Conservatives are doing with Dr. King what they so frequently do with the Bible: they are proof-texting.

Dr. King still has enormous moral authority in our culture, and some folks want to seize hold of it without having to listen to the whole message. They’d like to remember his “I Have A Dream” speech, but forget that it was delivered during the “March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” They want to remember his martyrdom, but forget that it happened while he was supporting sanitation workers who were on strike.

I was going to compare some of Beck’s statements to selections of Dr. King’s speeches, but unfortunately my copy of A Testament of Hope is packed away. Luckily, Ben Dimiero over at MediaMatters has his copy, and he’s done an excellent job of comparing Beck’s favorite themes to Dr. King’s. Consider a few quotes:

Beck: “They’re collapsing the system and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income for all the workers! Workers of the world unite!” [...]

King: “We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed national income.” [...]

Beck: “The thing that I do find about Barack Obama is that — and I think America is starting to catch on to this — this guy really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth. He believes in the global government and everything else.” [...]

King: “[W]e are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.” [...]

Notice how much King sounds like Beck’s worst nightmare? Yet this is the man whose mantle Beck is trying to wear? Consider this quote from a speech he gave to his staff in 1966 and tell me how Beck and his crew would react:

“We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. We can’t talk about solving the economic problems of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry … Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism … There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism. ”
(“Frogmore Speech”, quoted in I May Not Get There With You, pp. 87-88)

I’m sure that right now, Americans are looking at the Catholic churches being shut down because all the money is going into pedophilia lawsuits and thinking, “This is the organization I want running my country. What was the last big confessional Catholic country? Franco’s Spain? Yeah, gimme more of that.”

I know that the upper ranks of the Catholic hierarchy have had problems with Democracy for a couple of centuries now. We could talk about Pope Leo XIII and the error of “Americanism”, and we could talk about the tensions between John Coutney Murray and Alfredo Ottaviani.

We could also talk about Pope Pius IX and his Syllabus of Errors, which was a heavy broadside against the separation of Church and State, freedom of religion and democracy. But let’s be fair: Pope Pius IX was -- and I say this with all due respect -- batshit crazy. This was the man who had Edgardo Mortara kidnapped. He was not on speaking terms with sanity.

But I’ve always thought that these arguments were largely confined to the hierarchy and the academics. My impression had always been that the rank-and-file Catholic priests and the laity just ignored it. After Vatican II, I figured no one outside the ivory towers in Rome would be talking about it.

I know we’ve got a lot of lapsed Catholics in the audience. Is this sort of argument common?

[Edit: The original video was taken down recently. I suspect it was the post from PZ that did it. Thanks to richarddawkins.net for the mirror.]

Thou Shalt Not Lie

David Barton is reclaiming America for the Lord. He is tirelessly educating Americans about their historical roots and beloved constitution. He talks about the secular invasion in America, and he’s taking it back and giving it to God.

We’ve heard about one nation under god so often that we believe it. We know that in the beginning, God wrested America from the pagan hands of the devil’s children and gave it to his righteous servants.

But this is wishful thinking. Barton and his kind are Christian Revisionists, revising and denying history and spreading lies to suit an ideological agenda.

“The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element…of the Christian Right…The idea that America’s supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement,” writes Frederick Clarkson in The Public Eye.

The End Justifies the Means

Pullquote: “What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie. Such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”
Martin Luther

Christian Reconstructionists don’t just re-construct a nation for God- they reconstruct facts. And history revisionism is a huge part of the movement. Forget that the Old Testament law that they aspire to return to forbids false witness. Lying is a standard modus operandi for so many “Christian Nationalists.” The end justifies the means.

We don’t have room for all details- suffice it to say that the word “God” was not in the Constitution, and the founding fathers, Christian or not, were adamant about separation of church and state. “We’ve seen how religious beliefs (and other ideologies) inspire people to view others as subhuman, deviant, and deserving of whatever happens to them, including death. It is the stuff of persecution, pogroms, and warfare. The framers of the U.S. Constitution struggled with how to inoculate the new nation against these ills…” wrote Clarkson.

And “In God we Trust” did not become the official motto until 1956.

Enter Christian Nationalist David Barton, a major player in the Texas Republican Party, and founder of WallBuilders, a Dominionist group hell bent on “restoring” theocracy. Time (2005) named him among the 25 most influential evangelists. He is on the advisory committee for National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, and for Providence Foundation, “training and networking leaders to transform nations.” Reconstuctionist groups like Providence ultimately aim to “reinstate” Old Testament law, including the stoning of homosexuals, witches, and disobedient children.

