Heidelberg theology

 

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Overheard on the interwebs: "William Lane Craig argues that Adam and Eve were Homo heidelbergensis. That's ridiculous". Of course. I mean, everyone knows Adam and Eve were Homo erectus! :D

Liar, lunatic or Appolinarian?

 

A clever argument against C S Lewis´ Trilemma, arguing that it´s implicitly Apollinarian. And Appolinarianism is, ahem, an ancient heresy...

Check mate. 

Relics of a Church?

 

An attack video on the Catholic Church and their relics, posted by an ex-Protestant atheist on Reformation Day?! LOL. 

Halloween haunting

 

Credit: kallerna

So I just watched the movie "A Haunting in Venice" from 2023. It´s apparently loosely based on an Agatha Christie novel, "Hallowe´en Party". Which obviously explains why Swedish television choose to show it now. I admit the movie was quite good. 

The year is 1947. The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot lives in Venice, Italy and refuses to take any new cases. Naturally, he is tricked into a situation anyway. In the film, Halloween is celebrated even in Venice. Poirot, a skeptic and atheist, participates in a séance in a supposedly haunted house. He exposes the medium as fake. Naturally, the hoaxer is killed in gruesome fashion and the game is on. 

The rest of the plot is very Agatha Christie-esque: everyone´s guilty of something, more murders follow and the full story turns out to be quite complex. You have to pay attention, rather than going into the kitchen and make a coffee! And yes, some of the characters are pretty colorful.

Since it´s a Halloween-themed flick, there is a supernatural element to the story. Poirot has an explanation (I actually suspected that the passing reference to Mithridates would turn out to be significant) but in the end, we are left to think that maybe some of the hauntings were real after all...

That´s probably all I can say in a short review (muh-hah-hah). Happy Halloween, kids. 

Capturing cryptozoology

 

The skeptical YouTube channel "Truth is scarier than fiction" reviews the recent documentary "Capturing Bigfoot", which makes a strong case for the famous Patterson-Gimlin film (PGF) being a hoax. Which is awkward for cryptozoologists and other true believers in the hairy beast, since the PGF has always been the best piece of evidence for Bigfoot´s existence. 

Of course, none of this will move the needle, since peopel were seeing Bigfoot (a.k.a. Sasquatch) before the PGF even existed. Indeed, it was these observations that inspired the PGF in the first place. So people will probably continue seeing (and smelling) the elusive creature despite the documentary and its scandalous revelations.

Besides, many of these people (the humans involved in Bigfooting) thrive on controversy anyway, so this is just more grist for the mill... 

PGF cult exposed?

 

 

Some reactions to the recent documentary "Capturing Bigfoot", which was released this Tuesday. Apparently, October 20 is National Bigfoot Day in the United States. At least unofficially. 

I haven´t seen the docu and I´m too stingy (and too lazy) to buy/download anything from Amazon, but the bottom line is that it disproves the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. Or *maybe* disproves it. Or is part of a gigantic conspiracy and hence doesn´t disprove ape-shit. 

Ultimately, it doesn´t matter, since people will continue to believe in Sasquatch anyway. Including the pro-docu people linked above! So nothing has really changed here. 

Capturing Bigfoot

 

LOL. 

Marginalia

 

Overheard on YouTube. Biblical scholar and personal maverick Dan McClellan pointed out on Joe Rogan Show (sic) that Adam and Eve are only mentioned exactly once in the entire Old Testament. Yet, in Christian theology they are extremely central. 

Hmmm...

So the temptation in the Garden, the Fall and the Curse weren´t particularly important features of the religion of Israel. They weren´t used to explain the origins of evil, und so weiter. But what was? The Book of Enoch...?

Demons? Space aliens? Lemurians??? 

The Menzel gap

 

Yes, they are destroying evidence. Of course. For "legitimate" military reasons, sure. But it *also* means...cough cough cough.

Fatima is so over

 

A long but interesting skeptical discussion about Fatima, the Miracle of the Sun in particular. I was on the fence about Fatima for a while (I mean, it could have been paranormal *somehow*...or a UFO perhaps?) but this tends to tip the scales in a skeptical direction. It certainly raises awkward questions concerning the "official" Catholic position.

Many of the prophecies supposedly uttered by the Virgin Mary in 1917 were unknown at the time. Lucia never reported them to the priests interviewing her. She did so only later, in her various memoires. For instance, the prediction that her cousins would soon die. 

