Truth about religion.

[Beast]

I and many others I know have always tried to figure out why all religions have the same messiah time line and all the other similarities even with in the bible.

Answer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjGkRFFB ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_E0vfP7 ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyXIeB1q ... re=related

Watching these was like an Oh Sh!t moment. It all made since.

[Davin]

As much as I would love to have reasonable evidence that religions just took concepts and ideas from previous religions, none has come up yet. This stuff is just confirmation bias. There are hundreds of other stories about Jesus and Horus that really distinguish them as well as the reasons listed as to why the similar things happened.

So is it possible that Jesus, Muhammed  and others are just rehashed deities from previous religions? Yes it's possible. But I highly doubt that any evidence will ever surface that shows it definitively.

However it does show that the "miracles" and attributes aren't original.

[Beast]

After looking at the dates and stories i don't see why it would be completely out of the question. Maybe less of one group jacking an others religion but the same stories passing on to other cultures. Like the game telephone, by then end the message is different.

[Davin]

Yeah, I think it's possible and definitely don't think it's out of the question. The similarities are impressive, but I've seen lots of stuff (mythology is one of my favourite subjects) on this and it fails the test of reasonable evidence.

[Beast]

What reasonable evidence would you be looking for?

[Davin]

If I was looking for something to compare this to I would consider this in the same vein as a copyright lawsuit. Similarities certainly do help the case but it can also be lost on what is not similar. How many movies feature similarities? There are enough movies that share equal amounts of similarities but the movies generally have enough differences to prove that each one is an original piece of work. I find the same holds true for this.

[Beast]

But what evidence would you be looking for that would bring this from not out of the question to likely? Understandably this 30 minute piece can't give everything but that is the start.   Essentially just as most movies are the same so to are the religions, just different details to give a other messages and based on the writers objectives.

[Davin]

Because any form of good physical evidence is extremely unlikely to exist, something like documents that say, "hey that god getting resurrected is a good idea, let's do that for Jesus." The only other thing I can imagine to use as evidence is how similar and different the they are. I would be happy to see any other kind of evidence, but as yet the similarities are the closest thing I have seen come up, and there are too many differences in the mythologies for to say that they definitely copied it from them. If you look at Greek mythology compared to Roman mythology you can see that the Romans clearly copied from the Greeks because the gods are almost exactly the same, just with different names. The Romans had a few more gods, but the similarities between the two theologies and the lack of enough differences is good evidence that they did copy the Greeks. So I would look for something like that.

[Davin]

For another similarity, the Qu'ran and the Old Testimate are very similar from reading them both, so I do think there is a case to say that one is a derivative of the other, but I don't see the same kind of thing for other mythologies and the middle eastern mythologies.

[MikeTheInfidel]

I'm really getting sick and tired of this FALSE history of the development of religions. People need to stop believing Zeitgeist and the woo-woo pseudohistory of Acharya S. and do some actual research into how these things came about. Reality is much more interesting than this simplistic fiction.

Basically, nearly every single claim made about the various gods in this video is false. Acharya has made a career out of fabricating 'connections' between Jesus and other gods that have no basis in fact. The similarities are tenuous at best, if not outright fictional - i.e., the underlying stories have been stretched to the breaking point so that they sound very similar when in fact they were almost nothing alike in their original forms. For example, there are no stories in the literature about Dionysus being born of a virgin or about Mithras being crucified, though Acharya and Zeitgeist both assert that there are.

Acharya will defend her claims by saying that she has hundreds of primary sources to back them up. Unfortunately for her, she has no idea what a primary source is. A historian cannot be a primary source, and many of her "sources" are mystics and purveyors of their own pseudo-histories. She is dedicated to the idea that the Christian mythos is a whole-cloth theft of previous traditions. Sadly, too many atheists have fallen for her nonsense.

Please - STOP buying into this stuff. Actually look into the history of religions. Just as the truth about the universe is much better than the satisfying fiction of the Bible, the truth about history is much better than the satisfying fiction of the "Christ conspiracy" woo-woos.

[Beast]

Zeitgeist, never seen it so I don't know what you are talking about there. And you really can't say there are not similarities to all religions. After life, Salvation, Punishment for not believing, some one had to come up with these ideas and it evolved based on the 'knowledge' available at the time to reinforce these new belief systems. This was merely an exercise to get the thoughts going about where did this all come from and why it is so popular.

[elliebean]

I don't think the religions are necessarily directly copied from each other, but many of them do appear to have been made out of the same Lego kit.

[Beast]

I don't think the religions are necessarily directly copied from each other, but many of them do appear to have been made out of the same Lego kit.

Different colors, same building.

[elliebean]

Different colors, same building.

Well, not even the same building, necessarily. In my analogy, several kids get the same, identical Lego kit for christmas; they don't all build the same thing, but they have a limited number of parts to work with, so there are a lot of similarities. They might even borrow each other's ideas to incorporate into their own creations, on occasion, but none of them are skilled enough builders to create an exact replica or anything with any practical use.

Actually, a better analogy would be that they share a single kit between them and take turns building and then making sketches of each of their own creations.

Better still, it's not an official Lego kit, but a home-made one improvised out of sand and hardened chewing gum.

Very creative, these kids.  

[Beast]

Very creative, these kids.  

Totally.

I was referring to the structure of religion than literally the same building.