Alan B wrote:Bloody Hell! Quakers! Of course! And I used to go to their meetings when I was 'finding my way' when I was much younger.

Alan B wrote:Oh, yeah. Forgot about that.

I suppose Jains and Bahais are the only ones. Although digging into history might find a few odd ones that are no longer around.

Stein wrote:

Alan B wrote:Oh, yeah. Forgot about that.

I suppose Jains and Bahais are the only ones. Although digging into history might find a few odd ones that are no longer around.

Bahais are the most modern of these. That likely makes them the least ignorant and the least insane.

Stein

felltoearth wrote:My favourite kind of faith is personal. I wish people would keep it that way.

" The history of Jesus is not the elaboration of something which took place,
but the expression of something which men passionately wished to [have] take[n] place:
the suffering and death of a god [so] that mankind might be saved.

" To say that Jesus was a god transformed into a man is to speak both for the
believer and the historian, each according to his manner. But to declare that
Jesus was a man made into a god is equally wrong both to the faithful and to
the historian."

RealityRules wrote:The Jesus of History & The Christ of Myth--SSA Talk about Jesus & the Star of Bethlehem, Aaron Adair, 2013

The earliest Christians believed Jesus was an ancient celestial being who put on a bodysuit of flesh, died at the hands of dark forces, and then rose from the dead and ascended back into the heavens. But the writing we have today from that first generation of Christians never says where they thought he landed, where he lived, or where he died. The idea that Jesus toured Galilee and visited Jerusalem arose only a lifetime later, in unsourced legends written in a foreign land and language. Many sources repeat those legends, but none corroborate them. Why? What exactly was the original belief about Jesus, and how did this belief change over time? In Jesus from Outer Space, noted philosopher and historian Richard Carrier summarizes for a popular audience the scholarly research on these and related questions, revealing in turn how modern attempts to conceal, misrepresent, or avoid the actual evidence calls into question the entire field of Jesus studies--and present-day beliefs about how Christianity began.

RealityRules wrote:Richard Carrier has a new short book out, with a stupid title, and a stupid cover, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ.

The earliest Christians believed Jesus was an ancient celestial being who put on a bodysuit of flesh, died at the hands of dark forces, and then rose from the dead and ascended back into the heavens. But the writing we have today from that first generation of Christians never says where they thought he landed, where he lived, or where he died. The idea that Jesus toured Galilee and visited Jerusalem arose only a lifetime later, in unsourced legends written in a foreign land and language. Many sources repeat those legends, but none corroborate them. Why? What exactly was the original belief about Jesus, and how did this belief change over time? In Jesus from Outer Space, noted philosopher and historian Richard Carrier summarizes for a popular audience the scholarly research on these and related questions, revealing in turn how modern attempts to conceal, misrepresent, or avoid the actual evidence calls into question the entire field of Jesus studies--and present-day beliefs about how Christianity began.

A lot is a synopsis of On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Have Reason to Doubt, but Carrier also addresses criticisms of it and things he has raised elsewhere. It's pity there isn't better citation of On the Historicity of Jesus to provide better support for some of the things he says, in some parts at least, because there is.

Some selected parts (chapters) are available via Google Books

Hermit wrote:Thanks for telling us that mythicists are disinformed cults and cranks and possibly conspiracy theorists, Stein.

Stein wrote:

Hermit wrote:Thanks for telling us that mythicists are disinformed cults and cranks and possibly conspiracy theorists, Stein.

Oh, they are not just disinformed. They are also fanatical purveyors of disinformation, just like Trumpists.

"Gospel [was], as has been noted before, a fascinating new event in the literary world ... a very early instance of rabbinic genre which [came] to be known as midrash ... the building of a new narrative out of partially decontextualized and recombined verses from the Bible. // ... while the narratives of the Gospels have a kind of simplicity that we associate with folk narrative, the midrashic generation of these stories is by no means naive; they are the product of complicated relays and hermeneutic activities that underly the narrative consequences, whether birth, passion, or anything that comes in between." (p. 353)

" .. in my view, Jesus was entirely unnecessary for the formation of Mark’s Christology, as he is the fulfilment, not the provocation, of that Christology. Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is the precise fulfilment, I suggest, of well known and ancient pre-Jesus ideas about the Messiah as a divine human (which is not to deny a Markan contribution to the development of such ideas)

.. "the Son of Man” was [put] on Jesus’ lips, because he was a first-century Palestinian Jew, and “Son of Man” was the name that these Jews used for their expected divine-human (Christological) redeemer5 [5. "In contrast to Paul who [in Boyarin's view] occupies another corner of the Jewish traditional world in which different terminology was used ..."].

"The key to Christology is a partial reconsideration of the way that Daniel 7:13-14 works in the Gospel [of Mark] and of [the] Son of Man with respect to other messianic titles, particularly Son of God." (p.354-5)

Stein wrote:Illuminating piece here on how disinformation gets swallowed by cults and cranks:

"“We have an emotional relationship to information. It is not rational,” Wardle said. But people who work in the “quality information space”, Wardle’s term for journalists, scientists, researchers and factcheckers, still often act as if information-processing were fundamentally rational, rather than deeply tied to feelings and the way a person expresses their identity.

It’s crucial to understand that the way people process information is through entire narratives, not individual facts, Wardle said. Trying to combat disinformation through factchecking or debunking individual false claims just turns into an endless, fruitless game of “whack-a-mole”."

Later in this piece, we see --

"Research has also shown that disinformation and conspiracy theories are often deeply intertwined with racial prejudice and hatred"

-- as we also see among mythicists like Revilo P. Oliver, for instance, who are virulently antisemitic. I have even encountered some mythicists who are defrnsive and prickly about the Roman Empire, as a result, as if it could do no wrong!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... SApp_Other



Stein