Also, there are now more Ikea catalogs published than the Bible, making Ikea the superior religion.
Since Ikea a famous for their meatballs, a part of the holy dish and body of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, our Holy Noodle is more real than the Christian god, or any other god.
Middle English: via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin biblia, from Greek (ta) biblia ‘(the) books’, from biblion ‘book’, originally a diminutive of biblos ‘papyrus, scroll’, of Semitic origin.
Little books. Booklets. Since both God and Spiderman have several books, they will have to play this out by arm wrestling or Parcheesi.
Imagine picking up a copy of a copy of a copy of partial recreation of a blog entry about Spiderman existing in the year 4000, and having a long argument over whether Alain Robert, “The Human Spider” ever existed.
Imagine picking up a copy of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in the year 4000 and insisting “This guy couldn’t have been real, either”.
It’s curious, because I rarely see this argument aimed at the Apostles - particularly John and Peter. There’s just this tacit “They’re liars, it never happened” subtext. No one is brave enough to challenge the entire history of a schism in the Jewish church two millennia ago. Or to consider the apocrypha or the gnostic texts or the plethora of splinter faiths that emerged from this singular moment.
These are things that seemingly happened independent of a non-existent person, without any identifiable precursors. It’s like spilling a bunch of ink claiming Lincoln wasn’t real without asking who won the presidency in 1860.
In Julius Caesar a clock strikes three, and while they had hours (a fraction of the daytime, not a standard unit) they didn’t have mechanical clocks.
But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.
Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute. The miracles and matching Jesus up to fit the prophesies came later. Also Pontius Pilate loved crucifixion and had execution teams on standby where it was considered elsewhere in Rome a dire sentence for the worst of offenders. Pilate was the Roman equivalent of a hanging judge, so it was super-easy for a malcontent in Jerusalem to end up on the cross.
But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.
We know about Julius Caeser in large part due to the highly politicized nature of the office. If he was a “lesser” consul or emperor, less material would be produced and preserved over the subsequent centuries. The materials around minor prophets in far-flung holdings where the biggest literate portions of the population were ideologically opposed to his contemporaries weren’t going to make it to Cato the Elder in a timely fashion.
That takes us to the documents we do have, which are absolutely larded up with embellishment and gossip and mythological rumor. That’s not an unknown problem for exceptionally historical figures. We don’t discount the existence of the Pharaohs of Egypt because their surviving manuscripts describe them as deities. Nor do we dismiss the existence of the city of Troy because our handful of texts insist the city was frequented by Greek gods and goddesses.
Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute.
The significance of the founder of the Christian movement wasn’t that he was one more anti-establishment apocalypse prophet, but that he succeeded in galvanizing an enormous popular movement in a way prior rabbis and rabble-rousers hadn’t.
Blandly comparing Christ to Spiderman only really makes sense if you believe Spiderman has had the same influence on modern American society and culture as a Jewish mystic had on Rome. I mean, maybe 2000 years from now we’ll see it differently. But it seems fairly obvious that’s not the case.
As I understand it, Christianity got lucky. Jesus’ incident led to a movement in a time when it suited the purposes of disregarded demographics, of ambitious warlords and academic philosophers. It was the grain of sand that started a landslide, the planet suitable for intelligent life to evolve.
Jesus (again, according to academic consensus) was the lucky quantum to start a massive chain reaction.
I’m reading it as a joke like “yeah sure, a guy named Jesus was born to a virgin and rose from the dead”- which is about as likely as Peter getting bit by a radioactive spider and swinging from skyscrapers with his webs. Has nothing to do with whether either are influential on society. Of course they both are to varying degrees. One is treated like Greek, Egyptian, or Incan gods or priests or whatever comparison you think best maintains the spiritual elements. The other more like Santa, where kids believe it only so long as their peers and adults play along.
Imo, as long as we move forward as a society eventually to recognize the mystical parts are bullshit, who cares. Humanity collectively still seems to be in Santa stage wanting miracles to exist.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection. There is a ton of exaggeration in all mythology texts, and some are just stories to illustrate a point. But of those that did have factual events, they are rarely a true telling.
Maybe some Israelites left Egypt during a particularly shitty time in Egypt. It is so easy to take a story of a smallish group of Israelites escaping slavery during a plague and being chased by some guards who gave up, and repeatedly embellish that story until God both hardened Pharaoh’s heart and punished him for not doing right by His people (which number far more than could possibly have been living in Egypt at that time) by giving a series of plagues, and then wiping Pharaoh and his army out with a magical sea passage that closed on them. It’s such a trope of all human storytelling it’s been a joke for centuries.
Apply that to literally every story, think of the motivations behind those writing it, and you can get an amazing moral teacher becoming God.
But to the point of the meme, from the perspective of people in the future, there may have been a Peter Parker, but there’s no reason to believe there was a Spider-man without more to go on than the comics. Likewise, religious texts.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection. There is a ton of exaggeration in all mythology texts, and some are just stories to illustrate a point. But of those that did have factual events, they are rarely a true telling.
Can you be more specific here? What are factual events? Are you referring to the Bible? Which events specifically?
