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 Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 2:06 am
A: Intro
B: The Story of Christ; "Jesus Christ! Not again!"
-BI: Introduction
-BII: Mythra
-BIII: "Like A Vir-ir-ir-irgin"
-BIV: Christ's Mass Day
C: The Morality of Having Morals
-CI: Introduction
-CII: The Dark Ages
-CIII:Some Examples
-CIV: Humanity's Honey-Do List
-CV: God Told Me To
--CV.I: It's OK To Kill The Following
--CV.II: On The Fairer sex
--CV.III: Slavery
-CVI: And Another Thing
D: Sinners Unite
-DI: Introduction
-DII: The First Sinners
E: Is for END
Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to my rant. I hope you find it informative as well as entertaining. I decided to write this out of growing boredom. When I'm bored I write, you see. The end product if before you, for all of you to see. Please, feel free to comment on it.
Jesus Christ! Not again!
The story of Christ dates back well before Christ's birth. Let's take a look at one of his contributors.
Mithra
Mithra was a Persian/Indian God, who dates back to about 600BC. He is one of the largest contributors to the story of Jesus Christ. Here are some of the parallels between the two.
-Mithra was born on December 25th.
-Mithra was born of a virgin. (As were The Egyptian Gods, Horus and Osiris, the Greek Gods, Saturn and Apolo, the Sumarian God, Marduk, and the Roman God, Sol)
-Mithra's birth was witnessed by shepherds and gift-bearing Magi, who had followed a shooting star.
-Mithra is refereed to as The Light, The Way, The Son of God, and The Good Shepherd.
-Mithra raised the dead, cast out Devils, and cured the blind, sick and lame.
-Mithra was sacrificed on the Spring Equinox, more commonly referred to as Easter.
-Three days later, Mithra came back to life and acceded into paradise.
-Prior to his sacrifice, he dined with his Twelve Apostles, each of which represented a spot on the Zodiac.
-Mithra's worshipers ate bread symbolically as a representation of their God. This bread was marked with a Cross, a symbol which originally came from the God Tammuz.
-Mithra's worshipers also believed in an end times, in which the sinful and unbaptized would be dragged into 'Darkness.'
Any of that sound familiar?
Like A Vir-ir-ir-irgin
As we've seen, being born of a virgin is nothing new. See this all comes from the idea that sex is sin. Hence, babies are born of sin. If there was no sinning in the conception, then the child has no sin attached at birth, hence Child o' God. That simple.
The idea was so well held, that a few mortals tried to get in on the action, Julius Ceaser being one very notable name. It helped create a shroud of awe around the proclaimers. If they were conceived sans sins, they must be important.
Christ's Mass Day
Ok, so we know that the whole December 25th thing has been done before, but why? Well, it all starts with the Pagans. Yes, those Pagans. December 25th marks the Winter Solstice for the folks on the top-most hemisphere. For the Pagans, this was a big deal. They set aside this whole day to celebrate the beauty of nature and the 'rebirth' of the sun. Seems kind of obvious that if you want your God Child to hold some weight, you'd make sure he was born on the 25th of December.
This date was not set as Christ's official birth date until 350AD, when Pope Julius I proclaimed it so, proving that some traditions die very, very hard.
The Morality of Having Morals.
It is a well held belief that Atheism will lead to hedonism and anarchy, simply because one is not told to be moral by the church. I, for one, think this shows how 'deep seated' religion's morals are as a whole, if one must be restrained by the church in order to be pure of heart.
It is also worth noting that it is assumed Atheists do not care for life, simply because there is no end to justify the means. If there is nothing after death, why bother? However, wouldn't it make more sense to do the best you can in this one shot you've been given? If there is nothing after death, then you have to make the most of your time.
Religion promotes the idea that this mortal coil is simply an auditing time to prepare one's self for the final judgment. Keep your head down until your ticket is clipped and you can get on with eternity. This, in turn, promotes that one must put up with life. It makes life less valuable in a way. If you get to live forever, what's the point of doing anything now?
To get to the heart of the subject of Morals, lets look at the one time the Church had total, unrestable control over everything.
The Dark Ages
The Crusades. The Inquisition. Witch/Heretic burnings. The one time in human history when the Church had every ounce of control spiraled into one of the most intellectually and morally stunted periods, ever so aptly named the Dark Ages.
