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The origins of the 'Christian Dark Ages' chart

Also, Disney sells tarot decks now

Rohan Salmond

17 Nov 2021 • 4 min read

Can you believe I’ve been doing this newsletter for six months already? Thank you so much for reading - putting Modern Relics together every week has been a joy!

Last week I mentioned I delivered a sermon at Leichhardt Uniting Church. It’s now on YouTube if you’re curious.

And once again I’m asking you to join the Modern Relics Discord.

The origins of ‘The Chart’

Here’s a chart that’s been floating around the internet for over ten years.

“THE HOLE LEFT BY THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES”

It went viral again after being unironically posted by Twitter user @MaoistRebelNews, despite the chart being widely regarded as bogus by historians, and being debunked over and over again.

I remember when this chart was popular on Tumblr in the early 2010s, and I’ve always wondered who first made it and what brought them to do so. I think I’ve worked it out.

My search turned up this Quora answer by Tim O'Neill from 2015, which gives a bit of context:

The /r/badhistory subreddit refers to it simply as "The Chart" and calls the pseudo history it illustrates as "Chartism". They also place it at the very bottom of their "Nine Hells of Bad History" and reserve it for special mockery. It seems to have its origin with a moron called Jim West and was originally used as a graphic to back up a confused, ignorant and error-laden rant called "The Myth of Christianity Founding Science and Medicine"

I think Tim is right. The versions of the chart with fewest alterations are watermarked with NoBeliefs.com, a Freethought website that seems to have gone defunct in 2020. The “error-laden rant” mentioned above was written by Jim Walker (not West) in 2007 and is still available on the Wayback Machine.

There’s even a special page on NoBeliefs.com addressing the chart in particular, so it does seem to have originated with Jim Walker in 2007. Jim concludes:

As long as people argue over [the chart], I expect historians in the future will get to work on this. … In my commentary I challenged people to make a better graph. It has been seven years since I first wrote it and I'm still waiting.

I won’t dwell on it, but this brand of hardline New Atheism has become associated with Islamophobia and neofacism, which isn’t exactly a surprise. There are popular versions of the chart that have been altered to project a future “Islamic Dark Age” too, which is extremely sad and rather alarming to see.

Assassin 33 AD

Speaking of Islamophobia, it has been brought to my attention that there is a movie about a Muslim leader/terrorist (I think?) who hijacks a time machine to go back and kill Jesus.

My mind is buzzing. How do you go back in time to kill a man who is already famous for being murdered? If you killed Jesus before the Romans, would he still rise from the dead? Which “international film festivals” have allegedly showered this movie with more awards than any other in history - was time travel involved? I must know!

I will absolutely be watching this movie, but if you don’t want to, Cracked has done a spoilery plot summary here.

Neopets in the news again

Children’s website Neopets is back! In NFT form! Current owner of the broken website did the inevitable and chased the NFT trend, despite a resoundingly negative reception from the remaining diehard fans. Also like half of the NFT Neopets are crying for some reason.

Image: Kotaku. I have no idea who bought these as NFTs

Which all reminds me that, between 2000 and 2005, Neopets was majority-owned by Scientologists and run according to the Church of Scientology’s Org Board business model. That’s got nothing to do with what’s going on with the website now, but it’s a weird fun fact!

Speaking of NFTs and blockchain tech, Indonesia’s Muslim council MUI has declared cryptocurrency haram.

Disney is selling tarot decks, because why not?

Disney is starting to produce tarot decks featuring their villains and Nightmare Before Christmas characters. I was extremely surprised to read about this but apparently Disney made an earlier Nightmare Before Christmas tarot deck in 2001 as a special promotional item.

RNS reports that “Both of the currently available decks have generally received a favorable response from tarot readers,” but not from everyone:

Drew K. Prince, a pagan and podcaster at Magick Radio Chicago, said, “I don’t think Disney or any corporation should cash in on the magical arts. ... They might as well produce Mickey Mouse Jesus dashboard miniatures or Disney-themed Bibles.”

As far as I can tell, Disney has indeed never done this. But Mickey and Jesus are a favourite artist crossover project and you can get an unofficial hand-painted Disney Bible online!

Does this horse belong to Balaam

They do be like that sometimes

Religion, yassified

An account called @YassifyBot has been doing the rounds, feeding images of well-known people into FaceApp pro and turning them into women wearing a lot of makeup.

Anyway, I went through and found all the religious ones so you don’t have to.