Barton lectures and ministers all over the Christian and mainstream media, given a voice by bigwig networks of all faith stripes, spreading his fiction gospel about the roots of the nation. He insists in The Myth of Separation that only Christians should hold office!

His flock won’t balk at his extremist views- or his falsehoods. Goaded by “authority” figures like James Dobson, the late D. James Kennedy, and Glenn Beck, they praise Barton for holding up the Constitution. His teachings inform politicians, too. Never mind that Barton has lectured alongside holocaust deniers for white power “Christian Identity” groups like Scriptures for America. Barton claims he didn’t know, a weak protest for someone so politically astute.

Revising History

Barton’s research in his speeches and books is convincing- how can all those facts be wrong? With so many quotes and references to so many documents, he makes a strong case even if we don’t like that case, no?

No. History scholars refute Barton’s teachings. He misquotes past presidents, and twists their ideas. He deliberately leaves out quotes and distorts contexts.

He also makes it up as he goes along.

Barton has been thoroughly debunked. Rob Boston writes frequently on this, showing us that scholars have questioned quotes pumped by Barton and attributed to the founders. Not only did they find no sources for many facts and quotes, but Barton himself admitted some were bogus!

He’s an admitted liar. His education is from Oral Roberts University, ahem. But now he reviews material for curriculum textbooks. And his words are as good as God to homeschoolers. Say what?

AFTER all of his lies became common knowledge, Barton’s influence and popularity increased. Go figure.

Archaeologists in Bulgaria claim they have found remains of John the Baptist while excavating the site of a 5th century monastery on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan.

A reliquary – a container for holy relics – discovered last week under the monastery’s basilica was opened on Sunday and found to contain bone fragments of a skull, a hand and a tooth, Bulgaria’s official news agency BTA reported.

Excavation leader Kazimir Popkonstantinov lifted the reliquary’s lid in a ceremony in the coastal town of Sozopol attended by dignitaries including the Bishop of Sliven, Yoanikii, and Bozhidar Dimitrov, a government minister and director of Bulgaria’s National History Museum, BTA said.

The name of the island translates to “Saint John,” which would probably considered the first clue. Popkonstantinov argues that the bones are authentically John the Baptist because the reliquary is inscribed with the date of June 24 – the date that the Orthodox Church celebrates as John’s birthday.

This is a very slim twig to hang the identity of the bones on, particularly since the reliquary itself dates to the fifth century. I suspect that Popkonstantinov knows that, and that’s why we’re getting press conferences ahead of the facts rather than journal articles afterwards.

Dr. Christopher Rollston, a historian qualified to talk about the ancient near east, has some suggestions of what evidence would be necessary for Popkonstantinov to make his case:

1. A reliable ancient tradition, preferably from the late(r) 1st century or very early 2nd century CE, stating that the bones of John the Baptist had been moved to an island in the Black Sea; 2. An inscription on the burial box that stated something like “The bones of John the Baptist” (i.e., name and title…something such as ”John” would not be sufficient); 3. A palaeographic date for the inscription itself that was late 1st century or very early 2nd century (after all, arguably no one in later centuries would be able to locate precisely the burial site of John the Baptist in Palestine and it may be that even in the late 1st century no one would have been able to have done so!). (4) Carbon 14 dating of the bones that yielded a 1st century CE date.

British national pride must needs have some great dramatist to uphold the nation’s honor. For politic reasons Shakespeare was selected as the most suitable person to bear the imposture and the glory. Greatness thus became associated with his name. He became, in the progress of time, and from the influence of confirmed prejudice and ignorance and pride, supreme in the literary world.

This was in 1848, almost a decade before Delia Bacon would elliptically suggest the plays were actually written by Francis Bacon. Schmucker was independently the first, though he never suggested a substitute author.

But what’s this? The subtitle of Schmucker’s book was Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible. Yes, in fact the entire work was a parody, aimed at Higher Criticism in general and David Friedrich Strauss in specific. Schmucker was aghast at how Strauss had taken a scalpel to the New Testament and concluded that the Gospels contained almost no historical content. And so Schmucker tried to turn the same arguments against Shakespeare. Surely no one would suggest that Shakespeare hadn’t really written those plays. Right?

