tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post5186335872311311952..comments2024-02-13T12:50:30.457-05:00Comments on Rants Within the Undead God: Scientology, Christianity, and the Persistence of CultsBenjamin Cainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-15482863656295958382018-01-01T15:12:34.917-05:002018-01-01T15:12:34.917-05:00The bigger question: Is conservative, traditional...The bigger question: Is conservative, traditional Christianity itself a cult?<br /><br />https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/why-do-i-describe-conservative-christianity-as-a-cult/Garyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02519721717265344702noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-81342641790138120972017-12-09T14:44:37.429-05:002017-12-09T14:44:37.429-05:00Of course, we can receive plenty of answers, but I...Of course, we can receive plenty of answers, but I think you mean we can't confirm which if any is true. I suspect that the yearning for big answers is part of the irrationality that makes us fall for cons and easy answers. In "Reason, Attitude, and Ultimate Answers" I suggest that there's incoherence in the very notion of a perfectly complete explanation. I've also argued that the correspondence notion of truth that would be involved in these big answers is likewise suspect. <br /><br />Still, I've attempted to work out some big answers on this blog, which many won't find appealing if they deem them plausible. My aesthetic, cosmicist pantheism as an interpretation of philosophical naturalism follows up on pragmatic science and is based more on misanthropic faith than on any objective or factual demonstration. But that's what I think we're left with at the tail end of the Age of Reason. <br /><br />http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2017/12/reason-attitude-and-ultimate-reality.htmlBenjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-67245765452537088272017-12-04T14:48:41.516-05:002017-12-04T14:48:41.516-05:00People want to believe. The fact that we yearn for...People want to believe. The fact that we yearn for but can't receive answers to The Big Questions in this life means that most people can be swayed by magical thinking and charismatic personalities. Or; if you've seen one body thetan, you've seen 'em all.Mongo, At The Momenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00973606827337262084noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-79209631647049299362017-11-26T19:06:08.060-05:002017-11-26T19:06:08.060-05:00You might like this book Ben.
https://www.questia...You might like this book Ben.<br /><br />https://www.questia.com/library/94826627/posthistoric-man-an-inquiry<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-57708071084556712452017-11-25T13:50:06.553-05:002017-11-25T13:50:06.553-05:00Anon, from what I understand, the ancient Jews wer...Anon, from what I understand, the ancient Jews were divided on whether they believed in physical resurrection of the dead. The Pharisees and the Essenes believed the body would rise, while the Sadducees didn't. The idea of dying and rising gods does go back to the importance of the changing seasons and cycles of vegetation and of stellar motions. <br /><br />Hippolytus, the 2nd century theologian, says about the Essenes, '"Particularly firm is their doctrine of Resurrection; they believe that the flesh will rise again and then be immortal like the soul, which, they say, when separated from the body, enters a place of fragrant air and radiant light, there to enjoy rest—a place called by the Greeks who heard [of this doctrine] the 'Isles of the Blest.' But," continues the writer, in a passage characteristically omitted by Josephus, "there are other doctrines besides, which many Greeks have appropriated and given out as their own opinions. For their disciplinary life [ἄσκησις] in connection with the things divine is of greater antiquity than that of any other nation, so that it can be shown that all those who made assertions concerning God and Creation derived their principles from no other source than the Jewish legislation.'<br /><br />Judaism isn't as old or as original as this pro-Jewish writer seems to think, but perhaps Paul got his ideas about resurrection from Judaism. In fact, the strictness of Jesus's ethics likely also derives from the Essenes.<br /><br />http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12697-resurrection<br /><br />http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5867-essenes#anchor20Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-19580609010002397262017-11-25T12:23:47.600-05:002017-11-25T12:23:47.600-05:00Certainly, the basic idea of a Jewish healer and r...Certainly, the basic idea of a Jewish healer and revolutionary who was executed for political reasons by the Roman Empire is plausible. Jesus could have existed to that extent. His followers then would have searched their scriptures to find meaning in his tragic death. So they might have found Isaiah's passage on the suffering servant, and interpreted his death as sacrificial and as a further sign he was the messiah. The details of his career as a miracle worker could have been taken from the stories of Elisha, as Robert Price points out.<br /><br />It's also plausible to think the story of the life of such a person could have been invented for the purpose of teaching spiritual lessons, especially since we know the gospels weren't eyewitness reports and only two of them were independent of each other (Mark and John, John being likely late and based on hearsay, and Matthew and Luke likely depending on Mark). Jesus' life corresponds to the essence of the Gnostic Hymn of the Pearl: a transcendent, spiritually elevated soul is born into the prison of a lower world, symbolized by the Roman Empire and by spiritually blind Jews (Pharisees), and by the Egyptian Empire in the Gnostic hymn; this hero needs to recognize he doesn't belong there and must learn how to escape and return to his true home (a dove or the spirit of God tells Jesus when he’s baptized that he’s actually the Son of God); Jesus is executed by the archons or rulers of the lower realm (as Paul even says), but his true form and stature are revealed as he's resurrected and he ascends to heaven. So the essence of the historical narrative is also suspicious for how well it serves as an allegory and as a vehicle for the Platonic sort of teaching taught by the Greek Mysteries and by Gnostics.