In fact, it seems that Religion, which claims to have a monopoly on tolerance and morality, has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to tolerance and morality by the outraged secular masses.
Some examples
-150 years ago, slavery finally abolished in the modern world.
-100 years ago, women finally get rights equal to that of a man.
-50 years ago, segregation abolished.
-Now, same sex relationships are being battled over.
Humanity's Honey-Do List
The Ten Commandments are a really shoddy moral guide. The first four are plugs for God. Free advertising. The other six are venerated by people who don't seem to have read them. Lying? Envy? How do these trump things like Rape, Child Abuse, Slavery, the list goes on for miles!
Just the same are we supposed to accept such black and white laws in a world mainly colored gray? What of murder in genuine self-defense? Lying to a criminal to protect the innocent? Morality is best judged on a case-by-case basis, not saddled with a clumsy catch-all stencil of a guide.
God Told Me To
By today's standard, there is a lot of promoted immorality in the bible. Let's take a look.
It is Ok to kill the following:
-Homosexuals: Lev 20:13, Rom 1-26-32
-Adulterers: Lev 20:10, Deut 22:22
-Disobedient Children: Deut 21:20-21, Lev 20:9, Exod 21:15
-Women who are not virgins on their wedding day: Deut 22:13-12
-All non-Christians: Told by Christ: Luke 19:27
-Those accused of Wickedness by at least two people: Deut 17:2-7
-Anyone who works on the Sabbath: Exod 35:2-3, Num 15:32-6
On the fairer sex:
-It is shameful for a woman to speak in church: 1Cor 14:34-5
-A man must"ok" his wife's words if they are to have force: num 30:8
-A woman must not teach or hold authority over a man: 1Tim 2:12
-"Kill every woman that has slept with a man, but take for yourself any girl that has not: Moses Num 38:17-8
Slavery:
-God digs it: Lev 25:44-6, Exod 21:2-8, Eph 6:5, Col 3:22
-Sell your daughter to slavery: Exod 21:7-8
-How to beat your slaves: Luke 12:42-8
-How to mark your slaves: Deut 15:17 (Hint: shove an awl through their ear.)
Of course, there are good things in the bible, bits and pieces that pastors pick out to read every Sunday, but, if you find a piece of chocolate in a pile of crap, would you still eat it?
And Another Thing
Another question I'd like to raise is this: The bible is the word of God. Why don't all Religions under Christ (Catholicism, Christianity, Mormonism, Baptism, etc etc) follow these instructions to the T? If God is Omnipotent, don't you think he could have made a book that wasn't "Good for back then, but not so much now"? Why not something that encompasses all human morality?
Sinners unite!
Who told you that you were a sinner? I'll bet it was the church, right? Of course, the church has a magical cure for you. Sounds like the church cut you and offered you a band-aid.
The First Sinners
You know, Adam and Eve never actually sinned, if you think about it. They ate from the tree of Good and Evil. Right and Wrong. They had no moral guide before then. They, themselves, were not good or evil. They were morally ambiguous. They didn't know it was bad to eat the fruit, God just said not to. What happens when you tell a small child to not put their hand on a radiator? They end up doing it because A, they didn't know why they shouldn't, and B, you've just drawn attention to it. Reverse Psychology at it's finest.
The only way God could have prevented Adam and Eve from eating the fruit would have been to tell them why they shouldn't. Then he would have had to explain good and evil to them anyway.
These are just some of the things that really bug me and keep me up at night. I know they shouldn't, but they do. It's a several thousand year-old system that has far outlived it's usefulness. These are just my thoughts; the facts as I see them.
End.
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Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:35 am
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Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 5:53 pm
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Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 6:27 pm
Sweet.
P.S. - I heart your Crtl-Alt-Del siggy.
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Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 7:57 pm
I will too steal it. Thanks for sharing!
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Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2010 6:22 pm
Stealing it is not such a bad idea! I really enjoyed reading this. These are the exact things that bother me about religion, but I just can't put it into words.
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Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2010 9:01 pm
What's funny is I just gave a presentation in my theology class this morning about something very similar: "Making Sense of Violence in Religious Texts." It was really awkward, since it was a group effort made by a Christian girl, a Wiccan guy, and me - the class's token atheist.
