Wow! Going into my post history to show how fallible I am? Wow! That being said. I am much more of a philosopher than a clerk. So, I am not going to take time out of my life going over every single claim Loleo made. I never engage in that kind of hypervigilance to win a point. It isn't necessary. All you have to do is stop and think for a moment. The reason I say this is something I stated early on in this thing, and that is: Even if we were to pour over every last scrap of evidence and reference books etc. the point remains that it is impossible, IMPOSSIBLE to prove either Jesus' existence or his non-existence. I said this before Leo went digging trying to PROVE her point. All history is fiction. Period. We can not conclusively prove that George Washington existed. It could be a massive conspiracy for all we know. Now, if you take that to mean that I do not believe in George Washington, then you have missed the point and are better off just stopping reading this right now. But, we do have lots of secular evidence of GWs existence. Did I say PROOF? No. I said EVIDENCE. Evidence is not proof. Evidence will only lead us to find out what LIKELY was true or p[ossibly or propbably true. You can not prove anything in the past, including your whereabouts last week. Barring getting caught on video doing something. Even then, videos can be manipulated and interpreted. This is what makes religious apoligists so soft in the science area. They think that things can be proved to the point that they are 100% sure of Christ's existence and can stop questioning it and go ahead and worship it. It's that sure. I'm curious to know if Leo believes in Jesus to the point she worships him. Is she Chrstian in other words? To be so sure of a person's existence who lived 2000 years ago and of whom not only do we not have secular references of him, his claims, or claims of his followers are very extreme (raised the dead?) A rational person would first respond to such a claim in the same way they responded when they heard that Appollos drives a chariot of fire around the earth as the sun. Very few people respond to Appllos as a God and historical figure, though the Greeks certainly did for some time. So why do people gulp down Jesus "turned water into wine" without EXTREME EVIDENCE? That means LOTS of evidence. We simply do not have enough evidence of Christs existence to justify belief in him. In any case, one might rationally believe that there was this guy who was really popular that lived a long time ago and inspired these stories, but to believe he actually turned water into wine and all the other miracles with out A TON of evidence just makes one gullible, in my opinion. So, does it make sense to believe that a man walked on water when his name is Jesus, but a guy named Prometheus just could not have been born of a virgin? This is inconsistent. One would have to supply their line of resoning to support this inconsistency, right? In other words, when you hear a tall tale, do you AT FIRST, believe it is true, or do you place it in the category of MYTH untill all the evidence comes in? I think a logical person would place all tall tales in the myth category UNTIL a shit load of evidence comes in that proves otherwise, including the story of G. Washington chopping down a cherry tree and never lying. iN the case of Jesus, we are still waiting for that shit load of evidence, and all reasonable people will maintain his existence in the myth category untl that evidence arrives. Even after it arrives, we still can only, at most, believe that it MAY have been true, or if the evidence is simply overwhelming, we might believe that it is LIKELY true. But NEVER should we believe that it was DEFINITELY true. Not unless you were there and saw it with your own eyes. In other words, I don't have to supply evidence that Appollos is a myth do I? Then why do I have to supply evidence that Jesus is NOT a myth? It does not follow. It would be holding a double standard, right? There have been many people who have believed that Appollos was a real person, as well as Prometheus. I do not have to engage with such nonsense. It is self evidently false. If Appollos is not real then why do I have to assume that Jesus was real? (And by the way, history has provided many people who have claimed to have seen Appllos in the flesh or laughing as he rides his chariot accross the sky. Every year there are tens of thousands of sightings of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Loch Ness, Big Foot, the Great Pumpkin (just ask Linus0 etc. I would take a MODERN sighting of a myth more seriously than an ancient sighting due to the fact that the older a testimony is the more likelihood that it has been manipulated and twisted. There may be more eyewitness accounts of Appollos than of Jesus in fact.) So, where does that leave us? You cannot prove that Jesus was a myth. Period. It can't be done. No encyclopedia reference will do it. Ultimately, it falls in the category of opinion. What is your opinion after seeing all the evidence? You also cannot prove that he was not a myth, or that he was real. Not with books and talking you can't. Of course those stories were not EXACTLY like the story of Jesus. I was wrong to say that they were. But, no one would expect them to be EXACTLY alike would they? They would have to be the same story, with the Jesus name even, to be Exactly alike. But, when you see hundreds of stories with the same themes or archtypes popping up over time, and then someguy gets born under the same circumstances as all those childhood fairy tales that you knew so well groing up, you would have to conclude one of two things: 1) Either those stories were prophetic about Jesus and of divine origin, or 2) the new story is just a new version of those same old stories. We do not need to dig up references to prove the logic of this statement. They wouldn't help. All we need to do is establish that there were indeed stories with similar themes that proceeded the Jesus story. No one here or anywhere is making the argument that these stories do not exist and did not predate the Jesus story. Leo is making a third argument though, that any similarities are just coincidental and are all in our heads. There really was no Christ stories in other religions before the Jesus story and she pointed out many discrepancies between the Jesus story and the earlier Christ myths. Discrepancies, I already dealt with that argument. No one expected that any of the stories should be identical, That wouldn't make sense to write an identical story. So, in conclusion, If Jesus was not a myth, PROVE IT!
