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Goodbye Jesus

If you are still struggling with leaving xianity


Geezer

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16 hours ago, Robert_Tulip said:

A sermon I gave at my church last Sunday discusses these themes in relation to the river of life as a solar symbol, and is at my blog, rtulip.net

 

Forgive me for asking as I may have this wrong, but based on the quoted line - shouldn't you be listed as a Christian on this site?

 

Perhaps you'd like to do a proper intro in the Introductions thread, tell us a bit about yourself and your beliefs? "Christian atheist" certainly sounds like and interesting story to tell :)

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52 minutes ago, LogicalFallacy said:

 

Forgive me for asking as I may have this wrong, but based on the quoted line - shouldn't you be listed as a Christian on this site?

 

Perhaps you'd like to do a proper intro in the Introductions thread, tell us a bit about yourself and your beliefs? "Christian atheist" certainly sounds like and interesting story to tell :)

Sure, I will put an intro on the intro thread.  I have posted here on invitation from Josh Pantera, with whom I share interests in astrotheology.  The problem I would have with calling myself "Christian" is that I consider that Jesus of Nazareth is entirely fictional, but that recognising the fictional status of the Gospels can be a basis for a new reformation of Christian faith to reconcile with logic and evidence.

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Intro thread 

 

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On 9/28/2017 at 11:59 PM, LogicalFallacy said:

 

Forgive me for asking as I may have this wrong, but based on the quoted line - shouldn't you be listed as a Christian on this site?

 

Perhaps you'd like to do a proper intro in the Introductions thread, tell us a bit about yourself and your beliefs? "Christian atheist" certainly sounds like and interesting story to tell :)

 

You still attend church services as well, don't you LF? 

 

I figured that Robert could bring to the table some interesting perspective to those who are still going between church and who may attend even though they feel that they are now atheists. Robert was also a fellow moderator for DM Murdock when she was alive and had the privilege of meeting with her in central America. To the point of the thread, we have both spent a lot of time having to deconstruct both christianity and many of the claims that have become popular within atheism to allege at christianity. 

 

The main thing is that many of these Jesus parallel claims don't seem to make any sense at first glance. There's no story of Horus, for instance, set to a bible and which everything hangs on. There's diverse myths about Horus from diverse time periods in Egypt and much in the way hybridizing over the years. This is what the old mythicist's like Gerald Massey were drawing from when they first began to make these lists of parallels between Jesus and the other god-men of the near east. And they were explaining to christian audiences and trying to drive home the point that Jesus is in fact very much copied from these older god-men and many of the things which had been traditionally associated with these previous god-men. So these lists started to appear as Horus born of a virgin around Dec 25th, 12 disciples / followers, etc. etc.

 

Much of this information is buried in ancient texts. Massey, for instance, didn't always cite the sources well. What Murdock has done was to go back to the original source material to try and show the validity of these claims which were first made by 18th and 19th century sources, which, over time were wave of hand dismissed by mainly christian theologians and academics who wanted them buried and gone. She took up the cross of trying to justify these claims and further them. And what you find when analyzing the primary source material and what remains of the written historical records, Horus was born anew each morning, every day of the year, not excluding Dec 25th which is the morning after the winter solstice which is important with respect to the annual solar cycle and worthy of celebration in ancient times. He's depicted with 12 helper figures, which are broken into two parts representing the 12 hours of day and the 12 hours of night which the sun journey's through day after day, night after night. These mythic themes, among many others, apparently did find their way to being hybridizing into the Jesus myth. 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Joshpantera said:

 

You still attend church services as well, don't you LF? 

 

Hi Josh

 

No, I left a second time (Kind of like a reverse seconding coming!) back in Feb/March this year. So I'm well and truly out as an atheist.

 

7 hours ago, Joshpantera said:

She took up the cross ...

 

Love the ironic metaphor :D

 

You know I think I may have listened to DM Murdock on youtube... I'll have to see if I can find them again. Did Robert Price and Murdock have a disagreement at one stage that they later patched up?

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On 10/2/2017 at 3:53 PM, LogicalFallacy said:

 

Hi Josh

 

No, I left a second time (Kind of like a reverse seconding coming!) back in Feb/March this year. So I'm well and truly out as an atheist.

 

 

Love the ironic metaphor :D

 

You know I think I may have listened to DM Murdock on youtube... I'll have to see if I can find them again. Did Robert Price and Murdock have a disagreement at one stage that they later patched up?

 

Yeah, it was weird. He changed his mind along the way and they became friendly. 

