What is the most misunderstood historical event?

[abradley]

Tim O'Neill, Head Inquisitor against bad history.

187.5k Views • Tim has 280+ answers and 27 endorsements in History.

The Galileo Affair

Most people understand the trial of Galileo Galilei as a key example of religious bigotry clashing with the advance of science and the textbook case of "Medieval" ignorance and superstition being superseded by reason and science. In fact, the whole rather complex affair was not the black-and-white "science vs religion" fable of popular imagination and the positions of both Galileo and of the various churchmen involved were varied and complex. The popular conceptions of the Galileo Affair are marked by a number of myths:

(Continued)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-historical-event

"Galileo proved the earth went around the sun and not the other way around."

"The Church rejected science, condemned heliocentrism and was ignorant of the science behind Copernicus' theory."

"The Church condemned heliocentrism because it believed the Bible had to be interpreted literally."

And more. Read on.

 

[abradley]

More Tim

http://www.strangenotions.com/author/tim-oneill/

About Tim O'Neill
Tim O'Neill is an atheist blogger who specializes in reviews of books on ancient and medieval history as well as atheism and historiography. He holds a Master of Arts in Medieval Literature from the University of Tasmania and is a subscribing member of the Australian Atheist Foundation and the Australian Skeptics. He is also the author of the History versus The Da Vinci Code website and is currently working on a book with the working title History for Atheists: How Not to Use History in Debates About Religion. He finds the fact that he irritates many theists and atheists in equal measure a sign that he's probably doing some good. Follow his blog at Armarium Magnum.

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en.....9.20.3741.kJMxQkVlphA#imgrc=AJV2irJCHZTYyM:

4500 year old depiction of our solar system

maybe

 

[Valka D'Ur]

More Tim

http://www.strangenotions.com/author/tim-oneill/

About Tim O'Neill
Tim O'Neill is an atheist blogger who specializes in reviews of books on ancient and medieval history as well as atheism and historiography. He holds a Master of Arts in Medieval Literature from the University of Tasmania and is a subscribing member of the Australian Atheist Foundation and the Australian Skeptics. He is also the author of the History versus The Da Vinci Code website and is currently working on a book with the working title History for Atheists: How Not to Use History in Debates About Religion. He finds the fact that he irritates many theists and atheists in equal measure a sign that he's probably doing some good. Follow his blog at Armarium Magnum.

Interesting blog, and bookmarked for further reading.

Seems Tim O'Neill wasn't any more impressed with the cartoons in the NDT version of Cosmos than I was.

 

[bhavv]

WW2. Hitler was an innocent saint.

 

[warpus]

Probably 9/11 and its implications.

I mean, to begin with, way too many Americans don't even know who the terrorists on the planes were and where they came from.. and that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the misunderstandings about this event in America and elsewhere.

 

[JollyRoger]

The death sentence of a homeless carpenter's son.

 

[Tahuti]

The Islamic revolution of 1979.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Probably 9/11 and its implications.

I mean, to begin with, way too many Americans don't even know who the terrorists on the planes were and where they came from.. and that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the misunderstandings about this event in America and elsewhere.

What are you talking about dude? They were terrorists, that's who they were! And they came from... Terrorstan? I'm pretty sure that's right.

 

[Formaldehyde]

"Galileo proved the earth went around the sun and not the other way around."

"The Church rejected science, condemned heliocentrism and was ignorant of the science behind Copernicus' theory."

"The Church condemned heliocentrism because it believed the Bible had to be interpreted literally."

And more. Read on.

So this person hardly anybody has ever heard of before takes a bunch of nonsensical strawmen he creates, then destroys them in order to give the completely absurd impression that Galileo was not persecuted for standing up against rabid Catholic dogma at the time based on his brilliant observations using the telescope he invented?

This is one of the most reprehensible affairs which has ever occurred in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet even today, many still try to "prove" that it was Galileo who forced the church to act in such a barbaric and inane manner.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

What are you talking about dude? They were terrorists, that's who they were! And they came from... Terrorstan? I'm pretty sure that's right.

It's amazing how many people insisted (and continue to insist) that the hijackers got in via Canada.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I found this interesting response from an actually well-known atheist author to Tim O'Neill's "review" of his own book.

Warning: many cuss words found in this article...

