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Except that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no known historical records of Dionysus or Osiris. Or Mithra. (He didn't even mention Balder the Brave, one of my favorite death-and-resurrection myths). We do have historical records of Jesus of Nazareth. No serious scholar would ever deny that Jesus was a historical person, but I'm not so sure that any serious scholarship has ever uncovered the historical Osiris.

As for the exact relationship between the historical Jesus of Nazareth and these legendary gods, one might want to consider a certain conversation between two great myth-makers of the 20th century, Tolkien and Lewis:

Osiris and Dionysus may be great myths, but in Christ, myth and history are eternally bound together.

To further elaborate, Tolkien seems to have believed that these ancient myths of death and resurrection were "splintered light," that is, hints of the truth that were lost in legend. In a certain sense, Jesus is Osiris, Jesus is Mithra, Jesus is Balder. Only now, instead of mythical gods who exist in the realm of epic, we now have a historical person.

So, following Tolkien's "splintered light" theory, myths of death and resurrection in ancient religions is not evidence contrary to the death and resurrection of Christ. On the contrary, they can actually be understood as evidence for Christ.

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No, not really. It just means that God is outside of the timeline. It's like the timeline is a line in an empty 3D space, and God can step back and see all of it.

Which means its all already there, and to his perception (which is more acute then ours) all of existence is nothing nothing more then an unmoving picture.

Or perhaps envision it this way. The timeline is a line, right? But whenever we get a choice (essentially anytime we're alive) this line splits up into an infinite number of other lines, each of them representing a different choice we could have made. God can see all of these lines.

Prophecy isn't compatible with Quantam Theory, because a prophecy will be inaccurate in the mass majority of all future universes.

Though, yes, God can influence the future by affecting our world, and could control the future if he so wished. But he gave us free will so that we might have the ability to truly love him. Because it wouldn't really be love if we were forced to do it.

Love is literally a physiological set of chemical reactions which occur in the brain. Free will isn't a prerequisite for such reactions.

Your real arguement of course is that love is not meaningful without free will, but what is meaning? Can even god have anything more then an opinion on that, that will stand up to the socratic method?

That's an awful big assumption about the nature of love. I would contend that love, particularly God's love, most certainly transcends material chemical reactions.

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LEGAL DOUBLE-POST!

I was reading an article online about Midi-Chlorians (those "Force Cells" from Star Wars), when I found this paragraph. It seems to express some of my own ideas about the struggle between good and evil:



You can find the article HERE.

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That's an awful big assumption about the nature of love. I would contend that love, particularly God's love, most certainly transcends material chemical reactions.

And what proof could you offer for this assertion?

http://science.howstuffworks.com/love6.htm

The article seems to focus its attention on one certain type of love, ερος, that specifically between men and women. It does not seem to address other types of love, such as φιλος or αγαπε.

Second, the article by its very nature is addressing the chemical effects of love. But here's the question: is the love itself only the result of these chemical reactions, or could love as a transcendent quality be effecting these chemical reactions? The observations made are limited only to the physical, and can offer little or no observation about what is taking place on other levels of existence, or the precise relationship between them.

Now, I have no doubt that our feelings of love are influenced by these chemical reactions, but in my own thinking, love is more than just a feeling.

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I'm saying that by the very fact that we can compare moral practices means that there must be a standard to which we compare it. Some of us may not be as attuned to it as others, so yes, some people are wrong; this isn't a matter opinions; beliefs aren't opinions. (My use of 'having a low opinion' was probably a bad choice in wording.)



Merely because God can percieve everything doesn't mean we can't choose. It's like God's reading a book. He can skip forward to other pages and see what happens, and he can write in it if he decides to. But we do the writing for our own choices.



True prophecies come from God, who can see what happens in the future. With my line-splitting analogy, God can tell which line's gonna happen. So I guess it wasn't a great analogy.

But all this imagery clearly isn't helping very much. It's very difficult for humans to grasp concepts of time, since we can hardly percieve it, let alone concieve of a realm without it.



