CoreysMonster

But I thought theology was usually studied within the religion? Isn't that the difference between religious studies and theology?

__________________

bloodtrocuted93

I read "debates" as diabetes, probably because it's 6:52 am and I've been drinking coffee, doing homework, and getting high all night. I would like to take this opportunity to express my love and appreciation for diabetes, as well as for intelligent debates. Intelligent debates meaning well defended arguments, and not just a pissing contest.

Todd Hart

Depends on the course. Some theology courses are looks at the development of scriptures and mythologies and the like, they're fine. Sadly, quite a lot of theology courses focus on the kind of bullshit non-questions about resolving the problem of the trinity or observing the immaculate conception. They're pathetic, and anyone on them/running them should be mocked and ridiculed until they run from their universities crying.

__________________

MadClownDisease

Meh it's just studying the religion not only from an external perspective but from an internal one. Given that people genuinely believe in these things quite strongly, to see how they work on their own grounds is a pretty valid pursuit.

If there is a problem of the trinity, given how influential and potentially significant religion may be (ie if it were true) it's sounds to me a meaningful thing to examine.

__________________
Last.fm
Flickr

Todd Hart

What? It's like having a university course on counting the number of ****ing angels on a pinhead. It's pathetic drivel of the most nonacademic kind it's possible to imagine.

__________________

KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

Fire in the occult is supposed to symbolise 'ascension' or the path of consciousness onto a higher plane, it's used as a parallel to water, its opposite (the two seas meeting, synonymous with the concept of yin-yang, in essence; balance). It pops up in many different religions. It makes the Christian concept of Hell more interesting when thought of within this context.

And Apparently the Mesopatiaman flood goes only as far back as 1600BC, and was only a local flood, whereas the stories of the great flood date as far back as between 10,000BC - 3,000BC(Beggining of written history)

willT08

Well the rivers in question, Tigris and Euphrates show evidence of several large floods over the course of history. Any of which could have given rise to the great flood myths.

Consider this.

When we're talking about Mesopotamia we're talking about the only civilization in existence at the time. For the people there, they are the whole world and a local flood basically means a flood over the whole of human civilization. Therefore even what we'd call a 'local' flood would have been perfectly well described as a flood over the whole world to the people living at the time. For them a flood of Tigris and Euphrates would have flooded the entire known world.

__________________
Siktir Musik
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube

SlackerBabbath

Most historians would probably say that Jesus more than likely existed as a real person (after all, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus says that the Romans killed him, which suggests that he must have existed) but that some of the stories about him are either exaggerated or even completely fabricated.


Yes, the visible planetary bodies of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were most certainly considered as gods by several cultures. What seems to have happened is that notions of the gods were developed first then heavenly bodies with attributes that matched particular deities were picked out and named accordingly. Mercury was named after the fleet-footed messenger to the gods, probably because it moves so quickly across the sky, Venus, the brightest planet visible to the unaided eye, was named for the goddess of love and beauty. Jupiter, more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined, earned the name of the superior god.


I'd love to do something like that, but getting that sort of gig really requires qualifications, which I don't have. I just study this stuff purely out of personal interest.

Possibly, but I think that the flood myth probably started with actual flooding events that happened at the end of the last Ice Age when the Ice melted and sea levels began to rise. The problem is, by the time writing is invented and such stories are eventualy written down, we have a few thousand years of oral tradition first, which is open to a lot of change and development via the 'Chinese Whispers' effect.

Well, we know that the Mesopotamian mythology starts with two gods, Apsu (male) and Tiamat, (female) who were usualy depicted as fresh water and salt water. We know that the flood myth starts with the Mesopotamians too. Water seems to be very important to them in some way, which is hardly surprising since irrigation, along with agriculture, was first developed there. Then we have to consider that water is vital for all life to exist, so it's obviously always been considered as a very important commodity. Dunno about it being a 'good primative synonym for the wave nature of 'reality' ' though, it's possible I suppose but there's really no solid links to suggest it as far as I know.

