While I do consider the religious beliefs of ALL Christians (and all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, devotees of Ahura-Mazda, Voodoo practitioners, Cybelians, Druids, Appolonians, etc. etc. ad consummatio) to be entirely irrational, I do reserve the bulk of my mockery and vitriol for those, like Chuichupachichi, who fail so magnificently and so vocally to be even remotely Christ-like.
Forgive me for apparently lumping you all together, but (1) in America at least, the type of Christian that you profess to be is decidedly the exception, while the type of Christian that Chuichupachichi represents is the rule; and (2) as noted above, I do still consider you lamentably irrational if you believe in Jesus as an historical person who came back from the dead and was the actual, non-allegorical product of some mystical tryst between God and Mary.
On the other hand, I do have a certain amount of grudging admiration for anyone who recognizes the need to emulate Christ in order to be a good and proper Christian, no matter how irrational they are otherwise. Never mind that this need should be glaringly obvious to anyone with a clear head who has read the New Testament... there are few enough of you out there that it should be considered some kind of accomplishment. The fact that Christ-like Christians are such a minority suggests to me that there is some kind of direct correlation between the tendency to be religious, and an inability to think clearly and/or rationally.
Mere irrationality I can be good-natured about, but those aggressively bellicose types who seek to codify their irrational beliefs into our lawbooks I regard as dire enemies of humanity who richly deserve to have the embarrassing light of plain fact shone upon them whenever possible, along with heaping helpings of caustic derision.
I will say this about Christianity: If you define Christianity as simply the teachings of Jesus, unsullied and unvarnished by opportunistic interpretations, and without all the value-added nonsense embellishments about the prophecies of the Jews, virgin birth, healing of lepers with a word or a touch, walking on water, turning water into wine, coming back from the dead, etc., it doesn't offend me a bit.
What Jesus said was noble and beautiful, and unlike the things said about Jesus by other people, that nobility and beauty defy even an over-simplified satirical treatment like "HAY GUYZ, LET'S ALL TRY BEING NICE 2 EACH OTHER 4 A CHANGE, EVEN IF PEOPLE AREN'T NICE 2 US BACK, KTHXBAI". I'm a fan of that basic message, and it shocks, disturbs, and angers me no end that the majority of Christians in America today are somehow able to twist it into "God wants us to kill those Satan-worshipping Muslim ragheads, reject science, persecute homosexuals, shred the Constitution, and take over the government".
Unfortunately, nobility and beauty is not enough to make an idea practical. Karl Marx had some pretty noble and beautiful ideas too, and they also defy that satirical boiling-down treatment: "HAY GUYZ, LET'S ALL B EQUALZ & SHARE EVERYTHING, K?". I'd buy Marx a beer and call him a great-hearted giant among men if he wasn't dead, but his ideas still fail miserably when people try to put them into practice. People simply are not as motivated to be virtuous as Marx (and Jesus) apparently gave them credit for being, which is why attempts to put Christianity and Communism into practice inevitably result in atrocious, disastrous failures like the Inquisition or the Soviet Union.
To any Christian to whom my point of view sounds at all reasonable: I'd be more than happy to sit down and have a genuinely friendly meal with you, and even discuss your religious beliefs without any rancor whatsoever... though I wouldn't be able to help but be at least a little bit amused by them. I could never do the same with a 'Christian' like Chuichupachichi, because I'd either lose my appetite completely, or have my entire day ruined by an unfulfilled desire to stick my salad fork in his eye.
Those are some severely specious statements you've made about Christianity vs. Paganism.
You said:
"It has become quite a popular, spreading belief that Judaism & Christianity is simply an adaptation or a reinterpretation of previous pagan religeons."
First of all, this is not anything recent. It goes back to the very beginnings of your silly delusional religion. Second, what does 'popularity' have to do with it? Are you trying to imply that because many people agree that Christianity blatantly appropriated many elements from older religions, that the assertion is false? Your grasp of logic is as poor as your grasp of reality, Mr. Believes-in-a-Giant-Magic-Superhero-Who-Lives-in-the-Sky.
