawed this form of reasoning is. Yet it's a fairly popular form of reasoning even among people who pretend to be rationalists, skeptics and scientifically minded.

The Christ Conspiracy: An Index to the Review

Since the review of The Christ Conspiracy reached spectacular lengths, a post that indexes the articles seems called for. Short summaries of the problems identified in each instalment follows. This post should be seen as an appendix to the conclusion. Due to the proliferation of posts dealing with chapters 20, 23 and 24, and their close relationship, there are multiple separate entries for these.

Chapter 1

The problems encountered in this chapter do not really relate all that closely to the thesis itself, but do showcase that Murdock plays fast and loose with the truth.

Chapter 2

A couple of really fudgy claims, based on a sequence of sources misunderstanding and exaggerating each other's claims. Unreliable sources in general. However, the chapter itself does not contribute much to the conclusion of the book. The general claim that is made could be made with credible sources – Murdock has just chosen to use shoddy sources and shoddy claims to prop up a reasonable claim.

Chapter 3, 4

Some fallacies along the lines of the etymological fallacy, and a particularly strange logical fallacy – viz. the idea that someone acting illogically is evidence of his non-existence. She also claims that 'pious fraud' was coined to describe Christian practices, when the phrase in fact pre-dates Christianity by several decades.

Chapter 6

Protestant slander of a pope taken seriously. Saman and Maga? Sources please.  Pure speculation about the role of gnostics. Speculation about the 'malodorous chrism' as a term for sperm. A fabrication about the contents of the Nag Hammadi library.

Chapter 7

A mistaken reference (demonstrating that Murdock has not verified the veracity of the sources of her source). Unreliable numismatic third-hand evidence. Shoddy referencing.

Chapter 8

Misunderstands the Documentary Hypothesis. The orthodox dating of Pharaohs is off. A naive understanding of translation is evident. Ignorance of Hebrew phonemes makes for the amusing thought that the tetragrammaton contains the name of Eve. Acharya thinks that the use of the designation "Askhenazi" for eastern European Jews is evidence that early Judaism was greatly influenced by Aryans. Mr. Spock's (!) Vulcan Salute is presented as evidence that the Jewish God is a volcano God. Silly attempts to identify "Israel" as "Isis-Ra-El". Some more bullshit linguistics.

 Chapter 10, pt 1

A genuinely sub-par understanding of what allegory is, as well as mischaracterizing the Hebrew grammatical gender as a system of allegory.

Chapter 10, pt 2

Identifies the Book of Jasher referred to in the Bible as the medieval Book of Jasher.

Chapter 10, pt 3

Reads Amos' harangue against the worshippers of the God Kaiwan as though this was admission that Kaiwan is part of Biblical theology. Without any supporting evidence, she equates Kaiwan and El. This is followed what looks suspiciously much like Acharya admitting to believing in astrology - her definition of astrology is very positive and downright naive.

This is followed by use of an unreliable source (Pike). It is claimed that toponomies in the Bible are widely astrological - a claim that rests on such a weak foundation that it's in fact laughable. (From an unreliable source, again). Strong pareidolia (since there's seven stars in the Pleiades, all sevens in Judaism much represent the Pleiades).

Also, the book of Job is a freemasonic ritual manual (as in, that's its origins)

Chapter 14, pt 1

The seven archangels are the seven hathors. Angels are the angles of the zodiac. Murdock thinks metaphor is what you get when you read literally.

Chapter 14, pt 2.

Jesus being aware of crosses as an execution method is taken as evidence that he must be invented.  A few severely misleading pieces of reasoning regarding etymologies (hell, pesach), and other bad linguistics. Generally some of the reasoning indicates that Murdock thinks English designations are magical lenses into the past of a number of concepts. Bad dating of the Talmud. Claims which were not supported by their source whatsoever (i.e. Barbara Walker claiming that various things derive from Egyptian prayers to Osiris.)

Chapter 16

A treasure trove of bad linguistics.

