Cognoscenti324

Normally I'm happy to engage posters. But you have shown yourself to be such a caustic, pedantic little putz that I find myself strangely uninterested in enabling you. I'm sorry you can't follow the ball here. The possibility of the dreams of primitive, ignorant men leading them to believe the dead person they dreamed about might have some sort of 'spiritual' existence is obviously without merit. You are thus free to reject it.

Please continue your usual whining about how ignorant every poster is that you disagree with.....

James The Least

The "Ignore" function is your friend.

aa5874

What you think of me is totally useless at this stage. I have merely exposed and will continue to expose your absurdities. You have presented no evidence from antiquity to show that religion is a direct product of dreams.

And in any event, we already know how the Jesus cult started because it is documented by Aristides.

The Jesus cult started when people believed a story that the Jews Killed the Son of God.

Aristides' Apology Please, stop dreaming. There is an abundance of evidence from antiquity that show how the Jesus cult most likely started.

gurugeorge

There are visions in dreams, and recountings of them throughout history. That's more or less what we now call "lucid dreaming". Certainly there's some overlap between dreams and visions, some of the same parts of the brain are being used.

But I don't think even ancient people would have mistaken an ordinary dream for a vision, as that's understood nowadays. Visions (and lucid dreams, and "astral travel" and other similar phenomena) are a fairly distinct category of phenomenon, distinguishable from dreams by an odd pseudo-clarity, and mostly being had while awake and/or fully cognizant.

Cf. the philosopher of mind, Thomas Metzinger, for a general and extremely coherent take on this and other "fringe" experiences from the point of view of philosophy and cognitive science. There are more and more studies on this kind of thing too, IIRC a recent one showed that visionary experiences are more common amongst religious people than previously thought.

aa5874

The question is "What Started Christianity?" and there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jesus cult was started by a dream.

It is clear that the Jesus story was fundamentally derived from supposed prophecies in the Septuagint or a similar source.

Effectively, the story of Jesus is directly related to the OT--Not dreams.

The words and deed of Jesus are fundamentally related to supposed predictions in the Septuagint--Not dreams.

When Jesus got his first donkey ride in the Gospels it was predicted by the prophet.

Zechariah 9:9 KJV It is clearly evident that the Jesus story is not based on dreams but a product of supposed prophecies in the Septuagint or a similar source.

gurugeorge

Oh there's plenty of evidence for the claim that the human brain has a capacity to produce visions (which of couse includes auditory hallucinations) under certain conditions (and under the influence of certain beliefs). It's just a function of the way the brain is designed to model the world, and itself in the world. Under conditions of sleep deprivation, intensive study, breathing exercises, liminal states of consciousness (border between sleep and waking), etc., etc., the self-model can become un-moored from its normal habitat in the brain's model of a tested physical environment.

There are certainly lots of accounts of visionary experiences in Greek and Roman literature. A notable early one is the philosopher Parmenides' account of his encounter with Persephone at the start of his book on logic. Empedocles was also given to visions. Then for Romans there's Cicero's famous Dream of Scipio (fictional or not - and actually there's no reason why it should be fictional - it shows the importance of visions in the culture).

In ancient Greece, particularly in the Turkish colonies, there were these places where people who were very ill would go, tended by "Iatromantes" (healers - Parmenides himself was one, Elea was an Italian colony descended from a Turkish colony) - dark places like caves where very ill people would lie down and give up, do nothing. Eventually they might have a vision of the presiding deity (usually Apollo) which would either cure them or enable them to face death peacefully. The practice was called "incubation".

Visions as central to religion is a main theme of religion, in every culture. One particularly notable example, for triangulation, was the founding of one of one of the major Chinese Daoist sects by (the equivalent of) an upper class matron who communicated over several weeks with some kind of spirit who gave her a whole religious world-view. That particular religion lasted for a long time in China.

So, for the Paul writings, we have evidence of that type of experience. He got his stuff "from the horse's mouth", his Jesus spoke to him. That seems perfectly reasonable. These things happen. We now understand better scientifically why they happen, and that they are less uncommon than previously thought. No big deal.

