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Goodbye Jesus

Blind Faith


KT45

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"You can't use reason all the time sometimes you just have to have faith"

I was told this today. It made me think about how many people in the bible actually had blind faith when it came to the belief in the bible. Most people didn't have flat out blind faith like we are told to have. Usually they expierenced one of the following before believing:

 

Walked with God or deity (disciples walking with Jesus or God walking with Adam)

Saw a supernatural event (Elijah scooped up by fiery chariot, parting sea)

Experienced a miracle themselves (raised the dead)

Saw a healing (make the blind see)

Had a vision (Paul)

 

The funny thing is that even after all of this many still doubted. But anyway I haven't experienced any of these. Do I deserve less than these biblical figures? Does god love them more than me? He lets them experience these but makes me go to hell because he didn't feel like showing these to me?

 

Anyway, how many figures had flat out blind faith? If any, are they the majority or the minority? I'm guessing as far as people in the bible go they are the minority so why are we expected to have faith without any proof when so many in the bible got the proof they needed? I will believe in god when I get the chance to experience everything that either the apostles did or the prophets did. At least let me see a fiery chariot with fiery horse lift someone out of the sky into heaven. At least I couldn't dismiss it as a hallucination because a person would actually be missing. Anyway I still see no reason to have blind faith if major biblical figures didn't have to have it.

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Guest Mr. XC
Anyway, how many figures had flat out blind faith?

Too many of them. If you look at the facts, you discover that Christianity is a ripoff of previous religions. Had they known of the previous religions and their similarity, then this silly religion stuff would be practiced by a minority of people today. The bible even uses references to astrology, such as "Can you bring forth the Mazzaroth (the zodiac) in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? (an astrological constellation)" (Job 38:32) But then the bible tells of how astrology is useless and for whatever reason, Christians think that what is useless is evil, which keeps them from doing their homework and finding pre-bible documents that the bible is based upon. The bible basically descended from a form of sun worship.

 

Great claims deserve great evidence, so here is a start:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=64...th%22&hl=en

It has a long introduction to the video program. The research part of the program begins at 23 minutes 23 seconds. If you want to skip to Crishna, it is at 42 minutes 7 seconds. I posted this in another thread recently. It was original posted in this forum not too long ago in another discussion. If you download the video, it is 427 MB. It is a video not to be missed.

 

Here is a good start for research on Crishna:

http://www.innvista.com/culture/religion/deities/crishna.htm

http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/scriptures/ww...are/crishna.htm

http://www.truthbeknown.com/kcrucified.htm

 

Crishna is one of the easer prior re-tellings of the Jesus story to research.

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http://www.truthbeknown.com/kcrucified.htm

Crishna is one of the easer prior re-tellings of the Jesus story to research.

 

Oh please, as a ex-hindu I can assure you, that there is no similarity between the death of Krishna and Jesus.

 

1)Krishna was not crucified. He was shot in the arrow, unlike Jesus being nailed on a cross.

2)Jesus death had a purpose behind him, whereas Krishna death was because of Jealosy

3)Because of the geographical distance and the lack of interaction at the time of Gospel were written, it is unlikely the Gospel writers heard about Krishna(not Crishna)

4)Hindu theology and philosphy and Greek/Judaic philosphy is too damn different

 

Personally if I was you, I would use Krishna as an example of copy-cat saviour. A better example would be to use Mithra or Dyniousnes, which is the likely source of "inspiration". Research into that.

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http://www.truthbeknown.com/kcrucified.htm

Crishna is one of the easer prior re-tellings of the Jesus story to research.

 

Oh please, as a ex-hindu I can assure you, that there is no similarity between the death of Krishna and Jesus.

 

1)Krishna was not crucified. He was shot in the arrow, unlike Jesus being nailed on a cross.

2)Jesus death had a purpose behind him, whereas Krishna death was because of Jealosy

3)Because of the geographical distance and the lack of interaction at the time of Gospel were written, it is unlikely the Gospel writers heard about Krishna(not Crishna)

4)Hindu theology and philosphy and Greek/Judaic philosphy is too damn different

 

Personally if I was you, I would use Krishna as an example of copy-cat saviour. A better example would be to use Mithra or Dyniousnes, which is the likely source of "inspiration". Research into that.

OK. I will not pretend to know Hindu, but according to the website about Krishna, it is Jacolliot's description (whatever that means) that the death includes a number of arrows, instead of just one, along with the suspension in the tree branches? Or do you understand it as one or a few arrows nowhere in particular?

 

Are there many different interpretations of Hindu or just one? And was Krishna only part of the Hindu faith? A good example is that with Christianity you have the Catholic interpretation and the Gnostic texts, which both point to the same person, but say wildly different things.

 

I am confused about your last sentence about Krishna. In your first one, you say there is no similarity between the death, but in your second to last you say Krishna is a good example of a copy-cat savior? I sometimes forget to put in a negative, so maybe that should have been not to use Krishna as a copy-cat savior. I will look into Mithra and Dyniousnes after work.

 

My goal is to collect a bunch of links that point to websites that contradict Christianity (see More About Me in my profile), but I only want to include properly researched ones. I removed the http://www.truthbeknown.com/kcrucified.htm link since you indicate that it was not properly researched. It is hard for me to research myself when the sources that the website has are mostly books, which seem credible.

 

Thank you for your post.

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i agree, mithra is probably the best go-to "pre-Christian Christianity." Mithra was worshipped as early as 240 BCE in Rome... and originally appeared in the West after Alexander's troops brought it back from their conquests in persia as a military cult.