Chapter 17, pt 1

An instance of the linguistic fallacy of very short words (John - Aan), as well as an unsubstantiated and somewhat suspicious assertion.

 Chapter 17, pt 2

A seriously debunked dating of the Dendera temple. Atlantean racial theories pop up - i.e. the fact that the author of Revelations mentions a 'man' as one out of four symbols is seen as evidence that the author of Revelations believed in Theosophist racial theories (i.e. Adam is The Atlantean). There's a distinct lack of argumentation beyond assertions.

Chapter 19, pt 1

Murdock subscribes naively to idealizing descriptions of the Essenes. She rejects the DSS as having anything to do with them, and thus basically ends up having next to no evidence regarding their beliefs. Nevertheless, she dares make several sweeping statements as to what these beliefs were. Her argument in general is unclear.

Chapter 20:

Pt 1 Various shenanigans with regards to trying to show that Christianity is older than the mainstream assessment has it. Here we find Taylor describing the early church in terms that would need some backing up – but as usual, no evidence is given, just assertion. It is also worth noting that Murdock uses motifs from the NT as historical evidence in the most contorted fashion. Polycarp is quote-mined. Some quite vacuous statements about the Essenes are made, including unsourced speculation reported as fact, bad etymologies, as well as directly contradicting the previous chapter regarding the relationship of Essenism and Christianity.

Pt 2 Eusebius' Interpretatio Christiana: did Eusebius claim that the Therapeutan monks were Christian before Christianity? A most precious thing emerges: the quote-mined quote-mine! Does allegorical reading imply gnosticism?

Pt 3 Irrelevant twaddle based on the previous identification of Christianity with the Therapeutans (given that all evidence in favour of such an identification given thus far is mistaken). Murdock thinks 'therapeut' and 'doctor of the law' are etymologically connected. Murdock relies on Epiphanius' knowledge of Hebrew, which is more or less proven to be sub par. (Bad referencing practices, again.) Undue reliance on Higgins.

Pt 4 Murdock cites Geza Vermes, but gets Vermes's claim wrong. A somewhat misleading description of Jewish lending practices. Murdock focuses on the most anti-gentile intertestamental Jewish literature to paint an exaggeratedly hateful picture of Judaism.

Pt 5 Murdock's ignorance of the Talmud is coupled with her insistence on thinking that she knows something about it.

Chapter 23:

Pt 1 Some rather weak reasoning with regards to where western culture originated.

Pt 2 Murdock reports a quote-mine by Jochmans as a prima facie quote, in an attempt to make it seem like the Great Pyramid at some point has been covered by the sea. Some fairly bad arguments (Byblos being an Egyptian colony being presented as evidence for the Bible being an Egyptian book ...) Papyri allegedly five to ten thousand  years of age are alluded to. A claim with no support or evidence presented at all, regarding 'Logia Iesou'. Some quotes that essentially consist of nothing but a nested quote, along the line of Murdock quoting Jackson quoting Kuhn, making looking the original source up tedious and fucking well frustrating.

Pt 3 Misrepresentation of the Aryan Invasion Theory with regards to Indian archaeology and linguistics. Reliance on Hindu religious material for claims of really far back history (on the order of tens of thousand years ago). Not enough sources given to be able to assess the value of the presented claims. Murdock presents an argument that makes her claims regarding prehistory unfalsifiable. Value-judgments regarding rishi-culture and later brahmanic culture that rest on no ground whatsoever. Shitty historical linguistics: Murdock misrepresents the state of Indo-European linguistics as well as downright pulls the wool over our eyes with regards to the Nostratic theory. 

