Quote from jem:
If your point that the jewish bible and the jewish religion are really just like all the others well then that is a different argument altogether and one that I have only come across occasionally.
So if my statement was christianity had jewish roots and your statement was that Jewish roots are just like all the other roots well okay that argument is going to be very hard to pin down. And it may be true from a some perspectives.
Hmm. About the the best I can explain this is that theology as a hobby sure leads a person along some interesting philosophical avenues, and the further you proceed, the more hazy the lines become.
The curious thing about religion-oriented studies is that - for reasons I have yet to fully define - they tend to inspire disregard for a person's natural associative compulsion. Normally when encountering information or situations beyond our experience the first place our mind goes is toward corresponding this data to something within our experience or knowledge we can psychologically assign a metaphor to, thereby causing it to make sense to us. Religious association appears to inspire exactly the opposite (we remain on the lookout for what appears to conflict with an already adopted belief, then use it to reinforce our existing paradigm). For present I have chalked this up to simple dogma, since another common thread throughout religions is that anyone who doesn't agree with your religious beliefs is wrong. I remain suspicious of nutshell theories however, so the jury's still out on this one
.
Where Judaism appears to have a clear historical advantage is in being the most well-documented ancient religion (although this precept becomes questionable once you hit all the ancient Chinese and Zoroastrian stuff, but whatever), so for research purposes this seems the most likely place to start looking for Christian origins. The flip-side is that people tend to assume the Bible is the most concise and accurate extant source of Jewish history, law, and customs when this is far from the case. The amount of information that didn't make it into the Bible is mind-boggling (not to mention the reasons why most of this didn't make it in), but it's out there if you're willing to look. One of these days I'm going to read the complete Torah. Been meaning to do that for years. At the moment though I'm working my way through the unabridged translation of
Das Kapital, so it must wait
.
For those interested in better exploring Jesus and his surrounding influences (I still recall when I was around 7 or 8 and asked Mom why 30 years of Jesus' life was curiously missing from the Bible - something she was clearly unable to answer), a couple of quite decent references are
The Lost Books Of The Bible, and
The Complete Jesus (this one draws heavily from the aforementioned work, and my Mom accused me of trying to screw her up with when I gave it to her a few years ago
)
As to this statement:
Quote from jem:
If you were to believe in evil you would expect that evil of to create disinformation. Just like what astrology has done to skies.
Please re-read what I've posted so far then tell me if you are able to see the paradox in this, and we'll return to it later if need be (and you're truly interested in discussing it).
Quote from jem:
And yes there is a bunch of schlarship about crosses and stakes. But I do believe I read about the finding of evidence of roman crosses in digs in the last five years or so. Research on this area should be easy because it comes up a lot.
My wife and I both keep fairly up to date on the latest archaeological findings (f.ex. we maintained a subscription to Archeology Magazine for years) and I have yet to run across anything that conclusively refutes her original findings. If you can point me to any references though (preferably printed ones) I'm sure listening, and I can assure you she'd be most interested and grateful.
