tanya

Really?

This guy insults me, after you heap praise on him, and the best you can offer, is to split away his crap?

How about an apology, to me, and especially, to fellow forum member, Acharya S, about whom, this thread, is supposedly focused, though, without explicitly providing any references to her actual compositions, by you, or by zwardick.

I am waiting for an apology, not an excuse to shuffle off his raving to some distant planet.

You want to defend him, Toto, be my guest, but do so with a link, to some scholarly refutation, demonstrating that he is correct, and I am wrong, not by removing the garbage he spews out.

Chaucer claimed the guy is a scholar.

"Put up, or shut up".

Yeah, right. A real scholar.

:angry:

Zwaarddijk

I will not offer any apology to Acharya S, her research is shoddy as can get.

To you I will, but I am still boggled by this particular turn of events. I did see the post I am talking of, and as it no longer was possible to quote it - the forum gave an error message, I copy-pasted it. I have not written those things I attribute to you there, and they are not accidentally pasted from anywhere else.

Still, all those things I attribute to you are in fact things you do say in other posts - only phrased slightly differently. Would you not agree with the general sentiment of the post I apparently mistakenly have attributed to you?


That error, by the way, has nothing to do with the quality of the works of Acharya, and is therefore irrelevant to my challenge to point out a single error in my review of her works. You are welcome to do so at somerationalism.blogspot.com if you find any. I doubt it, though.

Zwaarddijk

Which one is more relevant? She's presenting all this original research that has little to no basis in real science - I am not presenting any original research.

You were the one to ask whether I had done any such research. When I reverse the question, you suddenly try and make it look like the dumbest question ever. My point was exactly what you say in this quote! Some people have that ability, so why do you present a question to me about whether I have done that in the first place? Unlike Acharya, though, when I cite works by those who have done that work, I do not misrepresent it.

I have not done any genetic testing. Neither has she. That should be the most important point here, as she's the one making these outlandish crazy claims.

Read your question here, then read this thing you asked previously in the same post:
Let us consider what this means by analogy: I have read books by people who have invested significant proportions of their lives in academic research, using methods from several fields, in order to figure things out. In figuring these things out, they test whether their ideas work out, and they compete - they try showing each other wrong. Only ideas that survive these tests well enough go on.

These are people who both have the ability to ponder, think and reflect on an issue as well as do the actual corn-raising. They write books about it. In it, they explain such that anyone scientifically literate can understand why their theory is likely to be accurate, and often what the problems with other competing theories are.

Acharya does not do that. She presents her theory, she accuses other theories of being religious, racist, freemasonic or colonialist propaganda. She never exposes significant problems in the works of others, she just accuses the authors of these theories of being terrible people.

Do you know of a thing we call BURDEN OF EVIDENCE? Whoever makes a claim is the one who is to provide the evidence of it. I can't prove they didn't do that 30 000 years ago - but neither can Acharya provide any proof that they did! The fact that she doesn't provide such proof, yet does not refrain from making that claim is a mark of bad science. (Or rather, the fact that the evidence she presents doesn't agree with her on that claim is even worse).

I am actually making a positive claim - I am claiming that Acharya's works are pseudoscience. And I am working my way, piling up bit of evidence after bit of evidence with the requisite documentation for showing her genuinely wrong. And for this, I am accused of faking my credentials, of being a misogynist, of being a Christian and of being an atheist. One of those I will admit to. I guess I'll let you guess which one. It's probably the worst of the bunch, really, that much has been implied to me by her fans on her own forum.

In fields such as archeology, a theory cannot be accepted just because it hasn't been disproved - there has to be some evidence for it to be taken seriously. Acharya's evidence is mainly fabrication, misinterpretation and terrible sources, as I keep documenting on the blog, chapter by chapter.