Pt 4 Mentions some Egyptian depiction of a fish trap as evidence of Sumerians being closely related to some North Europeans (but does not tell us anything about this depiction, so we cannot verify this claim). Conflates the Sumerians with Aryan invaders – something not even her source for this madcap claim actually does. Weird ideas about Semitic languages having gone into "permanent eclipse" are quoted. Iranians are mistaken for proto-Greeks and proto-Romans. Really weird arguments presented to show that the Hebrews were Indo-European (or at least a significant portion of them). Murdock mistakes 'levitical' and 'levirate' when reading her source (which got it right) and uses this conflation to present the idea that Levites were Indo-European (for the record, levirate and levitical are highly unrelated terms). Weird and unsourced claims about levirate marriages.

 Pt 5 Unsubstantiated ideas about Abraham's origin are restated. Some pretty bad etymologies presented, of which my favourite is Jessulmer as the origin of the name Jerusalem - which simply cannot hold, since Jessulmer is named for a medieval king. Also, false claims about words in Sanskrit. No references for claims about Jerusalem's origin in Egyptian religion, although pretty fat claims are made. A conspiracy theory regarding the Rosetta stone sneaks in. Some very out there claims about the origins of various British things, such as the word Britain and the druids. Finally, Murdock ascribes some credibility to notions that western culture has its origin on Ireland. A nationalistic creed that probably makes some irish people very happy, but c'mon, not an evidence-based claim in any sense whatsoever.

 Pt 6. Here, full-on delusionality is evident: Pygmies at the root of all culture! A lot of evidence alluded to, none actually given. Bad understanding of the theory of evolution. . 

Chapter 24:

Pt 1 Bad understanding of evolutionary theory. Bad logic.

Pt 2 Shoddy linguistics, shoddy referencing, shoddily unclear claims, chains of sources getting things more wrong during each step, reliance on religiously mislead 19th-century scholars who tried finding the lost tribes of Israel in the Americas, claims about the Chimalpopoca manuscript that are wrong. These fabrications are used to bolster the notion that the Biblical creation myth was present in the Americas. Lots of unsupported assertions.

Pt 3 Shoddy linguistics regarding languages of America and India.

Pt 4 Unreliable sources (James Churchward). Lots of assertions without any evidence. Bad linguistics. Appealing to previous bad linguistics as though it were evidence.

Pt 5 Pyramids. In this part, Murdock quotes UFOlogists and new age kooks. Murdock accepts the Ica stones as genuine. Murdock accepts exaggerated claims about the 'precision' of the Costa Rican stone spheres as accurate without thinking about the methodology of measuring such stones

Pt 6 Giants. Ancient Maps. Saturn having been a 'pole star'. Murdock relies on sources that think writing goes back 150 000 years. Murdock also seems to believe that the original religion of humanity must have been objectively good in some sense ­ - which is a weird idea.

My Conclusion

Pretty much what the title says, my summary and the conclusion I drew from reading The Christ Conspiracy, evaluating its arguments, checking its sources, evaluating the sources, etc.  

On Historical Linguistics: Part 2

The model I presented in the previous post only presents a way of structuring the findings once we have them. The next question then is what changes are the most useful ones to trace?

People like to think that similarities in vocabulary are a reliable indicator - this is probably why the belief that English descends from Latin is quite popular, even to the extent that ignorant teachers tell their pupils this as a fact. The problems with just looking at individual words is that words are borrowed quite freely from one language to another (or, well, at least it seems this is the case in Eurasia - for some reason, South American native langauges seem to have had more free exchange of grammar for whatever reason).

Another type of similarity is typological similarity. Typology is the study of the "properties" of languages, things like "what order do subject, verb and object come in", "does the language predominantly use suffixes, prefixes or neither", "does the language have prepositions or postpositions", and a lot of similar stuff. But here we have a rather interesting problem.

For some reason, various features tend to cluster together: it's not unusual for languages with this or that feature also to have these particular other features - and it seems this follows from some property of our brains or as some consequence of something more subtle about language itself.

