As a veteran, and yet hard-core lefty with an obsession for evidence-based policy, I’m often asked what my position is on gun control; which is to say, in my country (because that subject isn’t as much of an issue in other developed nations—we are...
In recent years I came to a revelation: Christians are actually worshipping the Antichrist. Not all Christians, of course. Consider, for example, the Christian youth who come out to me after a presentation to a church group to explain their disappointment with their...
There was a recent internet storm over Gnostic Informant’s (Neal Sendlak’s) attack video “Refutation of Richard Carrier & the Church of Mythicism,” which is so disjointed and inept (and until its subsequent editing, slanderous and...
Some commenters have at random times been unable to post comments on my blog because of a “nonce” error. A “nonce” in this context means a “one-off” token code that helps the site keep track of your activity on a webpage so hackers...
I recently did a show with Godless Engineer on M. David Litwa’s bizarrely ignorant declarations about the obscure apocryphon The Ascension of Isaiah. You can watch that instead if you prefer video conversation as a medium. But I will expand the essential points...
Antinatalism is the view that the human race should let itself go extinct; more particularly, it should do so because that outcome is “better”; and therefore having children is immoral (there is a decent entry on this in the Internet Encyclopedia of...
Astrotheology in general is not bullshit. Many ancient religions used it. But astrotheological explanations of the origins of Christianity, or the content of the Gospels, are bullshit. I denounced one such in a recent book review of Varieties of Jesus Mythicism...
I just published a formal academic review of the new book Varieties of Jesus Mythicism (ed. by John Loftus and Robert Price, Hypatia 2022) in Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (SHERM) 4. 1 (Summer 2022): 171‒192. You can buy the review there for...
I’ve had a lot of queries about what I think of the recent MythVision interview of Christian apologist James McGrath (12 August 2022). I’m kind of over him, to be honest, because he’s had ample chance to honestly engage with the peer-reviewed...
Last month I began a three-part series with A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis and A Bayesian Analysis of Kate Loveman’s Pepys Diary Thesis. Today I will conclude with the third random selection from my test set: LaDale C....
Last week I began a three-part series with A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis. Today I will continue with the second random selection from my test set, Kate Loveman’s “Women and the History of Samuel Pepys’s...
As an ongoing project I’ve selected three articles at random from among credible open-source journals in order to analyze their arguments in a way that makes clear their Bayesian structure, and what grasping this about them can tell us about sound historical...
Paul’s statement in Romans 1:3 that Jesus had “come of the seed of David according to flesh” is one of the most commonly cited pieces of evidence for Paul believing Jesus had been an actual man walking around Palestine (see Argument from...
The headline of this article should be a no-brainer. But there are still too many people who think otherwise, causing little action to be taken, and who are thereby dragging the rest of us into hell—a problem recently made fun of in the movie Don’t Look...
There are legitimate reasons to doubt Jesus existed, even as a mundane man whose legend became exaggerated (which is, definitely, always plausible too). These reasons have survived peer review—twice. And yet a common fallacy deployed against this fact is that...
I mentioned in my last article (What I Said at the Brea Conference) that I first became aware there that Dennis MacDonald has switched from saying that doubting the historicity of Jesus was improbable but at least plausible, to insisting it’s not even plausible....
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.