Story of Jesus Christ was 'fabricated to pacify the poor', claims Bible Scholar

[-MAKAVELLI-]

The moral decrees stated by religious texts are, I think, pretty much common sense decency for most people. Not everybody needs a text book to know right from wrong, and how to treat other people.

What I do think most Abrahamic religions represent are mans general fear of the unknown after the lights fade out from our lives.

What happens after?

Does anything happen after?

It's like going on the deepest, darkest sleep, but never waking up to know that you just had your deepest, darkest sleep.

Pea with a quick brain glitch where his intellectual side makes a cameo

[[ DUBBZZ ]]

Pea with a quick brain glitch where his intellectual side makes a cameo

Like Will Farrell during the debate in Old School

[COVID-19]

All religion is about mind control of others.

[Sweet Pea 50]

Pea with a quick brain glitch where his intellectual side makes a cameo

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just bright enough to know I don't know.

You know?

[Zarco]

For claiming to have this deep philosophical mind I think you miss the bigger issue and don't have much faith in humans.

Religion isn't essential to human existence or for the well being of humans. Because it's something that is used as comfort, doesn't mean it the ONLY thing that can give people comfort.

We have each other, we have love, compassion, the arts and many other philosophies that can help in any problem you have in life. Religion is not for the weak, it's just that it's been the dominant force for morality, charity, compassion etc...

Those things won't go away if religion goes away though. I think the opposite will happen to be honest. We will realize that this is all we have, so we need to turn to each other, not some fantasy that makes us feel better.

Thousands of religions have come and gone, and we are still doing fine. Humanistic ideals, progressive and secular morals have elevated themselves above any religious teachings in the best countries in the world.

There will be a day where religion is extinct, I truly believe that.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If you are telling me that I have no faith in humans because I believe that having faith in something is a good thing, then maybe you are missing the bigger picture. I don't see how religion is so bad that there is an army of humans trying to dissolve it. You have an issue in people believing in something that is likely not true right? Everyone believes in something that is not true, even you. And a lot of it is probably useless and senseless.

Say there is a girl that lives halfway across the world from you, her father cheated on her mother and she saw the whole fallout right before her eyes. Not only has she seen the pain her mother go's through, but she sees the suffering her 3 younger sisters go through as well. Her parents divorce in a nasty fallout, her mother takes her and her sisters to another country to live with her aunt. From having a stable happy family and great memories, she is now living with people that are her family, but that she has never met before. She does not get to see the father whom she loved every day like she used to. She is now in a strange country where she does not speak the language and has no friends. Her mother has nothing and has to work 2 jobs to support 4 little girls and hardly ever sees them. The years pass by and its now been 10 years since she has seen her father. Being the oldest, she's had to take on the role of a father by helping her mom out with the bills and with her little sisters. Since her late teens, she's had to work longs hours 6x a week to help keep eviction notices from coming in. She has been through extreme amounts of emotional/mental pain and suffering.

What if religion was her main source of comfort? My question to you is why should it be taken away from her? Just because it's that guys and many others belief that she should not believe in a "fantasy"? Can he help her see things through his intelligent and wise lense? Will his spidey sense kick in..."There is a girl out there, she needs my help." Will he fly out there, find her, and show her love and compassion, arts and philosophies that can help her as you said? What about all the other millions of people that need help at the same time as her, will he be able to reach them and guide them with his amazing emotional healing powers? And of course, they will automatically see things his way because every mind on earth is like his right? And when this amazing scholar dies, who will take his place because humanity will surely live on after he ceases.

[Cuauhtémoc1520]

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If you are telling me that I have no faith in humans because I believe that having faith in something is a good thing, then maybe you are missing the bigger picture. I don't see how religion is so bad that there is an army of humans trying to dissolve it. You have an issue in people believing in something that is likely not true right? Everyone believes in something that is not true, even you. And a lot of it is probably useless and senseless.

