Originally posted by DoctorScribblesIf you were a believer, you'd have your handy-dandy Secret Decoder Ring and be immune to the Prince of Darkness' deceptions.
The great deceiver is a genie that ought never be let out of the bottle. What makes you think that he hasn't simply deceived you into thinking that he has deceived me, in which case it would be you who has fallen for his tricks.
Originally posted by checkbaiterI don't follow. You said: "I think the reasons are that the myths try to copy the bible stories in order to make the bible less relevent."
The events could be copied.
You said the Bible stories, not the events, were copied, in order to make the Bible, not the events, less relevant.
Is is logically possible for currently unwritten stories to be copied and made less relevant?
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Originally posted by DoctorScribblesThe events such as creation, etc. were first passed down by word of mouth.
I don't follow. You said: "I think the reasons are that the myths try to copy the bible stories in order to make the bible less relevent."
You said the Bible stories, not the events, were copied, in order to make the Bible, not the events, less relevant.
Is is logically possible for currently unwritten stories to be copied and made less relevant?
The "spoken Word of God" was later written. When I said bible stories I meant the spoken word, or events passed down. Sorry, I should have been more clear. Poor choice of words on my part.
What I meant by counterfeit is ...
God / Satan ....Son of God / anti christ....healing / satanic healing....etc.
For practically everything God does, there is usually a counterfeit.
Flood / some flood myth....
Originally posted by FreakyKBHFreaky: "With respect to certain elements of mythology and similar stories found within the Bible, does the presence of like-stories negate the Bible?"
With respect to certain elements of mythology and similar stories found within the Bible, does the presence of like-stories negate the Bible?
What other possibilities are there to explain the presence of the similarities?
Of course not.
Freaky: "What other possibilities are there to explain the presence of the similarities?
It is a bit too simple and too convenient to use the simularities between certain ancient stories to "negate the Bible". These attempts of "rebuttal" are first of all ideological reasonings in "scientific" disguise. These scholars, ideologues of course, start with the implicite assumption "The Bible Must Be Bunk" and start reasoning from there.
Why would the fact that the different Middle Eastern cultures influenced eachother prove that "The Bible is Bunk ? Even the fact some culture was first in writing a story down doesn't prove this assumption is true. The fact that the same stories can be found in more cultures, for instance the "flood" story, could be seen as a reason to accept that there is indeed a certain historic truth in it, or that a certain truth is hidden in it, disguised as it were. It could be these Flood stories refer to the same historic event, a natural disaster that took place experienced by different civilisations, handed down through means of verbal history telling and later by passing it on by writing the story down. The fact that some cultures wrote it down later than others does not mean that they "borrowed" the story from others. Nor does the fact that the stories apparently influenced eachother prove that they are "borrowed". Even if they copied a written story from a nearby civilisation does not prove that they "borrowed" it. A reasonable explanation in the latter case could be that they found this written version representative of their own verbal history telling and that could be the reason they copied it.
An explanation could be that these flood stories are the records of early civilisations of different floods, taking place in different areas and different times.
Yet another explanation could be that the Flood stories refer to a cultural event taking place, a cultural event, a cultural disaster, that took place many many times in human history, namely the dissappearance of a human civilisation and the survival of the remaining small group of humans and their animals.
The fact that there are simularities for instance between the Mythras myth and the history told about the historic Jesus also does not prove the Bible is Bunk. The fact that there are simularities between Egyptian religion and the Biblical religion cannot be used against the Bible either. Also the fact that bread and whine is universal can hardly be used against the veracity of Jesus having the last supper. The fact that sacrifice is a universal cultural tradition cannot be used against the Bible either.
The symbolist language used in Middle Eastern stories and myths and stories and myths originated elsewhere is the same as is being used in telling the story of God's actual, historic and final Revelation, because that is the universal language people spoke and understood and hopefully are able to speak and understand now. All the myths ànd the stories of actual history telling have certain aspects in common. The cultural, historic and symbolic aspects are there in the same way as sacrifices, living animal bodies and living human bodies created by God or the gods, are present and in the same way sacrifices produced by men, living bread and whine, are present. Never, as far as I know, something considered dead, is taken in the important cultures to be sacrificed to God or the gods. In sacrifices life is being sent to where it came from, to God or the gods and not just in ritual sacrifices but also in others, like the sacrifices on the battlefield or the sacrifice of "sacrificing yourself".
All the Myths are telling a "true" story while concealing a certain truth, while the Gospels are telling a true history using the same universal human cultural language the myths are using and at the same time revealing the truth what the myths are concealing. This is THE big difference between the myths and the Gospels. What this truth is can be found if we study the many layered Gospels.
