Is Christianity much different from Judaism and Islam?

So, there’s two things I believe here. First, Moses was in fact an exiled Akhenaten of the old testament and secondly that the new testament with the story of Jesus was a Roman fabrication as a way to pacify the Roman province of Judea. The Jews back then were rebelling against the occupying Romans where the Roman emperor at the time with Titus Flavius Josephus [A Roman Jew] devised a way to supplant Jewish Rabbinic law or Judaism with Christianity as a way of making the Jews more manageable. While it didn’t destroy Judaism or Judaic Rabbinic law the introduction of Christianity certainly weakened it and the ancient Judea rebellion did also thereafter. What happened next was that this new religion was so successful in subduing a population as evident in ancient Judea that they eventually moved the project into Europe where began the purging of pagan Europeans by newly converted Christians.

I would say no. The historical Jesus may have been a result of both: the Romans’ invention to manage political affairs, but politics being what they are may follow either a belief in historical inevitability, - determination of events without exact causal referentiality, or the idea that people were following creative dictums of their own foreseeable effects of self prescribed causes.

At the very least , a mixture of both of these possible routes of acquisition of religion imply some generic consoderations bearing on religious motives of basic psychic functions of what the religious came to understand as the soul.

Christianity is an elaborate forgery of a religion in more ways than just one and I’m not talking merely about the Romans only either. For instance the very first Christians before Greeks or Romans were Jews, a topic for another time perhaps.

with love,
sanjay

I agree with Arminius on nearly every reply of his here. I especially enjoyed what James Saint said earlier about the projections of atheists unto themselves, I have been one of those and experienced others like that first hand. After having most of my family pass, seeing some high school friends take their own lives slowly or quickly, and being too poor to continue University studies, I turned to Christianity and I’ve been better off ever since, almost inverting those 3 major suffering points I just mentioned. I have beginners knowledge of philosophy and religious thought and I’ve barely entered adulthood so I doubt I can contribute anything of utility to this discussion due to lack of experience and knowledge.

Ezak42, I find Judaism and Islam much more deceptive and linguistically obfuscated over time than Christianity. Any obfuscations in Christianity can be traced back historically to omissions and transliteration differences. The atonement and the trinity seem clear to me, Muhammad’s magical and violent stature, along with historical studies and the empirical evidence of Moses and his proceeding prophets less clear. The logical faults are probably due to our nature, and to deny any truth in scripture only because of a few cherry picked fallacies undermines the entire purpose of establishing moral foundations that help us evolve and forgive in the best ways, while establishing a personal relationship with God to understand his interaction with us in our confusion. Do you think we will eventually unearth some sort of scientific origin that explains how a bunch of big brained sex monkeys overthrew erectus and neanderthalensis? Do you look at the OT books literally and the NT as a way to overthrow Rome by telling the story of a slave-god? In the beginning our language was confused, not to mention that time further divides our understanding of being. How will you choose to deal with random horrible happenings? Faith is better than no faith, Christianity being the most progressive and superior of all faith, comparable to Buddhism.

It kinda scares me the way zero_sum talks about his outlook towards modern middle eastern upheaval and the embellishment of a Jesus figure in Roman times for the sake of leveraging law and politics. He reminds me of a figure like Abdiel. The discussion of Christ as forgery reminds me of parts Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and his exegesis of the early Jews in pagan times. There’s probably a lot of Hasidism in Isreal in modern times waiting for the Third Temple and their political “Messiah” to come out of the groundworks so Jews can be redeemed, a somewhat tribal fervor. Modern scientific study and historical reflection on the data has allowed for a lot more people, especially the younger like myself, to turn to pagan ideas or atheism. I find it related to morals and the evolution of language rather than anything people will usually ascribe to it as dogma, or religion, or truth. I find most of it laughable and share excitement for the future, forgiving and praying everyday along the way. Prayer is a simple, harmless ritual but most people think its schizophrenic or useless. Law of attraction? Alchemy and Paganism in apocryphal texts? Probably, possibly, and currently occurring.

