JackalUK

Saying that, in a few weeks it's likely we will see the return of the 'bible bashers' in town who stand around in a group at night shouting at people out on the town on the weekend. They tend to disappear over the winter months.

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SlackerBabbath

Ahhh, Evangelists... my favourite prey.
I've had a few 'very public' debates with those guys.

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Zaphikh

Anybody who's spent decades of their life studying faeries and unicorns, their literature and essays, is most certainly full of knowledge and would be considered intelligent.

See how that reasoning falls apart? Yeah, it hits right home with theology because it's comfortable for you to side with something you sincerely want to believe in. Don't brush off faeries and unicorns as nonsense and a waste of time. The same awkwardness that's elicited from hearing about the seriousness of faeries and unicorns is identical to the same feelings secular folks feel towards theology. You can read and study it till you're blue in the face, but just because you've done it a long time doesn't mean it's worthwhile or even factual.

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ErikLensherr

Ugh, and then he'd mug at the camera like he'd made some great point. Buckley was full of shit, watch Noam Chomsky's appearance on Firing Line to see it made painfully obvious.

Although I'll give him a bit of credit for coming out against the drug war.

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willT08

I always enjoy watching Buckley even though really he's a fairly weak debater, he's a wonder to behold in my opinion.

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Zaphikh

Yep. Bullshit with the aid of reading a thesaurus. The debate between Buckley and Chomsky is extremely amusing to watch.

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CoreysMonster

To be completely fair, what you're talking about is basically studying mythology, right? I'd think it pretty cool to know a lot about the mythology of a bunch of different cultures and time periods, know their historical relevance and what their mythology says about the culture.

I also just realised that's analogous to religious studies, not theology. Carry on.

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Zaphikh

It's certainly shaped cultures, psyches, and a handful of other things - there's no denying that. In that thought though, so has the idea that the Earth was flat. I'd definitely agree that just because something may not carry any truth-value does not imply that it isn't influential.

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guitarxo

I have no idea what's going on ITT but i dont like participating in debates because i get overly emotional in them and feel like crying

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save the raffi

red_hot_chili18

I love a good mass debate

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KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

Yeah I read somewhere that the Judaic religion was a mashup of all religions around at that time, I find it super interesting that 'modern' Christianity is almost 'Religion.4', in a way.

A lot of this stuff is supposed to have something to do with astrology and that Jesus and Moses never actually existed in person, but were the representatives of the starsigns Pisces(?) and Taurus respectively (Moses was said to have horns)

"At the end of the Taurean Age, when Moses came down from the mountain to speak with the people and to greet them with the new commandments from God, he became angry when he found his people had became weak and restless in his absence, and so had created a golden calf to worship; a sign that they had reverted back to the old ways of the Taurean age of worship because they thought Moses had deserted them. Moses then forbade them the old ways of worshipping the golden calf and made them learn the ways of the new commandments. "

the bull is meant to represent Moses or sumert, in that Moses is Taurus
and the 'symbol' for early Christianity was a fish cos it's Pisces int it

Also, I read somewhere that El was the Canaanite deity Saturn, who represented chaos and destruction and shit

which is why loads of words go like "ELder" "ELite" "ELected "ELaborate" (maybe not that last one)

the temples of Saturnalia were meant to be something big in Babylon, which is why they may have been leeched for early Judaic foundations





It's interesting as **** though cos it means that religions to this day are still based on astrology

TooktheAtrain

lol I loved it when vidal really pissed him off.

VillainousLatin

Trololololol

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SlackerBabbath

Nope.