I posted the following link earlier but the subject keeps coming back so here goes:
"Are the Gospels mythical."
http://print.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9604/articles/girard.html
Who is René Girard ?
http://theol.uibk.ac.at/cover/girard.html
René Girard, a French scholar living and working in the United States, explains this truth, concealed by the myths and revealed by the Gospels, by using his "Theory of Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry" and the "Theory of the Scapegoatmechanism".
Can somebody try and read the universal language used in the theme of the "virgin birth" ?
I tried but I didn't come far. I need some help.
I hope you guys won't consider this post to be off-topic. I posted it in order to be able to understand more about René Girard and his ideas.
http://theol.uibk.ac.at/cover/girard_le_monde_interview.html
René Girard,
philosopher and anthropologist
"What Is Occurring Today Is a Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale."
An Interview by Henri Tincq,
LE MONDE, November 6, 2001
Translated for COV&R by Jim Williams
Can your theory of "mimetic rivalry" be applied to the current international crisis?
The error is always to reason within categories of "difference" when the root of all conflicts is rather "competition," mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be. No doubt terrorism is bound to a world "different" from ours, but what gives rise to terrorism does not lie in that "difference" that removes it further from us and makes it inconceivable to us. To the contrary, it lies in an exacerbated desire for convergence and resemblance. Human relations are essentially relations of imitation, of rivalry.
What is experienced now is a form of mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale. When I read the first documents of Bin Laden and verified his allusions to the American bombing of Japan, I felt at first that I was in a dimension that transcends Islam, a dimension of the entire planet. Under the label of Islam we find a will to rally and mobilize an entire third world of those frustrated and of victims in their relations of mimetic rivalry with the West. But the towers destroyed had as many foreigners as Americans. By their effectiveness, by the sophistication of the means employed, by the knowledge that they had of the United States, by their training, were not the authors of the attack at least somewhat American? Here we are in the middle of mimetic contagion.
"Far from turning away from the West," you write in your latest book,*"they cannot avoid imitating it and adopting its values, even if they don't avow it, and they are also consumed like us by the desire for individual and collective success." Should we understand then that the "enemies" of the West make the United States the model of their aspirations, even while feeling the need to slay it?
This sentiment is not true of the masses, but of the ruling classes. At the level of personal fortune a man like Bin Laden has nothing to envy of anyone. And how many party or faction leaders are in this intermediary situation, identical to his. Look at a Mirabeau at the beginning of the French Revolution: he has one foot in one camp and one foot in the other, and what did he do but live out his resentment in even more bitter fashion. In the US some immigrants become integrated easily, while others, even if their success is dazzling, live in a permanent anguish and resentment. This is because they hark back to their childhood, to frustrations and humiliations inherited from the past. This is particularly true of the Muslims, who have traditions of pride and a style of individual relations closer to feudalism.
But the Americans must have been the least astonished by what happened, since they live constantly in rivalistic relations.
America indeed embodies these mimetic relations of rivalry. The ideology of free enterprise makes of them an absolute solution. Effective, but explosive. These competitive relations are excellent if you come out of it as the winner, but if the winners are always the same then, one day or the other, the losers overturn the game table. This mimetic rivalry, when it turns out badly, always results eventually in some form of violence. In this regard, it's Islam that now provides the cement that we formerly found in Marxism. "We will bury you," Khrushchev said to the Americans. ..Bin Laden, is more troubling than Marxism, in which we recognize a concept of material well-being, prosperity, and an ideal of success not so far removed from what is lived out in the West.
What do you think of the fascination for sacrifice of the kamikazes of Islam? If Christianity is the sacrifice of the innocent victim, would you go as far to say that Islam is the permission to offer sacrifice and Islam is a sacrificial religion, in which one finds also that notion of "model" which is at the heart of your mimetic theory?
Islam maintains a relation to death that convinces me that this religion has nothing to do with archaic myths. A relation to death that, from a certain point of view, is more positive than what we observe in Christianity. I think of the agony of Christ: "My God, why have you abandoned me?" And: "May this cup be removed from me." The mystical relation of Islam with death makes it even more mysterious to us. At first, Americans took these Muslim kamikazes for "cowards," but, very quickly, they began to see them differently. The mystery of their suicide thickens the mystery of their terrorist act.
Yes, Islam is a religion of sacrifice in which we find also the theory of mimetic rivalry and the model. The candidates for the act of suicide are not lacking when terrorism seems to fail. Imagine, then, what is happening now when – if I dare say – it has succeeded. It is evident that in the Muslim world, the kamikaze terrorists embody models of saintliness.
