Religion as an Invention
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Sunday, August 23, 2026 16:07
VIEWED: 9267
PAGE 7 of 12
It's also nice that the church has rescinded on at least some of Peter's misogyny, and now says that not only can women participate in the church, but also that they can achieve salvation. Considering how important women converts were in the times of the church during Roman persecution, you'd think the Council of Nicea would know better. But I guess it was more important to perpetuate certain power structures.
I wonder about Peter, he took serious issue with Mary Magdalene and the other women in Jesus' life. I suspect jealousy.
As for the bible, new versions and translations are released all the time, with the language just slightly tweaked to validate whatever views the then-translators wanted it to have. The King James bible was a very superstitious book, it's leveled out since then, but other agendas have slipped in ideas. I don't know as well as DT does about the rewrites, but I do know that on some matters, like war and occupation, that certain world leaders have followed it "religiously."
This sounds like the source DT is drawing from for his claim.
Quote:
The English Biblical scholar, Robert Henry Charles (1855–1931), reasoned on internal textual grounds that the book was edited by someone who spoke no Hebrew and who wished to promote a different theology to John's. As a result, everything after 20:3, he claims, has been left in a haphazard state with no attempt to structure it logically. Furthermore, he says, the story of the defeat of the ten kingdoms has been deleted and replaced by 19:9-10.[17] John's theology of chastity has been replaced by the editor's theology of outright celibacy, which makes little sense when John's true church is symbolised as a bride of the Lamb. Most importantly, the editor has completely rewritten John's theology of the Millennium which is "emptied of all significance".[18]
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by RionaEire:
Why did the Jews have all those rules back then? I believe it is because God wanted them to be unique and seperate people, since he picked them and all.
Actually, the concept of a unified ancient jewry is a myth. The ancient tribes were constantly at war with one another, and worshipped different gods. At some point a king of Jerusalem replaced the names of all gods with the tetragammon YHWH, or Jehovah/Yahweh as we say it in English and Hebrew. This is not an actual god, but a placeholder name. The origin of "I am" is for "I am he whose name cannot be spoken." I did much pondering on the board as to the reason for that, and eventually I decided that it was much like the King David and King Arthur myths, which create illusion of historical unity by merging the lives of different people, similarly, YHWH creates the illusion of one God, for the purposes of uniting Israel. It didn't work, and it was fairly poorly done, and becomes obvious to anyone carefully reading the bible, as said God would come across as wildly schizophrenic. Also, worth noting that Israel contains El in the name, who was the God of Galilee and parts of Assyria, who had tracked west across north central asia, changing his name from Enlil to Ellil and in hebrew just to El. Later, El (meaning high, or the high one, as he was god of the sky, also interpreted as heavens) married Him, the sea goddess, and his name was changed to Elohim, which is believed by some Rabbis to be a name for the devil, which is odd, since they call their country Israel "to serve El"
Quote:
DT, what proof do you have that Revelation was written in the 1880s? I must confess I've never heard that particular conspiracy theory before.
Just the actual texts in physical form, but I'm sure there's a ton of information about this online.
rewritten, not written, It's been rewritten again many times. I have many texts here in old fashioned printed matter, it changes to meet the war demands of kings. It's not really the word of God. I am dubious that it existed in any form that would resemble the current, but I'm sure the information is out there.
The bible's radical rewrites aren't exactly a mystery. The 1880 rewrite was one of the more extensive: Over 30,000 changes were made. The part that people miss often when considering this is that it was not just minor changes like the names of Gods, or profound political ones, like the insertion of the word "witch" but really truly radical changes like which books would be or wouldn't be in the bible.
It's entirely possible that some books have no basis in the original text at all, the one that has come most under fire for this is the gospel of John. I find it more likely that books were written and added "loosely based" on some ancient text, sort of like the way spielberg and company make movies from Phillip K Dick stories, or maybe more like Albert Broccoli's James Bond movies, thinly and loosely constructed from short stories by Ian Flemming
Quote:
I wish there was Trad Irish Idol, I could handle watching/trying out for that.
How are you on Flogging Molly?
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Byte,
When me and Antimason went through this one a couple years back the number of sources was staggering, and there was little agreement other than that there had been radical edits. In fact, radical edits have been going on for a long time. The Hebrew bible was adapted from the Sumerian, but parts of it came from the Assyrian and Egyptian, and additional books from various parts of Israel which were added and subtracted from time to time, and also at times, radically edited.