I'm surprised you don't have the gang-rape and dismemberment combo (Judges 19-21, if I remember correctly). That was a fun discussion, there!
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Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2010 5:48 pm
A number of incorrect or misunderstood points in this. Not entirely correct. This view takes the Gospel and the traditions that have grown up around the religion at face value and does not look at the inner development of christianity. Long story short, over time many ideas were adopted into christianity because they were prevalent at the time. Not so much as a premeditated ripping off of other mythologies, but the world views and folk traditions that made those other religions also contributed to the rise of christianity to power in the Roman Empire. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Sex-as-sin was only true of a part of early christianity. Another part was very much into orgies. This was fought against by Paul when he told the communities to let the apostles do as they wanted because they are special, but to not follow their example. Both groups come from the general tendency at the time toward communism. [1]You actually don't understand the immaculate conception and the virgin birth. They are two very different doctrines. The immaculate conception relates to Mary, not Jesus. It was Mary that was born without sin, more-over not the sin of sex, but the Original Sin. The virgin Birth is the doctrine that Jesus is the result of God and not of Joseph's copulation with Mary. In short, Jesus was not born without sin, that was mary. Not even close. Jesus was not given a significant birth date because of a 'sun god' idea (as the son of God such an association is in fact heretical) but more as a simply marketing ploy: It was a date already celebrated on by the non christians, so they sought to conflate the two celebrations so that people would come to their feasts and not the pagan ones. Yeah, again not even close. The Dark Ages are so named because we didn't have much knowledge of what went on. They were not dark in the sense of 'bad and oppressive' but dark as in 'not illuminated.' We couldn't see what happened then. As we are getting more and more knowledge about the time, there are even calls for the term to be dropped as out-dated. It is also important to note that during the migrations and repeated invasions by wave after wave of barbarians and the decaying slave economy, the Church was the main safe-house of knowledge and culture. The barbarians, standing on a much lower level of deelopment than the Romans were, looked up to the Church for just that reason. Moreover, of your examples with the Crusades (which were political) and Witch/Heretic burnings (most of which happened during the renaissance, the 'age of reason') only the Inquisition stands on its own, and in most cases it served to restrain secular authorities from needless and pointless s**t. Your next list of examples is wrong for one major reason: Religion there served as part of the ideological justification for those things, but itself was not the instigator of those things. Even more, in the advanced capitalist countries, women still don't have equal rights with men even on paper! They ate from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil. Minor nit-pick, but still. And they did have a morality prior to that: God told them not to do it. What the fruit gave them was not knowledge of what good and evil are, but how to perform them. It is a rather long read, being an actual book and not a short pamphlet or blog post, but I direct everyone to Karl Kautsky's book The Foundations of Christianity. It is not only a great work of history more generally (dealing with Roman and Jewish history and society) but it gives great insight into the origins of Christianity and what caused it to grow and expand so completely over the empire. [1] Quote: If communism does not rest on community of production, but of consumption, it tries to convert its community into a new family, for the presence of the traditional family tie is felt as a disturbing influence. We have seen this in the case of the Essenes, and it is repeated in Christianity, which often voices its hostility to the family in harsh terms.... This demands extreme disregard for the family, but the following passage from Luke breathes direct hatred of the family (14, verse 26): “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple....” A closely related theme is the aversion to marriage, which primitive Christianity required as did the Essenians. The resemblance goes so far that it seems to have developed both forms of being unmarried: celibacy, abstinence from all marital practices, and unbridled extra-marital sexual intercourse, which is also described as community of women.... [ X]
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Posted: Mon May 03, 2010 10:48 pm
A number of incorrect or misunderstood points in this.
Not entirely correct. This view takes the Gospel and the traditions that have grown up around the religion at face value and does not look at the inner development of christianity. Long story short, over time many ideas were adopted into christianity because they were prevalent at the time. Not so much as a premeditated ripping off of other mythologies, but the world views and folk traditions that made those other religions also contributed to the rise of christianity to power in the Roman Empire.
However, Christianity is an ideology. The face value is the end result of the inner development. As for the whole-sale find/replace of Jesus in the Mithra story, I'm not pointing out that these ideas were indoctrinated because the writers were lazy, I'm pointing out that they were added at all. I'm not saying "Look, everyone, the writers of the bible were unimaginative plagiarists," I'm saying "This story dates back much farther than Christ, ergo, the story of Christ is a load."
