Does it? There's some thought in physics circles these days that "time" as humans understand and experience it does not actually exist. Nothing definitive, of course, but the line of inquiry is fascinating.
Ok, but in the terms of this debate, we mean whatever allows us to experience time when we say 'time'.
Near-Identical Jesus Myths That Predate Jesus Posted By Team Daily on 04/06/2015 I studied history in college, and spent a lot of my time researching ancient civilizations and comparative religions. As an agnostic, I am fascinated by religion and the idea of faith and belief, across all religions spanning the entirety of human existence. Some of the most fascinating projects that I did in college involved comparing ancient mythology to modern religious beliefs, finding similarities and multiple parallels. For example, anyone who has ever read The Epic of Gilgamesh will know that many biblical stories are plucked straight from the story, including the flood myth and the virgin birth myth. Historians and religious scholars know that religious texts are made up of a series of myths (that’s not to say they are not true, but just that they are mythical stories). These myths appear across different religions and eras, and the same stories repeat themselves over and over again throughout history. Today, I will present to you five near-identical “Jesus” myths that predate Jesus. Please note that many of these stories have differing translations and interpretations, some of which tell different stories. The main idea of this list is to remind you that the story of Jesus is rooted in ancient myth. Horus (3100 B.C.) CREDIT: Wikimedia Horus was one of the many Egyptian Gods. This is probably one of the best-known and contested deities that is often compared to Jesus. Some translations and Egyptian myths say that he had 12 disciples, and was born of a virgin in a cave. His birth was announced by a star, and was attended by three wise men. He was baptized at age thirty by Anup the Baptizer. Horus performed miracles, including rising at least one person from the dead and walking on water. He was crucified, buried in a tomb, and resurrected, just like Jesus. Buddha (563 B.C.) CREDIT: Wikimedia Buddha’s mother, Queen Maha Maya, had a dream that a white elephant with six tusks entered her right side, impregnating her. As was tradition in this time, the mother left her husband’s kingdom to give birth near her father. She did not make it the entire way, though, and gave birth while traveling. Buddha was born in a garden beneath a tree. In addition to this birth story, Buddha, like Jesus, also performed miracles, healed the sick, walked on water, fed 500 men from a single basket of cakes, was transfigured on a mount, and taught chastity, temperance, tolerance, compassion, love, and the equality of all. There are also some texts that say he was crucified, spent three days in hell, and was resurrected. That is not what killed him, though, as he died in his old age from what is believed to be food poisoning. Mithra (2000 B.C.) CREDIT: Wikimedia Mithra was an ancient Zoroastrian deity, and along with Horus has some of the most striking similarities to Jesus. Yet another example of virginal birth, Mithra was born to the virgin Anahita on December 25th. He was swaddled and placed in a manger, where he was tended to by shepherds. Like Jesus and Horus, he had 12 companions (which can be interpreted as disciples). He also performed miracles, identified with both the lion and the lamb, sacrificed his life to save the world, was dead for three days before being resurrected, and was known as the messiah, the savior, and “the Way, the Truth and the Light.” His religion also had a Eucharistic-style “Lord’s supper.” http://the-daily.buzz/near-identical-jesus-myths-that-predate-jesus/?ts_pid=2
Okay, that is quite satisfactory. (And I'm not ignoring you, or this thread, but I'm having internet problems and also very busy in RL, so I can't get into serious discussions on WF more than once a day or so.) The descriptions that ascribe temporality of a similar nature to our own concept of time to heaven are entirely to be expected because when you attempt to describe something to someone who has no experience that is even close to it, you have to use images that he is familiar with. (Think of trying to describe a rainbow to a person born blind, who has heard all about "colours" and even the scientific description of what they are, but has never in his life experienced anything like a colour.) So of course heaven would be described in such terms, since the goal is not to even attempt to explain the nature of it. As for the reason to suspect that "heaven" doesn't have time that is at all analogous to ours (which is not at all the same thing as saying it doesn't have time; I have toyed extensively with the concept that it may well be two-dimensional time, for example), it comes from certain considerations of how God could be God in the first place. Of course, to someone who doesn't believe in God in any case, there is no need at all to try to understand how the concept of God can be consistent, but to those of us who have good reasons for believing that God exists but cannot simply say "Well, God is God and we can't understand him," that is not a sufficient answer. I'm not saying that the faith of those who don't try to understand how it all works is not real faith; perhaps it is even a more comforting faith than my own. But it is not for me. I freely admit that I can't understand everything, but I want to try to understand what I can. In particular, for reasons I won't go into here (a friend and I worked them out over a period of several years, about 40 years ago, but they are much too long to try to develop in a WF post, even for someone with a reputation for long-winded posts), I have become convinced of what I (and my friend) call God's "all time nature". That is, he is not moving along steadily in time as we are, but he is at all points in time at the same time. No, I can't really picture it, any more than I can picture a hypersphere, but I can play around with a crude mathematical model of what it might