This is not ZEITGEIST, The Movie

[deleted]

False. The first part about religion actually addresses discussions currently being conducted in academic circles regarding Christianity. There is quite a bit of scholarly work done on both sides of the "is Jesus a myth" debate.

Parts two and three, about the government causing 9/11 and the Bilderberg Group trying to create a one world government are the ones which are *beep* They use some actual facts in there -- Prescott Bush was a closet fascist and did attempt a coup, there is talk of a North American Union, the U.S. government was aware of Pearl Harbor before it happened, etc. The problem is that the film takes actual historical fact and uses them to make giant leaps in logic about what will happen in the future.

To believe that a secret society set into motion a multi-generational plan to control the planet that would take over a century to be realized, and to believe that they've been able to keep this under wraps and running like a well-oiled machine over all this time and passing it through countless hands is just completely ludicrous. We're talking about the same people who can't even see the long-term benefits of developing renewable energy sources, yet they can plan ahead for over a century?

It's pure nonsense and many of the "sources" used in parts two and three have been found to be absolutely false. And if you believe those sources have only been discredited because they got "too close to the truth," then my friend, I also have some magic beans I'd like to sell you.

The part on religion is 100% truth.
Oh wait, you are a christian or jew? Duh, your whole foundation for life should be crumbling if you have any sense in your head.

I’ve already seen this months before. Old news.

Interesting documentary. Very ‘persuasive’ but sadly misconstrued. Esp the Christian/Pagan comparison, which has been around for centuries. One of the big things is that:

#1 Christians don’t actually believe that Christ was born on December 25th, but decided to celebrate it that day. That alone proves the doco’s material is dubious, poorly researched, and extremely unreliable. The author’s clearly manipulating data to contrive arguments and evidence.

#2 It is only the success of the Roman Catholic Church to fuse pagan practices and Roman culture together with Christian doctrine and theology that gives the “extra baggage” to Christianity even though there a few things the Catholic Church correctly intepreted, like the Nicene Creed.

#3 The documentary isn’t taking into account the fact that the mystery religions (like Horus, Osiris-Dionysus) were (more) grounded in Plato’s worldview (if you actually study them and read their stories outside of the web) while the Gospels and Paul are rooted in the Old Testament, so despite the “astonishing similarities” between Greek/Egyptian stories and the Jesus of the Gospels, every single word means something completely different.

#4 These kinds of arguments were popular in so-called "history of religions" circles until several decades ago, but they were generally abandoned. Atheistic fundamentalists and some people who took older religious studies classes still haven't caught up entirely. The thesis was basically that Christian theology took its primary components from preceding traditions rather than from events which occurred in Jesus' life. Usually it works this way: Jesus preached an inner kingdom of hippie social justice, but Paul put Jesus in the framework of a "mystery religion" (a category of pagan cult contemporary with early xianity). It turns out that you have to read those pagan cults using the terms of Christian theology in order to make that case, but obviously if you're using the terms of Christian theology to read pagan cults then the thesis that the terms of Christian theology are basically lifted out of the mystery religions is false.

Consider the first paragraph on the website "Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth":

"What the ancient evidence will show you is that ancient western culture had a conceptual model of reality, and ancient Christianity adopted that model. Ancient Pagans believed in various levels of divinity, with miraculous powers, coming down and going up to its home in the sky. Divine beings cared about people, listened to and answered their prayers. Gave them the power to prophesy. Even gave them a better deal in the eternal life that comes after death."

So the facts are:
1. They believed in some sort of non-human beings.
2. They beleived that non-human beings had non-human powers.
3. They believed that non-human beings lived in places that humans don't.
4. They believed that non-human beings interacted with humans.
5. They believed that non-human beings could provide humans with non-human knowledge and power.

Obviously these are so vague that we would only be surprised if there weren't people all over the world who believed these kinds of things. This is basically on the order of, "Many people believed things fell from the sky in ancient times, so Newton must have gotten his laws of motion from them." (There exist much better examples than this website, but...)

Leithart offers the interesting epigram, "The Devil has no stories." In other words, because only God can create out of nothing, whenever we make anything it will always be derivative in nature, so any story we write will unavoidably reflect the story, God's story. Hence we get posts like some of those above.

So, are there similarities? Sure, but not any kind of similarities that show that the fundamentals of Christian theology were derived from the mystery religions as opposed to the life of Jesus.


#5 The dilemma of the 911 conspiracy: the doco definitely proved that USA, military and corporations, among other conspirators, are capable of global conspiracy by emphasizing that other forces other than the Al-queda terrorists, are behind everything, yet failing to consider that a more realistic, less exciting alternative maybe the zeolot Muslim fundamentalists.

This really is a silly movie that thinks it has somehow proven things.