What If The Bible Had Never Existed??? (page 2)

snowbird

OK.

If the Bible had never existed, I believe I would still believe in a Creator.

I don't remember a time when I didn't believe.

The Bible just lets me know that there are others like me.

Syl

ziddina

WHICH tribal groups??? Most had MULTIPLE gods - remember, I'm referring to PRE-European influence - in other words, pre-1450's...

ziddina

NO, snowbird...

You have to go back to your most ancient ancestry...

Did THEY believe in a Middle-Eastern mono-theistic deity??

[Not that the bible actually contains only ONE deity but here again, most people either don't know that or ignore it...]

Get rid of that phallic mono-theistic monotonous monopoly on your brain!! Think OUTSIDE of the box!!

FlyingHighNow

Are you aware that this whole "Great Spirit" belief system was generated AFTER the Native Americans were influenced and conquered by Middle-Eastern Christian-god-worshipping whites???

This isn't true across the board. Some Natives were polytheists, some were pantheists and some were monotheists. The evidence for this predates the arrival of the Europeans and is archeological in nature. I don't necessarily believe there is one god only. By the way, the Christian Trinity teaches of three Gods in one, not exactly monotheism.

ziddina

FlyingHighNow, can you list the tribes who were 'monotheists' prior to the 1500's???

Yes, Christianity has had sufficient Greco-Roman influences to generate a 'three-gods-in-one' in the new testament - and as I've stated many times before, the entire bible actually contains several 'gods', not just one...

But again, most people don't realize that...

snowbird

I believe some did, Ziddy.

The Cushites, Ethiopians, and Nubians were close allies of the Hebrews/Jews.

I'll bet some were part of the "vast, mixed company" that accompanied the Jews from Egypt.

Remember, I'm deep into The Book of Jasher; that baby is totally outside the box!

the Christian Trinity teaches of three Gods in one

Not quite. Three persons in one God.

Syl

FlyingHighNow

Zidd, you've got one idea stuck in your head, so your mind isn't very flexible on the subject.

Here is an article for you start with. This is an eye opener:

http://www.custance.org/old/evol/2ch1/2ch1.html

An excerpt:

It might be thought that the picture has changed radically since the days of Renouf and his Hibbert Lectures. This is not the case. Sir Flinders Petrie, in an excellent little book on the subject of Egyptian religion, wrote as follows: (10)

There are in ancient religions and theologies very different classes of gods. Some races, as the modern Hindu, revel in a profusion of gods and godlings which continually increase. Others...do not attempt to worship great gods, but deal with a host of animistic spirits, devils, or whatever we may call them.... But all our knowledge of the early positions and nature of the great gods shows them to stand on an entirely different footing to these varied spirits.
Were the conception of a god only an evolution from such spirit worship we should find the worship of many gods preceding the worship of one god.... What we actually find is the contrary of this, monotheism is the first stage traceable in theology....
Wherever we can trace back polytheism to its earliest stages, we find that it results from combinations of monotheism. In Egypt even Osiris, Isis, and Horus, so familiar as a triad, are found at first as separate units in different places: Isis as a virgin goddess, and Horus as a self-existent God.
Each city appears to have had but one god belonging to it, to whom others were in time added. Similarly Babylonian cities each had their supreme god, and the combinations of these and their transformations in order to form them into groups when their homes were politically united show how essentially they were solitary deities at first.

Everywhere the pattern seems to have been much the same, wherever we have sufficient records to establish the historical sequence. It is not strange that a conquering people should set their own deity at the head of the pantheon, but it is also not strange either that for the sake of peace and harmony they should pay lip service to the deities of the conquered, though allotting to them inferior positions. This kind of broad-mindedness we would tend to commend today under the general heading of religious freedom. But the penalty of this broad-mindedness is that the truth is very quickly blurred. The solution is not simple: the Jesuits, as an example, have traditionally taken the stand that only the truth should be given complete freedom of expression and therefore religious tolerance is equated with lack of conviction. Any man who agrees that people may worship whatever they will is really confessing, so they argue, that he himself is not absolutely certain that he has the truth and therefore is willing to be broad-minded. They have a point. The monarchs of antiquity, like Cyrus for example, allowed complete freedom to conquered peoples to build their temples and establish their priesthoods as suited them individually. The consequence was that such men by their "enlightened" policy contributed to the tremendous proliferation of deities. As I have said, the problem is a difficult one: but ecumenism may be a worse menace in the opposite direction by insisting that everybody must agree to worship the same "God" who may be no God at all.

snowbird

FHN, I love his series.

His take on the "seed" of the woman is eye-opening.

Syl

strymeckirules

strange question.

the question should be,

"What if humans never decided to write down history?"

(remember the bible is many little scrolls from different time periods in one book.)

the answer is -

Then we would NEVER learn from our mistakes.

ziddina

Ah....

Snowbird, you do realize that the Great Pyramid is at least 1,500 years OLDER than the bible?? http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/howold.html

The most conservative estimates of its age puts it at 5,000 years old...

Which means that it actually predates "Noah's Flood"...

And the Ethiopians - as a nation - were located far south of the Egyptians. They couldn't have been the allies of the Israelites; they would have been spread too thin, and then there was the entire nation of Egypt in between, too.

There may have been a few Ethiopian stragglers from Egypt, however... I'd have to look that up in a reputable archaeological source.

What If The Bible Had Never Existed???

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