Yes. You missed some. But you found enough.

The gist should be clear to you: Falun Gong was not suppressed because China is an atheist government; it was suppressed because China is a totalitarian state, and all totalitarian states (religious or not), cannot abide allowing anyone to openly defy its legitimacy or control. China fabricates a narrative of a dangerous cult not because it is against cults, but because it needs a narrative to cover its real motive: to silence any dissent (no matter where it comes from), and prevent anyone getting the idea that you can challenge the state.

Hence China allows submissive religions that don’t have hierarchies of control outside China (thus implicating subversive foreign agency), but cracks down on nonsubmissives (from secret societies to protest groups) and submissives controlled by foreign institutions (e.g. Southern Baptists, but not Approved Christian Sects whose hierarchy is entirely in China). And China suppresses nonreligious groups just as eagerly for the same reasons.

Hence only a minority of even Chinese top officials are atheists. So atheism is not the motive. Rather, totalitarianism is. By contrast, the order defended in Iran is explicitly religious and driven by religion, religious leaders, and religious principles of deciding who is a subversive and who not. For example, unlike China, deconverting from Islam or converting to Christianity is explicitly illegal and punished by prison or death (examples, examples). You can see these are explicitly different conditions: in one, state religion is causing and dictating everything; in the other, it is incidental.

Thanks for finding that high-res image. This is a useful contribution for everyone here.

Which shows the stem and needles coming out of the cone, not some separate unidentifiable relish behind it.

I agree Josephus is often constructing tales rather than reporting them (his “cannibal Mary” is a classic case, though he even admits so by calling it a “myth,” a more on-point example is that modern scholars doubt his citation of witnesses to Masada and Gamala and thus suspect those entire accounts as fabricated; and other examples). But the evidence for Jesus ben Ananias is not from Mark to Josephus but from Josephus to Mark (Mark has all the distinctive features of the Josephus tale, while Josephus has none of the distinctive features of Mark’s tale, which signals direction of borrowing).

I also can’t believe Mark is responding to Bar Kochba (which would rule out Josephus responding to Mark anyway), because Mark then contains no relevant expectancies. Mark has many passages explaining why the world didn’t end despite the destruction of the temple (Mark 13; the fig tree; etc.), a concern that only existed in the first century. It was old news sixty years later (then more than an entire average human lifetime), and thus not something Mark would feel a need to desperately respond to then; he would instead need to explain why it remained a ruin for sixty years and what Bar Kochba would succeed or fail to do about it.

And Mark solves the temple problem by having Jesus move the apocalypse to the “end” of his generation, a move that could not work mid-second century (and thus would not even be contemplated, as it would immediately be a failed prophecy). We see this in John, whose final redactor “fixed” this, when it was then clear (indeed now by mid-second century) that Mark’s retcon also failed to come true, by having Jesus imply he could keep that last member of his generation alive however long he wanted (in John 21). So John is writing then. Not Mark. He is fixing Mark’s first-century fix. Mark also predates Luke and thus Marcion and thus the Second War. And Mark knows the Wars of Josephus but not the Antiquities (unlike Luke, which knows the Antiquities). And so on.

There basically is no way to get Mark to be writing at the time of the Second War. All evidence indicates he is a late first century writer, still expecting the world to end before the second century, yet needing to explain a fairly recent problem created by the destruction of the temple in the First War not launching that apocalypse.

Nevertheless, there is a vanguard of mainstream scholars arguing something close to your position now. I just don’t see any logical or evidential basis for it.

A point I made, too. But, yeah. It’s an odd rock to throw in his glass house.

And oh, the swords! Indeed, in my fisk I linked to my article on this (and I have a more detailed, scholarly treatment in my forthcoming book):

Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?

Allegro does not employ reliable modes of argument, and thus comes up with strange conclusions not logically supported by the evidence he presents. He is thus, pervasively, just unreliable. The most infamous example is his use of late medieval art to “prove” the use of mushrooms in Pauline congregations.

Whereas that his work is obsolete is not an indictment of him, but his work. It does no good to talk about “did he have a good argument half a century ago even though it’s obsolete now?” Since “it’s obsolete now” already rules out any relevance of his work now.

