Hercules and Jesus

[Craig B]

I've also read that Jesus was based on Horus. <snip> Yep, it looks like everyone took the same story and tweaked it for their own purposes.

There seem to be masses of lists like this in various places on the Internet, some more ridiculous than others. A few are quite mad; or they are written by humorists or charlatans, who have most certainly "tweaked (them) for their own purposes". Here's my favourite so far; and here's my favourite "parallel" from its list.

14.When Horus came of age, he had a special ritual where his eye was restored. When Jesus (and other Jews) come of age, they have a special ritual called a Bar Mitzvah.​

Makes you think, eh? A special ritual and a special ritual. The parallelist pulled that out of his bum, of course, unimpressive as it is.

But it's worse than simply a ridiculous parody of a "parallel". It is historically absurd. The Bar Mitzvah was not practiced in ancient times as anyone can find out in two minutes on the Internet! One would expect an expert on the histories of Jesus and Horus to be aware of this already, or to check the facts before including it in the list of "parallels".

Read this.

During the talmudic era and early medieval times, a ceremony made no sense, because a minor was permitted to participate in all religious observances as soon as he was considered mentally fit [to do so].​

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/history-of-bar-mitzvah/

Using the term as we do today, to imply a ceremony of simcha related to the coming of age 13, is a relatively recent ritual innovation in Jewish tradition, dating only as far back as the 13th century. There is no direct mention of it, beyond the signs of maturity just cited, in the Torah, the Mishnah, Shulchan Aruch, or Maimonides.​

http://ajrsem.org/teachings/journal/5765journal/krieger5765/

That approach to ritual maturity changed drastically sometime between the 14 and 16th century in Germany and Poland, where minors were no longer permitted to read from the Torah or be counted in a minyan. From that point in history, bar mizvah became an important life-cycle event throughout the Jewish world. Boys were called to the Torah to symbolize the attainment of adult status in the prayer life of the community.​

http://www.haydid.org/barmitzv.htm
Nor is it recorded or asserted that Jesus underwent a ceremony in which his eye was restored.

ETA. Here's another Jewish source on the antiquity of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

The bar or bat mitzvah is a relatively modern innovation, not mentioned in the Talmud, and the elaborate ceremonies and receptions that are commonplace today were unheard of as recently as a century ago.​

http://www.jewfaq.org/m/barmitz.htm

 

[GDon]

I've said before that I think it's better for people with an opinion to post justifications for that opinion, rather than link to videos by gurus who inspired Wooster cranks, and even expect us to sit through more than half an hour of the material. No. Please set down your arguments and we can consider them.

But if one of these arguments is that Horus was a black child and Jesus was a little black bambino, I don't think I'm going to be persuaded by your case.

Don't worry, Craig B, I was posting strictly tongue-in-cheek. Many of those "amazing similarities" come from the late 19th C and early 20th C, by pseudo-scholars with an interest in showing Christianity had an origin in pagan myths. There was a cottage industry for books of that kind in that time. And nearly all of it was bull-crap, either made up or based on misinterpretation of evidence. Interestingly, a lot of this came from Christian-minded writers (I won't call them scholars), who wanted to show that pagan religions and Christianity were pretty much the same thing. So they published books about how the pagan figures were all crucified, had 12 disciples, etc. Ironically, all this was later mined by others like Paul Joseph, Acharya S, Tom Harpur and others, who used that information for their own anti-Christian purposes.

As a theist myself, I have to laugh a little at how atheists can also believe silly things without any evidence. Theists, atheists, we are all not so different! We tend to believe something without evidence and without skepticism when it matches our prejudices.

Tim O'Neill has just started a blog called "History for Atheists" where he will discuss common mistakes made by atheists about history.

 

[Thor 2]

As a theist myself, I have to laugh a little at how atheists can also believe silly things without any evidence. Theists, atheists, we are all not so different! We tend to believe something without evidence and without skepticism when it matches our prejudices.

Tim O'Neill has just started a blog called "History for Atheists" where he will discuss common mistakes made by atheists about history.

Just can't let you get away with that one GDon. This is a skeptics forum and skeptics are the last ones to believe silly things without evidence. Skepticism is the mindset that I think the majority of atheists have.

 

[GDon]

Just can't let you get away with that one GDon. This is a skeptics forum and skeptics are the last ones to believe silly things without evidence. Skepticism is the mindset that I think the majority of atheists have.

Ah! Good to know. The claims in this thread are no doubt about to be substantiated any moment now.

 

[Thor 2]

Ah! Good to know. The claims in this thread are no doubt about to be substantiated any moment now.