The martyrs of faith in Christ are also, according to the Church Fathers, the "seeds" of Christianity...
Yes, but in Christianity the martyr does not die in order to be copied. The Christian can be moved to pity over him, but he does not desire to die like him. He is suspicious of it, even. The martyr is for Christians a model to accompany them but not a model for throwing oneself into the fire with him. In Islam it's different. You die as a martyr in order to be copied and thus manifest a project of transforming the world politically. Applied to the beginning of the 21st century, a model like this leaves me aghast. Does it really belong to Islam? One refers often to the sect of the "assassins" of the Middle Ages who killed themselves after having inflicted death on the infidels, but I am not able to understand this act, still less to analyse it. It must only be verified.
Would you go so far as to say that the dominant figure of Islam is the warrior and in Christianity it is the innocent victim, and that this irreducible difference condemns any attempt at understanding between these two monotheisms?
What strikes me in the history of Islam is the rapidity of its expansion. It was the most extraordinary military conquest of all times. The barbarians dissolved into the societies they had conquered, but Islam did not and it converted two-thirds of the Mediterranean world. It is not therefore an archaic myth as has been said. I would even go so far as to say that it is a resumption – rationalist, from certain points of view – of what happened in Christianity, a sort of Protestantism before its time. In the Muslim faith, there is an aspect that is simple, raw, and practical that has facilitated its spread and transformed the life of a great number of peoples in a tribal state in opening them to Jewish monotheism as modified by Christianity. But it lacks the essential thing in Christianity: the cross. Like Christianity, Islam rehabilitates the innocent victim, but it does this in a militant manner. The cross is the contrary, it is the end of the violent and archaic myths.
But aren't the monotheisms the bearers of a structural violence because they gave birth to an idea of unique Truth, excluding any competing expression?
One can always interpret the monotheisms as sacrificial archaisms, but the texts don't prove that they are such. It's said that the Psalms of the Bible are violent, but who speak up in the psalms if not the victims of the violence of the myths: "The bulls of Balaam encircle me and are about to lynch me"? The Psalms are like a magnificent lining on the outside, but when turned inside out they show a bloody skin. They are typical of the violence that weighs on humans and on the refuge that they find in their God.
Our intellectual fashions don't want to see anything but violence in these texts, but where does the danger really come from? Today, we live in a dangerous world where all the mob movements are violent. This crowd or mob was already violent in the Psalms. Likewise in the story of Job. It – the "friends" – demanded of Job to acknowledge his guilt; they put him through a real Moscow trial. His is a prophetic trial. Is it not that of Christ, adulated by the crowds, then rejected at the moment of his Passion? These narratives announce the cross, the death of the innocent victim, the victory over all the sacrificial myths of antiquity.
Is it so different in Islam? Islam has also formidable prophetic insights about the relation between the crowd, the myths, victims, and sacrifice. In the Muslim tradition, the ram Abel sacrificed is the same as the one God sent to Abraham so that he could spare his son. Because Abel sacrificed rams, he did not kill his brother. Because Cain did not sacrifice animals, he killed his brother. In other words, the sacrificial animal avoids the murder of the brother and the son. That is, it furnishes an outlet for violence. Thus Mohammed had insights which are on the plane of certain great Jewish prophets, but at the same time we find a concern for antagonism and separation from Judaism and Christianity that may negate our interpretation.
You dwell in your latest book on Western self-criticism, always present beside ethnocentrism. You write, "We Occidentals are always simultaneously ourselves and our own enemy." Will this self-criticism continue to exist after the destruction of the towers?
It continues to exist and it is legitimate for rethinking the future, for corre...
........... It continues to exist and it is legitimate for rethinking the future, for correcting, for example, that idea of a Locke or of an Adam Smith according to which free competition would always be good and generous. That's an absurd idea, and we have known it for a long time. It is astonishing that after a failure as flagrant as that of Marxism the ideology of free enterprise doesn't show itself any more able to defend itself. To affirm that "history is finished" because this ideology has won out over collectivism is quite clearly a deception. In the Western countries the divergence in incomes continues to grow greatly and we are heading for explosive reactions. I'm not talking about the third world. What we await after the attacks is of course a renewed ideology, a more rational one of liberalism and progress.
http://theol.uibk.ac.at/cover/girard_le_monde_interview.html
The true one and only God created all things.In creation God put in us the knowledge of the creator.A lot of this knowledge must be near the surface and comes out in stories that lend themselves to the truth about God.The truth is in the word that God has given to us by his Holy Spirit.The Word of God has been disputed but never proven wrong in fact it is 100% true and acurate.God loves you .
