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I haven't done any research into her claims, but I did run a quick check on the LDS Bible Dictionary, which only returned these two results when plugging the name in.
Grove. In Hebrew, called Asherah (of which the plural is Asherim or Asheroth), either a living tree or a tree-like pole, set up as an object of worship, being symbolical of the female or productive principle in nature. Every Phoenician altar had an asherah near it. The word is often translated “green trees” or “grove.” This “nature worship” became associated with gross immorality, and so the practice of setting up such “groves” or idols was forbidden by Hebrew prophets (Deut. 16:21; cf. Num. 25:3; Judg. 2:11–13; 1 Sam. 7:3–4; 1 Kgs. 11:5; Isa. 17:8; Micah 5:12 ff.).
Ahab. (1) Son of Omri, and the most wicked and most powerful of the kings of northern Israel; he married Jezebel, a Sidonian princess, through whose influence the worship of Baal and Asherah was established in Israel (1 Kgs. 16:32–33; 2 Kgs. 3:2); and an attempt was made to exterminate the prophets and the worship of Jehovah (1 Kgs. 18:13). We have another instance of Jezebel’s evil influence over Ahab in the story of Naboth (1 Kgs. 21). During Ahab’s reign the kingdom of Israel was politically strong. After a struggle with Benhadad, king of Syria, in which Ahab was successful (1 Kgs. 20), Israel and Syria made an alliance for the purpose of opposing Assyria. We learn from Assyrian inscriptions that the united forces were defeated by Shalmaneser II, and Ahab then made an alliance with Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, against Syria, and was killed while attempting to capture Ramoth-gilead (1 Kgs. 22; 2 Chr. 18). (2) A lying prophet (Jer. 29:21).
Perhaps that is of interest to this discussion?
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While it's impossible to say with only this information, I don't see how the premise that they were concurrently worshiped gets conflated into 'this is God's wife'. Deities of the area, Baal, Moloch, Asheroth, were often worshiped concurrently, but I don't think there was ever a conception of them being related (brother/wife/whatever). I think this is partly the scholar imputing other cosmologies and partly an attempt to sensationalize.
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so why were there dinosaurs?
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On March 23 2011 12:00 DTK-m2 wrote:
You don't have to reinforce that belief. It's a true fact. Religion has been twisted over the years to suit personal means, and even if it hadn't been, it still would come out twisted.
Consider this: assume that you are a true believer (or, if you actually are a true believer, just keep on reading) that the Holy Bible came down from God himself, and had no human influence whatsoever in it's original copy. Great, now we have a single book from the big man, with all the stuff we should listen to.
But we need to spread this book! Spread the word! How do we do that? By making more books. Unfortunately, no guy named Gutenberg has come along and invented a printing press doo-dah yet. Alas, how do we make more books? Only one way: copy them over by hand.
Yay, I just copied over a thousand pages entirely perfectly. I definitely didn't make a SINGLE mistake, because, you know, I'm perfect and all. Here you go, fellow dude! You can copy it to spread the word, too, if you want. I'm sure that you ALSO are completely perfect and will not make any mistakes when transferring the content of this book into another book.
Oh, what's that? We need to translate it into other languages? Okay, I'll do that. I'm sure that all of my interpretations of this specific phrase in this language are entirely universal, and that every other translator agrees with me exactly. Absolutely nothing will be lost in translation!
So yeah, that happens for a couple centuries. Then we end up with a million different versions of the bible. There are attempts to standardize the bible, of course (the original Gutenberg bible, the King James version, etc.) but they won't cover everything, and even those standardizations have come after centuries of miscopying and mistranslation.
Honestly, even if controlling men didn't cut out a wife of God on purpose, it could still have been accidentally lost over the long periods of time. One person copies a pronoun wrong, and instead of feminine, God's wife is now neuter gender. Now, instead of "she," we read "it," and assume that it is an object, with a connection to God that is no more special than any other object.
