Many people find polytheism strange, I don't, I find it refreshing, what I don't understand is why so many people gave it up for montheism?
Many people find polytheism strange, I don't, I find it refreshing, what I don't understand is why so many people gave it up for montheism?
Monotheism came first. God (one) created the universe. All the other so called gods are actually fallen angels and I must advise against any contact with them. They are happy to decieve and make you join them in misery. We have free choice though, which God gave us and if we want to we can choose evil. It's worth remembering that that truth that we seek, especially us autistic people, is a person - God. There is only one truth and only one reality.
Why not give monotheism a chance? Isn't it infinitely more exiciting to know that one loving Father created all of creation. You as an individual were created for a purpose only you can fulfill. You are unique and important in His eyes. He loves you more than you can imagine and is always with you. If you want to know Him, he will let you and you will never regret it as the happiness of knowing Him is better than anything the world can offer. If you spend some time in the quiet and ask Him to let you know His presence He will do.... most often very gently as a feeling of intense well being and love. Aren't we made for truth? why seek the lies of the fallen angels. Lies are boring.
Monotheism came first.
The earliest known example of monotheism was introduced by the Pharaoh Akhenaten in ancient Egypt, around 1350 BCE, as far as we know archaeologically and historically at least. All known records of monotheism occur after the 1300’s BCE, seemingly around 600 BCE with Zoroastrianism, and 200 BCE with Judaism.
God (one) created the universe.
I take it you have not studied the book of Genesis so much, given that God said, "Let there be light" and so on and so forth with the expanse, water and land etcetera, and then further more ~ God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness . . . ” in that the God of gods El was talking with his divine consort the Goddess Ashera; and the divine council collectively referred to as being the ‘Elohim’, which is normally transliterated out in English as being ‘The Lord God’.
Also, the Greek texts use at minimum masculine, feminine and androgyne grammar, so Genesis can be transliterated so that God and the Goddess created the heavens and the earth, and as such the Goddess said, "Let there be light" and [on account of God] there was light, and so on ~ which of course goes a long way for those who have had it up to the back teeth with secular and or religious misogyny.
Further more, in Psalm 82, it states, (1) God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgement among the “gods”. So monotheism did not come first in the bible either, with the book of Psalms having been compiled in the last thousand years preceding up to the Christ event, and the last text having been composed about 500 years before hand.
All the other so called gods are actually fallen angels and I must advise against any contact with them.
The pantheon of the Gods became as far as humans account for them as being the hierarchy of the Angels, all of whom did not side with Lucifer in the rebellion, and most polytheists treat their pantheon of gods as being representatives of nature and as such the spirit of life (i.e., God) and practice in ceremonies and make offering just as Christians and Catholic do with Easter, which was originally and still is a polytheistic tradition also.
I was told that "Ashera" was female and linked to olive groves, I don't know enough about it to say if it has any truth to it. I've know that Elohim was plural and possibly female for years, it's one of those things which pops up every now and again when discussing these things.
I've never heard of 'The pantheon of the Gods [becoming] the hierarchy of the Angels who did not side with Lucifer in the rebellion...'. Thats a new one on me, where did you read that, I'd be interested in reading that for myself?
I think seeing a pantheon as being just, 'representatives of nature..' a bit limiting, I guess it depends on which or who's pantheon you're talking about, many are much much more than that.
The passages you have quoted from the OT are part of why I find Christianity so confusing, as the NT is supposed to be a sort of new begining, but it relies heavily on the OT for it's creation stories etc, which are mostly a hi/story of the Jews.
If we have been created from whatever led to sentient life on earth, I suppose it is possible that God/s came into being at that time. I often wonder how my mind came to inhabit my body. Ancient ancestor worship seemed to be a bit of a stretch too far to seriously consider in prehistoric cave burials, but nothing can rule it out.
I think that’s highly likely, as there is a long history of people drifting away and some of the church’s motives were suspect to say the least. Christians would say that the church is made up of imperfect people, but it never ceases to amaze me how some practices are so remote from the Jesus in the Gospels, in which Jesus enjoyed the company of women and other people who were considered outcasts.
I couldn’t help noticing that the Sistine Chapel in Rome was filled mostly with males today at the joint service in which the Pope and the King prayed. It didn’t look a welcoming place for women.
I think that the Gods came into being with the Universe and are maybe it's conciousness. But then I'm not entirely convinced about the Big Bang Theory either, it's a patched and tattered thing, I know there are plenty of people here who disagree with me on this.
There do seem to be a lot of commonalities between ancient religions, so I think the Gods have been with us since our begining. I know it's currently trendy to believe that humans created Gods and before that there was ancestor worship, but this to me seems an absurd and circular argument.
Sorry got to go and sort dinner out, back tomorow
I think people have a choice of what to believe, but sometimes they are trapped by circumstances in a very controlling kind of religion and belief.
Personally, I can’t get beyond the idea of a loving God allowing so much suffering in the world, and the question of who or what created God is the other major block that prevents me having faith.