Impossible to tell really, there certainly seems to be some sort of polarity in place in most myths of the first gods, for example, the mother goddess has been linked with the earth, the moon, with water, even with the metal 'silver'. While the sky father has been associated with the sky, the sun, with fire and the metal 'gold'. I suppose pretty much anything that involves both the aspects of female and male is going to involve a polarity at some stage or another.

__________________
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius




Slacker's Gallery Feel free to view my paintings and leave comments.

SlackerBabbath

That's the strange thing, up until around the time that agriculture was developed around 10,000 years ago, we find no evidence of masculine deities or male equivalents to the Venus figurines. Doesn't mean they were not worshipped of course, just that we've no evidence for it.
You're correct in saying that the general view of many polytheistic religions was usualy something along the lines of the earth (female) mating with the sky (male) resulting in creation, or in Mesopotamian mythology Apsu (male) and Tiamat, (female) who were usualy depicted as fresh water and salt water.
Male deities, particularly what we call a 'sky father' seems to start with sun or 'solar deity' worshipping. It kinda makes sense that this sort of thing would appear when agriculture was being developed because that's when people would naturaly notice that the earth seems to need the sun in order to make crops grow.

Consider the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden for a moment. Most would consider it to be the story of how God created humans, but look a little closer, it actualy has a lot of agricultural connotations within it. They live in a 'garden' (a man made construction for growing plants, infact, a word often connoted with the Garden of Eden, 'paradise' is derived from an ancient Persian word meaning 'walled enclosure') and the text describes their son Abel as working with livestock, and associates their other son Cain with the growing of crops, so it's very suggestive of an agricultural setting.
Y'see, up until agriculture appearing, all humans were hunter/gatherers, and traditionaly in normal hunter/gatherer culture the male hunts while the female gathers and it is the females who are also responsible for the growing of any crops. So we can possibly assume that it was females who were first responsible for the development of agriculture. But what would be the religious ramifications of this? Well, if we consider that hunter/gatherers used to worship a mother goddess or 'earth mother' figure, they could have considered that she provided them with all the wild food they ate, in other words, they considered that the 'earth brought forth life', (as the Bible suggests in Genesis 1:11 when it says 'Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.') then when people started growing their own crops the earth mother wouldn't seem as important anymore because now they were providing for themselves. That suggests that agriculture possibly caused a great upheaval in religion, that the earth mother was possibly facing a kind of rejection or demoting by people at the time in favour of a 'sky father' figure. It certainly seems that religion went from being feminine to masculine around that time.
Mother Goddesses are often associated with fruit, so possibly fruit was an important symbol to her followers 10,000 years ago, possibly the story of Eve offering Adam some fruit (traditionaly an apple) harks back to a woman attempting to convince a man to worship her female goddess rather than his male god? We really have no idea, but something along those lines could certainly have been the event that caused the human notion of a god being insulted and throwing Adam and Eve out of his garden.


Hmmm, I'm not particularly well read on the Kabbalah, but I'll endeavour to answer any questions you may have via research.


There's a line in Genesis that's quite interesting. “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years" (Genesis 1:14)
That could be a clue. We know that ancient people navigated by the stars and we certainly know that they used the movemant of heavenly bodies to mark the passage of time and define when certain important times of the year were, such as the best time to sow crops or harvest them, which would naturaly become 'sacred times'. This could have been seen as the influence of the gods, but we are probably talking about minor gods as opposed to major ones. The actual roots of early religious mythology seems to stem from ancestor worship. People considered that their loved ones somehow continued after death in some sort of an afterlife, watched over the living and even influenced events or the lives of people. It basicaly looks like their ancestor worship culturaly developed, causing their notions of their ancestors to slowly change into notions of them as deities.

Who knows? Maybe the earth mother and sky father were originaly based upon ancient ancestors, a real mother and father.