I used to do something similar to Schmucker whenever the topic was the denial of evolution. Whenever someone trotted out the old line about evolution being “just a theory,” I’d shoot back, “just like the germ theory of disease.” It seemed like a good rejoined. After all, who’s going to deny one of the bedrock theories in medical science?

So I was a bit pained to read this otherwise excellent article at Respectful Insolence : Yes, there really are people who don’t accept the germ theory of disease.

Medicine does, however, have its version of a theory of evolution, at least in terms of how well-supported and integrated into the very fabric of medicine it is. That theory is the germ theory of disease, which, as evolution is the organizing principle of biology, functions as the organizing principle of infectious disease in medicine. When I first became interested in skepticism and medical pseudoscience and quackery, I couldn’t envision how anyone could deny the germ theory of disease. It just didn’t compute to me, given how copious the evidence in favor of this particular theory is. It turns out that I was wrong about that, too.

Damn.

Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that, even here in a City that is rooted in Dutch tolerance, was hard-won over many years. In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in Lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue – and they were turned down.

In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal, political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies – and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion – and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780’s – St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

[...]

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.

The World Trade Center Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves – and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans – if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values – and play into our enemies’ hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that.

For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – as important a test – and it is critically important that we get it right.

Mother Jones has an article about Bob Inglis, the former US Representative from South Carolina. Inglis is a profoundly conservative Republican, but wound up losing to another Republican in the primaries because he “strayed from his conservative roots.”

Some of that may be because he voted against the Surge in Iraq, but a lot of it probably comes from his unwillingness to work with the Tea Party wing. Here’s how he describes one meeting:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

The thing is, there’s very little new in this. Most of the things the Tea Party is spewing date back decades, or even centuries. As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his famous essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, these kinds of conspiracy theories date back to before the founding of America. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that changes is the nationality of the troops that are hiding just outside of our borders and waiting to invade.

I got into a discussion once with a professor who insisted that this is a uniquely American phenomena. I’m not quite as sure. So here’s my question: Is the kind of conspiracism seen above familiar to those outside the US? Do you encounter conspiracy theories regularly in your country?

This is mainly my own curiosity, so thanks in advance for your input.

Over at the Accidental Historian, Geds is starting a series on the Byzantine Empire. Like all good historians, he realizes that to talk about a period of history, he has to go back to well before that period actually began. Back to, say, when the universe cooled enough for protons to form.

Geds splits the difference and goes back to before Constantine, to the appearance of Christianity. In his discussion of religion in the Greco-Roman world, he throws out this:

There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of Christians.

The Roman authorities saw Christianity as a potentially destabilizing force in exactly the same way it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabilizing force. The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the Christian martyrs are special is because we have a lot of them.

That reminded me of a quote from a Roman text dated to the early fourth century:

The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up … he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune; he is absolved. (quoted from The Inheritance of Rome. p.21)

Note the assumptions here. Do you see the casual acceptance of what Chris Wickham calls “judicial violence”? Do you notice the implicit class assumptions?

Does it change your perceptions at all to know that this text was a Greek-Latin primer for school children?

This is the world that early Christianity found itself in.

Victor J. Stenger, author of works like God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, came out with a work last year titled The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason. In it, Stenger apparently has a section on the nonhistoricity of Jesus.

First off, he doesn’t do himself any favors by confusing Philo and Josephus. It looks like a simple mistake of confusing quotes, but someone should have caught it.

But second, is this really the battle we want to be fighting?

I know I’m suspect in this discussion, because I’ve stated that I do not accept mythicism. But I think it should be pointed out that even the most scholarly of the mythicists – Robert Price and Richard Carrier – acknowledge that it’s a very complex argument.

For example, Carrier has pointed out that a lot of the arguments from previous generations of mythicists have been really bad. Pointing to parallels between the Gospel stories and other myths in the Greco-Roman world doesn’t cut it. You need to explain why the biblical authors were adapting those stories. Carrier has argued that you really need a solid grasp of Jewish writings and other ancient literature before you can understand what was going on.

Lacking that knowledge, the mythicist argument is going to be counter-intuitive and, therefor, a hard sell.

In contrast, what do we gain from making the mythicist argument? If nothing else, it should be noted that even to mythicists, Paul and the authors of the Gospels did believe in Jesus – just a semi-divine Jesus who wasn’t present on earth. If we could, through masterful debate and sound reason, push believers back to that point, we still haven’t really gained anything for atheism.

