Christianity Clarifications (just looking at the facts)

It all starts with Abraham

• Religion scholars inform us that Abraham lived between 2150 and 1975 BCE but this data comes from extrapolation of religious texts. We have no information about Abraham from secular sources.
• Abraham had two sons:
  • Abraham's first son is Ishmael who is born of Abraham's union with Sarah's handmaid, Hagar
  • Abraham's second son is Isaac who is born of Abraham's union with Abraham's half-sister, Sarah, fourteen years later.
• Scripture tells us that some time after that, Sarah hears Ishmael teasing Isaac so asks Abraham to send both Hagar and Ishmael away
• Ismael's descendants form the Islamic faith which was later reformed by Muhammed in the seventh century
• Isaac's descendants form the Jewish faith
  • Jesus, an observant Jew with liberal views (he wanted Jewish people to obey the spirit of Jewish law but did not want to start a new religion) is crucified in the first century
  • The writings of Paul of Tarsus (an apostle who never met Jesus) help to create a new religion: Christianity
• Margret Atwood writes The Handmaid's Tale which has nothing to do with Hagar or Ishmael but does show how some modern people would prefer to live 3,000 years ago while they misquote and misinterpret religious history.

Christian Chronology

Two Great Schisms

• Ask modern Christians about "the great schism" and most are only aware of the split between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism ~ 500 years ago
• But between 325 AD and 381 AD, words (now known as Filioque) were added to the Nicene Creed which divided the main five churches (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem)
• Quite simply, here is the Filioque controversy boiled down to two lines:

  original text	the holy spirit proceeds from the father
  new text	the holy spirit proceeds from the father and the son

• The Western church (Rome) excommunicated the other four churches in 1054 which is now known as The Great Schism (was this action religious or political? I is hard to say since many cultures were theocracies at that time)
• From that time on humanity has only used two labels: Eastern Orthodox (sometimes: Greek Orthodox) and Catholic
• Now words have meaning and Orthodox comes from geometry (Orthogonal) and means "Straight Thinking". In the world of religion, the opposite of orthodoxy is usually termed heresy so doesn't this mean that Roman Catholicism, as well as everything derived from it including all the Protestant splinters (Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, Anglicans, Anabaptists (Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, etc)), represent "Heretical Thinking"?
  comment: churches did not like being referred to as heretical so some employed new verbiage like "Catholic Orthodoxy" or "Lutheran Orthodoxy" although modern bible scholars prefer the word "heterodoxy"
• Historical Facts: Jesus was an unordained teacher (so not a rabbi) who never claimed he was the literal "son of god" although he did speak metaphorically when saying we were all "children of god". Sometime between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus becomes divine. Then other people in the early Christian community create additional concepts like trinity and "triune god" in order to avoid polytheism. Some see the Filioque as just another step in completing the trinity story. So should you pray to Jesus? You might be a heretic if you do.

Bible Oddities (old + new Testaments)

• Most people in common culture today throw around the word "bible" as if there is only one, but there are many.
• Most Hebrew bibles are comprised of 17-books
• Most Catholic bibles are comprised of 73-books
  • There have been many sanctioned bibles over the past millennia but this bible-thing starts in the fourth century with the work of Saint Jerome and his book known as the Catholic Vulgate
    caveat: there were many Vulgates by many authors after Saint Jerome
• Most Protestant bibles are comprised of 66-books because Martin Luther's cannon removed 7 old testament books ( Deuterocanonical ) and questioned 7 new testament books ( Antilegomena )
  • Luther also contemplating the removal of The Book of Revelation since it appeared to be a collection of gibberish authored by someone thought to be suffering from food poisoning
    (to all my American friends obsessed with this stuff: It is "Revelation" not "Revelations". There is no trailing "s". I remember our religion teacher always correcting us with the line "there was only one revelation")
  • the two books of the Maccabees describe the activities of Jewish freedom fighters (read below)
  • comments: I remember receiving a bible book-mark at age 10 that contained a picture of a library bookcase with 66-books; I was told, by age-13 you will be able to recite those books from memory, and I could.