It sux that your life sux but my life sux too, and youre using Christianity to cope.

send them all to the moon in my opinion. Im trying to be nice and not literally hitler, we can build a nice little moon utopia for them to be sent to, but the moon is where they all need to be sent. Same as AI too, put ai to the moon.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4f9m4OYkCY[/youtube]

My life doesn’t suck, for the most part. It sucked before it most recently sucked which I expect come in random waves in life, but for the past year and a half it’s bucking a downtrend that happened because of random crappy things I didn’t predict would affect me so negatively. I’d love to go to the moon, but I’d rather stay here to learn from each other and have adequate survival resources, also wouldn’t I be missing out on quality animations like that pony garbage if I did go to the moon? Do I get to bring the so-called non-critical logically fallible religious texts with me? Is the AI life threatening like terminator or ex machina? Or is the AI more of a wall-e or sunny who just cleans up after me and helps battle any dissenters?

How much different is a burka from an Easter bonnet?

Well, radically different. An Easter Bonnet is worn during Easter, and generally no one today is forced to wear it. IOW no one got a vitamin D deficiency from an Easter bonnet because of societal control. An Easter bonnet, given it’s temporary use, is not - certainly today - a sign that whoever wears it is property, not to be trusted, less than a man.

What’s the difference between a straight jacket and a tight t-shirt?

Power, whose got it and the life you live in one as opposed to the other.

Yes very different. And yet the burqa and the Easter bonnet are both products of patriarchies which view women as subordinate to men. Where the burqa is a norm the patriarchy is in full control. Where the Easter bonnet still has any meaning, it’s meaning has so devolved and diminished that its wearer likely is not conscious of it. Women were to keep their head covered in public lest they tempt the sons of God who in the antediluvian age had fucked them and produced a hybid race of giants.

I wouldn’t be shocked that the bonnet has these origins, but I can’t find that origin. Could you link it?

Head covering is practiced by women in many orthodox or fundamentalist Christian sects today. The Easter bonnet is but one instance of this more general Christian practice. The claimant to apostleship Paul of Tarsus in his first letter to the Corinthians says that the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels. The angels he refers to are the fallen ones called “the sons of God” in Genesis 6. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim

Yes, but head covering has all sorts of roots, including decoration and protection from weather. And religious men wear hats also. So jumping from what some sects use hat wearing for doesn’t really work for me yet. And as far as I can find Easter hat wearing came about from both sexes dressing up on Easter. And sure, the women, being seen in a specific way by gender were prettified, hence flowers. But these women were generally not forced to wear hats all the time. And it almost has the opposite pull from the Burhka which is meant to eliminate from sight anything that another man might find attractive and any woman breaking that, in places where they are supposed to wear them, is in danger of violence by strangers and family. Women not wearing Easter hats or good ones might have, earlier in history and perhaps in some places today, found themselves socially on the outs. But so would men with the wrong car or suit or hair length.

I am not fully sure of your comment in the context of the thread since the Koran does not specifically say what apppropriate clothes women should wear just that they are appropriate. So we have Islam mixed with local cultural ideas about both women and appropriateness. Just as we have in female genital mutilation, say.

And while I do see some similar sexist roots between female genital mutilation and breast enhancement (which comes not out of Christianity but secular Western society) I’d be hard pressed to find myself asking what’s the difference.

Islam and the local cultures that are mixed with it and hard to separate out include a hatred of the self, the female, the body, ‘this life’ that is extreme, even compared to going back a few hundred years in Christianity and certainly compared with current Christianity. Islam means surrender, submission and the core ritual of prayers is a reflection of this core abnegation of the self.

In the abstract it is easy to see all the religions as more or less the same, some faults here, some positive aspects there. But the liklihood of all balancing out pretty neatly and evenly seems radically small to me. People will certainly kill from a Christian base, but to get suicide bombers with regularity you have to have a metaphysical self-hatred and hatred of the world really deeply built in. Christians have had much more power, and Christian based societies have had much more power and fire power for the last large chunk of centuries. And their body count is enormous. But the hatred of life in Islam, should it ever have power, would, I would guess make that body count pale in comparisom. But I would suggest that is not necessarily the best way to decide the degree of hatred. It is to look at what is left over in the person, the believer, once the memes have got inside them.

