Militant Atheism

johnson1010 · Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:31 pm

He's not defending the individual myths as being the literal truth.

He's defending the notion that the myths are used as allegory to point to real scientific observations which would have been hard for the ancients to swallow, or understand when not in some parable form.

I think he might be part-right about that, but i don't believe he is completely right in all the extents which he posits.

Stuart Mason · Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:47 pm


	stahrwe wrote: In what sense did their science show that a human being could be green from the waist up?

Osiris wasn't literally green and Horus didn't literally have the head of a falcon. These were symbolic representations of their attributes. Like how you see images of Jesus depicted as a lamb. It's symbolism. He's not literally a baby sheep.

Robert Tulip · Fri Jun 17, 2011 11:30 pm


	Stuart Mason wrote: Well to boil it all down, that the ancients believed the gods to be sentient and supernatural is so unambiguous from their hymns, prayers to them, sacrifices to them, rituals, etc. that I can't see how it could be interpretted otherwise. Such things as the practice of magic spells to appeal to the gods to alter the course of nature show that they didn't believe nature or the universe was just a matter of motion and evolution. And private prayers to the gods ostensibly don't make sense unless they believed the gods were sentient beings that could hear them. So I can't accept them as atheists by definition.

I've just come across this interesting comment:


	GodAlmighty wrote: For the Egyptians ... their religion was so exclusively connected to anthropomorphism of celestial bodies, that some folks of late antiquity considered the Egyptians to be atheists or at least pseudo-atheistic. As Jan Assmann writes: "The first says that the Egyptians were atheistic and materialistic; this view had been advocated by Porphyry in his Letter to Anebo. Porphyry holds that the Egyptians know of no other gods "but the Planets and those Stars that fill up the Zodiac..., and Robust Princes, as they call them," a passage Eusebius underscored by saying "that the very Arcane Theology of the Egyptians, Deified nothing but Stars and Planets, and acknowledged no Incorporeal Principle or Demiurgic Reason as the Cause of this Universe, but only the Visible Sun ... See now what is become of this Arcane Theology of the Egyptians, that deifies nothing but senseless Matter or Dead Inanimate Bodies." - Moses the Egyptian: the Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism p.84

For Eusebius, one of the central thinkers of Christian orthodoxy, to say the Egyptians "acknowledged no Incorporeal Principle or Demiurgic Reason as the Cause of this Universe, but only the Visible Sun" and deified "nothing but senseless Matter or Dead Inanimate Bodies" illustrates the sharp difference between the naturalistic approach of Egyptian religion and the supernaturalistic approach of Christianity. My view is that we have been so bombarded by the Big Lie that religion must involve the supernatural that many people find it simply impossible to imagine anyone could think otherwise.

My view is that the Egyptians, among the secret elite of initiates who studied these things carefully, were what Johnson has recently called 'gnostic atheists'.

Stuart Mason · Sat Jun 18, 2011 4:00 am


	Robert Tulip wrote: For Eusebius, one of the central thinkers of Christian orthodoxy, to say the Egyptians "acknowledged no Incorporeal Principle or Demiurgic Reason as the Cause of this Universe, but only the Visible Sun" and deified "nothing but senseless Matter or Dead Inanimate Bodies" illustrates the sharp difference between the naturalistic approach of Egyptian religion and the supernaturalistic approach of Christianity.

It more illustrates Eusebius' misunderstanding of Egyptian theology. A misunderstanding that was common in later periods as Egypt declined and was taken over by foreign rulers and understanding of the hieroglyphics was lost over time. That was an attempt by Eusebius to attack Egyptian religion as misguided and inferior to Christianity. Eusebius was quoting and commenting on the misunderstanding stated by the philosopher Porphyry who I mentioned earlier in the thread. Porphyry said it in a letter to an Egyptian priest named Anebo. In the Egyptians' response they extensively correct Porphry's misunderstanding of their theology at length and explained to him that they did in fact believe in an incorporeal principle and demiurgic reason. They further explained to him that the gods were ethereal, supernatural consciousnesses that encompassed and permeated all matter in the universe.

