If Jesus Had Never Been Born... No Art, No Law, No Science, No Human Rights
Words of Truth
Parallel universes may be becoming fashionable. Robert Harris's 1992
novel, "Fatherland," set in Europe after a Nazi victory in World War
II, was made into a well-received cable television movie last year. On
March 22,1996, the FOX network premiered a new series, "Sliders," in
which a school science project permits the protagonists to move
between worlds like our own, but with different histories. My own
interest in all this is that I am a regular on an Internet Newsgroup
called "alt.history.what-if." If you are one of those sensible people
whose eyes now glaze over at the mention of the Internet, rest assured
that your are not in for more cyber-hype here. The "what-if" group is
just a forum for people to exchange speculation on what the world
would be like if the Carthagenians had won the Punic Wars, or if the
Spanish Armada had landed in England, or if the South had won the
Civil War (there is always lots of discussion of the last one). In any
event, many of these discussions allude to the role of religion in
Western history, mostly in a disparaging fashion. I wrote this
submission for Christmas, 1994, to make the other regulars think
through the implications of this attitude. The piece caused enough of
a commotion that it seemed like a good idea to take it out of
cyberspace and put it into the light common day.
* * *
There are two preliminary matters I must dispose of before I can
address this question in earnest. The first is the school of thought
which holds that in fact there never was any such person as Jesus. One
of the more elaborate versions of this theory, I gather, is that Jesus
was a fictional creation of Josephus, the historian most famous for
his eyewitness account of the of the losing side of the Jewish
rebellion against Rome in 70 A.D. The short answer to this idea is
that Jesus is about as well attested in ancient history as anyone
gets. The long answer is that the Classical world did not have much
realistic prose fiction. The stories about the mythic figures often
compared to Jesus, such as Bacchus and Osiris and Mithras, all
happened "once upon a time," outside secular history. The closest
approach to an ancient historical novel I can think of, the Aeneid, is
a poem about a royal exile who lived in the misty past. The Gospels,
on the other hand, are rather flat prose accounts about the life of a
carpenter who was born in the reign of Augustus Caesar and executed
about 30 years later by a Roman official named Pontius Pilate. When
people in the Classical world made stuff up, they did not make up
stuff like this.
The other impediment to understanding the results of Jesus' life is
the theory which arose in the late nineteenth century that Jesus is
not responsible for Christianity. The idea was that the Gospels were
"very late and very Greek," that is, written at least sixty years
after the events they purport to describe by people of Greek culture
who did not understand the Jewish Jesus and his environment. This
approach to the New Testament seems to be ineradicable from
seminaries, though in fact scholars in the classical languages no
longer take it seriously. (Neither has it held up very well to
archeology, but that's another story.) The Oxford scholar in Classics,
Robin Lane Fox, author of "Pagans and Christians" and "The
Unauthorized Version," is at best agnostic about Christianity, but he
has no patience with the notion that Jesus was just a typical
Palestinian hill-preacher who paid a rather severe penalty for
preaching without a permit. As Paul Johnson remarked in his "History
of Christianity," a Jesus who did not say and do extraordinary things
does not explain Christianity. If you want a real lip-smacking
anti-Christian diatribe, you should read "Jesus the Magician" by the
Columbia University classicist, Morton Smith. He argues that of course
Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and to be a god and that his immediate
followers believed within days of his execution that he had literally
risen from the dead. Thus, Dr. Smith triumphantly concludes, all these
people were crackers. Well, maybe they were. But if so, it was their
lunacy that gave all later history a unique twist, one that would
never have happened without Jesus and his idiosyncratic ways.
So let us imagine an alternative Christmas night about 2000 years ago.
Rumors of the end of the age, of a miracle child, spread among
shepherds of Judea. They gather on a cold, clear night to watch the
stars, expectant of wonders. One by one, they all fall asleep, and the
night passes without incident. A few weeks later, some Persian
astrologers pass through the area and pay a courtesy call on King
Herod. They assure him, inaccurately, that his reign will be long and
glorious. They continue on to Egypt, to the Library of Alexandria,
where they host several well-attended colloquia on Indian mathematics.
History continues undeflected.
For most of the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity
was an underground religion. It was sufficiently obscure that you have
to hunt through Classical sources even to find criticisms of it. Its
absence during this period would have made a difference, I suspect,
chiefly to Judaism. The process of canonical and doctrinal synthesis
that occurred in Jewish culture after the destruction of the Temple in
70 A.D. was driven, at least to some degree, by the desire to sort
Judaism out from Christianity. While the Torah would probably have
been preserved much as we know it today, it is not at all clear that
anything like the Talmud would have been compiled. Rather than
rabbinical Judaism, the result would have been a Judaism of local
"temples" and syncretizing theology, not unlike Zoroastrianism. This
sort of thing was always threatening to happen in pre- Talmudic
Judaism, as the still-surviving Samaritans illustrate. Without the
Temple and with no aggressive ideological threat from a proselytizing
competitor, Judaism could well have faded into the general background
of Middle Eastern religion.
In the later stages of Roman imperial history, the implications of the
absence of Christianity become more dramatic. The late Classical world
was moving toward monotheism as surely as physics today is moving
toward a united field theory (many people think that both ideas are
delusional). Science and systematic philosophy were not forgotten, but
they had ceased to be persuasive to the educated. People at all levels
of society were ready for revelation, for the coincidence of this
world and the next. Oswald Spengler calls this cultural mode "the
Second Religiousness." It is a lifeless but fervent return to the
naive religiousness that colors the early life of a civilized culture.