New Testament Oddities

Book Order

• These books are not presented in the order of their publishing dates. If they were, then the books written by Paul of Tarsus (a man who never met Jesus) would occupy the first third.
• The next two books would be Peter 1 and Peter 2 which were not written by Simon Peter but were definitely written by two different authors.
• All of the original twelve apostles (perhaps with the exception of Mathew) were illiterate. They could not read or write so did not, and could not, write any of the books attributed to their names. Almost 40 years elapsed since the death of Jesus and the writing of the first Gospel (so there are, perhaps, 40 years of oral story-telling until someone decided to write them down)
• John Spong wrote the following: if the books of the new testament were reordered by their publication dates, then the first books would contain few-to-no miracles; miracles slowly creep with each book until the final book (Revelation) where you've got all kinds of wacky things going on. comment: could it be that many of these oral traditions are an ancient example of the modern telephone game?

Inter-book inaccuracies

• The first three gospels are often referred to as the synoptic gospels because they tell the same stories, and yet, they contain more differences than similarities. Here is just one major difference of many:
  • In the Gospel of Mathew, the disciples are told to meet Jesus in Galilee. Jesus ascends into heaven 40 days later
  • In the Gospel of Luke, the disciples are told to meet Jesus in Jerusalem where he ascends into heaven immediately
  • read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_resurrection_appearances_in_the_Gospels_and_Paul

Greek Myths become Christian Myths?

• Church tradition claims that Jesus was born of a virgin but we today we know that "virgin" often appears as a mis-translation of "young woman". scholarly speculation: some have mentioned (with little evidence) that people back then exaggerated the facts in order to have Christianity accepted. For example, most people were aware of the Greek story about Heracles (born from the union of a god named Zeus and a woman named Alcmene) or the Roman equivalent story of Hercules (born of the union of a god named Jupiter and the same woman named Alcmene). The reasoning here needs Jesus to be born of the union of a male God and human woman in order for the Jesus narrative to replace the Heracles/Hercules myth.
  • Many people do not know that Hercules had an identical twin brother named Iphicles which makes one wonder what ancient people thought about identical twins (one child came from a male god while the other came from a human man). Something similar happens with Jesus as is described in the Gospel of Thomas which is not part of any cannon because it was only discovered in 1945. The author of this book claims to be Didymos Judas Thomas (literal translation: Twin Jude Twin) who is the identical twin brother of Jesus and it sometimes mistaken for Jesus. You do not need to read too far before you realize why this gospel was not included in any original canon. But the similarity between the Jesus story and the Hercules story now seem evermore obvious.

The Star of Bethlehem

• church tradition claims that a star was positioned over Jesus's place of Birth and that this event attracted the attention of three wise men. Even though the city name of Bethlehem is only mentioned in one of the four gospels (Mathew), the star event is commonly referred to as the Star of Bethlehem. Now for some reason I will never understand, it appears that the common people from then to now (who were almost always illiterate) had no concept of analogies or metaphors so took everything literally rather than figuratively. So here are some facts that the church never mentions:
  • the phrase "wise men" really means "educated men"
  • "educated people" in those times (and possibly up to 400 years ago) believed in "astrology as a science" so these wise men (if they ever existed) are most certainly referring to an "astrological sign" rather than an "astronomical sign"
  • the name "planet" comes from the Greek word for "wanderer" because these objects appear to wander through the imaginary constellations compared with stars which maintain their relative positions to each other while they appear to rotate around Earth. This wandering is now known as retrograde motion and is only (properly) explainable if you also accept the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun (Copernican Revolution) which is something the Vatican only admitted in 1992 with their apology to Galileo (who was found guilty of heresy then sentenced to spend the remainder of his life under house arrest).
  • Now when two planets appear to loop together in the same part of the sky then this event may appear to be a sign from god; When those two planets are Jupiter and Saturn, and they come together in the constellation of Pisces (two fish which astrologers associate with Israel and Judea, some people are going to interpret this as A KING (Jupiter) is coming to Israel/Judea (Pisces).