I don't know that too many claims are being made. I see some conjecture, some of it humorous, and some tongue in cheek. Not all posters here are atheist either.

 

[Craig B]

Tim O'Neill has just started a blog called "History for Atheists" where he will discuss common mistakes made by atheists about history.

I have reservations about his lists too.

- That Christianity caused the "Dark Ages" by systematically destroying almost all ancient Greco-Roman learning,
- That Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria and that Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered because of a Christian hatred of science
- That Constantine was a crypto-pagan who adopted Christianity as a cynical political ploy (and personally created the Bible)
- That scientists were oppressed during the Middle Ages and science stagnated completely until "the Renaissance"
- That "the Inquisition" was a kind of Europe-wide medieval Gestapo and that the medieval Church was an all-powerful totalitarian theocracy
- That Giordano Bruno was a wise and brave astronomer and cosmologist who was burned at the stake because the Church hated science
- That the Galileo Affair was a straightforward case of religion ignoring evidence and trying to suppress scientific advancement
- That Pope Pius XII was a friend and ally of the Nazis who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust and helped Nazis escape justice

These are unnecessarily exaggerated representations. It is not necessary to praise Bruno like that to note he was in fact executed by the Church. Galileo was indeed persecuted for doctrinal reasons as stated by the Church itself, and the discussion of heliocentrism was impeded. Even if not a "straightforward" case, it was deplorable.

One doesn't need to exaggerate the power of the Inquisition to be repelled by its activities; one doesn't need to state that Pius XII was a friend of the Nazis to criticise the behaviour of the Church during the Holocaust, and Nazis were indeed aided to escape by members of the church. And so on.

In short, O'Neill is indulging in a bit of straw-manning.

 

[GDon]

I have reservations about his lists too.

- That Christianity caused the "Dark Ages" by systematically destroying almost all ancient Greco-Roman learning,
- That Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria and that Hypatia of Alexandria was murdered because of a Christian hatred of science
- That Constantine was a crypto-pagan who adopted Christianity as a cynical political ploy (and personally created the Bible)
- That scientists were oppressed during the Middle Ages and science stagnated completely until "the Renaissance"
- That "the Inquisition" was a kind of Europe-wide medieval Gestapo and that the medieval Church was an all-powerful totalitarian theocracy
- That Giordano Bruno was a wise and brave astronomer and cosmologist who was burned at the stake because the Church hated science
- That the Galileo Affair was a straightforward case of religion ignoring evidence and trying to suppress scientific advancement
- That Pope Pius XII was a friend and ally of the Nazis who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust and helped Nazis escape justice

These are unnecessarily exaggerated representations...

In short, O'Neill is indulging in a bit of straw-manning.

I've seen people argue for those positions many times, so I don't see them as exaggerated representations. O'Neill has responded to most if not all of those points as ones actually raised by atheists.

Which one of those do you see as the most exaggerated? I'll see if I can find O'Neill's comments on it.

 

[Craig B]

I've seen people argue for those positions many times, so I don't see them as exaggerated representations. O'Neill has responded to most if not all of those points as ones actually raised by atheists.

Which one of those do you see as the most exaggerated? I'll see if I can find O'Neill's comments on it.

If you can do so, let me have his comments on all such objections to his points. I can't choose a particular one. His approach to them all is the same. Bruno was executed for heresy

on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including Eternal Damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern.​

That's bad enough. We don't need to exaggerate Bruno's merits in order to be revolted at the treatment he received. Likewise Galileo. Read the terms of his condemnation. More recently, here's Ratzinger holding forth on Galileo, 1990.

From the point of view of the concrete consequences of the turning point Galileo represents, however, C.F. Von Weizsacker takes another step forward, when he identifies a “very direct path” that leads from Galileo to the atomic bomb.

To my great surprise, in a recent interview on the Galileo case, I was not asked a question like, ‘Why did the Church try to get in the way of the development of modern science?’, but rather exactly the opposite, that is: ‘Why didn’t the church take a more clear position against the disasters that would inevitably follow, once Galileo had opened Pandora’s box?’​

And so forth. So I'd like to see the comments on as many of the points as you can conveniently obtain.

 

[GDon]

If you can do so, let me have his comments on all such objections to his points. I can't choose a particular one. His approach to them all is the same. Bruno was executed for heresy

on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including Eternal Damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern.​

That's bad enough. We don't need to exaggerate Bruno's merits in order to be revolted at the treatment he received.

