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| Re: Darkknight's other thread: "does God exist?" [message #365200 is a reply to message #365186] |
Sun, 28 December 2008 16:29   |
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Spoony
Messages: 3915
Registered: January 2006
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General (3 Stars)
Tactics & Strategies Moderator |
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re: zeitgeist.
I'm quite happy to accept that a man called Jesus existed round about the alleged time and place (not that we have much to go on)... but the key word there is "man". A decent chap, sure... a great moral teacher (for the time, at least...) and philosopher, okay... but to say he was a supernatural, divine being is an extraordinary claim, with nothing to support it.
the business about the same attributes of previous messiahs is dead simple; relates to the emperor Constantine. he basically fused the existing pagan traditions with some of the alleged accounts of Jesus' life. that's why a lot of things relating to Jesus are astrological, have to do with the sun and stars' movements, etc.
I want to mention C.S.Lewis at this point. I've already gone over the fact I find a lot of Christianity's teachings to be morally repellent, such as the whole vicarious atonement business. Lewis was very dismissive of those who said that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but not actually anything more than a man - he pointed out that if Jesus was only a man, the whole business of redemption and so on is nonsense and therefore that proves he was the son of God. the obvious argument against this is that Jesus may have been insane, or lying. what I think is more likely (though I don't hear it said...) is that Jesus never said any of that stuff anyway, and it was all added later, rather opportunistically, for the purposes of securing temporal power.
Unleash the Renerageâ„¢
Renedrama [ren-i-drah-muh]
- noun
1. the inevitable criticism one receives after doing something awful
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