Spider where do you get your information from? I suspect you either ignore the facts or choose not to acknowledge them. If you would like to point out what i've said wasn't true i would love to see it. My major was theology and i base my information on what has been found. There have been 21 Christ like saviors all with similar stories chock full of virgin births, promise of salvation, death, resurrection, and ascending to heaven. If you choose to believe that the story of Jesus is original, than you're clearly misinformed.

Sounds fascinating. Can you tell me some of those beliefs with the virgin births and resurrections? Death is kind of normal, so I'm not sure why it has any significance. Ascending to heaven is also kind of normal for a god to do, so I'm not sure why you assign it any significance.

The mere fact that Jesus supposedly required a physical body in order to be "resurrected" and then his entire physical body ascended to heaven should be a huge Red Flag right there.

When the body dies the body is supposed to return to dust and only the spirit is transported off to the spirit world. The physical body is supposed to not be important in this religion.

What would Jesus have needed a physical body for? Why would have have had to have been "physically" raised from a grave? In theory he should have returned as a mere "spirit" his earthly body no longer being important.

Matthew has the earth quaking and a multitude of saints raising from opened graves as well, at the time of Jesus' resurrection. All of them walking around like zombies using their previous physical bodies. I suppose they all ascended to heaven too?

Yet this is supposed to be a religion based on an idea that we have spiritual souls, not about resurrecting physical bodies and maintaining their physical form! The physical body is not supposed to be important. How are the spirits and souls of people who have been cremated going to be "resurrected".

The very fact that these fables contain these kinds of outrageous and stories that are totally inconsistent with the main spiritual theme of the religion is just further proof that they are indeed just superstitious fables and rumors. Rumors that weren't even very well thought out at all.

Those who are resurrected will be resurrected into the bodies they had in life. Jesus told those who asked that he work a miracle to prove his claims "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The fact that Jesus was resurrected into the same body also assured his followers who doubted that he was really Jesus resurrected.

But I'm going to say this again: It's logical to question the existence of God, but it's illogical to question if God could do something or even would have done something. Unless there are some scriptures you would like to share that state that the resurrection is purely spiritual, then your objections and arguments are without merit.

You can say whatever you like, that doesn't give it merit.

The whole religion is supposed to be about spirituality. It's not supposed to be about resurrecting zombies.

That very notion implies that a physical body would be important to the process.

And of course it's logical to question whether or not a God would do something like that. Why would an all-intelligent God go out of his way to make his own story absurd?

What could possibly the be the motivation behind that? To try to get reasonable people to reject it as nothing more than stupid superstitious myths?

What would be the point to that?

That's a valid question when asking whether or not a specific mythology makes sense. If the God in the fables is doing utterly stupid things that don't fit in with the overall story then of course it's reasonable and logical to dismiss the stories as being utterly absurd.

Maybe the physical body is important to the process. You seem to think that you know everything that God is thinking and exactly what God is trying to achieve.

Part of your identity is how you look. Do you think your spirit is a transparent version of you? Let's assume our spirits have an appearance, could it be the same appearance as yours? It seems unlikely that a spirit can grow warts, gain weight or get a broken nose. Maybe the spirit is resurrected into the body simply so that those who knew you in life would recognize you in death.

Now you're the one who's trying to limit what God can do by requiring that God needs certain things to be in place in order for his processes to work.

I'm saying that it doesn't fit in with the overall thesis of the idea behind spirit and reeks of superstitious mythology to me.



Yes I do. I believe that if spirit exists it's totally non-physical.



I see no reason to assume that.


It seems unlikely that a spirit can grow warts, gain weight or get a broken nose. Maybe the spirit is resurrected into the body simply so that those who knew you in life would recognize you in death.


Nice theory but it seems like your just grabbing at straws to try to keep a mythology afloat that has already sunk to the bottom of the ocean of absurdity.

Also, if God truly wanted mankind to know of this miracle why not have Jesus march right back into town and confront the very same mob that crucified him?

Instead he supposedly only shows himself to a couple people and we hear all of that though hearsay rumors.

Add to this that Matthew claims that a multitude of saints were also resurrected at the same time and went into the holy city and showed themselves to the people there. Yet nary a single solitary account of this shows up in normal historical or anywhere outside of these few highly-questionable biblical stories. Not even as myths!

Nothing. Zip. Zilch!

Evidently no one saw these saints or if they did they were told to keep their mouths shut.

But what would be the point to that?

