A question about religion

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Gizmo gave the example of the Mormons are considered a cult in some places (where, I don't know). I thought they were pretty big.

On the other hand, there's the Amish. Is that a religious-type way of life? 'Cause they're pretty small but I don't think they're regarded as a cult.
 
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Rando

Guest
Both the Mormons and the Amish are just off-shoots of Christianity, so I don't think they count as either cults or religions unto themselves.
 
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Fire Slinger

Guest
But couldn't you consider Chirstianity a cult? Everybody follows some guy who claims to be the son of a god. Alot of the people are so fanicatical that they claim to have spoken to this god. People dress a certain way, act a certain way and read this large book, just because it's the will of this god?

For some reason, that's sounds like a cult to me.

BTW, most religions say that people are going to "hell", if they don't follow that certain religion. But isn't that what alot of "cults" say?
 
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Rando

Guest
Christianity and Islamm are the only major religions that I know of that have a concept of a place called hell. Most religions don't even have an idea of a heaven either. For instance, the jewish faith says that when you die, you go to be with God (not a heaven per se, but "with God") if you are rightous and choose to do so, but if you don't, you are not automatically consigned to hell, you just go and do something else during the after life.

Heaven and Hell were created by church officials as a reward and a punishment for doing or not doing what thier docturine says. There is NO mention of Hell in the bible. The closest thing is a description of a place that was once outside of ancient Jeruselam that was used, more or less, as a huge garbage dump. Imagine this for a moment, 2000 or so years ago. No sanitation, no cover for the waste, no ventilation to keep the stench outside of nearby homes. Now, to discredit me a little, I can not remember what they called it, but I know that the same word evolved into a synonym for Hell.
Also, you can find a few references for a hell-like place in Revelations in the New Testiment, but that was written 100 or more years after Christ died, and was heavily influenced by the fledgeling Christion church.

But, if we really want to get down and dirty, Jesus never said he was the son of God either. The closest was calling himself the "son of man". And, when he cried out "Father, why have you foresaken me!" while on the cross, there is no telling who or what he was talking to, considering the mind numbing pain and hysteria someone undergoing crucifixtion is going through. That is, if he said any such thing at all, since the first book of the New Testiment written (not apearing in the book, just written) was Mark, and historians have that as being first scripted 30 or 40 years after Christ. There were NONE of the 12 disiples involved with writing the gosples. Only the letters of Paul, and some of Acts, are genuine and "From the source."

I hope I did not insult anyone or step on any toes, but religion is sort of a hobby of mine, espesially the Western religions, and Christianity in particular. I don't think that human kind has ever come up with a more astounding and interesting invention.
 
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Rando

Guest
and on a rant, the concepts of Heaven and Hell that everyone is used to come mostly from the literary works of the likes of John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Dante Alagari's "Divine Comedy", both of which were written more then 1000 years after Christ...

...Maybe, since we can never be sure because the Gregorian Calender that the Western world follows is horibly flawed, and was started with "guesstimates" and "back-dating" about 400 years after Christ on the whim of the Church, who did not want to follow the "pagan" calender that worked just fine, but was "inheirently evil" for some reason, I guess because it was not "God's time"...

I could go on and on...
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
I agree with pretty much all you said, Rando, although I think that the Gospels were drawn from accounts from witnesses who were still alive from the time of Jesus (in other words, second-hand accounts but used first-hand accounts as research; kinda like the Holocaust preservation efforts today).

Still waiting for Gizmo to shed some light...
 
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Gizmo

Guest
Re: The Mormons
I`ve got a good friend who is a Mormon, so I`m not exactly biased or anything. But to consider them an offshoot of christianity is possibly wrong, as they don`t read the same Bible, don`t go to churches etc. It`s kind of like saying Judaism is an offshoot of Christianity (perhaps more accurately Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism). You wouldn`t even be allowed into a Mormon temple, and neither are most Mormons.
But I saw on TV recently that the Mormons are building a HUGE temple on the spot where their greatest original temple stood before it was burnt down by local christians who drove the Mormons out in the 1800s. The replica has got all the non-Mormons in the town scared because the Mormons are basically planning on driving them back out by only supporting Mormon-owned businesses and buying up all the available property.


Although I agree with Fireslinger that religion is an invention, I think that from a Sociological point of view the development of religion is almost universal regardless of the culture and so not remarkable. Consider how similar the belief systems of the huge array of cultures are. They all have a powerful deity or more commonly group of deities, they all reward good behaviour with bounty and bad behaviour with disaster. If the Sun God is angry the crops will fail, and somebody important must have done something wrong. Religious beliefs were an unavoidable part of the development of human culture as a means of bringing order to that which science had not yet explained.

As science advances, so religion recedes.

