Is there something else wrong with the list of 500 dead gods? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
I was talking with Mike Licona yesterday who is about to interact with McCormick. In some research, I found something very interesting in the list of 500 dead gods. Mike was glad I found it, but I was going to hold off so he could use it in his presentation. He has said he has other points so he wants me to go ahead with what I found.
Now one could answer that this discovery was made after McCormick wrote his book and published his list, but it’s still a problem. Why? Because it shows that McCormick really didn’t even look the way he should have at authoritative sources and it could be he just copied from his prior source and who knows how his prior source researched? It certainly wasn’t by any reliable means.
What I actually did was go through the list name by name. I looked at every single one. The list is bogus. Some of them I could find nothing on. Some of them were just local spirits in an animistic society. Many of them were part of polytheistic systems and thus the omnis would not really apply to them. Some were even repeats of earlier. McCormick didn’t look well. I take it he just had faith that what he put up was reliable and there was no reason to look. (Remember, Skeptics like to be critical and questioning of everything, except that which agrees with them already, such as any argument against Christianity.)
Still, there is one interesting item on this list.
I took a screenshot of his blog post that dates from February 6, 2008. As it stands, this one is still up there. For our purposes, I have circled it as well in yellow so you can hopefully see it in the picture.
If you cannot see it, I will tell you that the highlighted name is a deity named Jar’Edo Wens. This one is especially delightful to me because I get to not only point out the problems with McCormick’s research, but also the problems with Wikipedia which is seen as entirely reliable. As I began to look up this deity and see what I could find, the first story caught my eye with its title.
The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history
This is a story from the Washington Post. You can read it here. Unfortunately, I have found that I am not the first to notice that McCormick uses this, but the writer I just now cite wants to focus more on Wikipedia. I think it’s important to point out that not only McCormick uses this, but also so do several atheists who use the same list and think that it’s funny the things that theists will fall for. I think it is sad the things many theists will fall for, but unfortunately, atheists are just as prone to believe something because it agrees with them. Anyone who shares this list has not studied it.
McCormick wants us to believe he’s a researcher of the data, but he’s not.
That concept is just as much a hoax as Jar’Edo Wens.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
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