I agree, but the issue is that Bruno's merits ARE exaggerated, and almost always by atheists. And that's O'Neill's point. O'Neill writes about the exaggerations of Bruno made in the new "Cosmos" TV series here: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/cartoons-and-fables-how-cosmos-got-the-story-of-bruno-wrong/

A quote:

In the weirdly distorted version of the story the program tells, Bruno is depicted as an earnest young friar in Naples who was a true seeker after truth. But DeGrasse Tyson assures us that he “dared to read the books banned by the Church and that was his undoing.” We then get a sequence of Bruno reading a copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things which he has hidden under the floorboards of his cell. The first problem here is that Lucretius’ work was not “banned by the Church” at all and no-one needed to hide it under their floor... The idea that the Church banned and/or tried to destroy Lucretius’ work is a myth that Christopher Hitchens liked to repeat and which has been given a lease of popular life via Stephen Greenblatt’s appalling pseudo historical work The Swerve, which somehow won a Pulitzer Prize despite being a pastiche of howlers.​

So O'Neill isn't strawmanning those arguments. He explains in the link above the points made by "Cosmos", and why they are wrong.

 

[Craig B]

I agree, but the issue is that Bruno's merits ARE exaggerated, and almost always by atheists. And that's O'Neill's point. O'Neill writes about the exaggerations of Bruno made in the new "Cosmos" TV series

Here's Tim O'Neill on Bruno

Yes, he's a martyr for magical thinking, mystical woo and being a continent-wide pain in the arse.​

Do you think that is an reasonable comment about a person burned to death for heresy?

The idea that the Church banned and/or tried to destroy Lucretius’ work is a myth that Christopher Hitchens liked to repeat and which has been given a lease of popular life via Stephen Greenblatt’s appalling pseudo historical work The Swerve, which somehow won a Pulitzer Prize despite being a pastiche of howlers.

It didn't escape entirely unscathed. Never on the Index, but banned in Florence in 1517. Hitchens' blunders were very numerous. I wrote to him pointing out many I found in the hardback edition of God Is Not Great. He graciously thanked me.

 

[GDon]

Here's Tim O'Neill on Bruno

Yes, he's a martyr for magical thinking, mystical woo and being a continent-wide pain in the arse.​

Do you think that is an reasonable comment about a person burned to death for heresy?

Well, yes, it is a reasonable comment when the argument is that Bruno was a martyr for science. Perhaps we are arguing at cross-purposes here?

It didn't escape entirely unscathed. Never on the Index, but banned in Florence in 1517. Hitchens' blunders were very numerous. I wrote to him pointing out many I found in the hardback edition of God Is Not Great. He graciously thanked me.

From what I've read, it was only banned for being taught in schools in Florence. Actually having a copy of the book would not get you persecuted. But that's the incorrect implication given in the "Cosmos" program. The Bruno cartoon in Cosmos can be seen starting from around the 3rd min mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VERmsazb40Y

 

[Craig B]

Well, yes, it is a reasonable comment when the argument is that Bruno was a martyr for science. Perhaps we are arguing at cross-purposes here?

No, we are not. You see my point. Bruno was put to death for heresy. He was unjustly tortured to death, for his opinions, some of which were even correct, others wrong. It was not he, but his persecutors, who were the continent wide pain in the arse. What does O'Neill have to say about this? He has this rather obnoxious thing to say, same source.

If proven, any one of them (Bruno's opinions) would get you burned if you didn't recant. Though you tended to be given lots of opportunities to do so - Bruno was given years to change his mind. Bruno didn't seem too keen to deny any of them and said he would only recant if the Pope himself came and personally ordered him to. His execution could actually be seen as a kind of sixteenth century 'suicide by cop".​

So he was executed for his opinions. According to O'Neil, that somehow makes HIM the pain in the arse, and his death a suicide, not judicial murder by religious tyrants.

 

[Craig B]

I agree, but the issue is that Bruno's merits ARE exaggerated, and almost always by atheists. And that's O'Neill's point. O'Neill writes about the exaggerations of Bruno made in the new "Cosmos" TV series here: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/cartoons-and-fables-how-cosmos-got-the-story-of-bruno-wrong/

A quote:

The idea that the Church banned and/or tried to destroy Lucretius’ work is a myth that Christopher Hitchens liked to repeat and which has been given a lease of popular life via Stephen Greenblatt’s appalling pseudo historical work The Swerve, which somehow won a Pulitzer Prize despite being a pastiche of howlers.​

So O'Neill isn't strawmanning those arguments. He explains in the link above the points made by "Cosmos", and why they are wrong.

Here is a statement on the topic by Greenblatt.

Some six or seven decades after Poggio returned the poem to circulation, atomism was viewed as a serious threat to Christianity. Atomist books were burned; the clergy in Florence prohibited the reading of Lucretius in schools.​

That seems fair enough. I haven't read The Swerve. Does he say something different there?

