Original Sin?

Even more Good News from Neurologica.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/does-science-prove-god/

It's partly an argument I constantly make. In fact, I'd claim I've made it better, but then I had the luxury of multiple postings.

More Good News to spread:

http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/10/12/shroud_of_turin_dna_comes_from_all_over_world.html

You can end your bondage to an object.

I love the shroud, it has a pic of
Jesus the Giant on it. A 6' Jesus
that would have towered over
his disciples. Goliath was only
6' 9" and would barely make a
good NBA player. Yet he was so
tall he was called a giant. If Jesus
was really 6' tall, as the man on
the shroud is, it would surely have
been mentioned somewhere.

The Shroud shrouded in mystery. I usually don't read Nareed's posts but I do like that line from the end of the article.

Quote: FrGamble

The Shroud shrouded in mystery.

The real mystery is why a 6' Jesus was
never mentioned. You have two conclusions.
Jesus was not 6' tall. The shroud is a fake.
Duh.

Really only those two conclusions? Maybe the interpretation of the shroud's image could be off?

Quote: FrGamble

Really only those two conclusions? Maybe the interpretation of the shroud's image could be off?

We already went down that road. An
expert on these types of images said
the figure is 6' tall.

Maybe it got wet and stretched.

I'm listening to a lecture series on military history. Surprisingly, the lecturer delves deeply into the tangible origins of beliefs, customs and practices of various ancient civilizations. In particular he brings up religious beliefs.

According to his analysis, it seems likely Yahweh, or Jehovah, was derived by the Israelites from an Assyrian war deity. This would explain quite a lot. You'd expect a war god to be bloodthirsty and prone to use excessive force. How best to defeat an enemy, after all?

But he doesn't stop there. He makes a good, if brief, case that latter iterations of Jehovah as well as the appearance of Satan, reflect aspects of the Zoroastrian faith as practiced by the Persians, with Jehovah incorporating aspects of the good god, Ahura Mazda, and Satan of the bad god, Ariman.

Further, the Persians believed the world would end when the forces of Ariman faced off against those of Ahura Mazda. The latter would be led by a human savior, who'd be born from a virgin.

As ancient peoples go, the Assyrians stand out for cruelty. One can imagine what their war god was like. And that ultimately is what Christians, Jews and maybe even Muslims claim as a source of morality.

I'll admit to a great, big heap of confirmation bias on my part. But it's the one thing I've learned so far that even begins to make sense of Western religions, and how they've been moderated by other institutions over time. Now the progression of the decline of the Roman Empire to Dark Ages to Renaissance to Enlightenment to the Present begins to make logical sense.

In re my last post, it boils down to the following:

The dominant Western religion is a philosophical derivation of the war god of a people particularly cruel in warfare, but adapted to every day life. It is somewhat moderated by the latter adoption of two Zoroastrian deities, then further modified by the ideas born of 1) the old war-god period prophecies and 2) Either Jesus or his followers as set down in the New Testament canon.

But throughout all this, the moral core of the whole thing remains the old war deity, cruel, demanding, vengeful and bloodthirsty. The attempt to change him to a loving god fails completely. You get a "loving" god for whom too many morally neutral or inconsequential actions are sins which deserve harsh punishment, or at the very least a great deal of atonement and penitence. Not to mention his followers (supplicants?) keep finding ways to assert their own cruelty and vengefulness through him as a sacred act. No wonder this theology regards brutal, bloody murder as an act of "love" and "redemption."

And it's humanity that's supposed to be "broken"?

If this sorry, pell-mell agglomeration of primitive superstitions and really bad ideas is real (HA!), he should be begging us for forgiveness.