This is stupid I'm sorry. We copied works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, etc. from ancient times. Just because we don't have original works doesn't mean those that copy didn't stay true to the nature of the work.
Please grow up and do some proper research.
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On March 24 2011 09:27 oceanblack wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:00 DTK-m2 wrote:
You don't have to reinforce that belief. It's a true fact. Religion has been twisted over the years to suit personal means, and even if it hadn't been, it still would come out twisted.
Consider this: assume that you are a true believer (or, if you actually are a true believer, just keep on reading) that the Holy Bible came down from God himself, and had no human influence whatsoever in it's original copy. Great, now we have a single book from the big man, with all the stuff we should listen to.
But we need to spread this book! Spread the word! How do we do that? By making more books. Unfortunately, no guy named Gutenberg has come along and invented a printing press doo-dah yet. Alas, how do we make more books? Only one way: copy them over by hand.
Yay, I just copied over a thousand pages entirely perfectly. I definitely didn't make a SINGLE mistake, because, you know, I'm perfect and all. Here you go, fellow dude! You can copy it to spread the word, too, if you want. I'm sure that you ALSO are completely perfect and will not make any mistakes when transferring the content of this book into another book.
Oh, what's that? We need to translate it into other languages? Okay, I'll do that. I'm sure that all of my interpretations of this specific phrase in this language are entirely universal, and that every other translator agrees with me exactly. Absolutely nothing will be lost in translation!
So yeah, that happens for a couple centuries. Then we end up with a million different versions of the bible. There are attempts to standardize the bible, of course (the original Gutenberg bible, the King James version, etc.) but they won't cover everything, and even those standardizations have come after centuries of miscopying and mistranslation.
Honestly, even if controlling men didn't cut out a wife of God on purpose, it could still have been accidentally lost over the long periods of time. One person copies a pronoun wrong, and instead of feminine, God's wife is now neuter gender. Now, instead of "she," we read "it," and assume that it is an object, with a connection to God that is no more special than any other object. This is stupid I'm sorry. We copied works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, etc. from ancient times. Just because we don't have original works doesn't mean those that copy didn't stay true to the nature of the work. Please grow up and do some proper research.
Your condescending attitude doesn't contribute anything, and what he said is certainly not stupid (even if it is a bit dramatized).Considering the ~5,800 unique Greek manuscripts of the New Testmant we have, there are more differences between them then there are words in the entire NT.
Most of the differences are trivial, of course, but many of them aren't. Mind sharing your "proper research" sources?
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Problems in translations is a huge issue, and it was an important part of scholarly research leading up to and in the Protestant Reformation. European scholars began to increasingly see issues in the Vulgate, which was the Latin translation that was being used by the church at the time and realized that there were a lot of translation issues and problems of writings within the Vulgate that were not present in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
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On March 24 2011 09:27 oceanblack wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:00 DTK-m2 wrote:
You don't have to reinforce that belief. It's a true fact. Religion has been twisted over the years to suit personal means, and even if it hadn't been, it still would come out twisted.
Consider this: assume that you are a true believer (or, if you actually are a true believer, just keep on reading) that the Holy Bible came down from God himself, and had no human influence whatsoever in it's original copy. Great, now we have a single book from the big man, with all the stuff we should listen to.
But we need to spread this book! Spread the word! How do we do that? By making more books. Unfortunately, no guy named Gutenberg has come along and invented a printing press doo-dah yet. Alas, how do we make more books? Only one way: copy them over by hand.
Yay, I just copied over a thousand pages entirely perfectly. I definitely didn't make a SINGLE mistake, because, you know, I'm perfect and all. Here you go, fellow dude! You can copy it to spread the word, too, if you want. I'm sure that you ALSO are completely perfect and will not make any mistakes when transferring the content of this book into another book.
Oh, what's that? We need to translate it into other languages? Okay, I'll do that. I'm sure that all of my interpretations of this specific phrase in this language are entirely universal, and that every other translator agrees with me exactly. Absolutely nothing will be lost in translation!