"Mary´s" words about World War I don´t add up either. In 1917, Lucia said that the war would end in October that year and the Portuguese soldiers return home. The war didn´t end until over a year later, of course. A later version of the prophecy said that a new world war would break out under the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939), implying that "Mary" knew the name of the next pope already in 1917! But of course, this version was written down by Lucia *during the actual pontificate of Pius XI* and turned out to be wrong anyway, since World War II didn´t start until the pontificate of Pius XII...

The Miracle of the Sun (October 13, 1917) also turns out to be problematic. For instance, several people returned to the site in the following days and saw exactly the same phenomena as had occured on October 13. Yet, that had been the date indicated by Mary as *the* day for the miracle. While this does suggest that something "objective" was taking place, it might as well be something entirely natural. Perhaps the sun looked strange because of a sand storm which lasted for several days?

The skeptics in the video (Kevin and Derek) are more inclined towards a psychological explanation. People simply see whatever they want to see. Kevin shows a weird recording of a recent "sun miracle" at Medjugorje in Croatia which literally shows *nothing strange at all* happening, yet some pilgrims nevertheless "see" the sun spinning, change colors, et cetera. Kevin also points out the strange fact that no photos of the actual miracle in the sky over Fatima seem to exist, yet photographers were present at the site and took pictures of the crowds?!

There are other problems with the Fatima story too, not mentioned in this video, for instance that Mary wore a dress deemed "inappropriate" by the Catholic clergy (it was too short at the legs!). Official images of Our Lady of Fatima therefore don´t conform with the actual apparition as originally reported by the children. 

With that little observation, I end this blog post. 

A question of control

 

"The Heretic" (2024) is a bizarre American film. It´s actually a kind of philosophical or even theological horror film. I admit that I have no idea what the message might be. 

The main character Mr Reed (starred by Hugh Grant of all people) is a crazy, murderous atheist who captures two female Mormon missionaries in a maze-like house. His intentions are unclear, but revolve around attempts to prove that all religions are fake. Their real purpose is control. During the confrontation, it turns out that the Mormon girls are really skeptics. One of them claims that near-death experiences are caused by purely natural causes, while the other says that prayer is purely metaphorical or psychological in nature. Before they visit Mr Reed, the girls discuss sex and pornography.

The atheist arguments sound more convincing than the simplistic faith the missionaries pretend to have at the outset. However, I also get the impression that Reed might not be an atheist in the strict sense. He believes that all religions (or at least the "Abrahamic" ones) go back to a kind of primordial revelation, the exact nature of which is left unclear. It also seems that he is trying to convince himself, first and foremost, that all God-belief really is bunk. Note also that Reed has turned into a kind of cult leader. His personal paranoia is tied to Simulation Theory, which could be interpreted as Gnostic. Maybe the house of horrors is a "simulation" all its own?

And yes, I did notice the allusion to blood atonement and the in-house *skeptical* joke about Mormon "magical underpants" (but here used by the Mormons themselves). The usual pun on Moroni´s name ("Moron I") is also included. 

"The Heretic" ends with two miracles, but these are less convincing (I´m tempted to call them deus-ex-machina) than the bulk of the movie, making me wonder if they were tacked on simply to make the production somewhat less shocking to a religious audience. Well, at least it manages to portray consistent atheism-materialism as meaningless, brutal and absurd! 

Not sure if anyone really did become a heretic due to this flick. 

Folklore in the making (part 1)

 

So I looked into Dogman...again. It seems the skeptics are mostly right about this one. While strange reports of doglike creatures are as old as civilization, the modern Dogman seems to be a piece of emerging folklore which can be traced back to an April Fool´s Joke in 1987 (Michigan) and to Linda Godfrey´s article on the Beast of Bray Road in 1991 (Wisconsin). Godfrey´s subsequent book (published in 2003) plus the Internet popularized the Dogman and also "streamlined" him. 

Previously, there wasn´t really a single Dogman phenomenon. Now, there is. The creature is virtually always depicted as large, bipedal, intelligent, extremely dangerous and obviously canid. It´s also a flesh-and-blood creature. Finally, note the difference between Dogman and werewolves: the latter are said to be humans who can shape-shift into standard quadrupedal wolves.