Zeitgeist - anyone for a discussion?
by Shawn10538 46 Replies latest jw friends
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JK666
I don't like the changes they made recently to the opening of the movie.
JK
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Leolaia
Leo is making a third argument though, that any similarities are just coincidental and are all in our heads.
Jeez, you're dense. UNBELIEVABLY thick. You just can't help but misrepresent me, huh?
Here's more strawmen for ya:
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SacrificialLoon
Those scarecrows are being crucified, and look a lot like international bankers! More proof of errmmm... stuff and things.
BTW anything interesting happen on Z-day? I spent all day hiding from the Bilderbergers in a closet. :( -
Shawn10538
It's been a while since I have been able to think about this. But a point came to me.
Let's assume that every single fact stated by Leolaia is 100% true and correct. (First of all, I should acknowledge that I apparently do not understand Leo's final stance on the matter. I was of the understanding that she thought the whole Jesus myth theory was crap. I actually was not able to find her final disposition on the matter, so maybe she hasn't made up her mind yet, which would be more of a scientific/journalistically honest stance, so kudos if that is the case.)
But, I am not sure why she thinks that scholarship actually establishes anything concrete. The fact of the matter is that even if, for example, in the case of Isis, no one before me has ever made a connection between Isis and Mary, does not make that connection any less viable or legitimate. The fact that I am saying right now that Isis seems to be an early version of Mary, makes the connection just as legitimate as if some ancient Egyptian expert or scholar said it. So no need for clerking, the connection or similarities are self evident, so it needs no s holarship of any kind to legitimize it.
In other words, just because you walked around for 10,000 years with a pimple on your face and no big time scholar ever pointed it out to you and never published a paper on it, does not mean you do not have a pimple on your face. The pimple is there even if a child was the first to notice it - even if noone ever noticed it. So, Isis-Meri needs no reference or support of any kind. We have simply noticed a similarity. The similarity is real, not contrived. You don't even need to know "the original story" and you don't need to know the whole story. If you say, or I say, that Isis and Mary are similar, then it is so. No one ever told me that Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a Christ myth. No one needs to; it's obvious. Richard Bach the writer has never claimed to my knowledge to have based his book on Christ, but many of the Christ story elements are there, so, it is a Christ myth. In fact Richard Bach need not be aware that it is a Christ mtyh for it to be one. It falls into the category along with a thousand other Christ myths that people did not intend to be a Christ myths. The Little Prince is the same way.
So, it doesn't make sense for someone to sum up the matter by saying the whole theory is crap. This would be begging the question, and tho Leo won't agree with my using this term this way, ad hominem (in principle.) The fact that the makers of Zeitgeist have noticed all of these similarities is proof in and of itself that these similarities are real. They and many others for centuries have noticed the similarities between Jesus and a plethora of other gods and myths and stories etc. Just because some people cannot see the similarities does not mean that they aren't there.
It's like a puzzle. The makers of Zeit and other writers, historians and the like for centuries have noticed that certain ppieces of Jesus of Nazareth fit together with other pieces of pagan myths and astrology. If they fit, they fit. Period. And when there are hundreds of Christ stories ( a new one was just made by the way, 10,000 BC) that have many similarities to the Christ myth, then that suggests that they are all part of the same puzzle. Incidentally, no one has told me that 10,00 BC is a Christ myth. I concluded that all on my own, and I could sit here and tell you exactly where the movie is directly pulling from other Christ myths and where it does not. I don't need a scholar to tell me what I can see with my own eyes, and I see that the movie, 10,000 BC is a Christ myth. Period. It is the story of a prophetic savior coming and performing mighty works and saving his people. His father disappeared when he was young. This is like Jesus, whose father was in heaven. They both have fathers who were legendary and absent. And there you have it. No need to ask a scholar permission to say that 10000BC is a christ myth. It fits, no matter how hard you stamp you feet and say it isn't so. -
AWAKE&WATCHING
*sticky note*
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Mad Sweeney
I thought Leolaia's conclusion was pretty obvious: the Zeitgeist film's conclusions are based on crappy research and therefore, though the Jesus myth may be based on earlier myths, the film's weak scholarship can't be counted upon to solidly make that point. A documentary movie that has but a handful of sources, all of them secondary and none of them primary, is merely a cute little movie, not something to base one's serious viewpoint on.
