West,

I dont understand your obsession with knowledge being 'factual'. Actually Im not even sure what you mean by factual.
Can facts explain love or anger or wonder? Can they imbue life with meaning or value.

Scientists deliberately limit themselves to 'facts' as evidence for their theories and so they have no explanation for the mystery of being or even of simple conciousness but even scientists know love and anxiety and marvel at the things they see but cannot explain.

A religion based on 'facts' would be boring. A life constrained to the 'factual' would be tedious. The problem with belief in the supernatural world is precisely that some people, thinking concretely, regard it as a 'fact'.

Angels, demons, satan, god and all that mob are metaphors that have congealed into meaningless cliches that have little or no power to move the human spirit precisely because that are being taken as facts, boring, unprovable, undeniable facts. The imagination that originally breathed life into these words is now largely lost and talk of demons and gods has become concrete and mundane.

If the Bible doesnt do it for you then read something that does light the spark of your imagination... The Lord of the Rings... Midsummer Nights Dream... whatever but get the wheels of your imagination rolling and then see what you can do with God who creates worlds, chides and rewards her people, makes covenants and despairs over her lost children, who battles satan and who takes on this life herself in her search for a way to effect a universal salvation of the cosmos. Being imagination does not make it all untruth but rather is a powerful way of exploring truths that facts cannot approach. Out of imaginative exploration God emerges as a truth that imbues life with meaning and a wonder beyond our normal powers of explanation. The god who inhabits the parallel, spiritual universe is not the God who gives life here and now.

waterboy,

Thank you: But, I find your posts to me and West confusing.

My comments over several threads have related Mystery Cults to theocrasia and sycretism. I have said virtually nothing about gnosticism, except, perhaps, to Philo. The direction of the Mystery Cults divided after the Jewish excile to Pella. Some Jews became Christians to have access have to the Holy Land, others moved away from Pella to Syria (?). In this frame, and in previous posts, I have not been addressing the 200-325 gnostics or Zocoaster.

Rather, I have cited the godheads of other mystic religions having communities common to Christianity; Egyptian and Roman.

There is little new to the accretions appended to Jesus. Many of the theocrasic elements come from the Mystery cults and in Christianity. Where Christianity might differ is in its emphasis on Revelation through textual study and [feigned] histologies. [Paul also spun the cult into a religion]

Mysteries?

-- The Trinities, Sacraments, Transubstantion and the Transfiguration seem pretty mystic to me. Moreover, you critique West for trying to nail you down about Ghosts and Spirits. ---

Okay, now to my post that occasioned your response: My faulty historical accounts... What don't you believe? Where am I in eror?

-1- No Ammon (Ammon-Ra)? It was an Egyption god. The Ancients created composites, when lands merged. Heard of Tut-Ank-Amun? The last name is his god's.

-2- Sebellianism did not have a trinity?

-3- Galerius (313) did not allow freedom of religion and the Christians (325) overturned the rulung?

-4- The Christians, in Taliban facsion, destroyed the Great Statue of Serapis (390)

-5- That the Greek and Latin Churches split (1054) over the Filioque controvery?

Please number and cite your sources refuting the above 1~5. Refutation is valid. I will readily recognise any mistake. But you need to put up and show me wrong.

Oliver,

Exactly what point are you trying to make about Christianity?
Once you make that clear then there might be some point discussing the evidence.

West, okay i can see what you are saying now.

To extrapolate a bit on your assertion - to claim *anything* without the facts in the first place means such claims are meaningless as the source of information can only be made up.

At cursory glance i would agree with this statement. My only counter would be to say that, even still, the content of a claim may yet be true or untrue, regardless of the baselessness of the claim itself. It would be kind of like guessing or speculating in this case, eg. gambling or fortune telling might serve as illustrations. But still, the actual truth of the matter does not depend on the factual knowledge (or lack of it) underlying a claim made about it - A blind person may claim that the sky is blue having never seen it (and having absolutely no other facts at hand - in case you want to get wise about it ;)).
So your reasoning that "God is made redundant by the (baseless) claim of god" is not necessarily true which means your conclusion of "symptom of a much deeper problem" is also uncertain.

I can also offer another alternative view only as an exercise of mental gymnastics, not as an argument for the truth of God or souls, and that is that it might be oddly possible that factual knowledge on which the claims of gods and souls are perhaps based was available or known at the time of the origination of these claims and has since been lost, become hidden, or is no longer possible to obtain.
With the focus and emphasis on materialism in modern times, perhaps the ability or capacity to perceive those facts that could serve as a valid base for such claims is obstructed, and all we are left with are the remnants from ancient times, the relics and scraps carried down through the ages that hint at but do not amount to conclusive evidence and so fail to substantiate the same claims made in the present.

Donnie no doubt all religions have evolved by chinese whispers from linear anthroplogical (family groups) threads. [Baseless Conjecture to illustrate a point ->]Possibly the story of the ressurection of various deities has evolved from the family myth that Uncle Ug [no offence to our ancestors intended, I am certain they had complex dialects] survived fever in the stonge age or the expected migrating herds of wooly antelope one season never appeared ever again during the Ice age thaw. It could be argued then that religion offers a level of wisdom although the lessons are lost in time just as simpler village life is lost in the complexity of urbanisation.

This being the case it does not matter if the sky is blue to the blind except to a blind sailor who's faith in the blue sky puts him/her at risk. There again the blind have the sight of the non-blind to give them the truth. If everybody was blind know one would know what blue was.

But this is not the claim of religionists. God believers are claiming an absolute. God believers are claiming laws which they claim govern everybody and even if these assertions are done passively such as the way Tony Abbott forces his ideological superstitions onto the Australian people it is still a form of violence.

The magic religion claims such as giving happiness just does not work often the god believer is the most miserable. The moral assertions religion claims are also myth. Christian fundamentalism in America for example is interlinked with the gun lobby. The MOST Christian devoted to modes of physical violence.

Moral guidence? There is something suspect about a person who needs external moral guidence in order to not harm others.

waterboy it appears you are arguing we must believe in myth for the sake of believing in myth.

"Exactly what point are you trying to make about Christianity?
Once you make that clear then there might be some point discussing the evidence." - waterboy

1. Christianity in many ways is undifferentiated from the mystery cults. That a theist should statand back and look at a broader picture. This discussion is known to the oldies following Sellas and I across 5-6 threads, based on "How" does God exists (Sellick).

2. Christian spin looks at the deadly needs of the Romans et al., but were just as bad themselves.

3. Reply to your comment about mystery cults.

4. The Jesus cults of c. 33-100 grew into a religion.

You haven't answered my questions, where the history presented is wrong. Please do so. To many it is as factual as The Battle of Waterloo.

Early Point: Sells some threads back seem to recognise that Christianity was not a Mystery Cult, even though it shared many characteristics. My point was that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then... . Figuratively, one could take the components of Christianity and map then on table just as one can place elements on the oeriodic table. At the time, I think I said somethink like by rejecting Mithras and accepting Jesus, was a bit like accepting Helium and rejecting zinc. Look at the creation of relions, from the architecture of the theocrasia of the period, especially c. 600 BCE - 700 CE.

Please adddress the error in my histographies before countering the aforementioned. Thanks.

4. Address 1~5 that my citations are not historical.