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Sex-as-sin was only true of a part of early christianity. Another part was very much into orgies. This was fought against by Paul when he told the communities to let the apostles do as they wanted because they are special, but to not follow their example. Both groups come from the general tendency at the time toward communism.
You actually don't understand the immaculate conception and the virgin birth. They are two very different doctrines. The immaculate conception relates to Mary, not Jesus. It was Mary that was born without sin, more-over not the sin of sex, but the Original Sin. The virgin Birth is the doctrine that Jesus is the result of God and not of Joseph's copulation with Mary. In short, Jesus was not born without sin, that was mary.
You're putting words in my mouth, here. I never said It was Jesus who was the star of the Immaculate Conception, I was saying that Jesus being born of a virgin is nothing new, and explaining the origin of the idea. When you are born, the only two sins you have are the sin of Sex and the Original Sin. Jesus was the son of God, so he didn't have the Original Sin. Get rid of the sin of Sex, and you've got yourself a sin free baby.
As for sex being a sin, it seems fairly obvious that it wasn't only a part of early Christianity. It seems to be doing quite well these days. What ever happened to the Orgy group? The only doctrine we have now is the one that prevailed between those two (And many others.) Also, where did the Communism thing come from? Theology and Politics don't mix in my book.
Not even close. Jesus was not given a significant birth date because of a 'sun god' idea (as the son of God such an association is in fact heretical) but more as a simply marketing ploy: It was a date already celebrated on by the non christians, so they sought to conflate the two celebrations so that people would come to their feasts and not the pagan ones.
Ok, lets look at the argument you've presented. He wasn't given that birth date because of a non christian group that celebrated it, he was given that birth date because of a non christian group that celebrated it. I've tried reading this a bunch of times, and that's all I can get from it. I'm not saying he was given the date of birth simply for the fact that it was a pagan tradition, I'm saying he was given the birth date because it was significant at all. Besides, it was retconned into the story 350 years later. You're also putting words in my mouth with the 'sun god' notion.
Yeah, again not even close. The Dark Ages are so named because we didn't have much knowledge of what went on. They were not dark in the sense of 'bad and oppressive' but dark as in 'not illuminated.' We couldn't see what happened then. As we are getting more and more knowledge about the time, there are even calls for the term to be dropped as out-dated.
It is also important to note that during the migrations and repeated invasions by wave after wave of barbarians and the decaying slave economy, the Church was the main safe-house of knowledge and culture. The barbarians, standing on a much lower level of deelopment than the Romans were, looked up to the Church for just that reason.
Moreover, of your examples with the Crusades (which were political) and Witch/Heretic burnings (most of which happened during the renaissance, the 'age of reason') only the Inquisition stands on its own, and in most cases it served to restrain secular authorities from needless and pointless s**t.
The Crusades were only political as an after thought, if not simply a repercussion. The Crusades were a religiously backed Military campaign to reclaim Christian control of the Holy Land. True, it did have many political ramifications, but this was only because most invaders leave their mark in politics, economics and the society as a whole. Billing the Crusades as a Political Movement is completely farcical.
Witch/Heretic burnings lasted through the Renaissance, but it was the Dark Ages that propagated their universality as a form of punishment. Speaking of the Dark Ages in a brief tangent, if I may, I never said I kept in following with the idea that the Dark Ages were simply a barbaric time, I was using the misnomer we already use to illustrate that it was, indeed, a dark time in any case because of the religious fervor.
The Inquisition (Namely the Spanish Inquisition and the Papist Inquisition) was installed solely for the purpose of turning orthodox Jews into orthodox Catholics/Papists on pain of death or prolonged torture. Restraint was nearly nonexistent.
Your next list of examples is wrong for one major reason: Religion there served as part of the ideological justification for those things, but itself was not the instigator of those things. Even more, in the advanced capitalist countries, women still don't have equal rights with men even on paper!
Of course religion is only a justification. That's all it is. It justifies what happens when you die, it justifies what you're supposed to do before you die. It is the ultimate justificator. However, this does not pardon it from being a moronic justificator in all senses of the term. Humans are dirt bags. Plain and simple. We're social creatures that hate society. If you've got a Good Book with all the answers, that tells you to be a good person, why have stuff about Justified rape, murder, beatings, et cetera, et al. In fact, this just goes to my earlier point. How do these things make it into the list of stuff you're SUPPOSED to do, as opposed to the things you don't do on pain of fiery damnation!?
