Jayrok

I have read "Against Heresies" and the dialogue of Justin Martyr, among others you mentioned. I will go back and take another look from the point of view that some people called themselves Christians who might not have ever heard of Jesus Christ. That would be interesting.

aa5874

That is my objective--to get people to PRESENT and EXAMINE the written statements of antiquity.

Up to the mid 2nd century based on Justin Martyr there was no evidence that Jews knew of any character called Jesus Christ.

Dialogue with Trypho The 1st century Jesus Christ was an invention.

rlogan

Thanks for this demonstration of what manipulative people are all about: emotional attacks rather than substance. Doherty is just an "angry person".

One of the oldest tricks in the book by manipulators is to relentlessly act outrageously and get under the skin of the target, so that when he reacts in frustration you paint him as an "angry person". In the end an ad hominem.

I've been here long enough to see this relentlessly obnoxious style of argument (world of myths vs worlds of myth) distinction-without-a-difference red herring logical fallacy train in operation to understand why a decent person would want to plant a bomb under someone's car seat.

This is why scholars steer clear of this whole Christian tar baby. The entire edifice is based on enormous lies, beginning with the absurdity of coming back from the dead and all manner of miracles. The intellectually dishonest vipers yield on the obvious lies and replace that with a fiction that appears nowhere in any record, anywhere - the "historical" Jesus.

Having no evidence for him, a fiction of the invisible "historical" Jesus lying underneath, or behind, or between the pages of the mythical Jesus is proposed - but defending it is actually performed by attacking people who accept the writing for what it in fact is: myth. It's bizzaro-world. It is myth on the face of it, and you can't remove the fact it is myth by saying that you will ignore what is written on the pages, substituting in its place something that does not exist. What record are these charletans looking at for the historical Jesus? Nothing. A make-believe "record" of what you have after you remove the actual record. God what a zoo this is.

Any description of mythology forces us into allegory. It is a wonderful home for the malicious cretin who wants to make endless hay out of that necessity. Allegory is the antithesis of science. All of this rubbish about someone's allegory not quite capturing the "reality" of mythical subjects is a gigantic red herring.





Mary Helena I like very much your description here (still allegory but it is the way I like to think of it):


The common people of nascent Christianity have a very practical day-to-day problem: their hard labor is turned over to the temples. They are extremely poor so the slightest offering they are forced to give weighs very heavily upon them. Just the obligation to leave their houses and travel to a temple on an alleged "day of rest" is taxing.

The intellectual prison their culture imposes is the belief that sacrifice to the God (s) is necessary. How do we get rid of this obligation?

It is clear to me the power in the Christ concept is an economic one: the universal human nature that dictates what you made with your own sweat and labor should be yours.

The Christ concept eradicates the oppressive tax upon your labor and time, forcing you to give over your goods to the Gods, or rather their hypocritical representatives on earth who are wealthy and undeserving.

The reason the Christ concept spreads like wildfire as Pliny describes is because the "good news" means keeping the fruits of your labor. What is the Eucharist? Eating your own bread yourself. Drinking your own wine yourself. And when you eat your own bread you say "body of Christ". When you drink your own wine you say "blood of Christ".

This is the earthly reflection of what is going on in the intellectual dimension. Rather, they invented something going on in an intellectual/spiritual dimension for what they wanted to happen on earth: to eat their own bread. Who would not have faith in this intellectual or spiritual innovation, the simple justice of eating your own food vs. the injustice of giving it to rich people?

I wrote Earl Doherty maybe a couple of years ago because as an economist it was very natural to see this whole problem in two respects: the first is from basic human self-interest. That is how you need to view the individual participants in religion: What's in it for me? You need to see the purveyors of religion in a game-theoretic perspective. They are competing for adherents in a world of alternative belief systems. That is where the necessity of a literature war arises. I never received any kind of response, no big deal, but all of this effort dealing with trolls is sad.

Earl's descriptions of the mechanics were excellent, but what is missing is why people would see the Christ concept as so attractive. Why believe in that instead of some other myth? Well, this is the myth that lets you keep your own stuff. A myth that says you have to give your stuff to the rich guy cannot compete with that kind of justice and economic power.

He's right about there being different strains of Christianity, but the unifying theme across all of them is the Christ concept. The universal precept upon which it is founded is the obligation of everyone to sacrifice of themselves to their God (s) by giving their money to someone. The Christ concept removes that.

Once that concept is in the minds of enough people it is a movement that has political force, has to be recognized by authority, and is practiced in the open. Now you have markets for leadership positions, for scribes and scholars to serve the organization, and a literature develops because of it.

It is so easy to see the two major factions, the Pauline faction of the Marcionites vs. the Proto-Catholics with their gospels. It seems obvious to me that the Christ Concept came before someone re-interpreted Isaiah in order to justify it. That is, a scholar read through Hebrew scripture trying to extract from it a justification for an idea common people already had themselves. Nobody needs to tell us that we have the right to our own harvest. What we need is a scholar to find that universal truth in the ancient writings to put some literature behind our movement in the same way these pre-existing criminal enterprises have literature justifying their theft from us.

The irony of course is that eventually Christianity is co-opted by the state and much of the earthly obligations for attendence at a big cathedral and tithes are re-introduced. The only thing left is an empty promise of life everlasting once you die.

ApostateAbe

There seems to be a consensus among supporters of Earl Doherty's theory that there is no relevant difference between "world of myth" and "worlds of myth"? At first I thought it was only the unusual position of one or two. If any supporter of Earl Doherty's theory disagrees, then please speak up, because I may be tapping into a key point in this style of thinking, and I would like to understand it.

Toto

I think that Doherty bases his analysis on the idea that there were common elements in the various mythic schemes, and that we can get an idea of the mindset of early Christians from those common elements.

You seem to think that because there is not one single identical myth, that all the myths can be ignored in favor of reading the NT as a naively literal document.

ApostateAbe

You see the relevance of the distinction, and that is good to hear.

Toto

I was trying to explain your point of view. I'm glad I got it right. But I think you are wrong.

ApostateAbe

Well, I certainly am not claiming that there is any relevance to the point that not all the myths are identical. If the myths share the things Earl Doherty claims they share, then that is enough to support his point. But I differ from him more drastically. I claim that the set of myths are extremely diverse, chaotically distributed enough that they have barely anything in common with each other, and that includes no explicit "world of myth" nor "sublunar realm." The settings of their myths were on the earth, under the earth, and over the earth, below the moon and above the moon.

rlogan

Double negatives are also the province of masters in convolution. It is so tedious to even try to figure out what you fellows are on about.


Just look at you pretending we cannot even speak of myths as a general concept. There isn't even a single thing similar between one or the other.

Except you just used the word "myth" yourself, referring presumably to this collection of things which have nothing in common and therefore cannot even be referred to as having something in common - which shows how ridiculous this whole "critique" is.

But it is a great strategy for burning up page after page on diversionary nonsense.

ApostateAbe

Yeah, well I think I am about ready to accept the reality that this debate is comprehensible to hardly anyone. It gets far more complicated than double negatives. It takes both innate intelligence and too much time to even have a chance.