Steven Carr

ABE
In all of human society past and present, all known cults with a reputed-human founder have an actual-human founder.

CARR
Another of Abe's statements bites the dust of reality.

http://www.share-international.org/

'Maitreya, the World Teacher, has been based in the Asian community of London since July 1977, gradually emerging into full public view.

Artist, author and lecturer Benjamin Creme has for over 35 years been preparing the way for this extraordinary event.'

ApostateAbe

I don't know much about Ned Ludd. Do you think that he never existed?

ApostateAbe

Sorry, who do you claim the reputed-human cult founder is/was in this example?

ApostateAbe

Toto proposed that the "Christian movement had invented a founder for itself [Jesus] and backdated him." I rebutted with the point that we have no confirmed example of such a thing in either the past or present, so it is implausible. Your hypothesis seems to conflict with Toto's hypothesis, and it has a similar problem of plausibility. What do you propose to be the closest confirmed analogy to the assertion that Christianity "was invented, originated, and orchestrated by subversive 'disinformation' propaganda' produced by anonymous Jewish authors"?

ApostateAbe

I would like to thank everyone in this thread. I think everyone in this thread deserves credit for not disputing my primary assertions about explaining ancient myth vs. judging ancient myths. I would also like to know opinions concerning my formulation of the methodology of "Reciprocal Expectations."

Toto

Was Jesus reputedly a human being at the time of the founding? Not quite. Some early Christians thought he was god, or divine.
This is going to be common for every cult leader - that's why we call it a cult. This describes Paul as easily as Jesus.

Again, this is common to every cult, and applies to Paul as easily as Jesus

Paul or Jesus?

Ditto

This is a trick criterion. Joseph Smith considered himself a follower of Jesus and operated in a Christian society, and any doomsday predictions he made were part of the zeitgeist, as it were. And there is no clear consensus that Jesus was a doomsday prophet, as opposed to scholars who believe that those predictions were written back into his sayings after the actual doomsday of the Jewish Wars.

Like everyone.

What is there to explain?

Do you think that sociology is such an exact science that you can know what happened in the first century Roman Empire by analogy to current events?

Even if there were no other cult that invented a historical figure as a founder, that would not make the idea implausible. It seems entirely plausible to me.

But what about Judaism? Do you claim that there was a historical Abraham, a historical Moses, or a historical David? All of these figures are legendary, and most likely invented by later Jews as founding figures.

Are you going to claim that Romulus and Remus were historical?

You do it by claiming that Jesus was so obscure that the historical Jesus becomes unfalsifiable.

Can you name another of your doomsday cults or religions where the founder wrote nothing, and his closest followers also wrote nothing about him?

Toto

This actually does nothing to support your main thesis. You appear to have stated something that we can all agree on in an attempt to get us to agree with your next point. That works in some sales jobs, but it won't work here.

You keep talking about these methodologies, but you seem to be force fitting them to your preferred theory.

James Brown

Just FYI. When a person has another poster on his ignore list, then any reply made by that ignored poster shows up as a small blank box with wording something like, "This post was made by XXXX who is on your Ignore list."

So the OP can easily know THAT you made a reply without having any idea WHAT your reply was. So you have not caught the OP in a falsehood.

aa5874

The guy is reading my posts. Everybody read my posts. The "ignore list" is a complete waste of time.

ApostateAbe

So, Toto, if you propose that Jesus is more analogous to the Angel Moroni than to Joseph Smith, then your challenge is to find more relevant confirmed historical patterns that are common to both Angel Moroni and Jesus but not Joseph Smith. Little is accomplished by pointing that the things I listed are also shared by the Apostle Paul. I already agree with you. He, like Jesus, was a cult leader, though apparently not the cult founder.

Do you think that sociology is such an exact science that you can know what happened in the first century Roman Empire by analogy to current events?

Yes. Sociology is not an exact science, but it is a statistical science. There are known tendencies of social behaviors, and one of those tendencies is the formation of cults. Cults are found in every nation, and they tend to have characteristics in common with each other. See this "Checklist of Cult Characteristics" published by the Cult Studies Journal:

http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_art...l_checklis.htm

If such patterns exist across cultures today, then it is expected that such patterns would extend backward in time to prior human civilizations. Some propositions of sociology are plausible and some are not. If you have the perspective of human societies that anything goes, then of course any social behavior is plausible, and the criterion of plausibility has little relevance. I do not share that perspective.

But what about Judaism? Do you claim that there was a historical Abraham, a historical Moses, or a historical David? All of these figures are legendary, and most likely invented by later Jews as founding figures.

Are you going to claim that Romulus and Remus were historical?

I think those characters would be relevant for discussion if they were reputed to be human cult founders. As far as I know, neither Abraham, Moses, David, Romulus, nor Remus reputedly founded a cult.

You do it by claiming that Jesus was so obscure that the historical Jesus becomes unfalsifiable.

No, I do it by putting the character of Jesus in his reputed historical context. The society of Jesus was illiterate.

The claims of a historical Jesus would be falsified if earlier myths showed him to be more divine and later myths more human, if there was an early Christian sect that believed Jesus was explicitly myth, if there were evidences of apostates, heretics, Jews and pagans who believed Jesus to be no more than myth, or if there were no seeming vestiges of embarrassments concerning Jesus in the myths.

Can you name another of your doomsday cults or religions where the founder wrote nothing, and his closest followers also wrote nothing about him?

Good question. If you were to leave out the word "doomsday," then fulfilling the challenge would be easy. If you go to this page:

http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah...aimants00.html

You will find a list of 19 similar such figures, though presumably not all of them would be the founders of "doomsday" cults, and most of them would be short-lived. John the Baptist would be a good example to that effect, in my opinion--the earliest evidence indicates that he was a doomsday cult leader, and his religion survived his death, but we have no written evidence from either himself or his followers (only Christian gospels and Josephus). The Prophet Muhammad would be another good example, except he wasn't a "doomsday" cult founder. He had a heckuva lot of other things in common with the founder of Christianity, but not that, except if you count a non-imminent day of judgement as a "doomsday." Doomsdayism is found in only a minority of cults. One way or the other, such examples do indeed demonstrate that it is more than possible for cults (doomsday or non-doomsday) to leave no immediate written attestations but only spoken religious myths, especially in the ancient world.