Thus, even languages that recently have changed in certain ways, and where we can know contact with a language that already had a certain property is not the cause for the change, we can see that the other features often tend to hobble along in the same direction. Of course, language contact can make this even more powerful – unrelated languages can acquire features by influence, one from another. In fact, large areas of such belts of influence have been identified, and are called 'sprachbunds' or 'convergence areas'. So we find that from the perspective of historical linguistics, the fact that some pair of languages do a lot of things in similar ways (suffixes, SOV, postpositions, ... or whatever other bundle of features you can imagine) does not necessarily tell us anything about whether they are related or not.

However, one type of change is very amenable to a hierarchical analysis - sound changes. Over time, languages have sound changes happening to them. These can sort of be expressed as "search-and-replace". We represent the language in a textual form. (Note: we are of course rather used to this nowadays, given that we have literacy and all, but even a few centuries ago this was not a very common skill. Language is primarily spoken, and representing it as text when dealing with the history of spoken languages does kind of deserve mention of this fact.) We can then, for instance, do a sound change along the lines of this:

t → t^h
d → t

A word such as tin would come out as t^hin. Now, in case t^h did not exist in the language previously, the language has not lost any phonological distinctions - all words that previously were distinct still are distinct. But let's imagine another change:

t → t
d → t

This change removes a distinction, and thus we lose some "knowledge" about how the language was previously - after this, we cannot tell by just looking at a word whether it previously had a t or a d where there now is a t.

There also are conditional changes. These are basically changes that consist of rules where one sound is changed depending on sounds nearby, e.g.

k → t͡ʃ, / _e, _i

This would replace k with t͡ʃ when followed by e or i, a sound change that has happened in many languages worldwide. Essentially, though, such changes can be written like this instead, to remove the need for the notation with / _e, _i:

ke → t͡ʃe
ki → t͡ʃi 

Notice, however, that the k → t͡ʃ, / _e, _i notation is more succinct, and we also are less likely by accident to forget some particular instance. In fact, the change there could possibly be expressed even more powerfully as k → t͡ʃ, / _V, when V is a front vowel.

Other contextual things that may be of relevance are whether a sound is in word-initial or word-final position, whether it's before or after or even in the same syllable as the word stress, whether it's in such a position with regards to some weaker stresses of the same word, etc. To make the notation able to deal with such, symbols for stresses of different types is all it takes. Similar additions coding for whatever feature we need to trace should be easy to add as well. The notation that expresses contexts with / [surrounding sound]_[surrounding sound] is more compact than writing out every single substitution separately, but I am not going for a full Historical Linguistics 101 course here, so I will not regale you with such details.

A good principle:  

i) shared innovations indicate closer relationships
ii) shared retentions do not indicate anything very interesting with regards to distance

Why would this be the case? There are lots of possible changes - a shared change is thus somewhat a priori unlikely. Anytime some part of a language has not been hit by a change we will have a retention, though, so retentions by their nature will occur a lot more often than shared innovations.

Although I previously mentioned that the lexicon is somewhat unreliable, an analogy based on the lexicon might be better. Let us imagine we have a small island on which there are two languages. We do not know whether these first entered the island, and then diverged, or diverged and only then entered the island. We find that there's an animal on the island that does not exist elsewhere. It also turns out that they have very similar words for it, words that do not exist in any of the related languages outside of the island. How likely is it that they both came up with the same word independently? Fairly unlikely.

If they have different words, this does not necessarily tell us anything at all. One - or even both - of the languages might have come up with new words more recently. If they have the same word, we need to account for that: either, one of the languages has borrowed it from the other after arriving on the island separately from the other group (who borrowed from whom does not necessarily tell us who were there first, however!), or they arrived as one language that only more recently has differentiated into two.

However, one thing that would more clearly suggest that they did not arrive together is if one of the languages shared a lot of innovations with some language (or group of languages) outside of the island, and the other didn't - or even better if it shared innovations with another group of languages altogether. The likelihood that all of these groups started diverging from a shared origin at the same time, and some of the groups in isolation from the others had done the same innovations is very low.