You said:
"Propagating this view is intended to refute or discredit the validity of Judeo/Christianity’s teaching of that its source is the only true god and that he is someone other than the false gods of Paganism."
No. Propagating this view is intended to propagate sane, reasonable, rational, historical truth, unlike anything in the Bible or the withered heads of religious zealots like you. It's got nothing to do with promoting some set of irrational beliefs (i.e., religion) alternative to your own. Rational people aren't religious, and rational educated people laugh at the idea that your Bible is an historical document.
You said:
"The intention to disprove that is obvious from the implication of that Jud/Chr. is no different than the previous pagan religeons since it is merely a recycling of them. If this were true, and if at their core, they were really just the same thing. Then why would they have always produced different cultures/lifestyles/values that have always been at odds with eachother?"
First of all, it's spelled R-E-L-I-G-I-O-N. I didn't point that out the first time because I figured it was a typo, but you seem consistent about spelling the word with too many 'e's and not enough 'i's. I hate to make a spelling flame out of this, but seriously: if you can't even SPELL 'religion', then how on Earth could anyone take you for a serious enough scholar of religion to know diddly-squat about it?
Second, your argument here is very typical of the "oversimplify, misinterpret, then leap to a conclusion that does not follow" style of debate that is so frequently employed by clench-fisted, belligerent 'religeous' zealots like yourself. Christianity and Paganism have not "always been at odds with each other". Christianity became intolerant of Paganism, but the so-called Pagan religions have often been noted for their tolerance of other belief systems. In Pantheistic Rome, the common wisdom was that worshippers of different gods were basically doing the same thing, only putting a different face on it. Christians, by contrast, from the very beginning took the attitude (inherited from the Jews, from whom you cribbed and stole even before appropriating all those pagan traditions) that theirs was the ONE, TRUE GOD, and that all other gods were false. I see that you yourself are particularly strident about this point, as you go out of your way to characterize pagan deities as "false gods".
Don't even start with any nonsense about Christians being persecuted by the Romans. That was not a matter of Paganism being intolerant of Christianity, it was a matter of a profoundly martial society being intolerant of people who believed that killing was a sin, because such people make very poor soldiers.
You said:
"There is obviously a huge fundamental difference between them. Differences which are so different, that they are in fact, opposites. There are reasons why those similarities/mirrorings between Jud/Chr. and earlier Pagan religeons exist. Reasons of which their explaination would be to long for this already long post. Though I’d explain if requested."
The "huge fundamental difference" was not always there, and the two are not opposites. Early Christianity, particularly the flavor promoted by Paul/Saul of Tarsus, was deeply Gnostic, just like paganism. In other words, Christ was viewed as an allegory, not a real person, and the path to becoming a true Christian was an inner voyage in which symbolic figures (like Jesus) and events (like the Resurrection) were used as waypoints to finding the Christ within yourself, and actualizing it in your external life. Saul/Paul's Gnostic form of Christianity was suppressed by what became the Catholic church because Gnosticism is not compatible with the idea that you need a lot of clergy and bishops and a Pope to communicate with God for you and tell you what to do. There was a lot of money and power at stake, Paul's Gnosticism got in the way of the church getting at that money and power, and no further explanation is necessary to anyone who isn't so delusional as to believe in bearded robed giants who lounge around on clouds and watch with disapproval when humans masturbate. Suffice it to say that although Paul was extremely important to early Christianity and did more to spread the faith than anyone who came before him, his writings were shrewdly left out when the canonical New Testament was forged out of an incoherent pile of zany, foamy-mouthed ramblings about a parthenogenetic Jewish zombie whose vampiric God needed blood for some reason (yet couldn't just magic up an ocean of it to swim in to fill that need).
I laugh at your assertion that your post was too long to continue, as it was much shorter than other posts you've made in which you pitched hissy fits, blatantly flamed other people, and revealed your intolerance and homophobia (incidentally, did you know that a recent university study reveals that, as long suspected, homophobes find homosexuals repellent because they are themselves repressed homosexuals? Come out of the closet, Mary, and be the butterfly you are for once).
