The history of religion

[Rival]

What is wrong with the Tanakh available now?

Genesis: the creation accounts

Why is this 'wrong'?

 

[Secret Chief]

Dear god, this is nuts.

 

[exchemist]

The history of religion is not available because it is the history of religion which proves that religion is but a colossal fraud.
To know the history of religion, one has to research himself. The following are the results of my own research:

The peoples of the ancient Near East did not believe in heavenly, supernatural, immaterial beings! There was the term “lord”, which when applied to the social rank of the lord it could mean up to “king”, and when to the superior status of the king it meant “god”. Those belonging to the tribe, clan, or race of the king were all called gods.
The kings were augmenting their population (producing slaves at the same time) by having their noblemen, the lords-gods, raping confined foreign women, mostly prisoners of war (in fact, they were operating human breeding grounds). The unexpected aftermath of that practice was that some of the infants were recognized as “sons of lords-gods”, thus making the women mothers of gods, i.e., goddesses!

The women who turned goddesses, caused the public harems, where they were confined, to evolve into temples (The Egyptian name of the temple at Luxor is /ipt rst/ meaning “Harem of the South”, and of the temple at Karnak is /ipt swt/ meaning “Harem districts”).
What is more, however, was that since the lords-gods had to pay to rape the women so that the expenses of the human breeding grounds would not burden the king’s treasury, the custom of the remuneration was passed on to the temples thus creating the well-known practice of Temple Prostitution.
Scholars cannot confirm the practice of temple prostitution in the ancient Near East. Low-quality translations of the Egyptian texts prevent them from tracking the origins of the practice.

The Origins of Temple Prostitution

The lords-gods were transformed into heavenly immaterial Gods when someone made a joke saying that the ‘gods’ climbed ladders and went to live up in the sky (they were already at the top of the mountains: Olympus to Greeks, The Cedar Forest to Sumerians, i.e., halfway up, but that is another story). The above information we get from the oldest religious texts, the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.
The relevant passages, in the original hieroglyphic text translated word-for-word, can be found in the following article:

Occurrence of heavenly gods: When, where, and how.

In this way, the heavenly gods were created out of the lords called gods, and out of them, theologians produced the one and only God.

The Origins of Theology

The most interesting part of the whole story of the gods/Gods, however, is the introduction to the story which goes back by more than 40,000 years:

The Head Covering Veil

Any crank can publish stuff on academia.edu. There is no peer review. (I know of at least one perennial crank that habitually uses it.)

Have you had anything published in a peer-reviewed journal?

 

[IndigoChild5559]

The history of religion is not available because it is the history of religion which proves that religion is but a colossal fraud.

This is, quite frankly, an absurd claim. We have thousands upon thousands of years of religious history going all the way back to the origin or written text, and in some cases before.

The peoples of the ancient Near East did not believe in heavenly, supernatural, immaterial beings!

Again, this doesn't match up with what we actually do have. For example, we have the Gobekli Tepe temple, which shows an animistic mentality. So religious definitely goes back before written history.

 

[Trimijopulos]

Why is this 'wrong'?

You wrote: “Are you suggesting that if Judaism were true we would, for example, find a Torah from the 3rd c. bc the same as the Torah we have now, rather than, as we think, as a collection of sources (that we haven't found piecemeal either?)?”

So, what is wrong with the text we have now?

 

[Trimijopulos]

This is, quite frankly, an absurd claim. We have thousands upon thousands of years of religious history going all the way back to the origin or written text, and in some cases before.

Again, this doesn't match up with what we actually do have. For example, we have the Gobekli Tepe temple, which shows an animistic mentality. So religious definitely goes back before written history.

On what evidence do you connect Gobekli Tepe to animism?

Animism has nothing to do with religion.

By religion, we mean belief in gods.

The oldest religious texts are the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, which inform us that the modern immaterial gods were produced when it was said that the gods living on the tops of the mountains climbed ladders to the sky.

So, what is left to know is the exact time that the earthly gods were transformed into the modern heavenly gods.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Animism has nothing to do with religion.