The book of John and the revelation of St. John the Divine would have been written in Greek, not Hebrew. It's quite likely that Greek, and not Aramaic, was Jesus's native language. He was a member of a Nazarene cult that worshiped El and were offshoots of Zoroastrianism, as the result of a Persian conquest of Galilee centuries earlier.
The whole thing had buggerall to do with Judaism until really the council of Nicea, at a time when Jerusalem had a pronounced influence in Rome, decided that it did. They were promoting a Judah-based agenda for a religion which has been extinct for millennia, like the language it wrote. No one speaks the language, because it was written in shorthand, and can't really be deciphered, but a modified alphabet was reconstructed into a Hebrew language in a three year project form 1887-1890. Most Hebrew sacred texts were then translated *into* Hebrew from their various source languages.
An ancient Hebrew bible exists as source material for its 15th c. German translation, which has been revisited many times.
Riona
As for all these rules, and why they exist, it's because they all had some survival advantage for their tribe, either against some other tribe, or against nature. Some were good ideas, others sucked. Anyone who wants to know the literal true word of God is going go mad trying. They're going to be stuck with inconsistent conflicting texts of a society in a state of perpetual war writing in shorthand of long dead languages about Gods that don't exist, have been renamed in text written in myriad different languages which have been edited both properly and maliciously on hundreds of occasions with probably a million or so edits in all, some as radical as completely discarding the gospel of Thomas, or adding John.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I'm assuming Sin is somewhere in there among the many gods represented.
Definitely can see Sin in the Islamic representation of god, they like their crescent moons and bull horns symbology.
Or maybe... It looks like Sin is supposed to be the son of Enlil? As well as chief of the gods and lord of wisdom, so the two entities eventually merged into one which was both son and father. Later on when biblical scholars were rewriting all the old gods as demons, the name Sin instead became synonymous with our current definition of sin, "any act of transgression, especially a willful or deliberate violation of some religious or moral principle."
Shekina may have been an amalgamation of goddesses and god-wives, then also merged in with the overarching God idea.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Byte,
Sure. It's speculated that he was the initial God of the cult in Jerusalem. Sin worship was pretty widespread in the area, but the cult of Sinai were what we might call radical extremists of their day. They were particularly driven by a fear of the encroaching advancement of africans up the arabian coast of the red sea. Mt. Sinai and the Sinai peninsula is named for their god. It's been claimed many many other things, like China, or Sina, locally, but this is probably nonsense and a linguistic coincidence, Chin was a common family name which rose to dynastic power.
I would pick this one over "Molech" since Molech actually means king and in the reference that are translated as Molech, mlk=king, lmlk=molech=to the king, to is translated as sacrifice, and mlkm=molech, their=their king. Early kings like Ba'al later became deified and were referred to as gods. The book of Ba'al was written by his wife Anat, which is a common story (Aisha actually started Islam based on the writings of her husband Mohammed) But by the time of King Zebub of North Israel, Ba'al was considered god of Fire, a name he got for introducing the smelting of iron to Israel, though much of his actual sacred book is devoted to the construction of windows, he was most concerned with men not sneaking in during the night to bang his daughters which he had seven of. I imagine it kept him up all night ;) I also figure this is where the thing in Buffy with the "hearty beets" comes from.
Anyway, there are some specific gods that mlkm was used to refer to that slip my mind at the moment, but the name Malcolm et. variations come later from this.
This image of feeding molech children to be burnt is probably propaganda, those archaeologists have found statues with ashes of the offerings, it's unclear which god they are to or whether the offerings were alive or even human. It's also possible that stillborn or dead children were burnt by some cults as a ritual or superstition related to disease, etc. and probably the numbers were high, hence, this rather than giant graveyards.
Anyway, the cult of Sinai migrated out of Egypt to Zion, which may share a name origin, and most probably brought the egyptian gold based economic system with them, and became very powerful, and ultimately took over or formed the kingdom of Judah, which was in tremendous disarray at the time. When the cult arrived, the city of Jerusalem was standing, but completely abandoned, a mystery like Tikal, not yet settled as far as I know, but possibly similar reasons, the collapse of local agriculture, or possible a plague. Plagues tend to hit the places of high population density because of a much higher rate of contact, thus transmission.
