Dear George,

I would like to take back what I said about people taking their religion seriously. I am sure you take your religion seriously.

History is based on facts. A historian gathers the facts and creates a narrative from those facts. Unlike the facts a scientist gathers from a reading of a data collection device the facts on which history is based are much more unreliable. From the past there are various documents: clay tablets, eye witness accounts, government archives etc. The historian must make judgments on the validity of the facts. An account from the archives describing actions of the ruler may be influenced by the fact the writer of the narrative would not want to arouse the wrath of the ruler.

Chinese dynasties have employed official historians who write accounts of the dynasty. The accounts consist of biographies of important people, chronologies of happenings during the realm and essays on agriculture, trade etc. There is an account of a ruler who did not like being called a murderer and asked the historian to change the account. The historian refused and was executed. This was repeated with several historians. Finally the ruler let the account stand. In addition when a dynasty is replaced scholars attached to the old dynasty get together with scholars of the new dynasty to write an account of the old dynasty and its overthrow. This tradition has been continued with the present communist government getting together with Kuomintang scholars to write a history of the Kuomintang. The above is a separate thing from the propaganda each Chinese government puts out, and the history is not available. However, it is somewhere. If it is not destroyed it is available for future historians.

Typically a government does not open its archives for a certain number of years after the event. I had the pleasure of visiting the Bureau of Documents in London and examining the nineteenth century accounts of the British consuls in central Asia. The consuls were well educated men who wrote their accounts in beautiful copperplate hand-writing. Generally government archives are reliable

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Government archives are usually reliable as most governments want to base their actions on facts.

Another reliable source is the capitalist press. By capitalist press I do not mean the press owned by the capitalists which can be quite unreliable. By capitalist press I mean the press that carries the news on which investors rely.

In Australia there were protests against AIDEX the arms fairs sponsored by the Australian government in which the clients are generally agents of other governments seeking to beef up their military capability which may be used against their own people. During the protests there were ugly incidents of cars being overturned, nails strewn in the roads, etc. In general the protestors were schooled in non-violence, and the ugly incidents were inconsistent with the actions of most protestors. I did a survey of the various reports of the protests in the Australian press. The only newspaper that wrote about the ugly incidents and mentioned that they were probably due to agents provocateur was the Australian Financial Review.

Eye witness accounts are notoriously unreliable.

Some historians become ideologues. They marshal their facts to present a case for some social action much as a lawyer does to either prosecute or defend. Marx and Treitschke are two examples. When a historian does that they are no longer a historian and are not to be trusted.

Unfortunately the ideologues may produce very interesting and readable history. Just be aware that they have betrayed their trust.

In the Muslim rally in Sydney last night the speakers were denouncing the right to free speech - using the right of free speech. These people are ignorant of Australian values. Any person attending the Rally not an Australian Citizen should be deported; and any person swearing allegiance to Australian values and laws at a Citizenship ceremony, should loose their right as a citizen. They will continue to abuse our values until they install Political members who will install laws banning freedom of expression.

Josephus wrote:

"In the Muslim rally in Sydney last night the speakers were denouncing the right to free speech - using the right of free speech. These people are ignorant of Australian values. Any person attending the Rally not an Australian Citizen should be deported; and any person swearing allegiance to Australian values and laws at a Citizenship ceremony, should loose their right as a citizen. They will continue to abuse our values until they install Political members who will install laws banning freedom of expression."

Dear Josephus,

Deporting a person for attending a rally is inconsistent with Australian values as is limiting the right of free speech by shutting up people who are saying what one doesn't want to hear.

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Dear david f,

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« ... the problem is that some individuals hearing such words from an imam would not be incited to do anything wrong while others would be so incited.»
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Philosophers and jurists generally consider that freedom of speech is a law of nature. I, personally, am not aware of any restrictions imposed on the speech or expression of any living creatures other than those which the human species imposes on itself. Even kookaburras can laugh their heads off without being held to account.

Of course, governments could decree that laws of nature such as freedom of speech and expression are not to apply on their territory just as they could decree that gravity is not to apply on their territory. However, doing so would be about as effective as the gesticulations of “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha” waging battle against windmills.

In the same way that the pollens of springtime can have no effect on some people while being extremely unpleasant, sometimes even lethal to others – so it is with religious intolerance and incitation to jihad. Who could ignore that cultural, psychological, economic and sociological factors are the composite soil in which the incitation to jihadism takes root.

No sooner will the French government have finished weeding out the last radical imam than cyber-Islam will have taken their place. The maggots are in the apples. They need to take care of their apples so that they don’t get infested with maggots.
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« Exodus 22:18 (KJV) states "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." In some African countries this currently is causing murders of 'witches' … »

That reminds me of an article I read in an Abidjan newspaper in the Ivory Coast some years back. An Ivoirian was tried for the murder of another Ivoirian. The accused explained that he was out hunting with his rifle and shot a monkey up in a tree but when it fell down and hit the ground it turned into a man. The court accepted the explanation and acquitted him.

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Dear david f,

>>I am sure you take your religion seriously.<<

I am not sure what this means. I take the worldwide phenomenon of religion seriously and believe that a sense for it - or an atheist replica of it, say “atheist spirituality” - is built into our brains.

On the other hand you are right that I take my faith - containing assumptions about the nature of reality on which all my world view is built - seriously.

Again, I agree with your expose about history and historians. My distinction between facts and their explanations/interpretations was, of course, an oversimplification, the same as would be a strict distinction between experiment/observation and theory in physics (see critiques of Popper’s “falsifiability” criterion).

A document as such is a fact, although its explanation might include it being a fake. If that is universally agreed upon, then this becomes a new fact, and the document looses its historical significance. (Similarly, the Galileo’s “theory” that Earth orbits the Sun became a fact, although in contemporary theoretical physics this distinction between theory and experimentally established facts is more complicated).
(ctd)