RE: ivanhoe's first post.
While I agree with some of what you are saying, I don't think you've centered on the specifics of the question enough. You need to show your math.
As far as your second post goes, although related, this would likely be better served in a separate thread. Perhaps you can boil the topic down to its essence and we can rant about that for awhile as well.
The questions here, however, are: if and how.
Originally posted by FreakyKBHThis question has me thinking. Competition between belief systems occurs in the Bible itself--all that time the Israelites spent on getting rid of the various polytheistic tribes to carve themselves some Lebensraum. Dagon toppling off his perch. I see it that part of it as a victorious culture writing history from its own perspective (that of the victor).
Are these similarities contradictions, complements or competition?
As for Mithras / Christ, I understand it as one saviour giving way to another. There is no negation involved--Mithras' cult was dying out, his age was over; Christ represents a more suitable saviour figure for the new age of Pisces. (I distinguish between the historical Jesus and the Christ).
To answer your question, I'd say that the similarities complement the Bible, in the sense that they provide context within which to read it.
Originally posted by checkbaiterYou'd have got on famously with Tertullian, I think.
I think the reasons are that the myths try to copy the bible stories in order to make the bible less relevent.
Satan is a great couterfeiter.
"Tertullian [Tertullian, /Praescr./, ch. 40.] states that the worshippers of Mithra practiced baptism by water, through which they were thought to be redeemed from sin, and that the priest made a sign upon the forehead of the person baptized; but as this was also a Christian rite, Tertullian declares that the Devil must have effected the coincidence for his wicked ends. "The Devil'', he also writes, "imitates even the main parts of our divine mysteries", and "has gone about to apply to the worship of idols those very things of which the administration of Christ's sacraments consists".
In this rite he must be referring both to the baptismal rite and also to the Mithraic eucharist, of which Justin Martyr [Justin Martyr, /1 Apol./, ch. 66.] had already complained when he declared that it was Satan who had plagiarized the ceremony, causing the worshippers of Mithra to receive the consecrated bread and cup of water.." (http://www.innvista.com/culture/religion/deities/mithra.htm)
Originally posted by FreakyKBHThe so called "striking similarities" between Mithraism and Christianity are only striking if that is what you are looking for. For example people have claimed that both involve a virgin birth. Not only is this hardly proven in either case, but there is clear distortion to prove a point eg: Mithra was born of rock - rock is the mother earth - earth is a virgin - hence a virgin birth.
With respect to certain elements of mythology and similar stories found within the Bible, does the presence of like-stories negate the Bible?
What other possibilities are there to explain the presence of the similarities?
Similarly it is often stated that Christians celebrate a Winter birth for Jesus. This is hardly true. Only very ignorant Christians actually think that Jesus was born on Christmas day and when the tradition started it was not based on such a belief.
The fact that two religions have a celebration at midwinter is hardly a sign of similarity but more a sign of the importance of winter to peoples in the northern latitudes.
Originally posted by twhiteheadThe Catholic Encyclopedia states that "A similarity between Mithra and Christ struck even early observers, such as Justin, Tertullian, and other Fathers, and in recent times has been urged to prove that Christianity is but an adaptation of Mithraism, or at most the outcome of the same religious ideas and aspirations (e.g. Robertson, "Pagan Christs", 1903)." (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10402a.htm). As you can see, similarities were noted early on. The conclusions drawn from these similarities are what is at issue, not the similarities themselves.
The so called "striking similarities" between Mithraism and Christianity are only striking if that is what you are looking for. ...
The fact that two religions have a celebration at midwinter is hardly a sign of similarity but more a sign of the importance of winter to peoples in the northern latitudes.
The "earth as virgin" is perfectly consistent with mytho-logic.
Constantine I made Jesus birthday December 25 as a crowd-pleasing tactic. As a former high priest of Mithras, he knew who he was trying to please.
There are similarities at symbolic level between other cults & Christianity.
Here's an image of "Orpheus Bacchus" crucified: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/christian.htm
Here's a pre-Christian image of Horus crucified: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christianity/Jesus,_pre-4th_century_Christianity,_and_syncretism
Originally posted by Bosse de NageYes the similarities are at issue. I still contend that almost all similarities mentioned so far could easily be explained as people looking for similarities. For example a large percentage of religions around the world include bowing down in front of a statue. Is this a similarity and what conclusions can be drawn. Certainly not contradiction, compliment or competition!
The conclusions drawn from these similarities are what is at issue, not the similarities themselves.