You are thinking of the feeling of being in love. That mushy feeling is a biological thing. (I recall that some of the chemicals in that reaction are also found in chocolate.) But actual love is a choice, not a feeling. I don't care about and love humans because of my emotions. Usually I do so in spite of them.

I'm not sure how to answer 'what is meaning?' Meaning isn't exactly a thing in and of itself. Different things are created different purposes. To summarize it, we were made to love God with all our heart, body, and mind.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

Prophecy isn't so much God predicting what's going to happen as God proclaiming what he is going to do. An indepth study of the Prophets will make this clearer.

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That still does not mean that such a standard is inherent in human nature or that it is obviously a result of God. It just means that there are correlations. The correlations could have a number of causes, the most obvious one to my mind being that some basic laws are necessary for civilization to survive. The laws that are common to all societies in the past and present really strike me more as common sense than anything. I don't think a deity is necessary to have common sense.

- Kef

It's understandable that humans should create laws to enforce a sort of goodwill (no murder, stealing, lying, etc.) amongst humans using common sense. But we're dealing with morality (rather than just behavior inconvenient to other humans), and countries' general views of such things. If there is indeed a standard for moral behavior, then there is a true right and wrong. Which leads back to my other points.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

How would you define morality?

That would probably be a good thing to address before continuing.

Morals are the impulses within us that drive us to do good; to help others instead of ourselves. It also helps us take care of ourselves by keeping us from indulging in harmful behavior. It helps us choose to do what's right, by suppressing or stimulating certain instincts or desires or emotions when circumstances demand it. It is essentially the desire to do good.

They're the reason that unthinking individuals, those who haven't bothered to even form beliefs or think theirs through, try to act decently and with self-respect rather than blatantly pursuing their own fulfillment.

Concerning nation's 'moralites', (society's take on moral aspects of life) they all have the same basic morals. (There aren't any countries in which cowardice is revered or where a man would be proud of backstabbing his closest friends.) Most differences lie in misunderstanding of fact. Polygamous societies might think that humans were meant to have multiple wives, whereas monogamous ones would feel that human nature is conducive to only one wife. Similarly, a nation given over to excessive lust and sexual freedom *cough*US*cough* might simply be misunderstanding human nature and the proper place for sex. Or it could just be corruption and weakness.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

Merely because God can percieve everything doesn't mean we can't choose. It's like God's reading a book. He can skip forward to other pages and see what happens, and he can write in it if he decides to. But we do the writing for our own choices.

If the book is already written, then so are our fates, and so are our choices.

Methinks, we arn't really going to get anywhere by continueing this train of thought...lets let it suffice to say, that in the end the yes or no answer to the question: Is there such thing as freewill? Is dependent upon whether or not the person you ask is under the impression that a choice made was never a choice to begin with.

True prophecies come from God, who can see what happens in the future. With my line-splitting analogy, God can tell which line's gonna happen. So I guess it wasn't a great analogy.

Quantam theory shows that the movement of an electron, whilst being possible to apply to statistics, cannot be definitively predetermined. The theory thereby proclaims that it has proven chance exists in the universe. Extrapolating from this, we come to the splitting line analogy (or the Infinite Universe Theory), where a different universe exists for every possible outcome of every instant of action.

The point more or less is, that as far as all of this is concerned, not just a single line happens, but rather all lines happen. Any prophecy will only end up being accurate in just a few lines out of septillions, and therefore I do not believe quantam theory is compatible with your beliefs.

You might want a happy medium, in which while chance exists, out of every spin of the galactic dice, only result actually occurs. Combine that with giving god the ability to time travel (or maybe he doesn't have to because he's omnipotent...), and I would say you would have a solid explanation.

But actual love is a choice, not a feeling.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=love

Show me a definition that will back you up.

If you said god created us to choose to love him, you could bypass websters wall, but you would still be left with the conviction that god would have been better off leaving us as addicted to him, as we can be to narcotics? We would still have the choice to leave him, but why would we?

To summarize it, we were made to love God with all our heart, body, and mind.

And what is gods purpose if nothing made him? If we are merely extensions of him, then how can we ourselves have purpose?

