The fall of Christianity in USA

[joelr]

Yes, there are common threads in mythology including the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as myths of other cultures: Egypt, China, the Aztechs, Maya, etc.
Threads tracing back to ancient Babylon, Not Persia.
Gilgamesh finds that Utnapishtim tells him the Flood story ( Epic table XI known as the Flood table ) Flood story is first.
The overall message message of the Epic is sadness and frustration of death and the hereafter.
Whereas, the biblcial Flood message is one of hope and the gaining of eternal life via a resurrection.

Ancient Babylon was the Mesopotamian cradle of most of the world's religions.
This is why we see so many similar or overlapping religious-myth concepts and teachings throughout the world today.
As the people migrated away from ancient Babylon they took with them their religious myths and ideas and spread them world wide into a greater religious Babylon or Babylon the Great,.

Yes people copy myths or incorporate them into their own religions.

"Various themes, plot elements, and characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh have counterparts in the Hebrew Bible – notably, the accounts of the Garden of Eden, the advice from Ecclesiastes, and the Genesis flood narrative."

Changes between versions are also common, the fact that the basic narrative matches in many ways demonstrates the author used the Epic as a guide when writing Noah.
The overall message is not sadness but how to live a good life, worship Gods, why humans die, foundations of wisdom.
But at the end of just the flood part of the story they are granted with immortal life. Any resurrection narrative you take from Noah can be found in the Epic. Are you adding symbolism to Noah's Ark by interpreting it in light of later stories about resurrection?

 

[joelr]

Do you think, reflecting on your own view, that it might be a little too ideological? (too rigid and insistent on fitting things into little boxes they don't really fit that well in)

Not sure exactly which thing you think is being fit into a box it doesn't fit into? If it's the idea that Christianity isn't like mythology you would be way off. Comparative religions shows it is, all of the stories are ideas first appearing in other religions the literary style is intentionally literary fiction and we know the Persians invaded and were a huge influence.

"We believe that Zoroastrianism greatly influenced Judaism and Christianity, and then trickled through to Islam. This ‘osmosis’ particularly seems to have happened with the afterlife doctrine. The concepts of heaven and hell, individual judgement, resurrection of the body, the last judgement, the coming of the Messiah – these are mainstream Zoroastrian theological ideas which entered post-exilic Judaism around the fourth century bce. From my understanding of Judaism, it did not originally have a defined ideology as far as its eschatology was concerned. One must also also bear in mind that a Zoroastrian ruler, Phrates IV, was ruling Jerusalem in 40 bce."

This is confirmed by OT scholars.

If you were studying a Bronze age religion in China and found that in 300AD this religion made many theological changes to it's doctrine then also discovered that the Japanese had invaded and occupied China for 200 years prior and the new additions were all from the Japanese religious beliefs....that's not hard to understand?
That isn't fitting something into a small box that doesn't fit?
It seems you might just not want it to fit?

There was an emmesary to the Jewish leaders from the Persians and he was well liked and very friendly to the Jewish people. This played a role in warming up Jewish prophets to adding new concepts to their religion.

The Zoroastrian Flame | Beshara Magazine

 

[blü 2]

[

God isn't subject to, contained in, under, only of...nature.

Nature is another name for (external) reality, the world external to the self, the realm of the physical sciences. If God can't be found there then the only place God can exist is as a concept or thing imagined in an individual working brain. There's no third option, is there?

Instead of being of nature, contained and subject to nature, we think it's the other way around, as He originated nature in some way.

That gets us straight into physics, not least what's the procedure for originating nature, no?

A commonplace assumption (erroneous; but often assumed without being aware of even making the assumption) is the idea that God would have to be natural.

But the only other thing God could be is conceptual / imaginary, and exist only in working brains that contained the relevant concept. Nor is it at all likely that the concepts would match.

I'm pointing out that typical natural assumption appears entirely contrary to what we know in scripture.

Then since statements about nature are falsifiable, and stand on a real (examinable and objective) foundation, statements about reality derived from nature by science are always to be preferred if we seek accurate statements about reality, no?

God not only creates nature, but more than just occasionally in scripture alters the normal rules of nature in ways that seem simply naturally impossible. Ergo, He is above nature. Nature is subject to Him.

If scripture claims to make statements that have objective truth, then they must either conform to what we can demonstrate objectively to be correct, or they must fail, no?

 

[halbhh]

Not sure exactly which thing you think is being fit into a box it doesn't fit into? If it's the idea that Christianity isn't like mythology you would be way off. Comparative religions shows it is, all of the stories are ideas first appearing in other religions the literary style is intentionally literary fiction and we know the Persians invaded and were a huge influence.

