AtF: Conspiracy Theories

I’m beginning to think that Cooper is a conspiracy nut. Shocking, right? Seriously, he’s been throwing random, unconnected bits of information at us and telling us that everything, no matter how specious or counter to reality, supports his stupid, stupid premise. Now we’re about to see the next tool in the bag o’ stupidity. This time it’s the ol’, “The fact that nothing supports my premise proves the truth of the premise itself!” Yeah…

These records were mostly written (and then lost until their rediscovery in modern times) during the Old Testament period, during which time many of the peoples mentioned in them had vanished altogether from the historical scene or had been assimilated into other more powerful nations and cultures. Even those who retained their national or tribal identities soon lost all trace and memory of their own beginnings and went on to invent fantastic accounts of how they came to be. Indeed, the very early emergence of such mythological invention and the exceedingly rapid growth of paganism is a very telling point indeed against the modernist notion that Genesis is a late composition, for many of the names recorded with such astonishing accuracy in the Table of Nations, had disappeared from the historical scene many centuries before the time in which modernism would say that the Table of Nations was written. The Table of Nations, it thus seems, is a very ancient document indeed.

Yes. Almost immediately after the flood everyone forgot where they came from and started making shit up about their origins. And then they invented paganism, I suppose so they could piss Bill Cooper off. And the fact that there were all these different mythologies and beliefs is somehow proof that the Bible was absolutely right about where everyone came from. Also, I’m President Obama. And I live in a world where the gravity is upside-down, so I’m currently writing this blog post while sitting on my ceiling. I mean, seriously, what the fuck am I supposed to do with the text above? The fact that the names in the Table of Nations don’t appear anywhere except the Table of Nations (with the weird exception of Elam) means that the existence of the Table of Nations proves that we evil modernists don’t what we’re talking about. Okay, maybe I’m going about this all wrong. Perhaps I should be looking at the names that don’t appear anywhere in the Table of Nations. Let’s see, here, there’s Sargon. I honestly don’t think there could be a bigger name in the ancient, Mesopotamian world than Sargon. Yet he appears nowhere. I guess I could go with Cooper’s style of argumentation and say that “Sidon” was the same as “Sargon,” but since ancient records indicate Sargon was the legendary founder of Babylon while the Table of Nations says it was Nimrod, I guess I have to go with Josephus’s argument that the “Magogites” suddenly became the “Scythians.” Yeah. That works. Cooper then gives us a little gem that explains exactly why there’s no use trying to understand his actual thought process:

In time, of course, the true histories of several of these early nations became obscured beyond all recognition. Josephus was given good cause to complain that this had happened to the Greeks of his own day, and he lamented the fact that by obscuring their own history, they had obscured the histories of other nations also.

And, yes, this is the only case I’ve come across so far where Cooper’s quote and the actual facts are in line. Josephus did, indeed, lament about the fact that the Greeks didn’t understand the history of the world from proper antiquity. It’s right at the start of Against Apion. But, of course, we’ve already covered the fact that I don’t trust Josephus, since all he did was copy the Bible as if it were completely accurate history. So I suppose it stands to reason that Cooper would finally get a citation right at this point. Either way, we now take a turn for the bizarre.

Yet by no means all of the early nations were to follow this path. We shall see that many kept an accurate record down the centuries of their beginnings and wrote down the names of their founding patriarchs, bringing the records up to date with the advent of each new generation, and it is these records that provide us with such a surprising link between the ancient post-Flood era depicted in Genesis and the history of more modern times. These lists, annals and chronicles have been preserved and transmitted from generation to generation not by the nations of the Middle East this time, but by certain European peoples from times that long pre-dated the coming of Christianity, and it is most important that we remember the pre-Christian aspect of much of the following evidence, for it is too easily and too often alleged by modernist scholars that these records are the inventions of early Christian monks and are therefore worthless. Such claims of fraud will be examined in detail, particularly with regard to the records that the early Britons have left us and which are omitted in their entirety from modern history books, the media and the classroom.

