This would go over well if he preached it here in America.




Welcome back, btw!

I mean, in both cases, the personality cult had to start from a human, in both cases charismatic.

Then the close knit inner circle of followers starts building upon their stories.

Then early propagandists build up on the myth to gain followers.

Stories gets magnified, beautified. The mothers of all tall tales.

Mohammed likely had an actual historical existence. Family, descendents, at least a few corroborating external records from the time.

There is a good bit of evidence, conversely, that early Christianity was either one or a couple different "mystery cults" similar to others of the time - Mithras, etc. and that the Christ figure was originally an entity of purely spiritual redemption which was only later given an objective "historical" existence, with elements of the deicide-rebirth stories of Osiris, etc.

I originally thought as you- itinerant rabbi, actual guy upon whom the myth was built- but there are some solid arguments put forth that that may not be the case.

And of course there is zero corroboration outside the NT- the Josephus account being an obvious forgery- of any of it. If you get into these debates- which I advise not doing- you will be told that "historians all agree jesus existed". Yeah, biblical historians, who sort of have a vested interest in the historical veracity of the bible. Other historians dont touch it, because the NT isnt a historical document.

John the Baptist was probably a real guy- Jesus, maybe not.

Cults coalesce more easily around some charismatic figure.

It's more difficult for a leaderless group to be fired up.

So, ther must have been some kind of guru at some point,

and when building up their ideal 'Jesus', the group probably buit upon some % of the guru.

Anyway, it's academic in the dismissive sense of the term: we'll never know.


And it's not that important to begin with:

Christianity will end up dying under the weight of its vagueness and contradictions.


Unlike the healthy belief in the Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster (may pesto be upon it)

I think a nice aglio, olio, peperoncino sauce is much better than pesto.

on aglio & olio.

But I regard them as heretics (I try not to talk to them some minutes per day)

Honestly, a pesto rosso is proof of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But i also have an intrinsic - maybe "rabble rousing" - instinct to challenge widely held assumptions that seem to be based more on what "everybody knows" than actual evidence. And if you read into it, there are some solid arguments to back up the "no historical jesus" line.

http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/home.htm

For one, the cults were pretty common, and these mystery cults did not all have a leader, per se. Two, JTB probably was real, and some of his life was likely incorporated into the Jesus story. Three, there are lots of elements of Jesus's "life" which, again, parallel the stories of Mithras, Osiris, etc.

But it's a not-resolvable debate, as you say.. and i sure dont bother getting into it with hard core believers. But i find it interesting to think about.

I suspected that even more after reading a lot of Josephus. He demonstrates repeatedly that rabble-rousing Messiahs were a dime a dozen between roughly 30-66 CE around Judea.

e.g., there was the "Samaritan Messiah," sometime after Alleged Jesus died. He preached against Roman rule and gathered quite a large army of followers. Then he led them to the Samaritans' holy mountain, in preparation for an attack on Jerusalem. (The Samaritans had their own god, similar but not identical to the god of their Jewish neighbors. Which naturally caused a lot of friction since there can only ever be One True God. Cough...)

If he was hoping to intimidate the Romans with that tactic, it was an Epic Fail. The Roman governor at the time was still Pontius Pilate, and he dealt with this insurgency the same way he dealt with all the others, according to Josephus. Pilate called out his troops, massacred a bunch of the insurgents, captured the Messiah and had him executed.

It's easy to imagine bits and pieces of that story, and a thousand others, being heard and incorporated into the writings of religious propaganda later cranked out to support the New One True Religion (cough again).

and I'm sure he'll find some "Christian" law firm to take up his case.

I'm glad I'm retired. I swear, if I had to put up with a jerk like this at work, I would have ended up being fired.

Harassment is harassment.

who had prayer meetings in her office, and the security guard one AM as I was walking in was telling me about the weekly meetings on Monday AM in the office between 8-830 and "I'll be looking for you next week." It made me really uncomfortable that the person in charge of my merit raises could judge me based on my attendance.

One poster here who called Hillary Clinton a "cunning stunt" said I should shut up and be happy to have a job, what's there to worry about and all I cared about was money and that was my motivation, not the religious intrusion on my secular job

here...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1230&pid=29636

Looks like someone did some scrubbing.