There are a couple of possibilities for dating a flood event that may have been responsible for the legend of Noah, one is the Black Sea deluge of around 7,600 years ago and another is the flooding of the Persian Gulf sometime earlier. Both of these were caused by the gradual raising of sea levels after the glaciers of the last major glaciation melted, but they were sudden events because both involved the breaking of a natural dam or 'sill' located at the Bosporus Strait for the Black Sea Deluge and the Strait of Hormuz for the flooding of the Persian Gulf.
Both would have been devastating because there is evidence that both areas were populated at the times of their respective flooding, but it is likely that the actual Biblical flood event was originaly based upon the flooding of the Persian Gulf, because the legends that the story of Noah was based upon, the much earlier Sumarian story of the water god 'Enki' warning 'Atra-Hasis' about the rest of the gods plans to wipe out humanity with a flood and instructing him to build a boat to save himself and his family, as well as the later (but stil pre-Genesis) Babylonian version found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which involved the same god but a different flood hero called Utnapishtim, come from the same Mesopotamian (modern day Iraq) area that the flooding of the Persian Gulf took place in.

That Sumerian story of Atra-Hasis and the god Enki is actualy the oldest known version of the flood story (and does indeed only feature a localised flooding event, but it was considered by the authors that all of humanity lived in the localised area that was flooded) which was written down around 3000 years ago but Atra-Hasis himself is often considered to have been a real Sumerian king who lived sometime around 1700 BC, or 3700 years ago, so it looks like either the story of the flood was passed on as an oral tradition for a very long time before it was eventualy written down and the figure of Atra-Hasis was added to the mythology, or possibly even that the earliest written versions are all lost to history.

The beginning of written human history starts about 6000 years ago with the invention of writing in the same place, Mesopotamia.


Well yeah, in some contemporary contexts, a distinction is made between 'theology', which is often seen as involving some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied, and 'religious studies', which isn't. But it's only a loose distinction, I generaly just call any kind of religious study, whether it involves some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied or not 'theology' as a general term because personaly, I don't see the point in confusing the matter with a distinction.
Look at it this way, if a religious person is studying theology, they are infact studying the exact same scripture as the person taking part in religious studies, the distinction is really only down to how the scripture is viewed by the person doing the studying. The study of religion is a complex thing, there really is no need to make it even more complex in this way.

__________________
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius




Slacker's Gallery Feel free to view my paintings and leave comments.

Todd Hart

Intriguing. I know this is a totally unsupported hypothesis, but is it possible that one of the reasons we see a rise in paternal gods, and then finally into a single monolithic male god figure throughout human societal development is the rise in the concept of wealth and the slow but inevitable development of capital? I've always found it peculiar that monotheisms tend to discourse on a godly father rather than a mother, given that the female form is surely the one we would assume would be the 'creator', women consistently being symbols or fertility in many societies, for obvious reasons. Obviously it's beneficial to politicians if the god is male, because then you can claim sexual superiority, but it's still peculiar that in pagan religions and the majority of non-European tribal religions we see predominantly a mother rather than a father.

__________________

SlackerBabbath

Well, look at where monotheism first appeared, in Egypt when the Pharaoh 'Akhenaten' developed Atenism (sun worship). This was certainly a patriarchal civilisation, Egyptian queens even wore false beards as a symbol of their position of power. They may have been women but they ruled as men

It seems that the whole thing with the male deity being in charge started in the Middle East, where people were more culturaly patriarchal, while in Europe at the same time people appeared to be more culturaly matriarchal, but then with the Middle Eastern religion of Christianity (derived from the Middle Eastern religion of Judaism) being adopted by the Romans and spread across Europe, Europe became more patriarchal from it's influence.

Anyhow, gotta go and do stuff now. I'll catch up with any more posts tomorrow.

__________________
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius




Slacker's Gallery Feel free to view my paintings and leave comments.

willT08

Also important to note that one of the main outcomes of Atenism was to divert money from the priesthood straight to himself. Monotheism and capital gain were linked from the very start.

__________________
Siktir Musik
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube

Tor_Hershman

I don't like debates.

KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

Can we say there's a distinction between 'jesus' and 'christ' then? Would you say that Jesus was just a man that got loaded with all the meaning of Christ symbology that had already existed for thousands of years? I remember from RE in year 7 my teacher saying there was no written evidence for Jesus whatsoever, idk


man, but, like, I mean, how did they even know
they've got it all mapped out so frikkin well, stonehenge/the pyramids etc show us how much time and effort and worth they put into astrology, it's easy to pass this off as mere saturated fascination but I like to think that it's something more and that it all actually means something. I read a theory (pretty well accepted in the scientific community) that gravity affects us more in higher dimensions, and I feel this gives astrology some sort of merit, that these big jackoff lumps of mass in space are actually affecting us somewhat, not ont individual level but as a whole. Ascribing to string theory this gets bloody interesting cos it says theres 11 dimensions; the 3d, the 4th 'layer' dimension of time, and then 7 above that, with gravity the strongest int 7th. Where does the stuff about the 7 levels of heaven come from then, with gods throne being where gravity is strongest? The Egyptians I think say death is traveling through the 4d towards the stargate and science says it isnt reeaally a dimensions, so theres the 3 we live in, then death, then 7 levels of heaven. Aaaaaaaaa I find the coincidence fascinating aha. Idk if you've ever read into numerology but 7 is pretty important n'all.


yeah 95% of the stuff I spew out has no evidence and is all just my opinion, if you've ever read into the occult you see how it takes up an entirely different meaning, though (water)


Yeah but like, yin-yang there is no spoon and all that shit. Anything we could ever make reference to is born out of Maya and is therefore not Truth, any concepts applied to this would be the same. The polarity is an illusion in that good-bad/light-dark don't exist. There is only a 'state', and as a prerequisite it splits up into two classifications, but the classifications don't actually exist, only the 'state'. It's what the Buddhist concept of balance is about, not 50% yin 50% yang but understanding that they're both one thing they diffuse towards infinity and become nowt/everything. It's like, if you grab a meter ruler, each end being +/-, balance isn't holding on to the 50cm mark, it's accepting that + and - aren't real, and so either the ruler extends towards infinity, or stops existing; it becomes 0 or infinity, the nature of god in both spiritual and scientific terms. Even Polytheistic religions had the two main male and female, good/bad gods, what I'm proposing is that male and female gods are the classification to represent the unfathomable 'state'. It turns to shit a bit if there's not really any evidence of it which was why I asked, but idk everything is an archetype of an archetype anyway int it, is that fertility god literally the earliest evidence of a diety?

Twofly

I do!But only mass debating...

__________________
I'm not saying not to trust the internet, but there's an alarming discrepancy between the number of iPads I've won & the number of iPads I own.

KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

dno again I always assumed it was riddled with heavy symbology. The serpent is meant to represent knowledge and its symbology is used in countless religions as a really important factor (oruborus/egyptian stuff/dozens of creation myths/other stuff) which is strange considering man surely would have considered such a predator a natural enemy, then why use it as a symbol for something held in such high regard? But yeah I took this to mean that eve (the female, intuitive side of the psyche) was influenced by the serpent/knowledge to attain god's wisdom by eating the 'fruit', which I would say means it separated consciousness/human consciousness from the rest of reality in that it became self aware, became detached from god and as a result dropped down to a heavier, more dense vibration ('fall' of man). Or maybe just even becoming aware that that's what it always was.
idk


nah I just thought it'd be coolto hear your own personal beliefs about it (:
I suggest you read up on it its really interesting aha


yeah not only did they mark their passage, but also ascribed 'personality' traits or characteristics upon their location in relation to us. And yeah man I guess people do live on don't they, 'people', or; 'personalities' are just a culmination of genes and environment, we see traits and we either become in tune with them or reject them depending on our preference, so maybe early man didn't really differ in personality much, and these ancestors became the groundwork for all the diversity in personality now. These ancestors would have embodied a raw personality state, and then maybe over time these traits of pure human 'being' were used to give meaning to planets
idk


think about it in psychological terms, we feel this burning hole inside of us and we give it a name, mum and dad, and out of that initial root the whole of religion is born
idk
its half ****ing 5 none of any of this is gonna be very well written but I cba going to bed till I'm done typing



oh, that was the last bit I needed to reply to
okay

maggot9779

http://worldviewnaturalism.com/debates/

600+ debates there.

