Note: I refer to this recording as a 'chat' although perhaps it is more realistic to interpret it as another one of Dad's confident lectures to me. The photos are a fairly recent one of me against part of my library, and one of him as a young man, in his university days (pictured in the snow in my grandmother's yard).

 

I regular defer under the pressure of these long-winded, slow burning speeches, and allow him time to say his piece - at least as much as I can reasonably bear; one has to find a way to interject somehow or else he would just keep on talking indefinitely, missing the point, brokering no response (nor requiring any) - and prefer not to interrupt too much, allowing him to impart vast reams of data to me. However, he rarely affords me the same favour, usually cutting me off after a single, one line utterance, if that, in rude impatience, or talking over me as I am speaking, or telling me angrily 'that's what I'm saying!' when it is evident to me that it is nothing of the sort, putting me on edge psychologically, and leaving me nervous, stuttering, or otherwise prone to raising my voice to 'compete for airtime'.

 

It is true that my father is a very knowledgeable and scholarly individual, and a very bright man; a real font of knowledge - that cannot be debated - however, despite this, it is (and was at the time) my conclusion that he was invariably incorrect about the inferences he made from the true historical trivia he shared. It's a pity I never was afforded the opportunity by him to lay out my own case to anywhere near the same level of detail, resigning myself to mere hurried asides and awkward one phrase chip-ins (alluding to much more, not that he noticed*), as he continued to rattle on and on and on, to a sometimes patronising level of 'explanation', where one example could have been given, and the point already assimilated by me, and yet he provided ten.

 

I have, mercifully, had a chance to write at length in my book though, The Less Than Jolly Heretic (not that he will ever bring himself to read it, as has been stated to me, as indeed he has historically replied regarding all of my written work - I have written 13 books, only for him to scoff at them, unopened, and then criticise them to the hilt), and direct readers to that instead for my comprehensive arguments on the - total - non-existence of 'Jesus Christ', Christianity's responsibility for the fall of Rome (and the violent suppression and effective extinction of pagan values in much of Europe; at least West of the Rhine) and of both a benighted value-shift from Greco-Roman times to our Christian present and the need to reconsider these post-Christian values carefully, and return to a Greco-Roman value system more immediate and extensive by far than what my father summarised as 'making sacrifices to the Gods' (although, ironically, he was on the right track).

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*For example, at one point, talking of 'Jesus preaching to the apostles in the synagogue at Nazareth', and specifically on his followers' inability to read and write, I suggest to him "wait a second, they can't have been all that illiterate, they were Rabbis, weren't they?", prompting another dismissal and an extended monologue by him. I was referring to a passage in Chapter 4 of Carrier's book, titled "An Inordinate Fondness for Suspiciously Bad Arguments", on pp. 125-128, that explains that "This argument hinges on the assumption - which is actually a faith doctrine, derived from the mythology of the Gospels and Acts - that the apostles (particularly the top three men, the 'pillars' of Galatians 2:9: Peter, James and John) were illiterate (or indeed even fishermen). ... Even the Gospels don't ever really say this. Acts alone has one sentence claiming the apostles were illiterate (Acts 4:13). But Acts can't be trusted [On the illiteracy claim specifically: Carrier, Historicity, 263-64, 440, 528-31; Richard Carrier, Science Education in the Early Roman Empire (Pitchstone, 2016), 137-38. That Acts is not generally reliable: Carrier, Historicity, ch. 9; and Richard Carrier, "How We Know Acts Is a Fake History" (21 April 2023) at richardcarrier.info/archives/23447.]. ... First, all educated Rabbis were expected to ply a manual trade (and we know of ancient Rabbis who held such occupations as sandal-maker and stonemason); therefore 'being a fisherman' was not evidence of 'illiteracy' [See Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed (Lulu, 2009), 51-70; Philip Alexander, "The Rabbis and Their Rivals in the Second Century CE," in Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and Developments (ed. James Carleton Paget and Judith Lieu: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 57-70; Gregg Gardner, Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity (University of California Press, 2022), 21-37.]. ... A later author or tradent could have mistakenly assumed it meant that (on the correct assumption that most fishermen were illiterate), and not realised that the apostles were Rabbis, or whatever such persons were then called (and thus an exception to that inference). ... Since a movement begun by educated elites might raise suspicion from the masses, the contrivance that the founders were 'really' illiterate commoners just like them becomes self-serving. ... It's at least as likely, if not a certainty, that these apostles' illiteracy was a myth invented later. Because it has no contextual plausibility as history. Experts on ancient literacy have well documented that it is not possible that the kind of scriptural exegesis this sect's creeds and doctrines were based on could derive from a mere ad hoc recollection of scattered readings of scripture in public by the non-literate; and that thoroughly memorizing an extensive text was itself a years-long school exercise, not accomplishable by anyone bereft of an education altogether. ... And yet 'the apostles were illiterate' is one of those things that just 'keeps being repeated' by historians in this field, while none ever stops to ask if it's even plausible, much less credibly evidenced - or even works as an argument at all."