That said, there is one review that I do want to respond to here; not simply because it’s almost completely wrong, but because it’s often so ass-backwards wrong in ways that actually prove the points I argue. (and because demonstrating all this gives a surprisingly high entertainment value) It’s the screed-in-book review’s clothing from an Australian blogger, Tim O’Neill. O’Neill calls himself a “wry, dry, rather sarcastic, eccentric, silly, rather arrogant Irish-Australian atheist bastard,” so you would think we would get along like a house on fire. Sadly, no. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, if you roast an Irishman on the spit, you can always get another Irishman to turn the crank…

True confession time: O’Neill hasn’t impressed me to date; I typically have run across him in the comment threads of atheist blogs, usually snarking around and defending himself against charges of being an abrasive douchebag. He often acts as if he’s spearheading a one-man quest for rationality and can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t listen to him. He also gets frequently carried away with his need to: A) be right all the time, even when he’s wrong; and B) castigate the errors of lesser beings with unusually high levels of iness. For instance, he used to regularly show up on Richard Carrier’s blog doing his usual pissy, nitpicking schtick until of course he took it too far and Carrier actually caught him in a lie, which seems to have put an end to his antics on that blog. So in a nutshell, when I run across O’Neill nowadays, my first thought is almost always: what IS this guy’s ... problem?

The response goes on in a similar vein for many paragraphs as David Fitzgerald completely destroys his "review".

 

[Formaldehyde]

Here is my own selection for the most misunderstood historical event:

The myths of Hiroshima

August 05, 2005

SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.

The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 -- just five days after the Nagasaki bombing -- Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.

This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.

But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."

Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" -- and many other historians have long argued -- it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.

The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.

The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.

The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.

These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.

Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?

Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival.

Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare -- and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream -- an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy New York."

Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender -- and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.

Finally, Hiroshima's myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance.

Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed.... You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."

Eventually, history will not be kind one bit regarding this reprehensible matter.

 

[brennan]

The charge of the light brigade. The charge achieved its objective and would have likely been a battle winning event if they got the back up they expected and requested.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Obviously it was the driving causes behind the alan migrations

 

[bhavv]

Regarding Galileo, I've had people who literally believe that Christianity had no negative impact on astronomy / science during that time in history, and that the dark ages due to Christian suppression of science is a mere myth.

Just more reasons to despise religion.

 

[abradley]

I found this interesting response from an actually well-known atheist author to Tim O'Neill's "review" of his own book.

Warning: many cuss words found in this article...

The response goes on in a similar vein for many paragraphs as David Fitzgerald completely destroys his "review".

And here's the review's conclusion:

SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2011
Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that Show Jesus Never Existed at All by David Fitzgerald


David Fitzgerald, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, (Lulu.com, 2010) 246 pages,
Verdict?: 0/5 A tragic waste of probably rather nice trees.
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2011/05/nailed-ten-christian-myths-that-show.html
{Snip}

In Conclusion

I have gone to the effort to write a long review of this book not because it is a worthy work - it most certainly is not. It is not even the best that the Mythers can do: there are other books which may be flawed but are nowhere near as weak, clumsy, confused or amateurish as this one (as much as I disagree with him, at least Earl Doherty's thesis is coherent and well-researched). I have chosen to go into some detail with this one because it strikes me as encapsulating most of what is hopelessly wrong about the Myther thesis and its manifestations online and in self-published books like this one. Like most pseudo history, these arguments for the non-existence of Jesus are flawed by the fact their writers begin with their conclusion. That is bad enough to start with, and there is no shortage of amateur hobbyist theorists who are too enamoured of their "amazing idea" to subject it to sufficient comprehensive self-criticism. But this is exacerbated in the Mythers' case by an ideologically-driven bias.

A major part of the problem with most manifestations of the Myther thesis is that its proponents desperately want it to be true because they want to undermine Christianity. And any historical analysis done with one eye on an emotionally-charged ideological agenda is usually heading for trouble from the start. Over and over again, Fitzgerald does what most of these Mythers do - plumps for an interpretation, explanation or excuse about the evidence simply because it preserves his thesis. Their biases against Christianity blind Mythers to the fact that they are not arriving at conclusions because they are the best or most parsimonious explanation of the evidence, but merely because they fit their agenda.

The overwhelming majority of scholars, Christian, non-Christian, atheist, agnostic or Jewish, accept there was a Jewish preacher as the point of origin for the Jesus story simply because that makes the most sense of all the evidence. The contorted and contrived lengths that Fitzgerald and his ilk have to resort to shows exactly how hard it is to sustain the idea that no such historical preacher existed. Personally, as an atheist amateur historian myself, I would have no problem at all embracing the idea that no historical Jesus existed if someone could come up with an argument for this that did not depend at every turn on strained readings, ad hoc explanations, imagined textual interpolations and fanciful suppositions. While the Myther thesis is being sustained by junk pulp pseudo scholarship like Fitzgerald's worthless little book, it will remain a curiosity on the fringes of scholarship good for little more than amusement. This book is crap.


