St. Augustine admitted that Christianity is as old as the human race.

[Viva_Daddy]

"That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.

*St. Augustine. Letter of Retractions, Bk I, Chapter 12.3 (Augustine was not retracting the quoted statement. He made the quoted statement while retracting an earlier writing.)

He was only wrong in the part about Christ coming in the flesh.

[AtheistCrusader]

1. Falsely co-opting the entirety of human history isn't a new tactic for Christians.

[skepticscott]

6. Yes, there are yacht-clubbers who post here currently

who regularly try to credit religion for every positive social movement in the last 500 years.

[immoderate]

2. Explains evil as good as anything else.

--imm

[DetlefK]

3. The Christians were Christians before it was cool.

Dude, that religion is so vintage, back then there weren't even scriptures proving the existence of Don't-call-it-Christianity-yet.



It's really a shame when Christians don't care enough about their own religion to get curious.
Did you know that the original Jews were polytheists and worshipped Yahweh, the goddess Asherah and most likely numerous other gods like El, Baal and Kaus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah

[edhopper]

4. Was that all

6000 years of human history?

[Viva_Daddy]

5. No need for snarky

Obviously, if Christianity existed prior to the so-called "incarnation" then that "incarnation" had nothing to do with Christianity.

That is why I posted the quotation.

[Act_of_Reparation]

11. You know...

...if you don't know anything about the history of the Christian religion, that kind of makes sense.

Kind of.

[edhopper]

13. But it didn't

and Augustine was wrong, as he was with many things.

[cbayer]

7. Could you educate me as to what this means?

[Viva_Daddy]

8. It means Christianity was not "new" 2000 years ago.

The daily, yearly and "great year" cycle of the Sun which were dramatically portrayed in the myths of ancient man, existed long prior to the so-called "incarnation of Christ".

[bvf]

9. Meaning that the Earth

has always revolved around the sun?

Even if people didn't quite see it that way?

Wow.

[cbayer]

10. I am totally unfamiliar with this topic and will back away. Thanks for the info.

[okasha]

18. It's just a restatement of the "Jesus was a sungod" bullshit.

Augustine argues that since God the Father and God the Son are the same God and are coeternal, and "of one substance," then worship of one is worship of both. Because the first bumans--Adam and Eve-- worshipped Yahweh, they also implicitly worshipped Christ before his incarnation in the person of Jesus. It's eqjivalent to Muhammad's teaching that all foregoing prophets and patriarchs were de facto Muslims because the Jewish Yahweh is identical with Allah.

The OP obviously got this off some quote-mining mythecist website. If he'd actually read the book, he'd know that Reractionum doesn't mean "Retractions.". Augustine wasn't "retracting" anything. He was commentining on his own previous work and adding to it. A more appropriate rendering of the title would be something like 'Updates" or "Author's Notes."

[bvf]

19. Thank you

for that explanatory bit of religious "scholarship."

Just more bullshit vs. bullshit.

[cbayer]

21. Thanks for the further explanation.

Much as I like debate, I could not be less interested in this one.

[okasha]

22. What amuses me about it

is watching people who swear that their position is based on "evidence" and "scientific method" gulping down this kind of snake oil for the sheer joy of confirmation bias, without so much as a minute's thought or pause to check facts. "I just grabbed it off yahoo" is all they need.

[edhopper]

23. Religious people rely

On Faith and other ways of knowing more than evidence and the scientific method (no quotes)

When those things are in conflict, the often choose faith,

[okasha]

24. And?

Obviously some non or even anti religious people are as gullible as you think "religious people" are.
There seems to be a rather alarming faith in the intertubes in the. OP's post. Do you think it's wrong to ridicule that double standard?

[edhopper]

25. I thought the OP

Was a believer.

If not, your post makes sense.

[phil89]

26. If they don't believe in mythology being real

they're still ahead of the game.

[okasha]

27. The mythecists have created their own mythology.

Do you think that's okay?

[Warren Stupidity]

29. Nobody grabs anything off of yahoo.

What is this 1999?

[okasha]

34. Take it up with your buddy Toons.

[Warren Stupidity]

28. Retractationes or Retractationum not Reractionum

Reractionum isn't even a word, then again nor is eqjivalent.

[okasha]

35. Forgive us our typos as we forgive those who typo sgainst us.

[skepticscott]

37. By that logic, the Hebrews all worshipped Christ too

which makes perfect sense, since he was the Messiah they were waiting for for thousands of years afterwards.

Oh...wait...

[struggle4progress]

14. It's another instance of the fact that the word "Christian" has meant different things

in different communities

Suppose, for example, "Christian" means something like "a person who believes in the Christ." A person, who believes that both "the Christ" is the Jewish messiah and The Jewish messiah has come to us as Jesus of Nazareth, might then regard anyone -- who believed in the coming of the Jewish messiah but who lived before the time of Jesus of Nazareth -- as a person who believed in the Christ and therefore might call such a person a Christian. There seems to be a long history of arguing in this way: this is, I think, why Martin Luther insisted on referring to certain Old Testament figures as "Christians"

This species of argument seems to me somewhat of a semantic quibble, grounded in a Platonist preconception that words refer to some eternal abstract reality, but it may have seemed natural originally: the gospels were written in Greek and so probably spread originally through the Hellenic Jewish diaspora, in which Platonist views must have been widely known

[cbayer]

15. Seems entirely semantic and very tribal to me.

Thank you very much for the information, but this is exactly the kind of thing that does not interest me about religion.

[struggle4progress]

17. I was merely explaining what Augustine may have intended.

I regard it as an entirely inessential and rather uninteresting semantic quibble

[cbayer]

20. I got that. I did not mean to come off as rude.

[okasha]

12. Link, please.

[Warren Stupidity]

30. I just love it when people here who never provide any citations for any of their claims

are suddenly all "link please" about other people's nonsense.

[okasha]

31. We know you love you, Warren.

[Warren Stupidity]

32. link?

[okasha]

33. On second thought, perhaps you don't.

No one would blame you for that.

[skepticscott]

36. It's only the intellectually shallow

who who try to pretend that if someone can't provide a "link" to something, then it can be discounted.

Those of us with a little more depth know that there is a great deal of knowledge that isn't available on Google.

[LiberalAndProud]

16. St. Augustine needed to break Abraham out of hell.

Seems like they took an awfully long time to get to it, don't you think?