In any case, you're last bit, about woman's rights, is valid. I will give you that. However, I would like to point out that great leaps are being made on the women rights front now and in the last few decades. This greatly mirrors the Segregation issue, in that it took African Americans 100 years to finally get some resemblance of equality, and even today you have the K.K.K. out for blood for no simple reason. It's bigotry, and the church, as a whole, supports it. That is my argument.
They ate from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil. Minor nit-pick, but still. And they did have a morality prior to that: God told them not to do it. What the fruit gave them was not knowledge of what good and evil are, but how to perform them.
This doesn't make any sense. If you know what good and evil are, you have a concept of right and wrong. That statement is actually rather redundant. Anyway, what I'm getting at, is that if you know, say, stealing is wrong, then you know what stealing is. It's taking something that's not yours. Ipso facto, they know how to do evil if they know what good and evil is. I contend that the story is flawed no matter how you look at it.
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Posted: Mon May 10, 2010 7:07 am
Quote: However, Christianity is an ideology. The face value is the end result of the inner development. As for the whole-sale find/replace of Jesus in the Mithra story, I'm not pointing out that these ideas were indoctrinated because the writers were lazy, I'm pointing out that they were added at all. I'm not saying "Look, everyone, the writers of the bible were unimaginative plagiarists," I'm saying "This story dates back much farther than Christ, ergo, the story of Christ is a load." The second sentence their seems a bit weird, but over all, fair enough. Quote: You're putting words in my mouth, here. I never said It was Jesus who was the star of the Immaculate Conception, I was saying that Jesus being born of a virgin is nothing new, and explaining the origin of the idea. When you are born, the only two sins you have are the sin of Sex and the Original Sin. Jesus was the son of God, so he didn't have the Original Sin. Get rid of the sin of Sex, and you've got yourself a sin free baby. If you knew the difference between the two, fair enough, but it still misunderstands why 'virgin birth' was brought into it. it was for much more prosaic reasons than to dodge the need to expiate the sin of being concieved through sex. The messiah was meant to be decended from King David, but once Jerusalem was taken out and the militant Jewish Christianity was eliminated as a major force in the movement, there was no need for the connection with King David. At the same time, as you pointed out, it was common and easy for people to accept the divine parentage of 'great men.' Due to lazyness I will quote at length: Foundations of Christianity The original Christian idea of the Messiah is so completely in accord with the Judaism of its time that the Gospels attach the greatest value to showing Jesus as a descendant of David. For, according to the Jewish notion, the Messiah should be of royal lineage. Over and over again he is spoken of as the “Son of David” or “Son of God”, which in the Jewish system amounted to the same thing. Thus the second book of Samuel represents God as saying to David: “I will be his [your descendants’] father, and he shall be my son” (II Samuel 7, verse 14). And in the second Psalm the king says: “The Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son: this day have I begotten thee.” This is why it was necessary to show that Jesus’ father, Joseph, had a long pedigree going back to David, and to have Jesus the Nazarene born in Bethlehem, the city of David. The strangest statements are introduced to make this plausible.... The whole labor of love was in vain, however, and actually caused serious embarrassment for Christian thought as the community outgrew the Jewish framework. For the pagan world David was a matter of complete indifference, and it was no particular recommendation to be a descendant of David. Hellenistic and Roman thinking however was quite inclined to take seriously the fatherhood of God, which to the Jews was merely a symbol of royal descent. As we have seen, it was nothing unusual for Greeks and Romans to regard a great man as the son of Apollo or some other god. Yet Christian thought encountered a slight difficulty in its effort thus to raise the Messiah in the eyes of the heathen, namely, the monotheism it had taken over from Judaism. The fact that a god begets a son presents no difficulty to polytheism: there is just one more god. But that God begets a god and there is still but one God, that is something not easy to conceive. The question is not made simpler by going on to separate the generating power that emanated from the Deity as a separate Holy Ghost. All that was needed was to get three persons under one hat. On this task the most sweeping fantasy and acute hair-splitting were wrecked. The Trinity became one of those mysteries that can be only believed, not understood; one that had to be believed precisely because it was absurd.... Meanwhile the union of Father and Son in a single person was not the only difficulty for Christian thinking that arose out of the picture