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...perhaps he's what you evolutionist have been looking for...

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Homo Neanderthalensis by H.L. Mencken

(The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925)

I

Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

II

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-C

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Hey I like Betthoven

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Amen,and to think that he was deaf.According to Mecken and Slater I'm just one of the red neck "ignoble... imortal vermin"so I just get sixpack, some pork rinds,and head on down to the Piggly Wiggly and blast Beethoven's 9th from singel speaker 1956 Ford pickup

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Mencken lived during a time when people did not have cars in abundance. There were not radios in every house. Most people to have heard of or listened to Beethoven were required to travel to a theater to hear a symphonic piece. This would be virtually impossible for many. ...

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Henry Louis Mencken lived from 1880 to 1956. Cars had been around for a long, long time before his death. Radios, television sets, tape recorders were in use for a long, long time, and radios and television had been carrying symphony orchestra performances for years and years by the time of his death. However, much of the popular music which was around when Mencken was alive has *gone the way of the Dodo*, while the music of Handel, Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Prokofieff, Stravinsky, Ives, et al. continues to bring crowds to symphony orchestra concerts and is supported by heavy endowments. The music of Beethoven, et al., lives on, while popular music usually dies a slow death from disuse.

Anybody with a radio can tune into symphony orchestra concerts. They can buy CDs and tapes of symphony orchestra (and chamber music) concerts. H.L. Mencken wrote: *Nobody ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American Public.* He was very, very right about that one. However, he made money hand over fist from that knowledge by his pandering to the public taste.

Great music will continue to be available to the people who desire to listen to it. The disks and tapes of popular music often end up forgotten in landfills. To each his/her own...

ljbrs

*Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.* Goethe

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As far as the the other dying and rising "gods" of the mystery religions they were sworn to secrecy the exact opposite of the of the apostles who boldly proclaimed that Jesus had risen in front of hostile witnesses.

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That's just blatant nonsense. Of all the saviors that I mentioned only Dionysos was at the center of a "mystery cult."

... Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.

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Slater:

Thank you for the wonderful post, as usual. I always liked H.L. Mencken. I particularly liked his *Memorial Service* which is a hum dinger. I am certain that you must have read it. If not, there are sites on the web which have it. Somewhere (on one of my other sites) I have saved it.

Again, thank you.

ljbrs

*Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.* Goethe

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Homo Neanderthalensis by H.L. Mencken

(The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925)

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They put the formation of the NT in that time period primarily due to archaeological and textual evidence.
To say that the time set is based on archaeological evidence is misleading. It implies that there is physical evidence to support the claim. To the best of my knowledge there is only a fragment of one page from Mark surviving that dates from slightly before Eusebius and his merry pranksters. Everything else is newer.
Textual evidence is even slipperier. It sounds like it couldn't have been written before 70 CE becomes changed, in the hands of biblical scholars, to it was written in 70 CE. This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about when I say "assumptions."
Hell, a historic Jesus is an assumption. That is probably the one thing that the majority of contemporary bible scholars actually are in agreement on--Jesus' existence. But without any proof--therefore they are assuming the very foundation that all of their other arguments are based on. Not a good way to build a case.

I'd love to see you make the case that

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