 

alot of people also insist that Jesus had Buddhist influences, but I think these tendencies (detachment, moderation,etc) were just as evident in Greek stoicism and epicureanism.

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Guest Mr. XC

I am finding that this history is a bit too complex to research in all one night (lots of retellings of the same person, a ton of history, possibly not so reliable websites). I would be lucky to have a good idea of it if I worked on this all weekend.

This is probably the best page that I have found so far:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism

But the section that I am interested in ("Similarities to Christianity") is in disputed status. :mellow:

 

Thanks for the lead. Let me know if you have any other ideas or links to share.

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Guest tigg13

You want a biblical figure who had blind faith?

 

How about the guy who drove Pharoah's chariot into the Red Sea after dancing around a pillar of fire for who knows how long. That had to be one seriously committed dude.

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Anyway, how many figures had flat out blind faith?

Too many of them. If you look at the facts, you discover that Christianity is a ripoff .....

Whoa I just wanted biblical characters that believed without evidence. You know moses, noah etc. The ones that I just mentioned actually conversed with Jesus/God. I want someone IN THE BIBLE who believed for no good reason at all.

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Guest Mr. XC
Anyway, how many figures had flat out blind faith?

Too many of them. If you look at the facts, you discover that Christianity is a ripoff .....

Whoa I just wanted biblical characters that believed without evidence. You know moses, noah etc. The ones that I just mentioned actually conversed with Jesus/God. I want someone IN THE BIBLE who believed for no good reason at all.

Hmm. I tried looking for a list of characters in the bible, and just by skimming those lists (which were not complete), I do not recall anyone who was specifically described as believing without evidence. It is much easer to find people who do not have any evidence listed for believing in God in the bible, but in real life, they may have that evidence and it was not recorded in the bible. It could be argued that any character in the bible could have came across God or Jesus outside of what the bible describes.

 

One story does come to mind. We do not know why Job believed in God to begin with (so this is probably not a good example), but he continued praising God despite going through horrible times which I think would be evidence of choosing the wrong god to worship. The story of Job is kind of odd in that it begins with a story of God talking to Satan. When I read that introduction, I tend to think of "in a land far, far away..." which would be an introduction to some myth or fictional story. My own bible states that the origin of the book of Job is uncertain and that it was likely based on an ancient folktale. In my bible's introduction to the book of Job is similar to the one found here http://www.anova.org/sev/htm/hb/18_job.htm. It was kind of funny; during my attempt to confirm this (the Egyptian imagery from the myths of Horus and Seth), I found http://www.thegodmovie.com/ , which includes interviews with the authors of the Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com. I typically hold the idea that Jesus existed, but was not interpreted correctly because pagan/gentiles and Jewish influences were added to make his words more palatable to those audiences. Fun stuff, this bible.

 

Paul of Tarsus, or Saul/Paul, went from hating Christians to spreading Christianity to the gentiles because he saw a bright light, fell to the ground, heard voices, and was blind for three days. He also did not eat for those three days. I suppose you could call those events evidence, but I think that it is possible that Saul just suffered from stress and illness. Or he or someone lied about the whole thing. Several days later, he starts preaching what has now become Christianity. Anyway, I find it odd that Saul/Paul only needed "several" days to learn and understand Jesus' teachings (from probably at least third hand sources) before he started preaching to other people.

 

OK. I got of track quite a bit. Sorry about that.

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Whoa I just wanted biblical characters that believed without evidence. You know moses, noah etc. The ones that I just mentioned actually conversed with Jesus/God. I want someone IN THE BIBLE who believed for no good reason at all.

 

Umm...Job?

 

Best I can come up with.

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Guest Mr. XC

As an interesting side note, Judaism (not Christianity, of course) says that it is OK to doubt that God exists (almost blind faith), but you must act like He does. So it is OK not to believe in God, but you must follow what you may or may not believe in.

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yeah Job I forgot about him. But I think this shows that if a majority of people got evidence before believing then I should have evidence before I decide to believe.

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Guest Mr. XC
yeah Job I forgot about him. But I think this shows that if a majority of people got evidence before believing then I should have evidence before I decide to believe.
Interesting point. Although they will probably say that the existence of the bible (and if they are illogical, they will say that the bible is true because it says so) is enough evidence for you to believe.

 

I suppose you could say that the above logic (the bible in and of itself is evidence) could apply to other religions, but then you would have to prove that those other religions do not have any contradictions, and that is not fun. I personally think that the logic of "this religion makes sense and does not have any contradictions in its bible" is not enough evidence by itself for a reasonable person to believe, but that is my opinion. People can be very creative when coming up with their own religions. Just refer them to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to see that.

 

The most successful point that I have argued with a Christian about so far was that God telling Moses to kill Israelites who work on the Sabbath is repulsive, and does not belong in any holy book.

 

My research into Mithraism parallels with Christianity seem to reveal that many Christian apologists disagree with many, but not all, of the parallels. I think my current opinion of Christianity borrowing from other religions is best summed up by http://www.thegodmovie.com/faq.php which states:

Does The God Who Wasn't There claim that the Jesus story was plagiarized wholesale from another god's story?

 

No. The Jesus story is the product of many influences, literally over the course of centuries. Like the stories of most other god figures, it has no exact duplicate in a previous time. However, there is no single element of the Jesus story that does not appear in a previous god or hero story. Virgin births, miracle working, blood sacrifices and ascensions to Heaven -- to name just a few -- have a rich history in tales that came long before the Jesus story was developed.

But my opinion is subject to change pending additional research.

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