of the Messiah as soon as it came under the influence of the non-Jewish environment. What was to be done about Joseph’s fatherhood? Mary could now no longer have conceived Jesus by her husband. And since God had mated with her not as a man but as spirit, she must have remained a virgin. That was the end of Jesus’ descent from David. Yet so great is the power of tradition in religion that despite everything the beautifully constructed pedigree of Joseph and Jesus’ designation as Son of David continued to be handed down faithfully. Poor Joseph now had the thankless role of living with the Virgin without touching that virginity, and without being in the least disturbed by her pregnancy. Quote: As for sex being a sin, it seems fairly obvious that it wasn't only a part of early Christianity. It seems to be doing quite well these days. What ever happened to the Orgy group? The only doctrine we have now is the one that prevailed between those two (And many others.) Also, where did the Communism thing come from? Theology and Politics don't mix in my book. Eh, you misinterpereted what I said. I was saying that sex-as-sin, despite its prominence today, was a belief held by only a part of the early Christians, not the whole lot of them. The orgy group died out for a number of reasons: When the movement spread to people with property, they wanted to continue to pass it on to their children. You can't do that if you can't tell what bloke knocked the woman up. And yeah, it doesn't really matter what you think on that point, they felt differently. =P Though it isn't really correct to call it theology, as it was nothing so refined in the early days when the communal tendencies still held. They just lived together, pooled their independent incomes to the common purse, that sort of thing. They were much influenced by the contemporary sect of the pacifistic Essenians who were an agrarian communal group. Quote: Ok, lets look at the argument you've presented. He wasn't given that birth date because of a non christian group that celebrated it, he was given that birth date because of a non christian group that celebrated it. I've tried reading this a bunch of times, and that's all I can get from it. I'm not saying he was given the date of birth simply for the fact that it was a pagan tradition, I'm saying he was given the birth date because it was significant at all. Besides, it was retconned into the story 350 years later. You're also putting words in my mouth with the 'sun god' notion. in the OP, you Seems kind of obvious that if you want your God Child to hold some weight, you'd make sure he was born on the 25th of December. So yeah. You can complain about the 'sun god' part all you want, but if you change it from 'sun god' to 'god child' my point stands. You are saying the date was chosen to give authority to the claim of divinity. I am saying that the date was chosen simply so that the people who celebrated on that day would come to the Christian celebration instead. Quote: The Crusades were only political as an after thought, if not simply a repercussion. Put simply, the crusades called to restore the dominance of Byzantium and Christianity in Asia. The Pope likely was trying to suck up to Byzantium and the eastern Church to heal the schism and become dominant over the east as well. This is a pretty clear and political aim. That the call was made in religious terms is unsurprising as at that time all politics was interwoven with religion through the political, economic, and geographic interpenetration of secular and religious authorities. Later crusades included other areas, such as the Iberian Peninsula as part fo the Reconquista and eastern Europe against the pagan Slavs. All this served to (or aimed to serve to) enhance the power and prestige and authority of Rome. And tithes, always tithes. Quote: Witch/Heretic burnings lasted through the Renaissance, but it was the Dark Ages that propagated their universality as a form of punishment. Speaking of the Dark Ages in a brief tangent, if I may, I never said I kept in following with the idea that the Dark Ages were simply a barbaric time, I was using the misnomer we already use to illustrate that it was, indeed, a dark time in any case because of the religious fervor. The Inquisition (Namely the Spanish Inquisition and the Papist Inquisition) was installed solely for the purpose of turning orthodox Jews into orthodox Catholics/Papists on pain of death or prolonged torture. Restraint was nearly nonexistent. Yeahnah. Seriously, no. Burning was used for heretics, certainly, but witches were rare, and mostly executed by hanging or drowning. And witches were mainly killed by secular authorities. Religious authorities focussed more on forcing an admission and then on repentance. With the case of the Spanish inquisition things are a little different because while staffed by clergy, it was a secular institution under the monarch, not the Pope. In forcing catholicism, it was forcing obedience to the crown upon the new subjects in the newly won areas of the Reconquista. This secular basis of the Spanish inquisition is shown by the fact that is also took care of political cases. Of further note is that it didn't target 'orthodox jews' at all, but ex-Jewish and ex-Islamic (forced) converts. The inquisition had no authority over those