I do believe that many have a yearning for something better than obliteration at death. Even though astronomy has proposed theories that can answer how our world came about, many have had a need for a powerful being (God) to have created the world that we see. Perhaps that is how religion developed in our earliest human ancestors, and like them, groups have divided and taken different paths around the world or in the form of religion.
I wonder if some Christians didn't like being told that they'd drifted away from what Jesus/God intended? I mean I don't think Jesus wanted the apparatus of the Roman state running his church, or at least he didn't say he did?
Part 3.
The Jews and lots of others, believed that the birth of a messaih was immnent, )Caligula thought it was him), however many Jews didn't believe it was Jesus, so they still await their messiah. Christians, those who followed Christ, believe there will be a second incarnation and are waiting for it to happen. Mohammad was born and became the prophet of Islam, but was he not the second comming?
Regarding a messiah, there were also some Jews who believed a Messiah had to come from the Royal line of David, and that is why the Gospel of Matthew is keen to emphasise Jesus, lineage as descended from David, through Joseph as his non-biological father, although Mary was believed to have been of the line of David too.
Christians would describe the future return of Jesus as the second coming, as he has already been incarnated as a baby. As for the prophet Muhammad, Islam teaches that he is the final prophet after other prophets, such as Jesus who went before him. I can’t answer why Muslims, Christians and others don’t believe Muhammad is the Messiah. In the case of Christianity, theology and understanding develops and there is this idea of God being active and revealing God’s self as time goes on, even though the core teachings remain the same.
This is all very interesting and you're going into bits that I really don't understand and don't really know where or how to get good information on, like I didn't know that about the Apocalyptic writings.
I have seen people unable to cope when seriously challenged on thier faith and beliefs. I caused a crisis of faith in someone, a Mormon who stopped me in the street and started talking to me, we discussed issue of faith and belief for quite a while and he asked some good questions about Pagainsm, like did we have any special dietry rules and stuff. It ended up with me arguing that I believe we all have a spark of the divine within us and that speaks to us and guides us, and it is acting against the will of the divine to try and guide us away from that. All of a sudden he started shaking and ran away from me, I was a bit relieved and suprprised and got on with my day, a couple of days later I saw him surrounded by others of his faith, he saw me and started shaking really badly. I often wonder about him and if he's OK, I hope so. It really made me aware of easy it is to break someone and I'm much more wary of engaging with the religious like that, even if he did approach me and not the other way around.
I also remember the reaction of a school friend who was brought up a JW and realised her parents would let her die rather than have a blood transfusion, that a big thing for anyone to have to cope with, let alone a 14 year old. I think it all started when she wasn't allowed by her parents to have the anti rubella vaccination and asked why. I can't imagine letting a child die rather than give them life saving treatment, or an adult for that matter. It would have me seriously questioning any God who demanded that of me, do they have the right to be called a God and not a devil?
I have had similar thoughts to you for quite a while now. I can understand why people believe in their own particular faith because it is usually something they have grown up with and it is commonly, but not always, related to geographical area. I don’t know why some people become so argumentative over their form of religion being the ‘one and only true faith’, I think it can sometimes be because they are insecure in their own belief. For instance, some of the more fundamentalist Christians would argue seem to be reluctant to look beyond what is written in their translation of the Bible, and I know of one person who had some sort of mental breakdown when she signed up to a theology class and heard a Catholic priest saying that the purpose of the creation account in Genesis (OT) was to show that God created the world and all in it, but it doesn’t have to be read literally as it was written by and for people who had no concept of the world as we know it today, with the benefit we have of science. So theologically, it doesn’t matter how God created the world and that our ancestors included Homo Neanderthal is and other human types.
The Book of Revelation is a literary genre known as Apocalyptic writing. It reveals a transcendent reality which it temporal and spatial. It was a common form of writing in some Jewish communities that appears in other parts of the Bible. Revelation was addressing a community under persecution and it employs much symbolism and metaphor. These are screenshots from three separate sources, describing how Revelation can be read.
Continued …
I was having a gathering of Pagans at my house and door went, I opened it and there were these two guys there, one deaf and the other blind, who started to tell me that I should be a Christian etc,
You should have invited them in for dinner. As in they ARE dinner - that would have got them sprinting out!
A very odd thing happened once, (I know and to me of all people!), I was having a gathering of Pagans at my house and door went, I opened it and there were these two guys there, one deaf and the other blind, who started to tell me that I should be a Christian etc, because '..the sinful would be afflicted', I was so weirded out none of the obvious answers came out of my mouth!
I was so lucky, most of my lecturers where good teachers too.
I don't know what parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls my tutor had been translating, as it wasn't supposed to be a lecture about them.
I would love to know what those people who compiled and hid the Dead Sea Scrolls were.
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I had a thought last night, and I wanted to run past you all to see what you think?
The Jews and lots of others, believed that the birth of a messaih was immnent, )Caligula thought it was him), however many Jews didn't believe it was Jesus, so they still await their messiah. Christians, those who followed Christ, believe there will be a second incarnation and are waiting for it to happen. Mohammad was born and became the prophet of Islam, but was he not the second comming?