This is in reply to what "Ted (the other one)" wrote about Christianity borrowing Easter and Christmas from so-called 'pagan' religions:
It goes a LOT deeper than that. Osiris, Mithra, and Dionysus (all of whom were worshipped before Jesus was even born, and even before the Jews invented Jehovah) all had the following VERY INTERESTING things said about them:
* Was the son of a God
* Was born of a virgin
* Performed the miracle -- at a wedding, no less -- of turning water into wine
* Was tortured and violently killed, becoming a martyr
* Rose from the dead after being killed
* Was taken bodily into Paradise while still alive (after being resurrected)
* Sits in judgment of the dead
* Is the savior of Mankind
A lot of the symbols and traditions used by Christians are also cribbed from earlier 'pagan' religions that were suppressed in the rise of Christianity, including the symbolic cannibalism of Communion. It's not uncommon for archaeologists to have difficulty initially telling the difference between newly-rediscovered 'pagan' temples and early Christian temples. Dionysus was sometimes depicted nailed to a crucifix (although his story, which does vary, doesn't usually say he was killed that way)... in exactly the same pose that is typically used to depict Jesus, with the head bowed, knees together, legs turned to one side. Ancient icons depicting Dionysus crucified can easily be mistaken for Christian icons depicting Jesus, until you decipher what's written on them.
For example after example after example of earlier practices and traditions that were incorporated into Christianity and suppressed in their 'pagan' form, read Sir James Frazer's book THE GOLDEN BOUGH, which once upon a time was required reading for any university-educated person. It will give you a clear idea of how, in Europe, ideas about sympathetic magic became religious practices that were later incorporated into Christianity. The idea of a mock-king whose blood must be spilled at the Solstice in order to bring the resurrection of Spring every year is very, very old, and the idea that this mock-king would be brought back to life in the person of next year's sacrifice was quite commonplace.
If you ask me, religion in general is a disgusting sham that all too often closes and enslaves human minds (and sometimes bodies!). That includes the so-called 'pagan' faiths of old along with Wicca, faux-modern Druidism, Madonna Kabala Mahoney Malarkey, $cientology, the corruption of the Buddha's words that Buddhism has become, and every other bogus attempt to explain the world and tap into the mystic. However, unlike the Christians we know and loathe today, the ancient 'pagans' tended to be Gnostic in their worship, regarding it as a highly personal INTERNAL voyage that did not necessarily require priests or their bogus authority (except as guides to put one's foot on the path). These people were not prone to condemning others for holding differing beliefs, since Gnostic 'pagan' beliefs were mostly consciously allegorical anyway.
Saul of Tarsus, after converting rather suddenly to Christianity on the road to Damascus and changing his name to Paul, wrote extensively of Christianity as another approach to the Gnostic internal voyage... he also spoke of Jesus not as a real, actual person, but as an allegorical figure. In the rise of Mother Church and its greed for gold and power, Paul's gospel was conveniently left out of what became the Christian Bible.
It's also interesting to note that none of the Gospel authors included in the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) ever met or even saw Jesus. The earliest of them didn't write his gospel until AD 70, when Jesus had allegedly been dead for 37 years (I say 'allegedly' because there isn't any reliable evidence to prove that Jesus ever really lived in the first place, except as a Gnostic allegory). Three of the four had read and were heavily influenced by the Gospel(s) written by their predecessors, and their versions of Jesus' life had some rather glaring differences. In the 5th Century Tatian wrote his 'Diatessaron' in an attempt to fuse the four Gospels into one; this became the standard Christian text used in Syria during the 3rd and 4th Centuries. The Diatessaron was eventually replaced with four separate Gospels again, but it does show that there was a conscious effort to make the four Gospels agree more closely, an effort that did not cease when the Diatessaron fell out of fashion.
Christians, go and be superstitious all you like; comfort yourself with the delusion that you don't REALLY have to die if that's what you have to do to cope; spend your free time sending telepathic fan mail to your imaginary zombie superhero praising Him and pledging to be his servant in return for His having mercy on you for being born sinful as a result of a woman made of a spare rib from a man molded out of clay getting conned into eating a magic apple by a magic talking snake; whatever. Just stop getting it all over the rest of us, you insufferable bunch of nosy, prejudiced, narrow-minded, oppressive, hateful, judgmental, un-Christlike tools.
