fredhsu

You are not the first person to come up with this connection. I think you will really appreciate Neal Stephenson's fiction: "Snow Crash". I hesitated before adding the following link, as it does contain plot spoiler: wiki.

** plot spoiler to follow as well **

In this geek novel, Neal connects mythology of ancient Sumeria to the Tower of Babel. The ruler Enki is portrayed as a hacker of the human mind; he created mind virus programs in the form of magical words to program the people (slaves) to do various types of works.

The sumerian history serves as a background to chain together events taking place in a futuristic earth where the main character, Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and virtual metaverse swordsman discovers his true inner potentials as a programmer. Hiro eventually destroys the powerful Pentecostal churches backed by billionaire L. Bob Rife who is bent on world domination by spreading mind viruses in the form of "speaking in tongues".

Doug Shaver

An explanation that cannot be falsified cannot explain anything. In science, an unfalsifiable theory doesn't get to be called a theory. Like ID, it gets to be called pseudo-science.

Malachi151

Except for the fact that I've never read anyone saying that they thought the world was covered by water because they saw other floods, but I have read ancient accounts of people saying that the world was covered by water or mud due to the fact that they found sea shells and fish in the mountains. In addition, in the Middle Ages the Christians claimed that their finding of sea shells and fish impressions in the mountains was evidence of the flood described in Genesis, or course not making the connection that maybe the story is Genesis was produced from the same observations....

Malachi151

Well, but this is just a problem inherent in the interpretation of ancient myths, as I already said.

We can't prove anything about any of these myths, other than the literal text of their recording.

Now, your position can either be that all speculation and interpretation of ancient myths is useless, in which case they basically have no use for informing us about the past and the development of religion.

If that's your view, then that's fine, state your view and move on. Just say, "we can't know anything about these myths, so stop talking about them, all discussion of ancient myth s is 100% useless so stop doing it."

Fine, move along.

The claim that the Sumerian creation myth is rooted in the worship of ancient human rulers as gods is equally unprovable as the claim that it isn't.

No case about this myth can be proven either way.

If your view is that this myth isn't based on the rule of ancient human leaders who became viewed as gods and mythologized, then that view is equally "pseudo-science", since you can't "prove" that either.

Doug Shaver

You seem to be using "proven" the way a fundamentalist uses it when he says the Bible cannot be proven wrong or contradictory about anything. That kind of proof can only be had in mathematics. Real science does not deal in that kind of certainty.

My view is that the Bible God is a product of nothing but human imagination. That view could be falsified by hard evidence for an alternative origin, and I can specific quite particularly the kind of evidence that would do that. Until I see such evidence, it is reasonable and scientific for me to believe that my view is correct. I do not need to prove it beyond all possible doubt in order for it be a reasonable belief.

WishboneDawn

Fixed your post for you. :grin:

Malachi151

Absolute nonsense. You have absolutely no evidence at all to support your view, you are just pulling it out of your ass.

The "argument for atheism" doesn't apply here. We aren't talking about proving that something doesn't exist here.

We have a creation story of the Hebrews, it came from somewhere. What is the best explanation for its origin and development?

Your claim is just pulled out your ass based on nothing at all. It is the absolute worst possible and unprovable claim, based on no evidence and not even any investigation.

It is widely agreed upon by anthropologists and scholars of mythology that the Hebrew pantheon and creation story is based on the Sumerian and Babylonian religions. There are hundreds of parallels, and the Hebrew religion developed from a population of people who lived among these other civilizations, so its a much more reasonable view than saying it was pulled out of nowhere.

There is always a difficulty in "proving" links between any religions and cultural ideas. This isn't chemistry or physics. There is no way to solidly "prove" any of this stuff, the vast majority of what cultural anthropologists and mythologists do is unprovable, is all based on correlations and interpretations and speculation, and showing that "things are possible".

Did Buddhism influence the development of Christianity?

We will never be able to "prove" that it did, but we can determine if it was possible, and how likely it would be.

So, for example, we know that the texts of Buddhism were translated into Greek around the 2rd century BCE, we know that Buddhism was known in Egypt and Syrian by the 1st century BCE, and we know that there are similarities between elements of Buddhism and Christianity.

That's pretty much all we can say and all we will ever be able to say. Can we prove an influence based on this? No. But have we proven that an influence is possible? Yes. We can then look at specific textual correlations between Christian texts and Buddhists texts to look for direct influences, and when we do that we don't see good evidence for direct influences, so direct influence seems unlikely, but that doesn't rule out indirect influence.