I don't like to nitpick on spelling, but since this was at least the second time you misspelled it... it's "quantum". Sorry. ^^;

Anyway, if we were looking from the perspective that God exists, then it'd be trivial to just say that God makes his own rules, and so he can throw out quantum theory whenever he darn well pleases. (And, of course, if God doesn't exist, well, the whole prophecy thing isn't going to work out anyway.)

- Kef

I choose to breathe air, but I am not addicted to it. I rely upon it. We are an engine and God is the fuel, if you will. The reason we would leave him is because we're idiotic humans, and that's about it.



As a human in living in this natural world, I can't grasp the idea of a being that was never created. Nor can I imagine his purpose. But merely because I can't fully percieve it doesn't mean it isn't there, much like time.

I don't think we're 'extensions' of God, but I think I see what you're getting at. I, in my more pessimistic moods, sometimes don't know why God bothered to create us, why he thought it was worth all the suffering and despair to make creatures with free will just so we might love him. But apparently he thought it was worth it. Go figure.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

How about this one:

The point is, at least according to this definition, this kind of love is active, not passive. It is defined by actions, not merely by feelings.

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Well, yes, the easiest thing for a theist to do is throw up his arms and say "god doesn't need to make sense to our limited puny human minds", but I don't think Eldiran want's to play it that way.

This whole debate for me of course, is a massive battle of hypotheticals, as gods existence is pretty much one of it's main axioms.

That's true, I don't. But I honestly can't grasp certain concepts that could still concievably be true. All I can do is explain them in words, or think them over in words, but it never truly clicks. That's a source of despair in my life, actually, because I often feel that trying to find truth in this world is like trying to wrap my blanket of a mind around concepts the size of the sun. But I try anyway because I'm stubborn.



It is only now that we've strayed from discussion of morality and into things like prophecy and God's correlation to time.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

Sorry in getting to this so late...but according to the dictionary, opinions ARE beliefs. But who are you to define what the global morals SHOULD be? Everyone on the planet thinks that they themselves have it all right somehow. In fact, they believe it so much without even often realizing it, that they carry the attitude that they know that they are right. Homophobes know that they are right. Monogamists know that they are right. Pagans know that they are right. Mormons know that they are right. Ghandi knew that he was right. Hitler knew that he was right. Ann Coulter knows that she's right. So...since you seem so sure that you're right in your moral beliefs (i.e. opinions), how do you really KNOW?

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

I still think that the only truly universal laws, if we consider both the past and present, are "don't kill people" and "don't steal stuff", and I still think they don't take a deity to understand.

And, by the way, I do think "belief" and "opinion", while not interchangeable terms, are very related ideas. Both refer to something that isn't necessarily factual. (Something like the existence of God is not factual no matter how strongly you're convinced of it. It's not necessarily fiction, it's just not necessarily fact either... not until it is absolutely, 100% indisputable to anybody with common sense, at least.)

I think a useful distinction between "belief" and "opinion" is that an opinion is what you personally think of something, which may or may not have to do with facts (for example, "cheese is good" is an opinion that has nothing to do with facts, since the quality of cheese is entirely subjective), whereas beliefs are opinions on what the facts are.

- Kef

I don't know for sure. My moral state may mature in the future. But if I listen closely to my conscience, my moral impulses, and I'm willing to change and think, then I should be able to learn. I do think I'm right, but then it would be kind of stupid not to. Why hold beliefs if I don't, well, believe them?

As for the difference betwixt beliefs and opinions, Kef is right. The essential difference between the two is that beliefs can be wrong or right, whereas opinions cannot. If I believed my leg was made of cheese, I would be wrong. If I felt that swiss is better than brie (which it definitely isn't) then it's a matter of opinion, so to speak.



Those probably are the only laws that would be universal to all remotely developed cultures. But don't confuse morals for laws.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

But aren't laws generally based on ideas of morality? (Well, a lot of laws have purely administrative purposes, but I mean laws against common crime.)

It is only now that we've strayed from discussion of morality and into things like prophecy and God's correlation to time.

Ok, then getting back to the point, you argued that humans have morals that have nothing to do with survival, and which therefore cannot be results of natural creation.