Regardless of whether you believe in any religious notion or not, regardless of whether you believe in fairies and unicorns or not, the various beliefs in them are still interesting subjects to study, and studying anything, even if it is mythological, involves academic means of gathering knowledge. It's not what you study that denotes intelligence, but rather the way you study it and how much information gather and comit to memory on that subject.
There are many different people who are experts on various religions, mythologies and folklores who are all considered as 'intelligent'.
Infact, I know a woman who's considered as an expert in 'folklore', which involves the legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales, stories, tall tales and customs that are the traditions of certain cultures. Her studies often involves tales of fairies and unicorns and all other manner of exotic but mythical beings. She knows full well that these things don't exist, but studying such things gives us a window into the way that people used to (and sometimes still do) think. These folklore beliefs, just like religion, are part of the beliefs that helped to shape our cultures and societies, so really, one can consider the study of such things as a specialist subject within the anthropological study of human history.

You don't have to believe in any religion to study theology you know.


So you're suggesting that the study of anything that doesn't involve hard scientific reality serves no purpose? That we should burn any books we have on the subjects of religion, mythology and folklore and allow any human knowledge we may have on such subjects to just disappear?


So if you can admit that, how come you don't value the study of something that was so influential? Do you honestly think that it's a worthless study or is it just that it's something that doesn't personaly interest you?

No no no, that's a common misconception. Moses' face was described as "cornuta" ("horned") in the Latin Vulgate translation of the passage from Exodus in which Moses returns to the people after receiving the commandments for the second time. This even influenced artists such as Michelangelo to depict Moses with horns.

But we now know that people like Michelangelo misinterpreted the term and that the original meaning of the term meant "shining", in a similar way to how polished horn (a common decorative material in ancient times) shines.



Saturn was a Roman god (the god of agriculture infact) and the father of Jupiter, the head or 'king' of the Roman pantheon of gods. We can consider him as the same god as the Greek Titan Cronus who was the father of Zeus. Y'see, in Greek and Roman mythology, the gods were not the first things to exist. Both mythologies start with animistic forces of chaos or nature, who give birth to offspring (the Titans in Greek mythology) who in turn give birth to the heads of the current pantheons, (who in turn gave birth to the lesser gods of the pantheons. There's certainly a similarity to the Canaanite 'El', who was also considered as the father of the gods and, like Saturn, who was married to the Roman fertility deity and earth/mother-goddess called 'Ops', El was also married to a fertility deity and earth/mother-goddess called Asherah. The Greek equvalent Cronos was married to another mother goddess called Rhea, who is often considered as the same goddess as the Roman Ops.

This isn't really surprising, many pantheons of the ancient world had equivalent gods who were considered to be the same gods of different cultures but with different names. It possibly points to an earlier mythology that several different cultural mythologies split from.

The whole mother goddess thing is actualy more interesting to study y'know because the figure of a mother goddess is the earliest known deity to be worshipped, and it appears that she was worshipped in one form or another for a phenominaly long time.

Allow me to demonstrate.
Take a look at this.

It's known to archeology as a 'Venus figurine' and is made from mammoth ivory. It was found near Schelklingen, Germany and is known as the 'Venus of Hohle Fels' (after the cave it was found in) and is dated to between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, placing it in the 'upper paleolithic'. This is so long ago that Neanderthals still existed.

Compare that to this slightly younger figurine.

The famous 'Venus of Willendorf', carved from a type of limestone, found in Lower Austria near the city of Krems and dated to around 25,000 years ago.
We can see an obvious similarity. Almost all the early Venus figures have large or drooping breasts, such as a woman who has already had children would have.
They are generaly small, but never seem to be made to stand up and they are quite often very smooth to the touch in places, as if someone has worn it smooth with constant handling. This suggests that it was something that was considered to have been of enough importance that it would be carried around with people, who up until around 12,000 years ago were all nomadic.
The main reason that we associate Venus figurines with the Mother Goddess is that the figures continued to be made for thousands of years, gradualy changing in style, right up until historicaly fairly recently, when we know for definate who they represent.
The first ones, as we can see, were very crude, but over tens of thousands of years have become more and more stylised.

About 8000 years ago the Venus figurines gradualy became seated figures, like this one from Samarra, Iraq.