While I do consider the religious beliefs of ALL Christians (and all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, devotees of Ahura-Mazda, Voodoo practitioners, Cybelians, Druids, Appolonians, etc. etc. ad consummatio) to be entirely irrational, I do reserve the bulk of my mockery and vitriol for those, like Chuichupachichi, who fail so magnificently and so vocally to be even remotely Christ-like.
Forgive me for apparently lumping you all together, but (1) in America at least, the type of Christian that you profess to be is decidedly the exception, while the type of Christian that Chuichupachichi represents is the rule; and (2) as noted above, I do still consider you lamentably irrational if you believe in Jesus as an historical person who came back from the dead and was the actual, non-allegorical product of some mystical tryst between God and Mary.
On the other hand, I do have a certain amount of grudging admiration for anyone who recognizes the need to emulate Christ in order to be a good and proper Christian, no matter how irrational they are otherwise. Never mind that this need should be glaringly obvious to anyone with a clear head who has read the New Testament... there are few enough of you out there that it should be considered some kind of accomplishment. The fact that Christ-like Christians are such a minority suggests to me that there is some kind of direct correlation between the tendency to be religious, and an inability to think clearly and/or rationally.
Mere irrationality I can be good-natured about, but those aggressively bellicose types who seek to codify their irrational beliefs into our lawbooks I regard as dire enemies of humanity who richly deserve to have the embarrassing light of plain fact shone upon them whenever possible, along with heaping helpings of caustic derision.
I will say this about Christianity: If you define Christianity as simply the teachings of Jesus, unsullied and unvarnished by opportunistic interpretations, and without all the value-added nonsense embellishments about the prophecies of the Jews, virgin birth, healing of lepers with a word or a touch, walking on water, turning water into wine, coming back from the dead, etc., it doesn't offend me a bit.
What Jesus said was noble and beautiful, and unlike the things said about Jesus by other people, that nobility and beauty defy even an over-simplified satirical treatment like "HAY GUYZ, LET'S ALL TRY BEING NICE 2 EACH OTHER 4 A CHANGE, EVEN IF PEOPLE AREN'T NICE 2 US BACK, KTHXBAI". I'm a fan of that basic message, and it shocks, disturbs, and angers me no end that the majority of Christians in America today are somehow able to twist it into "God wants us to kill those Satan-worshipping Muslim ragheads, reject science, persecute homosexuals, shred the Constitution, and take over the government".
Unfortunately, nobility and beauty is not enough to make an idea practical. Karl Marx had some pretty noble and beautiful ideas too, and they also defy that satirical boiling-down treatment: "HAY GUYZ, LET'S ALL B EQUALZ & SHARE EVERYTHING, K?". I'd buy Marx a beer and call him a great-hearted giant among men if he wasn't dead, but his ideas still fail miserably when people try to put them into practice. People simply are not as motivated to be virtuous as Marx (and Jesus) apparently gave them credit for being, which is why attempts to put Christianity and Communism into practice inevitably result in atrocious, disastrous failures like the Inquisition or the Soviet Union.
To any Christian to whom my point of view sounds at all reasonable: I'd be more than happy to sit down and have a genuinely friendly meal with you, and even discuss your religious beliefs without any rancor whatsoever... though I wouldn't be able to help but be at least a little bit amused by them. I could never do the same with a 'Christian' like Chuichupachichi, because I'd either lose my appetite completely, or have my entire day ruined by an unfulfilled desire to stick my salad fork in his eye.
Those are some severely specious statements you've made about Christianity vs. Paganism.
You said:
"It has become quite a popular, spreading belief that Judaism & Christianity is simply an adaptation or a reinterpretation of previous pagan religeons."
First of all, this is not anything recent. It goes back to the very beginnings of your silly delusional religion. Second, what does 'popularity' have to do with it? Are you trying to imply that because many people agree that Christianity blatantly appropriated many elements from older religions, that the assertion is false? Your grasp of logic is as poor as your grasp of reality, Mr. Believes-in-a-Giant-Magic-Superhero-Who-Lives-in-the-Sky.
