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Source
+ Show Spoiler +God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar.
In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.
Information presented in Stavrakopoulou's books, lectures and journal papers has become the basis of a three-part documentary series, now airing in Europe, where she discusses the Yahweh-Asherah connection.
"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many ... or so we like to believe."
"After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife," she added.
Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.
Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.
"The inscription is a petition for a blessing," she shares. "Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife."
Also significant, Stavrakopoulou believes, "is the Bible's admission that the goddess Asherah was worshiped in Yahweh's Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Kings, we're told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her."
J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."
"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."
Asherah -- known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar -- was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued.
"Many English translations prefer to translate 'Asherah' as 'Sacred Tree,'" Wright said. "This seems to be in part driven by a modern desire, clearly inspired by the Biblical narratives, to hide Asherah behind a veil once again."
"Mentions of the goddess Asherah in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are rare and have been heavily edited by the ancient authors who gathered the texts together," Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, said.
Asherah as a tree symbol was even said to have been "chopped down and burned outside the Temple in acts of certain rulers who were trying to 'purify' the cult, and focus on the worship of a single male god, Yahweh," he added.
The ancient Israelites were polytheists, Brody told Discovery News, "with only a small minority worshiping Yahweh alone before the historic events of 586 B.C." In that year, an elite community within Judea was exiled to Babylon and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This, Brody said, led to "a more universal vision of strict monotheism: one god not only for Judah, but for all of the nations."
TLDR: God had a wife, and her name was Asherah, claims British historian Francesca Stavrakopoulou. Artifacts, amulets, and ancient text she found at modern-day Syria pointed to a belief system that worshiped a couple, Ashera being a powerful fertility goddess. She further claims that Asherah was edited out of the Bible by male scholars who compiled it, but that there were remnants of her presence particularly in the Book of Kings where she "is worshiped in Yahweh's Temple in Jerusalem." Some surviving texts refer to her as the "Sacred Tree". /end
Being neither Catholic nor Christian, this only affirms my belief that religion is and has always been subject to context, and people across geography and time have "used" it in order to better understand the reality that confronts them. To be sure, there are plenty of texts out there that are yet to be discovered (similar to the Gnostic gospels on Judas and Magdalene). Unless God shows up one day and tells everyone the Truth, I think religion will always play this hermeneutic function - which is in fact both empowering and dangerous.
Personally, I believe Kant has solved this riddle a long time ago. Granting the impossibility of proving or disproving God, religion has to happen personally. No matter what the manifestation or accouterment a given religion possesses, or no matter how people practice it, religion should first and foremost be a "wake up" event on a personal level. Faith, then, becomes inscrutable.
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this thread will be closed in no time in think...
but apart from that, im raised a catholic and imo the way religion is tought to us is nothing more then an interpretation of men. not god. so all the stuff they say in the bible and church should be taken with a grain of salt.
again, thats all just my opinion
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Bad timing for this thread, considering the other one that just got closed not 5 minutes ago:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=204068
On topic though, A History of God by Karen Armstrong is a book that you will almost certainly enjoy.
A Youtuber made a video summary of the first couple chapters here. He oversimplifies a few things, but it's good enough to give you an idea.
+ Show Spoiler +
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Wait. Is this an agnostic thread or a does god have a wife thread.
If its agnostic I'd like to add that its not just religion that gives you 'empowerment'. Any understanding can liberate you from fear of the uncertain and to rely on sources you would never trust otherwise will only lead to a life with split meanings. On one side you have one where its okay to believe in the stories and another where everything else requires a much strict form of evidence. I suggest science/agnosticism as a way to get empowerment without the compartmentalization.
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On March 23 2011 11:55 MuTT wrote:
Wait. Is this an agnostic thread or a does god have a wife thread.
I don't really get where OP is trying to go with this either...
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Im just sharing something of interest, so i dont mind if its closed. Its not as if i made this thread to outlast TL you know 
nope, History of God is ancient text as they come, you should read Rorty and Vattimo's Future of Religion instead.
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i dont know if this is correct or not, but if it is, its not surprising. things get modified over time. theres stuff about how god couldnt defeat some tribe cause they were using iron chariots, implying that god is not omnipotent... right in the bible. so god's concept changes with time isnt a new argument.
interesting nonetheless. mrs god? lol.
edit: also in all fairness to believers. this could be some study of some far extreme cult that existed at the time. theres always people will differing idea of god and its not exactly a fair depiction if that was the case.
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To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history?
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5003 Posts
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap
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On March 23 2011 11:58 gongryong wrote:
nope, History of God is ancient text as they come, you should read Rorty and Vattimo's Future of Religion instead.
I know AHoG has been out for quite awhile, but I only read it this last year
Tell me about Future of Religion
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Then why did he need to use Mary then? Joseph could have had his own child. QQ
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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.
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On March 23 2011 11:58 Jerubaal wrote:
To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history?
What is the bible if not history? This is not a rhetorical question. I hope the answer isn't god transcends time or something like that.
Though I agree that trying to (dis)prove (parts of) religion through archaeology is a bit silly.
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The article doesn't go much into detail, so we can always question the credibility of the "science". However, it does make sense that if there was a "female god", then the good males of our species would have probably taken her out (let us be honest, empowered women were never a good conclusion for any society).
However, what I'm wondering is how she could have gotten into religion in the first place. I would think that religion is both written and edited by man. It seems out of place for a male writer to think it a good idea to add a non-male god.
Oh well  this doesn't effect me much.
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Haha i like what evilTeletubby said at the end of that thread.
I really dont have much to say about the thread. I am worried that this will just turn into a big ol religion bash...
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For some reason I always try to log on quick to post in threads that are about to be closed. To leave my mark? IDK.
Anyways, this is interesting. Now a lot of religious debates saying women should be kept at work and such will have more reasons to support otherwise.
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United States42275 Posts
This looks to be more about the propagation and evolution of religion and mythology over time than the sensationalist title would suggest. Hopefully it'll avoid turning into a flamewar and we won't need to close it.
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We JUST opened, and JUST closed a religious thread.
I guess this means that God can't be given any female pronouns? I know some religious speakers wanted to make it sound fair (gender-wise) by not only using He, but by also using She, when referring to God.
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On March 23 2011 12:06 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
We JUST opened, and JUST closed a religious thread.
This specific topic [hopefully] won't spur flame between believers and nonbelievers.
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On March 23 2011 12:04 KwarK wrote:
This looks to be more about the propagation and evolution of religion and mythology over time than the sensationalist title would suggest. Hopefully it'll avoid turning into a flamewar and we won't need to close it.
Yeah... hopefully. I doubt it though
I think someone needs to make a thread on how to avoid flame wars on religious threads, before we can ever have a successful religious thread.
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psh. Neil Stephenson taught us this years ago. Hasn't anyone read Snow Crash?
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Well, the between-the-lines argument that these "female god" articles say is that once upon a time, there was a revolution in religious practice called monotheism. Purging the texts, and the system, of women served 2 purposes: 1. it reinforced the belief of the ONE TRUE GOD, and 2. it enabled male authors in a male-centered society to exert their power over women.
Claims are always made here and there, but the initial reaction on our part should be examination, and not outright rejection. Ratzinger is right all along, Deus Caritas Est!
DTK-m2, your entire... supposition... is practically irrelevant here. You narrate only the basic and mechanical aspect of the story, while the issue here is politics.
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On March 23 2011 12:08 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:04 KwarK wrote:
This looks to be more about the propagation and evolution of religion and mythology over time than the sensationalist title would suggest. Hopefully it'll avoid turning into a flamewar and we won't need to close it. Yeah... hopefully. I doubt it though I think someone needs to make a thread on how to avoid flame wars on religious threads, before we can ever have a successful religious thread.
A good way to start is to not have some people saying religion is wrong and others saying religion is right, i.e. arguing over the validity of religion. In the last thread people called religion "a scourge", etc.
Maybe we can just focus on the topic for once
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Bilbo was a pimp in Lord of The Rings!
And Gandalf was the local newspaper boy.
User was warned for this post
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On March 23 2011 12:07 101toss wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:06 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
We JUST opened, and JUST closed a religious thread.
This specific topic [hopefully] won't spur flame between believers and nonbelievers.
I'm seriously holding back from saying about thirty different things that would cause trouble, just because I want to see success for once.
I wonder if mainstream Christians will take this new "find" of God's wife to heart. I don't think it'll be taken seriously by most of them.
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On March 23 2011 11:58 Jerubaal wrote:
To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history?
To quote myself, why is this age obsessed with refuting others' religious beliefs?
Why is everyone so religiously secular these days? =)
On a side note, I'm Mormon, and we have always believed God has a wife. Why would he set up some arbitrary sociality for his children if it's not what he himself has attained in his state of perfection and happiness? His goal is for us to become like him, just like any parent(s). Most couples who live their religious beliefs would say that is the pinnacle of fulfillment for them and adds a new level of depth, closeness, and love to their relationship with each other and with God.
Also, we believe that anyone who lives the Gospel can eventually become an exhalted person (through the Atonement) like God is, so this idea is not strange to us. Any parent wants their kid to grow up and share in their wisdom and happiness.
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On March 23 2011 12:00 Redmark wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 11:58 Jerubaal wrote:
To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history? What is the bible if not history? This is not a rhetorical question. I hope the answer isn't god transcends time or something like that. Though I agree that trying to (dis)prove (parts of) religion through archaeology is a bit silly.
I usually regret my one-liners, but I'll go off on a tangent for one post so you don't go away empty handed.
Really, it's the obsession with reducing everything to history. Theology is history. Economics is history (Marx). History is now conferring meaning to theology instead of theology conferring meaning to history. Apart from (I hope) the obvious ridiculousness of this, history is a pretty poor techne on which to base your knowledge. To steal another quote, to be an expert in history is to know less than the poorest cook in Rome; to know Latin is to have the same knowledge as Cicero's maid.
On topic, this sort of thing crops up from time to time(e.g. The Gospel of Judas), but i assure you that some snippet of information that suddenly makes everything clear has not been overlooked for thousands of years and is usually well known by experts in the field. Another regrettable sin of this modern age is the belief that you've discovered something new.
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I don't think we should jump to conclusion based on the work of this one theologian alone. Is this person's work peer reviewed by other secular and non-secular theologians? Or are we seeking information that supports our view to bash religion?
I quote one person's comment from that link.
"The article is misleading. The ancient isarelites did indeed frequently pray to foreign Gods and godesses, and in every place in the Bible where they have done so, it has been called an abomination, that Asherah was an adopted Canaanite goddess, and that kings and rulers who worshipped such did evil in the sight of the Lord. The prophets of Asherah were central to the story of the face-off between Elijah and the Canaanites told in 1 Kings 18. The fact that archeologists find inscriptions to Asherah does not indicate that she was "erased" from the Theology, or that she was once main-stream Judaism. Anyone who has actually studied the old testament, particularly Samuel/Chronicles/Kings knows that this is indicative of the very falling-away and heresies that are documented in these texts."
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On March 23 2011 12:00 Redmark wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 11:58 Jerubaal wrote:
To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history? What is the bible if not history? This is not a rhetorical question.
Once the other non-Christians come to this thread, they're going to have a field day with that question.
Good luck. I hope this stays on the topic of history and the evolution of religion and mythology.
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God also had a pet dog named Taco.
User was warned for this post
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Its just such a waste of time.
Countless hours upon hours are spent trying to prove/disprove the bible as truth. If only we could just leave it well enough alone. If you believe it good on you, if you dont, good on you too its your life, but do we really have to have these atheists who attack religion with such zeal. The hypocrisy is hilarious.
"This seems to be in part driven by a modern desire, clearly inspired by the Biblical narratives, to hide Asherah behind a veil once again."
So ofcourse it couldnt actually mean Sacred Tree is has to be an obvious attempt to hide the name.
I would really like to know what this authors sources are because he is basically just saying stuff and we are expected to believe it as fact which is somewhat ironic.
Yes i get that there are apparantly 'ancient artifacts' but cmon.
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religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit
User was warned for this post
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On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit
I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable.
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On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable.
What? That's absolutely ridiculous. Believeing in the Christian God is just as ridiculous as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, why is one more outrageous than the other? Are you sure you're not biased?
User was temp banned for this post.
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On March 23 2011 12:24 Gatsbi wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable. What? That's absolutely ridiculous. Believeing in the Christian God is just as ridiculous as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, why is one more outrageous than the other? Are you sure you're not biased?
This is why religious threads get closed.
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Was she hot?
User was temp banned for this post.
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On March 23 2011 12:00 DTK-m2 wrote:
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.
This is a pretty ignorant view of the history of copying the Bible. Evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of this not occurring. With the Hebrew text (or the Old Testament half of the Bible), the copyists were as anal as anal could be about it. They usually copied down the text one letter at a time, and when they got done with the book, they counted forward and backward to find the word 1/2 way through, 1/4, 1/8, and et cetera. Their excellence in copying it evidenced by our finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which came about 1000 years before our next-earlier copies (done by the Masoretes), yet are extraordinarily close to the ones we already had.
The Greek text copiers (or the Bible's New Testament), on the other hand, were not quite so anal about their copying. Most of the copies were probably just done by slaves for the first few centuries. However, this is made up for by the sheer number of manuscripts that we have of what they did.
About the OP though, the Bible's pretty clear about Asherah, she was a god that nearby nations worshiped. The Israelites worshiped other Gods all the time, that's why God constantly sent bad things their way - so that they would realize the error of their ways and repent. Just because they worshiped Asherah doesn't mean they were all polytheists, or that this was common tradition in their culture.
Edit: Sorry guys, didn't read any of the posts about not wanting to flare up big arguments (my post took too long). I don't want to flare up big arguments either, especially since I don't check TL enough to take part in them.
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You can read upon the magisterium, it's basically the religious entity that studies the bible and it's ancient texts. There's tons of extra scriptures that did not make the bible, and if you want to read on it you can. You can say that it's based on the times and that's why its so diluted. That actually why Islam urges you to learn Arabic so you can read the actual Koran in it's original text.
