Cranakis @ Cranakis @lemmy.one

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19

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128

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yes. He's a former ADF lawyer, proper Christian nutjob. They say things like this. They believe this.

Where's the legislation? Dems would sign on in a heartbeat.

If someone has a better summary please feel free to post. I'm feeling apoplectic after watching the speaker role go to a Christian nutjob today and am frankly getting pretty depressed.

That was a chilling read that connected some dots for me. Thank you.

He doesn't deserve to be in government at all after his treason. Here he is 3rd from the presidency. Fuck this Christofascist.

I got volume 1 and 2 (old and new testament) in the mail the other day. The two of them together is a daunting 1200 pages. The content, so far, seems phenomenal. Asimov writes it as a study companion. Book by book, chapter by chapter, this appears to be his commentary on all of it. What he's learned about it that he believes is significant. I'll make a new post after I am enjoying his notes on Genesis so far.

But, by your argument, you do have enough evidence to rule out benevolence, no?

It was wild to me that none of the conservatives I know connected the dots. If the person is railing against the anti fascists...... what the fuck are they?

The religious blame the bad things on Satan, not God. Pretty convenient. God gets all of the credit an none of the blame. It's delusional.

Also, what rational argument suggests there is eternal pain and suffering? Some old Mediterranean folk lore twisted through time, with more Faust and Inferno (Dante) than scripture in the current belief? I don't see any reason to rationally believe there is eternal pain and suffering.

The simple obvious answer is that there is no God. If there is, I want no part of an afterlife with him.

"God is so moral that he doesn't need earthly morals" is an absolutely laughable justification. May God strike me dead before I click the "reply" button, if I'm wrong.

Totally agree. I appreciate Ehrman, both from a personal level and for his contributions. He's been really helpful to me in my late deconstruction and has been an inspiration for me to dig deeper and learn more.

Satan and Hell terrified me completely as a child. I was able to shake it but can still feel the scars. Too bad this is buried. I think further discussion on hell would be fun for me and beneficial for others here. Still willing to learn more about it all. I am pretty far past being afraid of the fictional version I was raised with but the concept of eternal torture hung me up for a long time during deconstruction (see my first post in this community for my overall view, boiled down).

I'm reading Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient world, on your suggestion. This seems like solid gold to answering my questions I posted. I appreciate the direction. I see there is a bunch to cover but this is doing a great job of getting me started.

It's a bit like reconstructing what a shredded document soaked in water until it's a giant ball of mush might have once said.

I'm starting to really understand that the more I read. Between secrecy of practice, what's been destroyed or hidden or removed on purpose, and the purposeful purging of information by the victors, there isn't much left to show. Hopefully archaeology will continue to give us new pieces to the puzzle.

For the scope of this community, I find that knowledge on this and other Biblical topics help me see Christianity for what it is; just another belief of people, created solely by people. I was heavily indoctrinated as a child and my deconstruction contained many struggles and moments of weakness when I questioned my questioning relentlessly. All of the indoctrinated guilt is built on a foundation of Biblical justification. Scholarly knowledge of the Bible, the time period in which it was written, and the people that wrote it has been the only effective medicine for me, long term, to loosen the hold those childhood lessons held over me.

Specifically to the topic of this post; If the concept of salvation predates Jesus by centuries and the Biblical "path to salvation" is just a new iteration of the soteria from Greek initiation rituals, how can any of it (Christianity or the Bible) be true? There's no more weight to salvation and by extension, no heaven or hell. Nothing worth fearing. Nothing worth believing.

Thank you. Good information and I grabbed that book and will read it. I had a feeling kromem@lemmy.world would show up holding the lantern 😊

If Moses was a priest of Osiris, then was the concept of salvation baked into Judaism of the time? I'm specifically interested in the concept of "being saved" through initiation and how it evolved into the rituals of modern Christianity.

I'm reading deeper into that link I posted.

The followers of Dionysos derived many of their eschatological beliefs and ritual prescriptions from Orphic literature, a corpus of theogonic poems and hymns. The mythical Thracian poet Orpheus, the archetypical musician, theologian, and mystagogue, was credited with the introduction of the mysteries into the Greek world. According to myth, Orpheus’ reclusion that followed his unsuccessful attempt to bring back his wife Eurydice from the Underworld or, alternatively, his invention of homosexuality brought about the tragic, violent death he suffered at the hands of Thracian women.

It's getting juicy. (I know I'm a nerd).

Bacchic-Orphic beliefs and practices: itinerant religion specialists and purveyors of secret knowledge, called orpheotelestai, performed the teletai, private rites for the remission of sins. For the Orphics, Dionysos was a savior god with redeeming qualities.

Sounding familiar.

From the Titans’ ashes the human race was born, burdened by the horrific inheritance of an “original sin.”

Then from the Kybele, cult:

Known among the Greeks as Kybele, or Great Mother of the Gods...Ritual purity was a prerequisite of initiation into the ecstatic cult of the Mother. Her priests, the Korybantes, and followers worshipped her with wild, loud music produced by cymbals (13.225.5a,b) and frenzied dancing, which, like the revels in honor of Dionysos, carried the participants despite and beyond themselves.

I recognize dogma and ritual I grew up with mixed in here.

"Part of God's plan" is their coping mechanism.

I don't understand how the religious don't take the next logical step of concluding: "Then God is a fucking bastard and the plan is sadistic."

Oh yeah. The two-source hypothesis. The deeper you get into reading on Biblical sources, the more you read about multiple authors on many sources. There is also the issue of the early works being hand copied by the religious. If you are the only scribe and you personally disagree with whatever you are copying that day, you can change it by leaving a bit out or adding a bit to "clarify." As archeologists continue to discover newer and older versions of various books, that becomes clearer and clearer.

And as you point out, once you rule out the Bible as any kind of divine work that has survived the ages (not divine and literally not the same text now as it was when any of it was written), what is left to justify any of Christianity?

I suspected it was Christianity that killed it, using the power of Rome. There have been similar knowledge purges in other religions/cultures also. Pretty frequent. It's this general idea that makes me resent religions and the religious. It was when I started to realize how much religion held society back from progress, and how much it stifled individual freedoms and personal agency that I began to get a bit bitter against it.

I really enjoyed everything you wrote on this post. I'd invite you to make some posts of your own in this community too. I always want to learn more and you sound like you've gone down some rabbit holes.

I shamefully haven't read it. I only realized it existed a few years ago. Thanks for the reminder. I just ordered a used copy online. I'll report back. Asimov was a genius so I'm incredibly interested to hear his take.

Holy shit. That's crazy! It sounds like that they had evolution figured out more than halfway, thousands of years before Darwin. I'm reading more now but others won't and I admit ignorance here. What happened that kept this idea from continuing to grow?