Is All Religion Just Fiction?

[Graceful Leonard]

For all I support a person's right to their faith, I also agree that religion has no place in government. It doesn't serve the public interest and simply gives the corrupt a get-out clause when justifying their actions.

[Prydonian]

Like with all history books, there is some good and some not-so good things in ancient scripture which as been greatly exaggerated by modern men in their pursuit of being believed as the best evangelist of the day. I can accpet the Bible as the Word of God to some extent, but I also accept other historical sources for their value as well. It is the modern interpretations that I challenge. No offense to anybody on here, I am talking from my own personal life off-line experiences with modern religious leaders and their followers.

[Clara Listensprechen]

No problem as long as you give credit where credit's due...and all Bibles should give credit for the "Word of God" that got plagiarized by any Bible from preceding sources. Case in point: Noah's story is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and even the Epic wasn't original; it too is a derivative work on an earlier but similar story. Nothing in The Bible is original and its credit to previous pagan writings is long, long LONG overdue.

[Prydonian]

Well the modern Bible as we have it now WAS basically put togther by man around the 3rd or 4th centuries AD, so I am not that suprised by what you said. The way they tossed writings together while elminating others must have been spectacularly obsecene.

[Clara Listensprechen]

This was a necessity for the Roman Empire to engineer an acceptable form of state religion, and it was engineering that had been Roman modus operandus since Romulus killed Remus and thereafter conquered the Latins, and subsequently the Celts. Angels, demons and Islam's jinn all have Celtic roots, and the Celts were far more widespread than just in Western Europe--when Paul wrote to Gallatians, he was addressing Celts.

And yet Celtic history remains buried by Abrahamic accounts of European history.

Throughout my previous debates about Bibles I've encountered people who proclaimed that much of Christianity resembled ancient Egyptian mythology; others proclaimed a resemblance to Mithraism, Zoroasterism. In fact, the Gospel of Matthew proclaims that high priests of Magism were "wise men". Understanding the political significance of religion in the region reveals that there are elements of ALL of those religions with bits of Teutonic tossed in for good measure. It's no accident that we have a term "Greco-Roman" in terms of mythology because this occurred as a direct result of Rome PWNing Greece while doing the same sort of religion engineering.

Paul may have been claimed to be Jewish but he was from a Mithraic ruling family; there was a confederation of Mithraic kingdoms that was conquered by Rome a mere 80-ish years before the time of Christ (sandwiched between the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire), and Rome co-opted Mithraism in similar manner. Not Jewish--Mithraic. What's also true is that there has been no Jewish rule in the area since Alexander the Great, but we have the misbegotten Balfour Declaration from Britain as the result of the spoils of World War I (The Great War). If we're dedicated to the business of giving lands back to indigenous peoples then we should give America and Canada back to the Indians and Israel back to the Canaanites.

It's the nonsense of religion that is the root of atrocity. It can be argued that it doesn't cause atrocity, but it certainly gives permission for it as long as it's committed in the name of the lord.

Now, there is a collection of scripture that doesn't fit the 3rd-4th century characterization you've submitted, and that would be all the epistles of Paul. Those were written in the latter part of the first century and Paul was the initial hijacker of Christianity before Constantine was. But you can read the end of most of his epistles where he sends greetings to members of Rome's ruling class, and you can discover in Acts how the order of the epistles in The Bible isn't chronological, even though it attempts pretense at being sequential. The Gospel of John was written in the 2nd century. But if your 3rd-4th century was in reference to the Ecumenical Councils presided over by Constantine and his imperial successors, you're quite right. These councils met for the purpose of establishing what was to be adopted and what was to be thrown out, but not in a vacuum; there were the competing and very popular Arians which Rome sought to quash (nor did they vanish--they became referred to as Goths..Visi and Ostra...with their very own set of wars). There isn't a word of The Bible that isn't political, and it sometimes makes references to books that Constantine tossed out.

Not that King James Stuart was any better--he tossed out even more books.

[Prydonian]

Good Grief, I am way out of my depth here. I am nowhere as educated as you appear to be on the subject(s) at hand. I graciously bow out of the discussion now.

[Clara Listensprechen]

Oh dear. I didn't intend to drive anybody off. The history behind Christianity is one thing; how divorced the beliefs are from its actual history to the point of its evoking a fabricated history is something else.

People who are certain of beliefs alone should feel welcome to participate even if history isn't a strong suit.

Regardless of whatever your strong suit may or may not be, religion, via government, affects us all. As long as this remains the case, religion also remains everybody's political business.

[pattie anne]

dear all -

well, am over my stomach flu, (you know, the kind where you first wish you would die, then you think maybe you won't die, and then by the third day you are sore, but glad you didn't die) but i still can't see worth a darn, as my new glasses have failed to appear in my mail box. (at least, i don't think they are there.) anyWHO, i am not even reading my daily Bible verses, just listening to them, so of course any research is 'toadly' out of the question. but i will be back soon, coughing and sneezing all the way, but at least able to see properly to type. so glad to see out little discussion has continued, even without me.

later.

*******************************

dear clara -

i have read all or at least parts of the following translations/transliterations of the Bible, yet return to the KJV for my spiritual food:

NIV
Douay (which was where i first read the Apocrypha)
The Living Bible
New American Standard Bible
The Jesusalem Bible (which I really like)

and of course i continue to read many scholars Bible commentary, the likes of Matthew Henry, Scofield, Wesley, and others, not necessarily to agree with all of them, but so as i know better what i believe and why i believe.

i am just so very sad that it only took only two readings of anyone's scriptures that turned you ever from all of them, and sadder still sometimes it only takes the reading of ONE.

our pastor was sharing with us, just last week that he visited some folks who came to our services, then stopped. they said the reason that they wouldn't be returning was that he was just too confrontational. and he told us that he was sorry, but he was only repeating what the Bible said. and a lot of folks, especially today, don't like it when the pulpit says that we are all a bunch of sinners doomed to hell unless we do somethign about it. what they want to hear is hug puppy dogs and smell the roses and we will all go to heaven.

love,
pattie anne

PS: BTW i do not agree with all this "celebrating" of Osama Bin Laden's death, for as Proverbs 24:16-18 has said, to not gloat/rejoice the defeat of a foe, lest the Lord God turn His wrath from him. what has been done, has been done to destroy the evil that is among us. the rest is up to God.

p. a.

[tch]

Don't much like the idea of 'celebrating' myself, but he has been such a bogey man for so long, I can't say I'll miss Bin Laden, and I hope it gives some small bit of closure to anybody that lost someone on 9/11.

As somebody who thinks this is the only world we get, I don't lose much sleep when bad people are taken out of it.

[Prydonian]

Things would be utterly boring and repetitive if this is the only world we get. I do beleive in an afterlife where we will live with our Father in Heaven and His Son Jesus Christ. I think both are far more merciful than the Bible or other books of ancient and modern scripture would have us believe. I amy not be good at the history aspects of the Bible, as stated earlier, but I did learn a few things in my studies as a Mormon in the 1990s. When all else fails us in worldy religions, true spirituality can bring us closerto the being we call God. And we can know peace through his Son's sacrifice if we accept it as such.


Yes, Clara, the councils of those centuries is indeed what I was referring to. They are the uninspired scholars who took the many, many books and epistles of the Church and changed them or left them out entirely of what they called a canonised Bible. A shame as there is something to be had for reading both Testaments if one has an inquiring mind.