But I personally don't know much about it, but just because they find evidence that is contrary to normal cathecism, doesn't mean it was part of the original. There was a lot of secular religions prior to Christianity and even Judaism. Before Paul and peter started the ministry there was just basically a bunch of Christians getting persecuted everywhere with structure barely in place.
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On March 23 2011 12:06 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
We JUST opened, and JUST closed a religious thread.
I guess this means that God can't be given any female pronouns? I know some religious speakers wanted to make it sound fair (gender-wise) by not only using He, but by also using She, when referring to God.
Well, it does suggest a good reason for referring to Yahweh exculsively as he. It's a very interesting article, but unfortunately I suspect most of us lack the depth of historical knowledge required to analyse it in more detail.
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On March 23 2011 12:26 101toss wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:24 Gatsbi wrote:On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable. What? That's absolutely ridiculous. Believeing in the Christian God is just as ridiculous as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, why is one more outrageous than the other? Are you sure you're not biased? This is why religious threads get closed.
Huh?
http://www.venganza.org/
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deleted
User was warned for this post
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On March 23 2011 12:32 tnkted wrote:
well, you'd think that mary would be god's wife, since he totally banged her to create jesus, and premarital sex is wrong...
But see, she was still a virgin.
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I am not having an opinion on this, but let it be said, many times throughout the OT jews constantly worshipped other gods than their god, God. So it could be just as well that those are remnants of pieces of whatever of something happening along the lines of worshipping god and then some other god.
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holyshit. 2nd religion thread in less than 1 hour or so, it's getting closed, the other one spun out of control almost immediatly
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On March 23 2011 12:24 Gatsbi wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable. What? That's absolutely ridiculous. Believeing in the Christian God is just as ridiculous as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, why is one more outrageous than the other? Are you sure you're not biased?
And that's not a biased thing to say?
On topic:
Do we know if a certain sect of Christians are already aware of this wife of God?
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On March 23 2011 12:15 mowglie wrote:
I don't think we should jump to conclusion based on the work of this one theologian alone. Is this person's work peer reviewed by other secular and non-secular theologians? Or are we seeking information that supports our view to bash religion?
I quote one person's comment from that link.
"The article is misleading. The ancient isarelites did indeed frequently pray to foreign Gods and godesses, and in every place in the Bible where they have done so, it has been called an abomination, that Asherah was an adopted Canaanite goddess, and that kings and rulers who worshipped such did evil in the sight of the Lord. The prophets of Asherah were central to the story of the face-off between Elijah and the Canaanites told in 1 Kings 18. The fact that archeologists find inscriptions to Asherah does not indicate that she was "erased" from the Theology, or that she was once main-stream Judaism. Anyone who has actually studied the old testament, particularly Samuel/Chronicles/Kings knows that this is indicative of the very falling-away and heresies that are documented in these texts."
People need to read this comment before posting further. Also, the mate of Asherah was not the orthodox Jewish God, but Baal, his Caanite counterpart. For those infidels who did worship Baal as God, it's obvious that you can interpret Asherah as being the wife of "God," but this does not mean the biblical God.
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On March 23 2011 12:39 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:24 Gatsbi wrote:On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable. What? That's absolutely ridiculous. Believeing in the Christian God is just as ridiculous as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, why is one more outrageous than the other? Are you sure you're not biased? On topic: Do we know if a certain sect of Christians are already aware of this wife of God?
On March 23 2011 12:12 0neder wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 11:58 Jerubaal wrote:
To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history? To quote myself, why is this age obsessed with refuting others' religious beliefs? Why is everyone so religiously secular these days? =) On a side note, I'm Mormon, and we have always believed God has a wife. Why would he set up some arbitrary sociality for his children if it's not what he himself has attained in his state of perfection and happiness? His goal is for us to become like him, just like any parent(s). Most couples who live their religious beliefs would say that is the pinnacle of fulfillment for them and adds a new level of depth, closeness, and love to their relationship with each other and with God. Also, we believe that anyone who lives the Gospel can eventually become an exhalted person (through the Atonement) like God is, so this idea is not strange to us. Any parent wants their kid to grow up and share in their wisdom and happiness.
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On March 23 2011 12:41 101toss wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:39 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On March 23 2011 12:24 Gatsbi wrote:On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable. What? That's absolutely ridiculous. Believeing in the Christian God is just as ridiculous as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, why is one more outrageous than the other? Are you sure you're not biased? On topic: Do we know if a certain sect of Christians are already aware of this wife of God? Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:12 0neder wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Jerubaal wrote:
To quote Ratzinger, why is this age obsessed with finding religion through history? To quote myself, why is this age obsessed with refuting others' religious beliefs? Why is everyone so religiously secular these days? =) On a side note, I'm Mormon, and we have always believed God has a wife. Why would he set up some arbitrary sociality for his children if it's not what he himself has attained in his state of perfection and happiness? His goal is for us to become like him, just like any parent(s). Most couples who live their religious beliefs would say that is the pinnacle of fulfillment for them and adds a new level of depth, closeness, and love to their relationship with each other and with God. Also, we believe that anyone who lives the Gospel can eventually become an exhalted person (through the Atonement) like God is, so this idea is not strange to us. Any parent wants their kid to grow up and share in their wisdom and happiness.
Ah, cool cool. Thanks for the info, 0neder (and for showing me it when I missed it, 101toss)
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The way I view it there are 2 ways too look at religion:
Faith: Believe whatever the fuck you want to and as long as it doesn't interfere with me, I don't care.
History of Religion: What did people believe in the past?
This is an example of the latter, but people keep trying to tie it to the former to say UR RELIGION IS BOGUS LOLOL!!!1!
Elaboration: The research turns up that ancient Israelites believed in a God with a wife. In the article, OP, thread, and even title, it draws the conclusion, or at least eludes to, that the God in modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam has a wife, and that the followers of those religions were just wrong with what they believed.
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Any understanding can liberate you from fear of the uncertain and to rely on sources you would never trust otherwise will only lead to a life with split meanings.
Exactly. Except you see the irony. If this axiom is true, it is unusable for life.
By one little change from a definite article (the understanding) to an indefinite article (an understanding, any understanding) what you are doing is encouraging split meanings.
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On March 23 2011 12:40 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:15 mowglie wrote:
I don't think we should jump to conclusion based on the work of this one theologian alone. Is this person's work peer reviewed by other secular and non-secular theologians? Or are we seeking information that supports our view to bash religion?
I quote one person's comment from that link.
"The article is misleading. The ancient isarelites did indeed frequently pray to foreign Gods and godesses, and in every place in the Bible where they have done so, it has been called an abomination, that Asherah was an adopted Canaanite goddess, and that kings and rulers who worshipped such did evil in the sight of the Lord. The prophets of Asherah were central to the story of the face-off between Elijah and the Canaanites told in 1 Kings 18. The fact that archeologists find inscriptions to Asherah does not indicate that she was "erased" from the Theology, or that she was once main-stream Judaism. Anyone who has actually studied the old testament, particularly Samuel/Chronicles/Kings knows that this is indicative of the very falling-away and heresies that are documented in these texts." People need to read this comment before posting further. Also, the mate of Asherah was not the orthodox Jewish God, but Baal, his Caanite counterpart. For those infidels who did worship Baal as God, it's obvious that you can interpret Asherah as being the wife of "God," but this does not mean the biblical God.
Moltke, do you think 0nder's post kinda just shows his utter misunderstanding or ignorance of how the Trinity has been formulated in the past and that he engages in a far too blatant anthropomorphism of God? I haven't studied Mormonism at all but whenever I've come across some Mormon doctrines I just feel as if it is entirely disconnected with Christian tradition.
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Soooo "let's rewrite the bible and make moneyyyyyy!!"
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On March 23 2011 12:40 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:15 mowglie wrote:
I don't think we should jump to conclusion based on the work of this one theologian alone. Is this person's work peer reviewed by other secular and non-secular theologians? Or are we seeking information that supports our view to bash religion?
I quote one person's comment from that link.
"The article is misleading. The ancient isarelites did indeed frequently pray to foreign Gods and godesses, and in every place in the Bible where they have done so, it has been called an abomination, that Asherah was an adopted Canaanite goddess, and that kings and rulers who worshipped such did evil in the sight of the Lord. The prophets of Asherah were central to the story of the face-off between Elijah and the Canaanites told in 1 Kings 18. The fact that archeologists find inscriptions to Asherah does not indicate that she was "erased" from the Theology, or that she was once main-stream Judaism. Anyone who has actually studied the old testament, particularly Samuel/Chronicles/Kings knows that this is indicative of the very falling-away and heresies that are documented in these texts." People need to read this comment before posting further. Also, the mate of Asherah was not the orthodox Jewish God, but Baal, his Caanite counterpart. For those infidels who did worship Baal as God, it's obvious that you can interpret Asherah as being the wife of "God," but this does not mean the biblical God.
I would not be surprised if there were a Semitic religion where Asherah was seen as the wife of Ba'al, but Asherah is usually identified as the wife of a creator god who is simply called "El" and is distinct from Ba'al.
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Eh... it makes sense I guess. If we see God as being male and as having created us in his image, what image would he create women out of? Duh his wife's!
If you see God as being gender neutral than why bother creating sexes to begin with? That certainly isn't in androgynous' God's image than... is it?
Doubt this will have any long term effects on organized religion what-so-ever.
DISCLAIMER I'm no theologist.
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Asherah -- known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar -- was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued istar kinda sounds like easter... so asherah could be the mother goddess in the pagan religions that easter is based on
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man i beat gods wife was banging. prolly the biggest smoke show in town
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Devout Methodist here, and I view this as no biggie. Modern Christians have the Trinity of three-Gods-in-One, and Yahweh/Jehovah/what-have-you has always been presented as either not having a gender or as hermaphroditic. Seems to me that the ancient Jews just had a dual divinity and worshiped two Gods in one. It's not like they had separate temples or anything.
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The doctrine of the Trinity is not three-Gods-in-One.
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Ashera isn't edited out of the bible. The bible states outright that Ashera was worshiped in the temple of God, it also attributes that "sin" to the destruction of the Jewish kingdom.
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On March 23 2011 13:03 koreasilver wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:40 MoltkeWarding wrote:On March 23 2011 12:15 mowglie wrote:
I don't think we should jump to conclusion based on the work of this one theologian alone. Is this person's work peer reviewed by other secular and non-secular theologians? Or are we seeking information that supports our view to bash religion?
I quote one person's comment from that link.
"The article is misleading. The ancient isarelites did indeed frequently pray to foreign Gods and godesses, and in every place in the Bible where they have done so, it has been called an abomination, that Asherah was an adopted Canaanite goddess, and that kings and rulers who worshipped such did evil in the sight of the Lord. The prophets of Asherah were central to the story of the face-off between Elijah and the Canaanites told in 1 Kings 18. The fact that archeologists find inscriptions to Asherah does not indicate that she was "erased" from the Theology, or that she was once main-stream Judaism. Anyone who has actually studied the old testament, particularly Samuel/Chronicles/Kings knows that this is indicative of the very falling-away and heresies that are documented in these texts." People need to read this comment before posting further. Also, the mate of Asherah was not the orthodox Jewish God, but Baal, his Caanite counterpart. For those infidels who did worship Baal as God, it's obvious that you can interpret Asherah as being the wife of "God," but this does not mean the biblical God. Moltke, do you think 0nder's post kinda just shows his utter misunderstanding or ignorance of how the Trinity has been formulated in the past and that he engages in a far too blatant anthropomorphism of God? I haven't studied Mormonism at all but whenever I've come across some Mormon doctrines I just feel as if it is entirely disconnected with Christian tradition.
Mormons don't believe in the Trinity, and don't have any use for it in their theology.
The fundamental belief of Mormonism is that an ancient group of Israelites came to the Americas thousands of years ago, establishing a civilization in the Southern part of our continent. When Jesus was incarnated in Israel, he was simultaneously incarnated to this offshoot community of Jews in America, whence Christianity was established simultaneously in America and Judea. This civilization was eventually destroyed, but in 1820 an angel spoke to Joseph Smith, a boy from upstate New York, and instructed him to go dig in the wilderness (like Timon of Athens) and there he found metal plates containing the scripture of this ancient American Christian civilization. Through the inspiration of God, he translated this scripture into English and published it as the book of Mormon.
That is the basis of the Mormon religion, as far as I understand it. If that sounds disconnected with Christian tradition to you, you're welcome to raise that point with their church. Otherwise, Mormonism exhibits traits fairly typical of American Christians: clean living, democratic organization, scriptural infallibility, direct individual communication with God, the near-certainty of salvation, and so on. I was also told by Mormon missionaries that even in the worst case, damnation does not mean eternal despair, but merely going to a third-rate heaven, since God loves all his children. I don't know if that's canonical, but Mormons are so cheerful in general, it may actually be part of their theology.
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OP is a scrub and needs to shut the fuck up. Really. Yeah its funny how people are like "we cant have a religious discussion without a flamewar waaaah", when its those people who start attacking people's beliefs every chance they get.
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Who cares? God never existed.
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United Kingdom16710 Posts
Ok, now it makes sense why the world is so f*cked up.
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Oh, ok then.
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Double posted, don't judge me.
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Ahm...
Scientist says that historical findings/data seems to say that a long time ago the christian "God" had a "Wife" which got "outwritten/forgotten/no one knows" over the hundreds of years/millenia christianity and its various "sects" have evolved/changed.
Thats not an attack on religion or anything and if you feel like that, you got some mighty problems...
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Part of having opinions is actually being well informed and well reasoned. If I say player A is better than player B then people can dispute that and state the reasons why. But for some reason the whole religion/faith is somehow immune to criticism and argument because it's just the way it is.
There are good aspects about religion, but there are also many bad ones.
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The worship of Asherah, and the use of Asherah poles, is repeatedly mentioned in the Bible, specifically in the context of the Israelites turning to worship foreign gods such as Asherah and Baal. They even go so far as to brazenly bring this into God's temple at Jerusalem. God is very clear that he is not happy with this. In fact, much of the Old Testament is documenting Israel who repeatedly turn to worship other gods, and God being angry about this.
