The real "Truth about Religion" - 3 part video series you should see if you haven't already...

[moobu2]

Seriously, if you don't have the time or desire to watch these now, save them for later.

"Origins of Christianity. How ancient myths evolved into the most powerful religion today."

part 1 -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjGkRFFBd0A

Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_E0vfP79yE&feature=related

Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyXIeB1qI6w&feature=related

[BadgerKid]

1. Very interesting. Thanks! n/t

[struggle4progress]

2. From the first few minutes of part one: "Horus was born on December 25."

I'm simply going to repost here something I posted in a similar thread last spring:

Ancient calendrical ideas can be quite confusing. Ancient Egypt predates the Roman republic by millennia, and the ancient Egyptians used multiple calendars. The 365 day year, of course, slipped a day or so every four years, so an epagomenal day dedicated to Horus need not generally have fallen anywhere near the winter solstice. This problem was corrected during the period of Roman rule, but the situation with the Roman calendar seems to have been quite dreadful around that time also, according to Wikipedia:

... a 27-day intercalary month .. was sometimes inserted between February and March. This intercalary month was formed by inserting 22 days after the first 23 or 24 days of February; the last five days of February, which counted down toward the start of March, become the last five days of Intercalaris. The net effect was to add 22 or 23 days to the year, forming an intercalary year of 377 or 378 days .... since the Pontifices were often politicians, and because a Roman magistrate's term of office corresponded with a calendar year, this power was prone to abuse: a Pontifex could lengthen a year in which he or one of his political allies was in office, or refuse to lengthen one in which his opponents were in power ... Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 BC of the official calendar, but the official calendar had drifted so far away from the seasons that it was actually mid-autumn .... The first step of the reform was to realign the start of the calendar year .. to the tropical year by making 46 BC 445 days long .... the pontifices apparently misunderstood the algorithm for leap years. They added a leap day every three years, instead of every four years .... Augustus remedied this discrepancy after 36 years by restoring the correct frequency. He also skipped several leap days in order to realign the year ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar

The Julian effort to define the solstice as December 25, of course, is interesting; and I suppose it's entirely possible that Roman rule in the time of Augustus finally enforced an occasional sixth epagomenal, rationalizing one of the Egyptian calendars. But, of course, the epagomenals did not occur near the end of the Roman year:

... According to Roman writer Censorinus, the Egyptian New Year's Day fell on July 20 in the Julian Calendar in AD 139, which was a heliacal rising of Sirius in Egypt ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar

So at the beginning of the Christian era, the Horus epagomenal day seems to have been a summer event, not a winter solstice event

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=214&topic_id=243286

In particular, "Horus was born on December 25" -- which is a claim that could only possibly make sense after the Romans conquered Egypt and imposed their own calendar there (since "December" is not a Egyptian month) -- turns out simply not to be true, even in Egypt's Roman era

I expect the rest of the nonsense claims could be handled similarly, but it should all be old familiar territory by now. Here's a post worth reading from on Stupid Evil Bastard about five years ago:

Ending the Myth of Horus
By Consigliere, on January 10th, 2005 ...

I’ve heard repeated here several times that .. Jesus is a copycat version of an earlier Egyptian deity ... When I first heard that Horus was the inspiration for Jesus several years ago, I didn’t give it much credence because I couldn’t establish any source material for the claims. I still can’t, but the internet is as adept at allowing anybody and everybody to pass on misinformation ... In short, of the claims outlined in this entry, I find the comparison between Horus and Jesus to consist of the following: they were of royal descent, they allegedly worked miracles and there were murder plots against them. http://stupidevilbastard.com/2005/01/ending_the_myth_of_horus/

Religious syncretism, of course, does occur and it's interesting. But just echoing inaccurate crap doesn't help us understand anything

[Silent3]

4. Wouldn't the important question about the similarity of birth dates...

...be that they are roughly three days after the winter solstice, regardless of crazy calendar system changes, or at least that the dates were originally chosen to correspond to dates roughly three days after the winter solstice, even if calendar inaccuracies or politics later push the dates around?

I'm not saying that I know that taking such things into account makes the Horus and Jesus legends match when it comes to birth dates, just that I think arguing purely on the basic of changing calendar conventions and nomenclature might be missing the point.

