Or Rhea and her son Zeus. Or Zeus and his son Dionysus.

freethinker:

Sorry - there is no easter bunny, there is no santa claus, and there was no global flood.

There is to an Easter Bunny and a Santa Claus!!!

[1] "Be fruitful and multiply" was hardly the only injunction. Stewardship was a major element, and one of the few Old Testament topoi that Jesus hit upon regularly. (He did not, for example, spend any time on the topic of fornication.)

[2] Jesus didn't re-up "be fruitful and multiply" when he summarised the whole of the Law. If he was an omniscient being, he had to be aware of the consequences of unchecked reproduction. If not so all-knowing, he was nonetheless wisely concerned with more important matters (i.e. how we treat one another and the things in our care). "Be fruitful and multiply" needs to lumped in with "suffer not a witch to live" and "whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you" as Obsolete Law.

[3] People are dumb. Very dumb. As a class we generally fail to follow the chain of simple reason past the first link, and we almost never check our work for error. This film is a symptom of that. It is not an argument, it is an emotional appeal. Attempting to argue with it is like arm-wrestling a jar of marshmallow cream. You're gonna win. You're gonna look stupid in the process.

[4] Not all ecologists are liberals. Not even most. Few are Christian, but that is because Christians attack them. Ecology should not be held hostage to any war upon liberalism. Why there's a war on liberalism I can't fathom (at least without being very cynical), but regardless: You can't do the teaching and preaching part of Jesus' final commandment if you're always going around yelling about how evil everyone else is. People tend to take that kind of stuff personally.

[5] True stewardship demands more than dominion. There's more than one parable about the Lord returning to wipe out those of His servants who presumed to abuse the authority He had given them. By speaking solely of dominion, you invite the wrath of the very God who gave it to us.

Let's do this the fun way. You've made a bunch of interesting assertions and claimed some scriptural basis for these assertions. References, please.

Christianity isn't based on plagiarized idols. It is based on belief in the same God that wasbelieved in by the Jewish faith. So is Islam. There are also ties in all three to other relgions that preceded them. That doesn't, by the way make any of them false. It just shows a chain of human belief in basically the same principles, making the entire chain stronger, rather than weaker. The difference is generally in language or method of expressing the ideas in religious texts. The basic cores of all of the religions are pretty much the same. They are consistent with one another to a remarkable degree, considering passage of time, illiteracy of the population at the time they were started and the fact that they had to be passed down orally at some points.

" It is based on belief in the same God that wasbelieved in by the Jewish faith. So is Islam."

Muslims and Jews believe in the G*d of Israel, Christians believe in the old horndog Zeus and Herakles' little brother and Hermes, messenger of the Gods. They also believe in a Heaven and Hell much like the Zoroastrians and spirits surviving death like the Egyptians and Zoroastrians and Greeks, among others. Mainstream Christianity believes that the Serpent told the truth, "You will not die." Islam also accepts this.

As for the idols, similarities between Ptolemaic works and Catholic works are known and documented. Isis translated especially well to Mary, Mater Deloroso, among other titles shared.

LT-7:

Christianity isn't based on plagiarized idols. It is based on belief in the same God that wasbelieved in by the Jewish faith. ....

Well, true, they claim that the "Father" is YHWH, but then they add his son and the ghost, and then Mary, and a whole pantheon of saints borrowed liberally from the gods of whatever culture that overran.........

At least Muslims don't claim divinity for Mohammad.

Thomas Paine:

Well, true, they claim that the "Father" is YHWH, but then they add his son and the ghost, and then Mary, and a whole pantheon of saints borrowed liberally from the gods of whatever culture that overran.........

At least Muslims don't claim divinity for Mohammad.

My dear sir, I am new to these forums, but while reading through the comments here listed, I could not help but reply to a growing attack on my faith. I am Catholic and have studied my faith for a long time. I will not attack other religions (as a few posters have, obviously without sufficient knowledge). It is completely and utterly wrong to insinuate that any Christians believe in more than one God. There is only one God in the Christian bible. The God of our so-called Old Testament and the New Testament are one in the same. However, without getting into too much philosophy, that one God is considered to be a being with three natures: the father, son, and holy spirit. Jesus is not some man we divinized. Nor did we rip the one God into two, or something. Although clearly a point of contention for other religions, we would say that Christ was both fully man and fully divine, but his divinity does not conflict with the divinity of the God of Israel, because Jesus is still the one God, as is the "ghost" as you called him.

Further, Mary is by no means divine. I cannot blame you for such an insinuation as many Christians seem to think us Catholics deem her so. On the contrary, we consider her a wonderful person and someone to be respected as anyone should respect their own parents. She was not raped by God and Zeus often did. She, like many people throughout the bible was a faithful servant of God and followed His will, so that the world could be saved.

And lastly, by no means are the saints to be considered any sort of gods. They, like Mary, are consdiered exemplars of the faith, and so they are respected for that. I do not see how on earth the saints could be based on other gods, as they were just real people. Although some older saint stories may have been blown out of proportion, they were all real people, living very real lives, not creations based on pagan myths.