It is not too surprising that some Israelites may have twistedly worshipped both the LORD and Asherah, an idol. In fact you'd pretty much expect something like that given the corrupted nature of their spiritual lives. Or, they were referring to Baal, as a previous poster said.
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Gods don't have wives or genders. There is absolutely no point of an omnipotent and omniscient being to have genders or be sexually attracted to another; because gender and sex are just biological mechanisms that evolved through the ages which enables us lesser creatures to propagate as a species.
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On March 23 2011 21:46 Rashid wrote:
Gods don't have wives or genders. There is absolutely no point of an omnipotent and omniscient being to have genders or be sexually attracted to another; because gender and sex are just biological mechanisms that evolved through the ages which enables us lesser creatures to propagate as a species.
You can't know that. God works in mysterious ways.
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On March 23 2011 21:20 snotboogie wrote:
The worship of Asherah, and the use of Asherah poles, is repeatedly mentioned in the Bible, specifically in the context of the Israelites turning to worship foreign gods such as Asherah and Baal. They even go so far as to brazenly bring this into God's temple at Jerusalem. God is very clear that he is not happy with this. In fact, much of the Old Testament is documenting Israel who repeatedly turn to worship other gods, and God being angry about this.
It is not too surprising that some Israelites may have twistedly worshipped both the LORD and Asherah, an idol. In fact you'd pretty much expect something like that given the corrupted nature of their spiritual lives. Or, they were referring to Baal, as a previous poster said.
It's pretty clear to me that many of the ancient Israelites were polytheists, up to and including their leaders. It's apparent from much of the language of this part of the OT that YHWH was simply Israel's god of choice. There's some controversy over whether El (the Caananite god that Abraham made his pact with) and YHWH (the god that delivered the Israelites from Egypt) were the same entity, and it appears that this connection was made by later authors.
The early Israelites were aware of and believed in a pantheon of gods, and the idea that YHWH was the only god appears to have not been present before the Babylonian captivity. There is a lot of linguistic evidence in the Bible for this.
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phew... that explains us then.
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It occurs to me that the bible is, in many ways, comparable to modern comic or fiction franchises. A lot of people with different views from different times and backgrounds contributed and somewhen some people decided what is canon and what is not (being called apokryphes instead). Naturally this process leads to inconsistencies. But that is the exact reason why taking the bible literally is not recommended (apart from the fact that customs from over 2,000 years ago might be anachronistic nowadays).
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So...if we have sex...then we are doing incest...which is a taboo...
EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
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On March 23 2011 21:20 snotboogie wrote:
The worship of Asherah, and the use of Asherah poles, is repeatedly mentioned in the Bible, specifically in the context of the Israelites turning to worship foreign gods such as Asherah and Baal. They even go so far as to brazenly bring this into God's temple at Jerusalem. God is very clear that he is not happy with this. In fact, much of the Old Testament is documenting Israel who repeatedly turn to worship other gods, and God being angry about this.
It is not too surprising that some Israelites may have twistedly worshipped both the LORD and Asherah, an idol. In fact you'd pretty much expect something like that given the corrupted nature of their spiritual lives. Or, they were referring to Baal, as a previous poster said.
Baal is just another name for lord it's a surname.
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Rather than the 10000000th religion thread, we should be discussing the more interesting point of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims actually originated from a (lost) history of polytheism. I'm an atheist so I don't know much about this stuff but this is the first time I've ever heard of something like this. Seems pretty big if the evidence discussed in the article is credible.
I also wonder if human beings are initially predisposed to polytheism. I'd love to hear if anyone has any theories on why early religions seem to all be polytheistic. I'd like to suggest a theory I just made up that maybe a monotheistic belief system takes more organization, whereas a polytheistic system can evolve naturally. It's easy to see how a bunch of myths and stories about supernatural forces can over time become integrated with one another. It seems to take more deliberation and planning to create a single, consistent deity and base all stories off of him/her.
Although from what I understand, a lot of stories in the Bible were indeed drawn from other stories and myths.
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On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap
This. Exactly this.
People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing.
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On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing.
Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess?
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On March 23 2011 23:50 Slow Motion wrote:
Rather than the 10000000th religion thread, we should be discussing the more interesting point of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims actually originated from a (lost) history of polytheism. I'm an atheist so I don't know much about this stuff but this is the first time I've ever heard of something like this. Seems pretty big if the evidence discussed in the article is credible.
It's weird that you're an atheist and interested in discussing religion.
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Wait, what? I thought God was ambiguously/non-sexed. How can a such a being have a wife of distinctly female sex?
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On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess?
I dont know but this website http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/god_have_a_wife.html
says that the Bible didnt hide the fact that Isrealites worshipped this goddess.
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On March 23 2011 23:40 heroyi wrote:
So...if we have sex...then we are doing incest...which is a taboo...
EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
If you have sex with a fish that is incest to, Were "related" to all life on the planet, if you feel like looking that far behind
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On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess?
Um, the Bible SAYS ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess (along with other gods) and God condemned them for it.
Quite frankly if they were trying to edit that out of the Bible, they would have to cut out everything after the Israelites left Egypt. (every other chapter the Israelites are worshipping false gods... and God is sending plagues/invaders to deal with it.. and then they go back to worshipping him.. and then the next chapter begins)
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On March 23 2011 23:58 MangoTango wrote:
Wait, what? I thought God was ambiguously/non-sexed. How can a such a being have a wife of distinctly female sex?
The Hebrew god YHWH is specifically referred to as a he. God is many things to many people, so that idea of ambiguity could just be one interpretation.
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On March 23 2011 23:57 Lennon wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 23:50 Slow Motion wrote:
Rather than the 10000000th religion thread, we should be discussing the more interesting point of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims actually originated from a (lost) history of polytheism. I'm an atheist so I don't know much about this stuff but this is the first time I've ever heard of something like this. Seems pretty big if the evidence discussed in the article is credible.
It's weird that you're an atheist and interested in discussing religion.
I too enjoy looking at the evolution of man's understanding of the world. I'm an atheist; that doesn't mean I don't enjoy doing research on non-atheist stuff.
I play tennis. Doesn't mean I can't talk about basketball
Obviously, religion has played a huge part in the development of different parts of the world- for better or for worse. It influences people immensely. Therefore, it could be a good topic of discussion, if one is interested in looking at the growth of societies and history in general. Our individual religious (or non-religious) identities don't really matter, do they?
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On March 23 2011 23:58 MangoTango wrote:
Wait, what? I thought God was ambiguously/non-sexed. How can a such a being have a wife of distinctly female sex?
Did you miss the part were God made man in his image? The guy rests, eats, enjoys smelling sacrificial meats, wrestles with Israel, his son's marry humans. It's pretty clear that the Bible portray's El and Yahweh as having the form of men. 2 Timothy even goes as far as to say that women are inferior because only man is made in Gods image.
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On March 23 2011 23:58 MangoTango wrote:
Wait, what? I thought God was ambiguously/non-sexed. How can a such a being have a wife of distinctly female sex?
The idea of the omnipotent god probably evolved through the ages. It's not like one guy suddenly invented god, the image of god changed constantly. At one time it was probably distinctively male.
While polytheism seems ridiculous to us now, it was more honest in a way, since it was a clear projection of humaneness toward a higher plane of existence to explain the world. The gods had obvious human qualities.
The omnipotent, omniscient being on the other hand is a much more robust concept, and fooled great thinkers for centuries. The less evolved polytheism could never have done that.
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On March 23 2011 12:20 mowglie wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 12:17 Keitzer wrote:
religion = belief. that's it...
what about the people that believe theres an alien god or some shit?
what about the europeans (fuck... romans?) that believed in titans, and other gods and shit I would go further and say that not all beliefs are equal, that some are pretty damn outrageous while other beliefs are reasonable.
I said that because me being a non-religion kinda guy think that each religion is taken from perspective.... From the perspective of a Christian, sure alien god is crazy... But from Alien god perspective, is Christian crazy/outrageous?
So basically, the op noted how the bible is being interpreted and I commented how it doesn't really matter what you believe as most of it is belief. And that's it.
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On March 23 2011 21:46 Rashid wrote:
Gods don't have wives or genders. There is absolutely no point of an omnipotent and omniscient being to have genders or be sexually attracted to another; because gender and sex are just biological mechanisms that evolved through the ages which enables us lesser creatures to propagate as a species.
So god is an unknowable, totally transcendent being, yet you are able to determine whether or not it has a sex? Sounds kinda silly to me :p
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On March 24 2011 00:12 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 21:46 Rashid wrote:
Gods don't have wives or genders. There is absolutely no point of an omnipotent and omniscient being to have genders or be sexually attracted to another; because gender and sex are just biological mechanisms that evolved through the ages which enables us lesser creatures to propagate as a species. So god is an unknowable, totally transcendent being, yet you are able to determine whether or not it has a sex? Sounds kinda silly to me :p
He is ignoring that fact that B'nai HaElohim did have sex and children.
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On March 24 2011 00:05 Krikkitone wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess? Um, the Bible SAYS ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess (along with other gods) and God condemned them for it. Quite frankly if they were trying to edit that out of the Bible, they would have to cut out everything after the Israelites left Egypt. (every other chapter the Israelites are worshipping false gods... and God is sending plagues/invaders to deal with it.. and then they go back to worshipping him.. and then the next chapter begins)
But I think the argument in the article is that they didn't just worship some random goddess outside of Yahweh, but that they believed that Yahweh and this particular goddess were a pair and worshiped them as such. I see a lot of reason to edit that out if the Bible is trying to espouse a monotheistic and male-centric (back then) religion.
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On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess?
That's my point. If the Bible was edited to exclude "the evidence" that ancient Israelites worshiped a goddess, then why does the Bible say that ancient Israelites worshiped a goddess?!
It's just plan insanity what people come up with.
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On March 24 2011 00:15 Slow Motion wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:05 Krikkitone wrote:On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess? Um, the Bible SAYS ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess (along with other gods) and God condemned them for it. Quite frankly if they were trying to edit that out of the Bible, they would have to cut out everything after the Israelites left Egypt. (every other chapter the Israelites are worshipping false gods... and God is sending plagues/invaders to deal with it.. and then they go back to worshipping him.. and then the next chapter begins) But I think the argument in the article is that they didn't just worship some random goddess outside of Yahweh, but that they believed that Yahweh and this particular goddess were a pair and worshiped them as such. I see a lot of reason to edit that out if the Bible is trying to espouse a monotheistic and male-centric (back then) religion.
You're now delving into the world of literary criticism. This is evidence for the historicity of the Bible.
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Sorry I think I'm not being clear with my point. As I read it, the article seems to be arguing that the ancient Israelites worshiped a goddess as a PART of their worship of Yahweh. The Bible seems to tell the story of ancient Israelites worshiping other gods as in believing in a separate religion. Whereas the article seems to suggest that polytheism and worshiping a female goddess alongside a male god was initially very much a feature of the original Judaism.
On March 24 2011 00:22 danl9rm wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:15 Slow Motion wrote:On March 24 2011 00:05 Krikkitone wrote:On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess? Um, the Bible SAYS ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess (along with other gods) and God condemned them for it. Quite frankly if they were trying to edit that out of the Bible, they would have to cut out everything after the Israelites left Egypt. (every other chapter the Israelites are worshipping false gods... and God is sending plagues/invaders to deal with it.. and then they go back to worshipping him.. and then the next chapter begins) But I think the argument in the article is that they didn't just worship some random goddess outside of Yahweh, but that they believed that Yahweh and this particular goddess were a pair and worshiped them as such. I see a lot of reason to edit that out if the Bible is trying to espouse a monotheistic and male-centric (back then) religion. You're now delving into the world of literary criticism. This is evidence for the historicity of the Bible.
I was just responding to the other point earlier that there was no motive to edit the Bible. And since the Bible was written by people, I think it's relevant to discuss the writing of it, and if there were choices to leave things out in the writing.
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I think people have to be careful about articles like this. Religeon is such a hotbutton issue that articles like this are quickly jumped on and supported or decried despite being somewhat sensationalist and lacking in firm evidence.
Personally, I think the female character unearthed is not a deity but is instead some sort of "lesser spiritual being" which most scholars know are very present in early abrahamic texts (there are many strange beliefs pertaining to demonology and the study of spirits).
Saying that "God had a wife" is this scientist making bullshit conclusions so they can vilify the "evil male chauvinists", and being an attention whore
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On March 24 2011 00:04 thoradycus wrote:
nvm
I find this comment... accurate.
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On March 23 2011 21:46 Rashid wrote:
Gods don't have wives or genders. There is absolutely no point of an omnipotent and omniscient being to have genders or be sexually attracted to another; because gender and sex are just biological mechanisms that evolved through the ages which enables us lesser creatures to propagate as a species.
In Greek mythology, the gods certainly had genders... and they copulated with humans (and nymphs and all other sorts of creatures) on a regular basis. Demigods were regularly formed from this process. Hercules, for instance, was Zeus's son... but Hercules's mother was Alcmena, a human. So it's not really a stretch to think that gods can't marry non-gods, if some mythologies had them screwing around all the time. I don't think there's a universal religious law that says a god can't marry a non-god, anyway.
Keep in mind that we're talking about faith-based traditions, allegories, and myths. They don't have to abide by evolutionary mechanisms or actual scientific facts if they don't want to. I think we're axiomatically allowing people to be born from dirt, faeries to actually exist (and to copulate with gods of water and deities who throw thunderbolts), and anything else that's supernatural.
If gods exist, then they can surely do whatever the heck they want
We're not questioning their existence in this thread, or the scientific/ logical validity of it all.
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On March 24 2011 00:30 JamesJohansen wrote:
I think people have to be careful about articles like this. Religeon is such a hotbutton issue that articles like this are quickly jumped on and supported or decried despite being somewhat sensationalist and lacking in firm evidence.
Personally, I think the female character unearthed is not a deity but is instead some sort of "lesser spiritual being" which most scholars know are very present in early abrahamic texts (there are many strange beliefs pertaining to demonology and the study of spirits).