(Note: Any Mythers who think I need to be educated on their thesis in the comments section, don't bother. I've been debating you guys online for nearly ten years now and I'm more than familiar with all the counter arguments and alternative readings and other contrivances you people use and so don't need the comments below to be cluttered up by them. Likewise, sneering comments or commentary by Mythers who I've bugged in online debates over the years will also be deleted. If you don't like that, then go whine on your own blogs. Have a lovely day.)

Edit (01.12.13): In January last year David Fitzgerald posted a lengthy response to my review. Since then some have asked me if I was going to reply to him. My reply has taken some time, since it is over 12,000 words long, but it has now been posted on Armarium Magnum:

"The Jesus Myth Theory: A Response to David Fitzgerald"
Posted by Tim O'Neill at 9:07 AM

 

[Arakhor]

Regarding Galileo, I've had people who literally believe that Christianity had no negative impact on astronomy / science during that time in history, and that the dark ages due to Christian suppression of science is a mere myth.

What? Now they're blaming the Dark Ages on the Catholic Church as well?

 

[abradley]

Regarding Galileo, I've had people who literally believe that Christianity had no negative impact on astronomy / science during that time in history, and that the dark ages due to Christian suppression of science is a mere myth.

Just more reasons to despise religion.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2009
God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam

James Hannam, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

(Icon Books, 2009) 320 pages
Verdict?: A superb and long overdue popular treatment of Medieval science 5/5
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/10/gods-philosophers-how-medieval-world.html
{Snip}

The Christian Dark Age and Other Hysterical Myths

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who has the lack of common sense to hang around on atheist discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person's grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.

So, alongside the regular airings of the hoary old myth that the Bible was collated at the Council of Nicea, the tedious internet-based "Jesus never existed!" nonsense or otherwise intelligent people spouting pseudo historical garbage that would make even Dan Brown snort in derision, the myth that the Catholic Church caused the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period was a scientific wasteland is regularly wheeled, creaking, into the sunlight for another trundle around the arena.

The myth goes that the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational types who loved science and were on the brink of doing all kinds of marvellous things (inventing full-scale steam engines is one example that is usually, rather fancifully, invoked) until Christianity came along, banned all learning and rational thought and ushered in the Dark Ages. Then an iron-fisted theocracy, backed by a Gestapo-style Inquisition, prevented any science or questioning inquiry from happening until Leonardo da Vinci invented intelligence and the wondrous Renaissance saved us all from Medieval darkness. The online manifestations of this curiously quaint but seemingly indefatigable idea range from the touchingly clumsy to the utterly hysterical, but it remains one of those things that "everybody knows" and permeates modern culture. A recent episode of Family Guy had Stewie and Brian enter a futuristic alternative world where, it was explained, things were so advanced because Christianity didn't destroy learning, usher in the Dark Ages and stifle science. The writers didn't see the need to explain what Stewie meant - they assumed everyone understood.

(Continued)

Links in the original.

There's a video here of Hannam describing the the book.

And here is one of Hannum's articles Science and Church in the Middle Ages at his site.

The internet is a wonder, why? Because when I was young (40's-50's) there wasn't a way to check whether things you heard were factual or not. So when somebody said 'They were the Dark Ages because the Church suppress any scientific thought' you were stuck with it, factual or not. Now with the internet the world and its knowledge is wide open to us. That's why I was worried when I read

"US relaxes grip on the internet"

, here comes a true dark age.

But the Obama admin came to it's senses. Can you imagine an internet controlled by Red China or ME Muslim countries!

So it's amazing how many 'truths' were falsehoods since I've had access to the 'net'.

Pray it stays wide open.

 

[Formaldehyde]

The internet is a wonder, why? Because when I was young (40's-50's) there wasn't a way to check whether things you heard were factual or not.

The opinions of someone nobody has every heard of before are not facts.

The simple truth of the matter is that there was no real "science" until the likes of Sir Francis Bacon, Decartes and Galileo came along much later and set the stage for the scientific method. Even then, it was considered to be "natural philosophy" where all sorts of utter nonsense was believed, including alchemy. Modern science didn't even come into being until even far later in the 19th Century.

Now knowledge is an entirely different matter. During the dark ages, the only advancements in knowledge in Western civilization really all came thanks to the Roman Catholic Church. But they also greatly constrained it through religious dogma which didn't allow anything they considered to be heretical to even be studied because they had complete and total control of institutes of higher learning.

This is where Galileo later ran afoul.

So it's amazing how many 'truths' were falsehoods since I've had access to the 'net'.

What you now need to do is to start thinking critically so you can discern which websites promulgate utter nonsense and those which do not. Which contain a great deal of facts to support these opinions and those which engage in sheer speculation instead.

Pray it stays wide open.

Pray that prayer has absolutely nothing to do with it.