We do know the Australian aborigines reached Australia during the previous glaciation, by the way when the entire Australian shelf was exposed - this is generally called the Sahul continent. Australia and Papua New Guinea formed one major landmass at the time the aborigines reached it. [http://sahultime.monash.edu.au/] [see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahul ] Yes, there was some sailing involved - but no further than about 300 miles is necessary during any leg of that journey. (You can check that for yourself - http://www.daftlogic.com/projects-go...calculator.htm provides a way of checking the distances from one point to another. Try identifying the shortest distances from island to island needed to get to Australia, except you should ignore the Torres strait because no water was there at the time!) 300 miles is a bit less than the thousands of miles Acharya posits to have begun 30 000 years ago. New Zealand's maori are, by the way, not particularly closely related to the Australian aborigines and there is no mystery to how they arrived there., They are in fact a tribe of Polynesians, whose language is closely related to Rapa Nui, Niuean and Tongan, among others - languages spoken on the islands settled by Polynesians. [see, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maori_language , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia] No human remains from prior to the Maori colonization of New Zealand have been found. The maories further kept contact with other polynesian tribes through sea voyages even after colonizing New Zealand, and their oral traditions recognize they arrived to New Zealand by ships. But relatively recently.

Why do you keep misrepresenting what I say? No. Never said anything like that. And I know of several movements happening between different parts of the world after we got out of Africa, not just sitting there. We have the Turkish tribes doing a fairly recent expansion in Eurasia, for instance, and we have the Indo-European tribes doing an expansion encroaching on Dravidians, possibly some Semites, the Basque, possibly some Finnic tribes, and so on, we have the Inuit moving over the Bering strait way after the other native americans did so, and we even have a group of Inuit moving back to northern Siberia after that. And we have a lot of other tribes expanding at the detriment of some other tribes, and I think that's a good reason we should respect the Polynesians. At some point when all the land around them had been taken, they went and actually found new land to colonize, not to the detriment of any other contemporary group. (Later on they got into wars with each other, of course, but that's par for the course, I guess.) Making shit up about them in order to support a theory of Freemasonic conspiracy, a pre-glacial civilization, Hindu colonization of Ireland in antiquity, etc like Acharya does in her The Christ Conspiracy is just disrespectful.

Your inability to read what I actually say, and your preponderance for making up strawman varieties of what I say reflects really badly on you as a person.

Robert Tulip

Having read through the seven pages of this thread on Zwaarddijk (aka Meikko/Sierios)’s ignorant and wrong claim that astrotheology is a pseudoscience, I have not found anything to change my negative assessment of his level of understanding shown in his comments at Free Thought Nation, his own blog, and now Vridar. He finds a few errata, and that is useful. This useful material is wrapped in a toxic bundle of errors, misrepresentations, ad hominems and insults, making his motives appear base and deceptive, and his perspective quite uninformed. Even if Miekko finds some statements in The Christ Conspiracy that could be better phrased, such as Acharya’s comment on Polynesian prehistory, that provides no grounds to impugn her thesis of a lost astrotheological origin for Christianity.

I have already explained, in a comment quoted in this thread, why Miekko is wrong about Polynesia. It was the ancestors of the Polynesians, not the Polynesians themselves, who made open sea voyages 30,000 years ago. Big deal. Miekko elevates such errata into a crusade against Acharya’s ideas. Maybe something constructive will come out if this if we can actually have a debate about philosophy and the big ideas.

Acharya’s hypothesis, explaining Christian memetic evolution against a cosmic mythological framework, is the most elegant scientific explanation of how the Bible came to exist. This thesis is growing in influence because it is coherent and compelling, despite the efforts at suppression by the new inquisitors such as Ehrman and Carrier.

Many Bible texts can be illuminated against this cosmic heuristic as a coherent explanation of the ancient cultural reality. Acharya begins from texts which are obviously cosmic, and analyses the Christian mythos to research the natural motifs in ancient religion. The evidence for this topic is fragmentary, because over many centuries it has been violently rejected and destroyed as heresy, creating strong prejudice against it within both scientific and religious communities. Some sources supporting astral ideas can rightly be criticised, and that is a big part of why Acharya is now finalising a second revised edition of The Christ Conspiracy for publication. But finding irrelevant errors fails to engage with the big ideas.