Arnold Toynbee says that the victory of a "mystery religion" is a
necessary feature of the late history of every civilization. The
problem with late Roman history has always been that Christianity
should not have been the victor in this contest. It should not even
have been a contestant. "Pagans and Christians," cited above, is in
fact an attempt to show that the Christianization of the Roman Empire
was an accident resulting from the victory of Constantine in the civil
wars of the early fourth century.
The victor should have been something called "astral piety." The
theoretical basis of this is the Neoplatonism that became fashionable
in the third century. Plato had held that there was an intelligible
world, a world of ideas, behind the world of experience. This world
could be approached, even to the One Absolute Idea which gave meaning
to the whole, by philosophical reflection. The Neoplatonists in the
decadent final centuries of Plato's civilization were interested in
the steps, the levels of being that stood between the everyday world
and Plato's One. These levels were associated with the Classical gods,
with the stars of astrology, with the crystal sphere within crystal
sphere described by Ptolemy's astronomy and supported by Aristotle's
physics. The Neoplatonists were also interested in direct, ecstatic
experience of the One. Thus this somewhat academic system came into
contact with popular Gnosticism. Gnosticism, the belief that ultimate
reality is accessible to an elite holding secret knowledge, appeared
about the same time as Christianity and was the chief danger to
Christian orthodoxy in the murky religious underground of the first
and second centuries. It practice, it was a faith of magicians and
wonder-workers and private revelations, a sort of shamanism for
city-folk. It gave life to the old gods again. This was the vital
force that made the astral piety of Diocletian a mass phenomenon. Even
after Constantine ended the persecution of Christianity, it made a
vigorous reappearance as the state cult supported by the emperor
Julian the Apostate. To this day, it has been the chief constituent of
the "hermetic underground" which peeps into the light of day from time
to time in Western history. A history without Christianity is one in
which this underground becomes the surface.
The Roman Empire itself, one suspects, would have trundled to its doom
in much the way it did no matter which mystery religion had government
support. (One can imagine the man who would have been Saint Augustine,
for instance, playing very much the same role for the state's
Neoplatonic Church as he did for the Church of Christ. He was always
temperamentally better suited to Manichaeanism than he was to
Christianity.) The end of Roman history was the beginning of Byzantine
history. This development was occasioned partly by the division of the
empire into eastern and western halves for administrative convenience,
but it also reflected real differences between the spirit of the weary
and depopulated West, in contrast to that of the vibrant and creative
East.
Surprisingly, it is easy to imagine a Byzantine Empire without
Christianity. The divisions we make in late antique history between
East and West are really somewhat artificial. Byzantium and the
Sassanid Persian Empire were in many ways part of the same culture.
This has long been recognized in their politics. Byzantium adopted
Persian court ceremonial, eastern liturgical practices, even much of
their eastern enemy's military technique. Both were theocracies
supported by feudal magnates. Both professed intricate versions of
monotheism. The only real difference was that the western half of this
culture area had been ruled by the alien Roman Empire for several
centuries. Without Christianity, much of the friction between
Byzantium and Persia would have been eased. Intermarriage between
important families in each empire would have been greatly facilitated,
for instance. They might, conceivably, have evolved toward the same
cult. Indeed, without the centralizing effect of continuous warfare,
one can imagine the both of them disarticulating into a single "family
of nations" like Europe or (for most of its history) India.
The really interesting question is what would have happened to Islam.
In medieval Europe, Islam was considered simply a Christian heresy,
and in fact Islam did absorb a quite remarkable amount of
slightly-garbled christology, just as it did much of Judaism. Spengler
suggests that the best way to look on Islam is as a Reformation, as a
movement to simplify and reinvigorate the common religious life of the
Middle East. My own reading of the Koran suggests that "Islam," of a
sort, would have been possible even if Christianity were non-existent
and Judaism were fading into a folk religion. The energizing principle
found in the Koran is that every people has its hour, its book and its
prophet. In the seventh century, Mohammed said that the hour of the
Arab people had come. Their hour would have come, one suspects, even
if the religion he was simplifying had nothing to say about the
Persons of the Hypostatic Union, but was quite eloquent about the
energies of the Neoplatonic Archons. The big difference would have
been in the international environment. In the late sixth and early
seventh centuries, Byzantium and Persia had gone through the
equivalent of a world war. Persia had finally disintegrated, but the
whole region was exhausted. More important, the provinces of the
Byzantine Empire bordering Arabia hated Byzantium, because the central
government kept imposing ever finer definitions of Christian doctrine
to which all local Churches had to submit. When the Muslims came, much
of the Middle East considered them to be liberators.
It is probably true that Christianity is more likely than most
religions to generate the "odium theologicum." Christian theology is
historical; it is simply drawing the implications from history.
Neoplatonic theology, on the other hand, is more like mathematics;
facts are irrelevant. On the whole, history starts more fistfights
than arguments about pure abstractions. In the politically more
pluralistic Middle East which would have obtained without
Christianity, the Muslims might have had to deal only with small
kingdoms, but the inhabitants of these places would not have been so
disaffected by the doctrinal preoccupations of their rulers. The
Muslim advance would been slower, its victories more ambiguous. It is
unlikely that it would have reached Spain and Sicily by the eighth
century, if at all. The unchristian West would have been left to
develop in peace.
Every culture in its youth is intensely religious. The organizational
proclivities of the West would have ensured that something like the
hierarchical church we know from history, with its penchants for
rarified definitions of doctrine and precocious bureaucratization,
would probably have happened no matter what the content of the
religion of the Springtime had been. Again surprisingly, we do not
have to imagine what a Neoplatonic Church would have looked like,
since one existed in the twelfth and thirteenth century. The
Albigensian Church, centered in the Provencal region of France, was
just such a church. It was not even Christian in any serious sense,
since it denied (with the Muslims) that Jesus had ever been crucified.
