Truth Be Known

I’ve been a fan of Neil Young’s music going all the way back to his days with Buffalo Springfield.

“Truth Be Known” is one of my favorite songs by Neil  (backed by Pearl Jam minus Eddie Vedder, with Neil on lead vocals), on his CD Mirror Ball.

Pearl Jam fans — please don’t rush out to buy the CD just because Stone Gossard and Mike McCready are playing rhythm and lead guitars behind Neil, and Jeff Ament is on bass. You might be disappointed.

At least, listen to “I’m the Ocean” and “Big Green Country” before you make a purchase decision either way. In fairness, at the very least, you need to be aware that Eddie Vedder only sings a single verse on one song. It’s not a Pearl Jam album, by any stretch of the imagination.

Fans of Neil Young, however,..shame on you if you don’t already own a copy. Neil’s vocals are an acquired taste, but you’ve already acquired it, right? The guys from Pearl Jam certainly seemed to have invigorated Young on the 1995 release. I especially liked the guitar work of Gossard and McCready on “Big Green Country”, and the lyrics from one particular verse in “Truth Be Known” that went:

When the fire that once was your friend
Burns your fingers to the bone
And your song meets a sudden end
Echoing through right and wrong
Truth be known…

There is great wisdom in those words — nothing hurts worse than being betrayed by a friend. Try to imagine what Jesus must have felt like, when Judas kissed his cheek.

Of course, if you’re a conspiracy theorist like D. M. Murdock, you may not even believe Jesus existed. By strange coincidence, a rather famous (in mythicist circles, at least) internet personality, Ms. Murdock (a.k.a. Acharya S.) owns the website provocatively titled Truth Be Known.

Presumably, the idea being conveyed by the name is that Ms. Murdock is some sort of extraordinarily gifted researcher who has learned truths that other people simply don’t know.

Ms. Murdock is perfectly willing to generously impart her wisdom to the masses through an astonishing array of products offered at bargain prices, of course. I certainly don’t fault Ms. Murdock for trying to sell her books, but she might better serve her readers to market her work as fiction, rather than the product of tireless research that may not be everything it’s cracked up to be.

After all, selling a book is sort of the point of writing one. Truth be known, the reason I used the cover photo for my book for this article was twofold: articles look better and catch the readers eye more frequently with at least one image embedded. Visual images tend to catch our eyes more easily than text, especially when a link to the article is posted on Facebook.

The other reason is related to marketing–shameless self promotion, if you will. Someone may actually click on the book cover and follow the link to Amazon to buy Counterargument for God, or perhaps one of my other books.

If you like what I write on my blog, just imagine how much better my work is when my editors cut out all the unnecessary banter. Of course, they’d cut all the stuff about Neil Young to keep me right on point, instead of letting me meander my way there.

However, let’s focus the spotlight back on our “independent scholar” Ms. Murdock, the inspiration for this article who among other things claims to be a polyglot (fluent in multiple languages) and a former trench master on archaeological digs in Corinth, Greece and Connecticut, whatever that means.

The ever-talented Ms. Murdock apparently researches, writes, edits, and publishes her work with very little help. She claims to have read (and translated) thousands of original sources written in multiple languages, even making the extraordinary assertion that she “had to teach herself hieroglyphics and ancient Egyptian on the spot as [she] was going along” in this interview promoting her book Christ in Egypt — The Horus/Jesus Connection

Wow! Really? How did she manage this remarkable feat? I can barely manage to string together a few sentences in English, most of the time. But how did she verify her translation was accurate? By any chance, is there some special version of Rosetta Stone for the actual Rosetta Stone?

Now Ms. Murdock’s most famous contribution to contemporary culture was her key role in development of the cult classic conspiracy theorist film titled Zeitgeist.

Someone needs to remind me…what is the saying my atheist friends parrot so frequently? Oh, yes. I remember now. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And quid est veritas? happens to be one of my favorite questions, one that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus the Christ in response when Jesus said he was “witness to the truth.”

(Translated into English) Pilate simply replied, “What is truth?” Now that’s a really great question that I’m constantly asking myself. What is truth? And conversely, what is B.S.?

