Easter Is Coming in 8 Weeks

Quote: FrGamble

I'm afraid it is you who are not getting it.

To quote the great Victor Hugo: "?"

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You can continue to think religion is fiction but you ignore its historical impact.

Why would I? After Constantine Roman politics become so drenched in pointless arguments about theology, it's no longer very interesting. Later on we had the Dark Ages.

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The Resurrection of Jesus and His life were never written as myths or fiction, they were written as true and taken as true right from the start.

No myths, no matter how preposterous, were ever written as myths or taken as such. They were all written as true and taken as true right from the start. Your particular myth is just one more in a long, long, long, line of them. Hercules, Osiris, Gilgamesh, Jesus, Mohamed, Ulysses, Penelope, Helen, Paris, Aeneas are all as realistically portrayed.

BTW, fiction did not exist formally until rather late in history. Myths, legends and religious texts (but I repeat myself) were all taken as fact at some point.

Modern myths, or rather myth-like fiction, is written as fiction and not supposed to be taken as fact. But the content is very similar. So when you talk about Jesus performing miracles, or having miracles performed on him, or however that goes, I take it as seriously as Superman being able to fly or stop bullets.

With one exception: some modern myths are made up on purpose to enhance or whitewash real people, or to make them look worse; things like the story of Washington and the cherry tree. In fact, speaking of that era, Paul Revere had a hand in mythifying the Boston Massacre. Which just goes to show one picture is worth a lot more than one thousand words.

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Persisting in comparing these historical mysteries and miracles to Santa Claus and James Bond might make you feel better but they make it obvious that you aren't really taking it very seriously.

Good point. I shall begin worshiping Osiris, Ist, Seth, Ra, Amun, Aton and the rest right now. I better start saving for an elaborate burial site, a mortuary temple (complete with a Ka), and for a priest to make offerings of bread and beer long after I'm gone. I want to be resurrected in the next world, after all. Now, should I have my corpse mummified in the traditional fashion with nitron, resin and linen bandages, or embalmed in a more modern way?

Seriously, how can I take obvious myths seriously? How they affect the societies that believe them, sure. That's important, sometimes even interesting. But the myths themselves are as truthful as the latest episode of The Flash.

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I don't like the Austin Powers movies but I don't loathe or try to embarrass anyone who likes them.

The fans of Austin Powers (and the first movie was a hoot) have never killed, maimed or tortured millions of people over the years for not believing his story to be true.

Quote: FrGamble

Were they so much more superstitious in the ancient world that we can't take seriously anything they thought or believed? No.

Oh, much more. Right up until the first few centuries of the Common Era, no less a personage than Diocletian paid people to read animal entrails to know the future. And can you imagine an admiral today performing a ritual involving chickens to see if he should attack right now or wait for a more auspicious time?

Next to that, even something as pointless as the daily horoscope seems almost rational.

Quote: FrGamble

Were they so much more superstitious in the ancient world .

Oh my yes. They were superstitious about
everything. Everything.

I find it interesting that you seem to bristle
at the word. Is it because:

"The current Catechism of the Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments."

Superstition is a sin to Catholics. Meaning you
have to take every aspect of your religion seriously
or it's a sin. How convenient to outlaw free thinking,
musn't have the flock wavering from what you want
them to believe.

"There is a thin line of distinction between the concept of superstition and religion. What is fully accepted as genuine religious statement may be seen as poor superstition by those who do not share the same faith."

Actually, there is no line between superstition and religion,
and the Church knows it. So they nip it right in the bud,
it's sin. Case closed.

Quote: Nareed

No myths, no matter how preposterous, were ever written as myths or taken as such. They were all written as true and taken as true right from the start. Your particular myth is just one more in a long, long, long, line of them. Hercules, Osiris, Gilgamesh, Jesus, Mohamed, Ulysses, Penelope, Helen, Paris, Aeneas are all as realistically portrayed.

BTW, fiction did not exist formally until rather late in history. Myths, legends and religious texts (but I repeat myself) were all taken as fact at some point.

I agree myth was a catch all genre in the ancient world. A way of communicating truth by the way of stories that were not true, but the morals or teachings were.

Hopefully you can see that the stories of Jesus are written differently. They are not myth and certainly not fiction. Outside of the myths themselves did anyone ever write about seeing Ulysses or Zeus? Were there stories of them working in a carpenter shop for 30 years in hidden obscurity? Were there genealogies tracing the lineages of their families through the ages? Did people fervently spread the messages of these myths and willingly die for them as truths?

