{"id":12395,"date":"2013-01-17T16:31:37","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T21:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=12395"},"modified":"2013-01-17T16:31:37","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T21:31:37","slug":"sandy-hook-and-jesus-mythicisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/01\/sandy-hook-and-jesus-mythicisms.html","title":{"rendered":"Sandy Hook and Jesus Mythicisms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Most of us have watched in horror and dismay<\/a> as a small handful of people<\/a> have spun conspiracy theories<\/a> around the tragic shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.\u00a0Andii Bowsher has noted the connection with another sort of denialism, that which one encounters in Biblical studies<\/a>. Andii quotes an article from\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/a> which I think is worth quoting at even greater length:<\/p>\n

The point is that when you freeze any moment of history, then analyse it in extreme detail, you\u2019ll always find numerous things that \u201cdon\u2019t add up\u201d. Every moment in history is full of them; it\u2019s just that most moments in history are mundane, and therefore go un-analysed. \"\"And \u201cif you have any fact which you think is really sinister \u2026 hey, forget it, man,\u201d Tink Thompson, a private detective who investigated the case, tells Morris. \u201cBecause you can never, on your own, think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short: it\u2019s not that the alleged Sandy Hook \u201cdiscrepancies\u201d are necessarily fabrications in need of debunking. It\u2019s simply that any brief span of time, probed in sufficient detail, will be found to contain plenty of them: the changing witness reports and reports about the weapons involved; the\u00a0quote in the newspaper, purportedly from the school principal<\/a>\u00a0who had, in fact, been killed; the\u00a0seemingly strange lack of records<\/a>\u00a0concerning the recent life of Adam Lanza. And the overwhelming likelihood is that they signify\u00a0nothing at all<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sandy Hook trutherism is unforgivable, but the essential fallacy on which it rests \u2013 that facts we can\u2019t account for must have a sinister explanation \u2013 is a widespread, human and dangerously seductive one. There\u2019s much about last month\u2019s tragedy in Connecticut that defies the search for meaning. Confronting that truth, even for those of us who are just onlookers, is hard. So it\u2019s depressing, but not exactly surprising, that the Sandy Hook \u201ctruthers\u201d can\u2019t bring themselves to do so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The parallels to other sorts of \u201ctrutherism\u201d \u2013 including but not limited to Jesus mythicism \u2013 are strikingly obvious.<\/p>\n

Of related interest, Jeff Carter has blogged about reading Meier\u2019s A Marginal Jew<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of us have watched in horror and dismay as a small handful of people have spun conspiracy theories around the tragic shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.\u00a0Andii Bowsher has noted the connection with another sort of denialism, that which one encounters in Biblical studies. Andii quotes an article from\u00a0The Guardian which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[2153,2592,7853,10756,11230],"class_list":["post-12395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mythicism","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-denialism","tag-mythicism","tag-sandy-hook-elementary-school","tag-shooting"],"yoast_head":"\nSandy Hook and Jesus Mythicisms<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Most of us have watched in horror and dismay as a small handful of people have spun conspiracy theories around the tragic shooting in Sandy Hook\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/01\/sandy-hook-and-jesus-mythicisms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sandy Hook and Jesus Mythicisms\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Most of us have watched in horror and dismay as a small handful of people have spun conspiracy theories around the tragic shooting in Sandy Hook\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/01\/sandy-hook-and-jesus-mythicisms.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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