Your level of education is simply too low for a decent conversation. If you don't understand that animism is a form of religion, I don't really know where to even begin with you.

an·i·mism
/ˈanəˌmizəm/
noun
1.
the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.
2.
the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.

 

[SalixIncendium]

By religion, we mean belief in gods.

Who is we? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?

It's sad that you can make such a claim as in the OP in complete ignorance of what religion is.

There are several religions that have no god. Buddhism, Jainism, Christian Atheism, Confucianism, and even sects of Hinduism to name a few.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

The oldest religious texts are the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, which i

Kesh Temple Hymn

Now, if you talked less and read more, you could avoid such silly mistakes.

 

[Trimijopulos]

Your level of education is simply too low for a decent conversation. If you don't understand that animism is a form of religion, I don't really know where to even begin with you.

an·i·mism
/ˈanəˌmizəm/
noun
1.
the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.
2.
the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.

Genesis 6:4 is an account of the creation of humans. What exactly do you make out of this passage?

For animism to exist, the concept of the soul is indispensable.

So, when and how the concept of the soul appeared?

If you want a decent conversation as you say, you have first to respect the person you are conversing with and then base your assertions on evidence.

They invented animism to justify the belief in gods: people started by believing in souls and then anthropomorphized the souls into gods, or, that people believed in a “supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe”.

 

[SalixIncendium]

If you want a decent conversation as you say, you have first to respect the person you are conversing with...

I'm going to let you in on a little secret that most of us already know...

Respect is something that is earned, not something you're entitled to just because you create a [questionable] post on a message board.

 

[Trimijopulos]

Who is we? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?

It's sad that you can make such a claim as in the OP in complete ignorance of what religion is.

There are several religions that have no god. Buddhism, Jainism, Christian Atheism, Confucianism, and even sects of Hinduism to name a few.

Religion is what people believed in various time periods.
Religions are philosopho-theological ideas that theologians brainwashed people with.
So, by religion, we (we who have been studying the subject of religion) mean belief in gods.

 

[SalixIncendium]

Religion is what people believed in various time periods.
Religions are philosopho-theological ideas that theologians brainwashed people with.
So, by religion, we (we who have been studying the subject of religion) mean belief in gods.

Then it would appear you need to study further, because you clearly missed the non-theistic religions.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

By religion, we mean belief in gods.

By religion we mean belief in gods OR OTHER SUPERNATURAL STUFF. Belief that a rock has a spirit, or that the universe is pervaded by a supernatural manna, is of course a kind of religion.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Genesis 6:4 is an account of the creation of humans. What exactly do you make out of this passage?

It's just not. the Genesis 6 passage starts off with creation already in existence. This is not rocket science here.

 

[Secret Chief]

By religion we mean belief in gods OR OTHER SUPERNATURAL STUFF. Belief that a rock has a spirit, or that the universe is pervaded by a supernatural manna, is of course a kind of religion.

Or other stuff that is not supernatural.

 

[Trimijopulos]

Kesh Temple Hymn

Now, if you talked less and read more, you could avoid such silly mistakes.

Please, be polite or you get no more replies from me.

One hymn does not produce “Religious texts”.
The Egyptian Pyramid texts are composed of 759 chapters and in Raymond Faulkner’s translation into English expanded to 319 pages of A4 size.

 

[Trimijopulos]

It's just not. the Genesis 6 passage starts off with creation already in existence. This is not rocket science here.

True! The primitive women whom the sons of Elohim raped, and they gave birth to us, the modern men of renown, already existed.
What you have to tell us is who were those sons of Elohim, who were created by the Elohim in Genesis 1:26-27.

 

[Trimijopulos]

By religion we mean belief in gods OR OTHER SUPERNATURAL STUFF. Belief that a rock has a spirit, or that the universe is pervaded by a supernatural manna, is of course a kind of religion.

The supernatural stuff is the work of theologians.

What organized religion preached that rocks have spirits?

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Or other stuff that is not supernatural.

can you give an example of something that is religious but has no element of the supernatural?