Debunking Archives - Page 21 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Was Jesus Copied Off the Egyptian God Horus?

Every year, around this time, you start seeing memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” some pre-Christian deity. One of the most popular deities for people to claim Jesus is “a copy of” is Horus, a god who was worshipped in ancient Egypt from prehistoric times until after the rise of Christianity in around the fourth century AD. Horus was believed to have been the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. He was closely associated with the pharaoh and he is usually depicted in ancient Egyptian art with the head of a falcon.

The truth is, all the memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” such-and-such deity are wrong. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who lived in Galilee in the early first century AD and who was crucified in Jerusalem in either 30 or 33 AD under the orders of the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. The stories about Jesus’s life recorded in the gospels are certainly heavily embellished with legend and fiction, but, ultimately, there was a real man who stands behind the mythological tradition. While the stories about Jesus recorded in the gospels have probably been influenced to varying extents by stories of various pagan deities, it is entirely wrong for anyone to claim that the whole story of Jesus is copied directly from any single pagan deity.

Of all the deities Jesus is often claimed to have been copied off of, Horus is one of the most commonly mentioned, but also one of the most absurd. I actually included an extremely brief debunking of the claim that Jesus is based on Horus in this article I published on my website in March 2018, but I received some flak over the fact that I did not quote any specific claims from proponents of the Jesus-Horus connection and respond to them. I suppose, then, it is about time that I wrote a more complete response to the alleged connections between Jesus and Horus.

Good and Bad Reasons to Learn Latin

You often hear people talk about the “practical benefits” of learning Latin, such as being able to understand legal, medical, and scientific terminology, expanding your vocabulary, and gaining a better understanding of English grammar. These certainly are real benefits to learning Latin, but, to be honest, at least on their own, they aren’t really very good reasons to learn the whole language, for reasons I will explain in a moment.

There are plenty of apologists for Latin out there who often try to justify learning Latin by listing these supposed “practical benefits” to learning Latin that apply to most people. The problem is that, if these benefits are the only reasons you are studying Latin, and you have no real interest in the Latin language or in reading Latin literature, then learning a whole new language may not really be worth it. There are, however, still very good reasons for learning Latin; they just don’t necessarily apply to everyone.

Famous Classical Authors Who Were Probably Not What We Would Consider “White”

Classical studies has long been perceived as the study of “dead white men.” This is a reputation that has certainly greatly injured classical studies as a discipline in recent years. I remember reading a rather disturbing answer on Quora a while ago written by a history professor in which he argued that, since we are now living in a modern, racially diverse world and classical studies is nothing more than the study of dead white people, universities should stop teaching the classics and, instead of hiring classics professors, only hire professors to teach subjects dealing with non-white history, like East Asian history or Latin American history.

One thing that many people do not realize, however, is that the ancient Mediterranean world was actually much more racially diverse than it is often portrayed. In fact, a very large number of the most revered classical authors were probably not what we would call “white.” Many of them came from lands all across the Middle East and North Africa, including the lands that are now the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria.

Did King Porus Defeat Alexander the Great?

According to all surviving ancient historical sources, King Alexandros III of Makedonia (most commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”) defeated King Porus (whose name is conjectured to have been Puru in his native tongue) of the Indian kingdom of Paurava in the Battle of the Hydaspes in May 326 BC.

Although Alexander was ultimately victorious, Porus and his men fought valiantly. The Battle of the Hydaspes was the closest one Alexander ever came to losing and he was reportedly so impressed by Porus’s valor that he asked him how he wished to be treated. Porus replied that he wished to be treated the way Alexander would have wanted Porus to have treated him. Alexander therefore appointed Porus as satrap of his own kingdom and the lands to the southeast as well.

Until I started writing answers on Quora, I had never heard anyone try to argue that Porus actually defeated Alexander in battle. We have nothing in our sources to suggest that and, as I shall explain in a moment, we have very good reason to doubt this assertion. Nonetheless, since I started writing answers on Quora around a year ago, I have discovered that there seems to be something of an obsession among Indian and Pakistani nationalists with “proving” that Alexander really lost and that the accepted narrative is a fabrication by the Greek historians who idolized Alexander.

In the answer, I intend to examine the historical evidence supporting the historical consensus that Alexander really did win the Battle of the Hydaspes. I doubt I will convince any hardcore Indian or Pakistani nationalists, but I am not writing this answer for them; I am writing it for those who are genuinely interested in knowing what really happened.

Spencer Ruins “Adam Ruins Everything”

Adam Ruins Everything is a comedy television series on TruTV starring comedian Adam Conover. It has been on air since September 2015 and has had, to date, three seasons, amounting to a total of sixty-five episodes. The basic premise of the show is that Adam Conover is an obnoxious know-it-all who cannot help ruining everyone around him’s favorite things by revealing to them the dark truths and common misconceptions surrounding them.

This premise provides a sort of framing narrative for a series of information-based comedy segments, which make up the bulk of each episode. Each episode usually consists of three segments debunking common misconceptions related to a particular topic, followed by a final “positive takeaway” segment in which Adam tries to make the audience feel better by putting a positive spin on everything he has said throughout the episode. Along the way, Adam cites various sources (some more reliable than others) and calls in people identified as experts to testify.