 

Carrier wound up defending Murdock against Ehrman's baseless critique in his book, "Did Jesus Exist?" It just goes to show how poorly many scholars understand any of this. Ehrman thought he'd found some low hanging fruit with her piece on the statue of a penis nosed cock, which seemed silly so he went for it: http://vridar.org/2012/04/20/richard-carriers-on-bart-ehrmans-did-jesus-exist/

 

That's an entertaining example of how many scholars won't even look into this stuff for themselves to see what is and isn't there. Ehrman would be surprised at how much is there in the historical records if he simply bothered to check it out for himself. 

 

 

 

 

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11 hours ago, SeaJay said:

Some of it is a bit of a stretch though. Can't remember the details but there's one god-man figure they say was born of a virgin. But they born from a rock, or something. So sure, there was no motherly intervention but calling it a virgin birth is stretching it. 

 

As for any similarities, they can be accounted for due to the fact that there's only so many original ideas the human mind can come up with. There are bound to be similarities between Jesus' life and Horus, Mithras etc. 

 

For example, if I were to create a god-man, what powers would I give them?

 

1. Ability to heal

2. Immortal

3. Bring the dead back to life

4. Reward followers with eternal life

 

Yes, how many original ideas can the human mind come up with? 

 

That's just it, we're looking at constructs of the human mind, Jesus not withstanding...

 

As for virgin births, here is some relevant reading material: 

 

http://freethoughtnation.com/isis-is-a-virgin-mother/

 

PROOF THAT ISIS WAS A VIRGIN MOTHER, FROM PRIMARY SOURCES AND THE WORKS OF HIGHLY CREDENTIALED AUTHORITIES

The virginity of Horus’s mother, Isis, has been disputed, because in one myth she is portrayed as impregnating herself with Osiris’s severed phallus. In depictions of Isis’s impregnation, the goddess conceives Horus “while she fluttered in the form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead husband.”  In an image from the tomb of Ramesses VI, Horus is born out of Osiris’s corpse without Isis even being in the picture. In another tradition, Horus is conceived when the water of the Nile—identified as Osiris—overflows the river’s banks, which are equated with Isis. The “phallus” in this latter case is the “sharp star Sothis” or Sirius, the rising of which signaled the Nile flood.  Hence, in discussing these myths we are not dealing with “real people” who have body parts.

isis flutters as a bird above osiris conceiving horus
‘Osiris…begetting a son by Isis, who hovers over him in the form of a hawk.’
(Budge, On the Future Life: Egyptian Religion, 80)

 

As we can see, despite her manner of impregnation Isis is clearly a virgin mother, considered as such beginning many centuries before the common era and continuing well into it.

For much more on this subject, see Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection, pp. 120-197. See also this forum post with the image from the temple of Seti I showing the hieroglyphs calling Isis a “virgin.”

Isis is the Great Virgin

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14 hours ago, Joshpantera said:

Jesus is in fact very much copied from these older god-men

Hi Josh, I just wanted to pick out this this single point from your comment, to reflect on the complexity of understanding the evolution of early Christianity.  Your term "copied" here is open to misunderstanding about what the most likely relationship was between Christianity and its precursors.

 

There are many similarities between Jesus Christ and other dying and rising saviours, which essentially reflect the psychological functions of religion. I summarise these functions in paraphrasing Campbell as reverence, reason, ritual and role.  Reverence for the awesome powers that control life provides the basis for a rational effort at explanation, in the form of myth, and is then reinforced in social rituals of worship and prayer which explain the identity and role of the individual in the community.  Precursor religions to Christianity developed myths of rising and dying saviours in order to represent the sun, which rises and dies each day and year, providing the light and life for the world, themes which also found their way into the gospels.  A scientific evolutionary understanding of this religious functionality can begin from a recognition that the sun is the source of stability, durability and fecundity, the three primary virtues Dawkins found in genetics.  

 

What then happened, as religion evolved, was that each successive culture sought to explain myth in a way that resonated with its social needs, and so the stories evolved to adapt to changing social situations.  It is important here to note, and this is why I focus in on this comment about copying, that the process of religious evolution occurs in a largely unconscious way, based more on feeling, with reason having a secondary function.  That means that rather than any explicit and deliberate copying of Horus and other older sun gods by the founders of the Jesus Concept,  the larger force at work was more like genetic evolution, in a memetic cultural evolution of ideas.  To provide an example of how evolution works, a person does not copy their grandparents in everything they do, but does have many similarities to them, arising both from the direct causal effects of genetic natural evolution and from the memetic nurtural evolution of how parents shared and transmitted the values and beliefs they had learned as children.  

