Currently only Patreon and recurring PayPal patrons, Facebook subscribers, and select vetted specialists, can post on my blog without their comments waiting in the moderation queue (all such patrons, please email me to find out how to secure this privilege if it isn’t already operating). All other comments go into moderation and must be approved before appearing.
Please note that I am quite busy and consequently only check the moderation queue every few days, sometimes longer (particularly if the comment load is high, taking much longer to sort through). Consequently comments in moderation may take a long time even for me to see them. Please have patience.
All comments in a moderation queue will eventually be approved and thus published that (a) are relevant to the article being commented on, (b) are reasonably civil, and (c) don’t abuse the privilege of being published here at all. For example, no trafficking in harassment, slander, or abject racism and the like. Comments that repeatedly ignore the material they claim to be responding to are also unlikely to survive review: I am not your publisher; if you want to publish long rambling essays that don’t honestly engage with anything on my site, find your own venue. Likewise, if a specific article has its own particular comments policy stated, any comments violating that will not be published there. Some repeat offenders who were warned have also been permanently banned and their comments will never be published. Heed warnings.
All civil and relevant comments submitted by any actual persons whose work, claims, or arguments are critiqued in the article they are commenting on will also be published. And I might whitelist your email address for the same commenting privileges of patrons thereafter. So please so-identify yourself to claim that privilege. But be warned: pretending to be someone you are not will result in a permanent ban. As will repeatedly violating the rules above.
New rule: AI content is banned from my comments. Anything that looks AI generated will be deleted. And this rule is absolute as of 2025. So even if you admit some content you post is AI generated, your entire comment will still be deleted. Use your own words and mind. Everything else is garbage.
New system: As of September 2025 I launched a new commenting system (wpDiscuz) and I am still working out its kinks. Please email me if you find problems with it.
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This page is continually updated to state present policy.
Just a quick question. I have not heard you speak about jesus as a solar god and how the winter solstice could represent the three day period where the “Sun” descends into Hades for three days. Christmas is linked to Winter Solstice celebrations of ancient Pagan cultures. While Christian mythology is interwoven with contemporary observances of this holiday time, its Pagan nature is still strong and apparent. Is this a a perspective with evidence and good methodology?
Not really a relevant question in this thread. But I did extensive postdoc research on this and found no credible evidence of it. The only connections to pagan influences that could actually be empirically established I outline in my published study, On the Historicity of Jesus. For examples of the problem see my recent article Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology for specific examples illustrating that point (see especially the section on “December 25”).
You can also look at my old article on Kersey Graves, which was a methodological warning I found proved out for even contemporary purveyors of this bogus theory when I completed a focused study on it. And that’s even counting things in that article I was wrong about—I would later find even I was misled on several facts, yet correcting those errors only makes the article’s point stronger. For example, when I wrote that I gullibly believed the claim about sun gods being born on December 25. When I completed my actual postdoc study, I found that was false.
Re: Great Cameo of France? Triumph of Joseph at the Court of the Pharaoh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7smTWI4g7kM
There is no point in just blindly linking to crank videos here.
Any further attempt to do this will be deleted per my comments policy.
Only post legitimate and pertinent facts here.
Quick technical question: I have found that I must continually refill my email, name, website, etc. for every comment. Do you have a FAQ site or are you managing this site through WordPress and I should look there for help? Thanks.
So, the comments field is run through a Divi theme on a WordPress platform. I do not like it. But changing it is a harrowing enterprise that always breaks the site so I have left it be. I may try to replace the comments system in future (there are countless plugins to try), but given past fails, I’m not encouraged.
Since the construct is a confluence of two interacting operating systems (the theme and the platform) there is no FAQ for it, per se, although I would think the engine being WordPress, then WordPress FAQs would apply, but I do not find them clear enough to be helpful on this point.
So you may try asking me what questions you have, and this will become the FAQ.
So…
I assume what you want is to get the auto-fill working.
So far as I understand it, there is only one way to do that: I have to select the option on the backend to show you a cookies option box on comments. I worry that will break something or fail. But let’s see.
I just now clicked it. In theory, now when you comment you should see that option box and can click it. It will then in future auto-fill by consulting your browser cookie. If you ever have to clear cookies, you’ll have to repeat the process to create a new cookie.
Please let me know if this works!
Oh that seems to have worked — thank you!
I also reinstalled Chrome and deleted cookies and enabled cross-site tracking but not sure if any of those things worked or it was just coincidental timing for what you did on the backend.
Well, I had not had that feature “on” until you promoted me to turn it on. So all that you should need is enabling cookies (and only for this web domain, if you micromanage your cookies).