I’m not going to argue against mythicism here, but I will argue that mythicism should not become a plank in the New Atheist platform. It is a difficult argument that stands to gain us very little.

Michael Paulkner has produced this gorgeous depiction of the ancient Israelite view of the universe. You can go to his flicker stream to see it in the original size.

There’s a lot more on his photostream that’s worth looking at. James McGrath likes this depiction of the Ptolemaic Universe, but I have a fondness for this one:

“Flint tools found in an English village show ancient humans settled northern Europe 800,000 years ago, far earlier than previously thought, which could prompt scientists to reassess the capabilities of early humans.”

How exciting is that? I think this is what separates religion and science (and history):  Ability to embrace being wrong as a good thing.

A Swedish scholar named Gunnar Samuelsson has successfully defended his thesis that the Gospels do not clearly describe a crucifixion that matches later traditions.

His argument seems to hinge on the word “stauroun,” which the Gospels use in a way that has been interpreted as meaning “crucified.” As in, “He was handed over to be ’stauroun.’

In this case, “stauroun” simply means to hang or suspend. Samuelsson has apparently done his homework and found that in the Gospel period, “stauroun” used in the case of executions could mean hanging or impaling.

There are a number of places to read about Samuelsson’s argument. CNN’s Belief blog has one report, but like a lot of other reports it has problems. Consider the opening:

There have been plenty of attacks on Christianity over the years, but few claims have been more surprising than one advanced by an obscure Swedish scholar this spring.

How is this an attack? Samuelsson’s arugment is very narrow; one might even say pedantic. He’s arguing that the Gospels – and only the Gospels – do not absolutely say that Jesus was crucified. That might be what they are trying to say, but there’s enough wiggle room in the words chosen that they could also be telling us that he was impaled or hung.

It reminds me a bit of the argument over Joesph’s profession, and by extension Jesus’s early profession: were they carpenters? The word the Gospel’s use is “tekton,” which merely means “manual laborer.” It’s the same root as our words like “technical,” or “technician,” that is, working with the hands. It might mean that Joesph was a carpenter (though probably not a furniture maker as sometimes depicted but rather a home builder), but it might not. The tradition that Joesph was a carpenter is first found in Justin Maytyr a century after Jesus’ death.

Regardless of what the Gospels say, early Christian tradition definitely had the idea that Jesus had been nailed to a cross. It’s possible that they were embroidering a bit, or perhaps were cleaning some things up, but I don’t see any real reason to be suspicious of the traditional reading as long as we bear Samuelsson’s points in mind.

Though I admit, part of me is morbidly curious as to what would have happened to early Christianity if Jesus had been impaled through the anus, as was sometimes done.

Hmmm, no, on second thought, nevermind.

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo’s colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a “visionary hero.”

“Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?”

Yes, we damn well should. We should never forget the atrocities committed and the millions dead. And we should never allow vacuous apologists like this one to sweep them under the rug. Consider his argument:

“The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth. Leopold turned the Congo into a vast labour camp? Really? In those days it was just the way things were done.”

It’s the same tired old rationalization in favor of colonialism. “Oh, being oppressed was good for them!” But the sad truth is that even other colonial powers were appalled by the excesses that were being committed in Leopold’s “Congo Free State.” Chris Bertram is right to compare Michel’s statement to Holocaust Denial.

Look, I could rant myself hoarse here. But instead I’ll just encourage folks to read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and get the full story of how Leopold scammed together his colony and how he ran it.

Of course, you could also read Heart of Darkness to get Joesph Conrad’s from-the-gut feelings after his visit to the Congo.

Finally, you can read the great Mark Twain and his work King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which has all the scathing lines and all the venom necessary to respond to Louis Michel.

[King Leopold II:] “These meddlesome American missionaries! these frank British consuls! these blabbingblabbing Belgian-born traitor officials! — those tiresome parrots are always talking, always telling. They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign — sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire — sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private “swag” — mine, solely mine — claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine — mine solely — and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.