In general, most of the show’s main points are usually broadly correct. The show clearly really does strive for factual correctness, as demonstrated by their repeated warnings that the show is fallible and their multiple “corrections segments.” Sadly, they do not always live up to their aspirations. Often the errors on the show are errors of omission resulting from the fact that it is only a thirty-minute show and they try to cram no less than three different debunking sessions into each episode, which results in a series of extremely rushed information segments that end up leaving out a lot of really important information.

Why Most So-Called “Medieval Torture Devices” Are Fake

We’ve all heard of so-called “medieval torture devices.” You can find tons of clickbait-y articles online and videos on YouTube and so forth talking about the most gruesome of these alleged devices. For instance, here is a YouTube video from BuzzFeed titled “5 Of The Most Gruesome Medieval Torture Devices.” It lists the “scold’s bridle,” the “rack,” the “iron maiden,” the “pear of anguish,” and the “brazen bull.”

Unfortunately for those who love reading about gruesome torture devices, most of the so-called “medieval torture devices” you hear about never existed at all during the Middle Ages. In fact, of the five devices listed in the aforementioned video, only the rack actually existed during the Middle Ages and, even then, it seems to have been rarely ever used.

Many alleged “medieval torture devices” were actually made up by hoaxers, showmen, and con artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These hoaxers would display these phony instruments of torture for commercial gain, telling people they were real medieval torture devices and charging people to see them.

Other supposed “medieval torture devices” were made up more recently. For instance, the notorious “Spanish tickler” (not mentioned in the video linked above) was only made up in 2005 as a hoax article on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, other supposed “medieval torture devices” are real torture devices, but they didn’t exist during the Middle Ages. Let’s go through in alphabetical order and debunk supposed medieval torture devices one-by-one.

Were Ancient People Conscious?

In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes (lived 1920 – 1997) published a controversial book titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book, Jaynes claimed that human beings were not conscious of their own thoughts until around 1000 BC and that stories about gods speaking to people originated from people hearing their own inner voices and mistaking them for the voices of external deities telling them what to do.

Jaynes’s claims were regarded as fringe, baseless, and bizarre even when he first proposed them back in the 1970s and today they are almost universally regarded by psychologists as the debunked relic of an earlier, less scientific stage in the development of modern psychology. Nonetheless, Jaynes’s hypothesis of the bicameral mind has garnered something of a cult following among non-scholars and has had considerable influence in popular culture, so I suppose it is worth writing a lengthy rebuttal to it.

Were the Greeks Really Obsessed with the Golden Ratio?

The so-called “Golden Ratio,” or φ, occurs when the ratio of the greater of two quantities to the lesser of two quantities is equivalent to the ratio of the sum of the two quantities to the greater of the two quantities. Expressed using incomprehensible math symbols, it looks like this:

Many people believe that the “Golden Ratio” is the pinnacle of aesthetic perfection and that, the closer something is to the Golden Ratio, the more beautiful it is automatically. Many people also believe that the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the Golden Ratio and that they incorporated it into all their buildings and works of art. Unfortunately for those who love a good math story, we have no good evidence to support either of these conclusions.

In fact, the Golden Ratio is not even mentioned in any Greek text until as late as the early third century BC. The Greeks were arguably fascinated with the idea of using mathematical proportions in art to a certain extent, but they were by no means obsessed with the Golden Ratio in particular. The story of how we came to believe that the Greeks were obsessed with the Golden Ratio, though, is as fascinating as it is bizarre. It involves a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, an eccentric nineteenth-century German psychologist, and Donald Duck.

Were Cats Really Killed En Masse During the Middle Ages?

The Middle Ages always seem to be the most misunderstood period in history. I wrote an article in May 2019 debunking a number of popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, but now I think it is time for me to debunk another. There is something of a widespread notion these days that, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church hated cats because they associated them with witches and that they instigated a massive pogrom to exterminate them. Supposedly, according to the major proponents of this story, this mass killing of cats either resulted in the Black Death or promoted the Black Death’s spread across Europe.

I will admit that my hands are not entirely clean here, since, when I was a freshman in high school, I gave a presentation in one of my classes about the Black Death in which I claimed that people during the time of the Black Death blamed cats for the disease and killed them, thus inadvertently allowing the disease to spread further. Since then, however, I have learned better. The idea people in the Middle Ages killed cats en masse is a misconception. Although some people in the Middle Ages may have killed cats occasionally, the idea of a massive pogrom instigated by the Catholic Church that resulted in the spread of the Black Death is 100% pure fantasy.

The Movie ‘300’ Is Fascist Propaganda

For those who don’t know, the 2006 fantasy action film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, written by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Michael B. Gordan, is based on the 1998 limited comic book series 300, which was written and illustrated by the American comic book artist Frank Miller. Both the film and the comic book are very loosely based on the story of the three hundred Spartans who allegedly fought and died in the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BC.

The film is almost entirely a work of fiction with very little basis in historical reality. Unfortunately, not everyone realizes this. Zack Snyder himself has boasted about how historically accurate the film supposedly is; he said in an interview with MTV: “… the events are 90 percent accurate. It’s just in the visualization that it’s crazy… I’ve shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it’s amazing. They can’t believe it’s as accurate as it is.”

I don’t know which “world-class historians” Snyder has been showing the film to, but I hope to demonstrate here that the film is not in any way an accurate reflection of historical reality and that it deviates markedly from the historical record in ways that clearly promote a message that is overtly racist, homophobic, ableist, and fascist.