be like. (And it is that "playing" that has caused me to wonder if "time" for God might be two-dimensional.) To give a very incomplete and insufficient image of it, it is something like an author writing a book that spans a certain amount of time. The author can go to any point in that book and spend as much time as he wants on it, yet he is not "in that time" even so. The author stands outside the time of the book, in a time that is not the same, not parallel, not analogous -- there is no meaningful way that a character in the book could say "Where is the author right now?" His "right now", in his framework, has no meaning in terms of the author's frame of existence. Of course, the reason for which that illustration is totally insufficient is that the time-frame in the book is similar to the time-frame of the author in that, within the framework of the book, all characters are moving ahead little by little, just as the author is doing in his own time. Again, for reasons I won't try to explain, I suspect that the very nature of time in "heaven" (which itself is just a term we use for describing something we know almost nothing about) is such that God can be in all times at once whereas the author can go to any particular part of his story he wants, in any order, but he can still deal with only one thing "at a time" (his own time). To use a different illustration, based on space instead of time, the old concept of a two-dimensional world trying to imagine a three-dimensional world such as ours can give us the same idea (though there, the major fault of the illustration is that both share the same time, where I suspect that "heaven" is different in terms of both space and time). If a three-dimensional being "reaches into" the two dimensional world, his "physical reality" there is in fact a cross-section of what he really is. And his three-dimensional reality is as much outside reality to the two-dimensional world as a two-dimensional object is to those of us who inhabit a three-dimensional world -- having absolutely zero thickness, it does not occupy any three-dimensional space at all, so it can be nothing more than a mathematical concept. And yet, to the two-dimensional people, it would be very real, while our three-dimensional reality would be what is unreal. Now, if the three-dimensional being who somehow had a way of projecting himself into the two-dimensional world withdrew himself, someone might ask: "Where is he now? Is his physical reality (meaning the two-dimensionalness, the only reality they could conceive of as "physical") destroyed, or is it somewhere else? But the question is meaningless, because it assumes an analogous concept of space. If the same concept is applied to time (and understanding higher-dimensional time as something really meaningful, something you can get your teeth into and picture in a concrete way is even harder than understanding higher-dimensional space), you can see how time as we know it could be a meaningless concept in that other reality. And it does make it possible to come up with consistent models of how some aspects of God can be explained meaningfully, aspects that appear to be self-contradictory if we assume that God must be of the same general nature as we are. So there is a quick summary of over 40 years of thought on the subject. And even this has taken me over two hours to write, because I just don't have the time to devote to it that I would like. Fortunately, Windows didn't crash on me part way through...
And that is why we needed a special kind of rep that sincerely thanks someone for their post without in the least agreeing with it. Thanks, @Asyncritus!
These are pretty popular claims, but ultimately most of them are utterly false, and it takes very, very little research to discover that this is so. http://www.gotquestions.org/Jesus-myth.html
As a non-believer like Packard, all I gained from reading all this was that you have spent 40 years carefully constructing an intellectual argument that will convince you that God is a very real possibility. In essence a carefully positioned set of goalposts that allows you to rise above the more obvious and basic problems in scripture and belief. But I can't help but feel that all you are doing is engaging on a mission of futility because, whichever way you spin it, you still have no more evidence for the existence of God than your own gut feelings (viewed by you as God speaking to you if our previous conversations are anything to go by), and all the rest is a huge effort at self-placating the obvious logical doubts over your beliefs. Just for argument's sake, do you ever try and put yourself in the shoes of a non-believer and apply critical thought to this concept from that standpoint, rather than from one of rationalising what you deem to be a truth from the off? You're an intelligent man and you're clearly capable of that level of thinking, so I can't help but feel sometimes that there is an element of denial over the credibility of the concept you choose to believe in.
This is it exactly. "Blah, blah, blah, therefore God", will never work, no matter how many pages of blahs you toss in there, because you could just as well plug in Leprechauns or Unicorns in God's place, and they won't pop into existence either.
You undermine yourself when you source evidence contains this right at the very start.... "False gods". In other words, not the one true God of Christianity. Trying to convince an atheist that he's wrong because the other myths and legends aren't the "one true God" seems to me to be infinitely stupid. The rest of the page seems to nitpick on differences. Surely the real questions is, even if the minutiae are different, the overall notion of a mystical deity is a theme running through many cultures over many millennia so, with that in mind, what credible claim does Christianity (or, indeed, any of the Abrahamic religions) have that their account is true and other rest are just stories of "false gods"? That is the real question being raised by the page Dan linked to, and I put it to you that it's not one that can be immediately answered with an logic based credibility.