Of course, a paranormal explanation is also possible, and the Dogmen would then be fairies taking whatever form we expect them to...

Can you look specifically at the earliest Bray Road reports and list what each witness actually said about whether the creature was walking on two or four legs?

Yes. I went back specifically to the earliest material, rather than relying on later Dogman summaries. The picture is actually more nuanced than I suggested before: some of the earliest Bray Road-area reports explicitly involve four-legged movement, while others involve upright movement or a transition between the two.

The most important source is Linda Godfrey's contemporary December 29, 1991 article in The Week, because it records testimony and the Humane Officer's files at the time, rather than decades later.

Earliest reports, approximately 1989–1991

Witness/report	Approx. date	What was actually reported about locomotion
Lorianne Endrizzi ("Barbara")	1989	Kneeling, not simply standing. She saw the creature beside Bray Road eating roadkill. Its knees were bent "like a human would do"; elbows were up and it held the food in its hands/paws. She did not actually describe seeing it walk on two legs.
Scott Bray	~1989	Reported a very large dog/wolf-like animal. Later accounts describe it principally as quadrupedal. The available contemporary 1991 article does not give a detailed locomotion account for his sighting.
Russell Gest / Heather Bowey group	~1990	This is particularly interesting. Heather and the other children initially thought they were looking at a large dog. It then stood up, and subsequently ran toward them "kind of like a dog," with bigger leaps. Thus this account explicitly contains both four-legged and upright behavior.
Mike Etten	~1990	Reported seeing a large animal sitting on its haunches, holding roadkill. This is not necessarily evidence of habitual bipedalism; the posture could be interpreted as a quadruped sitting upright.
Doris Gipson (Pat in the original article)	Oct. 31, 1991	Saw the creature running toward her after she got out of her car. She specifically qualified her interpretation: "you could suggest that it was on two legs," because she could see its chest so clearly. Thus probably bipedal, but she herself expressed some uncertainty.
Other reports in Jon Fredrickson's "Werewolf" file	pre-Dec. 1991	At least one report involved a hairy, pointed-eared creature chasing a deer on two legs. Another involved a fast "man-like" creature. These were already in the Humane Officer's files before Godfrey's article.
Robert Bushman and wife	reported as 1991 in later chronologies	Four-legged animal, described as running/chasing a deer. This is consistent with the quadrupedal strand of the reports.

The Endrizzi report is especially revealing

This is the famous image that essentially became the visual prototype of the Beast of Bray Road.

Endrizzi did not see a seven-foot humanoid walking down the road.

She saw something kneeling beside the road, with its back toward her, eating something. Its elbows were raised and its claws/forepaws were turned outward. When she drove past, it turned its head toward her but didn't flee. She estimated it at about 5'7" and 150 lb.

Godfrey's original sketch consequently depicted a kneeling canine humanoid, rather than a conventional upright Dogman.

That is an important distinction.

And the children give us perhaps the clearest "shapeshifting" locomotion

The Heather Bowey account is particularly interesting because the creature apparently looked like a large dog while on four legs, then stood up, and later ran back toward the house in a dog-like manner.

Godfrey's 1991 article records Bowey saying:

"When it stood up, they looked bigger than a dog's or coyote's..."

And then:

"I looked back and saw it running toward us kind of like a dog would run but with bigger leaps."

So this isn't merely a later embellishment that somebody "couldn't tell whether it had two or four legs." The original 1991 reporting already contains an animal that alternates between the two modes of locomotion.

Gipson is somewhat different

Doris Gipson's Halloween 1991 encounter is probably the strongest early apparently bipedal report.

She saw the creature charging her after she had gotten out of her car. She could see its large, hairy chest and described its movement as extremely powerful. But importantly, she didn't say categorically, "It was running on two legs."

She said that one could suggest that it was on two legs because she could see its chest so clearly.

That's a useful piece of evidential caution that often disappears in later retellings, where the account becomes simply:

"Doris saw a seven-foot Dogman running upright."

The original account is more qualified.

So your original impression was correct

Looking specifically at the early evidence, I'd characterize the phenomenon this way:

1989–91 Bray Road reports were not consistently of a permanently bipedal humanoid.