Their religion was one of sophisticated myth, not of stubborn history.
They believed in reincarnation. They had their own hierarchy, a set of
their own sacraments, their own sacred books. (If you believe some
people, they also had the Holy Grail, but that is another story.) With
the Gnostics, they held that the God of the Old Testament was the
devil. With the Manicheans, they held that matter was evil.
Reproduction was an indulgence granted to those members of their
community who, through social circumstance, simply had to have
children. They promoted birth control and nonreproductive varieties of
sex. (If you are interested in a remarkable speculation about what
would have happened if they had not been totally destroyed in the
Albigensian Crusade of the thirteen century, read Theodore Roszak's
insufficiently appreciated novel, "Flicker.")
What they did not have, anymore than did Julian the Apostate's
Neoplatonic cult, was any notion of "standing guard" on the state. Why
should they? In St. Augustine's theology, progress is both possible
and desirable in history. God loves the world, and calls men to repair
the damage they have done to it. In the Gnostic view of things, on the
other hand, the world is the devil's kingdom. The true God had nothing
to do with creating it. The only improvement this world can look
forward to is destruction. The idea of "the two swords," that church
and state are different social powers even when they support each
other, is one of the persistent themes in Western history. It is a
necessary corollary to the fact that the Church is pursuing its own
vision of the good. The state is necessary, the state is even a good
thing in itself. However, it has its natural limits. Without
Christianity, one suspects, the state would have been as omnipotent in
political theory as it is in China and Islam.
What the spirit of the Neoplatonic Church would have been like at the
emotional level, we can only speculate. There is only one day in the
calendar that has never been Christianized, that preserves the
pre-Christian spirit of Old Europe. That day is Halloween. There would
have been nothing in the heritage from late antiquity to change this.
In the Neoplatonic scheme of things, individual human beings are only
flickering hints of a transcendent One. In some forms of Gnosticism, I
gather, the mass of mankind are considered soulless cattle. Whatever
else a non-Christian West might have produced, it would not have
produced anything like a theory of human rights. Slavery might have
become rare in Europe for economic reasons, but it would have been
less likely to die out.
Arguably, Neoplatonic Europe would not have produced anything like
science, either. Whatever else you may say about Christianity, it is
certainly a very anthropocentric religion. Its theory of history is
wholly man-centered. It adherents are predisposed to find the universe
friendly, understandable, the product of a great Mind not wholly
unlike their own minds. It is a religion of Incarnation, one which
respects matter. (The art of a Neoplatonic West would almost certainly
have been overwhelmingly nonrepresentational, like that of Islam.) It
is also a religion of history, which means that it respects particular
facts even when there is no theory for them. The Benedictine physicist
Stanley Jaki has argued throughout a long career (see, for instance,
his "Savior of Science") that science could not have occurred if
Western culture did not implicitly assume, even when it explicitly
denied, a metaphysics something like that of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Aquinas was what is known as a "moderate Realist." That is, he thought
that abstract ideas were real and could be investigated, but that they
could be investigated only through the senses. Both in politics and
natural philosophy, he espoused the principle of subsidiarity. In
politics, this means that a higher level of government should not
interfere with a lower one if the lower one is capable of handling a
given question. In natural philosophy, it means that you don't have to
understand everything before you can understand something. There is a
passage in the "Summa Theologica" in which the Angelic Doctor explains
that Scripture and the world are separate spheres, each of which must
be understood in its own terms. This passage has been called the
"declaration of independence" of science. If Christianity had never
existed, that declaration might never have been issued.
Perhaps Fr. Jaki overstates the case. A Neoplatonic West would in some
ways have been even more fitted to pursue science than a Christian
one. The real difference between Western science and that of China is
not Francis Bacon, but Pythagoras. Modern science began in the late
Renaissance along with the Neoplatonic revival of that era. The roll
of great scientists who have been inspired chiefly by pure number, by
the elegance of order, would include people from Kepler to Heisenberg
and beyond. On the other hand, one suspects that something would have
been lost if the historical cast to Western thought were missing, an
almost sure loss if Christianity had never existed. There would have
been no Darwinism, for instance. Quite possibly astronomy would
suffered, since that science is so much connected with calendrical
concerns. Let us cut the baby in half, and say that something like
science would have appeared, but that it would have developed less
evenly, and would have been harder to adapt to engineering purposes.
Although the missionary impulse has played an important part in all
the dealings the West has had with the world up to the present day,
quite likely the West's unique desire to explore the whole world would
still have been operative even if the West had not been Christian.
(Other societies, notably those of Polynesia, seem to have the same
impulse to travel and settle as far as their technology allows.
Others, such as Hindu India, positively forbade oceanic travel.) A
non-Christian West would have felt less impulse to remake societies in
its own image. One can easily imagine prolonged relations of trade and
border wars between the first European outposts in the Caribbean and
the Aztec hegemony, since the Europeans would not have felt any
special horror at Aztec religious practices. But if the West met the
rest of the world with less presumption, it would also have met it
with less charity.
There is little ground for this speculation, but I think that we
should be pleased if we never know just what the West would have
become had it never become Christian. A shadow of it may have been
manifest in Carthage, or at least in Carthage as described in G.K.
Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man." It would have been altogether a
darker, more rigid, more ruthless civilization. The real choice in
ethics, it has long seemed to me, is not between Christianity and
liberalism, but between Jesus and Nietzsche. Had the shepherds slept
soundly that night, we would be living in Nietzsche's world.
Woden
news:3d02dea6.0412...@posting.google.com:
> If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
>
The mythical story would have had to find a different begining.
--
Woden
"religion is a socio-political system for controlling people's thoughts,
lives and actions based on ancient myths and superstitions, perpetrated
through generations of subtle yet pervasive brainwashing."
johac
wordsof...@hotmail.com (Words of Truth) wrote:
> If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
He was?