So yeah, that happens for a couple centuries. Then we end up with a million different versions of the bible. There are attempts to standardize the bible, of course (the original Gutenberg bible, the King James version, etc.) but they won't cover everything, and even those standardizations have come after centuries of miscopying and mistranslation.
Honestly, even if controlling men didn't cut out a wife of God on purpose, it could still have been accidentally lost over the long periods of time. One person copies a pronoun wrong, and instead of feminine, God's wife is now neuter gender. Now, instead of "she," we read "it," and assume that it is an object, with a connection to God that is no more special than any other object. This is stupid I'm sorry. We copied works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, etc. from ancient times. Just because we don't have original works doesn't mean those that copy didn't stay true to the nature of the work. Please grow up and do some proper research.
What???????
You do realize Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616? Gutenberg was born in 1398 and died in 1468. He invented moveable type printing almost a full century before Shakespeare was born...
Also, some of Aristotle's manuscripts survived and were collected. You can read about it here!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Aristotelicum
These works, unlike the bible, gave no one a reason to alter them for power. No one would have benefited from changing details. The bible, on the other hand, is heavily documented as having MANY versions, and some written by different authors.
Just saying. You probably didn't deserve a full reply considering you bashed the post with a "this is stupid", and immediately noting that Shakespeare were from "ancient" times...
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You do realize Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616? Gutenberg was born in 1398 and died in 1468. He invented moveable type printing almost a full century before Shakespeare was born...
Shakespeare's plays were never "printed" in his lifetime, and the version which came in the First Folio, which is the first authentic Shakespeare source was subject to heavy edition. The texts we find on modern bookshelves have been further edited by scholars who attempted to recover many of the defects of the original prints. In other words, there is no way of knowing how many versions and revisions of lost Shakespearean originals there were. It was not unusual even for a Renaissance author to produce two different finished versions of the same play.
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I have a sneaking suspicion this "historian" is a feminist in disguise.
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On March 24 2011 09:41 koreasilver wrote:
Problems in translations is a huge issue, and it was an important part of scholarly research leading up to and in the Protestant Reformation. European scholars began to increasingly see issues in the Vulgate, which was the Latin translation that was being used by the church at the time and realized that there were a lot of translation issues and problems of writings within the Vulgate that were not present in the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
Which original Greek manuscripts?
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On March 24 2011 08:57 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 08:52 wadadde wrote:On March 24 2011 08:24 kn83 wrote:On March 24 2011 04:42 Jswizzy wrote:On March 24 2011 04:31 kn83 wrote:
The fact that the ancient Jews worshiped many gods is no hidden secret, hell Christians and Jews themselves didn't try to hide this fact at all. Most people don't seem to know ( which many religious scholars point out) that monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and others are purely modern concepts that largely had no meaning to people in ancient/medieval times ( the words themselves were coined by Western Europeans in 17th-18th centuries, with no earlier parallels ). Also, many scholars of today pointed out that the rejection of Asherah (a foreign deity) had mostly to do with the Jews ethnic conflicts with the Canaanites and not with theology (the Jews still had female deities that they still worshiped afterward). Also, Asherah was said to by El's wife, not Yahweh (YHWH, who was considered the absolute, ineffable, beyond any relation, genderless, etc if your in to metaphysics). Yahweh was the center of attention because he's the "essence" of God (hence his "personal" name). Going back to the first point, the many gods and goddess of ancient Israel are in fact the numerous names/attributes of God/YHWH in Orthodox Judaism (one of the names, Elohim, is in fact plural, that's why God refers to himself as "we" in parts of the Bible, he's ALL of the gods, not one among others). When you think about it, its no different from Hinduism ("truth is one, but it is known by many names" says the Rig Veda). In light of all this if you're not a literalist, you could read the 2nd commandment as "don't cling to anything except me". If you were to translate these names in Arabic, you'd get the 99 names of Allah in Islam ( Muslims DO worship the same God, this shouldn't even be a debate). The issue about the Christian