What would be the point to having a multitude of zombie saints go into the holy city to show themselves to the people there only to tell those people not to tell anyone about the event?

That makes no sense at all, IMHO. Plus, any all-wise God would necessarily have to be smart enough to know that this would come back to bite him in his own butt if he's trying to get people to believe in these stories in the first place.

Why create stories that are absurdly impossible to believe and then demand that everyone must believe in them or DIE!

That in and of itself makes no sense and only implies that if the God were indeed somehow real he would be an extremely deceitful God who's purposely trying to screw with people's heads.

Isn't it better to just recognize that these fables are nothing more than man-made myths, rather than trying to support an idea that God is a raving lunatic who likes to jerk people around with utterly absurd stories and then demand that they must believe in them OR ELSE face HIS WRATH!

What kind of a God would that even be?

i was told today some of these saints are still roaming the earth today. How idiotic is that? to answer the question, a simple search of 21 saviors will give you ample results or may i suggest the book, Christianity before christ. Let me add that a majority of these stories are based on Astrology.

There is a difference between the Paganised version of Christianity created by the Romans and what is truly Christianity.

I suggest one looks into the early Christians and learns how to discern what is manmade propaganda and what isn't...

You made the claim, you have to offer proof. That's how these things work.

There are dozens of demigod myths very similar to the story of Jesus. Trying to argue that precise details don't fit and this somehow "saves" the myth of Jesus as somehow being "unique and therefore authentic" is absurd. You can rest assured that the same thing could be done for all the other demigod myths. They all differ in the nitty gritty details.

But the over all story is the same. A half-god half-moral male is born from a human woman who was somehow impregnated by a God. The precise details of the insemination process are moot. In fact, you'd expect those kinds of details to change from fable to fable because they are indeed totally irrelevant to the theme. The theme that is trying to be established is that the deity in question is somehow divine.

More to the point there's a very good chance that almost all such fables were indeed inspired by genuine people. In other words there probably was an actual human being who lived that inspired each of these myths. Although, once started they are easily copied and re-created.

The bottom line for me is that Jesus didn't teach anything new. On the contrary everything he taught in terms of moral values and the human condition comes straight out of the Eastern Mystical views and parallel the teachings of Buddhism at that time in history.

Seems awfully strange to me that the biblical God would send his son to earth to teach against his previous moral values and instead teach what the Buddhists had already known for centuries. In fact, Buddhism wasn't the first to come up with the moral precepts it teaches either.

So the things Jesus taught go way back in history. Long before he was ever born. How can this not seem strange to a Christian?

That Christ-like values were actually embraced my mankind long before God supposedly sent his son to teach these NEW SET of moral values?

How strange that mere mortal men were already trying to live by those moral standards way back when this same biblical God supposedly wanted them to behave entirely differently!

As far as I'm concerned the proof that the Jesus could not have been the son of the Biblical God as the Christians (i.e. the authors of the New Testament claim) is already well-established in the teachings of Eastern Mysticism. They beat Jesus to the punch in terms of setting up the moral values that he taught.

Excluding the teachings of Paul, of course, which is really nothing more than the ramblings of a writer who was using the fables of Jesus as an excuse to dredge up a lot of crap from the Old Testament in Jesus' name. Crap that doesn't even fit in with the moral values that Jesus actually taught!

Even the gospels themselves acknowledge that Pontius Pilate exonerated Jesus from charges of blaspheme. Clearly even Pontius Pilate understood that Jesus was just standing for a mystical view of life and never claimed to be the son of the God of Abraham.

So even according to the gospels it was just a rowdy mob who had Jesus crucified for blaspheme. And they were no doubt egged-on by angry Pharisees who were fed-up with Jesus publicly ranting about them being hypocrites.

Jesus offered nothing new to the world. And he most certainly couldn't have been bringing "New Laws" and expectations of behavior from God to mankind, because we can clearly see that the same moral values that Jesus spoke of had been around for centuries before that, thus implying the humans would have beaten God to the punch.

So just one more of a myriad of never-ending reasons why these fables cannot be true as written by the Christians (the only TRUE Christians who ever lived were indeed the authors of these rumors) Everyone else is a mere "follower" and supporter of these original fables.

Dozens you say? Well, it should be easy for one of you list a few of these ancient religions from which the story of Jesus was copied.



