• bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death,

    To use a more modern example, pretty much everyone agrees that Grigori Rasputin was a real person who played a crucial role in the court of the last Czar of Russia.

    But there are some positively wild and unexplainable stories that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence that they happened. The story about him healing the prince via a phone call sounds like actual magic. However we all know magic isn’t real, there is definitely some kind of logical explanation. But that explanation is lost to time.

    So where do historians land on Rasputin? Well, there was definitely a guy called Rasputin. Some of the stories about him are true. Some are probably false or exaggerated. There isn’t even a consensus on what colour the dude’s eyes were. But that doesn’t mean we dispute his existence.