Paul wrote of Jesus after the possibility that Jesus existed. Why did Paul rave on if Jesus had never been?
Why do people write stories today “based on a true story” but then they really aren’t, or are just extremely exaggerated?
These people lived in an uncivilized humanity, they were trying to create civilization based on their ideals or what they thought could work. Uncivilized in terms of what we have today.
There is also the possibility that they just wanted control to shape things the way they wanted to.
Let’s talk about creation. Who do you think would know more about religious creation. The people closest to the creation period, or people farther away from it?
Isaiah 19 - [Jesus] - The shepherd who will rule with a rod of iron and a shepherds staff.
Note - All Pharaohs carry a rod of iron and a shepherds staff.
The Old Test-amen-t Amen - [The hidden one]
Kings 1 verse 36 - Amen : the lord God of my lord the king say so too.
It’s true, pharoahs carry the rod of iron with the Ankh at the top.
Nope. I mean so really fucking Nope.
Christianity was an urban religion. It spread like a cancer throughout the towns of the Roman Empire, through the towns. By the time the Christians had closed down the schools of philosophy and imposed their creed all over the empire, the old religions only existed in the hinterlands, and those who continued to practice them were persecuted and condemned as witches.
Pagan = Village. Pagani = people of the village.
Hence all the pre-Roman religions from The Greek and Roman pantheons, the cult of ISIS and the indigenous cults of “Celtic” and “Germanic” tribes were lumped together for convenient persecution as “Pagans”, which is nothing more than a terms of abuse, and focus of oppression.
Your understanding of it, it based on a deep misunderstanding and historical ignorance, which matches your clown avatar.
With reference to “amen” you are mistaking the evolution of a word with the a religion.
You might just as well say that Christianity is a Germanic cult because we use the word “God”.
Duh, oh so very duh.
Ah ha! Finally I have a true Christian responding to my post. See how violent and rude Christians are - “fucking Nope” for example. Where’s the the gentle daisy loving Christian of Christ’s teaching?
'Consider the lilies in the field, they spin not, they toil not’. Forget that rubbish, lets just stomp on those lilies! Yeah, now that’s how Christians really operate.
The true story of Christianity’s beginning.
When Rome controlled most of the world, the Roman Emperor, Constantine, in 325 CE forced Christianity onto his subjects.
The people of Lithuania did not become Christians because they read the gospels and decided to accept their teachings. On the contrary, the people of Lithuania were forced into Christianity against their will, as a result of relentless military force.
“In 1309 the Teutonic Order moved its headquarters to Marienburg in Prussia. It had a papal license to wage perpetual war against the pagans and used this to launch annual crusades against Lithuania. These expeditions were very popular the nobility of northern Europe: campaigns were held twice a year, in the summer and in the winter when the order laid on special Christmas festivities for visiting crusaders.”
“The excuse for men who enjoyed fighting and to lay waste large parts of Lithuania in the name of Christ was removed in 1386 when the King of Lithuania, Ladislas Jagiello, married Queen Jadwiga of Poland and received Catholic baptism. The two kingdoms were united under Christian rulers and the Teutonic Knights no longer had any justification for crusading against pagans there.”
Lithuania was not the first country that fell victim to a campaign of lethal military force, for the purpose of forced conversion to Christianity. Three entire European nationalities became victims of genocide because they refused to become Christians:
“…the Vandals, Ostogoths, and Heruli. The last three were destroyed by the Pope of Rome because they refused to become ‘Christian.’ The armies of Emperor Justinian, in cooperation with the Pope, thrust the Ostrogoths out of the city of Rome. They have become extinct.”2
Jews had to endure the sword too. Millions of Jews from the fourth century CE until the 20th Century were forced to “kiss the sword” of Christ, or be put to death by that sword. Therefore, many, many Jews died at the hands of Christians in the name of Jesus. Fortunately, many Jews managed to survive. They survived by lying―they converted, but secretly remained Jews. The Christian Church finally realized what was happening and in 1492, the Spanish Inquisition tried to purge the country of these “Secret” Jews, called Marranos.
Christianity should not take any pride for their large numbers of subjects. Almost all Christian ancestors, Catholics and Protestants really had no choice in the matter. They were forced to accept Jesus as their god ― Invisible Friend in the Sky. Christianity was a forced religion. Today it is being forced in another manner, through an army of missionaries beating on your door and brainwashing your children in school classrooms, extracurricular activities and intramural sports.
I thought Lev was atheist this entire time.
A simple test is:
is it useful to use the term ‘pagan’ when referring to religions other than monotheisms like Christianity (and Islam and so on). And it is. And it isn’t confusing.
And it was’t confusing for Christians, for example, as PP1 points out, when they encountered groups with pagan religions and what they did to them.
Have Christians denied similarities and even roots in pagan religions? Sure.
But that does not make Christianity pagan. It’s Judaic roots - something that also gets denied but not perhaps in the same ways - lead to a very different kind of God - the capital ‘G’ a partial giveaway - which Christianity took even further from the world.
The Christian God - perfect, infinite, transcendent, outside - would be very strange to pagans and was.
Christian views of nature and sex, also quite strange to pagans.
The ontologies are different. Differing morals.
I mean the difference between a shaman (or pagan priest) and a Christian priest is pretty telling.
There is a radical gap between Christianity and paganism.
Now, sure, there are Christian sects who are more pagan, but pretty much anything at all has been batched under the term Christianity.
Wasn’t the first ‘one god to rule them all’ started by Egypt? A pharaoh?
Of course not. Well I mean maybe he started it, officially, but he wasn’t the first to have thunk it. Any time you have a group of people who are practicing a polytheism they eventually begin to wonder if, like the political arrangements of human beings, there is a hierarchy of power among the gods (after all, religious belief is a great big anthropomorphizing projection of the human psyche). If somebody says there is one main god, they get a henotheistic thing going for a while until they start to wonder if maybe there’s just one god… then they go mono. But no, there is never a single, first person to entertain a philosophical thought. All groups and languages eventually get around to asking the same questions and thinking in the same meta-psychologistic ways around the same time period.
You’ve completely lost track of the plot of the thread and are just chest-thumping in favor of paganism now. To return to the point: Christianity isn’t a pagan religion. It used and uses a few incidental symbols from pagan cultures it proselytized to. That’s it.
Ok, well I agree it isn’t a pagan religion… and I wouldn’t personally associate paganism with religion, unless it was dogmatic and coercive and systematic. I do say that a few holidays and symbolism are from paganism and Egypt though, so they can’t take credit for all of their symbolism and holidays like they do. That’s all.