On March 24 2011 11:49 kn83 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? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth#Counter-arguments"…if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned… To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has "again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars." In recent years, "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus" or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." Grant, Michael (1977), Jesus: An Historian’s Review, pp. 199–200
The Iliad contains historical material too and, like the Bible, and unlike the writings of say... Herodotus, it was not created for the purpose of passing along historical fact.
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