<br /><br />Certainly the question of whether miracles actually occurred in the ancient world, including Jesus' resurrection is interesting. But I also think it's worthwhile to wonder whether Christianity is founded on a monumental error and whether this is all tremendously ironic for the reasons I lay out in my above response to Harry Hamid's comment. If most Christians have only gotten as far as the Lesser Mysteries, because Christianity as a whole forgot about its true purpose, which is to teach the Greater, psychological and mystical secrets, to reveal the deeper meaning of its metaphor in the character Jesus, that is first and foremost hilarious. But it’s also a tragic lesson that applies to many other fields. This is why I talk a lot on my blog about this split between esoteric and exoteric, insider and outsider, enlightenment and ignorance.<br />Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-63743645992195709372017-11-25T11:58:30.291-05:002017-11-25T11:58:30.291-05:00There were numerous other people who supposedly &q...There were numerous other people who supposedly "rose from the dead" in the bible. The entire story of being "risen" is taken from ancient sun worshipers. The sun was thought to "die" and then "rise" from the dead. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-24402485650260810602017-11-25T11:57:54.385-05:002017-11-25T11:57:54.385-05:00That's right: the older some event is, the mor...That's right: the older some event is, the more muddled the evidence for it. Only if the event happens on a huge scale, as in a war or the collapse of an empire do we have all kinds of evidence pointing in the same general direction. But at the micro level, if we're dealing with what happened to a particular individual who wasn't a king or an emperor and who didn't write anything himself and who may not even have existed, because the stories about him are fantastical, the evidence is bound to point in different directions, assuming there's any good evidence for him at all. So questions of ancient history at that level tend not to be answered with much certainty, because the evidence is likely mixed and complicated. <br /><br />Another good example would be the Cargo cult.<br /><br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cultBenjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-14482692583042648082017-11-25T11:48:16.124-05:002017-11-25T11:48:16.124-05:00The number of early Christian martyrs who died for...The number of early Christian martyrs who died for their belief in the resurrection has been exaggerated. See Carrier’s articles at the addresses below. Carrier says, ‘None of the Gospels or Epistles mention anyone dying for their belief in the "physical" resurrection of Jesus. The only martyrdoms recorded in the New Testament are, first, the stoning of Stephen in the Book of Acts. But Stephen was not a witness. He was a later convert. So if he died for anything, he died for hearsay alone…The second and only other "martyr" recorded in Acts is the execution of the Apostle James, but we are not told anything about why he was killed or whether recanting would have saved him, or what he thought he died for…Yet that is the last record of any martyrdom we have until the 2nd century. Then we start to hear about some unnamed Christians burned for arson by Nero in 64 A.D., but we do not know if any eye-witnesses were included in that group--and even if we did it would not matter, for they were killed on a false charge of arson, not for refusing to deny belief in a physical resurrection.’<br /><br />In any case, it’s certainly possible to die for a mistaken or delusional belief. Many Scientologists suffer for their faith, because they’re treated like garbage by the tyrants who run their cult, and the same is true of every cult. The Manson family killed and died for their leader. And we don’t know what went through the minds of the early Christians who suffered or died for their faith. The religious reasons for doing so could easily have combined with political ones, just as they likely do for the Islamist terrorists who currently sacrifice themselves in killing those they deem non-Muslim oppressors. <br /><br />The bottom line for me is that there aren’t compelling reasons that I can see for thinking there was a historical Jesus. If there were some historical truth underlying Christianity, it was buried by so many myths and borrowings from the Old Testament and from pagan religions that the historical Jesus doesn’t really matter, as Robert Price points out.<br /><br />https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html<br /><br />https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/9978<br />Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-18800755166558595502017-11-25T11:47:53.457-05:002017-11-25T11:47:53.457-05:00As to how a Christian myth could have become liter...As to how a Christian myth could have become literalized, Freke and Gandy have an interesting theory. Some of the details of their account may not work out, but their main idea is powerful and simple: Christianity worked as a Jewish version of the Greek Mystery rites, such as those at Eleusis. As their name implies, these Mystery religions were highly protective of their secrets, so they had Lesser and Greater teachings, depending on how spiritually advanced were the disciples. This idea makes it into the New Testament, when Jesus speaks in parables and says "He who has ears, let him ear." <br /><br />The innermost secrets weren't written down, so we still don't know exactly what they were. According to Thomas Taylor, the early English translator of Aristotle and Plato, "the dramatic shows of the Lesser Mysteries occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in subjection to the body, so those of the Greater obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual [spiritual] vision." <br /><br />Notice that the Platonic feel of those secrets is more consistent with Gnosticism (the heavily dualistic and anti-natural heresies) than with literalistic, "Catholic" Christianity. Notice also that Jesus’ crucifixion could have conformed to the Lesser Mysteries, while the vision of his resurrected form, in the Gospel narrative, would have hinted at the Greater ones. So if Jews had the idea of incorporating that Greek model of teaching some mystical secrets, they could have used the narrative of Jesus' life as an "occult sign" of the deeper secrets, and thus as a test to determine whether the member was ready for the fuller revelation. If the disciple got hung up on the literal, materialistic plane, as it were, and only wanted to worship the character Jesus, as opposed to seeing the character as symbolic of the deeper, psychological truth, that everyone has Christlike potential, this literalistic follower wouldn't have been deemed worthy of receiving advanced study. This is in fact how the Gnostics responded to the Catholics, and they viewed Paul as more or less Gnostic precisely because he didn’t dwell on the historical Jesus, unlike the Gospel authors.