Hitchens preaches to the choir

[derspiess]

President is your middle name?  I can see that becoming an issue when you're in a mental hospital.

Especially when somebody decides to rub out the "P."

I doubt rubbing it out would be an issue, as long as it's done in private.

[Pat]

Huh.  More arguments for my position - my usual one (which I'm not sure if I've said on here before; I'm sorry if I have) is the concept of original sin.  Omnipotent, omniscient God makes man.  Man promptly fucks it up because man is fallible.  Either God is a liar and not omniscient, or else God creates man to take a fall and is a sadist.  Thing is, worship of either kind of entity seems at least vaguely immoral.

The Eden story is wierder than that.

God isn't angry at Adam for screwing up - the gods (plural, in that story and only in that story) are frightened that Adam, and hence humans, may become 'like them', and threaten their power. It is the god's fear that makes them turf Adam & Eve out of the guarden.

Seriously, check it out. 

If one were to be speculative, there are for instance of course ample signs that the biblical creation story doesn't really describe the creation of the universe per se, but only of the creation of a universe in the sense of a tribal splintering and the forcing out of Adam and Eve into what is for all intents and purposes a "new" world.

If one were a blasphemous fucktard with no regard for one's immortal soul, that is.

The question of influences on christianity is very interesting. When I was reading book VI of the Aeneid I very much saw the similarities to the christian after-life (however Virgil more or less says it is all allegorical by having the hero exit through the gate of horn through which false dreams come to humans). Did some searches and it seems I wasn't alone in seeing the similarities: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/christian-epic/

The Aeneid would have made a good bridge into the new religion as it was the national epic of Rome and was taught in schools all over the empire. It was used religiously for fortune-telling by asking a question and opening the book at random and looking for answers on the page that turned up. The caesar-cult would morph into christian caesaropapism which would survive in the eastern church of the byzantines and russians and would later morph into stalinism.

[Slargos]

The question of influences on christianity is very interesting. When I was reading book VI of the Aeneid I very much saw the similarities to the christian after-life (however Virgil more or less says it is all allegorical by having the hero exit through the gate of horn through which false dreams come to humans). Did some searches and it seems I wasn't alone in seeing the similarities: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/christian-epic/

The Aeneid would have made a good bridge into the new religion as it was the national epic of Rome and was taught in schools all over the empire. It was used religiously for fortune-telling by asking a question and opening the book at random and looking for answers on the page that turned up. The caesar-cult would morph into christian caesaropapism which would survive in the eastern church of the byzantines and russians and would later morph into stalinism.

Then again, your brain is geared towards pattern recognition, and you may be seeing causation where there's simply random similarity or humanity at work.

[Pat]

Well at least I'm not alone in having my brain geared towards seeing this particular pattern. C.S. Lewis became an atheist for a few years after reading the Aeneid. The similarities were never denied by the church. Instead Virgil was considered a herald of christianity.

As for seeing a direct line from the caesar-cult into caesaropapism, that's not exactly new either, nor that caesaropapism morphed into stalinism with it's mind-crimes. Revolutions often conserve more of the previous system than one might think, just look at Tocqueville's study of the old regime and the revolution.