I was outed as an atheist and they started in on me as soon as the boss decided to turn my company into a "Christian Workplace".

The worst wasn't that they tried to coerce me to attend it was the fact that they couldn't wait to tell me that they PREYED for me in those meetings.

Not because I was overworked and had no help in my department, not because I had a cancer scare, no they preyed for me because I needed to find God.

How fucking insulting is that?

When employers abuse their authority and encourage their employees to proselytize non-believers it's no different that any other kind of workplace harassment.

that your boss having other workers pressure you into coming to a weekly during-work-hours-on-work-grounds prayer meeting was just like going to a dinner party. And that when my concern was that my performance at work would be based on my attendance at these meetings, I was summarily dismissed as being cold-hearted, greedy, and money-grubbing. Because I guess anyone who doesn't volunteer at their job and pay their rent with smiles and hugs is a greedy bitch

It was incredibly uncomfortable. Even more so since there was a large contingency of people there who perfectly fit the bill of "holy rollers." This wasn't a matter of not fitting in with my peers - it could have been occupational suicide. This was an incredibly vindictive and petty-minded group of folks. I have no doubt that if I publicly stated my atheism, calls to the Ethics Line about made up bullshit would have been in short order. I mean, these same folks called the ethics line on my new boss (that replaced the holy roller) because he wore a pink shirt to work and that made them uncomfortable because only gay men wear pink shirts and they don't believe in gay because of their religion therefore his pink shirt was a religious bigotry.

O_o

It all worked out in the end - the interim manager soon quit after being replaced with a permanent manager who ended up being a buffoon, but one that gave me 2x's the amount generally allowed for performance bonus and 1.7x's the amount for yearly raise. I ended up getting close to $10,000 last year because of that.

And on edit - I know the pink shirt story is true because the number of bullshit calls to the ethics line were so numerous and so bullshitty that HR senior management had to come to our office and tell us in no uncertain terms to calm the fuck down and stop abusing the ethics line (which is for fraud, waste, and abuse, not poor wardrobe choices.)

for the record, my new boss was open about his Hindu faith. Surely that couldn't have led to the complaints about pink shirts...or drug dealing out of his office...or any of other calls made to Ethics...WHen HR came, he had been there for roughly 4 months and over 72 ethics line calls had been made about him. He was a douche, but not THAT much of a douche.

Good for you for standing up for yourself, and our now ts'd friend can go fuck himself. Anyone who thinks harassment in the workplace is just fine if it's religious shouldn't be here.

The prayer meetings at my company were every day and on all shifts. Many people were pressured into going but a few of us stood up and paid for it. When it's the owner of the company doing it there's not much you can do to protest except refuse to go.

and I have been on the receiving end of both. And like all other kinds of emotional and physical trauma, they give you such a physical reaction. I was nauseous going to work every day because I didn't want to be accosted by the security guard. I would pretend to be on the phone when I walked in the building. I made sure I *always* had work to do at 8-830 on Mondays, and felt very uncomfortable when people would talk about the meetings.

Later, after the interim manager had been replaced and was back to being a normal worker, she couldn't hold the meetings in the manager office - she wasn't manager. So she'd wait until Wednesday, when the case manager wasn't in the office, and use HER office as a prayer group meeting from 11-1130. now THIS pissed me off because it's an extra 30 minute break that non-participants didn't get. But again, complain about the Christians and they'll accuse you of dressing gay just to persecute them.

It's fine though. They're all unemployed now and I work out of my home. I hope I don't sound petty....I mean, everything happens for a reason. It's god's will....

Not that I believe in karma per se but my dad always said what goes around comes around and I believe in him.

go figure

Don't deliver an ass kicking!

it's actually a better word

so much so, I wasn't really even sure it WAS a misspelling

And a go fund me page too.

And I've had lots of jobs in my life. The most conservative boss I ever had liked GW. Still, he had no objections to printing jobs for LGBT groups or anyone else.

We never agreed politically, but he never put my job in jeopardy because of that. He was a Catholic. We never talked religion. He never brought it up.

It hasn't been a problem at most of my jobs but when it was it really sucked.