Religion, Rod Fleming's World

27/02/2023

Inanna and Jesus: a tale of syncretisation

Originally posted 2018-09-20 06:25:57.

In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’

There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. In an oral culture or tradition, myths grow and develop to reflect the lived experiences and cultures of the people telling them. It was only when writing was invented that these traditions could be codified and by that time, they had been evolving for thousands of years. This means that there are many versions of the same myth, as different peoples carried it forward.

So we cannot say that, because detail differences exist between two similar myths, they are different or have different origins.

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13/02/2023

Islam: Read all about it right here!

Originally posted 2021-02-23 17:43:03.

I’ve just refreshed my page that contains free downloads of all the major texts of Islam. For reasons that remain unclear, this page suffers frequent attacks. It’s almost as if Muslims don’t want people to read their texts…silly idea, no?

Actually, no. Islam does not want you to read the texts. Muslims go to great lengths to prevent you and condemn any version of the texts not written in Arabic. This, they say, is because ‘Allah’ speaks Arabic and so any translation of his words is blasphemous. However, a suspicious person, not me, of course, might argue that it sounds very much as if they don’t want we kuffars to read the texts at all. I wonder why that might be, if it were the case?

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30/12/2022

This Must Stop: Cruelty is evil

Originally posted 2013-10-11 11:44:54.

camel halal must stop — A camel being killed by ‘halal’

I am proud to be a European. Our culture has many faults, yet at the same time it has given the world so much. Science and democracy, equality under law and social inclusion simply would not exist without it. And across culture, art, science, engineering and technology, our culture remains a brilliant star, without which light, we would still be in the Dark Ages. I am very proud and lucky to be a part of that.

Despite this, I believed, for many years, that other cultures were equal.

But I was wrong. Culture is not a level playing field. The very qualities that define Western culture represent a system of morality, which allow us to judge other cultures. And we definitely should judge them.

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21/11/202221/11/2022

The New Atheists, New Age woo & Cultural Marxism

Originally posted 2017-08-01 19:48:42.

The New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens and many others, purported to offer a sane, secular attempt to roll back religiosity for the betterment of society. Instead, their efforts have begat the mother of all calamities.

How did this come to pass?

Scientific atheism, as promoted by the New Atheists, lacks any unifying central structure or code. Essentially it is based on a negative — not believing in God. So it can’t have a defining structure. Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent New Atheists, tried to answer this with his ‘brights’ — which was an embarrassment. (Since at least 2014, Dawkins has self-identified as a ‘secular Christian’ anyway.)

After the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution, European secularism based itself around Reason as the core methodology that would replace, in the minds of those who were atheist, religious belief. This reflected a rejection of hierarchical religious authority, which had begun in the Reformation. The works of philosophers like Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Paine promoted the idea of the free-thinking individual whose intellectual scalpel was Reason.

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18/11/2022

God proposition: god true or god false?

Originally posted 2013-07-03 16:53:42.

The god proposition is supported not by fact, but by faith. At the end of the day, the final word that the religiously-disposed have is to say that “It is so because I believe it to be so,” before covering their ears. For them, this trumps everything.

This is the hook that caught Descartes when he confronted the issue, and then backed off very quickly. “I think,” he said, “Therefore I am.” This is fine. He is self-aware therefore he is sure he exists. He cannot be entirely sure that he exists as he perceives himself or that anything that is around him is as he perceives it, but he does make a very convincing argument, based on the progression of rational logic, that it is so (and thus takes several hundred pages to confirm what any pragmatist already knows. But that’s an aside.) However, when confronted by the idea of God, God must exist, he says “Because he cannot imagine a world in which he does not.” Oops.
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18/11/2022

Merry Christmas!

Originally posted 2013-12-24 13:48:26.

Merry Christmas, Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Holidays…it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, because the meaning is the same: this is the time of renewal, when we slough off the old year and the wearisome encrustations that have built up and look forward to the new. It is the time when our sun, Sol, which has been slipping lower and lower in the sky, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, stops, and begins to rise again, bringing with it the promise of warmth.

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18/11/2022

Why Islam Cannot Change

Originally posted 2018-01-31 05:45:00.

Islam cannot change because of an internal quirk that prevents it.

Why does Islam resist change and always revert to its barbaric, bloody, violent nature? The answer is because it has no choice.

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18/11/2022

Secularism: Why Muslims must embrace it

Originally posted 2015-07-25 13:48:39.

The only way for the Muslim community to resolve the problems caused by the rise of Islamic extremism and the predictable reaction to it, is to accept secularism and to reject shari’aa and the primacy of Islam over other cults.

The issue is not between a Christian majority and a Muslim minority, it is between a society founded on democratic principles and reason, an arch crowned by the keystone that we can change the laws that govern us by electoral mandate, and a religious minority that refuses to accept this, and instead insists that no part of the law, as expressed through shari’aa — because it is ‘God’s’ law — can ever be altered, even in one word. Only secularism can resolve this.

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18/11/2022

The first Jesus? Sul and Enlil

Originally posted 2013-12-21 13:29:54.

Today marks the first day in one of our greatest annual cultural events: the winter solstice. From now until the 25th, the sun will appear to hesitate before it once again begins to climb into the sky. That of course, is the reason so many solar deities have their birthday on the 25th—Mithras, Dionysus and Jesus Christ being but three.

But what you may not know is that while these three ‘dying and rising’ gods, every one of them an agricultural deity, are clearly men, the very first was not; she was a woman.

The earliest version I have found is in the Sumerian tale of the goddess Sul or Sud. This is not a Sumerian name and it’s unclear where she came from, but that doesn’t matter. As befits a goddess, Sul was staggeringly beautiful and at the peak of her fertility; she knew it was time for her to choose a partner.

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06/11/2022

The Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari

Originally posted 2016-07-25 11:58:15.

The Hadith constitute the third pillar of Islam. They are ‘commentaries on the life of the Prophet.’ They are second in authority only to the Qur’an itself. The other pillars are the Qur’an and the Sirah . Together with the Sharia these form the ideological basis for the ‘religion of peace’.

Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal word of Allah. The Angel Gabriel transmitted it, exactly as spoken, to Mohammed. He memorised it because he couldn’t write. You make your own judgements as to how accurate his recall was likely to have been. (The Qur’an was not actually written down until some 80 years after Mohammed’s death, which is also worth considering.)