I will repeat once again, that such morals can easily be correlated to perversion of natural instinct. This assertion is parallel to your earlier assertion that bad is nothing more then misconstrued good.

Evolution by the way, does not infer perfection. Flaws insubstantial enough to convey little effect on survival crop up all the time. Certain dolphin species living in very murky waters, are almost completely blind. Its been proven that human noses are genetically equivelent to those of cats, but are less potent due to a higher tendency towards genetic error in pertinent genes.

Expanding this arguement a little further, if humans have traits which are not results of evolution, and that is all you know, how could you possibly infer from that, that christianity is true? How could you even extrapolate from that, that a god exists?

The argument would apparently be "Well, somebody or something had to put the traits there, then." It certainly wouldn't point to Judeo-Christianity in particular, but it would suggest the existence of at least one god. And aside from that, I can't really think of other possibilities at the moment (though that doesn't mean there aren't any) -- if we accept that these traits cannot be arrived at by evolution. I don't see particularly strong evidence supporting that "if".

I don't really buy the notion of morality being an intrinsic human trait, anyway. If you come across a feral child (a child who has grown up in the wild, like Mowgli in The Jungle Book), what ideas of morality do you think he'll have? I doubt he could even grasp the very idea of "right" and "wrong".

Here's a little food for thought from a different angle: many animal species have a code of conduct. Some species mate for life, for example. To act outside this code of conduct would seem unnatural to them (but, depending on the species and act, such "violations" can occur). But are they moral creatures? Is a swan a saint and a cat a sinner? Kind of a silly question, isn't it? How are humans any different?

- Kef

Yes, but they're still not the same. There are many things that are perfectly legal but are morally unnacceptable to some. And there are times when the morally correct thing to do is illegal.



I don't see how it's a parallel. The only similarity is that perversion is present in both.

What exactly is a perversion of natural instinct? Meaning that one instinct is unnaturally strong, and another might be unnaturally weak? That doesn't equate to morals. A truly moral person doesn't follow any one instinct, since all of them can be an improper response at times. Mother love might seem like a good instinct, and the sexual instinct a bad one, but there are times that their roles are reversed. We might need to suppress our motherly love so that we aren't unfair to others' children, and we might need to instigate our sexual instinct for the sake of our spouse. When people say mother love is good and sexual instinct is bad, they really only mean that mother love needs to be restricted much less often than the sexual instinct.



Evolution's chance of creating an impertinent gene wouldn't be enough to affect the entire human race.



That is a very good point. I may have been going about this the wrong way by saying that morals are impulses. It is concievable that morals are learned from our society. It doesn't necessarily follow that it's a human invention, however. Society also teaches people about mathematics, but they're not something that humans created, that could have been different if we'd so chosen. So perhaps morality isn't a human trait after all; perhaps it's simply a fact, a law of nature, if you will. (Now it suddenly dawns on me why C.S. Lewis never bothered to mention evolution.)



I don't think that wild animals are moral creatures; they follow their instincts and that's about it. Perhaps these cases actually are perversions of natural instincts. Humans are different because they make conscious choices rather than just obeying their instincts. They are also different from wild animals because they can learn morals. Domesticated animals, however, become able to actually choose somewhat due to the influence of their masters; they actually are able to act independently of their instincts. Perhaps human contact with animals essentially imparts morality and will into them. Maybe humankind has had morality imparted into them in the same way by contact with God. But all of this is merely speculative, since humans have no insight into the minds of animals. We merely have to work with what information we've got about our own nature.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

Wow, Eldiran! Looks to me that you're talking like a preacher!

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If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.

I'm not sure if you're insulting me or not. Either way, I'm trying to put forth my ideas and reason through any disagreements. Correct me if that's not what this forum is for.

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You're a moron if you think I'm not.

I certainly hope that's not supposed to be an insult. I might take offense at slander against my profession.

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Well, there are times when you shouldn't sound like a preacher, even if you are one. But I think it's OK in a religion thread...

Why would I insult you? You're like a friend to me just like everyone else.

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If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.