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently
in theVirgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened
nation?-Garry Wills, New York Times 11/04/04
John Baker
"Words of Truth" <wordsof...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:3d02dea6.0412...@posting.google.com...
Since when have most Christians cared anything about science, Raytard? Or
human rights, for that matter, at least when the Christians are the
majority.
And as for laws based on Christian ideology... thanks, but no thanks.
Sydney Webb
>
> If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
>
> Parallel universes may be becoming fashionable. Robert Harris's 1992
> novel, "Fatherland," set in Europe after a Nazi victory in World War
> II, was made into a well-received cable television movie last year. On
> March 22,1996, the FOX network premiered a new series, "Sliders," in
> which a school science project permits the protagonists to move
> between worlds like our own, but with different histories.
<snip>
> http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/ijhnbb.htm
This cross-posted sermon was first broadcast back in 1996 and appears
somewhat dated. There is a temptation to set follow-ups to
soc.religion.christian but what have the good people there done to
deserve this?
<follow-ups set>
- Syd
--
"Finally, this puts the emergence of liberated social mores and
the fully sick plastic lifestyle in Australian life much later."
- Sam R. alerts us to the danger of Disco what-ifs
LP
Truth) wrote:
>If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
>
From Newsweek, Dec, 13, 2004
From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell
the Christmas story and make the case for Christ.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653824/site/newsweek/
Dec. 13 issue - The news was unwelcome, baffling, frightening; nothing
about it was expected or explicable. Roughly 2,000 years ago,
according to the Gospel of Luke, in Nazareth of Galilee, a young woman
found herself in the presence of Gabriel, the angelic messenger of the
Lord whose name was known to Jews of the day as the mysterious figure
who had granted Daniel his prophetic visions. The woman, Luke writes,
was "a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of
David," and her name was Mary, Luke's Greek form of the Hebrew Miriam,
the sister of Moses and the first great prophetess of Israel. "Hail,
thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee," Gabriel said,
"blessed art thou amongst women"-terrifying Mary, who "was troubled at
his saying." Stunned and confused, Mary made no reply, her face
apparently betraying anxiety and awe. Sensing her confusion and fear,
Gabriel was reassuring: "Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour
with God."
Then the angel said: "And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,
and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be
great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest ... and of his
kingdom there shall be no end." In other words, Mary was to bear the
Messiah, the fabled and long-promised figure who, in the words of the
prophet Jeremiah, would "reign as king and deal wisely, and shall
execute justice and righteousness in the land." Mary was silent, then
finally found her voice: "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?"
Gabriel's reply-that "the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee"-raised more
questions than it answered, not only for Mary but for Joseph, for the
early Christians and, two millennia later, for us. In Luke's account,
Mary absorbed the tidings of her child's miraculous origin and mission
and "pondered them in her heart," still puzzled, still overwhelmed. In
the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph, knowing nothing about Gabriel's
appearance, is humiliated by the news that his future wife is
pregnant, and "was minded to put her away privily." In later years
Christians had to contend with charges that their Lord was
illegitimate, perhaps the illicit offspring of Mary and a Roman
soldier. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, some scholars
treat the Christmas narratives as first-century inventions designed to
strengthen the seemingly tenuous claim that Jesus was the Messiah.
And so the story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is, fittingly, as
riven with complexity and controversy as Christianity itself. This
month more than a billion Christians will commemorate their Lord's
Nativity. Amid candlelight, carols and the commingled smells of cedar
and incense, the old tale will unfold again: Gabriel's visitation, the
journey to Bethlehem, the arrival of the baby in a stable, the
glorious announcement to the shepherds in the night, the star in the
East, the mission of the Magi.
Yet, as with so many other elements of faith, the Nativity narratives
are the subject of ongoing scholarly debate over their historical
accuracy, their theological meaning and whether some of the central
images and words of the Christian religion owe as much to the pagan
culture of the Roman Empire as they do to apostolic revelation.
The rest of the article can be found here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653824/site/newsweek/
Johnny Bravo
Truth) wrote:
>If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
So your nonsense claim is that the Collossus of Rhodes wasn't Art,
the Code of Hammurabi wasn't Law, the Pyramids weren't built with
Science and Greek citizens didn't have Human Rights?
How did someone as stupid as you survive to adulthood?
--
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft
Ike
"Words of Truth" <wordsof...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:3d02dea6.0412...@posting.google.com...
>
>
>
Thank you for not disposing of those 2 preliminary matters. very edifying.
Sydney Webb
>
> On 10 Dec 2004 18:22:17 -0800, wordsof...@hotmail.com (Words of
> Truth) wrote:
>
> >If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
> >
>
> From Newsweek, Dec, 13, 2004
>
> From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell
> the Christmas story and make the case for Christ.
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653824/site/newsweek/
This post has been cross-posted to:
alt.atheism
alt.messianic
rec.org.mensa
soc.history.medieval
*and* soc.history.what-if
This post has no alternative-history content and is off-topic for
soc.history.what-if. If responding to this thread please check headers
carefully and only on-post to a group where it will be on-topic.
<headers set>
Josef Balluch
In a message sent 'round the world, Words of Truth poured fuel on the
fire with the following:
...
> There is little ground for this speculation, ...
My sentiments exactly.
...
Regards,
Josef
For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of
their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate
pursuit in which they can lose themselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
Joseph Hertzlinger
<baawa_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 10 Dec 2004 18:22:17 -0800, wordsof...@hotmail.com (Words of
> Truth) wrote:
>
>>If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
>
> So your nonsense claim is that the Collossus of Rhodes wasn't Art,
> the Code of Hammurabi wasn't Law,
Headline writers sometimes exaggerate.
