No Stupid Questions

Doesn't the old testament acknowledge the existence of the other gods of the region? The Hebrew's god tells them not to worship the other gods but only him. They're not presented as false gods, more as opponents.

This is one of the silliest quotes because we know that the ancient pagans often viewed one another's gods as correspondent - "Thor is their Zeus," etc.

And then you have the problem of henotheism where there is potentially a single god with many avatars and a pantheon of lesser spiritual beings... And you start to realize, "Wait, if the Vasihnavites, Shiavites, etc. are really just saying that there is a an arch deity over everything with many avatars in the form of lesser gods that he wears the masks of, plus lesser deities that can't defy him and act as angels and demons...

"... What is a God, really? Aren't they nearly monotheists..?"

What is a God.

Plus there's the very classic position of the Jews and the Chrsitians - the gods of gentiles are demons.

Christianity does not become a religion that denies other gods, but one that claims other gods are misidentified.

Throw in some liberalism and yuo can even have Christians arguing that the worship directed as Vishnu by devoted Hindus who lead ethical lives and strive to be great manifestations of goodness & virtue for the sake of God's love is not the worship of demons, at all, but rather, an attempt to reach our God through their own traditions that may even be guided in some form by the Holy Spirit...

So, IDK, IDK to what extent anyone is denying other people's gods and its relevance to religion today.

Congratulations! Remember to have extra diapers available at all times.

The very earliest stuff obviously doesn't have that, and we rely on church history because it wasn't like even the most interesting thing a Roman governor did that week to kill some random churchmen who created conflict among Jews, nor do we have much preserved about mobs killing these guys other than in the original Christian communal sources.

But really, if you start from the premise that everything Christians ever write about thesmelves is pure propaganda without an iota of truth in it, that creates a non-serious standard with which to evaluate things.

Is it really absurd to think that Protomartyr Stephen was killed by a mob of Jews for preaching a radically different religion to them in a time of great political upheaval? Isn't this exactly what we think of Christians at later times - that they'd just turn on a guy and kill him for being a heretic? Why is it so unbelievable that it once happened to a Christian? Why is it so troublesome that the only people who bothered to write about these martyrs and preserve their memory were the people who were victims in the course of this?

Obviously, you can say that it's propaganda and lies, and maybe some of it was. But we know it's absolutely historic that Christians wre officially persecuted later on. it is also par for the course that they would be less formally persecuted prior to that. it also amkes sense that Christians, like every other group, try to preserve a communal memory.

I am not saying you have to believe the corpus of text as 100% factual and become a Christian right now, but I am suggesting that people believing the text isn't absurd... Moreover, I would suggest that it tends to prove that Jesus Christ was real...

The text itself asserts

• Times & places where he was; actual historic figures; a trial and a death, all of a single person.
• Claims he drew large crowds, healed people, had some publicly known altercations with local religious authorities.
• Claims that other people died in very public events (Stephen the Martyr in Acts) and that actual meetings were convened to decide what to do about it with the head Jewish rabbi at the time (Gamaliel)
• Records his teachings in ways that sometimes kind of conflict with one another in terms of phrasing, and also records different details about events that could be mutually contradictory...

Which all implies that the synoptic Gospels and Acts were very opened to being fact checked by their contemporaries and future generations by trying to place themselves in history, and that the texts were not designed by a cabal of conspirators who wanted to deceive people and come up with the perfect story because the story they made was hardly written by committee - it has things we'd see as imperfections & errors.

Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth

The Telephone game is designed to show you how private rumors occur.

The four Gospels are all the accounts of eyewitnesses to these events that were then recorded by their own hand or by their assistant's hand, and preserved within the church. Of course, some speculate that they were forged later, but there's a very long, complicated argument that involves the earliness of the spread of the knowledge of the Gospels and how well they were independently preserved in faraway locations from France to Egypt that indicate that they likely were completed shortly after Christ's death.

It's also the case that Christianity was a proselytizing faith, right, so immediately there are operations which send missionaries into the world to spread the news... By all means, deny the miracles and the story, but it seems likely that there was consensus about what had happened before the missionaries departed, which allowed for there to be the preservation of the Gospels and what would later constitute the New Testament.

There's not a good argument to be made that these guys were just spreading nonsense and spitballing it as they go - the story was straight before they were leaving Jerusalem, or else the four Gospels and the subsequent apostolic letters would not have been something they could have ever all agreed upon.

Almost all of the Christian folklore surrounding Jesus can be directly tied to other myths that were common knowledge to Mediterranean people at the time.

Yeah I got the Mithra chainmail in my AOL account back in 1998 - I know the arguments.

But Christianity presents us with something very wild - it takes the Messianic tradition of Jews which was hitherto interpreted as being about creating an earthly Kingdom that conquers the world and incorporates the gentiles into Israel (or makes the gentiles servants of Israel, who all become noblemen living in a heaven on earth, some interpretations)... and Christ says

"Yeah, but no - the Kingdom is purely spiritual. It's not temporal. The gentiles join us by worshiping God with us and living these truths - look, this Roman occupier has more faith than all Israel, because you guys are just terrible. You bicker over the law, and miss the total point of the law..."

And the Messiah is now about conquering the world through spreading the Gospel of loving God, and loving your neighbor as yourself, giving up your possessions and conquering greed, freeing yourself from hypocrisy; living in simplicity and supreme virtue, at peace with those around you, practicing non-violence, and now we don't even need any kind of ceremonial laws at all because we are living the virtues. And that's how the world becomes part of Israel - by adopting the great things abotu our religion - and that's also how you get to heaven, which is only achievable after death when I come again...

This is a very unique interpretation of the Judaism of the time - absolutely revolutionary.

Even if you want to say that all the miracles and 'signs' are a myth, I think that the "Mithra" angle is actually bad beacuse you could just say they came up with those signs and added them so as to be able to claim they are fulfilling the Old Testament, which was infinitely more relevant to the Jews who were the community that gave birth to the religion.

Keep the faith, by all means. But part of believing is accepting that you don’t get to have proof.

Yeah I agree - there is no proof, and if there was proof, it would ruin it, because we'd no longer be doing good and loving God and our neighbor because it is right, but we would be doing it with the expectation of receiving heaven...

We would no longer be living a spiritual life for the good of oruselves and others - in hope & faith - but we would be Capitalists engaging in transactions that we deemed profitable.

Source?