Zeitgeist

[stonehart]

I'm certainly not an expert so I have to rely on those who are, but everything I've read suggests that even secular scholars don't date any books beyond the 2nd century. And my understanding is that as new manuscripts and other archaeological discoveries have been found, those dates get pushed closer and closer to the time when the apostles are actually supposed to have lived.

I do understand what you mean about the development and evolution of ideas. When I was a Christian I started to have serious questions about the depiction of the afterlife in Christianity. It didn't escape me that what we find written about the afterlife in the OT doesn't really match what is said in the NT. Even knowing what little I did about other religions and ideas floating around the Roman Empire at the time, it seemed obvious that Christianity was a fusion of Judaism and these other foreign elements.

I was especially wondering about the idea of hell. This idea as we know it just doesn't really show up in the OT. And then instantly it is a hot topic in the New Testament. This just didn't make sense to me.

That was just taken from my old University notes on language use and working out possible dates of production. Indeed some manuscripts do date back to around 200CE but that was not the point I was making.

What we were doing study in was contamination through latter edits to the original manuscripts, so sorry if I did not make that clear enough.... so apologies.

The problem we end up with when this happens is that many of the original manuscripts no longer exist so what we end up with is a contaminated version.

Was Johns Gospel written before 500CE, well yes possible but the version we have presented in the modern bible is almost certainly contaminated by latter edits.

The crux of the argument being that how can this be the true word of said god if it needs to be edited

PS: Keep this thread rolling as it is starting to get interesting and no name calling has started yet .. that has to be a first.

 

[Goggs Mackay]

It's my opinion that even if 90 percent of the bible was not even intended to be taken literally, there is still fundamental beliefs that are either true or not, e.g was Jesus a supernatural son of god, different from you and me?
Or was he just a normal human people listened to.

Anything else is window dressing and arguing over trivia. It's the core truth that is true or not, there is no grey for me whatsoever. And I will also say Christianity does not have copyright over good deeds, so when there happens to be an absence of bad ones, we tend to extol the virtues of 'Christianity' - utter tripe - those values existed a long time before the church and exist in 'good' people anyway. Being good has zero to do with Christianity.

I can promise you it is in me to try to do the right thing and it would have been had I been born ten thousand years ago. Christianity is a major new kid on the block - it owns the 'rights' to zero thinking.


Man, that was awesome. I must be sick cos I get off on typing that.

 

[stonehart]

Example on working out a language use date: Logos as found in the works of John was first used as a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge.
This word simply dose not appear in religious and philosophical writing until around the stated dates showing that the existing gospel we have if it was not written at that point was most certainly edited around this time or that word would not have been used.

Language as we all know changes over time and different periods leave a mark that is just as clear as a persons finger prints. In fact in some cases we can point out who in fact could have written the work through they style in which the write.



Yeah you can edit a manuscript as much as you like but unless you can write and think in the style of the time the original was written then a philologist will catch you out in time.

 

[mike]

The prophet of Hell Jesus is actually the main advocate for the idea of eternal condemnation to Hell in the Bible. No one talks more of Hell and eternal damnation than Jesus. He gives the believer two choices, either blind faith in him as God, or eternal torture in Hell. If you don't believe, you go straight to hell when you die, no matter if you have lived a flawless moral life and never thought a bad thought. If you don't believe you are doomed, on the other hand if you just believe and regret your sins, you can be a homicidal, psycopathic sadistic chainsaw massmurderer and still go to heaven according to the teachings of Jesus.Thus going to heaven and being a moral person is not the same thing.

Why Jesus is immoral.

 

[mike]

Ultraviolet photo of a critical word from the earliest known extant manuscript of Tacitus (second Medicean, Laurentian library, Italy).
The photograph reveals that the word purportedly used by Tacitus in Annals 15.44, chrestianos ("the good"), has been overwritten as christianos ("the Christians") by a later hand, a deceit which explains the excessive space between the letters and the exaggerated "dot" (dash) above the new "i". The entire "torched Christians" passage of Tacitus is not only fake, it has been repeatedly "worked over" by fraudsters to improve its value as evidence for the Jesus myth.