> the Pyramids weren't built with Science
They were built with trial and error.
> and Greek citizens didn't have Human Rights?
They had rights as citizens, not as humans.
Joseph Hertzlinger
<wordsof...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> There are two preliminary matters I must dispose of before I can
> address this question in earnest. The first is the school of thought
> which holds that in fact there never was any such person as Jesus. One
> of the more elaborate versions of this theory, I gather, is that Jesus
> was a fictional creation of Josephus, the historian most famous for
> his eyewitness account of the of the losing side of the Jewish
> rebellion against Rome in 70 A.D. The short answer to this idea is
> that Jesus is about as well attested in ancient history as anyone
> gets. The long answer is that the Classical world did not have much
> realistic prose fiction. The stories about the mythic figures often
> compared to Jesus, such as Bacchus and Osiris and Mithras, all
> happened "once upon a time," outside secular history. The closest
> approach to an ancient historical novel I can think of, the Aeneid, is
> a poem about a royal exile who lived in the misty past. The Gospels,
> on the other hand, are rather flat prose accounts about the life of a
> carpenter who was born in the reign of Augustus Caesar and executed
> about 30 years later by a Roman official named Pontius Pilate. When
> people in the Classical world made stuff up, they did not make up
> stuff like this.
The NT has a great deal of corroborative detail when it comes to the
life of Jesus. It is very vague when it comes to the teachings and
activities of Jesus after the resurrection.
sAnToLiNa
LP <whirl...@nospam.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ts2mr0t17dftcvkgd...@4ax.com...
>
> From Newsweek, Dec, 13, 2004
>
> From Mary to the manger, how the Gospels mix faith and history to tell
> the Christmas story and make the case for Christ.
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653824/site/newsweek/
...
> Mary was silent, then
> finally found her voice: "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?"
>
>
> Gabriel's reply-that "the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee"-raised more
> questions than it answered, not only for Mary but for Joseph, for the
> early Christians and, two millennia later, for us.
On the contrary, Gabriel's reply leads us to the final, succinct answer; the
entire story is fucking horseshit.
sAnToLiNa
Joseph Hertzlinger <jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com>
wrote in message news:VV6vd.1790$2J2...@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 15:44:43 GMT, Johnny Bravo
> <baawa_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > On 10 Dec 2004 18:22:17 -0800, wordsof...@hotmail.com (Words of
> > Truth) wrote:
> >
> >>If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
> >
> > So your nonsense claim is that the Collossus of Rhodes wasn't Art,
> > the Code of Hammurabi wasn't Law,
>
> Headline writers sometimes exaggerate.
>
Or, in this case, outright lie.
> > the Pyramids weren't built with Science
>
> They were built with trial and error.
>
A colloquialism that can be roughly translated as "science."
> > and Greek citizens didn't have Human Rights?
>
> They had rights as citizens, not as humans.
What's the difference?
Julian Richards
wrote:
>On the contrary, Gabriel's reply leads us to the final, succinct answer; the
>entire story is fucking horseshit.
You are the Archbishop of York and I claim my £5.
--
Julian Richards
medieval "at" richardsuk.f9.co.uk
Usenet is how from the comfort of your own living room, you can converse
with people that you would never want in your house.
THIS MESSAGE WAS POSTED FROM SOC.HISTORY.MEDIEVAL
Enkidu
news:324ehkF...@individual.net:
"No, honest, Joseph, I haven't been fucking around! It was the holy
ghost. Really. It was. That or an alien with big eyes and skinny
legs."
--
Enkidu
"Yee-Ha" is not a foreign policy.
JimC
"Enkidu" <enk...@leaddogs.org> wrote in message
news:Xns95BDC93AD573e...@68.6.19.6...
A Roman with a candle, so to speak.
Martin Reboul
"Julian Richards" <s...@sig.co.uk> wrote in message
news:n13qr057m09ajvo63...@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 18:53:08 -0800, "sAnToLiNa" <mys...@babylon.com>
> wrote:
>
> >On the contrary, Gabriel's reply leads us to the final, succinct answer; the
> >entire story is fucking horseshit.
>
> You are the Archbishop of York and I claim my £5.
This is a theological grey area best avoided.
'Coming of the Lord' jokes are so passe!
Cheers
Martin
Martin Reboul
"Joseph Hertzlinger" <jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com> wrote
in message news:147vd.1746$Yj4....@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
Um... corrobaritive of what exactly? I have had great trouble finding
any reliable historical source that even mentions the existance of JC?
No Roman stuff - arrest warrants, trial records, intelligence reports - nothing.
Very little Jewish stuff either... in fact he only seems to 'appear' a good
generation after his death?
Cheers
Martin
Joseph Hertzlinger
<martin...@SPAMFUKvirgin.net> wrote:
> "Joseph Hertzlinger"
> <jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com> wrote in
> message news:147vd.1746$Yj4....@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>> The NT has a great deal of corroborative detail when it comes to the
>> life of Jesus. It is very vague when it comes to the teachings and
>> activities of Jesus after the resurrection.
>
> Um... corrobaritive of what exactly? I have had great trouble finding
> any reliable historical source that even mentions the existance of JC?
>
> No Roman stuff - arrest warrants, trial records, intelligence reports - nothing.
> Very little Jewish stuff either... in fact he only seems to 'appear' a good
> generation after his death?
Actually, I was trying to argue that the resurrection of Jesus looks
far more improbable than his life. (I'm part of the Jewish contingent
on alt.messianic.)
Rob Duncan
"sAnToLiNa" <mys...@babylon.com> wrote in message
news:324ercF...@individual.net...