Eventualy we see a similar huge woman, again seated, but more stylised and flanked by two lions, like this one from Catalhoyuk, Turkey.

Now compare that with this known figure of 'Cybele', the Phrygian (Turkish) version of the Earth Mother. Notice what she's flanked by?

And compare that with this depiction of the Greek version Rhea.

Also, look at what guards the entrance to the Temple of the Egyptian mother goddess Isis at Philae.


So, looking at the way that mother goddess depictions look to have have developed over the countless millenia, it would appear that all of these different mother goddesses from different cultures share a common cultural origin dating back at least 35,000 years ago. This actualy makes a hell of a lot of sense when we consider that humanity started out as a single culture in Africa then seperated and spread out around the world.

If we consider the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah as yet another developmental version of this figure, we can actualy link Abrahamic religion (via El and Yahweh) to extremely ancient prehistoric religious notions.

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KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

ah I see I see. It just seemed to make sense to me that as opposed to physical people, the stories of such prophets were based on the development of archetypes which shared a common ancestor within astrology. Would you say Jesus physically existed then? The notion of the crucifixion and rising on the 3rd day, and the concept of 'christ' as a whole, is a concept way older than 2000 years old


aye again I had always assumed that this had connotations with astrology, in that primative cultures may have considered constelations as literal Gods, ascribed mythology to them and gradually developed a picture of what they represented, which 10Ks of years later became the Greek/Roman Gods


Is there not a dual nature to this, is there not also a masculine equivalent that was worshipped around the same time? I'd assumed the archetype of the mother God was the same thing as Gaia and that the father God was the 'sky' (can't remember the name atm) and that the fornicaton of the two gave rise to life on Earth (in conjunction with creation myths involving the universe. Can we talk about the Kabbalah for a bit?)


yeah this is what I meant by saying modern religion is just neo-astrology, assuming that astrology was the root of early religious myth.

TooktheAtrain

slacker m8 have you considered being a consultant for a documentary or something? No offense intended, but it seems like if your only outlet is this forum your (considerable) knowledge seems a little wasted. The amount and quality of the stuff you post could probs fill an encyclopaedia.

KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

^that, and


this, would you not say that the correlations between mythologies such as the war between the god and devil/tiamat and the notion of the flood possibly indicate a more tangible conceptual meaning than (obviously) a literal acount of events or mere myth? A buttload of the stories of the Flood came up on cultres that really had no way of interacting with each other, meaning the only link they would have had would have been a common link. It made sense to me that all these stories were steeped in heavy symbolic meaning and ad origins in fact, and were all actually based around the human psyche (as above so below)

The symbology of water also has heavy symbology in the occult and also most religions, I'd put this down to water being a good primative synonym for the wave nature of 'reality'. I won't go into what water is meant to represent cos I'm sure you're already well aware, but what would you say this meant in regards to the flood/aquarius? Could the two not be the same thing, and if its all man's way of interpreting the psyche, then other than the whole purifaction via 'pure consciousness' thing, what do you personally think it might represent? Dyou think it has any basis in some form of truth whatsoever?

Feel free to apply that last bit to all religion/mythology as a whole, in terms of the psyche as well as 'historical fact' (shit that happened irl that gave birth to these stories)

Same thing on the symbology of fire, as well. This is what I were getting at in that bullshitty thread I made when I were really baked that one time, You seem abundantly intelligent enough to understand what I mean when I say the polarity doesn't exist so I won't go into it, but how would you say this relates to mythology? They all have this thing of the main male god getting giggy with the main female god, but if the polarity is an illusion and that the only truth is Void, how would you say that this came to be? Could the concept of Void/monotheistic God not be a forerunner of every mythology?

JohnnyGenzale

Try the football thread. Great arguments there.

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Todd Hart

The great flood is based on a real event in Mesopotamia which was embellished by being passed down over generations.

As for fire, it's not hard to see why people would consider fire a symbol of danger and destruction.

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