DrJim

Shivalinga, I followed a few of the links you posted in the other tread.

It all left me wondering whether the ancient Hindus plagerized these other religions and not the other way around! Maybe other folk, like the Celts, travelled to India, and the Indians stayed at home and tried to copy these visitors' apparently superiour culture.

More seriously, There are a lot of extraordinary claims made in those sites, based on speculations and so forth by Voltaire and others. What do modern linguists say about the relationship between these similar sounding names? How do you know that the translations of the PUranas that are offered in those sites were not coloured by someone trying to fabricate those similiarities?

As far as my comments on Moses, etc. if someone wants to start a serious thread on that, I will join in as time allows. I stand by my statements about Kak, though. He didn't read the latest stuff on the history of Israelite monotheism or on the existence of Moses, etc.

If you stop and think about what Freud was proposing, you can see how preposterous it is: his ONLY source for information about Moses is the Bible. Yet, the story he tells of Moses is so radically different to what the Bible says, one has to ask where his evidence to do so comes from! It comes, of course, from his theories imposed on the text without serious engagement of the history of the origins of the text, its literary conventions, political and religious ideologies of the writers and so forth. It is made up out of Freud's own mind. Even if he is an expert psychiatrist deserving respect, his bit on Moses cannot be considered a serious bit of hisorical detective work.

JR Linville.

premjan

I've heard that this was originally a volcano God prior to becoming the sole God of the Israelites.