Um, for the record, us “modernist scholars” (if I may be so bold as to call myself a scholar) don’t “allege” that those records were made up by “Christian monks.” We pretty much know they were. Most of the knowledge we have of the European pagan cultures was hopelessly corrupted by the church. Imperialist Christianity is bad for anyone who has the temerity to have a different history than the one supported by the Bible. Really, it’s almost ironic that this is his next paragraph:

When we consider the truly vast body of evidence from the Middle East that is conveniently ignored in modernist commentaries on the book of Genesis, such wholesale omission will appear as hardly surprising. Yet perhaps the reader is unaware of the sheer scale of this omission, for the records of the early Britons, and that's not counting the Irish Celtic, Saxon and continental records which we shall also be examining, cover not just a particular phase of history, but span more than two thousand years of it. I cannot think of any other literate nation on earth that has managed to obliterate from its own history books two thousand years or more of recorded and documented history. Not even the censors of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China in their vigorous hey-day were this effective, or even needed to be this effective, in doctoring their own official accounts. So how did this extraordinary circumstance come about, and who is responsible for it?

Everything that he just said is completely accurate. It’s just that it wasn’t modern historians that did all of the intentional obliterating of records that point to an inconvenient version of the facts of history. It was the Christians. Human civilization pre-dates the Bible. Of this there can be no question. Jericho and Susa came in to existence before the Bible was written. There was no world-destroying flood. And even if we can only guess at what those industrious Christian monks did to the histories of the Norse and Gaelic peoples in Northern Europe, we do have an example of what might have happened. See, in the 1500s when the Spanish were conquering the New World they found sophisticated cultures that apparently desperately needed the European gifts of smallpox, hot lead implants from muskets, and the gospel. These were benighted savages, after all. So what did the Conquistadors do? They destroyed as many of the records of the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs as they could find. In fact, the Maya had the most complete writing system of Pre-Colombian America and we didn’t know that until recently because the Spanish actively destroyed records, codices, and taught their subjected people only the Spanish language, assuming they taught any written language at all. But it’s us terrible modern scholars who are trying to destroy the world history of people who don’t agree with us. Since I really don’t have the space in this entry to go in to the next bit, wherein we find that Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church because of residual anger from the Catholic Church destroying the Welsh people’s true history of Biblical descent (no, seriously, that’s the best I can figure to parse the thought and it might be the most confusing thought structure I’ve ever read). We’re also going to learn how Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain has been tragically censored by historians, even though it’s the most completely accurate history in the world. The only real problems with it that I know of is that it claims that after Aeneas founded Rome, his great-grandson made it all the way to Britain. Oh, and there’s a deeply important character named Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, who beat back the Angles and the Saxons in the waning days of the Roman Empire. If you want to know more about that, I’d recommend renting King Arthur, starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley. Okay, that’s a lie. I wouldn’t recommend renting that movie to anyone. It’s terrible. Anyway, I’ll hit that up next week. Instead I think I’ll offer this thought: historians generally aren’t worried about whether or not history agrees with us. If you run in to historians who are, it’s best to approach them carefully and be prepared to not believe a word they say. Propagandists love the argument from authority. They want, say, Thomas Jefferson to have been an Evangelical Christian who wanted to found the United States on Christian principles. He’s already accepted as an authority, what with being a Founding Father and all, so the next step is to get everyone to believe that he was also a Christian in a relentlessly specific way so that they can use his authority to get certain things put in place. This is not the concern of the historian. The goal of the historian is to paint as complete a picture of Thomas Jefferson as possible, warts and all. His tendency to want to have sex with his slaves might be inconvenient, but it’s part of who he was. The fact that he helped found the United States of America based on Enlightenment philosophy of freedom from religious dogma is nice. But even that doesn’t actually matter. See, the evil modernist historians and philosophers have, for the most part, come to accept that theocracies are bad. We don’t need Thomas Jefferson to tell us that. The only reason we particularly worry about asserting the authority of Thomas Jefferson is because that’s one of the few arguments that those who come from the other side will listen to. This is the gift of that terrible modernism that Bill Cooper reviles so. I don’t ask you to accept me as an authority. I ask you to look at the evidence I put forth and the evidence that Cooper puts forth and decide which one creates a more realistic picture of the world. The only reason I assert my own status as a trained historian is so that you know that I know what I’m doing. You don’t have to agree with my conclusion, but in order to prove me wrong you have to contend with the facts that I present. This, by the way, is why the ad hominem attack is so popular. I say that Susa was founded somewhere around 5000 BCE. You say, “Yeah, well, you molest collies.”* Even if I did, what does that have to do with the existing scholarship we have about the city of Susa? It only makes sense if you actually believe that my credibility as a human being has anything at all to do with something that happened some seven thousand years ago. In case your wondering, it doesn't... ------------------------------- *Ah, Caddyshack…