Steven Carr

The Maitreya does not exist.

This puts a bit of a dampener on Share International's religion.

How do they deal with the accusation that the Maitreya is a myth?

Easy. They ignore it.


http://www.share-international.org/m...itreya_faq.htm

If religions simply ignore sceptical claims that their religious leader is a myth, why should Christians of 2000 years ago have been forced to write explanations of why their Jesus really did exist?

And if we only had Share International's writings, would we ever know that sceptics say there is no such person as the Maitreya?

gurugeorge

Now imagine a whole bunch of Maitreya-like religions at that time - they all believe in mythical entities of one sort or another, some of their mythical entities come from long ago, some were supposed to have sojourned on Earth more recently.

In such a circumstance, the modern skeptical voice would have been fairly rare, and it wouldn't even occur to most people to question the existence of "the great founder of their religion" (a phrase like this appears in Lucian's Peregrinus).

Actually, the distinction wasn't our modern distinction between mythical and historical. This keeps getting confused in these discussions.

There's no problem with the concept of either a man mythologised OR a historicised myth, both have occurred. The problem is that for us moderns, in order to recognise that we are dealing with a man mythologised, we need a subtler form of historical evidence than "Great Being X sojourned on Earth at such-and-such a time and did this and that". That's what they all say. That's not historical evidence, it's just a myth with some pseudo-historical, earthly referents.

To plump for "man mythologised" rather than "historicised myth", we need some hint, some tiniest hint, that ANY of the people involved in the earliest forms of Christianity actually knew a human being personally.

It's this that's missing, or at the very least not clear.

rlogan

Spot on. But the evidence is missing, period.

To say that it is not clear buys into the torturous "born of a woman" - type interpretations, straining with just-so stories in light of the gigantic elephant in the room: these are religious screeds. Battling it out on the inter-spiritual plane with supernatural actors and theories of the universe that are imbecilic by our scientific standards.

show_no_mercy

Something resembling modern skepticism was only a trait found among the educated elite in 1st century Rome. Early Christians really didn't like them and kept their evangelizing away from them initially.

Chaucer

Actually, it was current among the Greeks before that. The Greek Atomists were, in fact, skepticism's trail blazers in the West, just as the even earlier Lokayata adherents were skepticism's trail blazers in the East (in ancient India).

Chaucer

mountainman

the ancient greek lineage was known for its skepticism ...


There was time when Maitreya was not.
Before Maitreya was born Maitreya was not.
Maitreya was made out of nothing existing.
Maitreya is/was from another subsistence/substance.
Maitreya is subject to alteration or change.

--- The Greek cultured Arius of Alexandria is skeptical.


It is, I think, expedient to set forth to all mankind
the reasons by which I was convinced that
the fabrication of the Maitreyans
is a fiction of men composed by wickedness.

--- The Greek cultured Emperor Julian is more than skeptical

lpetrich

And even that did not go as far as nowadays; they often took for granted the existence of people that we nowadays consider mythical, like Romulus and Remus.