trinity is not that Jews and Muslim actually think Christians worship 3 gods (Mormons kind of do though), its a debate over God's essence. The sensationalism around this issue is based on pure feminist crap about Abrahamic religions "suppressing" the feminine (completely ignoring the fact that sexism exist in ALL religions and the whole of human culture in general, see Pandora's Box in Greek Mythology for example). I think that explains everything. I am not really buying the whole Hindu thing. It contradicts the fact that all the Gods found in the Bible even Yahweh existed in the Canaanite pantheon before the formation of Israel. There is no evidence to believe that Yahweh was anything but a local storm God. All the Gods at that period of time were tied to locations and even Yahweh was tied to a mountain. First of all, no scholar/academic today believes Yahweh/YHWH was a local storm deity in the first place (they already had a storm/sky god named Hadad). Second, that all the deities were in the Canaanite pantheon already is nothing surprising (Jews, Canaanites and Babylonians are all Semitic cultures so of course they have the same deities. Hell, why do you think the Greeks and Romans had the same gods, their both Indo-European cultures). Third, I'm not religious nor anti-religious so this ain't just me speaking my bias interpretation of things, but all your assumptions have pretty much been debunked by historians after at least WWI. You can look this out in any new article on the topic, library or even Wikipedia of all places. Seriously, its just as stupid as the myth about Jesus never existing or the moon god myth about Islam, two other examples of things widely debunked by scholars. Where's a good place to find out more about the debunking of 'myth' that Jesus didn't exist? Sounds interesting! I always thought that there wasn't a solid reason to think that Christ existed, so how can the 'myth' that he didn't be debunked? Jesus probably did exist but there is no historical evidence to support that he did. The first historian to write about him was Josephus who was born after Jesus had already died and the account is considered a forgery by modern scholars.
lol what?? we're talking about the jesus of nazarath, not jesus christ, right??
It really hurts my brain when people bring up this argument when disputing the existence/non existence of jesus. "Oh, the earliest records of Jesus were written post-death" If that is your standard for history, then your brain is going to melt when you attempt fact check the existence of every ancient historical figure.
The first documentation of Hannibal was written by Polybius who was born AFTER the battle of cannae yet he happens to be the primary source for historical records of Hannibal's campaigns. No body is going to dispute Hannibal's existence, are they? If we disputed the existence of every historical figure because of some dubious documents or some contradictory accounts, we might as well throw away all of our history books, but thankfully that is not how historians operate. They look for multiple sources for converging accounts to find what are likely to be facts
When discussing ancient history, you need a very low standard for truth. A lot of what we consider to be historical "facts" is actually just speculation and hearsay.
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First, here is the link to the scholar who did the research, for those who question her intentions and the academic integrity of her work.
On March 24 2011 08:59 dOofuS wrote:I haven't done any research into her claims, but I did run a quick check on the LDS Bible Dictionary, which only returned these two results when plugging the name in. Show nested quote +Grove. In Hebrew, called Asherah (of which the plural is Asherim or Asheroth), either a living tree or a tree-like pole, set up as an object of worship, being symbolical of the female or productive principle in nature. Every Phoenician altar had an asherah near it. The word is often translated “green trees” or “grove.” This “nature worship” became associated with gross immorality, and so the practice of setting up such “groves” or idols was forbidden by Hebrew prophets (Deut. 16:21; cf. Num. 25:3; Judg. 2:11–13; 1 Sam. 7:3–4; 1 Kgs. 11:5; Isa. 17:8; Micah 5:12 ff.). Show nested quote +Ahab. (1) Son of Omri, and the most wicked and most powerful of the kings of northern Israel; he married Jezebel, a Sidonian princess, through whose influence the worship of Baal and Asherah was established in Israel (1 Kgs. 16:32–33; 2 Kgs. 3:2); and an attempt was made to exterminate the prophets and the worship of Jehovah (1 Kgs. 18:13). We have another instance of Jezebel’s evil influence over Ahab in the story of Naboth (1 Kgs. 21). During Ahab’s reign the kingdom of Israel was politically strong. After a struggle with Benhadad, king of Syria, in which Ahab was successful (1 Kgs. 20), Israel and Syria made an alliance for the purpose of opposing Assyria. We learn from Assyrian inscriptions that the united forces were defeated by Shalmaneser II, and Ahab then made an alliance with Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, against Syria, and was killed while attempting to capture Ramoth-gilead (1 Kgs. 22; 2 Chr. 18). (2) A lying prophet (Jer. 29:21). Perhaps that is of interest to this discussion?