My position is fully supported at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_bonnet. I mentioned it only as a symbol of the fact that Christianity, Judaism and Islam all traditionally held that women are subordinate to men and while the principle of gender equality has made some inroads into traditions of male dominance to varying degrees in these religions, evidence of patriarchy is still prevalent even in the more liberal modernized versions of these institutions.

I can see that women were required to wear something in church on their heads, yes. I didn’t see the part about fucking giants, though that wouldn’t surprise me.

The second link says the bonnet comes out of the tradition of wearing new clothes at Easter, not that the hat comes from the tradition of covering women’s heads in church. IOW while women have generally been free to not wear head coverings in church, the Easter bonnet tradition has continued. It no longer means that women are somehow problematic, its dress up.

And it’s pretty optional. And it fits with secular society seeing women’s decoration as more showy then men’s.

And none of this remotely makes the Easter hat remotely like the Burkha. IOW there seems to be some unstated hey, it’s all the same, when you ask what the difference is between a burkha and an Easter hat. Many traditions may be seeds for a part of what we do now, but that doesn’t make them the same. Easter hat wearing fits with secular societies ideas about women - that they should decorate themselves more intensely and femininely. And it would be optional as is participation in the church, at least for the adult females.

Burkhas are enforced by direct power in many places, even in the West where the law would side with any woman not wanting to wear one, but likely the law might have trouble actually making the woman safe with that choice in all or most cases.

I’ll put this a different way. I think a woman could wear an Easter bonnet on Easter church attendance, which is the current tradition, and even consider herself a feminist. But a woman wearing a burkha - which is worn year round, that is the tradition - would be fooling herself to call herself a feminist.

Okay. You asked me for a link and I obliged you with three including a link to the Wikipedia article on the nephilim. I also referenced 1st Corinthians 11 where Paul lays out the practice of head covering that became the norm in the churches for centuries. It’s up to you to read these references and to get the facts straight or not. My work is done.

felix dacat wrote:

Paul writes, “And every woman who prays or prophecies with her head uncovered dishonors herself. … And if a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off. And it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off. She should cover her head.”

The Scriptures say that in the mouth of two or three witnesses, let something be established. I think this is the only place in the Scriptures where it talks about this particular issue. Paul is insisting women, who pray in the church in public prayer do so with their heads covered. Is this a tradition or something women must do today. If this was a tradition, Paul was asking women to honor that tradition out of respect.

In the Middle East some Islamic women dress similar to Biblical times. In the days of the Roman Empire, a woman would cover her head, (they covered only their hair and did not veil their faces) because it was one way to avoid being thought a prostitute, who would go around with their heads uncovered as part of their dress…and Paul here is just speaking of covering the hair.

It also states in 1 Corinthians 11 7-9

For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but rthe woman for the man. 1 Corinthians 11:7–9.)

LOL

Now that is the perfect example of calling good evil and evil good.

Not sure what your point is. The latter verse clearly implies women are subordinate to men, a belief shared by traditional Jews and Muslims.

Another New Testament book, Ephesians expands on the idea in chapter 5:

There is some evidence that goes against this trend. For example Galatians 3:28 which reads:

Paul may be quoting a baptismal formula that he learned in the diaspora churches. This suggests that egalitarianism was already being practiced in the earliest Christian gatherings when Paul joined. Or, it seems to me, at least it was the ideal they sought, as opposed to general norm of male superiority that predominated in first century Mediterranean culture.

The formula doesn’t keep perfect symmetry by saying “man or woman” since it’s a quotation from Genesis “man and woman he created them” (1:27). In other words: “There is no more man and woman as originally divided since they are now united in Christ.”

Thus, the early gatherings of Jesus followers may have been the among most egalitarian groups of their day. But, if so, there has been a concerted effort over the centuries to hide or diminish this fact in favor of patriarchy not unlike that of the other major monotheistic religions.