 

[GDon]

No, we are not. You see my point. Bruno was put to death for heresy. He was unjustly tortured to death, for his opinions, some of which were even correct, others wrong. It was not he, but his persecutors, who were the continent wide pain in the arse. What does O'Neill have to say about this? He has this rather obnoxious thing to say, same source.

O'Neill argues against the myth that Bruno was killed for his science. I don't doubt his obnoxiousness, but it is irrelevant to the point, at least the point that I am making.

Here is a statement on the topic by Greenblatt.

Some six or seven decades after Poggio returned the poem to circulation, atomism was viewed as a serious threat to Christianity. Atomist books were burned; the clergy in Florence prohibited the reading of Lucretius in schools.​

That seems fair enough. I haven't read The Swerve. Does he say something different there?

I haven't read the book either, so can't help you there. Were 'atomist books' in fact burned? I wasn't aware that the Catholic Church of the time had a problem with atomism per se. (Lucretius had made comments about souls and reincarnation.) I'd be interested in understanding why the Church had a theological problem with atoms.

 

[Craig B]

O'Neill argues against the myth that Bruno was killed for his science. I don't doubt his obnoxiousness, but it is irrelevant to the point, at least the point that I am making.

I haven't read the book either, so can't help you there. Were 'atomist books' in fact burned? I wasn't aware that the Catholic Church of the time had a problem with atomism per se. (Lucretius had made comments about souls and reincarnation.) I'd be interested in understanding why the Church had a theological problem with atoms.

Here's some material on that point.

Giordano Bruno (1548 -1600) brought the atomists' view of the world to the attention of Western natural philosophers. For Bruno: "atomism became the key to understanding the universe and its Creator...God becomes the source for all change in nature, as well as the source of its existence." He viewed the atom in three senses: physics, mathematics and theology, arguing that atoms were divinely endowed with a tendency toward organization. However, his attempt to Christianize atomism did not catch on in church circles and became part of a package of beliefs and behavior which led to his condemnation as a heretic and death by burning at the stake in Rome, in 1600.​

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Physical Science/atomism.html

Whether Nicholas was committed to skepticism is unclear, but on 19 May 1346 his views were condemned by Pope Clement VI as heretical. Nicholas was sentenced to burn his books publicly and recant, which he did in Paris in 1347.

In the 14th century, Nicholas of Autrecourt considered that matter, space, and time were all made up of indivisible atoms ...​

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Autrecourt He was not physically punished.

Over time, the Catholic Church began to elevate Aristotle's writings to the same level as Scripture and had associated atomic thinking with Godlessness. (Quite frankly, the ChemTeam does not know how the process took place, but it did ... Only recently (around the late 1980's-early 1990's) has the Church formally admitted its error.)​

http://www.chemteam.info/AtomicStructure/Democritus-to-Dalton.html

For the answer to ChenTeam's puzzlement, the following passage is a hint. It's from a Catholic site defending the Church in the Galileo affair.

There was a real doubt on the part of some theologians, however, as to whether atomism could be squared with the doctrine of transubstantiation defined by the Council of Trent. Redondi noticed an unsigned denunciation of Galileo's atomism in the files of the Holy Office; starting from this rather slender clue, he constructed an ingenious and highly readable account of what might really have been going on in 1633.​

Nor can atomism easily be squared with other miracles. Atoms impose order on nature; they must be supposed to have "rules of motion"; and these might well be imagined to be independent of Church decrees.

In the same way Stalin preferred Lamarck to Darwin, because Lamarck is less of a challenge to the power of the Party to mess about as it saw fit with plants, animals and people. The biologists promoted by Stalin refused to believe in the existence of "corpuscles of heredity": genes in modern parlance.

Another exposition of this

Yet natural “laws” somehow attained their remarkable organizing abilities. One either explains them by natural laws or by humbly bowing to divine teleology at some point, as an explanation every bit as plausible as materialism (everything being supposedly “explained” by purely material processes) ... One might call this (to coin a phrase) Atomism (“belief that the atom is God”). Trillions of omnipotent, omniscient atoms can do absolutely everything that the Christian God can do, and for little or no reason that anyone can understand (i.e., why and how the atom-god came to possess such powers in the first place). The Atomist openly and unreservedly worships his trillions of gods, with the most perfect, trusting, non-rational faith imaginable. He or she is what sociologists call a “true believer.”​

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2015/08/atheism-remarkably-childlike-atomistic-faith.html

The Catholic source "New Advent"skips over much of this background in a most laconic way.