Say there is a girl that lives halfway across the world from you, her father cheated on her mother and she saw the whole fallout right before her eyes. Not only has she seen the pain her mother go's through, but she sees the suffering her 3 younger sisters go through as well. Her parents divorce in a nasty fallout, her mother takes her and her sisters to another country to live with her aunt. From having a stable happy family and great memories, she is now living with people that are her family, but that she has never met before. She does not get to see the father whom she loved every day like she used to. She is now in a strange country where she does not speak the language and has no friends. Her mother has nothing and has to work 2 jobs to support 4 little girls and hardly ever sees them. The years pass by and its now been 10 years since she has seen her father. Being the oldest, she's had to take on the role of a father by helping her mom out with the bills and with her little sisters. Since her late teens, she's had to work longs hours 6x a week to help keep eviction notices from coming in. She has been through extreme amounts of emotional/mental pain and suffering.

What if religion was her main source of comfort? My question to you is why should it be taken away from her? Just because it's that guys and many others belief that she should not believe in a "fantasy"? Can he help her see things through his intelligent and wise lense? Will his spidey sense kick in..."There is a girl out there, she needs my help." Will he fly out there, find her, and show her love and compassion, arts and philosophies that can help her as you said? What about all the other millions of people that need help at the same time as her, will he be able to reach them and guide them with his amazing emotional healing powers? And of course, they will automatically see things his way because every mind on earth is like his right? And when this amazing scholar dies, who will take his place because humanity will surely live on after he ceases.

I was the first one to say that religion gives comfort to millions in the world. I think this is the primary reason that people believe in gods. It gives them strength in time of need, it gives them something to believe in when life is at it's lowest place, but let's be fair in this analogy.

Let's say you are a little boy living in Palestine. You grew up devout in the Muslims faith and one day your father while walking to the store to pick up some groceries for you and your family get's killed by an Israeli soldier because he didn't hear the warnings over a loud crowd in an Israeli check point.

So your whole life you hear over and over again, that Jews are evil, and they are occupying holy Muslims lands. So you reach and age where the Imam is telling you that the only guaranteed way to paradise is by dying in battle against these evil Jews. What better way to die, than kill the very people that murdered your father.

So you meet up with some elders, they strap a bomb to your body filled with scraps of sharp metal and iron nails and you make your way to a crowded market place. You reach the busiest time, when there's the most people and you see a school bus pull up full of young Israeli children.

You look up at the sky and think for a second that detonating yourself is a terrible sin, but then you remember the words of your Imam, and the Surahs in the Quran that give you the strength and faith of knowing what you are doing is the will of Allah.

So you push the button on your cellular phone which detonates the bomb strapped to your chest. You kill 40 people, including 27 children. All innocent and not even old enough to comprehend this ideology that you say is used by so many people for strength and comfort.

So it goes both ways my friend. Isn't it better in the end to deal in the REAL world, and learn from each other, comfort each other and leave these silly superstitions behind that can push humans to do..yes, great and wonderful things, but also evil and terrible things.

[mrpain81]

Old news.

[iNorton]

A controversial American biblical scholar is set to make his first appearance in London next week to present a discovery that he claims proves the story of Jesus Christ was invented as a system of mind control to enslave the poor.

Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled 'Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus', asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.

At the 'Covert Messiah' conference, to be held at the Conway Hall in Holborn a week on Saturday, Mr Atwill will present his theory that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they entirely fabricated the story of Jesus Christ.

Outlining his ideas in a blog posting on his website Mr Atwill writes: "Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery."

Mr Atwill says that acts of insurrection by Jewish sects, who were awaiting the arrival of a so-called 'warrior Messiah' in Palestine, were a perpetual problem for the Roman Empire and that after the Empire had exhausted all traditional means of dealing with the problem they resorted to psychological warfare.

"They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system," Atwill told PRWeb.com

"That's when the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented.

"Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to 'give onto Caesar' and pay their taxes to Rome."

Mr Atwill continues: "Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.

To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East."

Elsewhere, Mr Atwill also writes: “In fact he [Jesus] may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”

Atwill says he made his discovery when while studying the New Testament alongside the 'War of the Jews' by Josephus - the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea.

Mr Atwill claims that he began to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts.

"What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus," Atwill claims.

"This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern", he continues.

"The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar."

Richard Dawkins, the English evolutionary biologist and author, well known for his anti-religion views, yesterday tweeted a link to the press release advertising the event in London.