 

The story of Jesus Christ evolved from earlier sun gods, but the process was far from a calculated and deliberate rational copying.  Rather, on the evolutionary model, some ideas worked and some didn't, and the evolution of society proceeded by cumulative adaptation building on successful precedents.  With Horus, his role as a sun god meant that he naturally stood in a one to twelve relationship, as the solar year stands in relation to the lunar month.  Most of the beliefs about such matters are lost, but can be to some extent reconstructed by asking what is the most plausible logical path of cultural evolution. 

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On 10/2/2017 at 11:01 PM, Robert_Tulip said:

  It is important here to note, and this is why I focus in on this comment about copying, that the process of religious evolution occurs in a largely unconscious way, based more on feeling, with reason having a secondary function.  That means that rather than any explicit and deliberate copying of Horus and other older sun gods by the founders of the Jesus Concept,  the larger force at work was more like genetic evolution, in a memetic cultural evolution of ideas.  To provide an example of how evolution works, a person does not copy their grandparents in everything they do, but does have many similarities to them, arising both from the direct causal effects of genetic natural evolution and from the memetic nurtural evolution of how parents shared and transmitted the values and beliefs they had learned as children.  

 

In the case of Jesus there's very deliberate, conscious, and willful copying of known mythological themes from the near east towards the aim of presenting something that people will respond to. It's a very consciously designed savior figure, set up towards the aims of proselytizing converts. It's evolution, in that sense, was one of consciously adding more and more to the myth as it rolled along. I don't think anyone could get the wrong idea about Jesus by suggesting that he's a copy of the god-men that came before him. 

 

The points that were deliberately copied, such as the example above about the virgin birth motif, carry meaning. And some one had to sit down and decide to add that meaning to the story, because it wasn't there from the outset. They had to recognize a need to add the virgin birth motif, probably simply to add more dimension to a solar allegory which hadn't yet had the virgin birth motif attached to it. That or simply the desire to give Jesus a virgin birth like Kings were thought to have had in the pagan world. In any event, it wasn't Jewish. It came from someone wanting the story to appeal to a certain audience in a specific way. So Matthew had to search out something that looked like it could be postulated as a prophecy of his virgin birth which brought him to quote mine / midrash Isaiah completely out of it's original context. And then insist that Jews ought to buy it, when it wasn't Jewish at all and Isaiah didn't prophecy anything of the sort. 

 

The above is an example of my astronomer priests manipulating their way consciously through religious creation, perspective. You can pretty much reverse engineer what likely went into the thought processes involved in creating these myths from previously existing motifs. It evolved, but very consciously towards particular aims. And they were not using anything all that original, they were copying pre-existing motifs. That shouldn't be a dirty word, I don't think. It plainly describes what myth makers were doing as they set out to write various, and conflicting Jesus stories. 

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On 18/10/2017 at 2:47 PM, Joshpantera said:

In the case of Jesus there's very deliberate, conscious, and willful copying of known mythological themes from the near east towards the aim of presenting something that people will respond to. It's a very consciously designed savior figure, set up towards the aims of proselytizing converts. It's evolution, in that sense, was one of consciously adding more and more to the myth as it rolled along. I don't think anyone could get the wrong idea about Jesus by suggesting that he's a copy of the god-men that came before him. 

Analysing the Christian copying of myth opens difficult problems.  Acharya cites Gerald Massey on the extensive parallels between the Gospels and Egyptian myth, and most of this analysis is plausible.  However, the process of transmission is often unclear.  In studying Christian origins, an analogy I like to use is to consider a field of grass where a forest once stood.  Seeing the field with no trees, it is hard to imagine the previous situation.  The ancient world was far richer in its cultural traditions and diversity, like an ancient forest, than we can easily see from the rather barren uniformity imposed by the Roman conquests, which famously ‘made a desert and called it peace’. This imperial desert was as much cultural as physical, limiting the ability of different cultures to interact independently, after Rome imposed its hub and spoke trade system.

A comparison is with blues music, with the songs that all use the same twelve bar chord pattern.  If we imagine a future where somehow the only blues songs surviving from last century were Crossroads by Robert Johnson and The House is a Rockin by Stevie Ray Vaughan, separated by five decades or so, we could infer that the same chord pattern meant Stevie deliberately copied the song.  But the reality is that there is a complex genre of music linking them together.  The connection between the Gospels and Egyptian myth looks somewhat comparable.

I find it compelling, for example, that Lazarus is a copy of Osiris, due to the extensive points of similarity between the myths.  This is a good example of deliberate use of an old myth, to enable Osiris to persist into the new age under a different name, recognising that the old myths were subject to various types of suppression.