Zombies

• In Matthew 27:52-53 we read about what can only be described as zombies or the living dead. It states, "And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." Based on this tall tale, when Jesus died the "saints" arose from the dead but stayed put at their graves until about 45 hours later when Jesus came back to life and came out of his tomb. At that time they strolled into Jerusalem "and appeared unto many." No adult in his or her right mind would ever believe this Biblical lie.

Old testament Oddities

• The first 5-books of the bible are known as the Pentateuch (or Torah or "The Law") and Bible scholars talk about two sources: A + B. The first four books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers) are from source "A" whilst Deuteronomy is from source "B"
• Many Christians have never read any part of the bible so do not know that there are two creation stories (Genesis + Deuteronomy) and the two do no match
• For example, the Ten Commandment story in Exodus is different in Deuteronomy
  • In Exodus, Moses ascends Mount Sinai to received the Decalogue (The Ten Commandments) which sometimes number 10, 11 or 12 depending upon the translation; he sees his people worshiping a golden calf, loses his temper, then smashes the tablets; five verses later he reascends Sinai the comes down with ~ 40 commandments.
  • These two events have different details in Deuteronomy
  • Members of the Abrahamic religions would have you believe that this was written down after it happened (if it ever happened) between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries BCE but there is some evidence that most of the old testament was written down when the 10-tribes were living in captivity in Babylon five centuries before Jesus.
• Many Christians think the Old testament is either identical, or similar, to the Talmud. Since the Talmud claims that Adam had a wife before Eve by the name of Lilith then I think we can agree that some editing has taken place over the past 2,000 years (BTW, you will only find Lilith mentioned in Isaiah 34:14 of the Christian Old Testament)
• Consider the ecclesiastical value of this quote from Ezekiel 23:20 then ask if it would be something any father would want his wife or daughters to hear on a Sunday morning?

  "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."

Good vs Evil?

Continuing the violence...

While on the topic of evil, Christian authored books and Hollywood movies would have you believe that peace-loving Christians were continually persecuted by Rome and/or the followers of pagan regions.

All secular historians agree that: While some accounts of Christians being put to death in the Roman arena are true, these events pale in comparison with the violence that Christians perpetrated on everyone including: pagans, adherents of other religions, Jews (a real joke since Jesus was an observant Jew), and Christian heretics (any Christian professing belief in an alternative interpretation). This violence reaches new heights with the Crusades (some scholars claim there were as many as seven), the Roman Catholic Inquisition (none in Venice but at least five in Spain), the burning of heretics, the burning of witches by Catholics and Protestants alike. And last but not least, the Salem witch trials (on 1692) by Protestant Pilgrims.

The violence unleashed upon the new world by Spain and Portugal all came with the blessings of the Vatican.

Festivals to Holidays

• Major Days (often celebrated by the general population)
  • Christmas
    • word is not found anywhere in the bible
    • Jesus was mostly likely born in September (using some references to the feast of the tabernacles); BTW, shepherds never watch their flocks at night in December which is the rainy season
    • meant as a replacement holiday to stamp out these observances:
      • the Roman festival of Saturnalia
      • heathen (people of the heath or bush) and pagan festivals of Europe (mostly Germanic and Nordic)
        note: in the religious context "pagan" means polytheistic but definitely not atheist
  • Easter
    • word is not found anywhere in the bible
    • meant as a replacement holiday to stamp out these observances:
      • the fertility festival held on the first day of spring (usually March 21) at the Eastern gate of Babylon named the Ishtar Gate (so Easter is a derivation of Ishtar)
        comment: this fertility festival involved symbols of reproduction including chicken eggs, rabbits, and prostitutes; modern people still celebrate Easter with chocolate eggs and rabbits but most do not know why
• Minor Days (only celebrated by the church)
  • Ascension Day
    • celebrated 40 days after Easter even though one of the gospels tells us that Christ ascended shortly after the crucifixion
  • Pentecost
    • celebrated 50 days after Easter
    • church tradition claims that the flame of the holy spirit (holy ghost) jumped from apostle to apostle causing them to speak some sort of angelic gibberish referred to as speaking in tongues. The truth is this: most common people living in Judea 2,000 years ago where illiterate and only heard others speaking Hebrew or Aramaic. Most literate people (especially those lucky enough to receive a liberal education in Athens) would also be familiar with speaking in Greek and/or Latin. What you and I refer to a multilingualism was interpreted by the uneducated as "speaking in tongues" (magic).
• Minor Days (only noted by the general public)
  • Saint Valentine's Day
  • Saint Patrick's Day