Saying that "God had a wife" is this scientist being an attention whore
And as we all know, attention whores are the worst kind of whores.
also, clearly, your on-the-spot, completely fabricated from conjecture, scenario that explains the existance of an unaccounted for female character in the bible is worth AT LEAST as much as the investigation and publication of an actual scientist
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At least God's name was mentioned in the OP, which is good.
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Lennon im with you on that. Religion is fast outdating itself. There has to be an introspection (especially among Catholics) to revisit the early means by which religion progressed, that is through assimilation. It is delusional if it believes a monolithic stance still holds. Which is why I really appreciate Ratzinger. He understands the volatile and complex realities of the absolutes of faith vis a vis the transient demands of modernity. Instead of taking an encompassing broadstroke on the infallibilty of the Word, Ratzinger redefines the role of religion as the water that purifies the intention of science, or politics. This formulation is honest and profound. It posits religion back to its roots - as the metanarrative that drives existence and gives it purpose beyond mechanical to-dos, yet takes into account the changes in human history.
More specifically, on the topic of God's wife, what it says at bottom is that in the earliest forms of worship, as far as the research is concerned, the practice used to involve BOTH YHWH and Asherah. The metaphysical "existence" of God and his/her gender is beside the point. The text is plain English how can some people misread that. Now, politics in the handling of religious text eventually purged it of Asherah, which in its remnant forms is either "one of the minor gods of the Canaanites" or a tree, or a pole (all logically a product of the purging previously stated). It is a scientific study for a scientific peer reviewed journal. It cares little whether God exists or what God's gender is, or how we should go about our religious practice. Its reading comprehension at its most basic level.
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On March 24 2011 00:24 Slow Motion wrote:Sorry I think I'm not being clear with my point. As I read it, the article seems to be arguing that the ancient Israelites worshiped a goddess as a PART of their worship of Yahweh. The Bible seems to tell the story of ancient Israelites worshiping other gods as in believing in a separate religion. Whereas the article seems to suggest that polytheism and worshiping a female goddess alongside a male god was initially very much a feature of the original Judaism. Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:22 danl9rm wrote:On March 24 2011 00:15 Slow Motion wrote:On March 24 2011 00:05 Krikkitone wrote:On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess? Um, the Bible SAYS ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess (along with other gods) and God condemned them for it. Quite frankly if they were trying to edit that out of the Bible, they would have to cut out everything after the Israelites left Egypt. (every other chapter the Israelites are worshipping false gods... and God is sending plagues/invaders to deal with it.. and then they go back to worshipping him.. and then the next chapter begins) But I think the argument in the article is that they didn't just worship some random goddess outside of Yahweh, but that they believed that Yahweh and this particular goddess were a pair and worshiped them as such. I see a lot of reason to edit that out if the Bible is trying to espouse a monotheistic and male-centric (back then) religion. You're now delving into the world of literary criticism. This is evidence for the historicity of the Bible. I was just responding to the other point earlier that there was no motive to edit the Bible. And since the Bible was written by people, I think it's relevant to discuss the writing of it, and if there were choices to leave things out in the writing.
Merely because I Include Elements of Religion #1 in Religion#2 doesn't mean that Relgion#1 IS Religion#2.
To prove the "God had a Wife" you would have to prove that there was No "Yahweh only" worship until after there was "Yahweh+Asherah" worship.
The fact that some poeple worshipped both is not particularly surprising (can bee seen in the spread of any of the major world religions... as they spread some people take some things from it and add it to other beliefs... that doesn't mean their belief is "christianity" or "islam" if other forms of christianity or islam condemn that belief.)
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On March 24 2011 00:33 popzags wrote:I find this comment... accurate.
eh? it was a double post..lol your point?
sry i didnt mention the dbl post on my edit
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On March 24 2011 00:39 Krikkitone wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:24 Slow Motion wrote:Sorry I think I'm not being clear with my point. As I read it, the article seems to be arguing that the ancient Israelites worshiped a goddess as a PART of their worship of Yahweh. The Bible seems to tell the story of ancient Israelites worshiping other gods as in believing in a separate religion. Whereas the article seems to suggest that polytheism and worshiping a female goddess alongside a male god was initially very much a feature of the original Judaism. On March 24 2011 00:22 danl9rm wrote:On March 24 2011 00:15 Slow Motion wrote:On March 24 2011 00:05 Krikkitone wrote:On March 23 2011 23:56 Slow Motion wrote:On March 23 2011 23:52 danl9rm wrote:On March 23 2011 11:58 Milkis wrote:
every once in a while people make dumb theories to get attention when the bible itselfs literally tells you why there were asherah poles in the temple
holy crap This. Exactly this. People that actually know what they are talking about don't even respond to this stuff anymore. It's just embarrassing. Isn't the whole point of her argument and the article that the Bible was edited to exclude the evidence she found that ancient Israelites worshiped a Goddess? Um, the Bible SAYS ancient Israelites worshipped a goddess (along with other gods) and God condemned them for it. Quite frankly if they were trying to edit that out of the Bible, they would have to cut out everything after the Israelites left Egypt. (every other chapter the Israelites are worshipping false gods... and God is sending plagues/invaders to deal with it.. and then they go back to worshipping him.. and then the next chapter begins) But I think the argument in the article is that they didn't just worship some random goddess outside of Yahweh, but that they believed that Yahweh and this particular goddess were a pair and worshiped them as such. I see a lot of reason to edit that out if the Bible is trying to espouse a monotheistic and male-centric (back then) religion. You're now delving into the world of literary criticism. This is evidence for the historicity of the Bible. I was just responding to the other point earlier that there was no motive to edit the Bible. And since the Bible was written by people, I think it's relevant to discuss the writing of it, and if there were choices to leave things out in the writing. Merely because I Include Elements of Religion #1 in Religion#2 doesn't mean that Relgion#1 IS Religion#2. To prove the "God had a Wife" you would have to prove that there was No "Yahweh only" worship until after there was "Yahweh+Asherah" worship. The fact that some poeple worshipped both is not particularly surprising (can bee seen in the spread of any of the major world religions... as they spread some people take some things from it and add it to other beliefs... that doesn't mean their belief is "christianity" or "islam" if other forms of christianity or islam condemn that belief.)
Yeah you're definitely right. I also think it's entirely possible that there was "Yahweh only" worship either before or alongside "Yahweh+Asherah" worship. Either way I have no idea cause I've never researched the issue. I just think that the possibility and argument made in the article, which seems to be the "No "Yahweh only" worship until after there was "Yahweh+Asherah" worship" argument, is interesting.
I have no feelings on its historical validity either way though. I just think people are misconstruing the argument when they say that the Bible already admits to their being worship and other gods and that this argument is nothing new. In fact your statement that "To prove the "God had a Wife" you would have to prove that there was No "Yahweh only" worship until after there was "Yahweh+Asherah" worship" is a perfect summary of what I feel is what the person in the article is trying to prove (whether convincingly or not).
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On March 24 2011 00:41 thoradycus wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:33 popzags wrote:On March 24 2011 00:04 thoradycus wrote:
nvm I find this comment... accurate. eh? it was a double post..lol your point?
My point is that in a thread like this, an edit like yours perfectly adresses the OP.
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The historian who wrote this article has obviously not read the old testament. In several of the books including judges and kings there are times when the Israelites stop worshiping God and start worshiping the gods of there neighbors, when they where in one of these phases they would often put idols from other religions in their temple. The two main god's they turn to are Baal and Asherah. Asherah was not an Israeli deity but a deity of the Canaanites who lived nearby. Whenever there was a new judge in the book of judges it would always talk about them destroying the alters of Baal and cutting down the Asherah poles.
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On March 24 2011 00:58 Atheros wrote:
The historian who wrote this article has obviously not read the old testament. In several of the books including judges and kings there are times when the Israelites stop worshiping God and start worshiping the gods of there neighbors, when they where in one of these phases they would often put idols from other religions in their temple. The two main god's they turn to are Baal and Asherah. Asherah was not an Israeli deity but a deity of the Canaanites who lived nearby. Whenever there was a new judge in the book of judges it would always talk about them destroying the alters of Baal and cutting down the Asherah poles.
I don't think you've read much of the thread, as all of this has been repeatedly raised and dealt with. I'm extremely confident that the historian who wrote this article knows far more about the old testament and the historical criticism associated with it than you do.
Edit: I mean the historians who did the research discussed in the article, not the journalist who wrote the article.
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Mormons believe god has a wife.
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who GIVES a shit. not me. what is the point of trying to "discover" whether or not an influential story book character had a wife
User was warned for this post
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On March 24 2011 01:22 Alejandrisha wrote:
who GIVES a shit. not me. what is the point of trying to "discover" whether or not an influential story book character had a wife
To quote Bart Ehrman:
"This kind of information is relevant not only to scholars like me, who devote their lives to serious research, but also to everyone who is interested in the Bible -- whether they personally consider themselves believers or not. In my opinion this really matters. Whether you are a believer -- fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal -- or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon."
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5003 Posts
On March 23 2011 22:55 Igakusei wrote:
It's pretty clear to me that many of the ancient Israelites were polytheists, up to and including their leaders. It's apparent from much of the language of this part of the OT that YHWH was simply Israel's god of choice. There's some controversy over whether El (the Caananite god that Abraham made his pact with) and YHWH (the god that delivered the Israelites from Egypt) were the same entity, and it appears that this connection was made by later authors.
The early Israelites were aware of and believed in a pantheon of gods, and the idea that YHWH was the only god appears to have not been present before the Babylonian captivity. There is a lot of linguistic evidence in the Bible for this.
Got any citations on this matter? I mean you are implying that there were some heavy edits done to Exodus and other books if this was the case and I'd like to see some nice evidence on this matter :O
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Religion has evolved over the last 2000 years just like every other element of human culture and society. It's difficult to see any document as infallible and immutable when it has changed so many times and comes in so many different forms/languages. I'm not saying the Bible is totally lacking in truth, but it has to be analyzed critically like any other historical source.
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On March 23 2011 11:57 FinestHour wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 11:55 MuTT wrote:
Wait. Is this an agnostic thread or a does god have a wife thread.
I don't really get where OP is trying to go with this either...
In every other news thread people seem to talk about the OP, if you post about religion people end up talking about it, there is NO WAY you can avoid "offending" someone. So, because TL is awesome in the sense that they don't want to offend someone's beliefs regardless of how ridiculous they are(unless it is on SC) they close the threads.
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On March 24 2011 01:24 Igakusei wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 01:22 Alejandrisha wrote:
who GIVES a shit. not me. what is the point of trying to "discover" whether or not an influential story book character had a wife To quote Bart Ehrman: "This kind of information is relevant not only to scholars like me, who devote their lives to serious research, but also to everyone who is interested in the Bible -- whether they personally consider themselves believers or not. In my opinion this really matters. Whether you are a believer -- fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal -- or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon."
I understand that religion is a huge facet of American culture but honestly I don't think a small tweak of the lore of Christianity would really have an affect on religion. I don't think it changes anything either way
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The Catholics change their beliefs around every couple of years anyway, so I'm not too surprised. Heliocentric galaxy? Married priests? Female deacons? Sports? Harry freaking Potter and Pokemon?
On March 24 2011 01:24 Igakusei wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 01:22 Alejandrisha wrote:
who GIVES a shit. not me. what is the point of trying to "discover" whether or not an influential story book character had a wife To quote Bart Ehrman: "This kind of information is relevant not only to scholars like me, who devote their lives to serious research, but also to everyone who is interested in the Bible -- whether they personally consider themselves believers or not. In my opinion this really matters. Whether you are a believer -- fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal -- or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon."
I think we're all familiar with the interesting phenomenon that atheists and agnostics are actually more knowledgeable about the Bible than actual believers, namely because believers go to church on Sunday, listen to their pastor, and leave, forgetting everything they heard before they walk out the door.
But I agree. Knowledge of the Bible is of extreme importance if you breathe, walk, and talk in the Western world.
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On March 24 2011 01:48 .Aar wrote:
The Catholics change their beliefs around every couple of years anyway, so I'm not too surprised. Heliocentric galaxy? Married priests? Female deacons? Sports? Harry freaking Potter and Pokemon
HAHAHA. Best one yet!
I dont get the sports and pokemon though...
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sick interpretation in the OP and Kant reference.
Actually, Kierkegaard owns Kant in terms of theology.
See his The Concept of Anxiety for exposition of humanity, the fall, qualitative leaps and authentic existence.
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On March 24 2011 01:27 Milkis wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 22:55 Igakusei wrote:
It's pretty clear to me that many of the ancient Israelites were polytheists, up to and including their leaders. It's apparent from much of the language of this part of the OT that YHWH was simply Israel's god of choice. There's some controversy over whether El (the Caananite god that Abraham made his pact with) and YHWH (the god that delivered the Israelites from Egypt) were the same entity, and it appears that this connection was made by later authors.
The early Israelites were aware of and believed in a pantheon of gods, and the idea that YHWH was the only god appears to have not been present before the Babylonian captivity. There is a lot of linguistic evidence in the Bible for this. Got any citations on this matter? I mean you are implying that there were some heavy edits done to Exodus and other books if this was the case and I'd like to see some nice evidence on this matter :O
He is only talking about the "documentary hypothesis" which was a commonly accepted theory on the origins of the Pentateuch. It is a fact that the "Books of Moses" are heavily revised. Hell, Deuteronomy didn't even exist until the reign of King Josiah.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/L4Vvv.png) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis
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On March 24 2011 01:55 Redunzl wrote:
sick interpretation in the OP and Kant reference.
Actually, Kierkegaard owns Kant in terms of theology.
See his The Concept of Anxiety for exposition of humanity, the fall, qualitative leaps and authentic existence.
Ahh, But Keirkegaard is a little less grounded for me. I had a field day with Kierkegaard in college with the attendant anxiety and angst. But yes, no one articulates existentialism and phenomenology better than him. I find Fromm's existentialism more radical and dynamic though.