Because I do not know for sure, I will not make a sweeping comment about other Christians, but Catholics embrace our Jewish roots. Jesus was Jewish, as were all of the apostles and many other important figures who started the Church. We also do not deny ties with other religions, pagan though they may be. In a class I just took about Christian art, we openly discussed the links of Mary and Jesus to Isis and Horus. Many artists used outside symbolism and the like to try to explain something that is unexplainable. God graciously presented himself in a visual way through the person of Jesus, and so in the millennia to follow, we have tried to capture that miracle. I would be hard pressed to find any artistic or literary venture, however, that did not borrow from works of the past.

Speaking for myself, I don't mean to be especially singeling out the Catholic Church for attack -- or Christianity in general. I am not a Christian, although I was raised as one, and many of my friends are (one is a Catholic priest).

Some of us are perhaps inclined to a negative response to Christian posters as a learned response to a couple of aggressive, dogmatic evangelicals who regularly post here.

I think many of us would welcome the opportunity to have an articulate Catholic perspective on many of the issues we tackle here.

I take contention with the claim that the xtian demi-deity actually existed when there is no evidence to support that. Furthermore the fiction sorounding the xtian demi-deitie's supposed linage is bass ackwards too. If xtains were more willing to admit that it is a philosophical mythological character I would probably respect them more.

Also, unless a Jew converted to Catholacism there are very few jewish roots and the Church was and has always been rather anti-semetic. Not much embracing there except from the rare individual.

Dear Snuffles,

If your god has three natures, why not four? Which part of his three natures expresses the feminine so active in what is largely a biological duality here on earth? If your god is a unity, why split it up? The jews don't. Neither do the Muslims. Come to think of it, the Mormons don't either or the Jehovah's Witnesses or quite few other Christian sects. In fact, neither did many early Christians who often were killed by for their dissent. Assert your monotheism all you like; but, the rest of us can count. Try here for some non-mysterious definitions of the kinds of theisms. Scroll a bit down the page and you'll find them.

Does one pray to saints in Catholicism? Do saints have their own little alters, a statue and sets of votive candles at which one prays? Why, yes, I believe they do. Again, nomenclature is of no importance compared to activity.

Why does Jesus happen to have the same birthday as Mithra, Sol-Invictus, and Attis. among others? Why does his story so resemble these others?

Why do Christian rites more closely resemble those of Dionysus, albeit in a more civilized fashion, than Jewish worship?

Why does Christian theology more closely resemble Zoroastrianism than Judaism?

If you want to be offended, perhaps, you should start with those who prepared you so poorly to answer these questions.

Your objections are rather like Monty Python's Dead Parrot routine. You may assert that the parrot ts just resting. However, any who care to examine the bird will quickly determine that it is "bleeding deceased."

"Which part of his three natures expresses the feminine so active in what is largely a biological duality here on earth?"

The fourth, Asherah. As I remember Judea went straight to Sheol when Asherah was pitched out of Temple. Even seen through the eyes of the Deuteronomist and his monotheistic followers, removing G*d's Wife was not a wise move.

Sssh, No hints from the peanut gallery!

tsedek wrote:

"...and although it may be uncomfortable for our Christian friends to play on a level field, it will be good practice for you and give you an idea of why people who haven't been raised in your mythos find mainstream Christianity to be childish and somewhat primitive and very much a derivitive faith based on Pagan mystery cults and ideas and having little to do with Judaism or its Egyptian antecedents."

Please wean yourself away from your obviously well-thumbed Thesaurus for just a second; few things are more irritating than when people think that adopting certain words over more straight-forward (and, therefore, presumably inadequate) ones lends an authorative, erudite air. It doesn't and you know what I'm talking about. End of discussion.

Now, if you could expand on what you mean exactly by "mainstream Christianity". Episcopalian? Unitarian? Roman Catholicism? Anglican? I know, as a relatively non-practising Protestant, that practise of 'flesh eating' is strictly symbolism manifest. And when did Pagan beliefs become childish? And 'derivitive' faiths?? You write that as if that was an abnormality. Be careful, my friend, you sound fairly zealous in your condemnation of 'other' beliefs. Obnoxious; yes. Arrogantly misguided; definitely. Try to keep this in mind: The opposite of faith is certainty, think about it. (Apologies to Anne Lamott)

Perhaps you should take the time to use a dictionary. The opposite of faith is unbelief, mistrust, doubt, and uncertainty. Apologies to no one.

As for the holy cannibalism so like, but much more civilized than the Dionysian rites of yore, more Christians than not believe in transubstantiation. The wikipedia covers it nicely.

When it comes to the childishness of paganism, Christian writers from Theophilus to Dante to Charles Benjamin Newcomb, not to mention oh so many protestant missionaries carrying the white man's burden these last two centuries, have commented on that very thing using those same terms. In these politically correct days, perhaps, what you object to is noticing that another's religious practice is more prone to using less sophisticated methodologies. Admittedly, transubstantiation is slicker than actually killing something and sharing it out; but, the principle is the same.

The derivations of Christianity are increasingly well documented. I mentioned some in a post earlier in this thread. For a very interesting take on them, I would recommend King Jesus by Robert Graves. one might also look at his The Greek Myths and The Hebrew Myths though a little digging will find new books as well.

It's usually better to be clear than clever.