[struggle4progress]

5. Your remarks presume all manner of fact not in evidence, such as "Horus' birthday

was three days after the winter solstice." Some early Egyptian calendars seem to have comprised a dozen 30-day lunar months, a scheme that would fall rapidly out-of-sync with both the sun and moon, since it misses being the solar cycle by something like five days a year and misses the lunar cycle by something like half a day a month. In remote antiquity, the Egyptians modified the 360 day scheme by adding together en bloc to the calendar 5 epagomenal days, traditionally corresponding to the five children born to Isis after her reconstruction of the dismembered Osiris:

August 24 begins the "five days out of time" when, according to Plutarch (Isis & Osiris, ch. 12), five principal Egyptian Gods were born. The civil calendar that was introduced in Egypt between c.2937 and c.2821 BCE had 12 months of 30 days each. Five epagomenal days, "days out of time," were placed between the 30th of the last month and the first day of the new year to bring the total to 365. Although the rising of Sirius (Sothis) originally marked the new year (Thoth 1), the missing quarter day in the civil calendar caused a "wandering year" as the rising of Sirius cycled through the days of the year; it returned to Thoth 1 every 1461 (civil) years, the Sothic Cycle. (For example, this occurred in 1320 BCE and 139 CE.) When the Julian calendar was introduced in Egypt in 22 BCE, New Year was fixed to its date that year, August 29. Therefore, in terms of the new, fixed Alexandrian year, the five epagomenal days were Aug 24 - 28 ... On the second day (8/25; 7/31) was born the elder Horus ... http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/FDOT.html

But the important calendrical event in Egypt, for many millennia, was the Nile flood, a regular late spring event (sometimes described as the tears of Isis for the murdered Osiris) with agricultural consequences -- and other Egyptian calendars were based on the Nile flood

The date for celebrating Christmas was not set until the fourth or fifth century; it is true that the Romans had attempted sometime around the Julian era to fix 25 December as the date of the winter solstice, so the date of the solstice could not have drifted more than three or four days from December 25 by the time the date of Christmas was finally set

[Silent3]

7. "I'm not saying that I know that taking such things into account...

... makes the Horus and Jesus legends makes the Horus and Jesus legends match when it comes to birth dates..."

What presumption is there in that, pray tell?

[moobu2]

3. This is a good website with a lot of good information about Astrological Christianity

The Unspoken Bible (Check out the links on the left of this page)

The Zodiac Bible Code
Unbeknown to billions of theists, the Bible was written in astronomical allegory. The Bible's writers as well as the pagan mythmakers perceived the sky to be another world inhabited by heroes and gods. Astronomy, astrology and parallel myths provide the keys to unlocking the code. Source material for this chapter can be found in the book section. See map of zodiac for a visual reference. The Origins of the Zodiac Bible Code

General

A Tale of Two Heavens, Christians believe in two heavens, but if one pays attention, the Bible refers to only one visible heaven. The double meaning arose out of Galileo's discoveries in the 17th century. 10/8/07

Bible Astrology An introduction to astronomy and astrology. This page serves as background to the constellations of the zodiac and how the bible depicts the sun's passage through the seasons. 4/18/03


Take the Garden Tour A visual tour of where many popular biblical stories fit on the Zodiac. 1/20/08

Bible Dates The Bible covers a span of 6,000 years that synchronizes with the Ages of Gemini, Taurus, Aries and Pisces. 1/8/04

Wisdom God created the goddess of wisdom before all things. Wisdom was the Bible’s code word for knowledge of astrology. Through wisdom, God’s message enters human consciousness. 5/20/03

Light Versus Dark The belief in good and evil supernatural forces comes from superstitious ignorance. Light was personified as good and darkness was personified as evil. 03/07/03

Myths of Babylonia and Assyria: Astrology and Astronomy Argues that the twelve zodiac signs were developed by the Babylonians. The link provides insight on the influence the Babylonians had on the Bible writers. 9/25/05

I'm in no way advocating Astrology. Astrology is a superstitious belief system that arose out of the need for early agrarian cultures to understand the movements of the sun, stars and moon etc...