Indeed. Our poverty is that we don't, and perhaps will never, have access to the original text. Gods across culture have always been assigned to certain natural phenomena. Politization of culture eventually led to the politization of god system as well. What it important to note is that in NO other religion is assignment from a minor position to a major one exists. Meaning, gods of other religions stayed where they are, the god of the streams, thunder, clouds, butterflies, etc remain as they are, no matter how convoluted, and some get demoted or are totally dissipated depending on the advances of culture. Herein lies the singular "revolution" and anomaly of the Catholic god. Not only was he made omnipresent/omnipotent/omnibenevolent, he also lost all his other minor "powers" - like being god of lightning. Politically this makes sense, because being god of lightning still while being already omnipotent is petty. The real question is, historically, how did this process unfold. And why is Asherah a difficult figure? On one hand it is pretty obvious that she was a minor god, some say good, some say bad. Yet outside the canons, she was right there beside YHWH, on almost every single account of her.
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On March 24 2011 10:01 billyX333 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 08:57 Jswizzy wrote:On March 24 2011 08:52 wadadde wrote:On March 24 2011 08:24 kn83 wrote:On March 24 2011 04:42 Jswizzy wrote:On March 24 2011 04:31 kn83 wrote:
The fact that the ancient Jews worshiped many gods is no hidden secret, hell Christians and Jews themselves didn't try to hide this fact at all. Most people don't seem to know ( which many religious scholars point out) that monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and others are purely modern concepts that largely had no meaning to people in ancient/medieval times ( the words themselves were coined by Western Europeans in 17th-18th centuries, with no earlier parallels ). Also, many scholars of today pointed out that the rejection of Asherah (a foreign deity) had mostly to do with the Jews ethnic conflicts with the Canaanites and not with theology (the Jews still had female deities that they still worshiped afterward). Also, Asherah was said to by El's wife, not Yahweh (YHWH, who was considered the absolute, ineffable, beyond any relation, genderless, etc if your in to metaphysics). Yahweh was the center of attention because he's the "essence" of God (hence his "personal" name). Going back to the first point, the many gods and goddess of ancient Israel are in fact the numerous names/attributes of God/YHWH in Orthodox Judaism (one of the names, Elohim, is in fact plural, that's why God refers to himself as "we" in parts of the Bible, he's ALL of the gods, not one among others). When you think about it, its no different from Hinduism ("truth is one, but it is known by many names" says the Rig Veda). In light of all this if you're not a literalist, you could read the 2nd commandment as "don't cling to anything except me". If you were to translate these names in Arabic, you'd get the 99 names of Allah in Islam ( Muslims DO worship the same God, this shouldn't even be a debate). The issue about the Christian trinity is not that Jews and Muslim actually think Christians worship 3 gods (Mormons kind of do though), its a debate over God's essence. The sensationalism around this issue is based on pure feminist crap about Abrahamic religions "suppressing" the feminine (completely ignoring the fact that sexism exist in ALL religions and the whole of human culture in general, see Pandora's Box in Greek Mythology for example). I think that explains everything. I am not really buying the whole Hindu thing. It contradicts the fact that all the Gods found in the Bible even Yahweh existed in the Canaanite pantheon before the formation of Israel. There is no evidence to believe that Yahweh was anything but a local storm God. All the Gods at that period of time were tied to locations and even Yahweh was tied to a mountain. First of all, no scholar/academic today believes Yahweh/YHWH was a local storm deity in the first place (they already had a storm/sky god named Hadad). Second, that all the deities were in the Canaanite pantheon already is nothing surprising (Jews, Canaanites and Babylonians are all Semitic cultures so of course they have the same deities. Hell, why do you think the Greeks and Romans had the same gods, their both Indo-European cultures). Third, I'm not religious nor anti-religious so this ain't just me speaking my bias interpretation of things, but all your assumptions have pretty much been debunked by historians after at least WWI. You can look