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Modern myths, or rather myth-like fiction, is written as fiction and not supposed to be taken as fact. But the content is very similar. So when you talk about Jesus performing miracles, or having miracles performed on him, or however that goes, I take it as seriously as Superman being able to fly or stop bullets.

In the absence of fiction in the ancient world you are conflating the modern notion of myth with the ancient perspective on them. Christianity marks an important change in the history of religion. No longer are we talking myth, but we are talking about a real human person. A person who was truly God and truly man. Who could and did preform miracles and was Resurrected from the dead. Yet He was just like you and I, a real person who did extraordinary things. History bears this out and no fictional character or events have ever or could ever have the impact they did not only back then but still today.

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Good point. I shall begin worshiping Osiris, Ist, Seth, Ra, Amun, Aton and the rest right now. I better start saving for an elaborate burial site, a mortuary temple (complete with a Ka), and for a priest to make offerings of bread and beer long after I'm gone. I want to be resurrected in the next world, after all. Now, should I have my corpse mummified in the traditional fashion with nitron, resin and linen bandages, or embalmed in a more modern way?

Awful point, I hope it sounded as silly to you in writing it as it did for me when I read it.

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Seriously, how can I take obvious myths seriously? How they affect the societies that believe them, sure. That's important, sometimes even interesting. But the myths themselves are as truthful as the latest episode of The Flash.

When did the last episode of Flash cause a movement that changed the world?

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The fans of Austin Powers (and the first movie was a hoot) have never killed, maimed or tortured millions of people over the years for not believing his story to be true.

In recent memory the only ones who have done this are atheists.

Quote: Nareed

Oh, much more. Right up until the first few centuries of the Common Era, no less a personage than Diocletian paid people to read animal entrails to know the future. And can you imagine an admiral today performing a ritual involving chickens to see if he should attack right now or wait for a more auspicious time?

Next to that, even something as pointless as the daily horoscope seems almost rational.

There are no less than three places within a two mile radius of me that I can get my palm read and fortune told.

Quote: Catechism of the Catholic Church

2110 The first commandment forbids honoring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed himself to his people. It proscribes superstition and irreligion. Superstition in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion; irreligion is the vice contrary by defect to the virtue of religion.

Superstition

2111 Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.

Quote: FrGamble

Outside of the myths themselves did anyone ever write about seeing Ulysses or Zeus?

Paris certainly saw Athena, Aphrodite and Hera.

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Were there stories of them working in a carpenter shop for 30 years in hidden obscurity? Were there genealogies tracing the lineages of their families through the ages?

Oh, plenty of Roman politicians did that. Pompeii Magnus, for one. Caesar pretty much talks mostly about his job n his own writings.

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Did people fervently spread the messages of these myths and willingly die for them as truths?

Try and understand this: the devotion to a story does not make it true. It certainly isn't evidence.

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Awful point, I hope it sounded as silly to you in writing it as it did for me when I read it.

Why, not at all. The Egyptians had a really nice conception about the after life, a lot nicer than Christianity's.

You know what the Ka is? The physical form of the soul, the "life force." Egyptians who could afford it, built a Ka statue in their graves as insurance against their mummy being damaged or destroyed. The Ba is the other part of the soul, the spiritual one. It's depicted as a bird with a human head. If a mummy was destroyed, the Ba could return to the Ka statue when resurrection time came around.

That's very advanced thinking, if not taken literally. It shows understanding of the soul as part of the physical body and part of this world. And most important that a person is both body and spirit, not spirit alone. I find it appealing.

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In recent memory the only ones who have done this are atheists.

I guess then all the willing Catholic guards at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and the rest were really all atheists? I don't think you believe that for a minute.

Hitler was not an atheist, and moreover, most of his adherents weren't. Even so, to claim that these acts were done in the name of atheism really is so far wrong, it misses the point entirely.

Quote: FrGamble

There are no less than three places within a two mile radius of me that I can get my palm read and fortune told.

Remember the ridicule faced by Nancy Reagan after word leaked she consulted astrologists?

Now imagine Obama and his chief of staff in the Oval Office, having someone slaughter a pig to read its entrails, and the results, not the fact, being reported by the press in all seriousness.

That's the difference between superstition in the modern world vs the ancient world.

Quote: FrGamble

When did the last episode of Flash cause a movement that changed the world?

If it did, would you worship The Flash?