But this is a relatively late correspondence being written in the Common Era. The belief of the Egyptians that the Sun was created by God rather than being God was already ancient by the time it was explained to Porphyry. The physical "disk" of Sun itself was distinguished from the divine being that created and/or controlled it. This is shown among other places in their creation stories where the creator god is typically portrayed as an eternal consciousness that manifests the Sun at the beginning of the world.

Robert Tulip · Sat Jun 18, 2011 7:34 am

Perhaps there is also the possibility that the Egyptians involved in this conversation with Porphyry had forgotten the natural basis of their religion. The fact is that the naturalistic conception criticised by Porphyry and Eusebius is regarded as accurate by modern atheism, in that there is no demiurge or 'incorporeal principle' except observable natural principles such as gravity and evolution. In considering how the Egyptians worshiped the actual stars as observed, there is much to rediscover about their views. Interlocutors with Common Era European respondents could hardly speak for the time of Egyptian glory thousands of years before.

On a speculative note regarding Egyptian stellar religion, here is a diagram I have made matching Osiris to Argo, the constellation that sits on the southern horizon as viewed from Egypt at the time of the Festival of Isis on 5 March each year when Osiris's body was floated in his coffin on a barque down the Nile River, with these stars immediately behind the boat in the evening sky. The second and third diagrams show an alternate reading of Argo, with the four faint stars on the deck of the ship as the focal point for the coffin of Osiris, Noah's Ark and the manger of Christ.


	Attachment: Osiris Argo Stars.gif [ 131.43 KiB \| Viewed 556 times ]


	Attachment: Osiris Argo Sirius Star in the East Orion Three Kings.gif [ 20.32 KiB \| Viewed 556 times ]


	Attachment: Osiris Argo Sirius Star in the East Orion Three Kings 2.gif [ 26.34 KiB \| Viewed 556 times ]

stahrwe · Sat Jun 18, 2011 8:40 am


	Robert Tulip wrote: On a speculative note regarding Egyptian stellar religion, here is a diagram I have made matching Osiris to Argo, the constellation that sits on the southern horizon as viewed from Egypt at the time of the on 5 March each year when Osiris's body was floated in his coffin on a barque down the Nile River, with these stars immediately behind the boat in the evening sky. The second and third diagrams show an alternate reading of Argo, with the four faint stars on the deck of the ship as the focal point for the coffin of Osiris, Noah's Ark and the manger of Christ.

Coffin of Osiris - went in Nile
Noah's Ark - floated in ocean
Manger of Christ - no association with water

A motivated imagination can see anything in the stars.

I didn't see any of the patterns RT claimed.
Perhaps the great lie has another victim.

Vishnu · Sat Jun 18, 2011 1:31 pm


	stahrwe wrote: Manger of Christ - no association with water

Except that mangers can be & often are used to water the animals who drink from it.

But I do concur that this one might be stretching a bit for an association, I personally don't see it as a strong one. A better parallel for me would be Moses sent down the river in the basket.

However, I do get Robert's main point. This is definitely a recurring theme, even acknowledged by scholars. I once found an article on it on Jstor, I'll see if I can pull it up again. But yeah, there was also Dionysus, who we know was syncretic with Osiris. In one version of his myth, as an infant he was locked in a chest with his mother Semele and cast into the sea. The mother died, but the infant survived. The Jstor article listed other stories with this similar theme as well. I'll post them here if I can find it.

But about Noah's ark, I guess it might also be relevant here to point out that in many writings of the early church fathers, they saw in the story of the ark saving people from the flood waters as a typological foreshadowing/parallel to the crucifixion. Just as the wood of the ark saved Noah's family from the flood, so the wood of the cross saves people from the flood of sin. Whether or not you find such a correlation convincing, that's what they argued, many times, as a word search over at CCEL will confirm.

Vishnu · Sat Jun 18, 2011 2:21 pm

Okay, I found my copy of the article. It is simply titled 'The Floating Chest', by NM Holley.