The root of the Jewish and Christian god is in the sheepherding culture of the 2000bc societies, which was no doubt influenced by the neighbouring Islamic belief system. The most interesting correlation between the two is not that they both believe in heaven and hell (this is actually a very common form, Valhalla being the Norse example, the Karmic reincarnation cycle is very similar as well), rather they are most notable for both being part of a VERY small circle of religions that worship a single all-powerful deity as opposed to a pantheon of gods.
 
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Rando

Guest
...followed by Christianity, then Islam.

The current Hebrew calender is at year 5000 something, puting the begining of thier calender around 3000 BC (or BCE, for Before the Common Era, if you want to be "in the know"). Thier religion would have developed well before this, putting Judiesim at something like 6000 years old or more.

In the Old Testiment of what is generaly called the Bible, Abraham was the first person to belive in the god Yehweh above all others.

This is not to suggest that they only thought that there was one god back then, but that Yehweh was the chief and most important god amoung the entire pantheon that the ancient Hebrews worshiped. The Comandment "Thou shall have no gods before me" is a testiment to the fact that there were other gods amoung the Hebrews. To me, that Comandment does not sound like "there are no other gods" but "I'm number one Hebrews, so watch out."

Next comes Christianity around 4BCE or so. It was started by an upstart Jewish Rabbi that wanted reform in his religion, not unlike Martain Luthor (not Dr. King mind you, the Council of Werms Martain Luthor")

Then, Islam came about. In the Islamic texts, it was Ishmail that was going to be sacrificed by Abraham up on the mount, not Issac as it is wriitten in the Christian and Jewish cannons. So, Abraham is the "patriarch" so to speak of all three religions.

And yes, the Mormons do read the "regular" Bible, just as all Christian branches do. They just added the Book of Mormon to thier holy texts, a compleatly seperate book, but not replacing the Bible.

And as I said before, Judiesim has no Heaven or Hell.

And, very few major religions today have a diety at all.
Christianity
Islam
Judisim (all three religions agree that they are all deticated to the same god)
and Hindi are all I can think of.

That leaves a lot of others that have no god, perhaps just a god-like figure or much reveared holy-man, or a set of philisophocal beliefs that are the religion unto themselves, but do not deal with a diety.
And lets remember that aside from Hinduisim, all of the polytheistic (meaning more then one god) religions are dead. I have grave doubts that I could go to Norway and find a still-used temple to Odin.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Why would Judaism have been well-developed before 3000 BCE? Where did 6000 BCE come from?

I don't know if Yahweh was the number one god in the Judaism pantheon; I think it more referred to the acknowledgement of other gods in other areas (whatever pagan gods were worshipped by the natives in the Promised Land before Moses and company took over) and admonished the Jews not to go start worshipping them (which apparently they did anyway, according to Kings and Chronicles I & II) (speaking of which, isn't Dark Horse Jewish? Maybe he can add something here)

What and who do the Native Americans worship today? Didn't they have a pantheon of gods?
 
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Rando

Guest
The current Jewish calender is at 5000 something.
That would make it 3000 years older then the Gregorian calender most of us are used to.
2000 - 5000 = -3000, or 3000, BCE.
I was just guessing that the tribes of the ancient Hebrews would have to have all gotten together and made some concrete desisions in thier religion before they developed a calender, so I just added a 1000 years to encompas more then enough time to do this and get orginized, making it 4000 BCE, or 6000 years ago. I would guess that the roots of Judeisim are even older then this though.
Obiously, I'm not a historian, so I'm sure I'm off, but that was my best guess.

And yes, the ancient jews got in trouble all the time for worshiping other gods but Yehweh, but there were other such gods in thier religions "way back when" I'm talking really old here, like 8 or 9 thousand years ago or older, long, long before the religion that is now modern Judeisim.
An example is Lilith, an evil seductress and sucubus that in really old Hebrew folk lore was, in some stories, the first wife of Adam. This can be seen in how in the 2 creation stories (there are indeed 2 seperate creation stories in Genisis, check it out) each has what seems to be a different woman.

Someone who is actually Jewish would be very helpful to this discusion. Does anyone know Darkhorse well enough to invite he/she over to help out with some stuff?

I really don't know anything about Native American religion, aside from the concept of "the great spiret", so some help from that department would be nice too.

This is fun. Rare is the chance to discuss religion and not have the conversation degenerate into name-calling, slander, hurt feelings and rage-filled examples of blind faith.
 
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Fire Slinger

Guest
Wow, Rando, I'm very impressed about your knowledge on western religions.

I'm not very religious and didn't know about some of the things you have spoken of.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Now the thread is so long I can't scroll down to see what you've said!

I say, I've gotta doubt your numbers past 3000 BCE. I mean, it's all well and good to "assume" that the ancients might have cobbled something together but to take THAT long? Another 2-3000 years? That's basically half of the known world history of time right there.