Actually, no. My thought process has been entirely the other way around. Having been brought up with religion, and having found it lacking, I discovered God in a personal way that had little to do with rational thought processes (in the same way that my discovery of you as a person was not the result of somehow convincing myself that you must exist -- I simply came across you on the internet). Instead, having discovered God in a way that doesn't prove anything to you (nor is it expected to; you didn't experience it, and I don't expect you to change your beliefs based on what someone else experienced) but that was quite sufficient proof to me, I then wanted to understand what I could of his nature. You may say this all you like, but you have no more chance of convincing me of it than those who insult you about what you know about Iran have of convincing you that you don't know what you're talking about. You can't convince them that you know Iran, and I can't convince you that I know God, but your detractors certainly will never succeed in convincing you that you don't know Iran, and you and others will never succeed in convincing me that I don't know God. Nevertheless, I respect your right to refuse the validity of my experience, since it doesn't fit with your worldview. Absolutely. It would be very irrational of me not to do so. I can no longer count the number of times, over the years, that I have done that. Again, you have the right to your opinion. I don't dispute that, or feel at all threatened (or "persecuted" ) by people disagreeing with my beliefs, and even insulting me for them. It is the right of everyone to disagree, and insult those who hold to other opinions.
And that you utterly refused to entertain the notion that it was hallucination, waking dream, delusion, or drug reaction shows your bias.
Question for you: Why do you suppose the human brain is programmed for such things as hallucinations, waking dreams, or even dreams themselves? We've all watched cats and dogs twitch in their sleep, dreaming that they're chasing prey because of some ancestral instinctive programming to do so as part of their survival, but is that the only function of the human brain as well, IYO?
But do you wonder about the things you don't know? Does it not get your creative juices flowing? To me, the fact that we don't know is entirely the main point. Someday science might explain these questiosn, but right now, there is that which we can perceive but lacks a scientific explanation. I want the explanation, but in the mean time, I see nothing wrong with dreaming.
And @Diacanu has been saying "It's all magic ." Now that he's willing to say "I don't know," the next step is to say "Religion =/= God. Let's ask more questions," it signals he's evolved past the emotional backlash against organized religion. Or, IOW, what gul said.
Yeah, okay, Dayton. Progress, then regress. Knew you couldn't sustain it. Unless maybe you can respond to gul's post.
Allow me to clarify. What one dreams of does matter. If one dreams of hegemony and violence, like Dayton, well, not so much. So, I repeat. About?
Science models the universe; it doesn't explain anything at all. Sometimes scientific models are so accurate that they seem like explanations, but they really, really aren't. The desire for explanations is a religious impulse, not a scientific one.
The unexplained. We've had this discussion before, and I've essentially argued that I view the God concept as the ultimate codification of all laws of nature. We don't have it codified yet, there are things about which we don't have a clue. And some of what we think we see isn't really there, while other things we don't see are. In the past, your view seems to have been that if it can't be explained, it doesn't exist. Half of what passed for science a few hundred years ago was laughably wrong. As a process for discover, science is hard to beat, but I doubt it will ever explain everything there is to know, and so long as there are gaps, who can say which dream of fancy gets it right and which gets it wrong? All you can say is that Async's dream doesn't work for you. Come up with your own. Or, just ignore that there is so much that we don't understand.
I don't have to make up dreams about what I don't understand in order to be amazed by what I don't understand. Incidentally, I also don't have to fail to understand something in order to be amazed by it in the first place. But more specifically, there doesn't seem to be a gap where @Asyncritus is planting his dream.
True, you don't have to, just as you don't have to buy his. The issue I have regards certainty, and the contempt it breeds in those who have it. Diacanu is just as certain about Async's view as Async is certain about it. And yet both are depending on some logical leaps to prove the worth of their positions.
Why? No. My view is if it can't yet be explained, it cant yet be explained. Making stuff up isn't an explanation. Investigation is. It can be confusing when you're surrounded by a media culture that says making stuff up is the same thing as a legitimate hypothesis, but um, fuck the media. No one has put forward ANYTHING that works as well. So, "hard to beat", doesn't quite do the job. If Async's dream just sat in his head being all cute, and making purring sounds, that would be lovely, but we all know it runs amok, and gives handjobs to Dayton's dreams, and causes real world ugliness. This isn't hippie-dippie crystal waving stuff. Saying it's okay to ignore evidence is not just wrong, it's lethal, as we saw with the latest measles outbreak. No, it ain't cute.