who were not baptised Christians. While this included most people, it is still an important distinction. It was there to deal not with Orthodox [random religion] but to deal with those who had been forcibly converted, and decided for political, economic, or simply security reasons who did not officially return to their former faith. The Roman Inquisition, again, only had authority over christians, and was focussed more on Protestants than anything else. And yeahno. It wasn't a dark time because of religious fervor. It was a 'dark time' because, like all societies at that stage of social development no matter what religion/lack of religion the people follow or use to excuse their actions, violence, disease, massive taxes, and feudalism existed. Quote: This doesn't make any sense. If you know what good and evil are, you have a concept of right and wrong. That statement is actually rather redundant. Anyway, what I'm getting at, is that if you know, say, stealing is wrong, then you know what stealing is. It's taking something that's not yours. Ipso facto, they know how to do evil if they know what good and evil is. I contend that the story is flawed no matter how you look at it. Of course it doesn't make sense, it is nonsense. But it is utterly stupid to to call something out for nonsense that isn't there, like you did. All in all, it's good that you are trying to actually put thought into opposition to religion and develop it away from a knee-jerk reaction, but there is a clear lack of knowledge of history and dogma present which would seriously undermine your arguments with any religious person who actually knows their s**t. And besides, it should be a matter of principle to be correct about s**t, and not simply give good and popular sounding arguments.
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Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 10:40 am
Quote: The second sentence their seems a bit weird, ... A longer explanation would be that, as an ideology, Christianity evolves. Through this evolution, the face value becomes whatever is important to the story at the time. Ergo, looking at the face value is enough to glean a rough understanding of the inner development, because Christianity wears its tenets on it's sleeve. Quote: Eh, you misinterpereted what I said. We've been misinterpreting each other this entire time. Why stop now? Quote: Though it isn't really correct to call it theology, ... Yes. Yes it is. It is totally, 100% correct to call Christianity, early or not, a theology. What I meant was that, nowhere, in this entire thing, did I once involve any political subtext into my rant. Communism, Democracy, Feudalism, Idiocracy, I don't care, I don't talk politics and religion at the same time. I end up a frothing mess of rage, because the two don't mix. My dad votes 'bible' enough for me to want to shove a hanging chad up his... Ok, this is getting us nowhere. Quote: You can complain about the 'sun god' part all you want, but if you change it from 'sun god' to 'god child' my point stands. And if you change this post into a cheeseburger, I'd have lunch. Paraphrasing is the biggest cause of misinterpretation this side of mumbling. Quote: You are saying the date was chosen to give authority to the claim of divinity. I am saying that the date was chosen simply so that the people who celebrated on that day would come to the Christian celebration instead. It seems to me, we're arguing different sides of the same coin. He was given a certain birth date to curry favor with the secular masses. He was given that exact birth date because it was an important secular holiday. Both equally true, and both are the same basic argument. we'll be chasing our tails next. Quote: Of course it doesn't make sense, it is nonsense. But it is utterly stupid to to call something out for nonsense that isn't there, like you did. Quote: nonsense that isn't there What? Nonsense is totally there. It's all up and down there. Thar be nonsense in that thar book. Here, I even made it official. I've left off a rebuttal to the majority, because you are correct. However, that does not mean that the church was not a huge factor in many of these things, and in some cases, a direct cause. Political or not, the Crusades (All 12) were backed by the Pope. Controlled by a monarch or not, (He was called a "Catholic Monarch" by the way) the Inquisition was inherently religious. Also, I used burnings for a catch-all term for the "Murder of heretics and accused witches." Also, why would any secular person burn a heretic? Heresy is doing things the church doesn't like. The church, not the general public. Now, witches, yeah, I can see the masses up and burning a witch (For heat, if nothing else) but heretics were 'enemies of the church.' They might have been directly burned by the townfolk, but you can put money on the fact that it was religion that allowed them to do it. Religion might not be 100% responsible for the horrid things humans do to one another, but it is often the cause.
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Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2010 9:59 pm
You really know your way around the bible. Excellent work. I loved reading it, it was very sarcastic while still being intellectual.
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