this out in any new article on the topic, library or even Wikipedia of all places. Seriously, its just as stupid as the myth about Jesus never existing or the moon god myth about Islam, two other examples of things widely debunked by scholars. Where's a good place to find out more about the debunking of 'myth' that Jesus didn't exist? Sounds interesting! I always thought that there wasn't a solid reason to think that Christ existed, so how can the 'myth' that he didn't be debunked? Jesus probably did exist but there is no historical evidence to support that he did. The first historian to write about him was Josephus who was born after Jesus had already died and the account is considered a forgery by modern scholars. lol what?? we're talking about the jesus of nazarath, not jesus christ, right?? It really hurts my brain when people bring up this argument when disputing the existence/non existence of jesus. "Oh, the earliest records of Jesus were written post-death" If that is your standard for history, then your brain is going to melt when you attempt fact check the existence of every ancient historical figure. The first documentation of Hannibal was written by Polybius who was born AFTER the battle of cannae yet he happens to be the primary source for historical records of Hannibal's campaigns. No body is going to dispute Hannibal's existence, are they? If we disputed the existence of every historical figure because of some dubious documents or some contradictory accounts, we might as well throw away all of our history books, but thankfully that is not how historians operate. They look for multiple sources for converging accounts to find what are likely to be facts When discussing ancient history, you need a very low standard for truth. A lot of what we consider to be historical "facts" is actually just speculation and hearsay.
Plenty the elder and Josephus had detailed histories of the first century neither of them mentioned Jesus and Josephus was in Jerusalem for the zealot uprising so you think he would of wrote something about Jesus if he was such a big deal. The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure.
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On March 24 2011 03:33 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Well, we lasted 7-8 pages before talking about proving the existence of God (which isn't the point of the thread). 'Twas a good try at a religious non-debating topic, but it's all downhill from here  On topic: What are the consequences (if any at all) of the belief/ discovery that God has a wife? Does this happen to change any core principles of Christianity?
I would think if God is assumed to have a wife then Christians would (probably) use it to further reinforce that gay marriage is wrong and such.
Since I bet most gay people don't care about Christians' views on gay marriage I would say,
"Nope, not effect".
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This just in, God approves of divorce!
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On March 24 2011 10:12 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:01 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 08:57 Jswizzy wrote:On March 24 2011 08:52 wadadde wrote:On March 24 2011 08:24 kn83 wrote:On March 24 2011 04:42 Jswizzy wrote:On March 24 2011 04:31 kn83 wrote:
The fact that the ancient Jews worshiped many gods is no hidden secret, hell Christians and Jews themselves didn't try to hide this fact at all. Most people don't seem to know ( which many religious scholars point out) that monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and others are purely modern concepts that largely had no meaning to people in ancient/medieval times ( the words themselves were coined by Western Europeans in 17th-18th centuries, with no earlier parallels ). Also, many scholars of today pointed out that the rejection of Asherah (a foreign deity) had mostly to do with the Jews ethnic conflicts with the Canaanites and not with theology (the Jews still had female deities that they still worshiped afterward). Also, Asherah was said to by El's wife, not Yahweh (YHWH, who was considered the absolute, ineffable, beyond any relation, genderless, etc if your in to metaphysics). Yahweh was the center of attention because he's the "essence" of God (hence his "personal" name). Going back to the first point, the many gods and goddess of ancient Israel are in fact the numerous names/attributes of God/YHWH in Orthodox Judaism (one of the names, Elohim, is in fact plural, that's why God refers to himself as "we" in parts of the Bible, he's ALL of the gods, not one among others). When you think about it, its no different from Hinduism ("truth is