Article: scathingly anti-mythicist

A really good blog article, and I fear he's right--the anti-rationalism behind the Mythers is part of some global rebellion against knowledge, that also encompasses the people trying to overthrow evolution by natural selection, and scoff at global warming (or the notion that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare--those guys just took a huge hit with the flop that was "Anonymous", but they'll regroup--possibly around some new Bard-substitute). It only takes a handful of so-called 'experts' who will tell them what they want to hear to embolden them. But in the end, they will sabotage themselves by being such a bunch of obnoxious ass-hats. The real danger is not that they will convince people they're right but that they'll collectively overturn the belief that there IS a right answer to anything--undermine faith in the most important of all human enterprises--our struggle to understand ourselves and the world around us, including our past. That they may despise each other doesn't mean they aren't on the same side.

"King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Paul Bunyan." Sheesh. If you're going to devote yourself to the notion that Jesus was a myth, at least know something about mythology. The Arthurian legends probably are based on actual figures who resisted the Saxon incursions. The Robin Hood legend is most likely not based on anyone specific, and the original stories are INCREDIBLY different from the guy we know about now, who changes with every retelling. Paul Bunyan doesn't seem to be based on a real person at all, and it doesn't seem like anybody ever thought he was, given that if he'd really lived, there would likely be a birth certificate somewhere.

Why didn't the Jesus story keep changing? Why did it get frozen in place? Why does it contain so many elements that don't seem to fit with what the storytellers want to persuade us? Because they, unlike the people telling truly mythical stories, were not at liberty to tell any old story they wanted to. They changed the story, yes--but only to a point. The mythmaking process got frozen long before it got to the point of being a true myth.

The Celts believed it was blasphemous to write down your sacred history, so we didn't get any version of Arthur until Celtic Christian monks decided to preserve the legends before they were lost. The poor people who probably told the first Robin Hood stories couldn't write at all, and the literate men who wrote down the early versions of the story were too distant from its source to know or care if it was based on a real person--they just wanted to share a good story about a rascal who robbed people (and in the original version, kept it all for himself, and doesn't seem to have been much of an archer). Paul Bunyan came into being around the campfires of French Canadian lumberjacks, and originally was not a giant, but the fact is all the guys telling the story were Paul Bunyans in their own right--they were just creating an idealized version of themselves, which is hardly what Jesus was to the gospel authors.

When your only way of making an argument is to set up a strawman and knock it over, you don't have an argument.