Robert Tulip wrote: This is a blatant example on your part of what is known as the ad hominem fallacy, something that is a stock in trade for fundamentalist attacks on astrotheology. The ad hominem method attacks the person not the content. You have trolled through Acharya’s writings to find some material from a book from last millennium that is not relevant to this thread except as a tangent. This thread is about the book Christ in Egypt, which you ignore and have not read. Instead you use the malicious tactic of trying to censor and demean Murdock by retelling tired and fallacious attacks on a pioneering book that provides excellent introductory material, albeit with some issues in presentation which fundies latch onto as fervent excuses to deflect attention from her main arguments.
It's not an ad hominem Robert. For example, I've provided reasons for why the parallel claims for Horus and Christ are false based on the primary sources for the Horus myth.
You try to make it seem like it's just presentation problems, but the claims are for parallels such as that Horus was born on Dec.25th, was conceived non sexually to a virgin,had twelve disciples,walked on water,was crucified,buried for three days and physically resurrected. You tack on to this that Horus raised Lazarus from the dead and had a temptation in the wilderness paralleling Christ's temptations.
All I want from you then is evidence from
primary sources for all these claims.
D.M.Murdock did make these claims and so do a lot of mythicists.
http://www.truthbeknown.com/origins4.htm#foot40c
Robert Tulip wrote:The comments from Flann on mythicism and astrotheology rest on his bizarre magical theory of an interventionist personal God who supposedly created the universe and then came to earth in the material person of Jesus Christ. That is junk science.
I'm still waiting for your explanation for the origin of the universe and the laws of nature.You think the laws of nature did everything but where did they and the universe originate?
Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Tim O' Neill who happens to be an atheist and no "moronic fundie troll"
Can’t agree there Flann. O’Neill asserts that he is an atheist, but my impression is that this assertion is just tactical cover for a fundamentalist religious perspective, since his methods of argument exhibit total hostility towards evidence and logic. I have read some of his work and find Tim O'Neill to be among the most abusive religious commentators I have encountered.
Mythicists have a conspiracy theory for everything it seems. He has excellent arguments against the standard mythicist arguments but it's quite obvious to me that he's no Christian apologist.
For example he downplays messianic prophecy of a suffering messiah who dies an atoning death. He says the early Christians were scrambling for strained prophecies to explain the fact that their messiah had been crucified and died. He also says they never mention in the N.T. the part where it says "he will see his seed and prolong his days."
He adds to this, there are contradictions in the accounts of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist in three of the gospel accounts and of where Jesus was born and lived in two gospels.
But he's wrong. Isaiah 53 is most definitely a prophecy of the messiah suffering for the sins of others and who dies and is buried. God says because he has done this he will divide him a portion with the great and that he will divide him a portion with the strong.
http://biblehub.com/nasb/isaiah/53.htm
This is exactly what Peter and Paul preached about his resurrection and exaltation. That's why they point to the Psalm about his body not seeing corruption and his inheriting the throne of David eternally.
And that's what Paul says of his humiliation and exaltation in Phillipians 2.
So they do mention his days being prolonged and his seed are those spiritually born of the Spirit of God.They are not desperately scrambling to find prophecies but these are central to their preaching especially to the Jews whose scriptures these are.
O' Neill is also incorrect in his analysis of the Baptism accounts.
Mark makes it immediately clear in his opening, that Jesus is the pre-existent
Lord of the O.T. who's way is prepared by John. So he's not saying something dramatically different from John's opening description. The Nazareth/Bethlehem question has been well answered by Christian commentators.
All this to say that he's no Christian fundamentalist and most likely really is an atheist, as he says.
The arguments in relation to Tacitus and Joseph made by the mythicists are widely rejected by scholars and historians, and O' Neill shows what the scholarly consensus is, and the good reasons they give for this in their analysis of these texts.
Incidentally the letters of Paul are not parables or parabolic in any shape or form. When understood as obviously meant the mythicists smile indulgently, as if we are the idiots and they have the golden key of parabolic hidden meaning which is astrotheology.
Even the interpretations given of Jesus parables can't be the
real meaning because they are not about the signs of the zodiac and the sun ,but these interpretations too must have an astrotheological message hidden in them.
But in the end people will believe what they want to, and no amount of argument and evidence will change that.
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