It lists the following stories as having the protagonist locked in a chest and cast into water-

1. Perseus
2. Telephus
3. Dionysus
4. Anios - (a great grandson of Dionysus)
5. Tennes

Then it goes on to list a "B" & "C" group, which have some variants, for instance, the chest may not have always been cast into water, or contained the protagonist himself, but instead contained a statue, or the story was not of Greek origin, etc.

Group B
6. Arsinoe
7. Thoas - (a son of Dionysus)
8. Eurypylus - (finds a chest with a statue of Dionysus)
Group C
9. Osiris - (often identified with Dionysus)
10. Adonis - (also sometimes identified with Dionysus)
11. Tammuz

So it's also interesting that many of these have some sort of connection to Dionysus.
The article does make the argument that this recurring theme was probably some sort of symbolism for agricultutral cycles. For example, Osiris's is obvious, his death signaled the coming of the inundation of the Nile.

Robert Tulip · Sat Jun 18, 2011 5:21 pm

The relevance of this discussion of Ancient Egypt to this thread on Militant Atheism is that the era of Christianity has involved systematic mass delusion regarding the nature and purpose of religion, but over the thousands of years of Egyptian culture, they developed a spirituality that was in tune with nature, and so had much more in common with contemporary atheism than with the modern versions of faith. I have just read The Egypt Code by Robert Bauval, and he presents an excellent argument along these lines that I will discuss later at more length.

I have previously discussed Argo and Osiris including here. The constellation Argo was a main marker for precession of the equinox in ancient India, where its brightest star, Canopus, is called Agastya, and it gradually became visible at more northerly latitudes over the millennia, encoded in myth and fable. Canopus is the brightest star in our region of the galaxy. The Indian name Agastya evolved to Argo, and to Noah's Ark. We see that Columba the dove is immediately above Argo, matching the Bible story of the flood. The constellation Argo was used to tell the stories of the epic of Gilgamesh, the deeds of Agastya, Noah's Ark, the barque of Osiris, and Jason and the Argonauts.

The association of Argo with the birth of Christ is seen by the fact that the deck of the Ark, where Noah collected the animals, equates to the stable in which Christ was mythically born surrounded by animals, as shown in the diagram above. Hence Argo is the rainbow constellation of the mythical covenants of God, through Noah and Jesus. We see clearly the manger beneath the star in the east (Sirius) as viewed by the three wise men (Belt of Orion). We also see the three wise men kneeling at the manger, seen as the deck of the ark. In the diagram above the three wise men are in the picture both in Orion and in Argo, at the vertical meridian line from the southern horizon to the zenith. This material is largely unknown because Argo is invisible from the northern latitudes that dominate global intellectual life.

From Egypt, Argo rises low in the south at Christmas, culminates in March and returns to the underworld for summer. For the ancients, the invisibility of Argo over the period of the Duat marked the death of Osiris. The south celestial pole, invisible beneath the southern horizon, was viewed as the realm of the dead, as attested by Virgil. At the time of Zep Tepi, the mythical Egyptian origin 12,000 years ago, Canopus was the South Pole Star. It has since gradually moved north from the pole, becoming steadily more visible at northern latitudes. The only other writer I know of who has discussed this material is Philip Coppens, but I have not read his book The Canopus Revelation apart from the excerpts available on his website.

It is not surprising if people find it confusing to see this association drawn between atheism, stars and religion. The trouble is that modern atheism has arisen in cultural opposition to religion, arguing that religion is intrinsically irrational. That is true regarding the conventions of belief in supernatural fantasy,which are completely irrational, but what this material on the stars helps to show is that ancient thought is actually more profound and accurate than often understood, that our grasp of the natural basis of ancient religion is extremely thin, and that there is scope for atheism to engage with reasonable natural religion in respectful dialogue.

In fact, the themes of atonement, redemption and salvation are natural in origin, looking to how humanity can be reconciled with the ultimate truth of actual reality, understood in natural terms. Such reconciliation requires admission of error, especially the big error of assuming that myths describe existing supernatural entities, rather than natural symbols. The Christian pathology is seen in the absurd idea that souls can be saved while the world is destroyed. A militant atheist stance is required to show the massive error and lack of ethics in current dominant forms of religion. In fact, eternal life is only lived genetically, in future generations, and symbolically, in the understanding of eternal truth. Saving the physical planet by becoming at one with nature is the entire framework in which it is possible to consider the salvation of souls as a rational idea.