"We believe that Zoroastrianism greatly influenced Judaism and Christianity, and then trickled through to Islam. This ‘osmosis’ particularly seems to have happened with the afterlife doctrine. The concepts of heaven and hell, individual judgement, resurrection of the body, the last judgement, the coming of the Messiah – these are mainstream Zoroastrian theological ideas which entered post-exilic Judaism around the fourth century bce. From my understanding of Judaism, it did not originally have a defined ideology as far as its eschatology was concerned. One must also also bear in mind that a Zoroastrian ruler, Phrates IV, was ruling Jerusalem in 40 bce."

This is confirmed by OT scholars.

If you were studying a Bronze age religion in China and found that in 300AD this religion made many theological changes to it's doctrine then also discovered that the Japanese had invaded and occupied China for 200 years prior and the new additions were all from the Japanese religious beliefs....that's not hard to understand?
That isn't fitting something into a small box that doesn't fit?
It seems you might just not want it to fit?

There was an emmesary to the Jewish leaders from the Persians and he was well liked and very friendly to the Jewish people. This played a role in warming up Jewish prophets to adding new concepts to their religion.

The Zoroastrian Flame | Beshara Magazine

Are you familiar with Joseph Campbell (or Carl Jung) or similar viewpoints? They point out in various ways that myths are metaphorical lessons or helpful teachings about real parts of the human psyche and about living life on Earth as human and such. Instead of being 'false', a myth is like a story, and tells us something true about life or choices we face.

Some are better than others of course, just as some stories are more helpful than others. If you merely have a general prejudice against metaphor or myth, perhaps we should just leave the topic entirely aside, having no way to discuss much on that in that case.

 

[halbhh]

If God can't be found there then the only place God can exist is as a concept or thing imagined in an individual working brain. There's no third option, is there?

This is a place you could potentially reexamine more critically or carefully.

If you simply posit the assumption that only this Universe exists alone, only this physics, and nothing else, then you can certainly then state various forms of that same assumption.

Just the logical tautologies that restate the assumption.

Nothing exists but nature.
God must be in nature, natural, or else not exist.
etc.

All merely various ways to restate the premise.

But, by definition, according to scriptures, from the start, God isn't from nature. Not subject to it, from the start. Able to alter it at will, for instance. Outside of it necessarily, by definition, from the very start.

So, you could talk of your own definition of some 'god' you defined that is only natural, just a part of nature -- but that wouldn't be the One in the scriptures of the common bible for example, Who isn't a part of nature at all. Even more, according to those scriptures, He not only originated this nature we see around us at the moment, but will also sweep it away and replace it with some new one later. That helps to illustrate how unlike a natural 'god' He is.

 

[metis]

Nothing exists but nature.
God must be in nature, natural, or else not exist.
etc.

As time has gone on, I tend to think this is likely correct. This is the same view that Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein took, and their minds weren't too shabby.

 

[blü 2]

This is a place you could potentially reexamine more critically or carefully.

If you simply posit the assumption that only this Universe exists alone, only this physics, and nothing else, then you can certainly then state various forms of that same assumption.

At the present time physics includes various hypotheses about other universes and metaverses, other dimensions, and so on.

And it seems far more reasonable to think that something pre-existed the Big Bang, that the contents of the Big Bang ─ all the matter and energy of our universe ─ did not inexplicably come into being out of pure nothing (which is not anywhere in space or time, has no qualities or attributes or potential).

So what we know about the world external to the self is what we can work out from our exploring, describing and trying to explain that world.

On the present state of our knowledge, it doesn't contain unicorns, for example.

But more importantly for theology, on the present state of our knowledge it doesn't contain the supernatural ─ which I associate with magic, the power to alter reality independently of the rules, the physics, of reality.

So in what manner can anyone say God, or gods, or souls, or magicians, or wishing wells, or the Wand of Power, or good or evil or mischievous spirits or fairies or goblins or werewolves exist in the world external to the self? The only manner in which we can presently say they exist is as concepts / things imagined in individual brains.

And God has a special problem in that regard, in that unlike the unicorn, there is no description of [him] appropriate to a being with objective existence, hence no objective test that can tell me whether this keyboard I'm typing on is God or not. I can tell it's not a unicorn, not a joshua tree, not a barnacle, spider, piece of coal, not light in the green band, not the smell of frying onions, but I can't tell whether or not it's God.

So God is not even conceived of as real, as having objective existence. If we look in the world external to the self for God, we have not the slightest idea what we're looking for, no criterion for success in our search.

It follows that the only way in which God and gods and the supernatural are known to exist is as things imagined in individual brains. If you disagree, please tell me the objective test to determine whether my keyboard is God or not. That, by the way, is not a joke or a mock, but an illustration of a very basic problem about the supernatural.

If not something real, something existing in the world external to the self, then what else can God be but purely conceptual / imaginary?