Do confirm though that it autofills now, when you add a new comment anywhere on the site (maybe pick a random article to add a comment on); and that everything else operates as before. If yes, then your suggestion has improved the site. Thank you!
Yes I have confirmed it works well now with a couple of other comments. Next up is figuring out how to use html tags to format text and such…
Thanks again — glad I was of help to you!
Standard basic HTML works in comments here, so for example you can type A HREF=”” in angle brackets at the start of a desired text, and insert the URL between the quotation marks, and then put /A inside angle brackets at the end of the text you want the hyperlink to show for, and the text will be hyperlinked.
It’s also possible to hyperlink to a comment, but currently that requires technical expertise to extract the URL hashtag (if you view page “source” and find the comment, the “article” id tag of that comment will show the hashtag that is the hyperlink to that comment, when that hashtag is placed after the URL of the post the comment is on, for example this text hyperlinks to one of your comments).
Bold (B) and italics (I) tags also work, as you discovered. And BLOCKQUOTE tags will indent quotations. It’s also possible to run UL/OL LI tag sequences, but it’s tedious (and of course you have to know what you are doing).
In your book On The Historicity of Jesus you give your opinion of the odds of Jesus having existed as I believe something like 12000 to 1 against his having existed. You then opine that viewing the information most favorably to Jesus having existed as 3 to 1 against existence. I have read and listened to many of your books and presentations since then and you never mention your opinion of 12000 to 1 against. I would like you to explain why you don’t mention or justify your opinion of the odds. Is it because you have changed your mind or because scholars and others roundly criticized you or some other reason. I think you owe it to your “fans” to explain.
The book extensively “mentions and justifies” these odds. That is in fact what that entire peer review study is doing: it explains the empirical basis for every estimate of odds. So, maybe, like, read it first and then ask a more specific question?
Even if you mean, why do I think the range is between 1 in 12,000 and 1 in 3, that is also explained in the book (and in more detail as to methodology in Proving History, the previous peer reviewed study establishing the method of developing these odds-ranges in OHJ).
The point of an error margin is that we cannot know where the actual probability lies. It is as likely 1 in 3 as 1 in 12,000 or indeed as likely any other number in between. All we can say with confidence is that the odds “are not higher” than 1 in 3 and “are not lower” than 1 in 12,000. So the 1 in 3 odds are the odds that need to be discussed to audiences skeptical of the result.
Is there any way I can view all recent comments on the blog?
For example, suppose someone asks an insightful question on one of your posts from 2022. You then provide a long and interesting answer. I would like to read such exchanges. But I won’t know that such an exchange has taken place unless I constantly go around checking all your old blog posts for new comments.
Would you consider adding a “view recent comments” feature?
Oh good idea. I activated that (bottom right margin) but my available widget only does the “last five” comments, which will quickly be swamped as comments cycle in, so probably will not achieve what you are looking for.
I’ll see if better options exist.
It might make sense to have it only show new comments on older blog posts (say, only on posts that are more than one month old) since of course everyone already knows that there are going to be lots of new comments on the latest post.
As for “how many would be enough,” it’s hard to say; depends on how long it’s been since the reader has last stopped by your blog. Ideally it would just allow you to scroll back through the latest comments indefinitely, if such a thing is possible.
So far as I can tell, no, that’s not possible with any of the widgets on offer.
I’ll do more research and see what exists.
I’d like there to be a page I can build with something like an RSS feed for comments. But I am not seeing anything like that having been built already, and I can’t code anything that complex myself.
I actually subscribe to https://www.richardcarrier.info/comments/ if that’s relevant?
There’s also one for each article individually: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/2513/feed
Thank you. I thought that feature existed but I never see it because I’m logged in as admin so it never shows it to me.
So, yes, if that is showing for you, then that should operate to keep you apprised of new comments on each blog or (presumably in the first case?) all new comments whatever? (That might be a noisy option)
Let me know if that’s how those work, since I can’t test it myself.
It indeed works as you surmised. I seem to have made a mistake in pasting the URL. I meant https://www.richardcarrier.info/comments/feed
It’s unfortunately hidden unless you’re in the know. It’s the link rel=”alternate” tags in the HTML. I use an add-on called RSSPreview which displays an icon with a dropdown list when it comes across any.
Yes. That’s an RSS feed, which you need an RSS feed reader to employ conveniently.
It may be a feature in the Disqus Comment System, which is the most popular and one I want to replace mine with, but that’s the “it will break everything and take days to fix it all” worry which has been keeping me from pulling the trigger on that.
I found a possible widget that can do more than five. How many would be enough? (They all require you to pick a fixed number to show, so it’s not adjustable for each reader so far as I can tell.)