[struggle4progress]

6. I don't think Christianity has traditionally had much regard for astrology

St. Augustine, for example, gives his view in Book IV, Chapter 3 of his Confessions: ...I was ready enough to consult those imposters called astrologers ... Yet true Christian piety must necessarily reject and condemn their art ... Nevertheless .. he had abandoned astrology .. simply because .. he had no wish to make his living by deceiving other people ... I asked him why .. a number of true predictions were made by astrology, and he .. replied this was due to the force of chance ... (translated by Rex Warner; copyright 1963 by New American Library)

[DeSwiss]

8. The Youtube links you've posted....

...are segments taken from the beginning of the movie http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912#">Zeitgeist. Much of the information from the Zeitgeist movie on Christianity's origins came from D.M. Murdock (who also uses the nom de plume http://www.myspace.com/120058877">Acharya S) who has written a number of scholarly books on the subject of religions. I'm currently reading her latest book now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ZmsRUmuWU">Christ In Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection. Another resource which has been around for over 100 years and is available for free, is the book http://www.archive.org/details/biblemythsandthe00doanuoft">Bible Myths and Parallels In Other Religions, which can be read online or downloaded in several formats (PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Daisy, Full Text, or DjVu).

The Zeitgeist movie has since spun-off into a movement called appropriately enough: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&ved=0CDAQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thezeitgeistmovement.com%2F&ei=w31xTJLrNsP48AamqaSwCw&usg=AFQjCNHLtLcSUTkyvAAZKGL5G2UT_0wZ5g">The Zeitgeist Movement. And this movement has also further spun-off into http://www.thevenusproject.com/">The Venus Project, which is an attempt to begin putting many of the practices and positions stated in the movie about the need to establish a new paradigm for living into practice.

Thank you.

[struggle4progress]

9. What are Murdock's actual credentials? According to the wiki page on Acharya S,

she recently wrote an intro to Kersey Graves's Sixteen Crucified Saviours. We have discussed Grave's previously in this forum; I'll simply repost one of my former comments:

Graves claims Krishna was crucified, and cites as evidence the report of a Mr. Higgins of a sculpture, allegedly in the British museum, showing Krishna "represented with a hole in the top of one foot, just above the toes, where the nail was inserted in the act of crucifixion." Since the ancient Mahabharata reports Krishna went to heaven after being shot in the foot by an arrow, it is reasonable to wonder whether the sculpture allegedly seen by Mr. Higgins does not represent the arrow-wound in Krishna's foot

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/wscs/wscs21.htm
http://www.indianetzone.com/38/death_lord_krishna.htm

Graves next speaks of the crucifixion of Sakia Muni, who he says is also known as Budha Sakia. But Sakyamuni is, in fact, just another name for Gautama Buddha, who (according to the Maha-Parinibbana-Sutta) went with his disciples to a grove on the banks of the Hirannavati at Kusinara, had a lengthy conversation on various matters, and then entered into a series of trances that carried him away: the standard Buddhist canon does not teach that Buddha was crucified

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/wscs/wscs21.htm
http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/dharmadata/fdd36.htm
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/India/buddha-life.html

After this, Graves wants to discuss "Thammuz of Syria." Mr. Higgins (whose ignorance of the Mahabharata we noticed above) now is cited as an authority on the crucifixion of Thammuz. Now Tammuz is in fact a very ancient character, already mentioned in the saga Gilgamesh. In "TAMMUZ AND ISHTAR: A MONOGRAPH UPON BABYLONIAN RELIGION AND THEOLOGY CONTAINING EXTENSIVE EXTRACTS FROM THE TAMMUZ LITURGIES AND ALL OF THE ARBELA ORACLES" (1914), Langdon says He appears in the great theological list as dumu-zi ab-zu, Tammuz of the nether sea and cites an ancient liturgy that speaks of the youthful god who perished in his boat, and another of the wild wind and wave which carried him away. The scholarship of Graves does not appear to compare favorably to the scholarship of Langdon

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/wscs/wscs21.htm
http://www.archive.org/stream/tammuzandishtar00languoft/tammuzandishtar00languoft_djvu.txt

So far Graves seems to have won zero of three, and there seems little point continuing to examine his claims

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=214&topic_id=195093&mesg_id=195105

If Murdock is relying on sources like Graves, then her scholarship may be rather questionable

[darkstar3]

10. Subpar, even for you.

Are we allowed to substitute people willy nilly now and use that substitution to discredit the original writer?

If that kind of blatant straw man is considered academic now, I think I'll start playing Six Degrees of Ray Comfort...