So you can judge (Without even hearing the arguments) that any argument, against the proposition that the story of Jesus is just a retelling of another story, is completely without merit? A forum is where people discuss their opinions or beliefs and sometimes debate with other posters in the forum. A blog is where you post your opinions and beliefs without anyone replying. What you want is a blog, not a forum.

I'm not going to walk you to kindergarten, hold your hand, and give you lunch money. Learning human history is up to you.

http://www.pocm.info/index.html

And besides, I'm not even concerned with these kinds of truly petty arguments.

I've already observed far better reasons why the biblical myths can't be true.

1. The story of Adam and Eve is logically flawed and contradicts iself.

2. The idea that mankind's fall from grace could be responsible for bringing death and disease into an otherwise "perfect creation" is totally unreasonable.

3. It's crystal clear that animals were designed to kill and eat each other. And we also know that they were doing these dastardly deeds long before mankind ever showed up on the planet.

4. A god who knows that it's the ONLY creator of reality doesn't profess to be jealous of other "Gods" and command people not to put other Gods before him. All he would need to say is that he is the only God and that there are no other gods.

So the Ten Commandments themselves are proof positive that these fables were written by men who were trying to create a religion based on a jealous God.

5. The biblical stories of the Canaanites and Egyptians go even further to prove the case. Both of these cultures are accused by the writers of Hebrew folklore to have refused to worship God, yet both of the cultures were clearly highly religious cultures, even in some cases supposedly sacrificing their own babies to the Gods. Gods that they supposedly refused to obey.

6. The Biblical fables claim that God is unchanging, yet these same fables have this God dealing with making at one point in time by drowning out all sinners, and then at another point he's offering to sacrifice his own son to save the sinners.

7. These Biblical fables claim that all sin is equal, and that no mortal men are without sin. Yet Noah and his family weren't flushed away when God supposedly rid the world of "sinners". Yet another blatant contradiction.

8. Jesus didn't even agree with the moral values of Torah. Even the Gospels have Jesus himself referring to the Torah as "Your Laws" when speaking to the Pharisees, not as "God's Laws". Yet another contradiction/

9. Jesus supposedly claimed that he did not come to change the laws, and the laws would not change one jot nor one tittle till heaven and earth pass. Yet the idea is that Jesus was supposedly bringing a new covenant of laws?

Do I even need to suggest the contradictions in that?

10. Ironically the moral values and behaviors that Jesus actually supposedly taught are in perfect harmony and agreement with the moral and behavioral values that had already been taught by Eastern Mystics centuries before Jesus ever lived.

If Jesus was God why would Jesus be totally out of sync with the teachings of the Torah and in perfect harmony with the teachings of the Eastern Mystics?

Or to put that yet another way, Why would the Eastern Mystics know ahead of time what God had in mind long before he sent his only begotten son to bring to mankind his "New Covenant of moral conduct"?

11. If some truly all-wise and all-knowing God truly wanted to communicate with mankind as a whole, why speak only to an insignificant crowd of nobodies saying, "This is my son in whom I'm well pleased". A crowd who never recording the event in any historical way outside of the biblical myths?

That would have just been wasted breath. He should have spoke out when his son was being accused of Blaspheme so that the people could see that they were wrong.

12. Who's idea was it in the first place to direct men to kill heathens and blasphemers?

Could any God truly blame men for actually OBEYING his very own directives?

IMHO, there's nothing to "disprove". The whole mythology clearly has no more merit than Greek Mythology.

The only reason we're even talking about it is because the Christians refuse to stop trying to PUSH their beliefs onto others.

You might claim that this isn't true, but it's impossible to start a thread in the "General Religion Forums" that speaks to any spiritual or religious ideas with the Christians coming in and arguing that "Jesus is the Only Way", and that "Only the Christian Bible is the True Word of God". Etc, etc, etc.

And then when people try to explain why they don't believe this utter nonsense, the Christians start screaming "Foul! You're bashing our religion", or "If you think the bible is FALSE you need to PROVE IT!", which is even more hilarious!

You talk about placing unsupportable beliefs in personal blogs. Well if that's the case then Christians should never speak beyond a personal blog.

It's a totally faith-based religion that cannot be proven to be true.

On the contrary, as far as I'm concerned, I've shown how the mythology itself has actually proven itself to be false. Add to that the historical evidence against it: (i.e. death, disease and imperfections clearly existed in the world before the arrival of mankind, and the fact that the Eastern Mystics were teaching moral values that far more closely match the moral values of the teachings attributed to Jesus than the Torah ever did) And there's nothing left to consider.

