Do you know why we have Religions?/Never Hold Up In Court / A Brief History Of Religions Flashcards
Do you know why we have Religions?
“Culture creates these religious ideas”__ Sigmund Freud
We have religions because of civilizations. Anthropology teaches us that early men were hunter gathers, and lived in Nomadic tribes. This was a very chaotic existence. Nobody in charge. No laws. No mutual respect for one another. Just total chaos all the time.
Eventually the idea of farming became very popular because it was many times easier to plant a garden and grow food as opposed to taking pot luck on hunting for food.
When people gravitated to farming, the whole world changed. Now instead of moving each day to look for food, people farmed and started living in civilizations. Groups became villages and towns then grew into cities.
As civilizations grew, people developed languages and therefore people could communicate with one another.
Because there was no need to be on the move hunting for food all the time, people settled into communities of villages, towns and in more modern times cities became popular for many. Cities had everything we needed to live. Everyone had different skills and trades.
Since civilizations grew, many clans were formed for a grouping of people that felt comfortable within their clan.
Everyone was from different backgrounds, and different clans had their particular Gods.
They had a God for everything. Gods to protect ships at sea. Gods to give them good crops each year. Gods to help them win battles and Gods to offer sacrifices in exchange for favors. Favors like win a battle. Heal my sick child. Give us a baby. Protect my family.
Killing Non Believers
Luke 19:27
But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.’”
2 Chronicles 15:12-13
And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul, but that whoever would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.
Deuteronomy 17:1-20
“If there is found among you, within any of your towns that the Lord your God is giving you, a man or woman who does what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, in transgressing his covenant, and has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have forbidden, and it is told you and you hear of it, then you shall inquire diligently, and if it is true and certain that such an abomination has been done in Israel, then you shall bring out to your gates that man or woman who has done this evil thing, and you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones. …
Exodus 22:19 ESV
“Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death.
Leviticus 20:13 ESV
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.
Exodus 21:15
“Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.
Testaments. You cannot give a testimony unless you personally see it!
If you don’t see or hear it personally, it is hearsay and not evidence in court.%—McGarrett on Hawaii Five-0.
So old and New Testament are complete hearsay, especially the gospels. They are not legal testament as they are hearsay and not admissible in court.
“To theology, facts do not matter. “BN 2021.
People were totally into pleading with Gods for favors.
There were always great sacrifice offerings made, because people thought nothing is for free, so they had to appease the Gods to gain the favor.
Over time the sacrifices escalated. Instead of fruits,livestock or wheat, people had to sacrifice something very dear to them to insure greater favors, like keeping them out of famines and wars.
It started being in vogue to sacrifice your child. Then it escalated to sacrificing your first born. This went on for centuries. Then one day even your first born wasn’t good enough to appease the Gods.
The sacrifice had to be very valuable to really appease the Gods. For a time, it had to be the first born son of a king.
This worked for awhile. Then they raised the bar very high and decided it had to be the firstborn son of a God.
It was for this reason that Hercules was invented as the firstborn son of a God. Hercules was so powerful a sacrifice, that he became the world’s very first savior!
So this pacified the world for awhile, then various civilizations started creating more Gods and more and more powerful saviors.
As time went by, nations became competitive with one another. Creating a more powerful sacrifice to gain more favor. They also created more powerful saviors and Gods to have more bragging rights than their neighbor. They did the same thing with their Bibles and holy books.
This worked well for some time, but by the time Constantine became the Roman emperor in the fourth century, there were far too many Gods and saviors. This drove Constantine nuts. He wanted one Rome and one savior.
Lets reflect for a moment why mankind needed Gods.
Freud answers in his book, The future of an illusion.
“The libido follows the paths of narcissistic needs, and attaches itself to the objects that ensure their satisfaction. So the mother, who satisfies hunger, becomes the first love-object, and certainly also the first protection against all the undefined and threatening dangers of the outer world; becomes, if we may so express it, the first protection against anxiety.”
MN: True. The dying soldiers on the battlefields of history are full of young men calling for their mother as they are dying. They are scared and revert back to calling out for mommy to save them.
Freud: “In this function the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, and this situation persists from now on over the whole of childhood.”
Freud: “Now when the child grows up and finds that he is destined to remain a child forever, and that he can never do without protection against unknown and mighty powers, he invests these with the traits of the father-figure; he creates for himself the gods, of whom he is afraid, whom he seeks to PROPITIATE (Find favor with a God),and to whom he nevertheless entrusts the task of protecting him.