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On March 24 2011 01:40 Alejandrisha wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 01:24 Igakusei wrote:On March 24 2011 01:22 Alejandrisha wrote:
who GIVES a shit. not me. what is the point of trying to "discover" whether or not an influential story book character had a wife To quote Bart Ehrman: "This kind of information is relevant not only to scholars like me, who devote their lives to serious research, but also to everyone who is interested in the Bible -- whether they personally consider themselves believers or not. In my opinion this really matters. Whether you are a believer -- fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal -- or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon." I understand that religion is a huge facet of American culture but honestly I don't think a small tweak of the lore of Christianity would really have an affect on religion. I don't think it changes anything either way
I think this depends on your brand of Christianity. It's not very threatening to something like the Catholic Church or any of the more liberal branches of protestantism, but to someone like a fundamentalist evangelical or a seventh-day adventist where the Bible is taken to be a literal historical account these small details can have many significant repercussions.
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I usually hate these topics because it just sensationalizes something that isn't very interesting in terms of the wow factor... like really? "OMG the isrealite people also worshiped God's wife?" really? that's it? (and of course many people just go OT with the OT (Off topic with the Opening thread)
This is to me is not surprising, any reading through the old testament would reveal that the Israelites also believed in a whole slew of other deities such as Baal, the golden calf, Molech etc, so if you just add another god or goddess to the mix doesn't change anything about how the people of Israel were like every other people at the time worshiping many Gods. The key thing here is that Yahweh or the God of Israel him/her/itself explicitly stated not to worship another Gods or idols or then face the consequences, to which there are many instances in the old testament (see the book of Judges, Kings, or Prophets) where Israel was punished for those acts.
So yes, there may in fact be a 'goddess' that Israel worshiped way back in the old testament, and yes it may not have been mentioned in the old testament, but with the reading of the old testament you would never thing that God approved of it.
What I find most interesting about the old testament is that somehow so many books can survive at a time where a lot of the people didn't necessarily even believe of the God that the book describes. (looking at the book of Kings you can find kings for several centuries who hate God)
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An interesting post, I am an atheist and I found that religion would be extinct in a matter of time anyways, probably not in my lifetime though. I have to agree that while this is an interesting discovery, it probably wont affect religion much, no one is going to abandon their religion simply because science finds that some fact in the bible is false, after all, there are already plenty of those.
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On March 23 2011 12:06 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
We JUST opened, and JUST closed a religious thread.
I guess this means that God can't be given any female pronouns? I know some religious speakers wanted to make it sound fair (gender-wise) by not only using He, but by also using She, when referring to God.
lol! that's the one thing you take away from this!? haha too funny.
hmmm seems the OP is almost trying to disprove religion through a small loophole so i think im gonna keep my thoughts out of it.
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so he cheated on her with mary then?
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On March 24 2011 02:03 jacknory wrote:
So yes, there may in fact be a 'goddess' that Israel worshiped way back in the old testament, and yes it may not have been mentioned in the old testament, but with the reading of the old testament you would never thing that God approved of it.
Except for the part where God tell's Moses to make a Asherah pole to save the Israelites from poisonous snakes. Numbers 21
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Very interesting thread. It's good that we talk about it because it makes people think about these things, which is better than pretending the issue of God or no God exists.
The God of the Bible has no gender or no need of gender because he is all in all. He spoke and the world came into being. He describes himself as a "he" and a "father" because we can best relate to him as just that, an authority figure from whom we get our lineage, who watches for us, directs us, and cares for us.
However, the same God also describes himself as having what we would consider as "feminine qualities" such as in the name El shaddai, translated to mean "mighty (or many) breasted one" referring to the provision of God for the people.
Jesus said that the children of heaven are not given in marriage, referring tot he fact that marriage, sex, and procreation are not needed in the eternal destination he was preparing.
The God of the bible has no need or desire to have a wife, if any sect or historical group has worshipped a wife of God, it does not describe the God of the bible, but something totally different.
People do this all the time, taking the original meaning of what the bible says and inject their own beliefs. The bible itself describes the Jews doing this quite often, either going after other "gods" (perhaps because those gods allowed you to sin) and/or through religiosity and tradition (read: legalism and the threat of control by men).
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On March 24 2011 01:27 Milkis wrote:Show nested quote +On March 23 2011 22:55 Igakusei wrote:
It's pretty clear to me that many of the ancient Israelites were polytheists, up to and including their leaders. It's apparent from much of the language of this part of the OT that YHWH was simply Israel's god of choice. There's some controversy over whether El (the Caananite god that Abraham made his pact with) and YHWH (the god that delivered the Israelites from Egypt) were the same entity, and it appears that this connection was made by later authors.
The early Israelites were aware of and believed in a pantheon of gods, and the idea that YHWH was the only god appears to have not been present before the Babylonian captivity. There is a lot of linguistic evidence in the Bible for this. Got any citations on this matter? I mean you are implying that there were some heavy edits done to Exodus and other books if this was the case and I'd like to see some nice evidence on this matter :O
The documentary hypothesis as popularly understood in books like "Who wrote the Bible" no longer appears to be accepted by the majority of scholars (scholars never could agree exactly on where J and E began and ended), but that doesn't mean they have thrown the whole idea out. It still seems to be widely accepted that no part of the Bible was written before ~600 BCE, and that P was added significantly later. Part of the documentary hypothesis was that these sources were all written independently and compiled later, but now the consensus seems to be that P was probably directly added to the earlier work.
I plan on spending a significant amount of time this summer reading OT journals and researching all of these viewpoints, as right now most of my knowledge comes from a handful of books written by scholars and a handful of journal articles.
What is certainly not contested is that the Pentateuch has been heavily edited from whatever its original form was.
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why is everyone pulling evidence from the bible without directly sourcing it?
2 Kings 21 shows the king of Judah making an Asherah pole as one of the reasons that "he did evil in the eyes of the LORD" (v.2)
Jeremiah 17 and Isaiah 17 are other clear passages where Asherah worship is frowned upon.
Seriously it doesn't make sense to have a lazy argument regarding what the bible says when there is such easy access to look through scripture. find your sources.
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On March 24 2011 00:35 Jameser wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:30 JamesJohansen wrote:
I think people have to be careful about articles like this. Religeon is such a hotbutton issue that articles like this are quickly jumped on and supported or decried despite being somewhat sensationalist and lacking in firm evidence.
Personally, I think the female character unearthed is not a deity but is instead some sort of "lesser spiritual being" which most scholars know are very present in early abrahamic texts (there are many strange beliefs pertaining to demonology and the study of spirits).
Saying that "God had a wife" is this scientist being an attention whore And as we all know, attention whores are the worst kind of whores. also, clearly, your on-the-spot, completely fabricated from conjecture, scenario that explains the existance of an unaccounted for female character in the bible is worth AT LEAST as much as the investigation and publication of an actual scientist
Calm the fuck down son. This "idea" just doesn't seem to have much backing. True, I'm no biblical scholar or anthropologist by any means but my parents forced me through 13 years of private religious schooling so Ive accumulated at least some biblical knowledge. All I'm saying is that I think this is sensationalist reporting at its finest. Its not a fucking crime to call that out.
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On March 24 2011 02:24 cerebralz wrote:
Very interesting thread. It's good that we talk about it because it makes people think about these things, which is better than pretending the issue of God or no God exists.
The God of the Bible has no gender or no need of gender because he is all in all. He spoke and the world came into being. He describes himself as a "he" and a "father" because we can best relate to him as just that, an authority figure from whom we get our lineage, who watches for us, directs us, and cares for us.
However, the same God also describes himself as having what we would consider as "feminine qualities" such as in the name El shaddai, translated to mean "mighty (or many) breasted one" referring to the provision of God for the people.
Jesus said that the children of heaven are not given in marriage, referring tot he fact that marriage, sex, and procreation are not needed in the eternal destination he was preparing.
The God of the bible has no need or desire to have a wife, if any sect or historical group has worshipped a wife of God, it does not describe the God of the bible, but something totally different.
People do this all the time, taking the original meaning of what the bible says and inject their own beliefs. The bible itself describes the Jews doing this quite often, either going after other "gods" (perhaps because those gods allowed you to sin) and/or through religiosity and tradition (read: legalism and the threat of control by men).
You almost sound like my friend who's preparing for priesthood now. Thanks for the sound reply.
One thing im really curious is, why does God (or the authors) insist on the nonsexuality of God. As you say God being a father is only a function of convenience, but essentially, from a spiritual perspective, God has/needs no gender. Why is this? Is this to avoid the confusion with the carnal requirements of gender? Gender seems to be too primordial that I don't see the reason why God necessarily has to be genderless.
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The judeo-christian God has a wife should be a more accurate topicname I'd say.
Theism is a pretty interesting subject to read about and the reasoning why people believe what they believe. Though I think the world in general is headed towards an non-theistic society and it's only logical to happen.
'God' is the belief for the unknown and unexplainable, and as we get more knowledge about the visible world, the idea is getting outdated.
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God doesnt exist, deal with it.
User was warned for this post
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On March 24 2011 02:31 JamesJohansen wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:35 Jameser wrote:On March 24 2011 00:30 JamesJohansen wrote:
I think people have to be careful about articles like this. Religeon is such a hotbutton issue that articles like this are quickly jumped on and supported or decried despite being somewhat sensationalist and lacking in firm evidence.
Personally, I think the female character unearthed is not a deity but is instead some sort of "lesser spiritual being" which most scholars know are very present in early abrahamic texts (there are many strange beliefs pertaining to demonology and the study of spirits).
Saying that "God had a wife" is this scientist being an attention whore And as we all know, attention whores are the worst kind of whores. also, clearly, your on-the-spot, completely fabricated from conjecture, scenario that explains the existance of an unaccounted for female character in the bible is worth AT LEAST as much as the investigation and publication of an actual scientist Calm the fuck down son. This "idea" just doesn't seem to have much backing. True, I'm no biblical scholar or anthropologist by any means but my parents forced me through 13 years of private religious schooling so Ive accumulated at least some biblical knowledge. All I'm saying is that I think this is sensationalist reporting at its finest. Its not a fucking crime to call that out.
Um Did you read the article? The article is saying, with evidence provided, that the female character is not just a "lesser" spiritual divine being.
"Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair.
They are trying to say that Yahweh and Asherah were together. What need would a "God" have for a "lesser spiritual being?" Also Asherah is directly refered to as a "goddess" in some biblical texts. No?
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On March 24 2011 02:33 gongryong wrote:
You almost sound like my friend who's preparing for priesthood now. Thanks for the sound reply.
One thing im really curious is, why does God (or the authors) insist on the nonsexuality of God. As you say God being a father is only a function of convenience, but essentially, from a spiritual perspective, God has/needs no gender. Why is this? Is this to avoid the confusion with the carnal requirements of gender? Gender seems to be too primordial that I don't see the reason why God necessarily has to be genderless.
a better question to ask is "why would God need a gender (or sex)?" humans need the distinction for procreation, but for a God Who was, and is, and is to come, aka everlasting/immortal, God has always been and will always be. God does not create other Gods.
so, a question you might want to ask is "why should God even have a gender?"
but anyways, most biblical scholars agree that God shows traits (and calls himself by these traits) like both a father and a mother.
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On March 24 2011 02:37 Facedriller wrote:
God doesnt exist, deal with it.
Prove it!
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On March 24 2011 02:38 JiYan wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 02:33 gongryong wrote:
You almost sound like my friend who's preparing for priesthood now. Thanks for the sound reply.
One thing im really curious is, why does God (or the authors) insist on the nonsexuality of God. As you say God being a father is only a function of convenience, but essentially, from a spiritual perspective, God has/needs no gender. Why is this? Is this to avoid the confusion with the carnal requirements of gender? Gender seems to be too primordial that I don't see the reason why God necessarily has to be genderless. a better question to ask is "why would God need a gender (or sex)?" humans need the distinction for procreation, but for a God Who was, and is, and is to come, aka everlasting/immortal, God has always been and will always be. God does not create other Gods. so, a question you might want to ask is "why should God even have a gender?" but anyways, most biblical scholars agree that God shows traits (and calls himself by these traits) like both a father and a mother.
Except your wrong he does create other Gods. El created all the other Gods they just got demoted to angels and demons when Josiah and Isaiah reworked the cannon.
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Doubt it.
There's no way God could have accomplished what he did in seven days with some skirt nagging him at every step.
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On March 24 2011 02:43 Flaccid wrote:
Doubt it.
There's no way God could have accomplished what he did in seven days with some skirt nagging him at every step.
6 days
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On March 24 2011 02:15 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 02:03 jacknory wrote:
So yes, there may in fact be a 'goddess' that Israel worshiped way back in the old testament, and yes it may not have been mentioned in the old testament, but with the reading of the old testament you would never thing that God approved of it.
Except for the part where God tell's Moses to make a Asherah pole to save the Israelites from poisonous snakes. Numbers 21
Good point, I haven't considered that - The only thing that I would question I would have is whether or not the pole that they made was truly an Asherah pole, did Asherah poles at the time have bronze snakes on them? (I also realize that later on as another poster mentions that worshiping Asherah poles are forbidden)
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On March 24 2011 02:38 JiYan wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 02:33 gongryong wrote:
You almost sound like my friend who's preparing for priesthood now. Thanks for the sound reply.
One thing im really curious is, why does God (or the authors) insist on the nonsexuality of God. As you say God being a father is only a function of convenience, but essentially, from a spiritual perspective, God has/needs no gender. Why is this? Is this to avoid the confusion with the carnal requirements of gender? Gender seems to be too primordial that I don't see the reason why God necessarily has to be genderless. a better question to ask is "why would God need a gender (or sex)?" humans need the distinction for procreation, but for a God Who was, and is, and is to come, aka everlasting/immortal, God has always been and will always be. God does not create other Gods. so, a question you might want to ask is "why should God even have a gender?" but anyways, most biblical scholars agree that God shows traits (and calls himself by these traits) like both a father and a mother.
I understand. But these seems more symptomatic than essential. A cursory review of religion across cultures point to gendered gods, why is the Catholic/Christian god any different? To me, I think something happened parallel to the evolution of religion, probably the shift to monotheism, and eventual omnipotence, which carried this "description" of God.