<br /><br />So you’d have these two layers of teachings, but because they were aimed at the lowly masses (the sinners whom Jesus said he came to save) who weren’t intellectually prepared for the higher meanings (unlike, say, Plato, who went through all the Eleusinian Mysteries), the more mystical and metaphorical teachings would have eventually been forgotten, because the masses glommed onto the entertaining narrative, onto the outer, lesser teachings about the life of Jesus. The narrative of his life and crucifixion could have been mistaken as historical, because the masses weren’t spiritually prepared for greater wisdom; they didn’t want to recognize their potential for ethical advancement, but only wanted to worship a savior who would do all the spiritual work for them. Thus, the Lesser Jewish/Christian Mysteries could eventually have been taken to be the whole of official Christianity, and the Greater Mysteries that were preserved by the Gnostics would have been banned as heretical by the Catholic Church that was more interested in controlling the masses than in enlightening them.<br />Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-18004707056400591042017-11-25T11:47:34.192-05:002017-11-25T11:47:34.192-05:00Apparently, Scientology keeps Hubbard's earlie...Apparently, Scientology keeps Hubbard's earlier involvement in the occult a secret from its members. But yeah, that must have been where he learned about some ancient religions and how to control people by creating a cult.<br /><br />The counterexample of Scientology doesn't support Jesus mythicism, since we know Hubbard lived. But I've read a number of the Jesus mythicists (Carrier, Doherty, Price), and I tend to think it's slightly more likely than not that there was no historical Jesus. There is no knock-down argument for his historicity. For example, the best pieces of textual evidence are flawed. The Josephus passage has been obviously tampered with by Christian copyists, and Paul hardly refers at all to the historical Jesus, even when he should have done so to support his arguments. He talks about “the brother of the Lord,” but not the “brother of Jesus,” and early Christians called each other brothers and sisters, which is partly why pagans thought they were incestuous. Most New Testament scholars believe Jesus was historical, but then again most such scholars are Christian, so their judgment doesn’t tell us much. The study of history is hardly a hard science. <br /><br />As to the timing of the rise of Christianity, of course it begs the question to speak of its rise so soon after Jesus’ death if there was no such historical founder. Romans were crucifying Jewish troublemakers all the time back then, so a story about a deified Jew who was crucified could have taken off any time before the Jewish uprising in 70 CE. <br /><br />Burton Mack shows that there weren't simply "early Christians" but a patchwork of communities that were eventually woven together to become a more unified Christianity. There were Gnostics (with the Gospel of John), Jewish Christians under James (with the Gospel of Matthew), pagan Christians under Paul, perhaps the Qumran sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls (according to Eisenman's intriguing theory). I don't recall exactly how Mack carves up the different communities, but the point is that there were numerous independent movements at that time that were more or less Jewish or pagan or that synthesized those religions to different degrees, and some of those movements began earlier than others. Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-82482782361090645192017-11-25T08:50:54.022-05:002017-11-25T08:50:54.022-05:00I suspect the governments of the time crucified a ...I suspect the governments of the time crucified a lot of seditious hotheads. Some guy named Jesus might have been one of them. After all getting put to death isn't the trick, rising from the dead is. The question of whether Jesus, considered as just another carpenter/seditious hothead existed isn't all that interesting. Whether this particular crucified seditious hothead rose from the dead is. The evidence gap between seditious hothead and Son of the Living God is still as wide as it ever was.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16294031118801500497noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-91459638338767680712017-11-25T08:31:04.489-05:002017-11-25T08:31:04.489-05:00Mormonism is another good example. We know for an ...Mormonism is another good example. We know for an absolute fact that it was a sham from the beginning. Judaism and Christianity are so old, it's difficult to prove to people that they are also a sham. Archeological evidence disproves many Old Testament claims, but people still believe. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-71572741708453781712017-11-24T16:51:56.600-05:002017-11-24T16:51:56.600-05:00I had never read much about Hubbard (and still hav...I had never read much about Hubbard (and still haven't, really), but I read a biography on Jack Whitehead Parsons (the inventor of jet fuel, basically) last year. Hubbard hung out in that same circle of sci fi writers and occultists and eventually stole Parsons' wife and money.<br /><br />Anyway, the argument against Christianity you counter here IS one that I've used to rationalize at least the existence of Jesus as an historical figure. Although the rise of Christianity so soon after Christ's death doesn't validate the Gospels, it would seem to at least provide evidence that he existed, which is really an open question so far as other evidence is concerned.<br /><br />That first generation of martyrs (outside of Paul, of course) might have been wrong about him, but at least they ought to have been right about his existence... right?Harry Hamidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13176265571549991218noreply@blogger.com