one, but it is known by many names" says the Rig Veda). In light of all this if you're not a literalist, you could read the 2nd commandment as "don't cling to anything except me". If you were to translate these names in Arabic, you'd get the 99 names of Allah in Islam ( Muslims DO worship the same God, this shouldn't even be a debate). The issue about the Christian trinity is not that Jews and Muslim actually think Christians worship 3 gods (Mormons kind of do though), its a debate over God's essence. The sensationalism around this issue is based on pure feminist crap about Abrahamic religions "suppressing" the feminine (completely ignoring the fact that sexism exist in ALL religions and the whole of human culture in general, see Pandora's Box in Greek Mythology for example). I think that explains everything. I am not really buying the whole Hindu thing. It contradicts the fact that all the Gods found in the Bible even Yahweh existed in the Canaanite pantheon before the formation of Israel. There is no evidence to believe that Yahweh was anything but a local storm God. All the Gods at that period of time were tied to locations and even Yahweh was tied to a mountain. First of all, no scholar/academic today believes Yahweh/YHWH was a local storm deity in the first place (they already had a storm/sky god named Hadad). Second, that all the deities were in the Canaanite pantheon already is nothing surprising (Jews, Canaanites and Babylonians are all Semitic cultures so of course they have the same deities. Hell, why do you think the Greeks and Romans had the same gods, their both Indo-European cultures). Third, I'm not religious nor anti-religious so this ain't just me speaking my bias interpretation of things, but all your assumptions have pretty much been debunked by historians after at least WWI. You can look this out in any new article on the topic, library or even Wikipedia of all places. Seriously, its just as stupid as the myth about Jesus never existing or the moon god myth about Islam, two other examples of things widely debunked by scholars. Where's a good place to find out more about the debunking of 'myth' that Jesus didn't exist? Sounds interesting! I always thought that there wasn't a solid reason to think that Christ existed, so how can the 'myth' that he didn't be debunked? Jesus probably did exist but there is no historical evidence to support that he did. The first historian to write about him was Josephus who was born after Jesus had already died and the account is considered a forgery by modern scholars. lol what?? we're talking about the jesus of nazarath, not jesus christ, right?? It really hurts my brain when people bring up this argument when disputing the existence/non existence of jesus. "Oh, the earliest records of Jesus were written post-death" If that is your standard for history, then your brain is going to melt when you attempt fact check the existence of every ancient historical figure. The first documentation of Hannibal was written by Polybius who was born AFTER the battle of cannae yet he happens to be the primary source for historical records of Hannibal's campaigns. No body is going to dispute Hannibal's existence, are they? If we disputed the existence of every historical figure because of some dubious documents or some contradictory accounts, we might as well throw away all of our history books, but thankfully that is not how historians operate. They look for multiple sources for converging accounts to find what are likely to be facts When discussing ancient history, you need a very low standard for truth. A lot of what we consider to be historical "facts" is actually just speculation and hearsay. Plenty the elder and Josephus had detailed histories of the first century neither of them mentioned Jesus and Josephus was in Jerusalem for the zealot uprising so you think he would of wrote something about Jesus if he was such a big deal. The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure.
No. Huge misconception. Jesus was completely insignificant during his lifetime.
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On March 24 2011 10:20 billyX333 wrote:No. Huge misconception. Jesus was completely insignificant during his lifetime.
Your just parroting my last statement I said he was obscure.
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On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:20 billyX333 wrote:
The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure.
No. Huge misconception. Jesus was completely insignificant during his lifetime. Your just parroting my last statement I said he was obscure.
Your logic: If he was such a big deal, why no records??
My statement: He wasn't a big deal.
