Tim O'Neill
@TimONeill007
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History writer, medievalist, blogger, atheist, sceptic and expatriate Tasmanian. https://t.co/bsQB7o1C3Q
Sydney, New South Wales
Joined May 2012
Just uploaded to the History for Atheists channel, my interview with @ProfTCSchmidt on his new book *Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ* (Oxford, 2025).
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… are “boy coded” books about war, exploration, male friendships etc. now too “toxic”? Where are the books for boys?.
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… these people to suggest modern authors and titles that showed this kind of book for boys still existed. Each time I did this, I was met with … silence. 🤔.So, DO they exist? Has the whole “boys’ adventure” category vanished? Has it been swallowed by the fantasy genre? Or ….
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… just didn’t recognise boys books when I saw them, that I was perhaps blind or that I was stupid. I submit that I’m none of these things and that, with an MA in lit, am fairly competent at analysing fiction and gender coding etc. In the face of all this scorn, I invited….
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… So yesterday I foolishly noted this in a comment on a TikTok where a woman was scolding men for not reading. I asked if the weird lack of books aimed at teenaged boys might be part of the problem. This suggestion was met with a storm of snark and insults, with claims I ….
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… almost nothing. A helpful sales assistant helped me search through the hundreds of books for girls for something a teenaged boy might like and eventually found one: a gay high school romance story. Adventure stories? Survival stories? Travel stories? War? Forget about it. ….
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… kind of books I loved as a kid still existed. To my surprise, I found not only that they didn’t, but I found barely any books for teenaged boys at all. Shelves and shelves of books for girls. And lots for younger kids, including books aimed at boys. But for older boys - ….
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… Treece, Jack London, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Geoffrey Trease and Leon Garfield were my favourites, along with older stuff like Verne, Haggard and Henty. Recently my brother noted his teen sons don’t read, so I went to two of the largest book shops in Sydney to see if the ….
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As a kid I read a lot of fiction and most of it was stuff written for boys: historical fiction, adventure novels, stories of journeys, survival and, often, war. This was considered pretty normal fare for a boy back then, and there was plenty of it. Rosemary Sutcliffe, Henry …
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Somehow I’ve run afoul of the mysterious and arbitrary rules of Elon’s X. What have I done? Who knows - I’m not told. How do I appeal? I can’t. What’s going on? I’ll never know. This site is absurd.
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RT @BartEhrman: New blog post - "Did Jesus Exist? Why I Don't Enjoy Reading the Mythicists". #blog #bartehrman #je….
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@alk345498252295 And on the preservation and transmission of these texts see:.
historyforatheists.com
The idea that we only have a fraction of Greek and Roman learning and literature because most of it was destroyed by Christians is a common assumed truism in much New Atheist discourse. But this is...
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@alk345498252295 . thanks to a succession of Christian scholars and scribes, Byzantine and Syriac.
historyforatheists.com
The closing of the Athenian Academy is often portrayed as the end of ancient philosophy. But was it? What really happened?
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The myths keep coming over on that neo-pagan thread, where I am blocked from replying. No, @alk345498252295. Those scholars only stayed in Ctesiphon very briefly and then went back to the Roman Empire where they were not persecuted at all. The reason we have Aristotle etc. is .
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Readers will be unsurprised to learn that, like most of this weird loon's rants, this is all nonsense. As the examples above show. These crazy semi-or-very racist and bigoted neo-pagan fanatics are infesting Elon's cesspool lately. Their "history" is usually cartoonish at best. .
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. the neo-pagan bigot @RealHellenist was not having any of that. So I got this last burst of crazed pseudo history before he . blocked me into silence:
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. was highly respected and taught unmolested by mobs of wicked Christian fanatics. Why? Because she didn't get caught up in the city's notoriously violent street politics. Being a pagan philosopher or even a female pagan philosopher was not the issue with Hypatia. Of course . .
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. This included pagan philosophers like Hierocles, Asclepius of Tralles, Olympiodorus the Younger, Ammonius Hermiae and Hermias: who all worked and taught there in the generation *after* Hypatia. It also included Aedisia - another pagan, *female* philosopher like Hypatia, . .
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Another myth is that Hypatia was the last gasp of pagan philosophy in Alexandria (and the ancient world) and that it ushered in "the dark ages". This too is nonsense. Philosophy flourished there for at least another century and half and included several pagan philosophers. .
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. totally anchronistic. See Watts *Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher*, Oxford, 2017, pp. 17-18, below:
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