So let’s get to the point — how seriously should we take the claims of Ms. Murdock, whose academic credentials consist of a Bachelor’s degree in liberal arts (Classics, Greek civilization) from Franklin and Marshall University? Perhaps we can learn something about her credibility from reputable academic sources. For example, while giving his readers an update on his ongoing feud with Richard Carrier about the historicity of Jesus, professor Bart Ehrman happened to mention “Acharya S.”, writing:

     A case in point of my “carelessness and arrogance” is the first instance of an “Error of Fact” that he [Carrier] cites, which I assume he gives as his first example because he thinks it’s a real killer.   It has to do with a statue in the Vatican library that is of a rooster (a cock) with an erect penis for a nose (really!) which Acharya S, in her book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, indicates is “hidden in the Vatican Treasury” (that damn Vatican: always hiding things that disprove Christianity!) which is a “symbol of Saint Peter” (p. 295).
In her discussion, Acharya S indicates that Jesus’ disciple Peter was not only the “rock” on which Jesus would build his church, but also the “cock.”  Get it?  They rhyme!   Moreover, the word cock is slang for penis (hard as a “rock,” one might think); and what is another slang word for penis?  Peter!   There you have it.  And so when there is a statue of a cock with a rock-hard peter for a nose, this symbolizes Peter, the disciple of Jesus.  No wonder the popes have kept this thing in hiding.
My comment on this entire discussion was simple and direct:  “There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up.”

Wow. I’m not surprised people buy her garbage posing as nonfiction, but some of them actually believe such nonsense? A secret statue of a rooster with a penis nose, hidden by the Vatican? Even Dan Brown would have a hard time making up a story that absurd. But I’ll admit that I am laughing out loud.

I don’t exactly blame Ms. Murdock for writing such silliness. Nobody is putting a gun to the head of people who buy it.

And what else can one do with a liberal arts bachelor’s degree focused on ancient Greek civilization? Flip burgers for minimum wage? I’m guessing that her options are rather limited. I would suggest that her books are all harmless nonsense, except crazed mass murderer Jared Loughner was allegedly obsessed with and his subsequent behavior heavily influenced by the movie Zeitgeist, which prominently featured “information” culled from Murdock’s work.

I also know that Loughner killed several innocent people during his attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and close friends blamed the brainwashing effect the film had on him. But that is their opinion on record, the close friends of Loughner, not mine. I have no opinion on the movie’s influence on Loughner’s state of mind. I’ve never even met the guy.

To be brutally honest, I had almost forgotten about that ugly incident. Loughner’s victims probably haven’t, though. Perhaps “harmless” nonsense was a poor choice of words, though.

What drew my attention to the work of D. M. Murdock only this morning was her “analysis” of the evidence regarding the Shroud of Turin, which I also investigated to some degree, reaching far different conclusions than she.

I couldn’t help but notice that for an alleged polyglot, Ms. Murdock seems strangely unable to comprehend her native tongue.

She relies exclusively on the statements of former STURP member John Jackson to challenge the recent claims of a peer-reviewed research paper that asserted the sample material on which the carbon dating tests were performed were taken from a damaged section of the shroud that had undergone “modern” repairs using cotton fabric, alleged to have occurred in the sixteenth century. When I wrote my article, I wasn’t even aware that Jackson had stated his opinion for the record, and since Ray Rogers took point on the effort to debunk the 2000 paper written by Marino and Bedford and actually reviewed the their evidence and the remnants of the original test material and found cotton, I’d be inclined to give the opinion of Rogers more weight than the speculation of his fellow team member.

Most curiously, Ms. Murdock cited a statement from the Associated Press reporting a statement from a dubious organization known as CSICOP, claiming that blood evidence on the shroud “had been definitively proved [emphasis added] to be composed of red ocher and vermilion tempera paint.”

Sorry, but there’s no way to sugarcoat it but to say that is anything other than an outright lie.  Nothing of the sort has been “definitively proved.” The ONLY experts who have been allowed by the Catholic church to scientifically examine the shroud were the scientists involved in STURP.

So who exactly are these “experts” being cited by Ms. Murdock and CSICOP who definitively proved anything scientifically, in regard to the shroud? The official summary from STURP included the following statement:

We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist. The blood stains are composed of hemoglobin and also give a positive test for serum albumin. The image is an ongoing mystery and until further chemical studies are made, perhaps by this group of scientists, or perhaps by some scientists in the future, the problem remains unsolved.

That isn’t paint, Ms. Murdock.The scientific opinion of the real STURP experts were stated for the official record in plain English, and they said the substance on the shroud was blood.

Given your history, I don’t know that I’m all that surprised to find out you seem to have a penchant for making things up as you go along. But truth be known, you can’t claim that I burned your fingers to the bone. We have never been friends, and I seriously doubt we will ever be.

I value honesty from my friends.