Looking at some of the points -- Ben's Message Board

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Saturday, September 07, 06:55:32pm

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Subject: Looking at some of the points

Author:
Wade A. Tisthammer

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Date Posted: 09/19/06 5:09pm
In reply to: Ben 's message, "Some other sites" on 09/15/06 10:20pm

The thread was about the "copycat" claim so I'm going to stick with this.

>Okay, fine, fine... here is another site that explains
>the history of Christianity. I can see you can't get
>past the white supremacy thing and look at some of the
>points the author makes...

Well, I have actually. But my time is limited as of late so as to not refute every piece of trash I see. Did I just call it a piece of trash? Yes I did. I would perhaps not be so overt if not for the fact that mainstream religion scholars (who are liberal and not sympathetic to conservative Christian dogma) reject the copycat hypothesis. And when you have a conservative and liberal scholar agree upon something, you can bet your bottom dollar that it�s probably true. As such, the copycat hypothesis has been pretty well discredited. Part of it is because the similarities are too superficial, many motifs are common and occur frequently without borrowing (e.g. a sacred meal of bread and wine was extremely common in the ancient world) and part of it is because sometimes the religions are distorted.

I went to the encyclopedia today and seems that Orpheus and Dionysus were to separate people in classical mythology, and there's no mention of either being crucified (Dionysus--being a Greek god--has no mention of him dying; Orpheus was torn apart by wild women).

The mother of Mithras swam into a sea containing several-hundred-year-old sperm to become pregnant. Mithraic cult involved its followers to be under a slain bull and become covered in its blood. Conclusion? Let's call the latter initiation rite �baptism� even though it's not water and has nothing to do with a symbolic cleansing of sin! Copycat! Let's also ignore that there's no evidence of this "baptism" existing before the Christian era. Let's also claim that the story of Jesus' birth (a Jewish girl becomes pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit) was copied from Mithras while pointing out only the superficial similarities, leaving out all the differences, and also leaving out the fact that miracle births are also widespread in ancient religions. Let's also ignore the scholarly criteria that professionals use when determining if borrowing took place, and also ignore that the criteria are nowhere near satisfied for any �copycat� claim.

Really, let�s try to exercise some sound judgment�at least to the extent of not accepting anti-Christian propaganda so uncritically. When it conflicts with what both liberal and conservative scholars agree upon, rejecting it as trash is probably the most reasonable thing to do.

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