[HN Gopher] The Phantoms Haunting History
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       The Phantoms Haunting History
        
       Author : lermontov
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2024-07-13 04:18 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
        
       | throwup238 wrote:
       | Judaism is the evolution of a Sun/Ra worshipping cult, its early
       | followers killed Moses and only perpetuated the religion out of
       | guilt, most historical evidence before the 14th century was faked
       | by monks, and the Carolingian dynasty was invented to pad the
       | current date by over 300 phantom years (the current year is
       | actually 1722, not 2024).
       | 
       | That's officially in my headcanon now.
        
         | whythre wrote:
         | Sounds like a Dan Brown fanfic
        
       | swayvil wrote:
       | He meditated. He prayed. He fasted. He ate mushrooms. He dwelt in
       | the wilderness. And by doing so he saw something more. Something
       | realer than what is popularly called reality.
       | 
       | But I won't do any of that. What I will do is read stories about
       | the people who did all that and interpret them with a
       | conventional eye.
       | 
       | Funny.
        
         | datameta wrote:
         | To approach the present moment with mindfulness generally does
         | not allow greater insight into the distant past than
         | archaeology and anthropology.
         | 
         | Edit: I misinterpreted your comment. Yes, I agree that it is
         | possible/likely that much of theology is built on top of select
         | few people's transcendant experiences.
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | > Many scholars have found themselves 'baffled and confused by
       | the enormous proportion of forged, remade, confected, and
       | otherwise mutilated documents' that form the premodern historical
       | record.
       | 
       | I'm sure they do. Nonetheless, they make the best of it. This
       | article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story
       | is as good as your carefully researched one."
       | 
       | Similar to intelligent designers saying, "hey, if you throw a
       | bunch of car parts on the floor, they'll never assemble
       | themselves into a car! So it had to be a Designer."
       | 
       | Or homeopaths saying, "There's so much conventional medicine
       | cannot explain. So my herbal cure and natural diet is as good as
       | their chemotherapy!"
        
         | swayvil wrote:
         | Without the evidence of firsthand observation to stand upon,
         | what have you got?
        
           | AlbertCory wrote:
           | > what have you got?
           | 
           | you've got a discipline that isn't _quite_ a science, but
           | usually makes a best effort to resemble one.
           | 
           | Which still ends up better than the wild ravings of
           | uneducated conspiracists.
        
             | whythre wrote:
             | Or the calculated lies of propagandists. The fact that
             | ancient histories were written with an agenda in mind may
             | be true, but that does not mean they are improved by adding
             | further layers of 'constructed truth,' IE, lies.
        
               | AlbertCory wrote:
               | You are only imitating the homeopaths and creationists
               | here.
        
               | mistermann wrote:
               | You are technically describing your interpretation.
               | Careful, the supernatural can be found in what would seem
               | like the very most unlikely places.
        
               | AlbertCory wrote:
               | Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
               | 
               | Do you have some of that for "the supernatural" ?
        
               | mistermann wrote:
               | Do you have proof that you are omniscient?
        
         | constantcrying wrote:
         | >This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up
         | story is as good as your carefully researched one."
         | 
         | It is essentially a denouncement of historical revisionsm
         | though...
        
         | mistermann wrote:
         | > This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-
         | up story is as good as your carefully researched one."
         | 
         | That itself is a great story!
         | 
         | I wonder how many people fell for it. At least one.
        
           | cchi_co wrote:
           | Critical thinking and discernment in evaluating information
           | are inportant
        
             | antonellaleo wrote:
             | In recent times, technology has proven to be more
             | sophisticated and just like any other currency that can be
             | stolen or lost, crypto and other digital assets has proven
             | to be more difficult to recover but not impossible, and
             | just like searching for any other monetary currency, you
             | need a trustworthy and honest agency or personnel who can
             | track and recover the value lost or stolen, in my case I
             | hired easyreclaimer@gmailcom, they followed the blockchain
             | and was able to recover over247k of my stolen funds within
             | a couple of weeks. The fees for the services I received was
             | fair and communication was excellent
        
             | mistermann wrote:
             | The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is roughly 20.1
             | miles per hour.
        
       | rdtsc wrote:
       | > While in the past their views may have been countered by
       | equally imaginative narratives from the left -- like the
       | liberatory progressivism of Whig historians and Marxist theorists
       | -- today it feels as though that ground is too often ceded in
       | favor of "trusting the science."
       | 
       | The first part describing the webs and flows of objectivity in
       | history, with interesting examples was well written, But the
       | conclusion is a bit odd. The author thinks, if you follow one the
       | links they provide, that the far right individuals like Tolkien's
       | works, and then also invent crockpot alternate histories, and
       | suggests that the left should come up with something similar.
       | 
       | > American narrative in decades, was the work not of historians,
       | but journalists. When the profession has ceded its domination
       | over the public narrative of history, amateurs will take over.
       | [...] Maybe that amateurism is not such a bad thing.
       | 
       | If historians won't do it, the journalists should. I can see
       | interpreting it, yes, but pretending to write whole fictionalized
       | narratives masking as history is a bit extreme. That's exactly
       | what journalists in totalitarian regimes do: in Russia they say
       | that Ukraine is a fictional country, it's just Russians corrupted
       | by the "Satanic West", in North Korea I am sure they tell similar
       | elaborate stories and so on.
        
       | constantcrying wrote:
       | What an awful article. Leaving aside the later half, which is
       | just a vague denouncement of various right wing stances on
       | history, the former part concerns itself with revisionist
       | history, which seeks to rearrange ancient or medieval history.
       | 
       | History will always be plagued by the various issues the article
       | point out, most narrators are totally unreliable, most documents
       | which have existed are lost and might have been intentionally
       | destroyed, physical evidence is selected by the surrounding
       | environment, measurement techniques are imprecise and the amount
       | of things that happened is incredibly vast. This state of affairs
       | means that we should expect that there are strong arguments for
       | multiple contradicting theories and that there is a great variety
       | of theories which are supported by much of the evidence.
       | Essentially revisionism should be the default state of history,
       | but of course it isn't.
       | 
       | In physics we have learned in the last hundred years that roughly
       | everything we had previously known was false and that most of the
       | assumptions made were in fact wrong.
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | > Inspired by archaeological discoveries in Amarna in Egypt,
       | Freud posited that the monotheism of Moses was, in fact, of
       | Egyptian origin: an evolution of the worship of the sun god,
       | Aten. Even more scandalously, he asserted that ancient Jews had
       | murdered Moses and perpetuated this monotheistic faith not from
       | religious devotion, but from an unconscious sense of unresolved
       | spiritual guilt.
       | 
       | I wonder how much of that had to do with the Nazi demonization
       | and dehumanization of Jewish people. Monotheism is one of the big
       | contributions to culture by Judaism. The other 2 major modern
       | monotheistic religions- Christianity and Islam are explicitly
       | based on Jewish monotheism.
       | 
       | Framing this as them stealing it from the Egyptians and killing
       | Moses (similar to Jesus) seems very inline with what the Nazis
       | would want to portray.
        
       | cchi_co wrote:
       | The evolution of history into a narrative that politicizes the
       | present is a double-edged sword.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-13 23:01 UTC)