I have checked a number of Miekko’s claims, and found that he appears incapable of reading Acharya’s text to understand its true meaning, because he is obsessed with cherry-picking quotes out of context in order to justify his insulting agenda of condemning her work as unscientific. Several times now he has made foolish mistakes, regarding Polynesia, Sicily and now Christmas. The rather wild innuendos he builds on these flimsy criticisms makes his whole approach read as a cheap polemic that fails to engage respectfully with its subject matter.

The main astrotheological thesis for Christianity is that Jesus Christ is allegory for the sun. So, we find the twelve disciples as allegory for the twelve months of the year, or twelve zodiac signs, as portrayed in widespread Christian art, notably The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci. We also see that Christmas is observed at the birth of the sun, the day each year when the sun begins its long trek back from winter to summer, and that the death and resurrection archetype of Easter maps on to the annual cycle of the seasons.

This solar mythos for Christ as source of light and life for the world fits within a much bigger and more complex cosmology, guided by the biggest visible movement of the heavens, the precession of the equinox, whereby the sun slowly moves into a new constellation at the equinox about every two millennia. Precession is a stumbling block for many readers of astrotheology, partly because the astronomy requires some study to understand it, but also because of the association between zodiac ages and astrology.

Ancient observation of the structure of terrestrial time accords precisely with the allegory of Christ as avatar of the Age of Pisces, the two thousand year period in which the spring equinox has occurred when the sun has been in that constellation. Seeing precession as the cosmic framework for Christianity does not mean that theology or religious studies more broadly should accept magical claims about influence of the stars, but it does mean theology should recognise that such ideas had wide ancient influence, and that these cosmic themes are central to explaining the myth of Christ, for example in the themes of the fish, belief and the alpha and omega.

The basic hypothesis of Christ as the sun inspires Acharya’s use of nineteenth century sources, looking back to a time when scholars had an open mind to exploring the relations between Christian origins and the surrounding culture. Much of this scholarship dates from before the post-Darwinian fundamentalist backlash, which closed academia off from this basic area of research. Discoveries such as the decoding of Egyptian writing created a ferment of new ideas about Christian origins, and this ferment in turn provoked a conservative reaction as the church saw this esoteric material as a far easier target than the new science of evolution.

Comparative mythology was largely excluded from academic study by the quarantining of Christianity as a special untouchable myth that was the province of conventional dogma. The strong cultural politics of this process have to be recognised, for example the debate around the heavy socialist atheist criticism of Christianity. Marxism simplistically rejected all myth on the basis of the modern contrast between myth and logic, but sought to replace the old Christian myths with new ones of its own. Meanwhile, the more nuanced and informed approach of comparative mythology, recognising that myths always exist as the stories that give meaning to our lives, was squeezed out of sight, and out of mind.

The backlash against comparative mythology perceived errors in the work of writers such as Godfrey Higgins, Kersey Graves, Gerald Massey, Helena Blavatsky and Alvin Boyd Kuhn. While I have not read their books in full, these authors are motivated by the astrotheological hypothesis that Jesus is allegory for the sun, but they advance this idea by including speculative claims that lack empirical evidence. Acharya makes use of such authors, whom writers such as Carrier consider taboo, by seeking to find and recognise the wheat among the chaff. In debating what is valid, it is advisable to avoid ad hominem fallacies such as Miekko’s pointing to an irrelevant error by Higgins to say he is worthless.

If we accept the premise that Jesus is allegory for the sun, the whole fundamentalist-historicist claim about the emergence of Christianity from Jesus Christ as a supposed single founder-messiah is cast into radical doubt. Some consequences here include, firstly, that there must have been far more secret communication between religious seers than is apparent from the historical record, since work that did not support the orthodox canon was suppressed, and secondly, that this esoteric motif of religious figures as cosmic allegory should be extended to consider other supposedly historical figures such as Moses and Solomon.