Mel Carriere · Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:50 pm

The majority of religious people are not militant at all, and true Christians who understand the teachings of Christ realize that murder and mayhem have nothing to do with it. I imagine this holds true for devout Muslims as well. It is an error of misguided fanaticism to accuse religious people of advocating or supporting murder. There is no shortage of fanatics in the atheist community, as well.

Vishnu · Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:44 am


	Stuart Mason wrote: It more illustrates Eusebius' misunderstanding of Egyptian theology. A misunderstanding that was common in later periods as Egypt declined and was taken over by foreign rulers and understanding of the hieroglyphics was lost over time. That was an attempt by Eusebius to attack Egyptian religion as misguided and inferior to Christianity. Eusebius was quoting and commenting on the misunderstanding stated by the philosopher Porphyry who I mentioned earlier in the thread. Porphyry said it in a letter to an Egyptian priest named Anebo. In the Egyptians' response they extensively correct Porphry's misunderstanding of their theology at length and explained to him that they did in fact believe in an incorporeal principle and demiurgic reason. They further explained to him that the gods were ethereal, supernatural consciousnesses that encompassed and permeated all matter in the universe.

To my knowledge, there was no "Egyptians' response" that "they further explained to" Porphyry. The scenario was that Porphyry's own student, Iamblichus, disagreed with Porphyry's assertions here against the Egyptian theology, and so Iamblichus himself wrote a response to Porphyry while posing as an Egyptian priest under the name of Abammon, claiming to be Anebo's mentor. Iamblichus was not an Egyptian himself, he was Assyrian, and his writings make it apparent that he had some influence from the Hermetic tradition, which itself was just an amalgamation of Neo-platonism with Egyptian theology. But the position of Iamblichus and Hermeticism is all anachronistic, projecting Platonic philosophy and theology back to the alleged time of the fictional Hermes Trismegistus. Much like how Herodotus tried to claim that the Greeks got their gods from Egypt, in an attempt to try an extend the antiquity of Greek religion and culture, it was not uncommon for ancient peoples to try and attach their heritage to Egypt because of Egypt's longstanding and prestigious legacy. And many of the philosophers were no exception to this temptation, and obviously, Iamblichus fell into that temptation as well.
The majority of scholars today reject the notion of any sort of esoteric monotheism existing within Egyptian polytheism, be it the Platonist sort of monotheism or whatever. This idea of an all pervasive transcendent incorporeal principle or logos or whatever was simply not indigenous to Egypt, with the possible exception of the Amarna heresy, which was quickly stamped out and erased from Egyptian history as soon as Akhenaten died.
The idea of this sort of ancient Egyptian monotheism was popular in the 19th century, and can be read of at length in the writings of Budge and others of that time, but today is almost entirely abandoned by Egyptologists and is considered an anachronism invented by some Greek philosophers.
And also, as I've stated before in this thread- [Click], the earliest Egyptian religious texts do not indicate that they even had a concept of a dichotomy between corporeal and incorporeal, that only developed much later, and so they definitely would not have had a notion of some ethereal incorporeal principle until the Greeks came along and introduced them to it.

Vishnu wrote:

For instance, such as Lois V. Zabkar, who, in his work "A Study of the Ba Concept in Ancient Egyptian Texts", thoroughly debunks the outdated notion of 19th century scholarship and proves that the Egyptian notion of resurrection, both of the deceased and of Osiris who they are mimicking, was understood to be physical, bodily resurrection, on EARTH, especially in the earliest periods, such as the Old Kingdom when the Pyramid Texts were written. It was only later after influence from outside cultures that the Egyptians gradually more & more incorporated ideas of a "spiritual" or incorporeal existence.