Jesus and Christianity from non-Bible sources

1. the body of Jesus disappeared from a guarded tomb
2. In some of the writings, Jesus walked around Galilee for the next 40 days performing miracles before his ascension directly into heaven.

To learn more about Christianity "from the scholars"

Many modern Christian preachers and teachers (includes everyone from priests to ministers as well as anyone teaching religion in "Sunday School" or "Public School") are either unaware of these historical facts, or chose to ignore them as unimportant. A lot of new books have been published in the past three decades three but I have found the the books authored by Bart D Ehrman, Ph.D., M.Div. to be a little more approachable by non-academics.

• books
  • https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Bart+D.+Ehrman (USA)
  • https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=Bart+D.+Ehrman (Canada)
• video lectures
  • https://www.thegreatcourses.com (purchase DVDs)
  • https://www.wondrium.com (online video: $20 per month or $45 per quarter)
  • "From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity" (24 lectures by Bart Ehrman)
  • "Books That Matter: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (24 lectures by Leo Damrosch)

My worries about the next Dark Age

• I have many friends and family who think that humanity's problems today are due to the fact that there is not enough Christianity in the world. This wish seems to ignore the historical fact that Christianity was made the official state religion of Rome in 379 by the emperor Theodosius I and that Rome was the most powerful empire of its day. Christianity had its shot at societal domination so what became of this? Answer: Rome collapsed causing the world to enter a new dark age which lasted 1,000 years. Many historians and enlightenment writers (Edward Gibbon is one) place the responsibility squarely at the feet of organized religion.
• Now I do not think you can only blame Christianity.
  • The knowledge loving, while literate, Athenian Greeks where well on the way to replacing "religion with reason" until the war loving, while illiterate, Spartan Greeks defeated them in war (the labels, conservative and liberal were used back then as well). But then the Spartans no longer had any Greek allies so were (eventually) conquered by the Macedonians under Alexander. Eventually the Hellenistic peninsula becomes a province of Rome.
  • Romans, being a superstitious people, renamed the Greek gods with Roman names then added them to their own polytheistic pantheon. This is probably how Rome acquired Christianity
• Putting Roman Aqueducts and Roman Roads aside for a moment, not very much in the way of European science or mathematics after "the initial contribution by the Greeks" up to "the Renaissance". The years between are still known as the Middle Ages by some and the Dark Age by others. While there is no official date for the start of the middle/dark ages, I think we can all agree that 1,000 years passed.

Before-After the Dark Age

Philosophy, as a serious endeavor, is still somewhat strange to me because philosophers continually rehash old-ancient arguments but never seem to move on. You might hear modern philosophical types talking about their big three which are usually Socrates, Plato and Aristotle but this limited preference, in my opinion, short-changes human intellect. How many non-scholars today are aware of these Greeks?

• Aristarchus of Samos was born in 310 BC.
  • He proposed that the Sun was the center of our world, not the Earth
• Eratosthenes was born in 276 BC.
  • He proved that the Earth was round then used trigonometry to determine Earth's size to within 10% of the actual value. He also used trigonometry to determine the distance to the sun within 10% of the actual value.