Meikko mocks Acharya’s comments about the Druids being influenced by eastern thought. This is a worthwhile case study, since knowledge of the Druids is so fragmentary, their ideas having come under the edict of the first of the real ten commandments in Exodus 34, “smash their groves”. But it is quite plausible that Buddhist missionaries visited Europe, and that conversation with Druids led to a religious recognition of universal commonality within ritual and myth. Oral communication in the ancient world among mystery schools must have been widespread, but the assiduous burning of any records by the church gives us a very distorted picture.

Similarly, Miekko disparages the speculation around Solomon as a solar myth. Ignoring the complete absence of historical evidence for Solomon’s temple and empire as described in the Bible, Miekko asks that we reject as worthless any etymological speculation around sacred names. While I agree that some of Acharya’s choice of words on such matters in Christ Conspiracy could have been more cautious, (and that is a big factor in her plan to revise it), it is important to place this speculation in context.

Namely, there is a strong hypothesis that Jesus originated as allegory for the sun within a broad esoteric Gnosticism, and that figures such as Solomon are similarly mythological. The astrotheologians of the nineteenth century supported this basic claim, and sought to explain everything in terms of it. That is a legitimate deductive scholarly method, even if it sometimes errs into advocacy of claims that should be more cautiously qualified. Astrotheology, like its more extreme sibling theosophy, came into heavy collision with the cautious inductive methods of the mainstream, which exclude metaphysical ideas altogether, whether natural or supernatural, lumping these cosmic ideas together with the false metaphysics of orthodox theology as unscientific. But that mainstream reaction was more about politics than logic.

Putting theology onto a plausible natural basis provides a coherent heuristic, a guiding idea to explain Christian origins. Astrotheology is pointing us towards a sensible and logical explanation of religion. The psychological, political and institutional resistance to these new findings and methods remain very strong, but the truth will out. While I don’t welcome Miekko’s derogatory tone, his crude mistakes or his false slurs about pseudoscience, I do welcome the attention he is bringing to this complex debate about religious origins. Such challenge and debate is important to vindicate and clarify the sound basis in logic and evidence that underpins astrotheological interpretation.

Robert Tulip

tanya

Thank you for an informed, intelligent response.

I suppose I may wish to offer some element of disagreement with your overly broad condemnation of Marxist repudiation of mythicism, but, on the whole, your rejoinder was much appreciated.

I would have enjoyed reading your post, even more than I did, had you incorporated (as I could not, for I know nothing about Zoroastrianism) something about the relationship between ancient (2500 year old) Persian practices and beliefs, and their influence on nascent Christianity.

There is little doubt that we underestimate the importance of the silk route, in ancient times, and by that, I mean, prehistoric times.

Your suggestion that Buddhists influenced the Druids, (two continents and an ocean away) may be right on target, I don't know, at first glance, it does seem far fetched, since Buddhism exerted essentially zero influence on China, (practically next door to India) until the 7th or 8th century CE. If a thousand years had been necessary to influence a neighboring country, how reasonable is it, to imagine communication, with a culture traversing huge distance, within a time frame many centuries earlier? Possible, surely, but not likely.

I think that excavation in Persia, will prove enlightening. After the second world war, the famous Roman baths were discovered next to the Kolner Dom, a result of the civilian bombing campaign of terror, conducted by the British.

Maybe the forthcoming assault against the people of Persia, with its own horrific bombing campaign, will similarly reveal ancient treasures, to help us better understand the origin of Christianity, but, in any event, I believe that it is to the Persians, and Zoroastrianism, that one must look, not the Jews, to uncover the multifaceted origin of this bizarre religion.

Will Wiley

Hi Robert, I'm somewhat familair with astrotheology broadly speaking, but not familiar with Murdoch's work, can you perhaps extend your thoughts here about what it is about the disciples (if the original sories are not lost), apart from there being 12 of them, that would associate them with the 12 signs of the Zodiac?
The 12 tribes of Israel seem, pretty clearly, to relate to these signs, but it isn't clear, to me, how the disciples would relate to the signs apart from via the 12 tribes.

lpetrich

As to the words budh and krishna and christ, let's look at their derivations.