BIG difference. Citizens of Rome, just like of the US, had special
priviliges. Rights not usually afforded to citizens of other nations.
Rights that were the envy of everyone. Pauls rights, as a citizen of Rome,
saved his hide on several occassions.
Rob
maff
Words of Truth wrote:
> If Jesus Had Never Been Born.....
>
415 CE d.|| Hypatia of Alexandria
"Hypatia is the most renowned female philosopher from ancient times. A
neoplatonist, her philosophies and status as a woman were threatening
to the increasingly powerful Christian bureaucracy. Hypatia was
brutally killed by a Christian mob. Her death is a powerful symbol for
the transformation of ancient society from Paganism to Christianity.
She is the author of A Commentary on the Arithmetica of Diophantus, and
A Commentary on the Conics of Apollonious. She also edited the third
book of her father's Commentary on the Almagest of Ptolemy."
.
.
.
"The persecution and murder of Hypatia was a transformative event.
After Hypatia, the stature of women, which had been enhanced via
involvement in Pagan systems of worship, was significantly diminished.
In the end:
"They dragged her along till they brought her to the great church,
named Caesarion. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore
off her clothing and dragged her through the streets of the city till
she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they
burned her body with fire..."
"After the death of Hypatia came the Middle Ages."
http://www.exovedate.com/ancient_timeline_seven.html
Hypatia of Alexandria
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hypatia+of+Alexandria&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hypatia+of+Alexandria&num=100&hl=en&lr=&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://news.google.com/news?q=Hypatia%20of%20Alexandria&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn
Christian atrocities
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&selm=18510aff.0411301229.5f1da429%40posting.google.com
--
"All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be
accepted by self-respecting persons as final. Reserve your right to
think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing." - Hypatia of
Alexandria
Phil Edwards
On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 06:38:57 GMT, Joseph Hertzlinger
<jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com> wrote:
>> No Roman stuff - arrest warrants, trial records, intelligence reports - nothing.
>> Very little Jewish stuff either... in fact he only seems to 'appear' a good
>> generation after his death?
>
>Actually, I was trying to argue that the resurrection of Jesus looks
>far more improbable than his life. (I'm part of the Jewish contingent
>on alt.messianic.)
This discussion is currently being crossposted to
alt.atheism
rec.org.mensa
soc.history.medieval
and
soc.history.what-if
as well as alt.messianic.
If you're contributing to it, please check the 'Newsgroups' header and
remove any groups where this subject is off-charter and/or unwelcome.
(It's off-charter for soc.history.what-if, to name but one.)
Followups set.
Phil
--
Phil Edwards rese...@amroth.zetnet.co.uk
"Is there any way to make John Calvin pope?"
- Steven J. thinks the unthinkable
Martin Reboul
"Joseph Hertzlinger" <jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com> wrote
in message news:5Oavd.2214$Yj4...@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
Do you mean 'The Resurrection' or the resurrection of his cult by his followers
that caused such trouble in Rome (as described by Tacitus)?
I'm sure he existed, even though there is little hard historical evidence. There
is of course none whatsoever for him being the son of God.
Cheers
Martin
Martin Reboul
"maff" <maf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1102931034.4...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
A typical early Christian reaction - the suppression of learning and knowledge,
misogyny, and cruel, unjust punishment of anyone who dares to think for
themselves or question their absurd religion. She should be admired as a
martyr - a real martyr!
Cheers
Martin
William Black
"Joseph Hertzlinger" <jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com>
wrote in message news:VV6vd.1790$2J2...@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> > the Pyramids weren't built with Science
>
> They were built with trial and error.
What!
You mean they just said 'Let's build a bloody great heap of rock fronted
with dressed stone, we'll work it all out on the way up...'
I get the impression it was all a bit more structured than that.
--
William Black
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe
Barbeques on fire by chalets past the headland
I've watched the gift shops glitter in the darkness off Newborough
All this will pass like ice-cream on the beach
Time for tea
thomas p
wrote:
Foreigners, slaves and women in Athens were all humans, but they did
not have any recognized rights because of it. That would be the
difference.
thedir...@yahoo.com
Joseph Hertzlinger wrote:
>
> Actually, I was trying to argue that the resurrection of Jesus looks
> far more improbable than his life. (I'm part of the Jewish contingent
> on alt.messianic.)
Your premise is impossible. It is impossible to set probabilities on
magical resurrections. Magical things like resurrections and miracles
are beyond the reach of rational analysis. It is impossible to reason
about magical miracles and magical resurrections. Magic can do
anything.
Dirk Hartog
---------------------
I don't care what you believe.
I care what the evidence is.
I care about the reasoning you use to justify your beliefs.
It is not morally acceptable to say ... our story is truth but yours is
myth; ours is history but yours is a lie. It is even less morally
acceptable to ... manufactur[e] defensive or protective strategies that
apply only to one's own story.
[John Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 1998, pg 28 - 29]
Joseph Hertzlinger
<martin...@SPAMFUKvirgin.net> wrote:
> "Joseph Hertzlinger" <jcyclespersec...@nine.reticulatedcom.com> wrote
> in message news:5Oavd.2214$Yj4...@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>> Actually, I was trying to argue that the resurrection of Jesus looks
>> far more improbable than his life. (I'm part of the Jewish contingent
>> on alt.messianic.)
>
> Do you mean 'The Resurrection' or the resurrection of his cult by his followers
> that caused such trouble in Rome (as described by Tacitus)?
>
> I'm sure he existed, even though there is little hard historical evidence. There
> is of course none whatsoever for him being the son of God.
Of course, he was a son of God. We are all God's children.
Phil Edwards
Please keep theological debate to the appropriate newsgroups. This is
currently going out to
alt.atheism
alt.messianic
rec.org.mensa
soc.history.medieval
and
soc.history.what-if
It's irrelevant to most of these groups and off-charter in at least
one. Followups set.
