Religion
Related: About this forumSt. Augustine admitted that Christianity is as old as the human race.
"That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.
*St. Augustine. Letter of Retractions, Bk I, Chapter 12.3 (Augustine was not retracting the quoted statement. He made the quoted statement while retracting an earlier writing.)
He was only wrong in the part about Christ coming in the flesh.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)skepticscott
(13,029 posts)who regularly try to credit religion for every positive social movement in the last 500 years.
immoderate
(20,885 posts)--imm
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Dude, that religion is so vintage, back then there weren't even scriptures proving the existence of Don't-call-it-Christianity-yet.
It's really a shame when Christians don't care enough about their own religion to get curious.
Did you know that the original Jews were polytheists and worshipped Yahweh, the goddess Asherah and most likely numerous other gods like El, Baal and Kaus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah
edhopper
(33,652 posts)6000 years of human history?
Viva_Daddy
(785 posts)Obviously, if Christianity existed prior to the so-called "incarnation" then that "incarnation" had nothing to do with Christianity.
That is why I posted the quotation.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)...if you don't know anything about the history of the Christian religion, that kind of makes sense.
Kind of.
edhopper
(33,652 posts)and Augustine was wrong, as he was with many things.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)Viva_Daddy
(785 posts)The daily, yearly and "great year" cycle of the Sun which were dramatically portrayed in the myths of ancient man, existed long prior to the so-called "incarnation of Christ".
bvf
(6,604 posts)has always revolved around the sun?
Even if people didn't quite see it that way?
Wow.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)okasha
(11,573 posts)Augustine argues that since God the Father and God the Son are the same God and are coeternal, and "of one substance," then worship of one is worship of both. Because the first bumans--Adam and Eve-- worshipped Yahweh, they also implicitly worshipped Christ before his incarnation in the person of Jesus. It's eqjivalent to Muhammad's teaching that all foregoing prophets and patriarchs were de facto Muslims because the Jewish Yahweh is identical with Allah.
The OP obviously got this off some quote-mining mythecist website. If he'd actually read the book, he'd know that Reractionum doesn't mean "Retractions.". Augustine wasn't "retracting" anything. He was commentining on his own previous work and adding to it. A more appropriate rendering of the title would be something like 'Updates" or "Author's Notes."
for that explanatory bit of religious "scholarship."
Just more bullshit vs. bullshit.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)Much as I like debate, I could not be less interested in this one.
okasha
(11,573 posts)is watching people who swear that their position is based on "evidence" and "scientific method" gulping down this kind of snake oil for the sheer joy of confirmation bias, without so much as a minute's thought or pause to check facts. "I just grabbed it off yahoo" is all they need.
edhopper
(33,652 posts)On Faith and other ways of knowing more than evidence and the scientific method (no quotes)
When those things are in conflict, the often choose faith,
Obviously some non or even anti religious people are as gullible as you think "religious people" are.
There seems to be a rather alarming faith in the intertubes in the. OP's post. Do you think it's wrong to ridicule that double standard?
edhopper
(33,652 posts)Was a believer.
If not, your post makes sense.
phil89
(1,043 posts)they're still ahead of the game.
okasha
(11,573 posts)Do you think that's okay?
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)What is this 1999?
okasha
(11,573 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)Reractionum isn't even a word, then again nor is eqjivalent.
okasha
(11,573 posts)skepticscott
(13,029 posts)which makes perfect sense, since he was the Messiah they were waiting for for thousands of years afterwards.
Oh...wait...
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)in different communities
Suppose, for example, "Christian" means something like "a person who believes in the Christ." A person, who believes that both "the Christ" is the Jewish messiah and The Jewish messiah has come to us as Jesus of Nazareth, might then regard anyone -- who believed in the coming of the Jewish messiah but who lived before the time of Jesus of Nazareth -- as a person who believed in the Christ and therefore might call such a person a Christian. There seems to be a long history of arguing in this way: this is, I think, why Martin Luther insisted on referring to certain Old Testament figures as "Christians"
This species of argument seems to me somewhat of a semantic quibble, grounded in a Platonist preconception that words refer to some eternal abstract reality, but it may have seemed natural originally: the gospels were written in Greek and so probably spread originally through the Hellenic Jewish diaspora, in which Platonist views must have been widely known
cbayer
(146,218 posts)Thank you very much for the information, but this is exactly the kind of thing that does not interest me about religion.
struggle4progress
(118,379 posts)I regard it as an entirely inessential and rather uninteresting semantic quibble
cbayer
(146,218 posts)okasha
(11,573 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)are suddenly all "link please" about other people's nonsense.
okasha
(11,573 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)okasha
(11,573 posts)No one would blame you for that.
skepticscott
(13,029 posts)who who try to pretend that if someone can't provide a "link" to something, then it can be discounted.
Those of us with a little more depth know that there is a great deal of knowledge that isn't available on Google.
LiberalAndProud
(12,799 posts)Seems like they took an awfully long time to get to it, don't you think?