Wikipedia's contributors have created Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots - Wiktionary

Buddha - awakened / enlightened one
From Proto-Indo-European *bheudh- "to be awake, aware"
English cognate: "bid" (command, invite, offer salutation)
An Old Irish cognate would start with "b"

Krishna - black one
From PIE *krsnos "black"
Cognates:
Old Church Slavic: chrunu "black"
Russian: chorny "black"
An Old Irish cognate would start with "k"

Christ - Greek khristos - anointed one
Translation of Hebrew mashiah - anointed one > English "messiah"
From khriô - to spread oil on, or some similar substance
From PIE *ghrêi- "to smear"
An Old Irish cognate would start with "g"

This means that Christ ~ Krishna is a coincidence.

Chili

Well at least call them 'people ranchers' who do not believe in talking snakes and understand that only conscious objectors will get slaughtered on the way out as 'lost brethren' to them.

-their primary premis is the difference between 'human' and 'man' wherein to 'be humane' already is to bleed for the human condition of man that is conditional only with no flesh about him at all.

-so baptism into the fold is necessary and critical here is that Catholic water is their life-line to heaven already paved by those who went before them.

-to encourage the courageous is quite contrary to bleeding for humanity's sake, I agree, and so it seems that they do not want cowards in heaven.

-Communion is with the saints in heaven from where solid food is validated as promised with Baptism, to be their water to walk on as Catholic among marauding 'have-nots' outside the fold.

-Purgatory is to fully connect with the life-line provided at baptism and leave the entire lymbic system behind as the place where flatlanders live.

Iskander

Dominus vobiscum

Robert Tulip

Hello Tanya, thanks. Glad to see your interest in the possibility that astrotheology is scientific. We have had quite a good debate with Seirios at Acharya’s discussion board, where he is welcome to post, even if he just digs himself a deeper hole. My comment on Marxism was about its repudiation of mythology (eg Marx’s view that religion is the opium of the people) not a repudiation of mythicism. The mythicist scholar Bruno Bauer was one of Marx’s teachers, and Lenin is said to have argued that it was imperative in the struggle against religious obscurantists to adopt revolutionary ideas like those of Drews, who held that the Gospel is a poetic retelling of the astral mythical journey of the sun god. That did not lead Lenin to any sympathy for astrotheology. Lenin was among the most evil monsters of all history, showing that discussion on the relation between Marxism and religion is quite complex. Persian influence is not a topic that has come up in this thread. But there are of course many good questions about it. Zoroaster, the legendary founder of Zoroastrianism, has a name that reputedly means star of splendour, or golden star, although Wikipedia claims his name means camel. This rather extreme divergence illustrates the difficulty of forming accurate conclusions about Zoroastrian influence on Christianity. I suspect the debates on etymology can conceal motives of dismissing symbolic content, as with the argument above that Krishna means black. It seems improbable to me that such prosaic meanings, ’camel’ or ‘black’, exhaust the linguistic content of these names. As Acharya has shown, the Egyptian term ‘krst’ was used to mean to anoint a mummy, suggesting a link with the concept of Christing as anointing.

I can’t help but think that people who ignore such meanings are likely to have an agenda of defending religious literalism, or an atheist agenda of suggesting religion should be abolished. The middle way of respect for mythology is far more complex.A good Wikipedia page on Buddhism and the Roman World documents the extent of Buddhist missions, such as the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in Athens in the time of Augustus. My point here was that Indian influence on the west must far exceed extant records.

It is unreasonable to simply dismiss discussion of the similarity between Indian and Irish words. The Indo-European language family includes most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia. Such linguistic continuity suggests that ancient cultural links were greater than is generally recognised.

The Vedic Sky God Dyaus Pita is etymologically linked to Zeus Patera, Jupiter and Deus Pater, and the Abraham-Sarah-Haggai triad appears to reflect the movement of the Brahmans from the Sarasvati and Ghaggar Rivers following the earthquake that redirected these rivers in about 1900 BC. These correlations are too strong to be simply coincidence, and reflect the extent of human movement and contact, illustrating how myth evolved from history over long periods of time.

Robert Tulip