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I find some of the posts are misinformed and incorrect, so for the sake of furthering the discussion, let me attempt to clarify some matter.
Except for the part where God tell's Moses to make a Asherah pole to save the Israelites from poisonous snakes.
The pole here signifies the cross of Christ, while Asherah typifies flesh which is sinful. So the story from Numb 21 clearly foreshadows and reconfirm the redemption accomplished by Christ, who come in the likness of the flesh of sin and became the bearer of all sin on the cross.
The God of the bible has no need or desire to have a wife, if any sect or historical group has worshipped a wife of God, it does not describe the God of the bible, but something totally different.
God does desire a counterpart, this is why He made man in the image of Him so that eventually the His regenerated believers would become His bride corporately. This is a major theme throughout the Bible, old testament or new. For example, in the S.S Solomon wrote of Shulamite's love toward her shepherd. In New Testament it mentions of the Church as the God's Bridal Army several times.
All in all, it shows that God does desire a wife, but just not Asherah which God despises.
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On March 24 2011 02:39 gongryong wrote:Prove it!
Christians have the burden of proof, not atheists.
I want to point out that I love usage of HAD, not HAS :D
Just kidding...
I am interested in Vatican´s opinion on this, that will be interesting.
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On March 24 2011 02:27 JiYan wrote:why is everyone pulling evidence from the bible without directly sourcing it? 2 Kings 21 shows the king of Judah making an Asherah pole as one of the reasons that "he did evil in the eyes of the LORD" (v.2) Jeremiah 17 and Isaiah 17 are other clear passages where Asherah worship is frowned upon. Seriously it doesn't make sense to have a lazy argument regarding what the bible says when there is such easy access to look through scripture. find your sources.
Some examples of implicit assumption of polytheism. Note that "LORD" is usually translated from YHWH:
Exodus 15:11
Who among the gods is like you, LORD?
Who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?
Joshua 24:15
But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
Deut 10:17
For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.
Exodus 20:3
You shall have no other gods before me.
Exodus 18:11
Now I know that the LORD is greater than all other gods, for he did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly.
Some examples of monotheistic claims:
Deut 4:28
There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell.
Psalm 96:5
For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens.
Isaiah 42:17
But those who trust in idols, who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame.
Modern Christians often explain the subtle references to polytheism away as mere semantics, but it's clear from the original language and context that they were referring to Yahweh as one special member of a larger pantheon. Note how polytheism is subtle and implied whereas the monotheistic assertions are bold and aggressive.
The Bible Unearthed by Finklestein and Silberman:
The existence of high places and other forms of ancestral and household god worship was not -- as the book of Kings imply -- apostasy from an earlier, purer faith. It was part of the timeless tradition of the hill country settlers of Judah, who worshiped YHWH along with a variety of gods and goddesses known or adapted from the cults of neighboring peoples. YHWH, in short, was worshiped in a wide variety of ways -- and sometimes pictured as having a heavenly entourage. From the indirect (and pointedly negative) evidence of the books of Kings, we learn that priests in the countryside also regularly burned incense on the high places to the sun, the moon, and the stars.
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On March 24 2011 02:46 Overpowered wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 02:39 gongryong wrote:On March 24 2011 02:37 Facedriller wrote:
God doesnt exist, deal with it. Prove it! Christians have the burden of proof, not atheists. I want to point out that I love usage of HAD, not HAS :D Just kidding... I am interested in Vatican´s opinion on this, that will be interesting.
WRONG. Fallacy of active negative. It's one thing to leave Christians alone to their beliefs, it's quite another to jump in and make a statement negating that belief.
Ratzinger is too clever for this, Im sure he'll come up with something radical.
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Christians have the burden of proof, not atheists.
I want to point out that I love usage of HAD, not HAS :D
Just kidding...
I am interested in Vatican´s opinion on this, that will be interesting.
Christians have proven the existence of God many times via many ways and methods. In fact, there's a whole major dedicated to this: Ontology. If you are interested in this matter, i suggest you see this.
Here
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On March 24 2011 02:31 JamesJohansen wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 00:35 Jameser wrote:On March 24 2011 00:30 JamesJohansen wrote:
I think people have to be careful about articles like this. Religeon is such a hotbutton issue that articles like this are quickly jumped on and supported or decried despite being somewhat sensationalist and lacking in firm evidence.
Personally, I think the female character unearthed is not a deity but is instead some sort of "lesser spiritual being" which most scholars know are very present in early abrahamic texts (there are many strange beliefs pertaining to demonology and the study of spirits).
Saying that "God had a wife" is this scientist being an attention whore And as we all know, attention whores are the worst kind of whores. also, clearly, your on-the-spot, completely fabricated from conjecture, scenario that explains the existance of an unaccounted for female character in the bible is worth AT LEAST as much as the investigation and publication of an actual scientist Calm the fuck down son. This "idea" just doesn't seem to have much backing. True, I'm no biblical scholar or anthropologist by any means but my parents forced me through 13 years of private religious schooling so Ive accumulated at least some biblical knowledge. All I'm saying is that I think this is sensationalist reporting at its finest. Its not a fucking crime to call that out.
I'm not going to assume any conclusions about your Biblical knowledge, but there is a significant difference between devotional Bible study and critical Bible study. Judging from my own experience of K through 12 (and an additional year of university) at a private conservative denominational school, virtually everything I learned about the Bible was of the devotional sort. Doctrines of our church were always assumed and opposing viewpoints, if they were ever even mentioned, were only brought up so that the teachers could demonstrate why they were wrong.
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Ancient Israelites worshiping different gods is not the same thing as them actually existing. The ancient Israelites worshiped tons of other gods than Yahweh, that's why he let them get taken over by invading people and thrown out of the holy land. He also claimed that Allah and Yahweh are the same god, one of the stupidest things anyone could say.
"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."
If he even read the bible it was told that the neighboring nations worshiped other gods and idols other than Yahweh, and he instructed the Jewish people to kill them less they begin to worship false gods too ( they didn't, they did, and he kicked them out).
This man did nothing of the sort to prove that god actually had a wife, instead of people worshiping Him and someone else. He quotes examples of people worshiping others than just Yahweh, and then deduces that there must actually be more than one, instead of what the bible already says about foreign gods. If you didn't know that the Israelites worshiped other gods than Yahweh, you really should just try reading some paragraphs of the bible. That this is a historic discovery is hilarious.
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On March 24 2011 03:06 SnK-Arcbound wrote:Ancient Israelites worshiping different gods is not the same thing as them actually existing. The ancient Israelites worshiped tons of other gods than Yahweh, that's why he let them get taken over by invading people and thrown out of the holy land. He also claimed that Allah and Yahweh are the same god, one of the stupidest things anyone could say. Show nested quote +"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant." If he even read the bible it was told that the neighboring nations worshiped other gods and idols other than Yahweh, and he instructed the Jewish people to kill them less they begin to worship false gods too ( they didn't, they did, and he kicked them out). This man did nothing of the sort to prove that god actually had a wife, instead of people worshiping Him and someone else. He quotes examples of people worshiping others than just Yahweh, and then deduces that there must actually be more than one, instead of what the bible already says about foreign gods. If you didn't know that the Israelites worshiped other gods than Yahweh, you really should just try reading some paragraphs of the bible. That this is a historic discovery is hilarious.
Are you aware that Islam considers itself an Abrahamic religion? Why do you think there's so much animosity between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Holy Land? What makes you think that the assertion that Yahweh and Allah are the same god one is one of the "stupidest things anyone could say?"
Christians have a different understanding of God than Jews do, does that mean they worship completely different gods too?
I think that part of our disagreement here comes from the fact that you're accepting the Bible at face value, ignoring a lot of the subtleties both in the text and from archaeological evidence that indicate you can understand the Bible better if you do a little bit of reading between the lines.
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If you just read the Bible you will see that the Jews worshiped tons of other gods, which was why God had to pwn them over and over. I'm not sure why the researcher in the OP's post thinks that "other gods" are such a big deal; if he'd just read the Bible he would see that there was way more than "Asherah" or whatever...lol.
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On March 24 2011 03:06 SnK-Arcbound wrote:Ancient Israelites worshiping different gods is not the same thing as them actually existing. The ancient Israelites worshiped tons of other gods than Yahweh, that's why he let them get taken over by invading people and thrown out of the holy land. He also claimed that Allah and Yahweh are the same god, one of the stupidest things anyone could say. Show nested quote +"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant." If he even read the bible it was told that the neighboring nations worshiped other gods and idols other than Yahweh, and he instructed the Jewish people to kill them less they begin to worship false gods too ( they didn't, they did, and he kicked them out). This man did nothing of the sort to prove that god actually had a wife, instead of people worshiping Him and someone else. He quotes examples of people worshiping others than just Yahweh, and then deduces that there must actually be more than one, instead of what the bible already says about foreign gods. If you didn't know that the Israelites worshiped other gods than Yahweh, you really should just try reading some paragraphs of the bible. That this is a historic discovery is hilarious.
It's nothing new, Scholars have wrote about this long before although it's normally El or Baal who is a married to Asher and not Yahweh. Sometime around the writing of Deuteronomy is when El and Yahweh become "revealed" to be the same God. The main point is that Asher was in the temple for 2/3s of the Temples existence which reveals that polytheism was the norm. All the bashing of Asher in the Bible is always from Deuteronomy writers and later.
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On March 24 2011 02:53 FindMeInKenya wrote:Show nested quote +Christians have the burden of proof, not atheists.
I want to point out that I love usage of HAD, not HAS :D
Just kidding...
I am interested in Vatican´s opinion on this, that will be interesting.
Christians have proven the existence of God many times via many ways and methods. In fact, there's a whole major dedicated to this: Ontology. If you are interested in this matter, i suggest you see this. Here
This word 'proven;' I do not think it means what you think it means. Isn't that the same William Lane Craig that said he would still believe in the resurrection even if he was transported back in time and camped outside Jesus' tomb long enough to verify with his own eyes that Jesus was never raised from the dead? Hardly a paragon of logic and rationality, that one.
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On March 24 2011 02:43 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 02:43 Flaccid wrote:
Doubt it.
There's no way God could have accomplished what he did in seven days with some skirt nagging him at every step. 6 days
And on the seventh day God drank too much at brunch and made a scene.
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This word 'proven;' I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yeah, that was a very bad choice of word on my part. I meant to say logical proofs.
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On March 24 2011 02:53 FindMeInKenya wrote:Show nested quote +Christians have the burden of proof, not atheists.
I want to point out that I love usage of HAD, not HAS :D
Just kidding...
I am interested in Vatican´s opinion on this, that will be interesting.
Christians have proven the existence of God many times via many ways and methods. In fact, there's a whole major dedicated to this: Ontology. If you are interested in this matter, i suggest you see this. Here
Woah, did I miss the papers where the existence of god has been proven? Ontology is not quite a major in proving the existence of god.
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On March 24 2011 03:22 FindMeInKenya wrote:Yeah, that was a very bad choice of word on my part. I meant to say logical proofs.
Same thing. I'm familiar with all of the major 'logical proofs' of God, as well as the myriad problems associated with them. I don't want to derail this thread by bringing them all in here, but maybe we can start a new thread to debate the veracity of those proofs. Let's just say that most philosophers don't find them as convincing as you seem to.
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While William Lane Craig does makes some crazy statement time to time, I found the arguments he brought in the video is a good start for some one who are interested in these matters.
Yes, ontology is not a mere major on proving the existence of God, but it does do that to a large degree, right?
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I agree, let's not bring in all the craziness in one thread.
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how do you find evidence for god's wife when there is no evidence for him at all...
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On March 24 2011 03:27 FindMeInKenya wrote:
While William Lane Craig does makes some crazy statement time to time, I found the arguments he brought in the video is a good start for some one who are interested in these matters.
Yes, ontology is not a mere major on proving the existence of God, but it does do that to a large degree, right?
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Ontological_argument
It's a logical Fallacy
I just want to talk about Jewish mythology anyways not argue about religion.
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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?
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On March 24 2011 03:32 bball wrote:
how do you find evidence for god's wife when there is no evidence for him at all...
It's evidence that some unspecified number of ancient Hebrews believed that their choice god had a wife, not evidence that the actual god that they believed in had a wife.
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Even God need someone to wash the dishes and remember him to do all that boring stuff.
Man... god is a slave just like me.
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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?
The most important core principle: monotheism.
Although it is likely this is some form of sensationalist writing. There were many hebrew gods in the Old Testament, but they were considered idols. It's quite possible Asher falls under this camp, probable even.
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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?
God does have a wife. The wife is the church of god (literally), but not an actual wife (allegorically). The purpose of God making people was so that they would either choose to be with him and do like him, or not. He'll be with the ones who want to know him. God having a wife is true, however saying it is some goddess is false. God's relationship towards the church is different from marriage, but it needs to be relayed to us in means that we can understand.
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On March 24 2011 03:42 DoctorHelvetica wrote:Show nested quote +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? The most important core principle: monotheism.
Well there existed the acknowledgement of multiple gods in the Bible; it was just the case that the Christian God didn't want his followers worshipping any other god besides him. Heck, it was even his first commandment!
So that being said, I don't think that his wife would change the principle of monotheism, unless Christians started worshipping her as well.
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i may be mistaken, but if a wife of God was acknowledged, i think you would end up with something similar to Catholicism where Mary is 'the mother of God'.
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On March 24 2011 03:43 SnK-Arcbound wrote:Show nested quote +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? God does have a wife. The wife is the church of god (literally), but not an actual wife (allegorically). The purpose of God making people was so that they would either choose to be with him and do like him, or not. He'll be with the ones who want to know him. God having a wife is true, however saying it is some goddess is false. God's relationship towards the church is different from marriage, but it needs to be relayed to us in means that we can understand.
I don't think that the church's relationship with God is exactly the type of "God's wife" relationship that the OP is talking about. Perhaps someone else could chime in on this topic, as I need to go to class now
Regardless, I think discussions like these are steps in the positive direction to keeping this thread open (rather than debating the validity of religion or God's existence), in my humble opinion.