That does not mean everything he said is wrong. It just means anything he said is only usable if you can independently confirm it in more recent work. But if you can do that, you don’t need his work.

Yes.

Bias channels through feelings and intuitions. It can be checked against objective reality and logical formulae because those are immune to feelings and intuitions. That is in fact why the Greeks invented them: precisely as a check against “opinions, feelings, and assertions.”

Logic vetting works because when an argument is logical (as in, “not fallacious,” hence the point of identifying fallacies so as to purge them), its conclusion cannot be false, if its premises are true. So your attention can then turn to the premises. This is what makes logic useful.

Then you need to anchor the resulting premises in objective empirical facts (and again, without fallacy). Because, again, that cannot have happened (or not frequently happen) unless there is something objectively true to the premise, and so then (and only then) you have confirmed that your “feelings, intuitions, opinions” are in that case correct: you have backed them with an objective anchor.

This is why historians need to be able to explain (and thus check) the logic of their argument, and ground each resulting premise in evidence, and not just assertions or personal feelings. And this is also why historians more interested in defending a belief rather than finding out if it is true or false will abuse this process; and their field may even have trained them to do this, because the field as a whole is more interested in defending beliefs than finding the truth.

A historian’s intuition, for example, can be right more often than a non-historian because intuition is an experience-based skill: it gets things right the more empirically informed it is, and historians spend years absorbing entire ranges of data about the world, literature, and so on. But it is not entirely reliable even in the hands of the greatest expert (countless examples prove this). So it always has to be checked and thus vindicated by evidence independent of the intuition or any other assumptions. Intuition is thus a heuristic (an abductive procedure), not a method (a deductive or inductive procedure; deduction must be logical, not intuitive, and induction must be probabilistic and thus mathematico-empirical, not, again, “intuitive”).

Hence we get methodologies of error (like “we need evidence for our premises; so we will cherry-pick evidence supporting it, and leave out evidence that undermines it”) which can only be caught out by fallacy detection, hence logics (e.g. that method has been catalogued by the science of logics as “cherry picking” which activates “confirmation bias”; so to control for the latter, you have to control for the former), and objective empiricism, hence fact-checking (e.g. we know, objectively, that that method can be refuted and thus cancelled by searching for any pertinent omitted evidence and using an objective, i.e. logical, procedure to calculate its effect on the previously-biased conclusion).

The better you do this (and the better you can confirm you did it, hence the need of making logics and evidence collection transparent), the lower the probability that you will be wrong. Conversely, the less you do it, the higher the probability that you will be wrong.

For more see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and its breadcrumbs.

It’s a good question, since this is also true in English (sky and heavens are also interchangeable poetically, and heavens is often used in English to refer to outer space). The pushback is not linguistic, but ideological:

When Christian scholars “guffaw” at my calling heaven outer space they are coming from the POV that heaven “obviously” means another plane of existence not visible or even accessible from outer space (hence why we don’t catch angels and god’s cities in telescopes: the cities and angels of heaven are in a parallel universe, not on Mars or orbiting Saturn). So when I correct this anachronism (their idea of heaven is a modern product of the scientific revolution which compelled “changing what heaven meant” to prevent Christianity from being falsified by telescopes) I am calling out an anachronistic ideology, not a linguistic error. In antiquity, and hence in the bible, OT and NT, “heaven(s)” does mean Mars and Saturn and the Moon and stars. They had no such conception of it being a parallel universe (see Aeon’s informative article on this).

I would have sooner thought his evidence was the kind of reverent inscriptions (not commercial market spellcasting) as document the Hypsistarians, around which there is indeed debate who those people are, and one theory is, a lost Yahwist cult (although there are also arguments against that; and I have not surveyed every argument so as to have any definite opinion here).

I hope they have more of an argument than that. That wizards “co-opt” existing deities in their art is well-established. It does not mean they are referencing an existing cult separate from Judaism when they do that.

For example, Jesus also starts showing up in magic. Does that mean wizards were worshiping Jesus or that Jesus must have had a cult around him other than Christianity? No. It means Jesus was a popular god people were talking about, and wizards chase the popular market and thus include popular gods in their spells.

This is textbook appropriation (indeed, for money); not evidence of a lost religion.