Born of a Virgin on December 25th, Crucified and Resurrected after Three Days

I have several argument on Facebook over Christmas trees.

Claim: The evil liberal atheists have banned the word Christmas in Christmas Tree!
Rebuttal: Find a reference to a Christmas Tree in the Bible.
> Stop questioning my beliefs!!1111 Its so rude of you!!!!111

 

I am actually very much looking forward to a reply to your thread. I was unaware of such a verse.

 

Ah, well, it is apocryphal.. And it's clear why it is so

 

Perhaps God does not act silly. Certainly the God of the Bible acts silly.

Right from the beginning in the Garden. God makes 2 humans that have no knowledge of good or evil. (Trusting and innocent)

Then God puts the greatest deceiver (Sataniel) in the Garden with these two humans. Obviously God would know the outcome of this battle. In fact it would be hard to argue that God did not intend the outcome.

So Adam and Eve do exactly what God created/intended them to do. What would be silly is to claim that God did not know what would happen.

Like a programmer creating a computer program. That programmer is happy when the program does what it is supposed to do !

God however is not happy that his creations do what they are programmed to do. This is silly.

Another good example of silliness is when God is hanging on the cross. Its kind of silly to allow himself to get into that predicament in the first place of course.

Surely God would have had more impact if he would have used his power to get down from the cross and shoot lightning bolts out at those that put him there.

What is also silly is that we should feel sorry for a God for masochism inflicted upon himself. I feel sorry for the mental state of the masochist but not because he caused pain upon himself.

Speaking of mental state .. what is really silly is when God calls out to himself while hanging on the Cross "why have you forsaken me"

That God would forget who he is and/or forsake himself is truly silly.

 

I'll ask the OP a question -- if Christianity is "identical" in beliefs and many practices, then why were the Romans torturing Christians to death? If communions were common, why the blood libels of Christians eating pagan children in eucharist? People might be persuaded to attack an alien belief, but there's no reason to attack a people who at every point are doing the same thing you are. We don't like Islam because Islam has some serious differences with Christianity. You might find it weird to find out your kid is a Hare Krishna -- but that's because Hare Krishna are much different than Christians. But you don't find a lot of people saying "weird Catholics" simply because they do most of the same kinds of things Baptists or Presbyterians do.

So why are Pagans into Attis afraid of Christians into Jesus. Same stories, same dates, same rituals, so what are they killing for?

 

Why did the Roman Catholic church persecute "pagans?" I don't think the similarities in faith mean much, especially when the blame for civil unrest falls on a given religious group, which as I understand happened to the Christians in pre-Christian Rome. I haven't looked too thoroughly into why Christians were persecuted, however.

Also, I'm not saying that everything was "identical" between Christianity and other religions with solar heroes like Attis, but the characters of Jesus and Attis (and Mithra, among others) certainly did share many important characteristics, and even canonical biblical texts indicate their inspiration from and common origins with other such religious teachings.

I see that Wiki has something about the subject of Roman persecution of Christians, and I don't see anything there about the nature of the religion itself (as opposed to other religions in the Roman empire) being at issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire

 

The Jews decorated trees in the Old Testament.

Jeremiah 10:1-5 (NKJV) = 1 Hear the word which the Lord speaks to you, O house of Israel.

2 Thus says the Lord:

“Do not learn the way of the Gentiles;
Do not be dismayed at the signs of heaven,
For the Gentiles are dismayed at them.
3 For the customs of the peoples are futile;
For one cuts a tree from the forest,
The work of the hands of the workman, with the ax.
4 They decorate it with silver and gold;
They fasten it with nails and hammers
So that it will not topple.
5 They are upright, like a palm tree,
And they cannot speak;
They must be carried,
Because they cannot go by themselves.
Do not be afraid of them,
For they cannot do evil,
Nor can they do any good.”

 

actually. If you

 

Jesus could have had a messiah complex. After all, his mother had spent years telling him that God was his father. Just before the crucifixion he had been telling his disciples how he was going to be sacrificed. So when he gets nailed to the cross he finally realized that he was just a man who had been lied to his entire life. Then he died.

 

There are many possibilities. One of the most nonsensical ones is that Jesus was God.

 

Were those bushy pine trees or something?

 

Theres a simpsons show about it

 

It is, however Christians believe in the new testament where you can be forgiven. We use the Old Testament to guide ourselfs in what is right or wrong, and the new testament for our philosophy and stuff.

 

This Attis was unknown to the Romans until first mentioned vaguely in a poem arounf 50 years before Jesus.

The first literary reference to Attis is the subject of one of the most famous poems by Catullus[7] but it appears that Attis was not worshipped at Rome until the early Empire.[8]
Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84 BC – ca. 54 BC) was a Latin poet of the Republican period. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.


Then, during the time of Jesus, the whole myth seemed to unfold as we read it now.