And I thought I read somewhere that historians have marked the time of Abraham and the rest of the "Israeli fathers" at about 2-3000 BCE (which is basically the Genesis book). So everything before in the book is speculation. In other words, if Judaism really was formulated 5-6000 BCE, why'd it take so long to get written down (I know, advances in writing probably, but then you could get in an argument there).

Darn it, I can't remember the rest... I'm going to have to cut and paste next time... but I'm pretty sure the Native American pantheon is pretty much equal, Great Spirit aside (who/what is the Great Spirit?).
 
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Rando

Guest
Beat's me.

If my old 1st edition Deities and Demigods Dungeons and Dragons book can be called accurate, then the American Indians did have a pantheon of different gods.

I am now going off in search of a web-site that might have a little something about Hebrew history.

I'll report back later.

This is fun.....
 
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Rando

Guest
I was off by oh.... a couple thousand years. But hey! I never claimed to be a historian.

So here we go, a brief outline of Hebrew history from Floyd College.
___________________________________________________________
BRIEF OUTLINE OF HEBREW HISTORY

NOTE: The B.C. dateS are approximate.

1900 B.C. Growing out of the Aramean strain, the Hebrews were becoming differentiated from other groups of Semites. Abraham dates from this period. Isaac was the son of Abraham; Jacob and Esau, of Isaac. Jacob had twelve sons. Ten were sons of Leah; two (Joseph and Benjamin) were sons of Rachel.

14th century By this time the Hebrews are in Egypt, according to the story of Joseph, as the result of famine. They prospered at first but were eventually government slaves.

1290 B.C. Moses led the people out of Egypt across the Sinai desert to Palestine.

1005-925 B.C. Period of prosperity during the reigns of David and Solomon.

933 B.C. Jeroboam formed northern kingdom of ten tribes.

721 B.C. Northern kingdom destroyed by Assyrians.

8th century Period of prophets: Amos 760; Hosea 750; Isaiah 739-95; Jeremiah 626.

586 B.C. Judah destroyed by Chaldeans - exile to Babylon.

539 B.C. Cyrus (Persian)released the Hebrews, who returned to Palestine. The Torah or Pentateuch was probably written down (first five books of the Old Testament). The temple was rebuilt.

300 B.C. By this time the Hebrews had become part of a Greek-speaking kingdom which was finally absorbed by the Roman Empire.

70 A.D. Roman Emperor Titus crushed a revolt.

131-34 A.D. Revolt against Roman Emperor Hadrain resulted in extermination or removal from Palestine.

134-1948 A.D. The Hebrew people were stateless, people of the diaspora (The "scattering").

1948 A.D. Republic of Israel founded in Palestine.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Don't know if anyone's interested, but I'm reading yesterday's Baltimore Sun paper right now (9/13/00) and there's an article from the Associated Press saying that a splinter group of the Mormons called Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints have pulled out all their kids and teachers from schools along the Arizona/Utah line. The official line is that they want to home-school the children but former members say it's in preparation for the apocolypse.

Cult? Or religion? And what if the pope said to do the same thing?
 
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Rando

Guest
Just when you thought that the fervor over the end of the world was over, here comes something new.

Cult or Religion?
This one is a tough call I think, so let's see exactly what Webster has to say:

Cult, noun
1- A system or community of religious worship and ritual
2- A religion or religious sect generally regarded as being exteamist or bogus.
3- Obsesive devotion to a person, idea or principle

Religion, noun
1- A belief in or reverence for a supernatural power
2- A particular intergrated system of these beliefs
3- The spiritual or emotional attitude of one who believes in such a system.

So, they sound a lot alike, don't they, with the exception of definition #2 under Cult.
I would take this to mean that any religion can be called a cult if the person that is calling it so does not agree or believe in what that group has to say.

I sould really get more work done before my supervisor comes around and se
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
That sounds about right, Rando. What it boils down to is that it's pretty much subjective...

Hey, get this. I've moved on to today's paper and there's an article about some woman in Baltimore who claims to be in daily contact with the Virgin Mary. At first the visions were just calls to prayer but they've moved on to the apocolypse and Satan and Mary meeting and now the Catholic Church has "investigated" and forbade her to hold her daily/weekly services that apparently thousands attend and spread her visions on the internet (what a run-on).

Hoo-whee.
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
... I'm just chock-full of religious news today...

Now I'm reading yesterday's Washington Post and the front page has an article about some artifacts have been found in the Black Sea that seem to support the theory of a massive flood happening in that area way long ago and could be the basis of the Biblical Flood. Says scholars generally agree that Genesis and the book of Noah were legends written down at around 2700-2900 BCE and the supposed flood in the Black Sea area happened around 7500 BCE.
 
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