The Gospel According To Jack The Ripper [Part 5 of 5]

This entry isn’t about the Ripper per se but uses him to make a point about history, culture, and theology. 

Ripperologists uninterested in those things are welcome to skip this part.

I used the term “presupposition” a lot in this entry.  It’s kind of akin to bias or preconception, perhaps more closely to stipulated evidence in a court case (i.e., both sides agree to certain basic facts to avoid having to hash them out in trial).

In the case of the Ripper murders, the presupposition was that the Stride and Kelly murders must have been committed by the same person who murdered Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes.

As pointed out, geography is the only thing linking Stride to the other murders, there’s no evidence of the modus operandi in the other three killings.

And Kelly’s murder occurred indoors and over a longer period of time that the three verifiable killings; the police appear to have simply assumed the killer always intended to do that much damage but never had the chance earlier.

That doesn’t ring true.  All the victims were sex workers, it would not take much to lure them into a private area to kill them and mutilate them at leisure.

Because of these presuppositions, most Ripperologists hold the killer attacked at least those five women, perhaps more.

But superficial similarities do not a case prove.

We find similar cases in history and theology.  We assume certain things to be accurate accounts, but as the famous drag queen J. Edgar Hoover once observed, “When you assume you make an ass out of u and me.”

Among far too many Christians there is a presupposition that the Bible is univocal, that everything comes straight from God through various prophets and scribes.

There ///can’t/// be any errors or contradictions in the Bible because the Bible itself says it’s complete and without error.

So despite overwhelming evidence of contradictions and variant versions of events, many people twist themselves into knots to prove all those things actually did happen as interpreted.

The Ripper case -- occurring in an era and culture far closer to ours than that of first century Galilee -- is rife with mistakes / misinformation / and just plain mischief. 

Despite widespread reportage, the public soon became bombarded with a dazzling array of “facts”, some true, some exaggerated, some completely bogus.

We can look at the Ripper case and deduce something happened in 1888, probably involving a single murderer plus an uncertain number of victims. 

Unlike first century Judea, the overwhelming majority of London citizens were literate.  Newspapers were readily available.  The basic facts of the cases were public knowledge.

But each report came shaded with the presuppositions of that particular publication.  Eager to make sure people read ///their/// story, many newspapers and reporters published speculation as fact or overemphasized certain details, making the stories seem even more lurid.

And this all happened in a relative short period of time, followed by years of serious -- and not so serious -- research into the case.

The result -- at least in popular culture -- is a complete hash of facts.  What most people “know” of the Ripper case comes to them through movies and television, not from study of the actual facts.

The same can be said of most contemporary Christians.  Their “Bible” is The Passion Of The Christ, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and God help us, Veggie Tales.

None of those were made with malicious agendas, but they were all made with agendas, just as the four gospels of the New Testament and literally dozens of rejected texts were all written with agendas.

Agendas are the product of presuppositions, and to pretend they don’t exist and that they don’t shade our interpretation of the facts leaves us vulnerable to believing erroneous claptrap.

In the case of Ripperologists, such claptrap is harmless; the events happened almost a century and a half ago, there is no one left to hold accountable.

But in the case of Christianity (and to be fair, all religions face this problem, I’m spotlighting Christianity only because it’s my religion and I know something about it), the claptrap manifests itself in supposedly divine / actually human doctrines that espouse child abuse, greed, bigotry, and selfishness, all the while protect the users and abusers from  accountability.

We need to look closer at things.

They are almost never what we think.

And they even certainly never what we’re told they are.

© Buzz Dixon