Matt Giwer
> A typical early Christian reaction - the suppression of learning and knowledge,
> misogyny, and cruel, unjust punishment of anyone who dares to think for
> themselves or question their absurd religion. She should be admired as a
> martyr - a real martyr!
Not wise. Elevating a person to stature without knowing a lot about
the person is why that same church is (at least used to be) very
careful in proclaiming saints. The bad comes with the good. The right
way to go is to praise the desired virtue as exemplied by the person.
So far as I am aware what was posted is just about all that is known
about her. What virtue did she exemplify? Sounds to me like she is in
the "first (descriptor) to" as in first woman to go to space rather
than first person to go to space.
--
Israel: A third world country which survives solely
because of American charity and pity.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3292
Gordon Johnson
in most other human groups which believed they had the truth. Such
incidents
are signs of mankind's humanity: being different in belief/looks/etc is to
be a target for that group. Ask Salmon Rushdie about it, the Jews, and
so on....
Humans are not to be trusted to behave themselves towards other people,
which is why we have to have laws to protect us from each other.
Which is also why we need Jesus/God/any other benevolent deity. Just
bcause we pervert good teachings, doesn't make the teachings or the
teacher wrong.
Gordon.
Bruce Sinclair
.. for what value of god ? :)
Bruce
------------------------------
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals
dying of nothing.
-Redd Foxx
Caution ===== followups may have been changed to relevant groups
(if there were any)
Bruce Sinclair
(snip)
>***** All I could care to comment is that similar occurrences happened
>in most other human groups which believed they had the truth. Such
>incidents
>are signs of mankind's humanity: being different in belief/looks/etc is to
>be a target for that group. Ask Salmon Rushdie about it, the Jews, and
>so on....
>Humans are not to be trusted to behave themselves towards other people,
>which is why we have to have laws to protect us from each other.
>Which is also why we need Jesus/God/any other benevolent deity. Just
>bcause we pervert good teachings, doesn't make the teachings or the
>teacher wrong.
Neither does it make it right. IMO, deities of all sorts are a pain. Wars
are fought when they are on both sides ... sometimes even the same one !
Religions seem to cause (or be an excuse for) most conflicts now and in the
past. How does this help mankind in any way ?
Gordon Johnson
> In article <so6dnQI80vf...@eclipse.net.uk>, Gordon Johnson <gor...@kinhelp.naespam.co.uk> wrote:
> (snip)
>
>>***** All I could care to comment is that similar occurrences happened
>>in most other human groups which believed they had the truth. Such
>>incidents
>>are signs of mankind's humanity: being different in belief/looks/etc is to
>>be a target for that group. Ask Salmon Rushdie about it, the Jews, and
>>so on....
>>Humans are not to be trusted to behave themselves towards other people,
>>which is why we have to have laws to protect us from each other.
>>Which is also why we need Jesus/God/any other benevolent deity. Just
>>bcause we pervert good teachings, doesn't make the teachings or the
>>teacher wrong.
>
>
> Neither does it make it right. IMO, deities of all sorts are a pain. Wars
> are fought when they are on both sides ... sometimes even the same one !
> Religions seem to cause (or be an excuse for) most conflicts now and in the
> past. How does this help mankind in any way ?
not just for religious reasons. Mankind needs SOME help.......Gordon.
thomas p
Teachings based on irrational beliefs are not good. At a minimum they
encourage irrational thought, which can "justify" anything.
maff
Martin Reboul wrote:
> "maff" <maf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:1102931034.4...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> > "All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be
> > accepted by self-respecting persons as final. Reserve your right to
> > think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at
all.
> > To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing." -
Hypatia of
> > Alexandria
>
>
> A typical early Christian reaction - the suppression of learning and
knowledge,
> misogyny, and cruel, unjust punishment of anyone who dares to think
for
> themselves or question their absurd religion. She should be admired
as a
> martyr - a real martyr!
She is Immortal.
> Cheers
> Martin
--
Do not stand by this grave & weep,
No one's here, I do not sleep.
For I am the thousand winds that blow,
& the diamond glint on the snow.
I am the sun on ripened grain,
The soft & gentle autumn rain.
When you wake in the mornings hush,
I am the swift uprising rush.
Of the quiet birds in circling flight,
The timeless stars that shines at night.
So, do not stand by this grave & cry,
No one's dead, I did not die.
Author unknown walksalone overat baawa orginization
maff
Actions speak more than words.
> Gordon.
bigb...@socal.rr.com
of the Catholic church in that period, I find it very hard to believe
civilization in Europe would've been darker, more rigid and more
ruthless than it was.
sAnToLiNa
thomas p <thomasa...@yahoo.dk> wrote in message
news:ai0sr0hf18bspjr16...@4ax.com...
Sorry, this doesn't explain the difference between human rights and
citizen's rights.
sAnToLiNa
Rob Duncan <robd...@gbronline.com> wrote in message
news:cJmdnci9jJ9...@gbronline.com...
Sorry, this doesn't explain the difference between human rights and
citizen's rights.
Rob Duncan
Human rights are the rights all men deserve, while rights of a citizen refer
to priviliges the country he belongs to provides. Big difference.
Rob
Tukla Ratte
> "sAnToLiNa" <mys...@babylon.com> wrote in message
> news:32cbl7F...@individual.net...
< snip >
>>Sorry, this doesn't explain the difference between human rights and
>>citizen's rights.
>
>
> Human rights are the rights all men deserve, while rights of a citizen refer
> to priviliges the country he belongs to provides. Big difference.