On the other hand, Aristotle (born 383 BC) published that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. People believed that for more than 1,800 years until Galileo did an experiment (supposedly at Pisa) to prove that Aristotle was wrong. On this issue, as well as others, Galileo was now up against the Catholic Church who had been dogmatically promoting incorrect Greek ideas like those of Ptolemy which stated that the Sun went around the Earth and that orbits were perfectly circular because god would have designed things that way. Was the church being stupid here -OR- where they angry become someone was challenging their world view. During the years associated with the inquisition of Galileo (it was NOT a trial), Galileo said in his defense: "The bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go" which, proves to me, that he had a better understanding of life on Earth than the Vatican. But let's not let the Protestants off the hook on this one. Martin Luther (b: 1483 d:1546) is very clear in his writings that he stood on the side of religion when he first heard about the new book published by Copernicus (b: 1473 d: 1543)

What might have been

• if the Peloponnesian War (where conservative Sparta conquered liberal Athens) had not happened. After this, Sparta was no longer able to protect itself. It was a short term gain for the Sparta but a backward step for humanity. Today, Sparta only lives on in comic books and big-budget action movies.
• if the Corinthians had not conquered their southern Greek neighbors in the Corinthian War (how many non-historians have heard of this one?)
• if the Macedonians under Alexander had not conquered their Greek neighbors to the south.
• if the Romans had not conquered all of the Hellenistic peninsula after the death of Alexander. Would Rome have renamed all the Greek gods as there own?
• if Constantine and Theodosius had kept church separated from state

What now?

According to Edward Gibbon, the 300-year rise of Christianity (after Paul of Tarsus put his spin on it) resulted in a 1,000 year dark age which Europe did not recover from until the Renaissance. Certainly we can all agree that the Vatican trial of Galileo in 1632 is one example of how religion delayed progress. Gibbon and others have made the case that the dark ages really did not end until the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Coincidentally, two founding fathers of the Enlightenment, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza, were both born in in 1632 (the same year that Galileo was found guilty "of promoting a competing world view" by the Catholic Church). I think we can all agree that the current spurt of human progress begins with the Enlightenment. IMHO, humanity needs to teach current and future generations LESS about religion (or teach religion the same way we teach Greek mythology) and MORE about enlightenment along with logic and empirical-based decision making. David Hume is another one of the founding fathers of the Enlightenment with accolades coming from no other than Benjamin Franklin wrote positively about his meetings with intellectuals like Locke, Hume and Adam Smith when Franklin was living in London.

Links

local

• My religion page (lots of deism here)
• My Dark Age page
• My Changing World Views page

remote

• https://skepticsannotatedbible.com
• https://www.deism.com
  • https://www.deism.com/bibleproblems.htm (Problems with the Bible)
  • https://www.deism.com/post/protect-children-from-the-bible (Protect Children from the Bible)
• Deism (wikipedia)
• Some Christian Deists claim that Jesus was a Deist
• Freedom From Religion Foundation (protecting the wall between church and state just as the founding fathers desired)
• https://ffrf.org
• The Clergy Project (a self-help support group for church leaders who have lost their faith)
• https://clergyproject.org

• https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Bart+D.+Ehrman (USA)
• https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=Bart+D.+Ehrman (Canada)

• https://www.thegreatcourses.com (purchase DVDs)
• https://www.wondrium.com (online video: $20 per month or $45 per quarter)
  • "From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity" (24 lectures by Bart Ehrman)
  • "Books That Matter: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (24 lectures by Leo Damrosch)
    • I find it amusing that Gibbon could see the decay in both empires while ignoring the decay that was creeping into the British Empire which he was part of before he relocated to the European continent.
    • books 1-3 deal with the decline and fall of the western empire (Rome then Ravenna)
    • books 4-6 deal with the decline and fall of the eastern empire (Constantinople)
      comments: just as Rome split into east and west, so did Islam. The Shiite capital was in Damascus (modern day Syria) while the Sunni capital was in Baghdad (modern day Iraq). American military activities have destroyed both places.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcm-X7g-8p4 (Early Christians in Roman Eyes with Bart Ehrman)

• https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/here-i-stand-the-legend-and-legacy-of-martin-luther-1.6419712 - Story of Martin Luther (Leaves out the fact that Luther's Reformation was probably caused by being struck by lightning but not dying)