[struggle4progress]

11. Well, here's her review on Amazon of the edition with her introduction:

A Very Important Work!, September 29, 2004
By Acharya S (Truth, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviours Christianity Before Christ (Paperback)

There is a reason this book keeps being reprinted: It is very important. Graves's seminal work has been widely assailed over the past century, yet it holds enough germane information concerning the world that is remains a classic, despite its perceived and real flaws. I view "The World's 16 Crucified Saviors" to be so salient that I wrote the foreword to this edition, defending it against unwarranted criticism ...

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Sixteen-Crucified-Saviours-Christianity/product-reviews/093281395X/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

[darkstar3]

12. And that matters why?

What do her views on Graves' work have to do with anything?

You really don't get how this is a straw man?

[struggle4progress]

13. What ARE her credentials? In evaluating her as a scholar, it seems relevant

to inquire into her preparation, which will determine what materials she is able to use. Her expressed admiration for the "work" o0f Kersey Graves, as a source on such matters, ought to raise some eyebrows about her credibility, since it is a rather easy exercise to show that Graves is completely unreliable

[darkstar3]

14. Once again you fail to understand how going after the source of the argument

is inappropriate. It doesn't matter where an argument comes from if it is legitimate. You're attempting here to dismiss the argument by painting the source with an association.

"You know who else used slogans? HITLER!"
"Oh, but Obama sat in Rev. Wright's church for 20 years!"
etc...

There is more Fox than of foxy about you.

[struggle4progress]

15. Historical "arguments" are meaningless, unless they can be based on historical facts,

and determining historical facts requires an ability to examine and evaluate historical sources. Simply finding early people, like Kersey Graves who happen to make claims you like, but without much basis in fact, is inadequate as a basis for historical "argument" -- and anyone who echoes such material deservedly loses credibility, which is probably why Murdock excites little or no scholarly attention

[darkstar3]

16. And you've done what, exactly, to verify or debunk these facts?

Here's a lesson on credibility:

You have employed an obvious straw man, substituting Graves for Murdock and attempting to attack Murdock's credibility through an associate. You have further defended this tactic as if it were somehow legitimate or substantially different from the Rev. Wright fiasco. You therefore have lost any credibility you may believe your Googley prowess has given you, at least on the topic of religious history.

And stop pretending, through phrases like your last, that you speak for "the scholarly." It may have escaped your superior perspective, but there are several denizens of this board who are most certainly members of that scholarly class to which you aspire.

[struggle4progress]

17. I've explained my point of view thrice, in various differing phrases, often with links, so

I do not think it worthwhile to continue in this vein. Others can consider for themselves whether I am talking sense. Goodday! :hi:

[darkstar3]

18. Thrice a failure.

Your POV is a straw man, and that is why your subsequent attempts to defend it, even with links (as if that made a difference), have failed. Good day yourself.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. I understand what you mean

You're not "substituting" one source for another.

You're saying that the author's work should be taken with a grain of salt because she relies on sources that are historically inaccurate.

It's like saying, "I don't trust that political writer because he uses Glenn Beck's book as a main reference."

[struggle4progress]

20. So I am not alone in my apparent lunacy

:)

[moobu2]

21. Why not use the same standards

when evaluating Christian religious opinion? The Bible is full of forgeries, sloppy mistranslations, historically inaccurate timelines, scientifically imposable claims and on and on. All I see you do is make excuses for it. In short, you have a double standard.

[struggle4progress]

22. Some of us don't read those old texts as scientific or historic. Of course, if one wants

to read them as scientific and historic texts, then the scholarly apparatus of scientific and historical criticism should certainly apply, and the results will not be favorable

The idea that the texts should be read literally, and are useful scientific and historical sources, is a fundamentalist view that many of us here do not share: but I expect you have been told that repeatedly by now

Even though I do not read them as scientific and historic texts, my own view is that careful scientific and historic critical methods can shed useful light on the texts: by modern methods, one can obtain insights into the social context that produced the texts, which helps clarify to whom the original authors were speaking and exactly what they might have been trying to say. Nevertheless, I do not think the texts themselves are about science or history: I think they are about something altogether different than that

[trotsky]

23. Ha!

Some of us don't read those old texts as scientific or historic.

Baloney. You absolutely do, or you wouldn't believe in Jesus. You pick parts of your text that you want to be literal, just like the fundamentalists. You guys just pick different parts, but I expect that you have been told that repeatedly by now.