Because my understanding is that the consensus among historians is that there’s only like one or two references to a “Jesus of Nazarath” outside of the Bible (Josephus being the main one, and even that is super vague).
The honus is on your to prove that he existed, not the other way around.
There are an unfortunate contingent of atheists that think “Jesus existed” = “support for Christianity.” I’ve had this argument on this very website. (Very common on the internet for someone to assume that a non-mythicist must be a Christian - uh, no, that’s following for that CS Lewis “lunatic or lord” false dichotomy.)
It’s clear that there was a real, vagrant preacher that had a following. Q and the Sayings source were likely compiled quickly after his death - it’s likely that many of the words attributed to him were the words of the real man.
At first, I don’t think he was understood as literally divine, just a messenger of god or prophet. There’s a clear escalation across the gospels if you read them in the order they were written - it’s really John that presents Jesus as the logos, and John was written last.
The most likely explanation was that he was an apocalyptic Messiah figure, who was supposed to lead to the overthrowing of the Romans. When he was killed, the cope became that he was resurrected. They negotiated with the text of the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, and constructed the fully human/fully divine figure that eventually became the theological party line.
Which story will you remember the most: the boring and mundane, or the fantastical and exciting?
Most stories back then were also passed around by word of mouth, so each retelling will be slightly different (possibly also more exciting than the last). By the time someone decides to write it down it has already been distorted. Probably not much is left of the original story.
Maybe the story of Noah’s ark started out as a real story of a man who managed to save a few of his livestock from a stormy day, and then it somehow got so distorted it became a story about a man surviving a world encompassing extinction level event.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection.
I’ve seen quite a few folks float the full blown “Jesus was invented by the Romans to trick the occupied state of Palestine into accepting Roman rule” theory.
Apply that to literally every story, think of the motivations behind those writing it, and you can get an amazing moral teacher becoming God.
Sure. Siddhartha (the Buddha), Mohammad, even Confucius to come extent.
But like with most of these, the divinity of a figure is decided on well after they’ve been dead and buried. What I’m stuck on in the denialist “You can’t prove Ancient Historical Figure X existed now that I’ve arbitrarily rejected the veracity of all the existing materials.”
But to the point of the meme, from the perspective of people in the future, there may have been a Peter Parker, but there’s no reason to believe there was a Spider-man
The point of the meme is that religious texts are fictional, because fictional texts exist.
The point of the religion is that society should organize itself around certain traditions and taboos, because it will lead to a utopian future of peace and plenty.
There difference between Jesus and Spider-Man isn’t their magical powers, its their activist base of enthusiastic followers.
Actually there are many books of Spiderman which means there’s more proof for Spiderman than there is for God.
And New York City is real, so that means Spiderman is real (this is literally the logic that some Christians use to defend the Bible)
Also, there are now more Ikea catalogs published than the Bible, making Ikea the superior religion.
Since Ikea a famous for their meatballs, a part of the holy dish and body of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, our Holy Noodle is more real than the Christian god, or any other god.
Little books. Booklets. Since both God and Spiderman have several books, they will have to play this out by arm wrestling or Parcheesi.
Imagine picking up a copy of a copy of a copy of partial recreation of a blog entry about Spiderman existing in the year 4000, and having a long argument over whether Alain Robert, “The Human Spider” ever existed.
Imagine picking up a copy of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in the year 4000 and insisting “This guy couldn’t have been real, either”.
It’s curious, because I rarely see this argument aimed at the Apostles - particularly John and Peter. There’s just this tacit “They’re liars, it never happened” subtext. No one is brave enough to challenge the entire history of a schism in the Jewish church two millennia ago. Or to consider the apocrypha or the gnostic texts or the plethora of splinter faiths that emerged from this singular moment.
These are things that seemingly happened independent of a non-existent person, without any identifiable precursors. It’s like spilling a bunch of ink claiming Lincoln wasn’t real without asking who won the presidency in 1860.
In Julius Caesar a clock strikes three, and while they had hours (a fraction of the daytime, not a standard unit) they didn’t have mechanical clocks.
But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.
Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute. The miracles and matching Jesus up to fit the prophesies came later. Also Pontius Pilate loved crucifixion and had execution teams on standby where it was considered elsewhere in Rome a dire sentence for the worst of offenders. Pilate was the Roman equivalent of a hanging judge, so it was super-easy for a malcontent in Jerusalem to end up on the cross.
We know about Julius Caeser in large part due to the highly politicized nature of the office. If he was a “lesser” consul or emperor, less material would be produced and preserved over the subsequent centuries. The materials around minor prophets in far-flung holdings where the biggest literate portions of the population were ideologically opposed to his contemporaries weren’t going to make it to Cato the Elder in a timely fashion.
That takes us to the documents we do have, which are absolutely larded up with embellishment and gossip and mythological rumor. That’s not an unknown problem for exceptionally historical figures. We don’t discount the existence of the Pharaohs of Egypt because their surviving manuscripts describe them as deities. Nor do we dismiss the existence of the city of Troy because our handful of texts insist the city was frequented by Greek gods and goddesses.