A language probably goes through far fewer sound changes than lexical changes - by an order of magnitude, at the very least - through any time span. Sound changes are further not really "loaned" after the fact - they tend to spread through a speaker community - and sometimes beyond it - but there isn't really any way in which they could be loaned. Words are loaned, not processes that happened in the past. A process that is going on can spill over, a process that has already happened is not relevant any longer.

Some changes seem to be fairly common cross-linguistically. We can observe, for instance, that historical *k has become t͡ʃ in certain very similar positions in English and Swedish as spoken in Finland. We know Swedish as spoken in Finland is closer related to Swedish as spoken in Sweden than it is to English, however. The same change has happened in a lot of languages, but Swedish and English are similar enough that one might find the shared change somewhat significant. It's not significant, really – Swedish as spoken in Finland and English don't have any particular affinities. However, such common changes might seem to undermine our use of sound change and shared innovation. There is a solution, however!

The order in which changes have happened may leave traces that make it possible to resolve what the order was. Languages in which a series of early changes have happened in the same order  from some ancestral form (after which more divergent changes have happened) are thus very likely to be more closely related than languages in which no such shared order exists.

An example might be helpful here. Let us imagine a language L and a sound change, lets call it A^→, where a final syllable having /i/ as its vowel causes the vowel of the previous syllable to become fronted, so e.g. /kaki/ → /keki/. (/a u o/ are 'back vowels' and /i e/ are front vowels; why they're called that can be learned from books on phonology, and I will not get into it. Suffice to say, this has to do with articulatory features of the vowels). Another change I already mentioned has k turn into t͡ʃ before front vowels, let's call it B^→.

If A^→  happens before B^→, /kaki/ will end up as /t͡ʃet͡ʃi/, but if B^→ happens before A^→,we get /ket͡ʃi/. We might find that some related language K has /kaki/ or /keki/ or /keke/ or whatever for a similar meaning, and we can posit with great likelihood that the original form was something like *kaki. However, our hunch would be better supported if we found many words where L's /t͡ʃ/ corresponds to K's /k/. If we were to find that a lot of words in L had t͡ʃ where K had k, and likewise a lot of words have k in both of the languages, we need to account for that - and an ordered pair of sound changes in one of them is a realistic and simple way of doing that. The fewer the sound changes we need to posit to explain it, however, the better we're doing (due to Occam's razor - don't posit a hundred changes when two suffice, etc).

If ten sound changes has happened, there's factorial of ten orders they could have happened in. That's a whopping 362880 different possible orders, each order roughly equally likely. (Well, some changes may depend on a previous change, reducing the number of possible orders a bit, but still.) The likelihood of two languages sharing ten sound changes in the same order without being in close contact is thus pretty low. (A further caveat, however: sometimes, sound changes do not have effects that make it possible to decide which out of two or even three changes happened first).

So, now that we have considered the benefits of the shared sound change as our measure of similarity, we will go on to try and see where this leads us.

On Historical Linguistics: Part 1

Historical linguistics is a field that does not produce very "practically" useful results - in a way, I guess it can be compared to G.H. Hardy's characterization of pure maths. However, historically there has been a great interest in it - many of the greatest minds of the late 19th century invested huge amounts of effort in this area. In part this can be attributed to nationalism.

Since historical linguistics deals with long-term history in a way that naturally is associated with the history of ethnicities and tribes, it is natural that methods have been developed to differentiate claims that have been made just to appeal to nationalist sensibilities from accurate claims about linguistic relationship that tell us something confirmably real.

Of course, the fact of two languages being related does not really convey any ethical obligations between the two groups, does not create any reason for speakers of one of the languages to be conflated with speakers of the other, or to assume that speakers of the two languages think in similar fashions and have similar political desires. Nor should it be seen as a way for the other group to claim part in more recent achievements of the other group.

