I’ve already seen this months before. Old news. And I've already made this point on another post. :)
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.
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sticks_m
16 years ago
The sad thing is that there are people who are shown and still don't see it. But then again like someone else said, truth passed through 3 stages, ridicule, denial, acceptance.
The REALLY sad thing is that you people need to be shown a movie like this at all to help you realize what is going on in the world today. Do you not have enough gray matter to realize these things by yourselves? Are you that busy with your lives that you don't have the time? Or do you simply believe what the tube tells you? What in the hell is going on with you?
Why don't you skip on paris hilton and britney for a week, forget that football game and stop being distracted by things in general. Educate yourselves for only you can truly do so. Years are passing and we're dumbing down, if we continue down this path they'll be whipping us and telling us it doesn't hurt, and we WILL believe them.
This movie should be old news.
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