Thus the longing-for-the-father explanation is identical with the other, the need for protection against the consequences of human weakness; the child’s defensive reaction to his helplessness gives the characteristic features to the adult’s reaction to his own sense of helplessness, i.e. the formation of religion.”
Savior and salvation. We already talked about Hercules the very first savior.
How did we get the idea of SALVATION?
It started with the Egyptians. Their Pharaoh was considered a god. He was too valuable to die and cease to exist. So they embalmed him. They removed his brain but kept his other organs intact. They removed blood and body fluids then filled the cavity with salt, a preservative that would slow down the decomposition of the body.
This preservative, salt, is called SAL in Latin. So since SAL saves the body, the word SALVATION was created.
Next the Egyptians believed that after a period of time the Pharaoh would come back to life. So they placed the preserved body in a tomb inside a pyramid with a pointed top which was pointed to heaven.
Inside the tomb were lots of treasures, the pharaoh’s slaves (buried alive),food and a book of history and instructions to bring the risen pharaoh up to speed on how things worked so he could resume his reign.
The book was called “The book of life”. Copious amounts of this book were copied and became a significant part of the Old Testament in the Bible.
As a side note, most of the Bible was plagiarized from more ancient religions. In fact, world renown Bible scholar, Bart D. Ehrman states that the modern day New Testament is presently 2/3’s larger than the earliest copies of the New Testament.
When Constantine came up with the idea of “One Rome and one God”, he chose the Early Christian religion, which was in its infancy.
Within a few years Constantine changed the Small Christian religion from 10% of the Roman population to over 90% of the Roman population.
How did he do this?
He made it the Roman law! Everyone had to join the Christian religion.
And to make it more attractive to neighboring nations, as well as all the conquered nations of Rome, he he used all of the most powerful attributes of all ancient Gods that ever existed.
He had his Greek scribes to plagiarize the most powerful quotations, the most powerful miracles and the most popular attributes and incorporate them into his New Testaments. For example, Gods and saviors like Apollo, Zeus, Dionysus, Hermès, Confucius, Allah, Jupiter, Saturn, Krishna and Mercury were written into Yahweh and Jesus.
If you Google popular attributes, quotations and miracles of Jesus you will discover that everyone of them were said and done centuries before by more ancient gods. To include most of which were virgin births and born on Christmas!
Another example. If you one day decided to start manufacturing automobiles, you would copy all the popular features. You would have a steering wheel you would have tires you would have bumpers you would have brakes you would have a gas pedal you would have a windshield you would have seats you would have power steering and air-conditioning etc. Because people like these features.
Then, in the fourth century, Constantine invented the Trinity and invented the nicene creed. Many people refused to accept these beliefs, but it was the law. Anyone refusing belief was beheaded.
Also about that time people still did not agree on who or what exactly Jesus was. On the New Testament, it took over 400 years to decide what went into the Testaments. There were hundreds of Gospels and between Constantine and the nicene creed, they settled on only four books of gospel, each having a completely different salvation plan.
Most conquered populations had no problems accepting having only one God. But the conquered Jews were adamant. They refused the Testaments of Jesus being their savior. Jews were monotheistic and could only have one God, Yahweh.
To fix this, the Gospel of John was created to be the Jewish Messiah about 95CE. Notice this gospel was written 95 years after when the Bible says Jesus was born. All the gospels were written generations after Jesus was purportedly born. Mark 30CE, Matthew 45CE, Luke 60CE, John 95CE. (Check order and dates)
Think of this a minute. None of the gospels were eyewitness accounts. They were written generations after the event. Three generations later for John!
They all purport to be eyewitness accounts but they are all written in the third person! If I give an eyewitness account I say, “I saw the man”. Our gospels in third person always says “They saw the man”.
The testaments love to use quotations. How can anybody give a direct quotation in a testament that was said 30, 60, or 95 years ago and be word for word accurate? The average lifespan was about 30 years!
Most people cannot repeat word for word what they said three sentences ago!
People didn’t go to school then. 99% could not read or write. Even most kings didn’t know their ABCs.
Yet most believers think The gospel authors wrote these gospels.
Another snafu of believing. The Gospels and New Testament were written in Koine Greek. Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic! The Bible itself says they were not learned men. None of them knew how to read or write. Not even Jesus. The Roman scribes were the only people there that could write, and they were very few and far between.
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