__________________



Last.fm

Steam

SlackerBabbath

Absolutely true, the very first known instance of monotheism would appear to have been done purely so that the king of Egypt could make financial and political gains.

I often wonder what sort of an impact it would have upon religion if it turns out that the monotheism in the modern Abrahamic religions was originaly inspired by Akhenaten.



Well I certainly wouldn't say that that the meaning of Christ symbology had already existed for 'thousands of years' before Jesus because the notion of the 'Messiah' or 'Christ' only really started about half a millenium (during the Babylonian captivity) before Jesus was born.

There's plenty of 'written evidence', the Gospels for example, how reliable that evidence is however is a different matter.
It's really impossible to tell for certain, but there's been so much written about him by different people that most historians apply the 'no smoke without fire' rule and consider that, at the very least, someone that the character of Jesus was at least partially based upon probably existed. Jesus is kinda like the figure of King Arthur, he historicaly has a status of 'legendary'. In history, it is generaly regarded that there are three states, 'actual', 'legendary' and 'mythical' in which 'actual' denotes somone who really existed, 'legendary' denotes someone who possibly existed but who's story has probably been greatly exaggerated and 'mythical' pretty much denotes fictional characters.


'Stonehenge/the pyramids'? Not much effort astrology-wise there really. I mean, yeah, fantastic feats of engineering and building for the time they were built, but the only thing remotely astrological about them is their alignment with certain heavenly bodies. It's really only a case of seeing where certain bodies appear on the horizon on particular days of the year and making your building face that direction.


It is believed that the origin of 'Seven Heavens' goes back to astrology. Ancient astrologists could identify just seven great heavenly objects and assumed each was floating in a separate heaven.
Interestingly, although the number 7 is considered as important in religious numerology, lots of other numbers are too. Look, pick pretty much any number and I could probably provide you with some sort of applied religious symbolism to do with that number in just Christianity alone.

One signifies unity; both the unity of God and the unity of members of the Church.

The number two represents duality. Specifically, it can symbolize the divine and human natures of Christ or the material and the spiritual.

The number three represents the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.)

Four can represent the Four Evangelists (authors of the Gospels), the four corners of the earth, or the four seasons.

Five symbolizes the five wounds Christ suffered on the cross (hands, feet, and side), and by extension represents sacrifice.

Six represents creation, because God created in six days, or imperfection, because it falls short of the perfect number seven.

Seven is the number of perfection. God rested on the seventh day, Paul lists seven gifts of the Spirit and Jesus spoke seven utterances from the cross. The number seven is especially prominent in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, in which there are seven seals, seven churches and many other things numbering seven.

Eight represents regeneration or resurrection. Thus many baptismal fonts are eight-sided, as is the baptismal cross.

Nine is symbolises angels, since there are nine choirs of angels.

Ten symbolizes completion, since there are Ten Commandments, Ten Plagues, etc.

Twelve is often used to signify the whole church, since there were 12 tribes of Israel and 12 apostles.

Thirteen represents betrayal since there were 13 people at the Last Supper.

Forty symbolizes trial or testing, since Noah's flood, Israel's wandering in the wilderness, Moses' stay on Mt. Sinai, and Jesus' temptation in the wilderness all lasted forty days.

See what I'm saying? In my own opinion, people read too much into the apparent symbolism of numbers.


Again with the symbolism? Look, let me just explain something about the purpose of symbolism in religion. Symbolism is often used by people who wish to make themselves look more important than they really are. They often claim that there are certain links between certain images or numbers and certain religious stuff and that only they have the secret knowledge to unlock these links, and if you follow them or join their group or give them money, they'll share their secrets with you.... and that's the way it's been for a few thousand years. Almost anyone can invent a symbolic link, and this has resulted in religion being saturated in hypothesis about apparent symbolic links that infact probably mean nothing at all. We'll learn very little about our ancestors and their beliefs if we keep getting bogged down with endless possible symbolic links.

__________________
“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius




Slacker's Gallery Feel free to view my paintings and leave comments.

KiLLSWiTCH-KnoT

dno I just find it interesting, I don't regard it as fact or owt, just in the same way that many people find different mythologies interesting