You said:
"Propagating this view is intended to refute or discredit the validity of Judeo/Christianity’s teaching of that its source is the only true god and that he is someone other than the false gods of Paganism."
No. Propagating this view is intended to propagate sane, reasonable, rational, historical truth, unlike anything in the Bible or the withered heads of religious zealots like you. It's got nothing to do with promoting some set of irrational beliefs (i.e., religion) alternative to your own. Rational people aren't religious, and rational educated people laugh at the idea that your Bible is an historical document.
You said:
"The intention to disprove that is obvious from the implication of that Jud/Chr. is no different than the previous pagan religeons since it is merely a recycling of them. If this were true, and if at their core, they were really just the same thing. Then why would they have always produced different cultures/lifestyles/values that have always been at odds with eachother?"
First of all, it's spelled R-E-L-I-G-I-O-N. I didn't point that out the first time because I figured it was a typo, but you seem consistent about spelling the word with too many 'e's and not enough 'i's. I hate to make a spelling flame out of this, but seriously: if you can't even SPELL 'religion', then how on Earth could anyone take you for a serious enough scholar of religion to know diddly-squat about it?
Second, your argument here is very typical of the "oversimplify, misinterpret, then leap to a conclusion that does not follow" style of debate that is so frequently employed by clench-fisted, belligerent 'religeous' zealots like yourself. Christianity and Paganism have not "always been at odds with each other". Christianity became intolerant of Paganism, but the so-called Pagan religions have often been noted for their tolerance of other belief systems. In Pantheistic Rome, the common wisdom was that worshippers of different gods were basically doing the same thing, only putting a different face on it. Christians, by contrast, from the very beginning took the attitude (inherited from the Jews, from whom you cribbed and stole even before appropriating all those pagan traditions) that theirs was the ONE, TRUE GOD, and that all other gods were false. I see that you yourself are particularly strident about this point, as you go out of your way to characterize pagan deities as "false gods".
Don't even start with any nonsense about Christians being persecuted by the Romans. That was not a matter of Paganism being intolerant of Christianity, it was a matter of a profoundly martial society being intolerant of people who believed that killing was a sin, because such people make very poor soldiers.
You said:
"There is obviously a huge fundamental difference between them. Differences which are so different, that they are in fact, opposites. There are reasons why those similarities/mirrorings between Jud/Chr. and earlier Pagan religeons exist. Reasons of which their explaination would be to long for this already long post. Though I’d explain if requested."
The "huge fundamental difference" was not always there, and the two are not opposites. Early Christianity, particularly the flavor promoted by Paul/Saul of Tarsus, was deeply Gnostic, just like paganism. In other words, Christ was viewed as an allegory, not a real person, and the path to becoming a true Christian was an inner voyage in which symbolic figures (like Jesus) and events (like the Resurrection) were used as waypoints to finding the Christ within yourself, and actualizing it in your external life. Saul/Paul's Gnostic form of Christianity was suppressed by what became the Catholic church because Gnosticism is not compatible with the idea that you need a lot of clergy and bishops and a Pope to communicate with God for you and tell you what to do. There was a lot of money and power at stake, Paul's Gnosticism got in the way of the church getting at that money and power, and no further explanation is necessary to anyone who isn't so delusional as to believe in bearded robed giants who lounge around on clouds and watch with disapproval when humans masturbate. Suffice it to say that although Paul was extremely important to early Christianity and did more to spread the faith than anyone who came before him, his writings were shrewdly left out when the canonical New Testament was forged out of an incoherent pile of zany, foamy-mouthed ramblings about a parthenogenetic Jewish zombie whose vampiric God needed blood for some reason (yet couldn't just magic up an ocean of it to swim in to fill that need).
I laugh at your assertion that your post was too long to continue, as it was much shorter than other posts you've made in which you pitched hissy fits, blatantly flamed other people, and revealed your intolerance and homophobia (incidentally, did you know that a recent university study reveals that, as long suspected, homophobes find homosexuals repellent because they are themselves repressed homosexuals? Come out of the closet, Mary, and be the butterfly you are for once).