	Quote: It appears that both Spiegel and Fairman consider Unas burial ritual as a resurrection ritual. Spiegel often speaks of the "resurrection of the soul," but on closer inspection it becomes evident that by that term he means the "coming-forth of the soul" from the grave. It seems to us that he should have used the latter term throughout his description and avoided the expression "resurrection of the soul." First of all, the "soul" or, more correctly, the Ba never died, and without death there can be no resurrection. But there is another problem here. The Pyramid Texts state emphatically that the king never died: "(Unas) did not die, he departed alive." Unas certainly died, but to the Egyptian mythopoeic mind his death was but a transition to a new life: "Thou sleepest, thou awakest; thou diest, thou livest." This is the idea that lies behind the statement: "Atum, that son of yours is this here, Osiris ... he lives and this Unas lives; he did not die, and this Unas did not die." Spiegel understands these words as being addressed to the Ba of the king, but the Ba is not mentioned at all. The comparison is between the dead king and Osiris. Just as Osiris was killed and rose to new life, so the dead king, identified with Osiris, through the recitation of the spell is made alive again. In other words, what we have here is the bodily resurrection of the dead king and not the resurrection of his Ba, which never died. To be sure, the body was in the grave, but it did not remain there inert or inanimate; special spells were recited to call it back to life: "His limbs which were in the secret place when he joined those who are in Nun are (now) united; he spoke his last words in Heliopolis. Unas comes forth on this day in the real form of a living Akh in order that he may break up the fight and punish the quarrel. Unas comes forth as a guardian of Maat; he brings her, as she is in his possession." The same idea of bodily resurrection lies behind another statement: "Thy body is the body of this Unas, thy flesh is the flesh of this Unas, thy bones are the bones of this Unas; thou goest and this Unas goes, thus Unas goes and thou goest." This passage refers to Osiris, with whom the pharaoh is identified, as Sethe observed. Through the recitation of these spells and the effectiveness of the ritual, Unas becomes alive in his true physical corporeality. Only as such can he be transformed into a Ba or an Akh, traverse THE EARTH and the heaven, find his place among the stars, and be in command of other glorified dead (Akhs). With this idea of bodily resurrection we reach perhaps the most ancient stratum of the Egyptian conception of the afterlife, that is, a continuation of life as a physical corporeality - a conception common to other religions at the earliest stage of their belief in survival. Certainly long before the period of the Pyramid Texts speculative theologians first attempted to elaborate this primitive belief in bodily survival by differentiating more precisely between various forms of existence in the hereafter: an effective BODY, an Akh, a Ba as welll as other transformations the deceased could undergo. "The Akh (belongs) to heaven, the corpse (belongs) to the earth" is an emphatic statement indicating an advanced stage of this differentiation. It is to be remembered, however, that at ALL stages the BODY of the deceased was considered not as inert and lifeless matter but as A LIVING ENTITY which, with ALL ITS PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIC FACULTIES, FULLY LIVED in all other forms of transformation and without the effective role of which no continuation of life could be conceived. Truly, then, the Egyptian concept of man in his afterlife KNEW NOTHING of his "spiritual" constituents as opposed to his physical ones. - pg.81-83

So the Egyptian resurrection, especially back in its early days, could be nothing but a physical, bodily resurrection since originally the Egyptians had no concept of the incorporeal/ethereal/spiritual world. They did not have this dualistic idea, like the Greeks, of physical vs spiritual. As Zabkar elsewhere states-


	Quote: It is understandable that many historians of Egyptian religion, confronted with the apparent dualism of "the Ba to heaven, the corpse to the Duat," have tried to identify the Ba as the spiritual element in opposition to the body as the material or physical element. The Egyptian concept of man KNEW NO SUCH DISTINCTION. - p.112


	Quote: The dualistic view that man is constituted of two distinct elements, in the sense of the Orphic, Platonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic philosophies, IS ALIEN TO THE EGYPTIAN CONCEPT OF MAN. Though the ancient Egyptian was thought to live after death in a multiplicity of forms, each of these forms was the full man himself. For this reason we consider the Egyptian concept of man to monistic. - p.113

So given all of that, I'd have to say that the above quotes from Assmann, Porphyry, and Eusebius actually illustrate a more accurate understanding of Egyptian theology than that of Iamblichus, or even yourself, just based on what I gather from your post here.

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