Friday, 7 April 2006

BAC Again 1 Mote of Truth, Ready?

Truthdig - An Atheist Manifesto: "what exactly did the U.S. attempt to “steal” from Iraq? and could you clarify how the U.S. “created” a civil war?’

1) Paul Wolfowitz and others openly stated before the war that it would really not cost the US anything because Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction - that is, that these revenues would be stolen to pay Halliburton et al to build what war contractors were paid to help the military trash. In other words, I burn down your house and pay to rebuild it with your 401(k). Moreover, contrary to the Hague Convention, Order 39 of the occupation government privatized the Iraqi economy so that American companies could buy the assets for nothing - very much the way the German occupation bought assets of the occupied counries in WW2.
2) After the April 2004 fighting, in which Muqtada as-Sadr’s militia largely closed the roads against American convoys to help the resistance in Fallujah repel the American Marines, the occupiers undertook a deliberate policy of using Shi’a militiamen in Sunni areas, notably in Fallujah in Nov 2004, and unleashed Shi’a death squads of the Badr Organization in the same fashion as in El Salvador in 1980 - “the Salvador option” they denied they were considering when Newsweek broke the story in March 2005 that they were considering it (which they denied doing in 1980, but they deny planning to do now what they denied then that they were doing!). But from the very beginning, the occupation set up a puppet government on sectarian lines in order to emphasize sectarian differences."

and 2000 hand-polished lines crushed in a firefox ['Truthyness"] overload....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
This article discusses whether Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, actually existed as a historical figure. For the historical setting in which Jesus is said to have lived, see Cultural and historical background of Jesus; for historical perspectives on Jesus' life, assuming he existed, see Historical Jesus; for discussion of the theory that Jesus is entirely mythical, see Jesus-Myth.

Believers in Biblical inerrancy, such as Christian fundamentalists, reject all claims that the Gospels are anything less than the literal truth regarding Jesus' life. The Catholic Church likewise upheld at the Second Vatican Council the historicity of the Gospels in the document Dei Verbum. Nevertheless, subjecting the Bible to the same level of source criticism that secular historical texts receive raises questions of historiography. Modern historians, though they consider the Gospels biased toward the Christian perspective, still to a great extent hold that the Gospel stories are to some extent based on historical events; the chief disagreement is to what extent.
Main article: Pauline epistles

Paul, according to both the Acts of the Apostles and his own letters, had never met Jesus; he knew him only from his visions and his conversations with other Christians. Nevertheless, his epistles, being written over a period from 55 to 65, are often consulted for evidence regarding the historicity of Jesus. However, all but 7 of his epistles are regarded by many of modern scholars as having not genuinely been authored by him.

.../... The significance of non-Pauline authorship varies depending on which epistle is considered, but it is notable that the 7 uncontested epistles appear to some scholars to present a more docetic and gnostic view than the far more orthodox epistles which constitute those in dispute, particularly more so than the pastorals. Princeton University's Professor of Religion, Elaine Pagels, a specialist in the study of gnosticism has in consequence proposed that Paul was in fact a gnostic, in her book The Gnostic Paul; a view which implies that the Pastorals, and the other disputed Pauline epistles, were created by the church to bring Paul's followers into the fold and to simultaneously subtly counter his arguments. Pagels' arguments have not found widespread acceptance in academia.

The epistles that the Bible itself attributes to other individuals (Peter, James, John, and Jude) are generally considered to be written at a much later date, and hence are rarely considered in this context.

.../...


Jewish records of the period, both oral and written, were compiled into the Talmud, a collection of legal debates and stories so large that it fills over 30 volumes. There is no mention of anyone called "Jesus" (in Heb. Yehoshuah) within it, the closest match being a person (or persons) called Yeshu from the Babylonian Talmud. However, the description of Yeshu does not match the biblical accounts of Jesus, and the name itself is usually considered to be a derogatory acronym for anyone (possibly, but not necessarily, Christians) attempting to convert Jews from Judaism, standing for yemach shemo vezichro ("erased be his name and memory"). Additionally, the term does not occur in the Jerusalem version of the text, which would be expected to mention Jesus more often than the Babylonian version, rather than less.
Main article: Jesus-Myth
This 6th- or 7th-century Egyptian depiction of Jesus includes grapes. Early accounts of Jesus' life had many elements in common with contemporary Pagan myths, including virgin birth, godmen and sacrifice.
This 6th- or 7th-century Egyptian depiction of Jesus includes grapes. Early accounts of Jesus' life had many elements in common with contemporary Pagan myths, including virgin birth, godmen and sacrifice.

The existence of Jesus as an actual historical figure has been questioned. The Second Epistle of John warns that "many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," which populist writers Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have cited to support the view that such doubts date back to very early Christianity; established critical scholarship maintains that the passage refers to docetism, which critical scholarship considers unrelated to the question of Jesus' existence. The views of scholars who entirely reject Jesus' historicity are summarized in the chapter on Jesus in Will Durant's Caesar and Christ. In support of this claim, they cite a complete lack of eyewitness and contemporary, or near-contemporary accounts; the great number of contemporary and near-contemporary works which they feel should, could, or might have mentioned Jesus but didn't; a lack of detailed accounts of Jesus' life from sources other than Jesus' followers; nonexistent physical evidence; and alleged similarities between early Christian writings and many contemporary mythological accounts. Perhaps the most prolific of these Biblical scholars disputing the historical existence of Jesus is the professor of German, George Albert Wells. In more recent times, it has been advocated by the scholars Earl Doherty and Robert M. Price.


Some of the most well-known early adherents of the mythological school include Voltaire, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky (Whose 1908 work 'Foundations of Christianity' [6] remains one of the important works in this respect) and David Strauss (1808-1874), who was the most intellectually influential early mythologist. Many of these authors did not absolutely deny Jesus's existence, but they believed the miraculous aspects of the Gospel accounts to be mythical and that Jesus' life story had been heavily manipulated to fit Messianic prophesy. Both Strauss and Kautsky argue that very little can be deduced from the surviving documents concerning the historical Jesus. According to the Slovenian scholar Anton Strle, Nietzsche lost his faith in Christianity as a result of reading Strauss' book Leben Jesu. Another important mythologist was Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879-1959), a philosopher and a consistent defender of the thesis that Jesus did not exist.

Another integral part of this view is the idea the early Christians were docetic - that Christ was a spiritual being rather than flesh and blood. Professor of German G.A. Wells says regarding the New Testament:

"It is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way—as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion." .../...

A recent book, The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (2004), by journalist-priest Tom Harpur, discusses another possible origin, based partly on the writings of Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Egyptologist Gerald Massey. Massey's The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ: A Lecture, published in 1880, explores the similarity between what has been written about Jesus and what has been written about Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, who "may have been born about the year 120 B.C." From page 2 of the lecture: "... according to the Babylonian Gemara to the Mishna of Tract 'Shabbath', this Jehoshua, the son of Pandira and Stada, was stoned to death as a wizard, in the city of Lud, or Lydda, and afterwards crucified by being hanged on a tree, on the eve of the Passover. ..." See Yeshu.

External links

posted by USSSlavebation @ 4/07/2006 04:14:00 am 

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