Anyway, prolly more than you wanted to know. I guess one more detail, the wars of ancient Israel were largely based on the mad desire of Judah to conquer all of Israel, and some rather gruesome incidents where they massively exterminate the other tribes, some of which are still in the bible.
This is basically the same sort of logic as Nazi Germany, which intended to depopulate eastern europe and replace the local population with Germans. They're still doing it of course, but now they're calling themselves the EU and doing it through propaganda and economic manipulation, through the Euro, which is of course based in Frankfurt, by issuing power, not that it would really be any better if it was actually based in Brussels as it claims. Frankfurt banking industry of course is what spawned the Reichsbank, and Deutchbank, which now dominates the Euro. The major media arm of propaganda is Bertelsmann, the media conglomerate that made its fortune on being the primary creator of Nazi propaganda.
When you look into this stuff in depth, the way things work becomes clear in an abstract view, but thing become less certain rather than more.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Interesting. Quick off topic: is this where all the German national debt is coming from, their banks trying to buy power for a nationalist agenda?
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Riona and Happy: just wanted to put in some obligatory reassurance that discussing the evolution, translation, and so on of the bible does not discredit the current beliefs of any Judeo-Christian religion.
By nature, the more metaphysical beliefs of Judeo-Christian religion, such as in heaven or God, can not be proven or disproven, and a discussion about old human interpretations of any God has no bearing on the actual existence of those ideas. Similarly, I'm not bothered by most of the rules those religions follow, I mostly take issue with a select few interpretations which are by no means the view of the majority.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Same place as ours. All of Europe is rapidly becoming in debt to the Euro Consortium, who holds issuing power of the currency. The balance of this issuing power is based in Frankfurt, Germany in the same way that the balance of ours is based on Liberty Street in NYC.
It doesn't matter that the FED is inside the US, or the the Euro which is based on the FED is inside Europe, the bankers still hold the power. If a nation, such as Ireland owns no issuing power, there is no way for it to get out of debt. In order to operate a govt., they must borrow money, which they pay back by taxing their populous, which means that the economy will sink forever, making it a slave state.
The way such states are created is with economic incentives. Economic "balancing" offers are made to bring lesser economies "up to scale" with more successful ones. This is essentially a bribe. It means that during the short reign of the current politicians, the economy will flourish, and they can do whatever they want. Afterward, their people will be enslaved for eternity, but they're politicians, and don't care.
It's pointless to have any discussion about defeating or displacing TPTB without an underlying understanding of where it is they get their power from, and how they use it. The most essential piece of their power is the issuing of currency. If you could take from them that alone, you could do a lot of damage to their empire.
Other keystones to knock out besides the issuance of fiat (currency and land grants) would include their control commodities, their propaganda network, their intelligence gathering apparatus, their illusion of legitimacy (democracy et al.), their military superiority and the authority granted to their central govts.
I'm probably missing a few because I just got up, and you never hit 100% off the top of your head but those were intentionally placed in descending order of importance.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Riona and Happy: just wanted to put in some obligatory reassurance that discussing the evolution, translation, and so on of the bible does not discredit the current beliefs of any Judeo-Christian religion.
By nature, the more metaphysical beliefs of Judeo-Christian religion, such as in heaven or God, can not be proven or disproven, and a discussion about old human interpretations of any God has no bearing on the actual existence of those ideas. Similarly, I'm not bothered by most of the rules those religions follow, I mostly take issue with a select few interpretations which are by no means the view of the majority.
Trust me, I know
I rather enjoy these discussions when it feels more inquisitive/informative and less hostile. My personal belief is that while the old testament can be quite fascinating, (or complicated and frustrating depending on your thoughts and circumstances) it has little bearing on the day to day lives of most Christians. That Jesus was a pretty shiny guy, efficiently summarizing our faith in two commandments:
Quote:
1. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength;
2. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
Of course, him taking on all our sins past present and future, granting us forgiveness and the eternal life we don't deserve was pretty shiny too. Just my opinion, but I think setting an example like that kinda encourages forgiveness. Christianity is about forgiveness and redemption, not wool and linens, not trimming beards, and not hatred of any sort.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by TheHappyTrader:
My personal belief is that while the old testament can be quite fascinating, (or complicated and frustrating depending on your thoughts and circumstances) it has little bearing on the day to day lives of most Christians.
Some of those early books, genesis esp. play majorly for most Christians though, as do the psalms.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME