When Will There Be Guaranteed Freedom From Persecution To Be Religious

[EnderD_503]

Originally Posted by Apocalipstic

Even in a thread about persecution for not being religious, we are falling into discussing it all from a Christian standpoint and using Christian language.

Our calendar, holidays, tv programing....so much of our culture. It KILLS me when I turn on the History Channel and they use the Bible as a historical textbook. Christian bias is definitely there in media.

Oh yeah, for sure. The kicker is that the calendar/holidays themselves are largely heathen-derived. Christmas (Jul/Yule), Easter (from the Germanic goddess of spring/fertility Eostre/Ostara), saints days (for example, St. Brigid's feast coinciding with Imbolc, St. John the Baptist's Day with northern European midsummer celebrations lest we forget those wonderful bonfires ), not to mention holiday figures like Santa Claus and their root in the Wild Hunt of northern Europe.

You'd think people would clue in that christianity is a mythology like any other, and one that adopted the practices of other religions to gain followers. Yet people still whine that saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas is an attack on christians...yet the holiday itself isn't even originally christian.

Have faith in it if you'd like, but there's hardly any logic to pursuing the idea that christians/religious people bear any kind of moral/behavioural high ground. The entire history of christianity tends to counter that logic.

Originally Posted by Apocalipstic

We don't actually know definitely and concretely that Jesus ever even existed.

Originally Posted by Fenchurch

I subscribed to a certain degree of skepticism about Jesus' existence at one time, but it seems to me that there are really quite a few sources that confirm his place as an historical figure. Of course, I do not believe that he was the son of any sort of god. What I do believe is that Jesus was a culturally important philosopher who paid rather too high a price for suggesting that we might all want to be nice to one another now and again. But I don't need to believe in a sky-god to share that philosophy.

Mostly every prof. I've had on the subject has subscribed to the view that there was very likely a historical figure named Jesus. The thing is that we know very little about him, though what little non-christian evidence exists points to him as being a likely illiterate political rebel both involved in the revolt against Roman occupation as well as trying to reform judaism for the purpose of rebellion against the Empire. Religion and rebellion were very much connected during the period. From what we can see, his message was most specifically directed toward the Jews and was a rallying call to fight occupation and reform judaism as an accommodation.

Anything else written about his life is pretty much pure speculation. Highly unlikely that he was a philosopher of any kind. In the Greco-Roman and medieval Jewish tradition, this would have required literacy and he was likely not literate. Additionally, there is no evidence about his own beliefs, and much of the moral code later attributed to christianity was likely inspired by judaism or created after his death since the New Testament was pieced together over centuries also after his death.

It would have been unlikely that the Romans would have recorded much about his religious leanings. Christianity at that point wouldn't have been called christianity and would have been among a number of other cults present throughout the Roman Empire. Jesus himself would not have called it "christianity." Additionally, the supernatural factors within his life were added later, and were largely inspired directly by Mesopotamian mythology.

Originally Posted by Fenchurch

Actually, the sources I tend to trust most are non-christian Roman historians. Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius all would have been contemporaries of Jesus, and all mentioned him in their writings, mostly to talk about what a nuisance the Jews were becoming.

None mention anything about his supernatural affiliations.

We still need to be careful when citing scholars like Tacitus in particular. Tacitus' works largely copies or his own versions of previous works rather than original material. They are useful in so far as they they've managed to preserve many works that would have been otherwise lost (Germania, Agricola etc.) He along with Pliny and Suetonius would have been moreso writing in the Roman tradition than recording what was ever known for certain. Remember that the Greco-Roman world had different ideas on truth, history and historical accuracy than we do today.

But their writings do suggest that at one point there was a Jesus of some sorts involved in the Jewish revolt against Roman occupation.