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On March 23 2011 11:58 gongryong wrote:
you should read Rorty and Vattimo's Future of Religion instead.
That's gotta be a very short book.
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On March 24 2011 03:42 DoctorHelvetica wrote:Show nested quote +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? The most important core principle: monotheism. Although it is likely this is some form of sensationalist writing. There were many hebrew gods in the Old Testament, but they were considered idols. It's quite possible Asher falls under this camp, probable even.
The issue under discussion is whether or not they were always considered idols. A lot of people replying in this thread have a view of the Bible that it is exactly what it says it is, which answers the question rather cleanly from a superficial point of view. From a historical critical viewpoint however, there is significant evidence of assumed polytheism in the Bible itself, one type of which I posted on the last page.
There are other lines of evidence such as the types of stories told (e.g. Abraham and his immediate descendants interacting personally with a tangible God vs Yahweh guiding later Hebrews as a pillar of cloud/fire and generally interacting in more removed/intangible ways), and how they correlate to the types of stories told by other contemporary religions. The evidence doesn't support the assumption that Abraham's descendants always believed that there was only one God and the others were simply idols, but that's an assumption that most Christians are raised with and many of the posters here seem to be working from.
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On March 24 2011 03:43 SnK-Arcbound wrote:Show nested quote +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? God does have a wife. The wife is the church of god (literally), but not an actual wife (allegorically). The purpose of God making people was so that they would either choose to be with him and do like him, or not. He'll be with the ones who want to know him. God having a wife is true, however saying it is some goddess is false. God's relationship towards the church is different from marriage, but it needs to be relayed to us in means that we can understand.
The wonderful thing about religious opinions/theories about the nature of the world (= god, the universe and everything human) is that it's completely open to speculation. Since nothing can ever be tested, attractive speculation becomes the highest form of truth. Let's hope we can all laugh about how playful and ultimately pointless these speculative adventures grounded in dogma are.
Obviously science does go beyond mere speculation. It's just unfortunate that we cannot study things that don't seem to exist. Does Santa have a wife? Damn, science fails again.
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Remove this thread please
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On March 24 2011 04:07 Igakusei wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 03:42 DoctorHelvetica wrote: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? The most important core principle: monotheism. Although it is likely this is some form of sensationalist writing. There were many hebrew gods in the Old Testament, but they were considered idols. It's quite possible Asher falls under this camp, probable even. The issue under discussion is whether or not they were always considered idols. A lot of people replying in this thread have a view of the Bible that it is exactly what it says it is, which answers the question rather cleanly from a superficial point of view. From a historical critical viewpoint however, there is significant evidence of assumed polytheism in the Bible itself, one type of which I posted on the last page. There are other lines of evidence such as the types of stories told (e.g. Abraham and his immediate descendants interacting personally with a tangible God vs Yahweh guiding later Hebrews as a pillar of cloud/fire and generally interacting in more removed/intangible ways), and how they correlate to the types of stories told by other contemporary religions. The evidence doesn't support the assumption that Abraham's descendants always believed that there was only one God and the others were simply idols, but that's an assumption that most Christians are raised with and many of the posters here seem to be working from.
Well even some early Christians supported the idea that more Gods existed. Marcion had a huge following and he was excommunicated in the second century from the church because he was teaching that Yahweh was a lesser malevolent god that made the Earth when El wasn't looking. As a matter of fact the canonizing of the books of the Bible is a direct response to Marcion's work on making his own canon.
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I bet that there are some dumbass creationists in here.
I'd gladly skullcrush a creationist.
User was warned for this post
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On March 24 2011 04:14 Butterz wrote:
Remove this thread please
Why? It's been pretty civil so far...
On March 24 2011 04:19 Facedriller wrote:
I bet that there are some dumbass creationists in here.
I'd gladly skullcrush a creationist.
Goddammit, you're trying to prove me wrong. Let's try to keep this thing on-topic and avoid posting inflammatory one-liners that can't do anything but degrade the quality of the thread.
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studying ancient texts/belief systems =/= believing the ancient texts/beliefs
seriously, why are people trying to turn this thread into another god debate
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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.
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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.
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im pretty sure OGSMC isn't married 
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On March 24 2011 04:31 billyX333 wrote:
studying ancient texts/belief systems =/= believing the ancient texts/beliefs
seriously, why are people trying to turn this thread into another god debate
Absolutely!
But there's no chance in hell that many would reply to new evidence about the beliefs of some ancient people if it didn't have some significance for us now.
People inadvertently care about core truths. There's no way to talk sensibly about any of this without addressing how absurd the fascination is. Well, maybe there is a way, but it entails ignoring the elephant in the room. That's hard.
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Overall this thread includes a lot of historical information o.o;
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This is why i don't follow religion because it just gets to altered by man for their own means. Just live ur life the way you want it and follow whats good if a religion helps you with that follow it but take everything with a grain of salt.
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I kind of agree with this research. I mean, after all, within the Bible we can find two different tales of the creation of the universe (one next to the other believe it or not) and many accounts that Jesus had multiple brothers and sisters (blood related, not followers).
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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.
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.
But on the upside you do get to conceive of yourself as a crusader for truth in an era of self-delusions and you do get to conceive of your opponents as cogs in a machine of lies that has been under laborious construction for several millennia, so I guess there are compensations for throwing disinterested scholarship under the bus.
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I'm also interested to hear this type of thing but lets be honest, a book that old has been through more than one gratuitous edit.
When I learned about it in christian school it was basically solved with "the Bible is God's word, so He won't let man tamper with it", how do we know the Bible is God's word? Well, it claims it is. Talk about circular logic.
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I'm pretty sure that it's already common knowledge that Zeus was married to Hera, what's so new about this?
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On March 24 2011 05:17 carloselcoco wrote:
I kind of agree with this research. I mean, after all, within the Bible we can find two different tales of the creation of the universe (one next to the other believe it or not) and many accounts that Jesus had multiple brothers and sisters (blood related, not followers).
Creation isn't the only story we can find two conflicting accounts of in the Bible.
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What happened to her? Are they divorced now?
oh you mean, in theory, this theoretical being had a wife?
wow.
Breaking News!
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On March 24 2011 05:43 Mindcrime wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 05:17 carloselcoco wrote:
I kind of agree with this research. I mean, after all, within the Bible we can find two different tales of the creation of the universe (one next to the other believe it or not) and many accounts that Jesus had multiple brothers and sisters (blood related, not followers). Creation isn't the only story we can find two conflicting accounts of in the Bible.
I was just providing general examples...
In fact, according to the Bible all of us should have been stoned to death. Yes! It is in the Bible!
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Pointless discussion, might wanna start with proof for the existance of a god before trying to show that this being had a wife.
But yes, the fictional character might have had a fictional wife.
Don't really understand what this thread is trying to accomplish.
User was temp banned for this post.
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On March 24 2011 06:46 Nausea wrote:
Pointless discussion, might wanna start with proof for the existance of a god before trying to show that this being had a wife.
But yes, the fictional character might have had a fictional wife.
Don't really understand what this thread is trying to accomplish.
This is about the history of a set of religions, not the truthfulness of their claims. The existence or nonexistence of YHWH is beside the point.
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On March 24 2011 03:12 skypig wrote:
If you just read the Bible you will see that the Jews worshiped tons of other gods, which was why God had to pwn them over and over. I'm not sure why the researcher in the OP's post thinks that "other gods" are such a big deal; if he'd just read the Bible he would see that there was way more than "Asherah" or whatever...lol.
This. The only thing archeological fragments that claim "God had a wife" prove is, that at one point there were people who believed such a thing. Beyond that, it has no meaning whatsoever.
Between the landtaking of Israel under Josua, until the day Israel went into the Babylonian Exile, there was constant warfare between the monotheists in Israel and a polytheist faction who worshipped other deities besides JHWH (which was explicitly forbidden).
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.
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Here we go again. I'm not a religious person by any means, but I think I'm unbiased and educated enough to throw in my two cents here. I'm going to get straight to the point. Seeing these kinds of threads are starting to get annoying because the arguments and criticisms that a thread like this produces is so simple-minded and old that even I myself can counter them on behalf of religion. Actually, I don't even want to waste my time replying to these criticisms, nor would anyone else. My advice is that you guys (at least many of you) should take a break from playing starcraft to read up on theology books (supporting BOTH sides and written by well-respected and reliable authors) if you are actually interested in coming to your own truthful conclusions. Let's be honest. Most people who comment on threads like this in a gaming forum, youtube, etc., are people who probably googled up something like "why christianity sucks" to support their own preconceptions. I mean, hey, I used to do that too. I'm being totally honest right now. Recently, I began to consider myself to be a spiritual person, and I think it's a good change.
tl;dr: Arguing about religion over the internet is a total waste of time, and anyone who is serious about coming to a truthful conclusion about a particular subject would go to the library, bookstore, etc., to do legitimate research.
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On March 24 2011 04:42 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +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.
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On March 23 2011 11:49 gongryong wrote:
To be sure, there are plenty of texts out there that are yet to be discovered (similar to the Gnostic gospels on Judas and Magdalene).
All of which could be fiction. It's actually pretty rare that books convey an unbiased truth, I don't see why I would believe in stories.
The argument "because you can't disprove them" evidently useless. Are there other reasons?
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On March 24 2011 08:24 kn83 wrote:Show nested quote +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.
I get the impression that there is very little outside of the Bible that even mentions Yahweh, so most of the discussion about where he came from ends up being largely speculation. Here's a recent article by some scholar postulating that he started out as the Canaanite god of metallurgy, of all things.
http://jot.sagepub.com/content/33/4/387.short
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On March 24 2011 08:24 kn83 wrote:Show nested quote +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.
Oh really?
The cult of Yahweh predates the gradual development of monolatry and monotheism in the Kingdom of Judah.[97] Theophoric names, names of local gods similar to Yahweh, and archaeological evidence are used along with the Biblical source texts to build theories regarding pre-Israel origins of Yahweh worship, the relationship of Yahweh with local gods, and the manner in which polytheistic worship of Yahweh worship evolved into Jewish monotheism.[98] For example, one source presents Yahweh as the name of a god in ancient Semitic religion, in origin a storm god both related to and in direct competition with Hadad (Baal).[99] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
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On March 24 2011 08:24 kn83 wrote:Show nested quote +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?
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On March 24 2011 08:52 wadadde wrote:Show nested quote +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. Although John the Baptist has plenty of historical evidence backing him up and I think there was a legitimate mention of "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" at about 90 ad. Anyways if the gospel of Matthew was true I would think that the Romans would of wrote about all the Zombies/Ghost? and earthquakes described in Matthew 27:52-53 I mean Pliny the Elder wrote about Manticores so why he not write about that event?
try http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=94;t=000913;p=0
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On March 24 2011 08:52 wadadde wrote:Show nested quote +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?
Yes, please answer this. I was interested in this subject a while ago and came to a conclusion that debate is still up in the air.
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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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On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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.
I think you're misreading what he meant.
If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B)
The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A)
A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent
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On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent
His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?"
We still aren't getting anywhere
My original example of why that logic is terribly unreliable involves the life Hannibal. Every single historical record of Hannibal and his campaigns were written after his death. Details of the campaigns themselves are often in disagreement among ancient historians like livy and polybius.
Hannibal was by far much more significant than jesus was in their respective lifetimes yet both of their lives are quite obscure.
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On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere
He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal."
Hence the !B -> !A thing.
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On March 24 2011 09:57 Igakusei wrote:Show nested quote +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?
Whatever were preserved. There were obviously many since various scholars from all across Western Europe were scrutinizing the Vulgate. The consensus was that the Vulgate had some bad translations and blatantly added in passages that weren't present in any Greek manuscripts.
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On March 24 2011 10:51 Signet wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal." Hence the !B -> !A thing.
Wow, what?? "No evidence for the existence of jesus" followed by "he was an obscure figure"
How are we getting anywhere?
Why even mention "he was an obscure figure" That isnt contributing to your argument whatsoever. William Shakespeare lived in obscurity as well, so what??
You can't use "he wasn't a big deal" as an argument for his non existence.
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On March 24 2011 10:55 billyX333 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:51 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal." Hence the !B -> !A thing. Wow, what?? "No evidence for the existence of jesus" followed by "he was an obscure figure" How are we getting anywhere? Why even mention "he was an obscure figure" That isnt contributing to your argument whatsoever. William Shakespeare lived in obscurity as well, so what?? You can't use "he wasn't a big deal" as an argument for his non existence.
No one was arguing that he didn't exist.
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On March 24 2011 10:59 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:55 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:51 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal." Hence the !B -> !A thing. Wow, what?? "No evidence for the existence of jesus" followed by "he was an obscure figure" How are we getting anywhere? Why even mention "he was an obscure figure" That isnt contributing to your argument whatsoever. William Shakespeare lived in obscurity as well, so what?? You can't use "he wasn't a big deal" as an argument for his non existence. No one was arguing that he didn't exist.
I know, we are arguing whether or not there is evidence for his existence. This was your statement which I bolded, do you recall?
Reminding us that the records were written post death is in no way peculiar at all in the context of ancient history. I dont see why people mention this. That was my original point.
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On March 24 2011 10:52 koreasilver wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 09:57 Igakusei wrote: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? Whatever were preserved. There were obviously many since various scholars from all across Western Europe were scrutinizing the Vulgate. The consensus was that the Vulgate had some bad translations and blatantly added in passages that weren't present in any Greek manuscripts.
Ah, well from what I've read the Greek manuscripts had a large share of discrepancy problems too.
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On March 24 2011 10:55 billyX333 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:51 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal." Hence the !B -> !A thing. Wow, what?? "No evidence for the existence of jesus" followed by "he was an obscure figure" How are we getting anywhere? Why even mention "he was an obscure figure" That isnt contributing to your argument whatsoever. William Shakespeare lived in obscurity as well, so what?? You can't use "he wasn't a big deal" as an argument for his non existence.
I'm not arguing for his non-existence. This is a little confusing with the way you're using "you" and linking me to Jswizzy's argument. I'm only trying to clarify what he meant.