It goes a LOT deeper than that. Osiris, Mithra, and Dionysus (all of whom were worshipped before Jesus was even born, and even before the Jews invented Jehovah) all had the following VERY INTERESTING things said about them:
* Was the son of a God
* Was born of a virgin
* Performed the miracle -- at a wedding, no less -- of turning water into wine
* Was tortured and violently killed, becoming a martyr
* Rose from the dead after being killed
* Was taken bodily into Paradise while still alive (after being resurrected)
* Sits in judgment of the dead
* Is the savior of Mankind
A lot of the symbols and traditions used by Christians are also cribbed from earlier 'pagan' religions that were suppressed in the rise of Christianity, including the symbolic cannibalism of Communion. It's not uncommon for archaeologists to have difficulty initially telling the difference between newly-rediscovered 'pagan' temples and early Christian temples. Dionysus was sometimes depicted nailed to a crucifix (although his story, which does vary, doesn't usually say he was killed that way)... in exactly the same pose that is typically used to depict Jesus, with the head bowed, knees together, legs turned to one side. Ancient icons depicting Dionysus crucified can easily be mistaken for Christian icons depicting Jesus, until you decipher what's written on them.
For example after example after example of earlier practices and traditions that were incorporated into Christianity and suppressed in their 'pagan' form, read Sir James Frazer's book THE GOLDEN BOUGH, which once upon a time was required reading for any university-educated person. It will give you a clear idea of how, in Europe, ideas about sympathetic magic became religious practices that were later incorporated into Christianity. The idea of a mock-king whose blood must be spilled at the Solstice in order to bring the resurrection of Spring every year is very, very old, and the idea that this mock-king would be brought back to life in the person of next year's sacrifice was quite commonplace.
If you ask me, religion in general is a disgusting sham that all too often closes and enslaves human minds (and sometimes bodies!). That includes the so-called 'pagan' faiths of old along with Wicca, faux-modern Druidism, Madonna Kabala Mahoney Malarkey, $cientology, the corruption of the Buddha's words that Buddhism has become, and every other bogus attempt to explain the world and tap into the mystic. However, unlike the Christians we know and loathe today, the ancient 'pagans' tended to be Gnostic in their worship, regarding it as a highly personal INTERNAL voyage that did not necessarily require priests or their bogus authority (except as guides to put one's foot on the path). These people were not prone to condemning others for holding differing beliefs, since Gnostic 'pagan' beliefs were mostly consciously allegorical anyway.
Saul of Tarsus, after converting rather suddenly to Christianity on the road to Damascus and changing his name to Paul, wrote extensively of Christianity as another approach to the Gnostic internal voyage... he also spoke of Jesus not as a real, actual person, but as an allegorical figure. In the rise of Mother Church and its greed for gold and power, Paul's gospel was conveniently left out of what became the Christian Bible.
It's also interesting to note that none of the Gospel authors included in the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) ever met or even saw Jesus. The earliest of them didn't write his gospel until AD 70, when Jesus had allegedly been dead for 37 years (I say 'allegedly' because there isn't any reliable evidence to prove that Jesus ever really lived in the first place, except as a Gnostic allegory). Three of the four had read and were heavily influenced by the Gospel(s) written by their predecessors, and their versions of Jesus' life had some rather glaring differences. In the 5th Century Tatian wrote his 'Diatessaron' in an attempt to fuse the four Gospels into one; this became the standard Christian text used in Syria during the 3rd and 4th Centuries. The Diatessaron was eventually replaced with four separate Gospels again, but it does show that there was a conscious effort to make the four Gospels agree more closely, an effort that did not cease when the Diatessaron fell out of fashion.
Christians, go and be superstitious all you like; comfort yourself with the delusion that you don't REALLY have to die if that's what you have to do to cope; spend your free time sending telepathic fan mail to your imaginary zombie superhero praising Him and pledging to be his servant in return for His having mercy on you for being born sinful as a result of a woman made of a spare rib from a man molded out of clay getting conned into eating a magic apple by a magic talking snake; whatever. Just stop getting it all over the rest of us, you insufferable bunch of nosy, prejudiced, narrow-minded, oppressive, hateful, judgmental, un-Christlike tools.