Non-Christian Testimony for Jesus? – From the authentic pen of lying Christian scribes !!

 

[mike]

This page makes an excellent point, the "deeds" of other figures we accept as myth, but when "jesus" does the same things, its accepted as "true"

POCM Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth > POCM > Christianity is another ancient Pagan religion.

 

[Digital Trickster]

"Lighthouses are more helpful then churches."

-Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father, author, and inventor ​

 

[SPX]

What we were doing study in was contamination through latter edits to the original manuscripts, so sorry if I did not make that clear enough.... so apologies.

It seemed like you were making two points, but I think I got it now.

I'm quite interested in what can be shown beyond much doubt to be later interpolations into the biblical canon. Acharya S actually talks quite a bit about this in The Christ Conspiracy. She calls it "the holy forgery mill."

I wonder what the Christian scholar's response is to this.

The problem we end up with when this happens is that many of the original manuscripts no longer exist so what we end up with is a contaminated version.

I was aware that we didn't have any originals, but I thought we had manuscripts from every book dated earlier than the dates you gave.

The crux of the argument being that how can this be the true word of said god if it needs to be edited

Right. Well I agree with that.

This goes back to a point that I made earlier. I don't understand why an all-powerful god would entrust his message for humanity's salvation to a book anyway. There are all kinds of problems with books: they can be tampered with, they can be misinterpreted and (especially at that time in history) they take time to make it from one part of the world to another.

If God wanted everyone to know something, considering that he can do anything he wants, then why not just reveal this truth to them in a clear and undeniable way through direct revelation?

Devil's Advocate: We can reconstitute the words of the originals by comparing existing manuscripts and looking for similarities. In doing this, our current Bible is close enough to the originals that the wording of passages related to all essential doctrines is not in dispute.

 

[SPX]

This page makes an excellent point, the "deeds" of other figures we accept as myth, but when "jesus" does the same things, its accepted as "true"

POCM Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth > POCM > Christianity is another ancient Pagan religion.

That page looks like an awesome resource that I'm going to dig into pretty deeply.

I'm not seeing sources, though.

 

[SPX]

Anything else is window dressing and arguing over trivia. It's the core truth that is true or not, there is no grey for me whatsoever.

Agree.

And I will also say Christianity does not have copyright over good deeds, so when there happens to be an absence of bad ones, we tend to extol the virtues of 'Christianity' - utter tripe - those values existed a long time before the church and exist in 'good' people anyway. Being good has zero to do with Christianity.

That's not what I said, so . . . straw man argument?

What I said is that Christianity--and religion in general, I certainly think the same could be said of Buddhism--is that Christianity has inspired many people to do good. And it has. You say that "being good has zero to do with Christianity," but I can assure you that for some individual people it was Christianity that reformed their thinking. Only after an encounter with Christian teaching did they go from what society would call "bad" people to productive do-gooders. (Islam did the same for Malcolm X, by the way.)

If you are so angry and bitter toward religion that you can't acknowledge this then I don't know what to tell you.

 

[SPX]

Why Jesus is immoral.

Well nobody's perfect, LOL. . . That's obviously not what I personally find inspiring.

 

[Goggs Mackay]

SPX - I wasn't actually agreeing or disagreeing with your particular point. That is just I thought I've had on the matter for a long time and it seemed an opportune time to type it. I have said before that a good portion of my family are committed christians and they are most certainly the good type. Being a christian does not preclude good behaviour but nor does it guarantee it. In my opinion whether you are a christian or not has little to do with your day to day behaviour and christianity has no more claim on being 'good' than anything or anyone else. That was my point but I see how it could have looked as being a direct response to what you said.

 

[Digital Trickster]

 

[SPX]

SPX - I wasn't actually agreeing or disagreeing with your particular point. That is just I thought I've had on the matter for a long time and it seemed an opportune time to type it. I have said before that a good portion of my family are committed christians and they are most certainly the good type. Being a christian does not preclude good behaviour but nor does it guarantee it. In my opinion whether you are a christian or not has little to do with your day to day behaviour and christianity has no more claim on being 'good' than anything or anyone else. That was my point but I see how it could have looked as being a direct response to what you said.

Okay, thanks for the explanation. And I mostly agree. I don't think that Christianity has a magical power that makes people good.

What I do think is that philosophies in general have the ability to influence people. Whether its Christianity or Buddhism or nihilism or stoicism, sometimes the human mind runs up against an idea that resonates with it and has a concrete, transformational effect. I believe that, while many people have used religion for selfish purposes (Columbus and the settlers who followed him, for instance), it has also been a source for good for many people. And there are many people who are better members of society because of Christianity.

As for being a Christian having much to do with one's day to day behavior, I think that in most cases that's true. But I can tell you that when I was a Christian I would do all kinds of things I didn't really want to do, like pick up hitchhikers or other inconvenient (and occasionally dangerous) things, because the Bible told me that "he who knows the good he ought to do, and does not do it, sins."

Like you say, for a lot of people, goodness will come naturally. I'm not sure that's true for me personally, to be honest. I'm not sold on my own goodness. Sometimes I need a little poking and prodding. And even though I have left Christianity behind as far as literally believing in it, I do wonder sometimes if I would consider trying to do the right thing as important as I do today if I had never been indoctrinated. To be clear, it could've just as easily been some other religion or philosophy. But since I was born to the family that I was, for me it was Christianity.

 

[Goggs Mackay]

SPX - yes I can see your experience in many others. I suppose at the end of the day, if becoming a christian caused someone to change their life for the better and hopefully help others then anyone who had a problem with that is on their own. Whatever works.

For me I have trouble getting past the fact it was shoved down our throats at school without any debate whatsoever. In fact, if you spoke up you were seen as a troublemaker. And that is the way religions like it - make it so people don't question any of it. That is indoctrination and even if the outcome is good I still don't like it!

 

[SPX]

Well yeah. Trust me, I know. I never have any problems with Christians believing whatever they want to believe until they start wanting to regulate what I believe and how I act. So really, I'm mostly libertarian: Do whatever you want but don't step on someone else's toes in doing it. The problem with any religion that is evangelical though is that the adherents are pretty much commanded by God to go out and disturb others.

I can walk out my door, turn right, and see the Mormon temple about half a block from my apartment. And I am regularly interrupted in my daily activities by eager Mormons wanting to tell me about "the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." But I get why they do it. They were raised from the cradle to believe it's what they're SUPPOSED to do. So I'm pretty gentle in my rebuke.

I guess what I look for is intention. If the person BELIEVES they are doing right, then I actually consider it a victory in a way. As controversial as this may be, I was somewhat sympathetic toward the guys who flew planes into the Twin Towers. Why? Certainly not because I agreed with them. But I understood that within their own minds they believed that what they were doing was right. And I sometimes feel that we need more people who are willing to act radically to do the right thing, because there's a hell of a lot of sitting around and pontificating while injustices are being done all around the world.

(BTW, even though I sympathized with them, I would of course have gladly taken the 9/11 bombers and popped a cap in their ass. Popped a cap and then sincerely wished them a safe voyage into the afterlife.)

 

[Goggs Mackay]

I disagree a little in that the 9/11 terrorists were not doing what THEY thought was right but what SOMEONE ELSE told them what was right. They did no thinking of their own I'd wager.

 

[SPX]

Well I guess however you want to phrase it.

On that point, though, I think we are all under a number of influences that we aren't even aware of. I believe in striving for freedom of thought, but am also realistic that total freedom of thought is unachievable. We're all subject to a little bit of mind control.

 

[boomerang]

From a non-scholar's point of view, Christianity looks a lot like a kind of fall-back position on the part of a failed Roman empire. Weren't the first popes members of the Roman aristocracy? It would make sense as a way to maintain the social order using a combination of minimum physical force and psychology, as opposed to brute force alone.