The biblical fables, and the rumors of the New Testament simply don't hold water against reality.

There are countless sane and rational reasons to recognize and acknowledge that the Biblical stories as nothing more than superstitious rumors and fables.

Add to this that those very fables claim that to not believe in them equates to refusal to obey God and they've nailed the proof home!

You can't have stories that are so absurd that it's completely sane and reasonable to dismiss them as nothing more than the mere superstitious imagination of men, and then expect people to believe that some God will condemn them for nothing more than not believing in these stupid stories?

That, in and of itself, is an insane notion, IMHO.

I'm sorry if this may sound blunt, but gee whiz, it's just the TRUTH!

I agree with Abracadabra..
Any discussion of letting non-Christians do and say what they want, brings on a barrage of "stop persecuting Christians, stop disrespecting Christians, why are you waging a war against Christianity" ...etc, etc....

Like Proposition 8 in California, Mormons (in Utah) spent several million dollars fighting it because... to allow gay marriage would infringe upon the Mormon's religious freedom to hate gays and not allow gay marriage.... How screwed up is this logic !!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had posted the following somewhere on this site before, but I believe it is relevant to Abracadabra's last post...
One of the strongest arguments for Christianity and the Jesus story is that it cannot be proven to be untrue. We are 2000 years later without videos, pictures etc to prove the biblical version of Jesus is false.....
Kinda like flying elephants....
I have seen many live elephants in my 54 years, many pics, etc...and I have never seen an elephant fly. There are cartoons and drawings of flying elephants (dumbo, etc..) so some might think they are based upon truth... and some would argue, since I have not traveled the globe and looked at every elephant, the elephants I have never seen could have a few among them that can fly.

But based upon logic, reason, science and common sense I know elephants don't fly. Kinda like God wasn't mad at people for eating an apple after listening to a talking snake... then inseminating a woman to have a god/son to suffer and die for us. I wasn't there 2000 years ago, but this story is beyond bizarre.....It would be easier to buy into worshiping flying elephants !!!

This is too funny coming from the same person who argued against my use and definition of Paganism.

So it looks like you are finally agreeing with me, now all you have to do is go back over 3 years of posts and change "Christianity" to "Paganism".

I don't see where there's a problem. The people on this web site are using the term "pagan" in the "Christian" sense of the word (i.e. to refer to any religion that doesn't support or acknowledge Christianity)

I've always acknowledged that Christians use the term "Pagan" in that way. No surprise there.

Where I had a disagreement with you was that you were attempting to claim the Roman Catholicism is a "Pagan" religion.

I'm sure that I would still disagree with how you personally use the term "Pagan". Catholicism fully acknowledges Jesus as "The Christ" and also recognizes the God of Abraham. Because of this it cannot be dismissed as a "Pagan" religion when attempting to use the term "Pagan" to mean any religion that doesn't worship the God of Abraham.

Catholics are definitely Christians and always have been!

So I will always be in disagreement with your charge that Roman Catholics are Pagans.

This is a reminder to keep the debate civil and not insulting.

Thanks,

Kim

You can disagree with me all you want.
It was you who posted the link to POCM which contains this:

From: http://www.pocm.info/getting_started_pocm.html
"Christianity is a product of it's time and place. Christianity is an ancient Pagan religion."

Like I've said before... You cannot mix red and blue and still have red. Same as you cannot mix Christianity and Paganism and still have Christianity...

This really is a simple concept, why is it even being debated?

Peter,

I'm not even sure what you are attempting to "debate". Other than some sort of semantics idealism over a specific work (i.e. the term "Pagan").

I've told you many times in the past that I don't even use the term myself. And one reason I don't use it is because it does indeed have so many different meanings to different people. Thus rendering it rather useless.

You are the one who seems to become extremely passionate over the use of this particular word.

~~~~

Just to refresh my position on the word I'll explain how I see it from a purely linguistic point of view.

To begin with, to the best of my knowledge it's a generic term to start with. There is no specific religion that I am aware of that is entitled "Paganism".

On a personal perspective, I have learned that the term orginally meant "Worshipers of Nature", or "Worshipers of the Land", or something along those lines. People who view Nature as God, or see God in Nature. People who worship "Mother Earth" as a living entity.

That was my original understanding of what "Pagan" means. Since Pantheism is a believe that "All is God" (i.e. all of nature is God), then all Pantheists, would also be Pagans. But not all Pagans would necessarily be Pantheists.

In any case, the Christians have traditional used this term to simply mean anyone who worships a "God or Gods" other than the God of Abraham. In other words, if your not a Jew, Muslim or Christian, (or atheist), then you must be a "Pagan", because this is what they have come to define the term to mean.

An atheist would not be a "Pagan" because an atheist doesn't believe in any kind of God at all. In theory a person needs to be worshiping something in order to be called a "Pagan".