His original post that you replied to was:
Jesus probably did exist but there is no historical evidence to support that he did.
Which actually directly states his opinion that Jesus of Nazareth most likely did exist. Hardly something that can be considered an argument for non existence.
I think you are projecting a bit. (I don't mean this in an attacking way, just reread his original statement and see if it makes sense from the interpretation I offered)
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if humanity cauld take religion as an idea and not a fucking strict rule our world would be such an nice place. But this will never happen cause people are stupid. Well end of story for me is that the most epic fanatasybooks are written by them
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On March 24 2011 10:30 Signet wrote:Show nested quote +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.htmPolitics 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.
No, no, no. I agree with you. I didn't mean to suggest that contemporary academia only produces that narrative—just that it does produce that narrative and that it’s a pretty stale one. I mean the study in the OP certainly fits the bill, despite how outdated the bill is.
But I think we agree on that already, and I’m really interested in hearing some legitimately contemporary psychology so thank you for that link. Once I’m done typing on my thesis tonight, I’ll definitely give it a look-see.
Show nested quote +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.
I have no knowledge of the textual history of the Bible. It's kind of out of my area of expertise so I won't speak on it. I general, though, that the idea of a bunch monks slyly facilitating their private political schemes by intentionally manipulating their own manuscripts strikes me as a bit too Dan Brown.
I also categorically distrust activist scholarship as it almost certainly results in academics slyly manipulating their own manuscripts. It might be a little apolitical of me, but the world can to hell. I just want to know something before I die. And I think targeting the lowest common denominator of opponent ideologies kind of muddies the waters for everyone.
I got nothing but goodwill towards you, though. You sound like a fairly tolerable academic .
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On March 24 2011 06:59 MrBadMan wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 03:12 skypig wrote:
If you just read the Bible you will see that the Jews worshiped tons of other gods, which was why God had to pwn them over and over. I'm not sure why the researcher in the OP's post thinks that "other gods" are such a big deal; if he'd just read the Bible he would see that there was way more than "Asherah" or whatever...lol. 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.
How can you claim with certainty that the 'default position' for every human is that there is a god?
One would rather argue that the 'default' position is actually nothing at all. Why would default be an idea that is culture and time based, while default should actually be neutral and unbiased.
You make rather... bold assumptions regarding people who refute arguments from theists.
'pretend that he doesn't exist' - implies there IS a god. There is no logical argument for this way of thinking besides information from peer and some book that was written and rewritten for over 2000 years.
' It's some sort of mass psychosis' - this is just plain disrespect to people who doesn't believe what you believe.
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On March 24 2011 11:02 Signet wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 10:55 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:51 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal." Hence the !B -> !A thing. Wow, what?? "No evidence for the existence of jesus" followed by "he was an obscure figure" How are we getting anywhere? Why even mention "he was an obscure figure" That isnt contributing to your argument whatsoever. William Shakespeare lived in obscurity as well, so what?? You can't use "he wasn't a big deal" as an argument for his non existence. I'm not arguing for his non-existence. This is a little confusing with the way you're using "you" and linking me to Jswizzy's argument. I'm only trying to clarify what he meant. His original post that you replied to was: Jesus probably did exist but there is no historical evidence to support that he did.Which actually directly states his opinion that Jesus of Nazareth most likely did exist. Hardly something that can be considered an argument for non existence. I think you are projecting a bit. (I don't mean this in an attacking way, just reread his original statement and see if it makes sense from the interpretation I offered)
I was disputing one claim (which I bolded) and then the supposed evidence for why he believes there is no evidence. Thats all. Wasn't trying to debate but rather crush this misconception that records of historical figures need to be written during ones lifetime to be valid.
It might sound like I want an argument but I don't really. I just hear this completely invalid point brought up time and time again which irritates me to no end
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On March 24 2011 11:13 billyX333 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 11:02 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:55 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:51 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:45 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:41 Signet wrote:On March 24 2011 10:26 billyX333 wrote:On March 24 2011 10:24 Jswizzy wrote: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. I think you're misreading what he meant. If Jesus had been a big deal during his lifetime, there would have been better records. (if A then B) The fact that there aren't these records therefore shows that Jesus was an obscure figure during his lifetime. (if not B then not A) A -> B and !B -> !A are logically equivalent His original statement was "there is no historical evidence of jesus" and then he went on to prove his point by saying "why no records if he was a big deal?" We still aren't getting anywhere He follows that with "The fact is Jesus was an obscure figure." Which means exactly the same thing as "He wasn't a big deal." Hence the !B -> !A thing. Wow, what?? "No evidence for the existence of jesus" followed by "he was an obscure figure" How are we getting anywhere? Why even mention "he was an obscure figure" That isnt contributing to your argument whatsoever. William Shakespeare lived in obscurity as well, so what?? You can't use "he wasn't a big deal" as an argument for his non existence. I'm not arguing for his non-existence. This is a little confusing with the way you're using "you" and linking me to Jswizzy's argument. I'm only trying to clarify what he meant. His original post that you replied to was: Jesus probably did exist but there is no historical evidence to support that he did.Which actually directly states his opinion that Jesus of Nazareth most likely did exist. Hardly something that can be considered an argument for non existence. I think you are projecting a bit. (I don't mean this in an attacking way, just reread his original statement and see if it makes sense from the interpretation I offered) I was disputing one claim (which I bolded) and then the supposed evidence for why he believes there is no evidence. Thats all. Wasn't trying to debate but rather crush this misconception that records of historical figures need to be written during ones lifetime to be valid. It might sound like I want an argument but I don't really. I just hear this completely invalid point brought up time and time again which irritates me to no end
The entire point of that sentence was that the only account of Jesus in the 1st century outside of the Gospels was a forgery. The whole Josephus thing being born after Christ died was just to give reference to the time period in which Josephus was writing his histories. I wasn't using it as a proof. I realize that Ancient History is very ambivalent.
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On March 24 2011 08:45 Jswizzy wrote:Show nested quote +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. Oh really? Show nested quote +The cult of Yahweh predates the gradual development of monolatry and monotheism in the Kingdom of Judah.[97] Theophoric names, names of local gods similar to Yahweh, and archaeological evidence are used along with the Biblical source texts to build theories regarding pre-Israel origins of Yahweh worship, the relationship of Yahweh with local gods, and the manner in which polytheistic worship of Yahweh worship evolved into Jewish monotheism.[98] For example, one source presents Yahweh as the name of a god in ancient Semitic religion, in origin a storm god both related to and in direct competition with Hadad (Baal).[99] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
The source it list, "Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible" itself doesn't declare YHWH was a storm god, it merely states, "it has been assumed by earlier scholars such and such" and then concludes that YHWH is closer to El (a preserved name) than Hadad (the actual Semitic storm god). Thats why Yahweh is called El-Olam in the Bible. Yahweh itself means "I am that I am" and Hadad was said to be in conflict Yam ( a different god altogether) not YHWH. Also Ba'al is in reality an ancient title used for kings, male gods, and any prestigious male, not a particular name for anything.
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On March 24 2011 08:52 wadadde wrote:Show nested quote +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
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On March 24 2011 11:31 kn83 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2011 08:45 Jswizzy 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. Oh really? The cult of Yahweh predates the gradual development of monolatry and monotheism in the Kingdom of Judah.[97] Theophoric names, names of local gods similar to Yahweh, and archaeological evidence are used along with the Biblical source texts to build theories regarding pre-Israel origins of Yahweh worship, the relationship of Yahweh with local gods, and the manner in which polytheistic worship of Yahweh worship evolved into Jewish monotheism.[98] For example, one source presents Yahweh as the name of a god in ancient Semitic religion, in origin a storm god both related to and in direct competition with Hadad (Baal).[99] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh The source it list, "Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible" itself doesn't declare YHWH was a storm god, it merely states, "it has been assumed by earlier scholars such and such" and then concludes that YHWH is closer to El (a preserved name) than Hadad (the actual Semitic storm god). Thats why Yahweh is called El-Olam in the Bible. Yahweh itself means "I am that I am" and Hadad was said to be in conflict Yam ( a different god altogether) not YHWH. Also Ba'al is in reality an ancient title used for kings, male gods, and any prestigious male, not a particular name for anything.
I said Baal was a surname awhile back on page 4 and I am not arguing about anything but the idea that God is somehow some pantheistic deity.
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On March 24 2011 11:05 HULKAMANIA wrote:
I have no knowledge of the textual history of the Bible. It's kind of out of my area of expertise so I won't speak on it. I general, though, that the idea of a bunch monks slyly facilitating their private political schemes by intentionally manipulating their own manuscripts strikes me as a bit too Dan Brown.
I also categorically distrust activist scholarship as it almost certainly results in academics slyly manipulating their own manuscripts. It might be a little apolitical of me, but the world can to hell. I just want to know something before I die. And I think targeting the lowest common denominator of opponent ideologies kind of muddies the waters for everyone.
Well again, it doesn't have to be deliberate or malicious. It can be as simply as - if people believed X, and a certain passage can be translated as saying X or Y, which are they naturally going to assume?
A bit more bold would be - if people believe X, and the scriptures say something that contradicts that, maybe they honestly believe a prior error has occurred (I think this is the case for the Conservapedia folks who are/were in the process of writing their own Bible translation) and that they are simply correcting the error. Most, or at least many, people seem to believe that the views of God should coincide with their own views. Humorous example - about a month ago, a man gained internet notoriety when he committed some sort of hate crime against a homosexual, and in an interview he revealed a tattoo of Leviticus 18:22 as part of his justification for his actions. (tattoos are forbidden in Lev 19:28) But more generally, there's no shortage of people who insist that a certain Biblical scripture be followed without exception or even enshrined into our nation's laws, while insisting that others are unimportant or even that God really intends us to do the opposite. And after observing enough of this behavior and interacting with many such people, I'm convinced that they're not making it up or lying to themselves. They really do believe that God's views are in lockstep with their own, and that therefore any biblical passage which may contradict their political beliefs is a mistranslation or something that was only meant to apply to ancient society, while the views they agree with are timeless. (obviously this goes for some folks on both sides of the political aisle) If such a group of people had an opportunity to change Biblical cannon, I think they could have done so completely in good faith, honestly believing that they were correcting a past error that had occurred. (I'm not even saying that this necessarily happened, only that it is easily conceivable without a presumption of malice or conspiracy)
There was a cool History Channel show about some of the tricks Greek and Roman priests used to make people think miracles were happening at the temples. Different religion, but it's the same principle - people willing to be a little dishonest if they believed it would help people believe the truth. The Shroud of Turin is a good example of a hoax meant to persuade people to believe in the Resurrection. Claims of miracles taking place at a statue of Our Lady of Fatima at a church in CA, the famed Basilica of the Holy Blood in Belgium, supposedly liquefying saints' blood in Naples Cathedral (that the church will not allow to be chemically verified as actual blood) are all examples of what are almost surely deliberate hoaxes. But the people behind them believe that this small action of deception will bring people to God, so the good outweighs the misdeed right? It's the same rationalization that might have allowed people to edit the biblical texts if they believed it ultimately served God.
It's theorycrafting on my part, but a lot of knowledgeable historians seem to believe similar explanations.
I got nothing but goodwill towards you, though. You sound like a fairly tolerable academic .
Well I appreciate the good thoughts Dunno if I could be considered an academic; I've been out of grad school (math) for hm 5 years now. I still keep in touch with some academic psychs... their commentary is pretty interesting.
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In my opinion, the argument stated in the OP among others in this thread boil down to whether you take the Bible as the inspired word of God or not. Archeological evidence is somewhat arguable either way, but my approach is simple, being a believer:
The Bible as we have it today, is a mix of words, sayings, and stories, which as a whole make up the person of who i believe God to be. That is, take the whole thing, each part describes a part of God that exists. The bible by itself, or taken as a selection of literature or history, is just words on a page, but the information that it carries, speaks of a person. I believe that the original text/language it was written in comes closEST to capturing, as in a photograph who God is. Even these languages of men, though, are still fail to equate the 100% of who God is. However, just like if there was a biography written about you, reading the biography would not equate to KNOWING you.
Granted that every language of history has inconsistencies that can be interpreted a variety of ways. Granted that the Bible we hold now was written by men and you can argue or not whether they made mistakes or not. Granted that the aggregation of the Bible was also done by men, who may or may not have included or excluded for their personal reasons.
Counting all these things, if you actually meet the person of God, and are aquainted with who he is, then the information of Bible will either confirm or refute your personal experiences, and better yet, cause you to seek for more.
The apostle Paul didn't write the epistles thinking it was going to be combined into some sort of master book one day. He wrote inspired words to people he cared about, outlining the truth of what he believed God to be. The words are a container that hold the information which is truly without form and void.
"in the beginning was the Word..." to me reads "in the beginning there was information" That information to me is the God of the Bible in a person. A person who caused the information to have a container, take shape and be translated into what we understand.
God does want a wife, according the the bible, but not in the procreative way we do as humans. The union of two people being like one flesh, knowing and being known and accepted in a perfect marriage relationship is the closest thing we can relate to, so i believe that's what was used.
Great discussion though <3 to everyone who posted in this thread. I do mean everyone! ^^
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Religious books may be fake, it's always interesting, you don't need a story to be true to enlight you.
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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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If God's wife is the sacred tree, this takes "eating the forbidden fruit" to a whole new level.
Finally it makes sense why God was so pissed at Adam.
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Religions evolve and change over time. For instance, the Greek, Norse, and Hindu Gods all ultimately came from the same source, the lore was changed over time. To say that in some ancient proto-hebrew precursor to Christianity, there was ditheism, therefore the current idea of 'God' has a wife is the same as saying that there are many gods because the ancient Semites were originally polytheistic.
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Doesn't anyone realize that poking holes in bible lore is completely futile in this day and age... in EVERY day and age.
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On March 24 2011 18:57 Gnial wrote:
If God's wife is the sacred tree, this takes "eating the forbidden fruit" to a whole new level.
Finally it makes sense why God was so pissed at Adam.
The snake... oh... my... god. You're onto something here, I never would have considered that!
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edit: wrong thread : / sorry
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EPT