If I'm reading you correctly, human rights are an abstract notion of
what rights people *should* have. However, the rights that people
*actually* have -- citizen rights -- depend on the laws of whatever
country they happen to live in, which may or may not encompass all human
rights.
Am I close?
--
Tukla, Eater of Theists, Squeaker of Chew Toys
Official Mascot of Alt.Atheism, aa 1347
thomas p
Phil Edwards
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 19:39:10 +0100, thomas p
<thomasa...@yahoo.dk> wrote:
>>Sorry, this doesn't explain the difference between human rights and
>>citizen's rights.
>
>Actually it does.
Fascinating though this discussion may be, I have to point out that
it's currently being crossposted to a shedload of groups, and I'd lay
money that it's neither relevant to nor welcome in most of them. It's
certainly off-charter for soc.history.what-if, and I strongly suspect
that it's also off-charter for r.o.m and s.h.m. If you are
contributing to this thread, could you spare thirty seconds to prune
the Newsgroups line before you hit Send? Many thanks.
sAnToLiNa
What are these human rights and where do they come from?
sAnToLiNa
Actually it doesn't. What's the difference between human rights and
citizen's rights?
Rob Duncan
"Tukla Ratte" <tukla...@tukla.net> wrote in message
news:32dj7sF...@individual.net...
> Rob Duncan wrote:
>
>> "sAnToLiNa" <mys...@babylon.com> wrote in message
>> news:32cbl7F...@individual.net...
>
> < snip >
>
>>>Sorry, this doesn't explain the difference between human rights and
>>>citizen's rights.
>>
>>
>> Human rights are the rights all men deserve, while rights of a citizen
>> refer to priviliges the country he belongs to provides. Big difference.
>
> If I'm reading you correctly, human rights are an abstract notion of what
> rights people *should* have. However, the rights that people *actually*
> have -- citizen rights -- depend on the laws of whatever country they
> happen to live in, which may or may not encompass all human rights.
>
> Am I close?
>
> --
> Tukla,
Id say youre spot on.
Rob
sAnToLiNa
What are the rights that you think all humans *should* have, why should we
care what you think about this subjective matter, and how are they different
from citizen's rights?
thomas p
wrote:
I'll try again. Neither exists independently, and neither includes a
universally agreed upon list of rights. They are both concepts. In
principle a person has human rights by virtue of being human, but he
only has citizen's rights if the law recognizes him as a citizen.
Michael Emrys
wrote on 12/16/04 7:43 PM:
> ...why should we care what you think about this subjective matter...
1. It might be interesting to hear what he thinks on the subject.
2. I might agree with him that some or all of those rights plus others ought
to be recognized and protected.
3. If #2, then maybe we could organize in some way to bring that about.
Michael
Rob Duncan
What the hell are you talking about? Citizens rights are the rights granted
to you by the state and human rights are rights virtually all people
recognise that people have.
Not the same thing.
Rob
Rob Duncan
Ulitmately from respect.
Rob
Rob Duncan
Trust me, hes proven time and again that hes far to stupid to understand a
good explanation like the one you just gave.
Rob
sAnToLiNa
For instance?
sAnToLiNa
So, not in principle but in the real world, what's the difference?
sAnToLiNa
Non-responsive, to say the least.
sAnToLiNa
Thanks for the non-trivial input. So give us some examples of "human
rights" as opposed to citizen's rights, then explain the difference. Will
you ever?
sAnToLiNa
> > ...why should we care what you think about this subjective matter...
> 1. It might be interesting to hear what he thinks on the subject.
It might, if he had shown the tiniest inkling to this point that he might
answer the question.
> 2. I might agree with him that some or all of those rights plus others
ought
> to be recognized and protected.
Me too, but it doesn't answer the question I'm asking of him and he has been
assiduaously avoiding.
> 3. If #2, then maybe we could organize in some way to bring that about.
In other words, you don't recognize a difference between human and citizen's
right.
Michael Emrys
wrote on 12/18/04 5:06 PM:
>> 3. If #2, then maybe we could organize in some way to bring that about.
>
> In other words, you don't recognize a difference between human and citizen's
> right.
Wrong. As has been pointed out to you before, citizens rights are contingent
on the enforcement of some political body controlling the jurisdiction in
which one happens to reside. Human rights are those one is entitled to by
virtue of being human, whether one is allowed to exercise them by said
governing body or not.
If that is not clear to you, then at least show me the courtesy of not
putting words in my mouth that do not say what I mean to say.
Michael
sAnToLiNa
Michael Emrys <em...@olypen.com> wrote in message
news:BDEA2B12.4C0C7%em...@olypen.com...
> in article 32k2hdF...@individual.net, sAnToLiNa at
mys...@babylon.com
> wrote on 12/18/04 5:06 PM:
>
> >> 3. If #2, then maybe we could organize in some way to bring that about.
> >
> > In other words, you don't recognize a difference between human and
citizen's
> > right.
>
> Wrong. As has been pointed out to you before, citizens rights are
contingent
> on the enforcement of some political body controlling the jurisdiction in
> which one happens to reside. Human rights are those one is entitled to by
> virtue of being human, whether one is allowed to exercise them by said
> governing body or not.
>
AND AN EXAMPLE OF THIS WOULD BE????????
> If that is not clear to you, then at least show me the courtesy of not
> putting words in my mouth that do not say what I mean to say.
>
Explain (1) how in the hell one would "organize" to bring about the
realization of a platonic ideal, (2) if that's not what you really mean,
then what you really mean, (3) an example of a human right as opposed to a
citizen's right. To date there has been absolute, 100% bupkis in regards to
(3).
Rob Duncan
Bye, bye, moron.
Rob
sAnToLiNa
There's still time to answer the question, weenie.
Otherwise, hasta, coward.