The book of revelations talks about a battle on the plains of Megiddo, (amrmageddon), but there have been many battles on the plains of Megiddo. And people wonder why I get confused, monotheists are like a bunch of kids all screaming 'My dads bigger than you Dad'.
It is good that your lecturers were such great teachers. Sometimes university tutors and lecturers have brilliant minds, but they are poor teachers, as that is a skill in itself. I would have loved to have been sitting in your Dead Sea Scrolls lecture. Translation software is very good, but no substitute for someone with expertise in ancient language translation.
One of the more interesting things that I learned about the translation of the Scrolls was that the Scroll texts are remarkably similar in translation to the corresponding OT texts. The differences are only minor, so we can have confidence that the OT has been translated appropriately for the intended reader of the Bible (Jewish and Christian). That of course isn’t to say that the meaning of earlier versions of the text, before they were put together to form the Bible as we know it today, didn’t have a different meaning for an earlier community, yet it would be wrong to ascribe things that were happening in Israel/Judea and beyond to the practices of the intended readers/listeners of these texts, except to explain they were wrong to worship Asherah as there was only one God. Clearly Asherah was alive and kicking in that part of the world, that is why she is condemned so much in the Book of Kings. But for the people of faith in the God of the OT, Asherah was to be done away with.
I was told that "Ashera" was female and linked to olive groves, I don't know enough about it to say if it has any truth to it.
As the mother of all, she was considered therefore as being the Goddess of fertility and fruit bearing trees and groves etcetera.
I've know that Elohim was plural and possibly female for years, it's one of those things which pops up every now and again when discussing these things.
It seems that the word Elohim is grammatically masculine, on account of the El prefix being the name of God, but can refer to male and female qualities of divinity, given that the pantheon consists of gods and goddesses, and that humans were made in their likeness ~ ‘male and female they were created’ ~ and all that. For that reason I would of thought the word Elohim was androgyne?
I've never heard of 'The pantheon of the Gods [becoming] the hierarchy of the Angels who did not side with Lucifer in the rebellion...'. Thats a new one on me, where did you read that, I'd be interested in reading that for myself?
It was not meant like that, given that as monotheism became the thing ~ the polytheistic gods had to go thematically leaving only then the hierarchy of angels to be accounted for, and it was only the angels that sided with Lucifer that God cast down, not the gods of the pantheon as DaughteroftheKing stated.
I think seeing a pantheon as being just, 'representatives of nature..' a bit limiting, I guess it depends on which or who's pantheon you're talking about, many are much much more than that.
By nature I mean existence as a whole, and that the representatives of which are all the spiritual and material manifestations of the absolute (God) and the infinite (Goddess).
The passages you have quoted from the OT are part of why I find Christianity so confusing, as the NT is supposed to be a sort of new begining, but it relies heavily on the OT for it's creation stories etc, which are mostly a hi/story of the Jews.
Jesus came along as foretold to spiritually instruct those who had lost their way materially, hence the need for the OT and the NT regarding historical and contextual clarification ~ but as for the Bible being the history of the Jews, I have never thought of it like that ~ being that I consider everything comparatively from multiple perspectives.
I was told that "Ashera" was female and linked to olive groves, I don't know enough about it to say if it has any truth to it.
As the mother of all, she was considered therefore as being the Goddess of fertility and fruit bearing trees and groves etcetera.
I've know that Elohim was plural and possibly female for years, it's one of those things which pops up every now and again when discussing these things.
It seems that the word Elohim is grammatically masculine, on account of the El prefix being the name of God, but can refer to male and female qualities of divinity, given that the pantheon consists of gods and goddesses, and that humans were made in their likeness ~ ‘male and female they were created’ ~ and all that. For that reason I would of thought the word Elohim was androgyne?
I've never heard of 'The pantheon of the Gods [becoming] the hierarchy of the Angels who did not side with Lucifer in the rebellion...'. Thats a new one on me, where did you read that, I'd be interested in reading that for myself?
It was not meant like that, given that as monotheism became the thing ~ the polytheistic gods had to go thematically leaving only then the hierarchy of angels to be accounted for, and it was only the angels that sided with Lucifer that God cast down, not the gods of the pantheon as DaughteroftheKing stated.
I think seeing a pantheon as being just, 'representatives of nature..' a bit limiting, I guess it depends on which or who's pantheon you're talking about, many are much much more than that.
By nature I mean existence as a whole, and that the representatives of which are all the spiritual and material manifestations of the absolute (God) and the infinite (Goddess).
The passages you have quoted from the OT are part of why I find Christianity so confusing, as the NT is supposed to be a sort of new begining, but it relies heavily on the OT for it's creation stories etc, which are mostly a hi/story of the Jews.
Jesus came along as foretold to spiritually instruct those who had lost their way materially, hence the need for the OT and the NT regarding historical and contextual clarification ~ but as for the Bible being the history of the Jews, I have never thought of it like that ~ being that I consider everything comparatively from multiple perspectives.