However, he later tweeted: "RT doesn't imply endorsement. I'm not qualified to judge Atwill's thesis. Just thought it might be worth a look."

Mr Atwill's theory is simply one of a number of what are known as Bible conspiracy theories.

These theories commonly include the suggestion that secret societies, mystery schools and other religions used the fictional story of Christ to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...r-8870879.html

What a ******.

[IMG]http://http://static1.fjcdn.com/comments/Didsomeonesay+full+******+_8ac199837f084b2879bef3e 6b30d20e0.png[/IMG]

[Sweet Pea 50]

The closest thing I can think of as an eternal object, was one of the Giant Sequoias out in Kings Canyon.

3000+ years old.

(No drugs were involved, by the way.)

But I walked away with a sense of, I don't know, good.

I can't explain it.

(If somebody posts up a chainsaw after this, I don't blame them.)

[squealpiggy]

Piggy's gonna love this sheeeeet!

I'll be honest, I don't buy it. The scholar is known as being a bit of a crank, and the timeline of christianity is way too far off the mark to qualify as a Roman conspiracy. Don't forget that for the first couple of hundred years of the religion the christians were routinely turned into lion-poo, and the reason for that is that they were a rowdy and uncooperative apocalyptic death cult that was an offshoot of radical messianic Judaism.

There's a kernel of truth to the claims though. Canonical christianity was invented by the Romans at Nicaea in the 4th century CE. That's when the various writings that made up the gospels and the rest of the new holy book were carefully selected with different audiences in mind. Of the Gospels there is a Jewish one (Matthew) that emphasizes Jewish law and scripture and a Roman one (Mark) which was written to appeal to Gentiles particularly in Rome. You also have a more esoteric gospel of John which is the one that really emphasizes the divinity of Jesus and Luke which is supposed to be a historical account.

Basically modern Christianity was invented by the Romans but this was done by Emperor Constantine to pacify the christians, not by Tacitus to pacify the Jews. But this was already established.

I dislike when people do this. Religion helps hundreds of millions of people in their lives, what does this "scholar" do to help millions of people get through tough times and to give them hope?

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Peter Higgs, hasn't done anything to help millions of people get through tough times and given them hope either. Scholars seek to uncover the truth, not to give everyone good feelies.

Alls he does is go around ranting his beliefs to get that intellectual superiority high just like all the other non-believers and religion bashers. Damn fool has no idea what he is doing in a deeper sense, he truly believes his view is wide but its actually so narrow.

You then say:

"I can live my life without religion, but not every mind is the same. Ive seen people go through some real unfortunate things and all they had to hang on is their faith."

Just think about the message you are conveying here. You can live your life without religion but just think of all of the people who are weaker or stupider than you that can't!

And then you dismiss a biblical scholar as arrogant and mean for questioning the insisted-upon truth of the most powerful religion on the planet.

The moral decrees stated by religious texts are, I think, pretty much common sense decency for most people.

I disagree with that. Just taking the much vaunted (by people who don't know em!) Ten Commandments:

I am the lord your god
You shall have no other gods before me
You shall not take the lord your god's name in vain
You shall make no graven image of any thing and bow down before it (for I am a jealous god - seriously, look it up)
Mark the Sabbath and keep it holy
Honour your mother and father
Do not murder. FINALLY.
Do not steal.
Do not bear false witness against your neighbour
NO COVETING!

Yes you have to go through 50% of the commandments before you get anything even remotely resembling moral interactions with other human beings. The first five are all about cowering before the Sky Monster!

That's the central commandments of the Jewish faith. That's without getting into Levitical recipes for different types of offerings or the truly atrocious arbitrary punishments for myriad crimes prescribed by Deuteronomy. And then you consider the punishments meted out by god directly for things like arguing with Moses.

What I do think most Abrahamic religions represent are mans general fear of the unknown after the lights fade out from our lives.

What happens after?

Does anything happen after?

It's like going on the deepest, darkest sleep, but never waking up to know that you just had your deepest, darkest sleep.

Judaism doesn't really cover the afterlife. Or it didn't, not until that Jesus fella came along.