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On March 24 2011 05:17 HULKAMANIA wrote:
If you ask me, the scholarship itself is sensationalist and not just the reporting on it. It's a heroic narrative typical of contemporary academia:
Once upon a time, there was gender egalitarianism. Then the men, because of their irrational misogyny, ruined everything and initiated an oppressive and patriarchal hegemony that lasted for thousands of years. Fortunately, modern scholarship now allows us to see through the misunderstandings of our forefathers and undo the great evils that they bequeathed to us.
That summary of academia's view of cultural sexism was probably more true 20 years ago. Evolutionary anthropologists/sociologists today are looking for natural (non-conspiratorial) methods for which gender roles or whatever other aspects of society may have developed. For example, the following is an Invited Address from an APA (ie the most important psychological association in the US) conference in San Francisco 4 years ago:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Politics and outdated academia (aren't they really the same?) is where you'll find the worst man-haters. In fairness, some of these rabid feminists deal with some incredibly backwards men as opponents on a regular basis; their experiences are more negative than the average woman's.
I'm not even taking issue with the archaeology, either, but I can't really fathom why it's being framed as some doctrine-redefining discovery. The one demographic that this could possibly discomfit would be strict, literal-interpretation inerrantists, which isn't even the most tenable of inerrantist positions, which isn't, in turn, the only religious conviction that can be held on the scriptures.
And I guess that's my problem with both the research and the press on these things. Because they refute the most basic, simplistic, uncritical approaches to scripture, they are taken to destabilize the entire structure of religion. It's like assuming that nutrition is a bunk science simply because the hardline, fat-free diet that some diet gurus used to preach turned out to be a bad approach. It's discrediting a highly elaborate and complex belief system on the grounds that one of its myriad cells is demonstrably wrong. What it ends up doing is impoverishing the dialogue on both sides of the fence.
I think the internet has a tendency to make the literal-interpretation stance seem less common than it is. For example, according to a 2008 Gallup Poll, 44% of Americans believe the earth was created as-is within the last 10,000 years while just 14% believe in natural evolution (36% believe in intelligent design, the rest unsure). I think if you did a poll even of just the religious people on TL, more than 50% would believe in natural evolution and very few in 6-day creationism.
As it affects everything from school curricula to political discourse, it's important to show how flawed the literal-interpretation inerrantist position is.
As was stated, it's difficult to imagine that after thousands of years of manual copying, the Bible suffered from no inadvertent errors or from the translator's own biases when there were multiple linguistic translations to choose from. But beyond that, when literacy was low and few people owned personal copies of the Bible, to say the least it would have been tempting for the Church to alter the documents to suit their own agenda. Even today, certain groups are editing the Bible to suit their own agenda (The Conservative Bible Project, for example) so I'm skeptical that people managed to avoid this temptation for 2000+ years. It doesn't have to be such a deliberate attempt either - hypothetically, if the Jewish culture evolved from viewing YHWH as a male deity with a spouse into a culture viewing YHWH as a masculine yet genderless creator with no such companion, the process of copying the written record might have included benevolently purging the perceived error and attempting to extrapolate what the "true version" of the text was.
Besides that, examining ancient cultures is interesting.
However I completely agree that the press on science, anthropology, etc is typically awful.
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On March 24 2011 06:59 MrBadMan wrote:
As for the debate whether God exists or does not: deep inside everyone knows that he does exists. It's the default setting in every human being. Through education or lack thereof, this default setting gets switched off, the certain knowledge that God exists is diminshed.
For a plethora of reasons, many people actually choose they want nothing to do with God, and pretend that he does not exist. It's some sort of mass psychosis. It is pointless to debate with people like that, they have trapped themselves in their own personal hell and the door is locked from the inside. Whatever floats their boat I guess...life is too short to argue with fools.
It's incredible to assume everyone "knows" there is a god. There are many people believe it or not that have never believed in any gods. Belief in god is not a default belief. Most people are taught about gods. I will give you the fact that humans do have a fascination with the uncanny and the "spiritual". This applies to other things and not only gods. The human desire for belief in the fantastic is very real.
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EPT