Atomism is defended by Lucretius Carus (95-51 B.C.) in his poem, "De Rerum Naturâ." With the exception of a few alchemists in the Middle Ages, we find no representatives of atomism until Gassendi (1592-1655) renewed the atomism of Epicurus.​

http://my.newadvent.org/cathen/02053a.htm

But that's probably enough for now.

 

[TimONeill2]

No, we are not. You see my point. Bruno was put to death for heresy.

But not for anything to do with science. GDon has explained several times that I am addressing that myth. That he was executed for heresy is not in doubt.

He was unjustly tortured to death, for his opinions, some of which were even correct, others wrong. It was not he, but his persecutors, who were the continent wide pain in the arse.

"Unjustly"? By what standard? Theirs? Ours? Historians avoid value judgements like this.

What does O'Neill have to say about this? He has this rather obnoxious thing to say, same source.

If proven, any one of them (Bruno's opinions) would get you burned if you didn't recant. Though you tended to be given lots of opportunities to do so - Bruno was given years to change his mind. Bruno didn't seem too keen to deny any of them and said he would only recant if the Pope himself came and personally ordered him to. His execution could actually be seen as a kind of sixteenth century 'suicide by cop".​

I'm not sure how this is "obnoxious". Obviously I'm noting how things looked to the authorities of the time, to explain the reasons they felt they had for executing him. I'm not endorsing them - see above about historians avoiding value judgements

So he was executed for his opinions.

He was. That happened a lot in the seventeenth century.

According to O'Neil, that somehow makes HIM the pain in the arse, and his death a suicide, not judicial murder by religious tyrants.

I said nothing of the sort.

Here is a statement on the topic by Greenblatt.

Some six or seven decades after Poggio returned the poem to circulation, atomism was viewed as a serious threat to Christianity. Atomist books were burned; the clergy in Florence prohibited the reading of Lucretius in schools.​

That seems fair enough. I haven't read The Swerve. Does he say something different there?

No, he doesn't. But forbidding a book to be given the very high status of being a set text in the schools, something only accorded to the very highest authorities, is not the same as banning it. No-one had to hide their copies of Lucretius under floorboards. And Greenblatt overstates the influence of Lucretius on Bruno anyway. The latter actually got his ideas about multiple worlds from the man he called "the divine Cusanus" - that's Nicholas of Cusa, Cardinal, Papal Nuncio and second only to the Pope. But that detail didn't quite fit the pseudo historical fairy tale Greenblatt and the new Cosmos show was trying to peddle.

 

[Craig B]

"Unjustly"? By what standard? Theirs? Ours? Historians avoid value judgements like this.

Say you so? Is "continent-wide pain in the arse" a value judgement?

 

[TimONeill2]

Say you so? Is "continent-wide pain in the arse" a value judgement?

As I said, I was summarising how they saw him and in the context of explaining why he got executed.

 

[Craig B]

As I said, I was summarising how they saw him and in the context of explaining why he got executed.

So the answer to your question

"Unjustly"? By what standard? Theirs? Ours? Historians avoid value judgements like this.

is that you adopt "theirs". You are not avoiding value judgements where they correspond to those of the Church at that time. Historians don't avoid that? Here's one who does. He makes value judgements about Stalin's acts, without adopting Stalin's standards of what is just. Does that mean he fails as a historian? Judge for yourself. The Great Terror^WP

Conquest argued that Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin, although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s ...
In the book Conquest sharply criticized Western intellectuals for their blindness towards the realities of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and, in some cases, even in the 1960s. He described figures, such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser and Romain Rolland as dupes of Stalin and apologists for his regime for denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.​

 

[TimONeill2]

So the answer to your question is that you adopt "theirs".

Don't be ridiculous. In context, I was trying to get someone to see why they executed him. To do that is not to agree with them - that's absurd. Historians try to work out what happened and why, not to judge the past by the standards of the present.

You are not avoiding value judgements where they correspond to those of the Church at that time.

Utter nonsense. How the hell can I share seventeenth century Catholic ideas about "heresy" when I have no religious beliefs at all? You're being totally absurd.

Historians don't avoid that? Here's one who does. He makes value judgements about Stalin's acts, without adopting Stalin's standards of what is just. Does that mean he fails as a historian?

Historians sometimes do that about values systems they share, which means they can do it about history that is within living memory. But the further back you go the more and more invalid our value systems become. Given that Robert Conquest was born in 1917 and died last year, all of the people he condemns were contemporaries of his. That's nothing like condemning people from over 400 years ago who would find our post-Enlightenment ideas about freedom of ideas and personal religious conscience utterly incomprehensible. That's like saying someone should have called the police to arrest Aztec priests for murder.