And with Horus, the temptation of Christ in the wilderness uses the template of the war between Horus and Set.  However, when this parallel gets simplified, as occurred in the Zeitgeist movie, some of the comparisons are strained. When mythicists engage in polemics against faith, the simplified copying story can itself turn into a new myth, saying that the Gospels are just a rehash of older stories. Like the blues, it is as much possible that themes in the Christ Myth were part of broad cultural genres whose details would have been apparent to people at the time but have now largely been lost. I am not saying there was no copying, more that the actual process is much more complex. 

On 18/10/2017 at 2:47 PM, Joshpantera said:

It's a very consciously designed savior figure, set up towards the aims of proselytizing converts. It's evolution, in that sense, was one of consciously adding more and more to the myth as it rolled along. I don't think anyone could get the wrong idea about Jesus by suggesting that he's a copy of the god-men that came before him. 

The evolution included mutation, with significant change in content as well as the continuity seen in adding new elements.  The copying model is just part of a complete view, since there were major innovations in the construction of the Christ Myth as it reused older memes.  The key change seems to be the placement of Jesus in history, with the whole Pilate story, which I think was used to time the Jesus story in order to match the observed shift of ages by precession.  For Mark to claim all these mythological events in the Gospels actually occurred in a specific historical place and time, recent enough to be known but long enough ago from the time of writing that no one could easily disprove the popular myth, was a decisive mutation from the earlier mythological frameworks.

 

On 18/10/2017 at 2:47 PM, Joshpantera said:

The points that were deliberately copied, such as the example above about the virgin birth motif, carry meaning. And some one had to sit down and decide to add that meaning to the story, because it wasn't there from the outset. They had to recognize a need to add the virgin birth motif, probably simply to add more dimension to a solar allegory which hadn't yet had the virgin birth motif attached to it. That or simply the desire to give Jesus a virgin birth like Kings were thought to have had in the pagan world.

Using the word ‘simply’ in this way can over-simplify the meaning of myths.  The meme of virgin birth brings together the continuity of Mary with Isis and other goddesses, the cyclic solar model of a new start to each day and year with Christ as metaphor for dawn and spring, the popular moral combination of chastity and fecundity, the sense of the miraculous, the messianic purity ideal, prophecy, the comparison with kings like Alexander who had such myths told about them, and probably other factors too.  Each of these points would have differing popular and priestly resonance, continuing today with divergent views on Mary.  The big variance between the synoptics on the birth stories illustrates the complexity. 

 

On 18/10/2017 at 2:47 PM, Joshpantera said:

In any event, it wasn't Jewish. It came from someone wanting the story to appeal to a certain audience in a specific way. So Matthew had to search out something that looked like it could be postulated as a prophecy of his virgin birth which brought him to quote mine / midrash Isaiah completely out of it's original context. And then insist that Jews ought to buy it, when it wasn't Jewish at all and Isaiah didn't prophecy anything of the sort. 

Again I fear that is too simple and even perhaps radical as a rejection of how dogma used the prophecy myth of the young girl giving birth to the messiah.  Isaiah is an important part of the mix.

On 18/10/2017 at 2:47 PM, Joshpantera said:

The above is an example of my astronomer priests manipulating their way consciously through religious creation, perspective. You can pretty much reverse engineer what likely went into the thought processes involved in creating these myths from previously existing motifs. It evolved, but very consciously towards particular aims. And they were not using anything all that original, they were copying pre-existing motifs. That shouldn't be a dirty word, I don't think. It plainly describes what myth makers were doing as they set out to write various, and conflicting Jesus stories. 

Constructing myths is iterative.  That means the subsequent versions of Mark’s Gospel, in Luke and Matthew, reflect and incorporate popular and mystery school reaction to Mark’s initial version, adding in birth stories.  The overall development of a story that would achieve mass appeal is a bit like popular song, where no one knows what will become a hit.  To claim the copying is all conscious seems to neglect how memes can exist in culture without their origins being fully understood by people who use them.  Similarities can be unconscious and accidental, reflecting broad genres of belief and culture as much as calculated planning.

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15 hours ago, Robert_Tulip said:

A comparison is with blues music, with the songs that all use the same twelve bar chord pattern.  If we imagine a future where somehow the only blues songs surviving from last century were Crossroads by Robert Johnson and The House is a Rockin by Stevie Ray Vaughan, separated by five decades or so, we could infer that the same chord pattern meant Stevie deliberately copied the song.  But the reality is that there is a complex genre of music linking them together.  The connection between the Gospels and Egyptian myth looks somewhat comparable.

 

As a blues and Jazz musician I get the parallel. 

 

 

 

 

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