Grog

It was an allusion to Allegro's Sacred Mushroom.

aa5874

Again, this is not really about the human brain and its capacity to produce visions but that your claim is errroneous that without visions there would be no religion.

Please, show that the Greeks and Romans had visions of their Gods before their religion started.

Again, Paul could NOT have gotten anything from the "mouth of a resurrected character" but he most likely got it from the Septuagint and Scriptures of the Jesus cult.

But, in any event, the Pauline writers did NOT start the Jesus cult and made no claim that they did.

Robert Tulip

Memetic evolution is a good answer to the question of how Christianity emerged. Memetics answers the process question, setting the cultural evolution within a natural scientific framework and excluding all traditional supernatural magic. Which memetic factors were decisive for Christian success is then the ‘what’ question we should ask once we accept the ‘how’ question of natural evolutionary causality.

Memetics applies the scientific model of material causality to the study of cultural change. This is challenging in principle because it asserts that complex phenomena such as cultural ideas must in principle have material causes, with no point at which the idea separates itself from the material to introduce a non-evolutionary causal process.

Memetics recognises that the genetic process of cumulative adaptation should in principle also govern the causal process of other complex living systems such as human culture. And this is quite plausible. A society contains people who are continually trying out new things. Some innovations succeed and some fail. The basic criterion of whether a given innovation succeeds or fails is exactly the same in genetics and culture – whether it is more adaptive to its environment and hence is able to replicate in a way that is more fecund, durable and stable than other innovations. The fact that memetic change is faster and more complex than genetic change does not in any way indicate how memetic change might bring in non-evolutionary factors.

Regarding the content of the Christian meme, selective pressures included:
- the emotional attraction of a story whose core Easter ritual was modelled on the natural annual cycle of death and rebirth,
- the need to syncretise a range of older myths into a new story for a common era,
- the geopolitics of the Roman-Jewish wars,
- the way Jewish Davidic monotheism picked up the messianic ethical message of ‘the least shall be first’ as a compelling cultural framework for the Christ Myth
- and importantly, the neglected topic of how the Jesus story explains universal history in a way that maps directly to the cosmology understood by ancient seers, with the spring point of the sky precessing from Aries into Pisces at the purported time of Christ as symbolising a New Age.

gurugeorge

Oh but it is, that's part of the background evidence one has to bring to the table.

Those cults are obviously far too old and evidence of their origins far too scant, to say anything definite about (other than that they probably started in a shamanistic fashion); my evidence is based on what we do have evidence for, which is for contemporary and near-contemporary religions, and some ancient religions, from everything from Shamanism to the origins of several large-scale religions (Islam, some forms of Daoism, Hinduism, etc., even Buddhism with the vision of "Mara") But for the Greeks and Romans there are scattered fragments here and there (like the Parmenides/Empedocles fragments I mentioned) which talk about encounters with deity. There are also some visions recounted in the "Orphic" gold leaf evidence, which is very, very old.

For a general overview, cf. William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. Absolutely necessary reading, IMHO, for anyone who wants to get a feel for what religion actually is and was, so their textual analysis can be more informed. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend that you do.

He THOUGHT that he had gotten the word from a resurrected character. Obviously there was no resurrected character, the vision wasn't real. Visions don't represent real entities. But they can seem real to those who have them.

You seem to have difficulty grasping this: IN REALITY, no resurrected entity, but a visionary experience is precisely the experience of something that isn't real, but SEEMS REAL to the person having the vision.

So when we see in an ancient text that someone "spoke to God", and if we have no reason to think they are lying or perpetrating fraud, the obvious interpretation, given the known capacity of the human brain to produce visions and auditory hallucinations under certain conditions, is that they had that type of experience. They really, really thought they were speaking to God, he was there, palpable to them. But we know it was just a trick of the brain, and whatever the God "said" to them was produced by their own brain.

The evidence we have suggests "epopthe", self-revelation of the divine, to those in Jerusalem whom Paul says preceded him. This has been read by Christians as pertaining to the post-resurrection appearance of someone they had previously known in the flesh, but we are under no obligation to read the text that way. The text can easily be read as visionary experience of an entity they didn't know previously in the flesh, but who (they thought, as people who have visions tend to think) was revealing Himself to them for the first time.