The significance of the founder of the Christian movement wasn’t that he was one more anti-establishment apocalypse prophet, but that he succeeded in galvanizing an enormous popular movement in a way prior rabbis and rabble-rousers hadn’t.
Blandly comparing Christ to Spiderman only really makes sense if you believe Spiderman has had the same influence on modern American society and culture as a Jewish mystic had on Rome. I mean, maybe 2000 years from now we’ll see it differently. But it seems fairly obvious that’s not the case.
As I understand it, Christianity got lucky. Jesus’ incident led to a movement in a time when it suited the purposes of disregarded demographics, of ambitious warlords and academic philosophers. It was the grain of sand that started a landslide, the planet suitable for intelligent life to evolve.
Jesus (again, according to academic consensus) was the lucky quantum to start a massive chain reaction.
I’m reading it as a joke like “yeah sure, a guy named Jesus was born to a virgin and rose from the dead”- which is about as likely as Peter getting bit by a radioactive spider and swinging from skyscrapers with his webs. Has nothing to do with whether either are influential on society. Of course they both are to varying degrees. One is treated like Greek, Egyptian, or Incan gods or priests or whatever comparison you think best maintains the spiritual elements. The other more like Santa, where kids believe it only so long as their peers and adults play along.
Imo, as long as we move forward as a society eventually to recognize the mystical parts are bullshit, who cares. Humanity collectively still seems to be in Santa stage wanting miracles to exist.
I haven’t really heard that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist as an argument against Christianity, just that he wasn’t God and didn’t to miracles/resurrection. There is a ton of exaggeration in all mythology texts, and some are just stories to illustrate a point. But of those that did have factual events, they are rarely a true telling.
Maybe some Israelites left Egypt during a particularly shitty time in Egypt. It is so easy to take a story of a smallish group of Israelites escaping slavery during a plague and being chased by some guards who gave up, and repeatedly embellish that story until God both hardened Pharaoh’s heart and punished him for not doing right by His people (which number far more than could possibly have been living in Egypt at that time) by giving a series of plagues, and then wiping Pharaoh and his army out with a magical sea passage that closed on them. It’s such a trope of all human storytelling it’s been a joke for centuries.
Apply that to literally every story, think of the motivations behind those writing it, and you can get an amazing moral teacher becoming God.
But to the point of the meme, from the perspective of people in the future, there may have been a Peter Parker, but there’s no reason to believe there was a Spider-man without more to go on than the comics. Likewise, religious texts.
Can you be more specific here? What are factual events? Are you referring to the Bible? Which events specifically?
Because my understanding is that the consensus among historians is that there’s only like one or two references to a “Jesus of Nazarath” outside of the Bible (Josephus being the main one, and even that is super vague).
The honus is on your to prove that he existed, not the other way around.
There are an unfortunate contingent of atheists that think “Jesus existed” = “support for Christianity.” I’ve had this argument on this very website. (Very common on the internet for someone to assume that a non-mythicist must be a Christian - uh, no, that’s following for that CS Lewis “lunatic or lord” false dichotomy.)
It’s clear that there was a real, vagrant preacher that had a following. Q and the Sayings source were likely compiled quickly after his death - it’s likely that many of the words attributed to him were the words of the real man.
At first, I don’t think he was understood as literally divine, just a messenger of god or prophet. There’s a clear escalation across the gospels if you read them in the order they were written - it’s really John that presents Jesus as the logos, and John was written last.
The most likely explanation was that he was an apocalyptic Messiah figure, who was supposed to lead to the overthrowing of the Romans. When he was killed, the cope became that he was resurrected. They negotiated with the text of the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, and constructed the fully human/fully divine figure that eventually became the theological party line.
The big reason for this is that the name Jesus is interpreted and thousands of men came to and from Nazareth.
Can anyone disprove one of them wasn’t “Jesus of Nazareth”?
Tap
No more than anyone can prove one of them was.
Which story will you remember the most: the boring and mundane, or the fantastical and exciting?
Most stories back then were also passed around by word of mouth, so each retelling will be slightly different (possibly also more exciting than the last). By the time someone decides to write it down it has already been distorted. Probably not much is left of the original story.
Maybe the story of Noah’s ark started out as a real story of a man who managed to save a few of his livestock from a stormy day, and then it somehow got so distorted it became a story about a man surviving a world encompassing extinction level event.
I’ve seen quite a few folks float the full blown “Jesus was invented by the Romans to trick the occupied state of Palestine into accepting Roman rule” theory.
Sure. Siddhartha (the Buddha), Mohammad, even Confucius to come extent.
But like with most of these, the divinity of a figure is decided on well after they’ve been dead and buried. What I’m stuck on in the denialist “You can’t prove Ancient Historical Figure X existed now that I’ve arbitrarily rejected the veracity of all the existing materials.”
The point of the meme is that religious texts are fictional, because fictional texts exist.
The point of the religion is that society should organize itself around certain traditions and taboos, because it will lead to a utopian future of peace and plenty.
There difference between Jesus and Spider-Man isn’t their magical powers, its their activist base of enthusiastic followers.