That's how this field of study goes, its not math, its not physics, and we don't do lab experiments to verify if "religion X was influenced by religion Y".

Now, the scholars agree, and I concur for the same reasons, that the Hebrew religion evolved from the Mesopotamian religions that preceded it. If you want to understand the reasons for this, then fine, go figure out it, do some reading yourself, learn something, in fact you can start with the links I provided in the OP.

My starting positions is that the Hebrew religion evolved from the Sumerian and Babylonian religions, which pretty much every scholar on this subject aside from Christian fundamentalists agrees on.

Given that the Babylonian religion is itself based on Sumerian religion, and the Sumerian religion gives us the oldest recorded creation story and description of gods in the region, or indeed in the world, where did this creation story come from and who are these gods?

The description and depiction of the "gods" by the Sumerians is really the same as human rulers. The Sumerian gods lived on earth, wore clothes, and had human concerns. They "created humans" so that they could do their work for them. The humans that they created were naked and they worked in the "garden of Edin" and gave the fruits of their labor to the "gods". The gods are depicted as people in fancy clothing sitting on thrones which the "naked humans" walk up to and give offerings of the food that they gather. The objective of life for humans, according to the Sumerian myth is to work for the gods.

Now, it seems pretty reasonable to me, that this creation story and the Sumerian religion could be based on very early civilization where human rulers were worshiped as gods, or it could also be a later mythologizing of an early civilization where the rulers were not worshiped as "gods" at the time, but were later mythologized as "gods" by later generations.

In either case, the "gods" described in the Sumerian myth, then, would be human rulers.

I find nothing unreasonable about this proposition, especially since the rulers of Mesopotamia and Egypt were long hailed as gods and sons of gods.

The "Hebrew myth" really is that the worship of a remote and "heavenly" god preceded the worship of human leaders as gods, but the EVIDENCE does not support this view. In the earliest civilizations that we find, human leaders were worshiped as gods, this really seems to be the starting point, not the other way around.

Not only does the evidence indicate that god worship started with the worship of human rulers, but this provides a much better explanation for how god belief evolved and it explain that characteristics of god belief, as well as the historic links between church and state.

So, the view that god belief evolved from the worship of human leaders does have many points of support, and it makes sense.

Now, if it is the case that Sumerian religion evolved from the worship of human leaders, and the Hebrew religion evolved from the Sumerian religion, then ultimately the God of the Hebrews is based on the Sumerian gods, who, were ultimately, rulers of an early slave civilization.

I find that this makes perfect sense, and the possibility for this being the case is certainly supported by the evidence. In other words there is nothing in the evidence that we have that rules this out.

Furthermore, based on my study of ancient and privative cultures, I, as well as others, find that ancient and primitive people didn't tend to simply "make stuff up". I think that this has a lot to do with simply not being very imaginative and having a relatively small set of ideas to work with.

When you look at "creativity" and "story writing" today, people have very highly developed imaginations and we have a huge host of stories and experiences to draw on, and we indeed encourage people to make an effort to "be creative".

This wasn't the case 7,000 years ago, and it wasn't the case in primitive cultures 200 years ago. primitive mythology tends to relate much more directly to the real world than does more modern mythology.

Primitive myths are "less fantastic" and more modern myths are "more fantastic". The myths have grown over time, as all myths tend to do.

Now, Sumerian religion as we have it was recorded about 6,000 years ago.

Hebrew religion as we have it was recorded about 2,700 years ago.

The Christian religion was recorded about 1,900 years ago.

Even assuming that Hebrew religion is older than its recording, it still probably only developed some 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, being newer than Sumerian religion by a greater amount of time than Christianity has even existed. So, the Hebrew religion is still a relatively "modern" religion compared to many other Mesopotamian religions.

The Hebrew religion has undergone a lot of evolution and abstraction from its presumed Sumerian roots, hence the Hebrew development of the idea of some "transcendent heavenly god", as opposed to the earthly rulers of the Sumerians.

What I find to be "pseudo-science" is taking the modern concept of "God" and transposing it back on 6,000 year old civilizations, which is really what the religionists do, they are the ones that claim that their view of God is the original, but in fact there is no evidence for this, and we shouldn't be so foolish as to take their view of god and assume that this was the view of god held by earlier people, i.e. the view of some transcendent heavenly god.