Instead, there were several morphological/locomotive patterns:

quadruped → large wolf/dog-like animal

crouching/kneeling → Endrizzi

sitting on haunches → Etten

stands upright → Bowey group

moves on four legs, then stands → Bowey group

apparently runs upright → Gipson

explicitly runs on two legs → one of the reports in Fredrickson's file

That is considerably more interesting than the later standardized "Dogman" description.

One further wrinkle: pre-1991 reports

Godfrey herself later said that when her December 1991 article appeared, people came forward with additional accounts and told her that some sightings had occurred as much as ten years earlier. She also mentions a possibly related 1936 incident in Jefferson County, roughly 40 miles away.

So there really are two separate questions:

1. Was the Beast of Bray Road originally reported as a biped?
   Yes, unequivocally.
2. Was it originally reported exclusively as a bipedal Dogman?
   No. The earliest material contains a mixture of quadrupedal, crouching, sitting, transitional and apparently bipedal behavior.

And I think this is relevant to our previous discussion about the pre-1987 Dogman reports. The Bray Road material doesn't look like a simple case of people copying a pre-existing "Dogman = seven-foot wolf-man" template. The earliest witnesses were actually describing something considerably more ambiguous: a strange, unusually large canid that could apparently behave like an ordinary quadruped but sometimes adopted a remarkably human-like posture.

That makes the locomotion itself one of the most intriguing features of the case..

October surprise

 

The release date for "Capturing Bigfoot" is October 20. In case you give a damn. Trust me, *many* people do. This is the documentary supposedly proving (once and for all) that the famous Patterson-Gimlin film is a hoax. That is, the best and most iconic evidence for Bigfoot´s existence. If the film falls, it´s over. Or so skeptics hope. 

The docu has already been shown on some film festivals, but the yuge public release will be in three weeks. Apparently, October 20 is the 59th anniversary of Patterson´s and Gimlin´s original encounter with the elusive beast...

Bring out the pop corn, guys.  

Mythicism triumphant?

 

Prominent Jesus Mythicist Richard Carrier claims that Mythicism has won. Or is about to do so.

Why is a historical Jesus an obsolete paradigm?

Deceiving spirits

 

Here we go again. I actually wondered about this myself: if even the Anti-Christ makes miracles, how can miracles prove the Catholic Church? Or Christianity in general? How do we know *they* aren´t the Anti-Christ?

From MythVision, commenting the recent conversion/reversion of YouTube personality Joe Schmid to Catholicism. 

Juan Diego mythicism

 

Claim: Juan Diego never existed. You know, the guy who supposedly saw Marian apparitions in 1531. The Lady of Guadalupe.

Hmmm... 

Candle in the dark

 

A Catholic debunks an Orthodox miracle. Hmmm...

Social experiment

 

I admit that I never heard about the famous Princeton philosopher Joe Schmid before. Perhaps because he is just a random guy on YouTube who happens to study philosophy somewhere at Princeton? Recently, Schmid shocked his fellow atheists/agnostics by converting (or strictly speaking reverting) to Catholicism. Or did he? 

Some suspect he is just trolling. His video does look unserious, but perhaps he is just the hyperactive autistic type? Anyhow, this is the current drama on YouTube right now. 

Do I care? Nupe. But in case you´re interested, the first video above is Schmid´s conversion story, while the second is a critique from Derek of MythVision. 

Materialist Monday (OK, Tuesday local time)

 

Is dead, stays dead? 

In case you´re interested...

The infamous missing third fragment of Mark was a prank!

Teal is blue

 

"Paranoid Protestants" is a three-hour long video about the Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) from a skeptical (probably atheist) perspective. It´s interesting, to be sure, and it´s obvious that the narrator (who sometimes doubles as himself!) has done some heavy reading on the history and theology of this particular denomination. I actually learned some new stuff about both Adventists and others from this documentary.

However, there are also some rather obvious problems with this production. For instance, the Branch Davidians headed by David Koresh are prominently featured. But what on earth is the *real* connection between the cult at Waco and the SDA Church? Not that much, really. It´s like making a docu about atheism and throw in Jim Jones and the People´s Temple (who were "Marxists" and sometimes sounded like atheists). 

The content-creator also believes that apocalyptic Protestantism (including the SDA) is the main cause of so many Americans believing in conspiracy theories. But a more likely explanation is that both apocalypticism and conspiracism have a common cause independent of both, or that they are parallell phenomena influencing each other. 

With that, have at it!