Ancient History in Skeptical Inquirer: A Fact-Check

I usually look forward to getting the Skeptical Inquirer every other month, but I’m starting to think that they need (a) a better copy editor and (b) someone to fact-check their articles. For a publication devoted to truth, there was quite a bit of questionable material in the May/June 2012 edition. I’ll confine my critique to material directly related to ancient history.

In Peter Barglow’s article on whether post-traumatic stress disorder meets the criteria for a real psychiatric illness, there is a questionable assertion about Greek mythology. (I’m not much of a fan of the increasing number of dull, though sadly necessary, articles on whether some disease or another is a figment of doctors’ imaginations. As the old guard of skeptics have, as a group, aged into late middle age and beyond, the amount of attention they pay to medical issues, not coincidentally, has risen proportionally.)

Barglow writes that the first PTSD sufferer was

…the fourth century character Herakles, created by the dramatist Euripides. Driven insane by a Greek goddess, he suffered transitory murderous frenzy precipitated by the violence of his twelve labors.

Almost everything in here is false.

• Euripides wrote in the BCE time period, an important distinction. Without the BCE, this implies Euripides worked in the CE time period.
• Euripides worked in the fifth century BCE and wrote Heracles sometime between 421 and 416 BCE, when the play was first performed.
• Euripides did not create Heracles. Heracles was a preexisting character of Mycenaean origin. (Walter Burkert speculated that he was Neolithic in origin, but this cannot be proved.) I suppose Barglow meant “Euripides' characterization of Heracles in the fifth century BCE,” but this is not what he said.
• In the play, two goddesses (Iris and Madness) cause the insanity at the behest of a third (Hera).
• In Euripides’ play, Heracles kills his children after performing his Labors, but in most other versions of the myth, Heracles performs the Twelve Labors in penance for killing his children.

Then, in Elie A. Shneour’s article on the “Ongoing Decline of Religion,” we read about the “Epic of Gamesh,” clearly a mistaken rendering of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then Shenour writes that “Hinduism emerged from bloody sacrificial cults brought in by Arian invaders in India around 1500 BCE.”

This is also false.

• “Arian” refers to the followers of Arius, a Christian heretic. “Aryan” is the name for the proposed conquerors of India. (Some older texts occasionally spell Aryan and Arian, but the Aryan spelling has been standard for more than 120 years.)
  
• The hypothetical Aryan invasion of India is highly controversial. The theory emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a racist theory explaining how dark-skinned Indians came to possess mythology and languages related to the Indo-European myths and tongues of Europe. The evidence for the “invasion” is linguistic, and there is no archaeological evidence proving that the diffusion of Indo-European language and religion into Europe occurred via warfare instead of peaceful contact, assimilation, or just diffusion.
• Pre-Hindu Vedic religion is no bloodier a cult than any other sacrificial cult of its time period, including those practiced by the peoples who lived in India before the “Aryan invasion.”

Incidentally, the reason for all these “bloody” sacrifices is quite simple. Ancient people didn’t have butcher shops or supermarkets. When they wanted meat, they had to kill an animal by hand, and consecrating the animal to a god helped assuage the guilt of taking a life by imagining that the animal is reconstituted in heaven as one of the god’s cattle, sheep, etc. Sacrificed animals were butchered and the meat distributed to the citizenry. Religious sacrifices were the primary means by which the poor and city-dwellers obtained meat until the end of the Roman Empire. Put in those terms, sacrifices sound much less violent and more useful than the current factory farm and slaughterhouse system. In other words, animal sacrifice in ancient times is not a particularly strong argument, as Shneour claims, that religion is evil.

I also take issues with Shneour’s thesis that religion is inexorably declining and fading away. While it is true that in the United States there has been a marginal uptick in the number of people claiming to be atheist or agnostic, the number of people expressing belief in God, heaven, and angels has remained fairly steady for decades. Organized religion may be declining (though it was never as strong in the U.S. as believers claim), but religious belief is not declining except among a certain segment of the population that not coincidentally happens to be the same upper-class, academic elite to which Shneour belongs.

In Europe and among elite populations in the United States, yes, religion is in decline. But outside of that, and especially among non-elite populations, religion continues to play the same role in daily life that it did when those “bloody” “Arians” finished reading the “Epic of Gamesh” and high-tailed it to India.