His closing is true enough to be painful. Leopold is reading an article from one of his detractors:

[reading:] It seems strange to see a king destroying a nation and laying waste a country for mere sordid money’s sake, and solely and only for that. Lust of conquest is royal; kings have always exercised that stately vice; we are used to it, by old habit we condone it, perceiving a certain dignity in it; but lust of money — lust of shillings — lust of nickels — lust of dirty coin, not for the nation’s enrichment but for the king’s alone — this is new. It distinctly revolts us, we cannot seem to reconcile ourselves to it, we resent it, we despise it, we say it is shabby, unkingly, out of character. Being democrats we ought to jeer and jest, we ought to rejoice to see the purple dragged in the dirt, but — well, account for it as we may, we don’t. We see this awful king, this pitiless and blood-drenched king, this money-crazy king towering toward the sky in a world-solitude of sordid crime, unfellowed and apart from the human race, sole butcher for personal gain findable in all his caste, ancient or modern, pagan or Christian, proper and legitimate target for the scorn of the lowest and the highest, and the execrations of all who hold in cold esteem the oppressor and the coward; and — well, it is a mystery, but we do not wish to look; for he is a king, and it hurts us, it troubles us, by ancient and inherited instinct it shames us to see a king degraded to this aspect, and we shrink from hearing the particulars of how it happened. We shudder and turn away when we come upon them in print.”

[Leopold:] Why, certainly — THAT IS MY PROTECTION.. And you will continue to do it. I know the human race.

We may shudder, but this time we will not look away.

Craft Shop Family Buys Up Ancient Bibles for Museum

[...]

With a goal of establishing a national Bible museum of great depth and size, the evangelical Christian family behind the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores has been spending heavily to amass a collection that has set dealers buzzing in the staid world of rare books.

First off, what is it about the founders of big box stores that makes them want to open museums? Alice Walton is building an art museum in Arkansas – and swiping Hudson Valley art in the process. *grumble*

Second, this is something that could be done very well, or very, very poorly. Many Americans are woefully ignorant about the history of the book itself. A museum about the collection, transmission and translation of the bible could be a real educational asset, or just another Creation Museum.

Even if the museum has a clear Evangelical bias, I think it might still be worth it. If nothing else, there are enough good Evangelical scholars that I think would give the exhibits a very balanced tone. The patrons might not hear the theories of the Dutch Radicals, but I can live with that.

Plus, there’s a lot of potential to tell engaging stories that bring people in, while also leaving them with a sense of how complex the book and its history really are. How about the stories of some of the great translators like John Wycliffe? The politics and personalities involved in the creation of the KJV? The controversy around Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum?

Or how about stories from the formation of the canon? Granted, there would be a challenge there, since it’s a long, drawn-out and frequently unsatisfying story. But it’s got shocking twists (the first canon was probably established by the arch-heretic Marcion), heroes (Eusebius recording the names of the fallen before undertaking one of the great feats of scholarship in the ancient world), and lots of funny names (“Polycarp of Smyrna”? C’mon, you just made that up.)

But I’m afraid that it’s going to turn out to be a one-dimensional presentation of some canned stories without any scholarly underpinnings. I’m afraid, given some of the quotes in the article, that it will just be seen as another tool for evangelism, like the Creation Museum.

A lot depends of the adviser, Dr. Scott Carroll, who is unfamiliar to me. Anybody know his background?

One of the good things about working in the museum field is that other museum folks are more willing to tell it to you straight. And so, during a tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, one curator told a group of us about the historic baseball that Abner Doubleday didn’t have when he didn’t invent baseball, when he wasn’t in Cooperstown, which wasn’t in 1839.

Of course, not everyone wants to hear that, which is why the curator was venting to us. Despite the fact that the Doubleday myth has been roundly debunked for decades now, people still show up at the Hall of Fame wanting to hear the old story about the Civil War general designing the baseball diamond.

This kind of story is sometimes called a “zombie fact,” no matter how many times you try to kill it, it always rises again. Somehow they just seem lodged in our collective memories, and no amount of pounding gets rid of them.

There are a number of national “zombie facts,” like the idea that Columbus was trying to prove the world was round, or the story of Washington and the cherry tree. But I think most of these facts exist on the local level, just as little stories that get passed around the community that no one ever bothers to check.

In this region, we have to tell people that the song “Yankee Doodle” probably wasn’t written at Fort Crailo – which, incidentally, wasn’t really a fort. And no, I’m sorry to say, Captain Kidd did not bury his treasure anywhere along the Hudson, nor did Robert Livingston abscond with any and bury it on his land.

Not, of course, that telling people does any good. The zombie fact always rises to lurch another day.

What sort of “zombie facts” do you have in your region? Are there any that particularly get under your skin?