~~~

When I speak with Christians I assume that when they use the term "Pagan" they are using it to refer to any religion that does not recognize and worship the "God of Abraham". Period. It's a cut-and-dried word in that since with a very distinct and simple definition.

When I speak with someone who considers themselves to be a "Pagan" I realize that they use the term to mean something different. Precisely what they mean by it may vary. But I have found that most people who claim to be "Pagans" are typically in agreement that spirit is in everything. So ultimately they either worship nature as God, or they worship God as the spirit that is in everything. Something along those lines.

~~~~

Now in the case of this website, it appears that they are indeed using the term "Pagan" in the Abrahamic sense. They are agreeing that the term "Pagan" means - (to worship something other than the God of Abraham)

What they are trying to make a case for, is that the story of Jesus evolved from "non-Abrahamic myths". So, in that sense, their claim that Christianity is actually a "Pagan" religion is true. Because it's their claim that the myths of Jesus did not come from the Abrahamic religion, but instead arose from non-Abrahamic stories and was incorporated into the Abrahamic picture of God.

So they are not using the term incorrectly. They are simply using it to mean, "non-Abrahamic", which is ONE of the many valid definitions of the word. In fact, this is the preferred definition by Christians. So it's appropriate that they use it the way they did within the context of their presentation.

~~~~

In the meantime Peter, you are the one who seems to have some sort of fascination with this term.

Like I say, I seldom if ever use the term myself. In fact, the only time I ever use it is when speaking with someone else who happens to bring the term up. They I try to figure out which definition they are most likely using it to mean.

Like I say, Christians versus people who consider themselves to be "Pagans" use the term "Pagan" to mean entirely different things.

To a Christian the term simply means - "To believe in a God other than that God of Abraham".

To a so-called "Pagan" the term usually, but not always, means - "God and Nature are One"

Although, like I say, the Christians no doubt viewed the Greeks as "Pagans" when in reality the Greeks did not worship Nature as God. The Greeks clearly had a male-personified view of God in Zeus much like the Christians had a male-personified view of God in Yahweh.

~~~

Just to elaborate a tad bit further, the original Hebrews did not always view God as a a male-persona. On the contrary, even the biblical contain descriptions of God as an unknowable omnipresent spirit and various things like.

Many of the original Hebrews would not even speak the "name" of God, in fact it was forbidden to do so. I think many Jews even today speak God out as G-d, because this is a leftover from the days when it was forbidden to even speak the name of God, so they try to not "speak" it by not writing it out completely.

Taking this back much further the origins of the name "Yahweh" for God also came from the four Hebrew letters YHVH (again representing an unspeakable reference to God)

Taking that back even further it is believed by some that YHVH actually originally represented Earth, Air, Fire and Water, and was the basis of a belief that God and Nature are ONE. (the very basis of Wicca and the Pantheistic views of Eastern Mysticism)

Also, even in the Hebrew scriptures the term "Elohim" as a reference to God, yet this is definitely a "Plural" term meaning that God is more than ONE. And many people have also suggested that this term also refers to the feminine and not the masculine which is rather interesting too. Sounding more like the Moon Goddess of the Wicaans rather than a Zeus-like male-chauvinistic Godhead.

So in any case, since many ancient Jews actually took a rather abstract view of "G-d" and did not even wish to identify it with any sort of persona, many people, including myself, feel that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus himself was such a Jew. And thus Jesus could have easily view "G-d" in an abstract pantheistic sense himself (assuming of course, that Jesus actually existed at all)

~~~

In any case, the way in which the POCM website uses the term "Pagan" is completely compatible with the very simple definition of "Pagan" as referring to any non-Abrahamic religion. Because they are arguing that the story of Jesus does not have Abrahamic origins but instead can be shown to be nothing more than a retelling of non-Abrahamic beliefs (i.e. "Pagan" beliefs)

That's the very basis of their position.

You seem to be trying to make a big deal over a word that has fuzzy semantics to begin with.