Prior to such time, those details were largely unwritten and quite different from what apparently was the superoimposition of the Gospel story on the Roman World which was becoming Christianized.

In other words, it was as in every other case where Christianity became superimposed upon an existing prior God-myth, that the one replaced the other.

It is my point that as Rome heard the gospel and came to flesh out the details of what is now the Attis Myht, the oine created the other in what was a popular invention as Christianity flourished.
This explains how christians became influenced to accept Dev 25 when we know that date is wrong.


VThe earliest certain image of Attis as deity appears on a 4th century BCE Greek stele from Piraeus, near Athens. He is portrayed as the Hellenised stereotype of a rustic eastern barbarian, sitting at ease, sporting the Phrygian cap and shepherd's crook of his later Greek and Roman cults. Before him stands a Phrygian goddess (identified by the inscription as Agdistis) who carries a tympanon in her left hand. With her right, she hands him a jug, as if to welcome him into her cult with a share of her own libation.[29] Later images of Attis show him as a shepherd, in similar relaxed attitudes, holding or playing the syrinx (panpipes).[30]


In the late fourth century a cult of Attis became a feature of the Greek world.

 

That's right OT is good stuff .. Keep those women in their place and have as many concubines as you can afford !

 

But those have changed with the time. There are lots of bad things in the OT that are not reconciled by the NT. You ignore and avoid that inconvenient truth on a regular basis.

Your argument implies that "God's law" is relative to what society finds acceptable at the moment.

 

And so it is in fact relative to what society finds to be cool and acceptable You use the New Testament as your excuse to do just that.

 

I guess raping someone and paying their father is a good way to live, but gay marriage?

Dear God man.

That is a blatant sin.

 

Are you talking about Nimrod/Alexandre The Great who might well be the same as Mithra?

 

Christians do not believe in nor follow the teachings of prophet Isa whom you call Jesus. What Christians do follow is a set of European Norse, Celtic, Roman, Germanic and Greek gods. This is actual factual. Research the Conference at Nice, France or the Nicean Conference/ Council of Nicaea.

 

Is this a Muslim perspective? I don't know who else would call Jesus/Isus/Joshua "Isa." Anyway, you seem to think that "Isa" really lived, which I find unlikely given the evidence for and against. He was a solar hero, and far from the only one. Of course, I don't think Islam ever had a solar hero in its religion, but rather started out like Mormonism did - as a "revelation" from one self-proclaimed prophet which claimed to some extent to build upon an existing religion. The old astrological "wisdom" never found its way into either of these religions, as the lone "prophet" of each wasn't schooled in such things. This of course leaves the followers of their religions even further removed from the starry truth of a character such as "Isa" than the unwitting Christian and Jewish believers today, as it adds that extra layer of newer religious nonsense which also treats the solar hero as a real historical person. In short, you have a long way to extricate yourself from your mythological quagmire.

 

I think it is clearly that the sum of the OT is to love god and love our fellow man.
But the sum of the NT is that we must accept truh, or else we will love things that we ought not, and ignore our fellow man because we are vblind to the fact they we are hating him.

Like the Civl Rights Movement was opposed with "Separate but equal" for a century, until Martin Luther King made us face the Truth.

It wasn't equal.
The Laws made us act as if it was.

 

Regardless of whether Jesus actually lived or not.
The New Testament is a well disseminated argument that claims Truth is our God. with billions of people paying attention to what is written in it.
The claim of human salvation as a species wherein Jesus, said that he symbolized Truth, [/U] and is the sole savior for humans who must cope with the real world by thinking, and thinking correctly about everything.

That is so right that the bible is actually unnecessary, except as a vehicle for getting the universal audience of all men and peoples to understand the message.

 

You are corret about most Americans who bhae pagan and are sexually promiscuous.
They are calling themselves christians while aborting 1.2 million babies every year as Ezekiel complaint about in his day, and birthing 1.5 milluon baby bastards every year.

The 1.5 million women who have legitimate babies every year still are church goers and moral, in genral.
They are still behaving as sinful but confessing christians.

Islam, on the other hand, is guilty of pretense in respecting and accepting jesus as a prophet from god, whie do nothing he told them to do:



1) They do not love their enemy.

We see the terrorism today, and can read about the previous expansion of Islam by force.

Christians "sell" their christianity, but muslims impose it.

2) They do not strive to be the sons of god, which Jesus said all men can become:

John 1:12
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name

3) They do not acknowledge that the father of Truth is Reality, hence God is not one.

4) They do not strive for peace, but fight even each other.

5) They do not turn the other cheek, especially to those who oppose their religion, though Jesus demonstrated that Christians should even endure martydom by their critics.

6) They do not "preach the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" which Jesus SPECIFICALLY said to do.

7) They do not believe "All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men," as they kill people who burn the Koran.

 

Oh my...