Of course, various idiots have failed to understand this and used as well as abused proper methodology with an axe to grind for whatever retarded reason. Still, the ability to at least somewhat differentiate nationalist propaganda from stuff that is more likely to have some real historical core to it has probably helped rein in some of the most inane pseudolinguistic hypotheses. Such pseudolinguistics still are aired frequently in various venues for nationalistic, religious or possibly even other reasons. I will return to these pseudolinguistic claims later on, so as to tie back to the main topic of this blog.

Of course, another important part in trying to figure out the history of languages was probably general human curiosity - you get a very real puzzle with some very real information about prehistory.

The first observation we'll make is that some languages are similar to each other. These similarities come in many shapes: German and Dutch have similar phonologies, a lot of shared vocabulary, and a large amount of shared grammar.  The same goes for, say, Italian and Spanish. Realizing that such pairings (or even larger tuplets) of languages are somehow related was a starting point, in some sense.

A natural follow-up question is how we rank the relatedness of several closely related languages? Say German, Dutch and English, or Spanish, Romanian and Italian. And by 'how', I don't mean "what is the rank", I mean "how do we go about to rank them".

Let's first define what we mean when we say two languages are "related":

Def. 1: Two languages are related if  they have come about by distinct sets of historical changes that have happened to a shared ancestral language.

Graph 1: an example

The edges in the graph represent changes. We could also use an empty set of changes:

Graph 2

Latin and Italian are related, because both Italian and Latin can be derived from Latin by different sets of changes. Now we can start wondering about things like relative distances.

It is clear that Latin is closer related to Latin than Italian is to Latin. This is a trivial statement, but it can be developed a bit. The model I will present will have a slight flaw, but one that is rather 'acceptable' as far as practical consequences go: we will not be able to distinguish whether Spanish or Italian is closer to Latin. I will later give a closer justification for this particular gap in the system.

Graph 3: A small tree of related languages

Now, we can clearly form a bigger structure like graph 3. Since I have not yet described why we know this structure, we shall just see this as an example of how relations work, rather than as a statement of facts about these languages. With the assumptions given in the graph, we a situation where Spanish, Italian and French form a rather tight group, and German, English and Dutch likewise. We basically can say that languages that share a node, are closer related to each other than they are to languages that do not share that node.

Graph 4: a tree with a complication

We might think that this gives us an opening as for how to compare how close a language is to the root: count the number of intervening nodes. Under that assumption, Latin is closer to Indo-European than Spanish, Italian, French, English, German or Dutch. However, since we really don't know the exact distance of Germanic or Latin to the root, this is putting a lot of stock into the intervening nodes. Also, we could have had a situation like graph 4, where a node we've got no record of ever existing actually makes the distances slightly off (if we just go by the number of nodes). 

Of course, positing an intermediate node if in order to make an assertion regarding distances of some set of languages violates Occam's razor - we can't just willy nilly insert a Pre-Germanic node without evidence, and then assert that Spanish, Italian and French are closer to Indo-European than German, English and Dutch are. What we can do, however, is use this example to show why the number of nodes between our proto-Language and the descendants isn't particularly informative: it only tells us about how well we know the number of languages to have split from a branch and in what order - it does not tell us anything about how great the changes between the nodes are, and thus nothing about which particular branches' nodes are closer to the root.

However, now we do have a hierarchical way of comparing whether (language a, language b) or (language a, language c) are the closer pair of relatives. This is only really meaningful as long as one of the languages is held constant - when we're comparing (language a, language b) with (language c, language d), our measurement gets somewhat less meaningful. 

In the next post, I will present what linguistic content is most often used for finding out things about relations between languages - but also point out how ignoring other content makes the idea of any kind of 'objective measure' of relatedness beyond hierarchies along the lines presented above. (Although one could imagine improvements in method that would fix that problem as well.) 

I will also present some considerations as to why Occam's razor makes the conclusions those methods reach rather likely, and why we can consider families such as Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic, Afro-Asiatic and a number of other families overwhelmingly likely accurately to represent how these groups of languages are internally related.